REVIEW Sep 2024 Object – Space – Time:  John Tunnard and the English Modernists at Leeds Art Gallery

David Hancock

Director of the Fourdrinier, artist, lecturer, and curator, David Hancock provides a fascinating insight into the work of the British Surrealist artist, John Tunnard, from his exhibition ‘Object – Space – Time:  John Tunnard and the English Modernists’ at Leeds Art Gallery until 23 March 2025. Hancock is currently developing work on six Surrealist artists from the collection at Salford Museum & Art Gallery for the exhibition, ‘The Omnipotence of Dream’ which will run from 19 October 2024 – 23 February 2025. One of the artists that Hancock will be focusing on is John Tunnard, whose work Pas de Deux (1946) will be included in the show. Hancock came across the exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery by chance.

In a moment of serendipity, I unexpectedly found myself in a small exhibition of the work of John Tunnard and the English Modernists at Leeds Art Gallery at the start of June. The exhibition, ‘Object-Space-Time: John Tunnard and the English Modernists’ brings together the gallery’s holdings of Tunnard’s work bequeathed to them by Sheila Lintell in 1997.

Lintell had been a student of Tunnard’s when he taught at the Central School of Arts & Crafts in the late 1920s and had started to collect his work. Given his friendship circle (many of whom are included in this exhibition), it is surprising that Tunnard’s work isn’t more widely known, but he seemed to always position himself on the periphery, not wishing to get involved. The exhibition at Leeds is made up of the Lintell Bequest, alongside works by his contemporaries, John Bigge, Barbara Hepworth, Henry G. Hoyland, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, and Edward Wadsworth, as well as a handful of contemporary artists from the gallery’s collection.

In my own practice, I am currently responding to several works from the collection at Salford Museum & Art Gallery (SMAG) for an exhibition, The Omnipotence of Dream that opens on 17th October, one of which is a 1946 painting, Pas de Deux by John Tunnard. The work has been in SMAG's collection since 1951 and this will be its first outing. As I write this, the work is currently being conserved and framed for its inclusion. Therefore, it was a rather fortuitous coincidence to come across this exhibition as I wandered around the rooms at Leeds Art Gallery.

Tunnard is an intriguing artist, forming a missing link between Surrealism, Constructivism, and Neo Romanticism; he is able to incorporate motifs from these often opposing movements into a single work. Take for example, the aforementioned Pas de Deux. The background of the painting is a simple depiction of a Cornish landscape, with a small white triangular tower centred on the brow of a hill. The upper part of the hill is contained within an aperture fractured into two parts. The left side of the aperture is toned a pale blue. The right side is stone coloured. The pale blue section contains an angular red structure. Down the vertical side is a row of black saw-like teeth. The horizontal upper section bisects both parts of the fracture, disintegrating into black lines as it zigzags across the second section. An ominous stain winds itself around the upper part of the structure, drawing both parts of the fracture together. On the stone side are two biomorphic forms, one large, grey, with a red interior with projecting fins, folds and claws. The other form is small, bone white, with rabbit-like ears as it precariously teeters on the uppermost appendage of its larger companion. To the right of this form is a vertical set of steps, or an upended viaduct, rising from the hillside. The rendering of hillside towards the foreground of the painting appears to be etched into the board and smeared over with an oily black. In the lower right of the painting is a red spill flowing to the left and right in rivulets. Rising from each end point is another angular scaffold made of four closely aligned white lines. These frame the biomorphic forms at an irregular angle, shifting in colour from black to white to red as they cross the demarked sections of the paintings. The painting Pas de Deux is indicative of much of Tunnard’s mature output and seamlessly blends through his laying of painting techniques and abstracted forms, alongside his ability to draw from both his own unconscious and the material world around him – the landscape of his beloved Cornwall.

Tunnard’s friend, the artist Julian Trevelyan provides an imaginative and vivid description of Tunnard’s work from the March 1939 issue of the London Bulletin:

“First Tunnard walks along the seashore till he spots an old ship’s timber, a cast off ironing board, a washed-up chart, an unfinished lavatory seat… Next he turns his spiders to work on them. Delicate webs are spun, whilst the slug ambles around leaving his silvery trail behind him. Now it is the turn of the shipworms and the weevil who scour the surface into most intriguing patinations.”(1)

Trevelyan’s conjuring of Tunnard’s trained, painterly menagerie conveys the variety of surface textures on display in his artistic enterprise. His skills as a textile designer are evident in his creative output. His practice sits at the juncture between Abstraction and Surrealism, often depicting a Cornish inspired dreamscape populated by biomorphic and architectural forms, themselves a perversion of the flotsam and detritus left behind by the populace. He was particularly fond of the work of Miro and Klee, and elements of both of their work can be found in the amorphous forms and textured luminous surface.

Michael Remy continues these ideas, suggesting that Tunnard’s relationship to Surrealism lies in “the transformation of the vestiges of a world we think we know into the harbingers of a novel vision.”(2) In his painting, spectral structures and Constructivist forms inhabit the same space as his representation of the Southwest coast. Tunnard is able to merge several contradictory aspects: from the formal rationality of constructivist abstraction, to the irrationality of Surrealist meanderings, these are charged with his fondness for the mystical landscape of his adopted home.

Tunnard is a fascinating character. He dressed bizarrely at private views and on occasion introduced himself to attendees by performing a triple somersault across the gallery and announcing himself as he landed at their feet. He was born in Sandy, Bedfordshire in 1900, and later studied design at the Royal college of Art from 1919-1923. He established a business with his wife, Mary (or ‘Bob’ as she was known), printing silk scarves, before turning to painting in the 1930s. He joined the London Group alongside Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore in 1934. After Bob presented him with Herbert Read’s book, Surrealism in the mid-1930s, his work shifted dramatically, moving away from traditional figuration. It became more abstracted and included esoteric motifs situated within a topography reminiscent of the Lizard Peninsula that he and Bob had relocated to in the early 1930s.

However, he never fully aligned himself with Surrealism. Though he was included in major Surrealist exhibitions, he was never an official member – probably due to the restrictions that the Surrealist group placed upon its members. The war years were his most productive artistically, producing over three hundred works. Tunnard was a conscientious objector (though at 39 years old, he would have been too old to be called-up so he never had cause to make this official). Instead, he assisted the war effort briefly as a fisherman making crab pots, and then as an auxiliary coastguard, spending hours upon hours staring out to sea, watching out for enemy incursions.

Object-Space-Time provides a definitive overview of Tunnard’s practice across twenty or so works. Placed alongside his peers, the uniqueness of his individual vision is apparent. Though there are clear similarities between Tunnard’s work and those of Nash, Nevinson, and Wadsworth, in the landscapes and seascapes of the British coast, he creates something entirely otherworldly. As Tunnard merges the Modern ‘isms’, he also merges the abyssal and the terrestrial, creating a liminal space of the unconscious, of shipwrecks and ruins.

It is pleasing to see several contemporary artists presented alongside Tunnard and the English Moderns in the exhibition. A work, Torso III (2022) by Cornish-incomer, Ro Robertson leads the viewer, both physically and visually, towards the Tunnards in the adjoining room. There is a lovely symmetry between their shared aesthetic: the bodily experience of the sea and the sand and the combing of objects washed ashore pervades their respective practices. In Robertson’s work, a red triangular sheet of metal akin to a ship’s hull, adorned with abstracted fins, rudders, and sails points to a discarded pair of stained Calvins in which a pebble nestles. Within the room itself are works by Gordon Cain, Boyd Webb, and Sara Barker.

Barker’s work, a child slipping, a man losing his hat, in the natural weather (2017), incorporates a range of materials - car paint, jesmonite, and steel rods – to create a physical and metaphysical representation of space.  In the context of the surrounding works, this evokes the bucolic; the industrial materials conjoin to create a work of subtle fragility, potentially reflecting environmental damage caused by the extraction and manufacture of these materials. Cain’s digital collage, Cleft (2008), also relies on the contrast of materials. Though his experience as a sculptor enables him to convey an illusionary realm outside of the physical experience of the landscape, as with Tunnard’s work, it is devoid of the physical object. Webb’s practice also seems somewhat akin to Tunnard’s in this respect, salvaging debris from his surroundings to construct staged sets within his studio, which he then photographs. In Dry Eyes (1984) a discarded carpet is transformed into rolling moors. Two dead pigeons, suspending by black rods, circle overhead, as broken furniture morphs into rocky outcrops. These three works each bring a new context to Tunnard’s work, evidencing the need for this timely reappraisal.

This leads nicely to my own response. Though I am still ruminating on what form this will take, I have reconstructed the biomorphic forms from Tunnard’s painting in clay. Bringing the two-dimensional into the three; transferring the intangible into the physical has been a challenge. I am not a sculptor and have little experience of modelling. After several attempts, I have come to understand how these forms might be realised, standing upright and supporting their own weight. As a painting, these forms were not required to function in reality, and in constructing a set (not unlike Boyd Webb, but on a vastly reduced scale), it is necessary that these objects remain immobile within the still life. I am still considering the other elements, possibly creating a deconstructed frame within the frame, and there is also the doll. It is not necessary that the doll resembles Tunnard, but instead appears out of my imaginings of a character who might sit well within the assembled objects. He must be in keeping with the general aesthetic, whilst conveying Tunnard-like qualities. I have a fix upon him, and as I research Tunnard further, learning more of his nature: his flamboyance and humour, his pacificism and kindness to animals, his love of jazz and pirates, and his reticence to join groups but capacity to maintain strong friendships, he starts to step forward into being.

Object – Space – Time:  John Tunnard and the English Modernists is on show in the East Gallery of Leeds Art Gallery until 23 March 2025.

The Omnipotence of Dream opens at Salford Museum & Art Gallery on 17 October and runs until 23 February 2025.

Footnotes

(1) M. Remy, Surrealism in Britain 1999 Ashgate Publishing Company, p.258