Ditchling Museum Of Art And Craft

[poliphilo]

The Museum of Arts and Crafts at Ditching has only a few minor works by Eric Gill, but his spirit predominates- as it did in the lives and over the work of his followers. Gill was mind-rackingly odd- a cult leader and sexual predator who achieved a version of modernism through a passion for medieval catholicism and is the only British artist who could be exhibited alongside Matisse and Picasso without seeming like a pale copyist or an eccentric interloper. Gill revolutionised sculpture and typography and produced religous art that convinces- which is a hard thing to do in an unbelieving age. He drew all sorts of craftspeople to Ditchling- where he established a pompously named guild-cum-commune with its own chapel- and it is their work, in metalwork and calligraphy and weaving etc that is mostly on show. There are oddities- for instance an example of the textiles that were woven for Charlton Heston to wear in Ben Hur and a small selection of drawings and contraptions by the (non-Gillian) cartoonist Roland Emmett. My favourite exhibit (sadly only on loan) is a garden roller carved on its ends (by a Gill disciple under the master's supervision) with sexually explicit images of a boy and girl.

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I saw the garden roller in the Portrait Gallery's exhibition about the legacy of William Morris: it is indeed an impressive object.

I had not known of this museum: another one for the list of places to go, things to see. Oddly enough, I was reading about Ditchling at the weekend (the Guardian recommends the winery there...)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It'd set in a beautiful part of the world- and if you're craving the bright lights- only a few miles up the road from Brighton.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Gill was featured in that Victoria Cohen Mitchell programme about "The Bohemians" the other week, about his art and his reprehensible sexual practices. He's one of those "can we separate great art from the artist" cases that always provokes so much debate. So many of them had hideous personal lives.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The authorities at Westminster cathedral asked themselves- after the scandal broke- whether they could carry on living with Gill's Stations of the Cross- and decided after much heart-searching- that they could.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

There's a massive Gill sculpture in the building where I work, commemorating the end of WWI. True to form, it is very odd.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I used to dislike Gill's work but he's slowly crept up on me. I now think he's a really important artist.