Clare Taylor on the exhibition of Laura Knight‘s work at MK Gallery, showing until 20th February 2022.
Circus, 1935 – ceramic dinner service
This show at the MK Gallery injects bold colours and equally bold subjects into the urban landscape of Milton Keynes. It brings together an astonishing range of Laura Knight’s work in oils, watercolour, charcoal and pencil as well as her designs for ceramics, costume and the poster to explore what the exhibition catalogue calls ‘the gaze that she cast over her surroundings and the assorted characters that entered her orbit’. Visitors might recognise her subjects drawn from the circus, but the wartime subjects and her portraits of the disenfranchised are much less well known. The show also illustrates her long and varied career, from early drawings made when she was still studying at Nottingham Art School in the 1890s, to her election as Royal Academician and author of two autobiographies, the second published to coincide with her retrospective exhibition at the R.A. in 1965. The fact that this is the first major show since makes this re-examination long overdue, also charting the fall from favour of Knight’s form of modernism to the present-day revival of interest in twentieth-century British portraiture and its subjects.
Lamorna Birch and His Daughters, 1916-1934
The show also reveals wider issues around the place of women (and a few men) in twentieth-century Britain. Knight overcame restrictions on women students painting from the nude when she was still in her teens by hiring her own model, and her ethereal portrait of the model Lily Poyser (‘The Yellow Lady’) hangs in the opening room. This is counterpointed by images of women at work, a theme she was to return to throughout her career and one where Knight often inverts viewpoints. An oil of the fishing fleet leaving Staithes in Northumberland focuses not on the ships themselves, or the men who sailed them, but on the single figure of a woman walking towards the viewer, away from the sea and the group watching the ships’ departure. The same room contains a very different kind of portrait, heroic in scale. Here, however, the focus is not on classical imagery or the female nude but rather on domestic life, taking as its subject her fellow artist Lamorna Birch and his two daughters who are depicted in a brilliantly impressionistic setting of dappled shade. Significantly, motherhood is often absent from these canvases: the next room includes more plein-air Cornish works where Knight reclaims the right of women artists to paint the female nude, posing bodies against turquoise-blue waters, while modern women with bobbed hair and loose clothing in saturated colours poised on cliff tops. Here, the panoramic viewpoints into water are often unsettling and the models’ faces again turned away from the viewer.
The Rehearsal, 1948
The central room displays Knight’s love of spectacle to great effect, rooted in both populist and more established art forms. Straightforward portraits of performers, particularly women, are less frequent than glimpses of moments of transformation. Dancers tie shoes, circus performers are seen just off stage and actors wait around in rehearsal, their identities in turn hidden and revealed by costume and make-up. This interest in performance continued throughout Knight’s career. The show also includes examples of her post-war works painted at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and in London theatres. Here, she not only portrayed the actors, such as Paul Scofield, but also members of the wardrobe and dressers. A portrait of Gwen Ffangcon-Davies preparing for the role of Juliet contrasts the actor’s auburn wig and gold gown against a white wardrobe and the black and white uniform of the dresser handing her hair pins.
Depictions of female members of historically marginalised groups also throw up a disjunct between Knight’s portrayals and the privileges of the successful artist. Portraits of women from Traveller and Roma communities with titles such as ‘Gypsies at Epsom’ are one example of this. Knight’s studio was in a converted Rolls Royce, the payments she made to sitters an alternative to prosecution for practicing their main source of work at the races, telling fortunes. These works concentrate on colour, pattern and line, often pairing women of different generations in double portraits out of doors- there is little hint of hardship here, rather clothing and setting contribute to what Sophie Hatchwell (in her thought-provoking catalogue essay) identifies as stereotypes of Roma and Traveller appearance and culture. The same room is hung with a series of portraits of African-American communities painted on segregated wards in Baltimore, a commission obtained through her husband and fellow painter Harold Harvey. Here, further contradictions are clear; Knight might avoid caricatures in her portraits but the words she used to describe her sitters (‘fine types’) were deeply racist.
Take Off, 1943
Knight was, however, ahead of her time in securing not only full election to the R.A, but also a retrospective in her own lifetime, the first woman to do so. She was also active in promoting both herself and her profession. Interestingly, it was her wartime works that she singled out as her greatest achievement and, for me, these were the most powerful. The deeply-lined faces of the all-male crew of the Stirling bomber convey concentration and tiredness are captured in ‘Take off’, hung next to another wartime portrait, of an all-female team raising a barrage balloon. This told its own story of female empowerment: although it was thought double the number of women would be needed to replace a male team, in fact it was less than half.
Frequently criticised by contemporaries for her ‘strong, masculine style’, the exhibition might have gained from showing just how her work stands up to that of her male (and female) contemporaries as portraitists. However, it brings to the fore an artist who fought for equality in pay as well as status and engaged with curating her own reputation decades before the term became fashionable. It also allows the visitor to engage with a very British version of social realism, and with how artists such as Knight sought to capture men and women at work in both urban and rural settings across the early twentieth-century.
Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring, 1943