Cyril Mann (1911–80): Commemorating a London artist

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A tribute exhibition at Piano Nobile Gallery (5 October- 5 November 2011), marking the centenary of the birth of Cyril Mann, traces the development of this London artist through nearly six decades of painting, from the 1920s onwards. Some works are exhibited for the first time in 73 years. Others include historic rarities of post-war views that have disappeared long since.

Throughout his painting career Mann rejected the prevailing fashion for abstraction and dreamt of revitalizing figurative art. Unlike Turner and the Impressionists, he was fascinated by the dazzle of sunlight, seeking to portray its enhancing and disintegrating force on surfaces.  

Born in London in 1911, Mann spent much of his childhood in Nottingham and was the youngest boy ever to win a scholarship to the Nottingham School of Art, aged 12.

He travelled to Canada in 1926, intent on becoming a missionary. Isolated in the wilds of British Columbia, he soon abandoned religion to take up painting again. Two years later, in Vancouver, he met Arthur Lismer, a Sheffield painter and member of the Group of Seven, Canada’s Post-Impressionist art movement. On Lismer’s advice, Mann returned to England in 1932, to continue his art studies.

Hardship followed during the Depression years before he met wealthy art patron Erica Marx. She was so impressed by Mann’s talent that she established a trust, enabling him to study at the Royal Academy Schools (1934–7). He continued his art studies in Paris under Scottish Colourist J D Ferguson, until the war forced him to return to London. He married  Mary Jervis Read, then served in the Army for five years, never rising in the ranks or serving as a war artist.

Assessing his early years, John Russell Taylor, art critic and Mann’s biographer wrote:   ‘Mann was never totally uninterested in the objective world, but he was more interested in conveying his transfigured vision of it’.

Piano Nobile has included some of Mann’s earliest urban scenes, of which Russell Taylor said: ‘His mind was as ever on more abstract considerations: the primacy of the sun, the dreamlike quality of everything beneath compared with this ultimate, vibrant reality’. 

In his Paris and London paintings, the artist often faces the sun. Extreme tonal contrasts make some works appear nocturnal. An example is  Pont Neuf  (1938), which Mann considered his first masterpiece. It is exhibited for the first time since it was painted 73 years ago. 

St Paul’s from Moor Lane was first shown in the Wildenstein ‘Artists of Fame and Promise’ exhibition in 1948, the year of London’s last Olympics. Here Mann portrayed the iconic landmark dome silhouetted against the sun, surrounded by bombsites. Barbican flats and office blocks blot out this view today.  

The 1950s saw a sea-change in the artist’s approach. Painting in artificial light in a flat without daylight, he explored still-life objects casting three-dimensional shadows. The designs are formalized, with a strong line and intensified colour. Mann called this his ‘solid shadow’ period (1953–7).

He married  Renske van Slooten in 1960. At 48 he was 28 years older than his Dutch-Indonesian wife. Depressed and frustrated by lack of recognition, he was tormented by stomach ulcers and had virtually given up all artistic ambitions. Following a serious nervous breakdown he was diagnosed with manic depression.

His health and mental condition gradually improved, as Renske brought some financial security. He gave up teaching to concentrate full time on painting.

From the early 1960s onwards, Mann’s oeuvre comprised mostly interiors, nudes, portraits and still-life paintings. He worked wherever the mood took him, never using a studio or joining an art movement. In 1964, the couple moved from their small council flat to a house in unfashionable Walthamstow. He continued to be fascinated by the dynamic effects of sunlight bouncing off surfaces, but he now painted without preliminary sketches, at great speed. 

 ‘A sense of liberation is perceptible’, wrote Russell Taylor, ‘even in the way the pictures are painted…as though for once ratiocination can be bypassed and the artistic instinct allowed to speak uncensored for itself.

It is difficult not to see these celebratory paintings, with their heady sense of liberation, as the peak of Mann’s achievement. In them at last it all comes together. He can afford to forget or disregard all the rules that have been drummed into him (at the Royal Academy Schools), only because he knows them so well they have become second nature. If the painting at last looks easy, it is because at last it is easy. For Mann at this stage, as it should ideally be for all artists, the tree so carefully planted in youth and strictly nurtured through the years has finally burst into blossom. The world at last can take care of itself and all the artist needs to do is go with the flow.

Mann died, after several spells of mental illness, on 7 January 1980, aged 68.