Margaret Mellis – excluded from art history?

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Margaret Mellis

By Andrew Lambirth

Margaret Mellis (1914–2009) is usually snagged in passing by the fishing nets of art history via her marriage to the influential aesthetician Adrian Stokes (1902–72) and her brief involvement in the avant-garde circles around wartime St Ives.  Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth came to stay during the war and Naum Gabo became a neighbour, and it is clear that this milieu led to her shift from painterly figuration to severe Constructivist reliefs and collages, work shown in the Tate’s 1985 St Ives exhibition and now represented in national collections. Sections of the artworld have also become interested in her late driftwood constructions, shown regularly in recent years at Austin/Desmond Fine Art in London. The period between these 1940s works and her turn to driftwood construction is now filled in for us by Andrew Lambirth’s gorgeous new book, the first book-length study of the artist.

Margaret Mellis’ best period of work lasted from 1980, when she began making her driftwood constructions in large numbers, until 2001, when she stopped work owing to the onset of Alzheimer’s. The 36 glorious colour illustrations of these works are themselves worth buying this book for. The driftwood pieces were picked up on the beach at Southwold in East Anglia where she moved from Syleham (a village further inland) with her artist-husband Francis Davison in late 1975. The collection of the material involved a certain level of surprise and primal aesthetic appreciation of found materials and the decision to use particular pieces together allowed for an improvisatory quality alongside considered decision making.

The painted yet flaked nature of the boat fragments produced a painterly quality within an essentially sculptural relief idiom. Such ‘painterliness’ suggested associations of the elements (sea, clouds), although any figurative metaphors in the shapes themselves (and they do not always have associations in a clearly determinate sense) came from within the structuring process rather than leading it. The starting-point of a rectangular format was loosened as she developed, both in profile and in introducing space within the work. Thus her early practice as a Constructivist re-emerged, fused with more down-at-heel and metaphorical strands of thinking characteristic of post-war art. These driftwood constructions are both self-sufficient and fascinatingly suggestive artworks, immensely aesthetically satisfying and uplifting.

Being explicit about the exceptional aesthetic value of Mellis’ late work, to which Lambirth devotes less than a quarter of his text, is intended to raise a whole series of issues about writing art history. For all their quality, these works are not in art history yet, because art history is still essentially dominated by notions of movements and styles and, read in those terms, these works are too belated a flowering, well beyond the originating context of 1930s Constructivism and 1950s ‘associative abstraction’ (‘St Ives’). So commentators have to search for reasons for non-promotion of the work: Lambirth reaches for Mellis’ early marriage to Stokes (an association which both stopped him writing about her work, as someone too partial, and put other people off writing about her, out of a certain anxiety over his prickliness). Lambirth also puts Mellis’ neglect down to her own removal from London, her dislike of self-marketing and (in the late 1970s) her deference to her husband. All this assumes the ‘natural’ virtue of worldly success at the expense of explaining why an artist might want to neglect it (and live a life of bohemian primitivism) or how that neglect was still performed from a semi-insider position which prevented her work from being lost and indeed led to its being carefully marketed.

What accounts aiming to promote a re-evaluation of an artist tend to do (and Lambirth’s well-researched text is ‘normal’ in that sense) is both to explore career connections with the already validated (Stokes, Nicholson, Gabo in this case) and to explore the fullness of an oeuvre but withholding explicit evaluations concerning the its unevenness. I might say, in response to Lambirth’s committedly even-handed approach, that Mellis’  rather poetic figurative paintings of the 1930s, and the c.1957 semi-abstracted paintings of wilting flowers are deeply impressive in a way that I find her mid-career abstract works are not, following rather consciously as they do the period desiderata of painterly elementalism and generative abstract grammar. Yet it is perfectly wonderful for a life-long art-practitioner to synthesize understandings and resources in a sustained late period, and in a sense her artistic identity is achieved only during the 1980–2001 period, at which point we read back glimmerings and anticipations of what is to come (but only because it is already there). If such special periods of artwork (whether they be early, middle, or late) ultimately prove aesthetically sustaining for artists and art-lovers (as I think Mellis’ late driftwood constructions will), then art history itself will find itself needing to deploy different story-nets to catch up with such work. Lambirth’s thorough and well-illustrated career survey certainly provides substantial documentation and assessment, but how this artist’s major late work might finally feature in a history of art is still, at this point, an open question.

Margaret Mellis  by Andrew Lambirth is published by Lund Humphreys, 2010. 192 pp. 126 colour and 18 mono illus, £40.00 ISBN 978-1-84822-048-5