Wales is so often seen as the land of poetry and song. We think of Dylan Thomas (or perhaps Gwyneth Lewis who wrote the memorable bilingual words for the facade of Wales Millennium Centre), of Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Cerys Matthews and Catatonia, the Manics and Bryn Terfel. But what about its art? Ask someone in the street to name a Welsh artist or two and they will probably struggle.
This is despite the best efforts of presenter Huw Stephens for the BBC TV series The Story of Welsh Art, broadcast across the UK in 2021. And it was the case 75 years earlier for the London-born David Bell (1915–1959) when he became one of three key staff members in the Cardiff office of the newly formed Arts Council of Great Britain. His responsibility (and driving passion) was to foster art in Wales and he was well placed to do so. He had trained at the Royal College of Art and greatly valued his Welsh ancestry.
In his short lifetime, he was better known as the pioneering organiser of Arts Council exhibitions which toured Wales, the first full-time curator of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea and author of the ground-breaking book The Artist in Wales (1957) than he was as a painter. However, his paintings of his everyday world provide us with extra insight into his overall character and thinking. These are mainly portraits and landscapes which he experienced directly and intensely. As such, they were part of the 'concern with environment' which Bell identified and tirelessly encouraged in order to define and grow contemporary Welsh painting.
His oil painting of Welsh-language poet and novelist T. Rowland Hughes of around 1947 is one of his best male portraits. It captures, in the sitter's hands and turned head, a sensitivity and a certain vulnerability. Bell and Hughes were disabled and both died in their 40s. The palpable affinity between them was also due to Bell's deep love for poetry. His favourite poet was Keats, and he and his father Sir Idris Bell co-translated the Welsh-language poet Dafydd ap Gwilym during the Second World War.
Possibly his best female portrait is that of the Oxford academic Miss Barbara Flower who also died in her 40s. The painter and sitter knew each other through their fathers who were colleagues at the British Museum. His canvas was painted in the 1930s, either when he was an art student or soon thereafter. Flower is depicted as scholarly and, thanks to her beautifully painted colourful dress, a very spirited individual. Her translation, in collaboration with Elisabeth Rosenbaum, of the first cookery book was published posthumously as Apicius: The Roman Cookery Book (1958). Barbara and Elisabeth had tried out the recipes on their Oxford colleagues.
David Bell's landscape works are of the Wales he knew. Rheidol Valley, Aberystwyth (1940s) incorporates the industrial – a gas works – with the rural, a new form of beauty that he learned to increasingly appreciate thanks to his contact with the refugee artist Josef Herman who became renowned for his Expressionist depictions of Welsh coal miners. Bell showed Herman's work in Wales and wrote about it.
A different aesthetic exists in Spring at West Cross (c.1953), the view from opposite the Bell family's terracotta-tiled home across a sunlit Swansea Bay. It is Mediterranean in feel and harks back to his love of Cézanne. It recalls, too, the French-inspired north Wales landscapes of the ill-fated J. D. Innes and the uproarious Augustus John, brother of the now better-known Gwen John, whom Bell named as a key figure in The Artist in Wales.
In contrast, his successor at the Glynn Vivian, Kathleen Armistead (1902–1971), brought her own sensibilities to bear upon the art scene in Wales in the more liberated 1960s. She hailed from Leeds and had initially trained as a pianist in London. She was the first full-time, female curator in Wales and was a lesbian — quite a challenge in a largely conservative and predominantly male profession. Her mission was to extend the forms of contemporary art being made in, or brought to, Wales.
She was especially sensitive to correspondences between music and abstraction. This manifests itself in her acquisitions for the gallery. For example, in La cathédrale engloutie III by the Swansea School of Art and Royal College of Art-trained Ceri Richards, we are confronted with a subtly modulated synthesis in velvety blues and rich umbers of Debussy's music, which reflects the painter's love of colour and the Welsh coastline. Like Armistead, Richards is an accomplished pianist and both emerged from working-class, industrial backgrounds. By the 1960s, Richards was a trustee of the Tate Gallery.
Another example is the bronze Anima — Curved Form with Inner Form (1959) by fellow Yorkshire woman Barbara Hepworth. The enveloping female body (Hepworth was a mother to triplets) and Jungian concepts inform this work but so does the sea, although here it is a Cornish one around St Ives. Armistead also acquired an imposing, gender-fluid sculpture titled Angel Torso by Jacob Epstein made in 1923 and cast in 1961.
Like Bell, Armistead had professional contacts in London but was keen to encourage Wales-based practitioners. One such is Colin Jones whose Funeral, Merthyr (1965) she bought from the commercial Dillwyn Gallery in Swansea which three very enterprising, local women launched in 1962. In this painterly work, we can see the influence of the local (and of Ceri Richards) but also of continental European painting (such as Nicholas de Staël's).
Armistead was keen to introduce an international modernism into Wales and we find this in, for instance, a sculpture by the Welsh artist Peter Nicholas titled Torso for a Dead Prince (acquired in 1967) and the depictions by Eric Malthouse from the 1950s onwards. Malthouse was from Birmingham and succeeded Richards at Cardiff Art School in 1944. Thereafter he absorbed elements of cubism and the internationally influenced art of the St Ives School. He was a co-founder of the avant-garde 56 Group who showed in the gallery in 1960. This new approach is evident in a later acquisition such as Malthouse's vibrant Orion (1966).
In the 1950s and 1960s – and against the odds – David Bell and Kathleen Armistead transformed art production and art appreciation in Wales. In so doing, they contributed significantly to the wider process of nurturing a new Welsh confidence. In 1955 Cardiff became the capital of Wales, in 1964 the country gained its Welsh Office and three years later an autonomous Welsh Arts Council was born.
Yet in subsequent decades these two trail-blazing curators in Wales become temporarily lost in the ensuing and rapid melée of changes in and expansion of art practice, consumption and curation. Furthermore, Bell and Armistead's advocacy of modernism did not align with the alternative, anti-establishment visual culture model developed over the last 40 years within the influential writings on Welsh art by Peter Lord.
We forget this intrepid pair at our peril. After all, Wales is a historical and modern artistic nation.
Ceri Thomas, artist, art historian and curator
This content was supported by Welsh Government funding
An exhibition, 'Shaping Wales: Armistead and Bell' was at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery from 13th May to 12th November 2023
Further reading
Ceri Thomas, Shaping Art in Wales: David Bell, Kathleen Armistead and the Modern Artist, H'mm Foundation, 2023