Jessica Dismorr

narodený: 1885

smrť: 1939

životopis:

Jessica Stewart Dismorr was an English painter and illustrator. Dismorr participated in almost all of the avant-garde groups active in London between 1912 and 1937 and was one of the few English painters of the 1930s to work in a completely abstract manner. She was one of only two women members of the Vorticist movement and also exhibited with the Allied Artists Association, the Seven and Five Society and the London Group. She was the only female contributor to Group X and displayed abstract works at the 1937 Artists' International Association exhibition. Poems and illustrations by Dismorr appeared in several avant-garde publications including Blast, Rhythm and an edition of Axis.
Dismorr was born at Gravesend in Kent, the fourth of five daughters born to Mary Ann Dismorr, nee Clowes, and John Stewart Dismorr, a rich businessman with property interests in South Africa, Canada and Australia. The family moved to Hampstead in the 1890s, where Jessica Dismorr was educated at Kingsley College and where she became head girl. Her mother suffered from extended periods of ill health but her father's income meant the family were free of financial worries and Jessica was able to travel extensively in Europe.
Dismorr attended the Slade School of Art from 1902 to 1903, before training under Max Bohm at Etaples in 1904, and at the Académie de La Palette in Paris, between 1910 and 1913, where she studied under Jean Metzinger and was in the circle around the Scottish Colourist, John Duncan Fergusson. In Paris, Dismorr shared a studio with the American artist Marguerite Thompson. In 1911, Dismorr contributed several illustrations to the avant-garde Rhythm magazine. During July 1912 she showed three landscapes, to favourable reviews, with the Allied Artists Association. Dismorr exhibited with Fergusson and S. J. Peploe in October 1912 at the Stafford Gallery in London. From 1912 to 1914 Dismorr also exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. In 1912 and 1913, Dismorr exhibited Fauvist influenced work with the Allied Artist's Association. The Fauvist influence is said to have resulted from her studies at the Académie de La Palette.
Dismorr met Wyndham Lewis in 1913 and by 1914 had become a member of the Rebel Art Centre. She maintained a studio in the Kings Road, Chelsea, London, as well as taking frequent trips to France. Dismorr was a signatory to the Vorticist manifesto published in the first issue of their literary magazine, Blast in 1914, and also contributed illustrations and a written piece, Monologue, to the second issue in 1915. She shared the group's depiction of the dynamics of the machine and their desire to challenge the public's conservative views on art but little of her work from this period survives. The four works she contributed to the Vorticist exhibition in 1915 are now thought to be lost, as is the original of The Engine which was reproduced in an edition of Blast. Both the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate hold one example each of Dismorr's work from this period and the collector John Quinn displayed several examples in New York in December 1916. Dismorr exhibited with the Vorticists again in New York in January 1917 at the Penguin Club.
Apart from Dismorr, the only other female member of the Vorticist group was Helen Saunders. William Roberts's painting The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915, from 1961–62, shows the seven males dominating the foreground and the two women behind with Dismorr in the doorway being the furthest away. According to Kate Lechmere, the financial backer of Blast and the Rebel Art Centre, Dismorr had a difficult relationship with Wyndham Lewis, and was, along with fellow artist Helen Saunders, one of the "little lapdogs who wanted to be Lewis’s slaves and do everything for him". Lechmere claimed that on one occasion Dismorr stripped naked in Oxford Street to demonstrate she would do anything Lewis asked of her. Dismorr and Wyndham Lewis fell out in 1925 when she refused to purchase some drawings from him when he was short of money but they appeared to have resumed a cordial friendship in 1928 when she did lend him some funds. Robin Ody, a close friend and the executor of Dismorr's will (in which all the beneficiaries were women), summed her up as "the Edwardian phenomenon of the new woman". Ody considered that she did not have a physical relationship with Lewis. Lechmere's relationship with Lewis ended bitterly, and she carried out a legal struggle to recover money owed her by him. Lechmere had provided all the funds to pay for the Rebel Art Centre, where the Vorticists first met in 1914—a fact which Lewis had to admit to Christopher Nevinson who had not wanted "any of these damned women" in the group.
During World War I Dismorr served as a nurse in France and then as a bilingual field officer with the American Friends Service Committee. After the war Dismorr was at the centre of the London avant-garde world, acquainted with both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, with her poems and illustrations being published in various publications. During 1919 several poems by Dismorr were published in The Little Review but following a highly critical article by A.Y. Winters she did not submit any more for publication until the 1930s. Early in 1920 Dismorr had a handful of paintings shown, in group shows, at both the Mansard Gallery and the New Art Salon.

More...