Text by curator and researcher Dr Nicola Baird for the exhibition ‘The line is an unreal thing’: Dorothy Mead and Edna Mann that opens January 19th, 2024.
Dorothy Mead (1928-1975)
Born in London in 1928 Dorothy Mead attended the South-East Technical College and Dagenham School of Art where she first encountered artist-teacher David Bomberg. Despite having lodged a formal protest against his approach – ‘I was 16 years at the time and understood little’ – Mead was subsequently won over, following Bomberg to the City Literary Institute and, in 1945, to the Borough Polytechnic, now London South Bank University. In 1946 Mead became a founder member of the Borough Group, formed, in the artist’s own words, to ‘further the aims of David Bomberg and to establish his students as professional painters’. She exhibited alongside its other members including Dennis Creffield and Cliff Holden, with whom she had an 11-year relationship, until the group disbanded in 1951.
In 1956 Mead enrolled as a mature student at the Slade School of Art where she continued to flourish, influencing younger artists, including Mario Dubsky, and becoming president of Young Contemporaries (1958-59). And yet, despite winning the Steer Medal for Landscape Painting and a Prize for Figure Painting, Mead was forced to leave without a degree, her failure to sit the perspective exam compounded by Professor Coldstream’s refusal to accept a thesis in which she had stated her belief in ‘the scientific method’ as ‘alien to me in my work as a painter’. Key to understanding the nature of Mead’s audacity and originality as an artist is a statement made in a letter to Andrew Forge: ‘It seems that I do not toe the line. I recognise no line. I accept only myself. The line is an unreal thing to me, and the gamble on myself has to be made, not just in energy and work, but in self-belief.’
Mead was an exceptionally dedicated artist of ‘monumental intention’, and ‘deep feeling’ whose paintings possessed ‘inner thrust and structural density’. And yet, unable to secure a permanent teaching position she struggled to sustain herself financially combining intermittent employment at Goldsmiths, Chelsea School of Art and Morley College with casual jobs including as a cartoon animator for Halas & Bachelor, a West End theatrical costume designer, and a waitress at Lyons Corner House.
Although included in the 1964 Arts Council exhibition, 6 Young Painters along with David Hockney, Peter Blake and Bridget Riley, an active member of the London Group since 1960 and its first female president, Mead was never given the opportunity of a solo show. For Holden, ‘Dorothy had courage, stuck to her principals … She … never sought to turn her work into a saleable commodity’ and yet she did once confide, half-jokingly to her younger sister Val that ‘she would change her name to George – our Dad’s name – giving her much more chance of being recognised as a painter’.
Indeed, Mead has not yet achieved the level of recognition she rightfully deserves, while her role as mentor to her one-time lecturer and married long-term lover Andrew Forge remains largely unacknowledged. For Mead their tempestuous relationship was at once, ‘the most wonderful thing’.
that has ever happened to me’ and the source of much hurt and distress. Although ‘a very abundant, very positive person’, Mead tragically attempted suicide on more than one occasion, resulting in periods of rehabilitation in Springfield University and Maudsley Hospitals. Mead died in 1975 at the age of 46 from a brain tumour.
Edna Mann (1926-1985)
Born in East London in 1926, Edna Mann was an artist, teacher and mother described by her siblings as a ‘brave’, ‘vivacious’ ‘lifeforce’. First educated at Romford County High School for Girls, Mann went on to study at the South-East Technical College and Dagenham School of Art where she encountered artist-teacher David Bomberg. Mann was one of the few female artists to attend Bomberg’s classes and, like Dorothy Mead, though initially sceptical, in 1944 she followed him to the City Literary Institute and subsequently to the Borough Polytechnic, now London South Bank University. Works executed while under Bomberg’s tutelage include charcoal renderings of the exterior of Westminster Abbey, the interior of St Paul’s Cathedral and Cityscape, likely drawn from the roof of the Borough Road building.
United in their appreciation of Bomberg, Mann, along with fellow pupils Mead, Cliff Holden and Miles Richmond founded an exhibiting society known as the Borough Group (1946-51). Prior to the group’s formation Mann had accepted a scholarship to study book illustration at the Royal College of Art, choosing to leave after a year because of her tutors’ trenchant opposition to Bomberg’s influence, a decision which seemed to those around her all the more controversial when having become pregnant, she was encouraged to leave the group as Bomberg did not believe that it was possible to be both an artist and a mother.
Mann would go on to raise three children, combining motherhood with both artmaking and teaching. Transitioning out of what husband Don Baldwin referred to as her “mud plum” period, between the late 1940s and 1960s, Mann began increasingly to embrace abstraction and the use of vivid colour. Moving during this time between Forest Hill, Romford, Leightonstone and Woodford, Mann also taught art at Lucton County Secondary Modern School in Debton near Loughton before gaining employment at Burnt Mill School in Harlow (1962-1978).
In 1965 Mann’s work was included in The Harlow Arts Festival, the same year in which she had her first solo show of paintings, drawings and prints at the Drian Galleries in London, founded by Lithuanian émigré Halima Nalecz. Also in 1965, having begun, from the late 1950s onwards to experiment with imaginative and observational writing, Mann succeeded in having a play – entitled The Leavers written with Frank Hitchcock and including Nigel Graham and Anthony Hall – broadcast by the BBC. Although she is well-represented in the Sarah Rose Collection, it is incredibly rare to see examples of Mann’s work on display elsewhere.