 We welcome everyone, we are just going to give it another few seconds while everyone logs in, I can see the participant numbers climbing all the time. So, we will just wait a few seconds until we have got a good group of people with us today and I introduce our speakers. Ok, I think we will make a start. Welcome everyone, my name is Sarah Turner, I'm the Deputy Director at the Paul Mellan Centre for Studies in British Arts, which is a resource institute and educational charity based in Bedford Square in London, and you can find out all about our activities at our website. Welcome back if you attend our events regularly, and a special welcome to those of you who are new to the PMC. This is an event in our summer Research series, which is entitled Lichred, crystal, concrete, the arts in post war Britain 1945 to 1965. And there are still plenty of events left in this series. So if you enjoy today and would like to come back, some of the events are in person, but they're all live streamed as well. Again, have a look on the events space on our webpage to find out about those. But without further ado, I'd like to introduce today's seminar and our speakers. And the title of our seminar today, Marginalized Spaces and Emigrate Artists, will take us through some really interesting spaces, galleries and studios, places that have somehow become sort of fallen off the traditional narratives of post war British art and are often included as a footnote within those histories. But today's speakers will really take us into those spaces, especially the Abbey Art Centre, and tell us why we need to know more about it and to properly grapple with it and account for it in the histories of post war modernism. I just want to briefly introduce our two speakers to you today. And you can find their full bios on our webpage as well, if you want to see more and read more about their very impressive fellowships and publications. Our first speaker will be Sheridan Palmer. And Sheridan is an art historian, curator and biographer and an Australian Research Council, Senior Research Associate at the University of Melbourne, where she's working on an ARC project, The Abbey Art Centre, reassessing post war modernism 1946 to 1956. Sheridan is also an associate of the Centre of Visual Art at the Victorian College of the Arts and has previously worked in conservation at the National Gallery of Australia and as a curator at the Art Gallery of Ballarat and as an art dealer in Australian and British art. Our second speaker will be Jane Eckart, and she's an art historian, curator and teaching associate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She's also a fellow at the Centre of Visual Arts, the University of Melbourne and a postdoctoral research associate on the 2020 to 2023 Australian Research Council project, The Abbey Art Centre, working with Sheridan Palmer and a multi institutional team of researchers from Australia and the UK. Her interests are in the field of modernist diasporas and multiple modernities, particularly in the areas of sculpture and printmaking. Sheridan and Jane, it's really a real pleasure to have you join us, both based in Australia. So we've scheduled this event to try and fit in with a convenient ish time zone for us both. And we're really grateful for you to staying or doing this across your dinner time in the evening in Australia. So and so we're here in the PMC over lunchtime and people joining us from the UK and from Australia and around the world as well. I think this is one of the great benefits of doing some of these events entirely online that the audience members who can join as a base across the world and can interact. And that's just a call out to our audience members to say, please do interact with this seminar. This is very much research in progress. The speakers want to give this research now to get feedback to generate conversation. So we'll have two papers and then there'll be plenty of time for questions, the conversation, and we really hope that those of you who are joining us will will enter into that dialogue about this really intriguing art centre. I'm just going to talk you through some of our housekeeping slides just so everyone is aware of of those. I actually can't see. Oh, it's just starting. There we go. So we'll have two presentations followed by the Q&A and you can type your questions using the Q&A function. And during the papers as well, you might want to use the chat box as well to communicate with us. The session will be recorded and made available to the public via the Paul Mellon Centre's website after the event. And close captioning is available as well. So you can enable that by looking at the CC live transcript button at the bottom of your screen. OK, so without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Sheridan to share her presentation with us. And just again say a very warm welcome and thank you for joining us today, Sheridan. Thank you, Sarah. Whoops. Sorry, I'm just trying to get up my there with me. That's looking well full screen. Thank you, Sheridan. Getting there. Now I'm going the wrong way. Sorry. OK. There and we're away, I think. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. And thank you Paul Mellon Centre. I'd like to acknowledge first the traditional and present custodians of the wire injury people on whose land I live. From the 1930s to the immediate years following the Second World War, an increasingly common fate amongst the flow of human traffic was a sense of rootlessness and mobility. We're still coming to terms with the scattered traditions that this global predicament created. And adapting James Clifford's use of ethnographic modernity, which he defined broadly as diverse ways of thinking and writing about culture. I apply an ethnographic paradigm to the post war artist colony, the Abbey Art Centre. In 1946, the British born German Emma Gray art dealer and galleriest William Oly acquired a rambling three acre property at 89 Park Road, New Barnett on the rule fringe of London. It functioned as his home and a repository for his exceptional private collection of ethnographic art. And by early 1947, he was advertising it as an artist colony. He ran the Abbey Art Centre along utopian and socialist lines of patronage, creating something he had dreamt of as a young sculptor in Germany, where he promised himself that if at any time in his life, he should be able to do so. He would found a community on a nonprofit basis where artists could obtain studios at as low a price as possible. Frederick Jemison considers utopianists often emerged from fallen societies from which they came, and Oly's escape from the Nazi Germany and establishing the artist colony exemplifies this. As a young man in the early 1900s, William Oly had worked as an architectural sculptor on public monuments in Cologne, Berlin and Frankfurt on Main and mingled in modernist circles such as those of the avant garde dancer Isadora Duncan and the inimitable British theatre designer Gordon Craig. By the 1920s, he'd established himself as a dealer in Asian antiquities, where he acquired at London auction houses and resold them in Germany. Like the objects that he bought and moved across borders, Oly also became part of a diaspora escaping national socialism arriving in London in 1933. For refugees, this replacement of roots with roots, R-O-U-T-E-S, had consequences for identity and belonging, and may explain William Oly's benevolence to transient artists and foreign outsiders that he's abby colony, as well as his passion for artefacts of otherness. In London, Oly reinvented himself firstly as an artist, then as a dealer of antiquities, ethnographic artefacts and modern art. He was active in emigre support networks and anti-fascist pro-working class groups such as the Artists International Association and the Communist Club. By 1941, he'd opened the Barclay Galleries at 20 Davies Street, Mayfair, and resumed dealing in mostly Southeast Asian, Chinese, Mexican and Mesopotamian antiquities, as well as African and Oceania artefacts. Hermian Waterfield, the African and Oceanic specialist, places Oly amongst the top 12 collectors of ethnographic art in Britain, but Oly as a person was a considerably richer mix. His interest in contemporary art saw him alternate exhibitions of modern British and European artists with antiquities and ethnographic exhibitions, and as such, Oly's gallery conversed across centuries and continents. Rex Butler and ADS Donaldson, two of our colleagues, see this as a model and as a forerunner of world art. The contemporary artists that Oly showed included Henry Moore, Francis Hodgkins, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Oscar Cacosh, Joseph Herman, J.B. Yates and the Potters Lucy Rhee, and Hans Copa, as well as Australian and refugee artists from his Abbey Art Centre. Even throughout the war, the Barclay Galleries attracted major art collectors and cultural cognoscenti, such as William Fag from the British Museums Department of Ethnography, and Soham Jennings, the British art historian and East Asian ceramic expert and assistant keeper of oriental antiquities at the British Museum. The artists Eileen Agar, Jacob Epstein, Fred Orman, Lucy and Freud, and Graham Sutherland frequented the gallery. At New Barnett, Oly's Abbey Art Centre consisted of an eccentric conglomeration of buildings, and it still exists today as an art colony. It included a three storied 19th century house, reputably the first concrete house built in Britain, a 13th century tithe barn relocated from Kent, which by 1950 housed some 500 ethnographic tribal and religious artefacts. A schoolhouse, a clock tower, and numerous dilapidated buildings used as artist studios. The diverse community of refugee, German, Austrian, Australian, British and Commonwealth artists that Oly gathered around him created a cosmopolitanism that traversed national boundaries within a single location, and offered artists an interstitial base to negotiate Britain's and Europe's changing cultural landscape. Especially during this major geopolitical reconstructive phase. William Oly often returned from his Barclay galleries with newly acquired objects and tribal sculptures, which he showed to artists interested in the exotic or the aesthetic connections between primitivism and modernism. Diddie Hulmerman points out that it's relevant here that, and I quote, before the image, however old it may be, the present never ceases to reshape. With its pervasive out of time and elsewhere, the Abbey Art Centre, I quote, served as a hinge between the metacultures of modernity and tradition. Something the ICA's 1948 exhibition of 40,000 years of modern art, a comparison of the primitive and modern, was concerned with. It's this ethnographic turn towards a modernist primitivism that preoccupied many artists in the early post-war period. Eduardo Peolotsi being one of the more influential amongst the young contemporaries. As was the Australian sculptor Robert Clipple and Oliver Fritchman and the refugee Australian filmmaker and animator Peter Foulders, and the latter three were all Abbey residents. To illustrate how the Abbey Art Centre and all these cornucopia of antiquities and ethnographic treasures produced a productive anachrony, that nurtured cognitive aesthetic and intellectual pathways, I've selected three Abbey residents. First, the young Scottish artist, musician and jeweler Alan Davy, who moved to the Abbey with his wife Billy in April 1949. We know that Davy had visited the Barclay galleries in 1946 when he was on leave from the forces and where he saw African sculpture. And in 1948, as they were transiting through London on their way to Europe, Alan may have noticed a sign in the Barclay gallery's window advertising residential studios, which they took up on their return. Surprisingly, there's scat reference to the five years that the Davy spent at the Abbey Art Centre, even from Davy himself. Yet this phase was critical to his creative autonomy and spiritual liberation. All his tribal art, antiquities and religious icons exuded a primal shamanistic magic that appealed to Davy's pan sensuous instinctual urgencies and sacred fears and are powerfully evident in the gestural paintings upsurge of 1951. An altar of the blue diamond 1950. Moreover, the bucolic peripheral, the bucolic peripheral location of the colony, with its mystical ecclesiastical atmosphere further complemented Davy's spiritual drives, where he said he could let his creative spirit roam freely. And it's worth mentioning that Oly had purchased the property from a religious sect known as the confraternity of the Kingdom of Christ and several clergy continued living there until 1950. Helen Little suggests that these years were crucial for Davy's improvisatory process where he dove into the unknown, and his biomorphic form celebrated a world of imagination and beauty at odds with the common view of alienation and disaffection of the post war milieu. Further, the Aztec, Mexican and pre-Columbian figurines that adorned shoals and cabinets in Oly's house were also fertile sources for Davy's jewellery at the time his main form of income, with animal burden human motifs incorporated into exotic rings, pendants and broaches. Reflecting on the importance of primitivist art in a later interview, Davy claimed, quote, the things in art which are most moving for me are the arts of the so-called primitive people, art of other cultures and ancient art that have this dynamic quality, intuition and a tremendous intensity. In the same year that Alan Dave and Billy Davy moved to the Abbey, a young destitute British artist of Irish heritage arrived, Philip Martin believed images transcended and transformed worldly mean and materialism, and that the artist assumed the role of a spiritual archaeologist. Having lived amongst the so-ho poor and wandered the war damaged streets of London, Martin discovered a language of beauty and truth in discarded detritus and scarred graffiti walls, and he began making collages with what other people threw away. This close reading of rejected materialism, whether a bus ticket, a fragment of newspaper, a lolly wrapper or a trodden matchbox, reshuffled realities and reflected his dissatisfaction with bourgeois and parochial traditions. James Clifford wrote that, quote, collage brings to the work elements that continually proclaim their foreigners. Martin's 1951 tashist collage required world interpreter and the innovative small black and white monotype dense tashist gestural oils collages and torn paperworks that both he and Davey were making at the Abbey during 1949 to 50, point towards the influence of Kurt Schwitter's, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and the French artist Raymond Ains and Jacques Villegl's decollage compositions. Davey had seen the early works of Pollock, Mark Tobi, Arp and others at the 1948 Venice Biennale, which may have influenced his and Martin's tashist paintings collages and frotages. These predate Michelle Tapio's exhibition opposing forces at the ICA in 1953. But as Fiona Gaskin states, a quote, the events of recent history had revealed new depths of human cruelty and new modes of expression and ideas sought to synthesise and abnegate these global destabilisations, tashism being an instrument in that process. Inscribed in one of Philip Martin's early 1950s notebooks is a statement by the Hungarian French photographer Brasai. Like a quote here, graffiti is the state of our civilisation, our primitive art. Graffiti reaches the heart of the burning problems of our age and it's understandable why most of them remind us of lost civilisations, Peruvian, Pre-Columbian, Mexican. End of quote. This existential reconfiguration belonged not only to the disenfranchised city wanderer, the romantic nomad, but as Hannah Feldman points out, to those for whom the experience of war motivates cultural production. Artists across all national terrains during and after the Second World War responded to this crisis. Henry Moore, Kokoska, Peolotsi and Schwitters spring to mind, and not only those visually expressing the pressures of decolonisation. Philip Martin found refuge, close friendship and creative stimulus at the Abbey, but Europe was to be his destination. His debt to Alan Davy cannot be overstated. Just as Peggy Guggenheim introduced Davy to the London Art Deal as Gimple Phil in 1949, so Davy provided Martin with an introduction to Guggenheim in 1954. Gimple Phil also included Martin in the 1951 Summer Exhibition, surely on Davy's recommendation. In 1952, Michel Taupier included Philip Martin in his Un Art Autra, the publication on the free expressive anti-compositional artists associated with the art informale movement. Thereafter, Martin's career accelerated, and he exhibited with many avant-garde lumeries such as ARP, Dubuffet, Matter, Vieira de Silva, Riopelle and Toby. Yet while Philip Martin and his partner Helen Marshall, another Abbey artist, gained international attention, their common fate and constant movement and rootlessness eventually rendered them invisible to modernism's global and national art histories. My third resident at the Abbey Art Centre is the Australian artist story in Bernard Smith, who lived there with his family between 1949 and 1951. Smith, who had been awarded a British Council scholarship to research the 18th and 19th century art of the colonial imperialist period, was exhaustively investigating visual and written archives in order to fully understand the nature of European art. He was able to understand the vision, the politics of contact and territorialism. At the Abbey, numerous artefacts in William Orley's collection interested him, including a book of tarpa cloth samples acquired by Cook on one of his voyages of exploration, and several oceanic objects which influenced illustrations in his major revisionist book, European Vision and the South Pacific, first published in 1960. This groundbreaking book paved the way for postcolonial studies and shaped discourses on cross cultural history and decolonisation. Orley and Smith got on well and discussed the role of primitivism in modernism and the migration of symbols and objects throughout history. Conversations that helped Smith contextualise the origins of aesthetics, material evolution, and what Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood call mnemonic topology. Again, the ICA's exhibition 40,000 Years of Modern Art brought these anthropological issues into renewed focus. Displayed in Orley's house was a ceremonial feathered helmet once worn by a person of high command. It floats out of time and out of place, leaving speculation about a lost world, and while symbolising the exotic other, it carried a narrative that raised questions of ownership, exchange, or the darker intervention of colonial dispossession. In one sense, the helmet exemplifies the abyss cultural predicament of outsideness and marginality, which for many of the Australian and refugee artists resonated with a historical and contemporary perception of their geographic fate and dispersal. If William Orley's ethnographic collection brought the ancient into the new, where images migrated anthropomorphically and temporal time disintegrated, it also provided a double provincialism that to varying degrees affected the Australian and the displaced European artists and how they viewed their past, their post national present and futures. The ethnographic paradigm, so visually abundant at the abbey, implicitly contained the assumption of alienation with, and here I borrow Hal Foster over there, which maps into back then, and the most remote becomes the most primitive. An imperialist narrative that Hal Foster argues is residual in much of art and cultural disciplines. Indeed this historical hegemony preoccupied Bernard Smith, and he used it in his revision of the colonial past and the nativist past. So why was the abbey art centre overlooked, given eminent artists and critics visited. Henry Moore, who lived nearby at much Hadam regularly dropped in to see only, not only because he is interested in his friends collection of archaic, Aztec and pre Colombian artifacts. But he also secured a number of sculpture assistants, including the Australian Oliver Richmond and the British Peter King. Jacob, Jacob Epstein, Il T messens, Edwardo Peolotsi, William Turnbull, Lippi Lipschitt, Francis N Sousa, Gerard Dillon, the expatriate Australian writer Jack Lindsay, John Hartfield, the exile data artist, the filmmaker Jean Renoir, and the art critic Morris Collis, Cotty Burland, and Sir Kenneth Clark all visited. The profusion of networks that William Oly and these visitors created makes mapping this creative community important. Yet if the abbey art centre exemplified the here and the elsewhere, a condition of global modernity, it also represented a collage of cultural predicaments. Perhaps William Oly chose to keep the abbey marginalised, a private creative hub and a collector's paradise free from the hands of institutional and bureaucratic regulation. He'd approached the British Council for a grant to establish the art museum, but the abbey was obviously unsuited to the British Council's national vision and nothing eventuated. Moreover, with Britain's post war reconstruction, rationing and a constrained political situation, the abbey known as a haven for communists may have further contributed to its marginalisation, especially as the Cold War intensified. By 1954, most of the abbey's original group of artists had dispersed, all but four of the 21 Australians had returned to Australia. Alan Davie had moved to Gamble's studio at Rush Green, and only a few British and European artists remained at the abbey as a new generation replaced the old. When William Oly died in 1955, this creative colony slipped further into cultural oblivion. To conclude, if art history is a field of constant revision motivated by engagement with issues that have been ignored or marginalised by traditional approaches, then the abbey art centre rightly demands rehabilitation within the disciplines of art and cultural history. For it provides us with an important lens for reassessing transnational artistic experimentation and modernist post war cultural production. For myself and the art historians involved in our Australian Research Council project, it enables a reassessment of Australian post war modernism within an international context. Thank you very much. And I'll have to you, Jane. Thank you very much, Sheridan. That was fabulous. I might understand the screen. Thank you once again, Sheridan. Following you, I too would like to acknowledge that I'm speaking on the land of the war and tree people and wish to pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. Marginalisation can take many forms. The abbey art centre was and still is geographically marginal to London's museums and galleries in terms of its location in New Barnett. A 15 minute walk from Cockfoster station in half an hour on the Piccadilly line to Bloomsbury or 40 minutes to Mayfair. In 1946, when William Olly purchased the abbey from Father Ward, New Barnett was still part of Hertfordshire, yet to be subsumed into Greater London and comprised a typical Victorian era railway suburb with orderly rows of detached and semi-detached terraced houses bordering a wide green belt to the north. The area boasts of no other galleries or even artists studios, and so the abbey was something of an anomaly, slightly secret and isolated from the surrounding community. The abbey has also long been marginal to accounts of postal art ingestion, as we've just heard, though frequently mentioned in passing it's often relegated to those out and most margins of the text, the footnotes. Why this should be the case is arguably because the majority of abbey residents in the postal years were foreigners, expatriates from the form of British dominions, notably Australia, and European refugees from Germany, Austria and Poland. They faced a notoriously insular London art world where, as John Berger claimed, such few foreign artists as were admitted nearly all had Parisian reputations. Since then they've largely elided histories circumscribed by purely nationalist concerns. And those few British born artists who worked at the abbey during this period, as we've just heard, such as Alan and Billy Davies, Philip Martin and Helen Marshall, were invariably barely out of art school and without gallery representation. So the abbey years represented for them a period of struggle and obscurity that tended to be later downplayed in personal narratives. Furthermore, as we'll see, the sorts of art made at the abbey varied enormously. Far from one prevailing style or philosophy, eclecticism reigned supreme. Cubism, expressionism, surrealism, tashism, social realism and post-impressionism were all deployed at the abbey, often simultaneously. This eclecticism was matched by the abbey's assortment of salvage and quran buildings, which traversed, as we've already heard, temple and spatial boundaries. So that alongside the renowned tithe barn, which we see here in the centre, you could encounter, for instance, a half timber cottage, which we see here on the right, containing a reconstructed 16th century shopping arcade on the ground floor. You could encounter a carriage house, replete with 19th century parishes, a thatched, a waffle and all hut, and even the remains of an African cryl, and these were all remnants of Father Ward's folk park. While this environment represented the antimony of modernism's forward-facing aspirations, it was precisely the stimulus of the past for artists of the present that only sought. And this architectural eclecticism was matched by Oly's personal collection of what we'd now term world art, displayed in the tithe barn, which opened to the public in 1952 as the abbey art centre. To quote from the museum's brochure, the collection included specimens from the South Seas brought back from Captain Cook's voyages, a cast bronze head of a prince from Benin in Nigeria, a queen mother's ceremony stool from Ashanti, and a host of other interesting objects from the Australian other originals, ancient America, Egypt, China, the Melanesian Islands, Africa and Oceania. Inside the main house, Oly believed in juxtaposing old and new, eastern and western, so that the common room was hung with Chinese scroll paintings, alongside works by Henry Moore, Emile Mould and Matthew Smith, including Moore's stones in a landscape of 1936, which we see here, which has since re-entered the Henry Moore Foundation's collection, and also a 1941 shelter drawing. So these were available for the residents to freely examine and, you know, even make copies of if they wished. Oly's eclectic and expansive worldview also underpinned his dealings at the Barclay Gallery's Mayfair, where, from 1941 until his death in 1955, he alternated exhibitions of antiquities, particularly Chinese, Tibetan, West African and pre-Columbian American, with those of contemporary artists. In May 1942, when assembling his first exhibition of what he termed representative contemporary British art, he wrote to Henry Moore that it would be, and a quote, of great interest if a strong unfettered group of artists were formed embodying what seems to be the most important work being done at this present day. And then to paraphrase, and he would then go on in turn to recommend a second group of younger unknown artists. Moore agreed to participate, becoming, as we've already heard, a regular exhibitor and visitor to the gallery, and an occasional guest at the add-in. And along with the selection number of established senior artists, including Francis Hodgkins, Matthew Smith, Duncan Grant, Oscar Cacosh and Paul Nash, more effectively underwrote the risk of showing lesser known artists from Central Europe, the Commonwealth Nations and the British colonies. One of the first such exhibitions in October 1942 was that given to the Berlin and Leipzig trained artist Catarina Wilsinski, who had worked in Paris before the war, winning the Prix de Rome in 1930. Known for her architectural illustrations of Italy, she escaped to England in 1938, and during the Blitz recorded London's bombed out churches and terrace homes. At the time of her exhibition at the Barclay Gallery, she was based in Oxford, where she made a series of sensitive pen portraits of emigraith scholars who'd found refuge there, such as the Jungian, Jung's translator, Gohard Adler, and the renowned East Asian art specialist, William Cohn, whom we've seen this central portrait. Cohn wrote two catalogue essays on Chinese art for William Oly in 1943 and 46, and in 1949 would help establish the Museum of Eastern Art, which is now the Ashmolean's Eastern Art Department. The portrait we see here reflects two key aspects of Oly's network. One recently arrived emigraith scholars such as Cohn and two, the contemporary artists such as Wilsinski. While scholars found refuge in Oxford, several emigraith artists found an affordable and sympathetic home at the Abbey Arts Centre. One of the first to arrive in the summer of 1947 was the Berlin-born sculptor Inge Neufeld, later known as Inge King. She had spent the war years in Glasgow at the Glasgow School of Art under the benevolent wind with Benno shots who encouraged her close study of the work of Epstein and Zadkin. In Glasgow in 1944, she married a Czech physician and pharmacologist, but she was widowed just months before arriving at the Abbey where she worked under her married name Inge Winter. During her first year at the Abbey, King was direct carving in stone and wood in a geometric cubist mode, as we see in the three words here. But in 1948, this evolved to a more organic mode of abstraction with links to ARP, Hepworth and more. The transition can be seen in her pair of cubist dances in red Scottish sandstone, which she reworked into two separate figures. We're looking at this pair of figures here, which she later split within a few months and reworked into these. Dancer of 1948 and flower dancer. Dancer clearly owes its frontal flattening and this sort of syncopated rhythm to Gaudiobreshka's red stone dancer of around 1913. While flower dancer, we see two views of it here, progressed further towards biomorphic abstraction. Any semblance of torso or limbs lost among a right profusion of curling frons. And this work here is the same piece. It was recovered after 1951 when it was damaged and transferred to Australia. Dancer, this one here, was purchased by the Glasregenforia Moray Glasser through the intercession of the Jungian psychoanalyst, Dr Carl Arbenheim, who befriended King in Glasgow and first told her of the Abbey Arts Centre. Arbenheim had heard about the Abbey from, in King's words, one of Oly's women. This was almost certainly Oly's third wife, Lotta Adam, who worked in the high end London dress shop rebel of Baker Street for Sigmund Freud's daughter, Matilda Holletshire, before leaving Oly at the end of the war for the folk musicologist Burt Lloyd. Both Burt and Lotta Lloyd remained on very friendly terms with Oly, and indeed when Oly required a housekeeper at the Abbey, referred to him a political refugee from Berlin, Catebodi, who later became Oly's fourth wife and eventually owner of the Abbey Arts Centre. While this exchange illustrates the very tangled and pervasive nature of Oly's and King's emigrate networks, it should be noted that this exchange also extended within the Abbey, where the Australian sculptor Robert Clipple produced a strikingly similar work to King's, also in Red Sandstone, although his work, his stone was salvaged from a London bombsite rather than being brought down from Glasgow. Clipple's opus 40, Red Sandstone carving, originally known as Anatomy of Sculptural Energy, was almost certainly inspired like King's by Gaudia Brescia. And Gaudia Brescia, Clipple, considered at this time to be in a quote the greatest sculptor of the century. The interest in Gaudia Brescia's work, and in turn, his source material, African art, was fostered in the rich context of the Abbey and the Barclay galleries. In March 1950, after a year in Paris and New York, King returned to the Abbey and was soon engaged to the Australian painter, printmaker Graham King, who had likewise returned to the Abbey after his own travels through Europe. Graham King, Alan Davy, and Philip Martin were then all experimenting with monotypes inspired by Pyle Clay. Inger joined them, producing her own series of monotypes exploring tashiest mark-making. She also constructed at least one suspended mobile sculpture in wire and sheet metal, which was left behind at the Abbey and is now lost. But a surviving photograph in the centre suggest it probably shared more in common with Alan Davy's fragile ephemeral mobiles that he made at the Abbey out of grass stems than with Alexander Calder as might be assumed when anyone says mobile, they immediately jump to Calder. Both Inger King and Alan Davy also produced around this time relief sculptures in clay cast in plaster. King's untitled reliefs from 1950 recalls surrealist experiments of automatism and the sorts of biological systems that Davy explored in his monotypes and paintings. Other reliefs retain vestiges of figuration. Impresion from Oton Cathedral 1951 reduced the Rominesque Saints figures to a series of intersecting lines and dots resembling insects, while bird machine also from around 1951 avert the sticking imagery of Clay's twittering machine of 1922. During this fertile period of cross-pollination at the Abbey, in June 1950, the King's commissioned Davy to design and make Inger's silver and copper wedding band. Davy, as we've already heard, was then making studio jewellery inspired by pre-Columbian art, which he studied at first hand in the British Museum, as well as at the Abbey and the Barclay galleries. And he was finding a ready market for his jewellery unlike his paintings at the time. The design for King's wedding band exists in Davy's sketchbook of jewellery designs, if you can use the right pointer here we see that, among his papers in the Take Gallery archives. While the King family retained two versions of the ring, the first on the left here made by Davy and a second slightly narrower and less worn copy made by King in Melbourne and stamped with her initials. Davy's example inspired King to likewise take up jewellery making in Melbourne, where in the early 1950s the market for sculpture was virtually non-existent. Many years later, in 1979, when Davy first visited Australia, he stayed with the Kings at Warrindite and was present in their living room when fellow Abbey resident James Gleason visited the Kings and interviewed them for a National Gallery Oral History project. The impact of the Abbey continued to be felt in each of their lives decades after their years of residence. Another Jewish emigre or refugee artist who found shelter and encouragement at the Abbey was Helen Grunwald. Having escaped Vienna as a teenager in 1939 with her parents, a concert by a linnist and a kindergarten teacher. She studied during the war at Beckinham School of Art and soon began exhibiting with the Left Leaning Artists International Association or AIA, which only, as we've heard, helped set up in 1933 when he returned from Germany to Australia. Grunwald held her first solo exhibition at the Barclay Galleries in July 1948, comprising 10 atmospheric paintings in London, including Victoria Station, which Sir Kenneth Clark, her earliest and long-term supporter, loaned for the occasion alongside a number of drawings. The fortnight of the exhibition closing, Grunwald had moved to the Abbey, where Oly led her a studio in the cottage and encouraged her to leave her day job, painting plaster saints for a firm of religious publishers, and instead to concentrate on painting full-time. In May 1949, she held a second solo show at the Barclay Galleries showing 35 paintings, all completed at the Abbey, and she served on the invitation as impressions and paintings of London, the churches, the markets, life of the city. The exhibition was a success with Clark purchasing from at several works, and Eric Newton offering his personal congratulations. Grunwald's school friend from Vienna, Angela Varga, first visited the Abbey in early 1950 and was introduced by Grunwald to Kenneth Clark. Varga was two of her works and wrote her a reference that gained her admission to the Slade. Varga returned to the Abbey in October that year to study printmaking and painting at the Slade, and mural painting at the Central School, filling sketchbooks in her spare time with observations of Billingsgate Fish Market and Smithfield Meat Market. Learning to Vienna in 1953 after her study, she remained in contact with the Abbey, both through Grunwald and through her sister Kate, who married another Abbey resident, the young British sculptor and avant-garde filmmaker Peter King, who died so prematurely in 1957. A few years later, Varga attempted to raise the Abbey's international profile by arranging a series of exhibitions of the Abbey residence works in Rome and Vienna, though the exhibitions were ultimately never realised. The Abbey was more than merely a residential community. It attracted a steady stream of visitors, as with her from Sheridan, and these in turn opened further avenues into the London art world. The late South African poet, artist, curator and laterally architect David Lewis, who was then living in St Ives, visited the Abbey in 1948, and there introduced the Australian sculptor Robert Clipple to his friend from Cape Town, the Lithuanian, enograe, and fellow sculptor, Lippi Lichitz. Clipple and Glitzon regularly socialised with Lichitz in London and attended the opening of his acclaimed exhibition of carved sculptures at the Galleria Pollinale. Epstein and Moore, as we've heard, also visited, as did Bernard Mininsky, we see here, who many of the Australians studied with at the Central School, and the German anti-fascist photo montage artist John Hartfield, whom Noel Cwernagham recalls meeting at the Abbey. And later in the 1950s Peter King met the Genoese iconoclast Francis Newton-Sousa at the Abbey. A similarly diverse range of artists, many of them refugees from Hitler, exhibited at the Barclay Galleries. In May 1949 visitors to the gallery could see the work of three artists in addition to Brunwald. The Swiss artist, dramatist and translator, Giorgette Boner, exhibited her illustrations to the Chinese classic Monkey's Pilgrimage, which she translated from Arthur Whaley's English edition into German for a recent Zurich edition. Arthur Mackenzie, later known by the adopted name of George Kenson, showed direct carved sculptures in stone and alabaster inspired by Epstein and Gaudi Breschke, as well as by African and Oceanic art. And the young German-Jewish emigre, Melaine Cosman, showed drawings of dancers and musicians. This was Cosman's first exhibition, which came about through her having been at school with only some Ernst in Geneva just before the war. The combined invitation to all four galleries we see here, build Grunwald and Cosman as a quote as two artists, two young artists of promise being presented by the Abbey Art Centre. Despite Cosman having never been an Abbey resident, indeed she and Hans Keller had by then just settled in Hampstead. So this suggests that the Abbey was more than just affordable studio accommodation. It was also a platform from which to launch unknown young artists into London's art world. The Barclay Galleries provided that all-important launch pad for many Abbey residents. A group show in July 1949 presented Helen Grunwald and Inga King, who was then still going by the name of Inga Winter, alongside the Australians, James Gleason, Peter Graham, Graham King, Robert Clipple, Max Newton and Mary Webb. However, this was not an entirely Abbey show. It also included sculpture by Henry Moore, Karen Jonson, who always struggled to get gallery representation, and the Emigre sculptors Fred Cormas and Ola Nynch, as well as paintings by the Irishman Gerard Dillan, who was also a frequent visitor to the Abbey, and the South African oeslin duplesis, who was a friend of Duncan Grant's. Furthermore, it featured Fred Olman's pastels of Wales and Morocco. The inclusion of Olman's semi-naïve school of Paris landscapes is significant, because Olman was also one of a number of Jewish and Emigre artists, including Epstein and Joseph Herman, who collected African art and were regular patrons of the Barclay Galleries. Olman lent several works from his collection to Ola for his first Art of the Primitive People's exhibition in 1945, including this figure we see here, which Olman later featured in a still life painting of around 1952. A second group show of Abbey artists held in December 1952 heralded the arrival of the Abbey that year of the acclaimed animator and silhouette artist Lothar Reiniger and her film director husband Karl Kopp. Reiniger and Kopp most likely heard about the Abbey through their friends, the Frishmans. Marcel Frishman had been a cartoonist and contributor to Simplissimus in the 1920s, while his wife Margaret Crock Frishman studied printmaking, painting and sculpture in Lipsig and Berlin. The Frishmans had fled Germany in 1933 living in Denmark and Belgium before spending the war years in Melbourne and settled at the Abbey in 1951. They in turn knew of the Abbey, either through news of Melbourne artists Newton and King, who had by then returned to London, or more probably through Caterina Wilsinski, who was a good friend of Crock Frishmans and indeed had or like have studied in Lipsig and Berlin. Yet, aside from these two group shows, the only Abbey residents to hold solo exhibitions at the Barclay Galleries were Helen Grunwald and Mary Webb. The Invitation to Webs exhibition in 1948 announced it was the first exhibition of the series, Artists of the British Commonwealth, Australia, Mary Webb of Sydney. So, Oly evidently intended to continue with further exhibitions of Commonwealth artists drawing from his pool of Australian Abbey residents, but the envisage series never eventuated. This was likely owing to the exhibition's poor reception, with the Times finding Webb's work overly robust and lacking in delicacy, and Eric Newton damming her effectively as a minor artist, neither school professional nor truly naive painter, but lacking a tradition of craftsmanship and condemned to being and a quote an earnest admirable groper. So, Commonwealth artists were thereby deemed lesser byproducts of the British art system, imitative and essentially lacking any tradition. The most Afro-Caribbean and South Asian artists from countries still under British colonial rule were presented as colonials and attracted enormous interest. Between 1947 and 1955, the eminent Nigerian modernist Ben Enwonwu held five solo shows with the Barclay Galleries, where his work was acclaimed by critics such as Eric Newton and Maurice Collis, who were both friends and stored supporters of Oly's. Jacob Epstein bought two works, including Enwonwu's Yorabu Girl of around 1946. At the time of his first Barclay Galleries show in 47, Enwonwu had just graduated from the Slade, was engaged in post-diploma studies in anthropology through University College London, working with the British Museums Collection, and on completion in 1948 will be elected a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Enwonwu's engagement with Igbo spiritualism and iconography, his knowledge of Igbo carving techniques and tools inherited from his father, and his schooling in European figuration would seem to make him a natural fit for Oly's gallery. Yet I'd suggest this was a precarious platform on which to exhibit. Despite the extraordinary technical sophistication and naturalism of ancient Yorabu art, as seen in this famous Ben and Ivory Mask from the Selig Mac Collection, reproduced on the cover of this 1946 Barclay Galleries catalogue, anthropologists, archaeologists, curators and collectors still frame this work as primitive. Enwonwu's name was consistently linked in the press with Ben and Art, and so he had to negotiate this racist othering, leading ultimately to his strong identification with the negritude movement and pan-Africanism. If primitivism framed Enwonwu's reception, the closely allied category of colonial artist framed the presentation of two disparate young artists, Kofi and Tubin from Ghana and Dennis Williams from what was then called British Guiana, when their work was jointly presented at Barclay Galleries in June, July 1949. It was timed to coincide with a new initiative of the Colonial Office, Colonial Month, which aimed to stimulate greater public interest in developing Britain's colonies. A secretary of state for the colonies Arthur Preach Jones, who was a trade unionist labour MP and first chairman of the Fabian Colonial Bureau, invited scores of museums and businesses to mount special displays for Colonial Month, as a result of which William Fag curated traditional art of the British colonies for the Royal Anthropological Institute, centred on the recently excavated Iffa Terra-Coho heads that were lent by the Oni, and the renowned Ben and Ivory masks that we just saw a moment ago, while swimmers exhibited 110 Nigerian masks collected and loaned by the Colonial Educator and Enwonwu's former teacher, Kenneth C Murray. Oly responded with an exhibition of oceanic art and the Ashanti and Ashanti kudos or ceremonial littered vessels from Ghana alongside paintings by and Tubin and Williams. And Tubin was then studying at Goldsmiths College on a British Council sponsored Colonial Secretary's Scholarship. He had already completed seven years study at Achimod College in Accra, Ghana, where from 1937 he'd worked closely with the Russian Jewish Enveyor Sculptor from South Africa, Herbert Vladimir Meravits, who encouraged and Tubin study of Ghanaian ethnography. After Meravits died in London in 1945, and Tubin accompanied his widow, the Berlin Sculptor and anthropologist Eva Meravits. Oh, sorry, a bigger pun. I'm just going to go back to that. Sorry. On field research, the field trips to research the art of the Yorobu and the Akhan acting as translator and assistant researcher. Eva Meravits wrote the forward to the first exhibition of primitive art at the Barclay Galleries in 1945. She assisted with the second exhibition there in 1946. And in 1949 had just published her first book, The Sacred State of the Akhan. It is almost certainly she introduced and told them to Oly reflecting again the importance of these emigre networks to all these dealings. And Tubin exhibited at the Barclay Galleries, vibrantly colored paintings of community life, often of women preparing meals such as this one we see here, which was bought from the exhibition for the Government Art Collection. And he showed these along with some of his manuscript research on the Akhan language. Shortly after returning to Ghana and Tubin found that the National School of Art became the leading authority on Ghanaian cultural heritage. Dennis Williams, or to Antwoven's co-exhibitor, arrived in London in 1946 on a British Council scholarship, two years ahead of the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants, and studied at Campbell School of Art. While none of his work from the Barclay Galleries exhibition seems to have survived, Cotty Berlund, who was always good friend and the honorary curator of the Abbey Arts Centre Museum, who published widely on world art, particularly on the indigenous art of the Americas, Cotty Berlund described Williams' work as, and I quote, "...a series of imaginative paintings of great artistic sensibility with some depicting groups of faces strongly reminiscent of Iroquois false-face society masks." End quote. But either to little known exchange, Berlund asked Williams whether he was inspired by Iroquois masks, to which Williams replied he'd neither seen nor heard of them, prompting Berlund to conclude in classic fashion that, and I quote, "...the repetition of forms by unrelated artists browses interesting problems in the psychology of art and the invention of design." End quote. In a far better known exchange, Wyndam Lewis, who first saw Williams' work at this same Barclay Galleries exhibition and was deeply impressed, described Williams' monolith in his listener review as having, quote, "...a look of Picasso, to which Williams retorted that as the descendent of African slaves, quote, it is not a case of my going to Picasso, but Picasso came to Africa and to me." This photograph of Williams, taken some months afterwards, when he returned briefly to Georgetown by New York, shows him with the first of his Plantation series, which Alison Thompson has recently linked with the Cuban Alfredo Lamb's Jungle of 1945, and of course, through lamb with Picasso. Yet Williams' reply to Wyndam Lewis upends the power and balance of Picasso's cultural appropriation, assigning the weight of authenticity and cultural capital to subalterns such as Williams himself. The exhibitions of Edwanw and Tubin and Williams were framed as colonials visiting or transiting through London, responding to Western modernism, yet inextricably linked to their respective cultural heritage. Despite the deterministic ways in which their work was linked to the notion of the so-called primitive and the paternalistic tone of many of the exhibition reviews, their work nonetheless generated immense interest in London. In contrast, Mary Webb, when presented as a Commonwealth artist, was received as a poor imitation of British art lacking traditional craftsmanship. Between these two categories, the colonial and the commonwealth, the Barclay galleries also presented the work of immigrant artists such as Ullman, Wilsinski, Grunwald and King, who engaged with quite different strands of modernism. You've got the paradoxically naive school of Paris modernism in the case of Ullman, a socially engaged realism in the cases of Wilsinski and Grunwald, and an avant-garde abstraction in the case of King. And some of these enigraves, notably King, Grunwald and Varga, found refuge at the Abbey, where, alongside the contingent of visiting Commonwealth artists, they could work in peace on the outskirts of London, operating in the lesser-chartered margins of post-war modernism. Thank you. I just need to speak to that. Great. So Sheridan and Jamie are back on screen. Well, thank you both for such rich papers. I'm sure I'm speaking for all of the audience members when I say that I learned so much about some figures that I'd heard a little bit about or knew something about and other people that I've never heard of and think, you know, again, these sort of very loud questions that have been asked about. marginalisation about who has been written in and written out of histories, especially categories of national histories as well, national art histories, but not only about people, but about spaces. And infrastructures, I think, because, you know, both of you were speaking, not only about the Abbey Art Centre, but took us into Mayfair and into the kind of more conventional gallery commercial spaces as well. Of the networks of dealing and buying and selling of art, then up to New Barnett to a space, a more social space where the domestic, the private and the public, the world of art making and living were blurred. I think we've got such a complex picture here through both of your papers, which takes us across territories, across national and international boundaries, geographical boundaries, temporal boundaries that you are both talking about, but also, you know, asking us about how we write our histories that not only I think perhaps don't focus on so much the individual artists, that's not to say that they're not important, both of your papers talks about, you know, artists that were. very significant makers, but asked us to kind of consider their artistic production within these more complicated infrastructures of making and I think of living as well, that's what really came through for me in both of your papers, this is about. Arts and Arts making is something that can't be separated, it's about life and living as well, so I can see on the chat as well, lots of people are saying thank you to you both. As well, lots of people saying really interesting, absolutely fascinating, and just a reminder to the audience that you can put any specific questions that you have in the Q&A box and I can see some are already coming up there so please do that and I will read them out to Sheridan and Jane as well. I just wanted maybe just to start as often for context whether you could just give us a bit of background and explain how you both came to the Abbey Arts Centre and sort of what's its status within Australian histories of the post war and and how this maybe they're just the wider project that you're both part of came about what's the energy behind researching this particular space. Right now, that just be really helpful to give us some context of why you're working on this topic. Sure, Sheridan, do you want to answer that first. Yes, I am. I came across it because I was writing researching and writing the biography of Bernard Smith. And I think my first visit there would have probably occurred about 2012 2013 when I went to the Abbey, and I mean I just found the whole Abbey Centre quite magic. We see photographs back in the late 40s when the artists were there and it was much more dilapidated, but nevertheless it was still in spring and summer it was glorious and there were lots of flowers and they had lots of hens. They had produce during these really austere times after post war. They had old glass houses where they were growing tomatoes and vegetables so there was a lot of self sufficiency. And there was also from what I learned through through researching the Bernard Smith archive. William Oley was gregarious and charismatic, and he loved having artists around. So, after a big huge communal meal, they would retreat to the living room and in winter time in front of a big warm fire, and they would talk. They would talk about art, they talk about influences, they talk about probably all sorts of wonderful things. The cross cultural conversations that were occurring were rich, varied, and the input would have been this really remarkable period of evolving friendships, but amazing exchanges as well. We've still got a lot of work to unravel in terms of this very first wave of Australian artists who went and lived there for sometimes up to three or four years, and then returned. And it's what they're coming back with. That is also another very interesting question. And in some ways, and quite a number of the artists that were at the Abbey came home and went to remote Indigenous communities, went to the heart, the centre of Alice Springs and lived and worked amongst Aboriginals, or went into northern New South Wales and just looked at their own country of a new, a fresh. So, then we had sort of James Gleason and Robert Clipple and Inga King, so those artists actually pursued and pushed modernism here in Australia in a magnificent way. But what we don't know, what we don't see with this group is the eclipse that occurred when from about the mid 1950s through to the 1960s you've got another wave of expatriate Australian artists, Sidney Noll and Arthur Boyd, Brett Whiteley, and they have eclipsed this incredible community of Australian artists. I think I've actually digressed from how I came to know about it, but it's hard Jane and I crossed over because we were both researching up at the National Library in Australia and realised that we had this in common. So Jane, I'll give a hand over to you now. So it certainly was a crossover. I came to the abbey through my work on Inga King. So I started a PhD in 2009 on the centre five group, and Inga at the time was one of only two members of the groups to the live. And six months into the thesis, I finally met my supervisor, Charles Green, who'd been on sabbatical until that point. And his first words to me were, now you do know I'm Inga King's godson, don't you? I said, no, I didn't have a clue. And of course, his father was Doug Green, who was at the abbey and had known Graham King in Melbourne and Thursma Inga over there at the abbey. And that was just one little penny dropping that, you know, the significance of that, that little group over there in the late 40s. That was the start. And I went over in 2010 and met the intention only was had the great fortune to be there on one of their annual open days. I never got to go into the studios. So it's important to say the abbey is actually still a functioning art centre, and people are still working in the studios and still producing and exhibiting. It tends to be less, a little bit less sort of international now it's mainly British artists working there. So it's not a whole history yet to be done of those subsequent generations, but we decided to focus on those years when only William Oly was still alive, which is when most Australians were there. So that and then in 2012 heavily pregnant went over to Sheridan's house when she had a whole bundle of the Bernard Smith papers on her dining room table. And we went through them to come through all the bits and pieces on on on the abbey and compared notes and that sort of the start of this project. That's been going on for quite a time. Yeah, generating these, you know, collaborations and friendships and relationships as well through through research. I'll read out one of the questions that we have. And this is from Rosamund West and Sheridan, I think this is particularly to you and a phrase that you use in your paper. And Rosamund said she's particularly interested in what you describe as a double provincialism. And could you talk a little bit more about that phrase. It has to do in a sense with that tyranny of distance and I think the Australian artists already felt that once they arrived there there was that. There was that provincialism aspect. The periphery in the center which is such a hackneyed phrase now but it was so true then. That sense of a double provincialism was because they were out there at the abbey in this other marginal space so this double distance in a way. Both was a blessing and in some ways a restriction. And a lot of other Australian artists and there were a lot of Australian artists in London in these immediate post war years. They felt the need that they needed to be right in the center. Perhaps access to the galleries and all of trying to find what was going on. It was an hour's train ride from Cock Foster into London. They would go in for the day and a lot of them went in regularly. They would go to films, to theater, to the galleries, do the gallery rounds. And Robert Clipple for example, when he would go into the slade, in his diary he said, terrible day. Terrible day. And he'd retreat back to the abbey where he said, this is where I want to be. This is where I've got the freedom to explore and experiment. And he, I mean, while he met Eduardo Peolotsi and William Turnbull very, very early after he arrived in London. The abbey seemed to be the space, as you said earlier, the space that gave him the freedom and similarly Davey, the freedom to roam creatively. So I think you raised a very interesting point about that space. But coming back to the double provincialism, the double distance aspect, I think it's one thing that's probably impeded the abbey to a degree being better known. It still concerns me why it's been left out and not written into histories because William Olly was such a highly respected dealer, very much admired and loved. And he was generous. He had, I think, a weekly luncheon at the Barclay galleries where people would come in and have coffee and Fred Allman and Jacob Epstein and a lot of people would come in. He was, he was really well known, but he seems to have fallen off too. So this notion of being pushed out to the proofry, even by from London. And then the Australian artists sensing this double provincialism aspect. I think these issues that need to be further looked into. It's interesting because it's almost like, I don't know whether it's sort of like a snobbishness or an issue about fashion because you know cockfosters has not been discussed as a centre or as a hub of modernist or experimental dialogue. There's so much about Soho and, you know, other areas of London, the kind of, you know, there is that sort of centralism, which, which sounds ridiculous when you say it, but it is pervasive, isn't it? And even somewhere that is, it's part of Greater London. It's really like you say it's on the Piccadilly line. But yet, you know, it really hasn't been accounted for until you know you're doing this research of a kind of complex mapping as well. I think it's that it's, you know, trying to what you what you're trying to do is, you know, balance or spin so many different histories together. And there are, you know, they say there are there are difficulties in that and there are frictions, you know, this is not an easy story to tell, but it's a really necessary recounting revising of the histories of modernism. You know, it's really interesting to think about the energies of what you're doing with maybe exhibition projects that are happening at the moment, for example, at the Barbican, the post war show there, which I think again has a, you know, is doing something which is perhaps, in harmony with your, your research about, again, how do we account for, you know, more complex narratives of British art in that case, or a show like between islands at Tate as well, which recently closed. You know, thinking about British and Caribbean artists. Again, in a similar time period as well. So I think, again, there's around these projects about revisionism, which is not just adding more names in, but it's really asking questions about how the, you know, the histories of modernism have been written around, you know, these problematic phrases of minor and major, and how we, how we kind of release ourselves and kind of imagine a different kind of, of history as well. I think, you know, these are really massive questions to grapple with. I have to say, it was very much visiting the exhibition, the Barbican, that made me, and a few other exhibitions visited in London recently, that made me probably more alert to these tiny fleeting references I was picking up in, you know, our upon our trolling newspapers and any mention of the Berkeley galleries. What shocked me was that I was completely unaware of these exhibitions like I was unaware of colonial arts. And it really has only just recently dawned on me that they were two very different things. A colonial artist was quite different to a Commonwealth artist. And yet you could think it was just a staging where their nation was at in terms of independence. But it also came down to a skin colour. It came down to a whole myriad of different issues. But what amazed me was no one talks about those exhibitions of the Berkeley galleries, whereas we do know all about, you know, his know these dealings and primitive art. But there's a lot more work to be done. And then it dawned on me that football. Why were those artists not staying at the Abbey? Why did Dennis Williams not, why did he stand hamsted and not at the Abbey? And these kinds of questions. Liffie Leitcherts visited me many times, but to him, Chelsea was the only place to be. He had been in London 10 years previously and to him, the art world was Chelsea, so he wasn't here in New Barnard. But yeah, it's interesting. And to put these artists in relation to our little contingent of Australians, I think, raises these interesting questions. Why one is elevated on the other's not and vice versa. I think that's, you know, and those questions about the relation empire, imperialism, decolonisation, independence, race, racism within the art world, that, you know, these are really kind of, you know, I can feel from what you're saying, Jane, you know, these, these questions really kind of, yeah, causing this, you know, the frictions that you need to kind of address and deal with to kind of fully account for the Abbey Art Centre. If that just links to a comment, I'll just read out by the curator Sarah McDougall, who's done a lot of work on Emma Gray art histories and art historians, particularly Jewish artists and just fascinating and complementary papers, neatly interweaving narratives of Emma Gray artists with that of the Abbey Art Centre and the Barclay Galleries, and with only himself against a fascinating backdrop of colonial and post-colonial perspectives, and I think that just sort of again neatly encapsulates this need to really think about these connections that you're bringing out, Jane, there between colonial commonwealth, but also then in connection with Emma Gray artists and really think about these, the connections, but also the stark differences as well. I want to just make sure we get in as many questions as we can. As I said, these are great opportunities to hear research as it's in progress and emerging. So we have a question here from Kirstyn Knight, who says, who asks, when the Emma Grays came back, did they set up similar artist colonies in Australia that were perhaps modelled on the Abbey? Sharon, do you want to take that all? I'm not sure whether they actually did. The only thing we did note was that Graham and Inga King, when they had a modernist house built out in the bush, they painted their beams dark and their walls white, and there was a sort of a sense of the tithe barn. They started collecting some tribal art, or primitivist art works, and also ceramics, and Bernard Smith started a collection of ceramics, and David later on was a collector of tribal artefacts. It's like as though what they were exposed to at the Abbey, they sort of emulated in their lives. But as far as joining or becoming a part of or even establishing a community, no, not really. The time had passed. They had moved on to different things. They came back. They had to get find employment. They started having families. These things consumed, although the Abbey was very much family oriented, and there were babies and children and wives and au pair girls and all sorts of people out at the Abbey. It just didn't really manifest that way in Australia. Jane, do you have any thoughts? My feeling on the communal aspect of the Abbey, most of the residents would say it was not an artist's colony in the sense that they didn't come there to learn from one another as some colonies might operate if you think of painting colonies on the coast of France at the turn of the 19th century. It existed primarily as a way of supporting impoverished artists by offering them somewhere affordable to both live and work. But I think the companionship and the exchange of ideas was probably the critical factor of the Abbey that if you wanted to, you could dine in the main hall. I don't think I have very lavish meals, but you could share a meal and then afterwards share a conversation. You weren't forced to do that. You could, if you prefer, heat your baked beans on a stove in the studio and just keep to yourself, but the option was there that you could have those conversations. Moly, as you rightly pointed out, was the great facilitator of conversations even before the Abbey. In his various different studios in South Cank, Sincton and Chelsea, he would have a weekly salon and you'd come and have your cup of tea, and he'd place some records on the gramophone, the bark or something. .. fondi ym mwynhau a a chymdeithas i'w hunain. Yn ym mwynhau ffugir yn ystod yn oed, ond mae efallai yn eu bod yn mawr. I think another point. Sorry. I was just going to say. The other thing I think is that when they did come back to Australia by 1955-56, we've got a major internationalism going on with the Olympic Games. Felly, fe ddau'r cofnidio ar y cwlaethau arweinio ar y cyfnodd y moedl yn cyd-dymwyciaeth a oedden nhw'n ddull ar y cwlaeth mwyaf. Felly, mae'n gallu'n gweithio ymgyrch. Felly, mae'n meddwl i'r ddweud yma yn y cyfnodd ar gyfer cofnidio arweinio ar y cwlaethau ar y cwlaeth, ond we did. We had Mariola in Sydney, and we had Montsourvat just on the outskirts of Melbourne, and they're quite a number of Hermannsburg, for example. But yes, I'm sorry, Jane, I cut across you. What were you going to say? Just I was on the conversation point, and I was really going off from the tangent away from artist colonies, but speaking with Hermione Waterfield recently, she said, you know, when Oly, and she was talking more about Ernst Oly, the son, but when Ernst Oly was still running the Barclay Gallery is, which went up until 1977, people could go into the gallery and always be assured of getting a cup of tea, they bring their sandwiches and a little paper bag. There would always be someone to sit down and talk about their collections, and she said, and that sort of ability to converse about your collections, that sort of knowledgeable collector, she thinks no longer exists, but that ability to talk about art, whether it be your collection of Ben and Bronzers or whatever it is you're collecting, that ability she feels has lost, and yet that's an ability that William Oly certainly cultivated and relished, and was so much part of his motivation. On top of this sort of social utopianism of the Abbey of being able to help artists wherever possible, that was what fed him, those conversations about art, and that's really what fed him, I feel. Yeah, I think that's the sort of social experience or the socialisation around practice seems to again come out really clearly, and as you were speaking as well, I was just thinking, it feels like there's a really important piece of work to do that maps or connects or takes account for these spaces that were created that gave a home, sometimes quite literally in the domestic sense of a place to rest your head and live, but also a home from a place to kind of display and to be nurtured and your artwork sort of cared for and sent out into the world. I'm thinking particularly places like the Dryang Gallery set up by Halime and Elshay, a Polish artist herself and who was also involved in the establishment of the New Vision Centre as well with Dennis Bowen and places like Gallery One with Victor Mosgrave, again you showed a photo of Susa, important for artists from India and Pakistan in this period, galleries like Signals, David Medulla, and again I think there's been a lot of new research on this, these galleries and perhaps individually, but it feels as well about connecting up some of these narratives as well, which gives us this much more complicated cosmopolitan modernism to think through cobb and immerse's work as well about again really accounting for the relationships between empire colonisation and decolonisation within our histories of modernism. So I think we've gone over time because there's so much to say and so much to discuss and I feel like it's the beginning of conversations between us here at the PMC and your research project in Australia and with the audience members who've really so kindly joined us today to be part of this event and maybe Jane and Sheridan, you've just got a moment or two so if you look in the chat you will see the thanks and the gratitude that people have sent your way for such a fascinating stimulating whether it's lunchtime, dinner time or whatever it breakfast time wherever you are in the world, but I think we just want to say huge thanks for sharing that research with us, really fascinating and I think connects to not only this larger seminar series that we're running at the PMC but we have a collaborative symposium next week which we're running with colleagues at the Barbican and a symposium called Strange Universe which again is exploring many of the same ideas about a reframing of post-war modernism and histories and really thinking about how exhibitions are restaging those, how art historians and artists are grappling with those narratives now so if you can get to London please do join us for that, if you can't we will record it and again share those events on our website. So thank you so much Sheridan and Jane for really stimulating, rich period of time with you to hear that research and I hope it was useful for you two as well to do to share that research with us. It was absolutely great, thank you very much, thank you. So thanks everyone for joining us. Thank you. Bye.