A NUN and a lecturer at an Anglican teacher-training college are not figures immediately associated with Surrealism. But, in a celebration of the art movement’s centenary, the Hepworth Wakefield is highlighting some overlooked artists, particularly women artists, who were part of Surrealism’s story. David Chipperfield’s monumental gallery, built from pigmented concrete on a bend of the river Calder, with views of Wakefield Cathedral and medieval Chantry Chapel, is the perfect space to appreciate Surrealism’s home-grown aspects.
Marion Adnams was Head of Art at Derby Diocesan Training College, founded to provide teachers for schools in poor neighbourhoods. Adnams lived in the family home all her life, and combined painting, printmaking, and exhibiting with caring for her elderly mother and teaching. In 1966, she designed a series of murals for Immanuel Church, near Burton on Trent. Two year later, aged 70, the artist lost most of her sight, but continued creating art. Towards the end of her life, she reflected that “death and resurrection . . . life coming out of death in varied and curious ways” had been her overarching theme. Adnams lived to the age of 96, and her funeral was held in Derby Cathedral.
Photo Michael Pollard, courtesy The Hepworth
WakefieldInstallation view of “Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes”. (Works by Marion Adnams on rear wall.)
Four of Adnams’s works are on display in “Forbidden Territories”. Panure (1946), plays on the term for a set of matching jewellery by presenting a pair of horned animal skulls, possibly sheep or goats, enveloped in spools of spiralling white paper, bringing to mind scriptural scrolls. The skulls are rendered in photo-realist detail, with the grey background visible through the eye sockets.
The starting point for Adnams’s Surrealist paintings were often natural objects collected on walks, or her regular trips to the south of France, which she would draw before incorporating into paintings. This practice mirrors the surrealist tradition of objets trouvés, in which found items and everyday things would be recombined or presented in unexpected ways to give access to the desires and urges of the unconscious.
© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London. Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery (Norfolk
Museum Service)René Magritte, La Condition Humaine (1935)
Two more paintings from the 1940s, Serpents in Your Tides (1940) and Alter Ego (1945), demonstrate Adnams’s skill at depicting folded paper to give the illusion of historic, formal costume. The Gainsborough style wide-browed picture hat with paper-curl plumes in the earlier painting was one of the works inspiring the milliner Stephen Jones’s 2011 Ascot Collection.
Adnams’s horror at the destruction of the Second World War and her mother’s failing health during this time is reflected in the two bands of camouflage drapery, resembling offal, which the central female figure in Alter Ego holds from her pin-straight outstretched arms. Pressed for time with her teaching and caring responsibilities, Adnams described her art-making as an escape into “the Enchanted Country”.
Mary Wykeham challenged head-on the Surrealists’ dismissal of religion. Having exhibited alongside Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, she found Roman Catholicism in 1950 and became a nun, taking the name Little Sister Mary of Jesus. Wykeham lived in the order’s houses in India and London and spent time as a hermit in Switzerland. She said that the Surrealists’ “anti-religious declarations were a catalyst” allowing her to find “new roads in the arts and in living” by combining Christianity and Surrealism.
Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute/Webster Hamilton Ltd., Glasgow. Photo Adam ReichNicolas Party, Landscape (2022)
Although Wykeham said, of taking her vows, “it was the end of life as a painter and the beginning of something quite new,” she continued her artistic practice into her later years, dying in1996 at the age of 87. Her interest in the “divine chaos” of hymns, Bible verses, and church architecture can be seen in works such as Dream-Desert (1979) and the copper engraving Night River/Contemplatio (1988), resembling the form of a stained-glass window.
Bringing together more than 100 Surrealist works, “Forbidden Territories” places artists once consigned to the margins of Surrealism alongside its most celebrated practitioners. Surrealism’s influence on current artists is also evident. Max Ernst’s exploration of the Bavarian forests of his childhood, in the oil painting The Forest (1927-28), is set against the contemporary Swiss painter Nicholas Party’s Landscape (2022). Parry’s linen backdrop with brightly coloured lollipop trees sheds fresh light on the emotionally etched bark images of Ernst’s imagination. Similarly Dali’s Mountain Lake (1938), with its ominously suspended black telephone receiver, takes on new menace through proximity to the spectral skulls in Adnams’s Panure.
“Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes” is at the Hepworth Wakefield, Gallery Walk, Wakefield, until 21 April. Phone 01924 247360. hepworthwakefield.org
