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The painter and construction-maker Margaret Mellis has led a remarkable and productive life, though sadly she is now living out the remainder of her existence in the twilight of Alzheimer’s, confined to bed and unable to work. Born in 1914 in China of Scottish parents, she came to Scotland as a baby, growing up to study music which she forsook for painting at Edinburgh College of Art in 1929. A talented student, she won a travelling award, studied with André Lhote in Paris, got to know Spain and Italy a little, before studying briefly at the Euston Road School in 1938 and marrying the writer and painter Adrian Stokes. They went to live near St Ives in Cornwall in 1939, and soon friends and refugees from the war turned up to stay: Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth (with their children) and then Naum Gabo and his wife. In this creative and social ferment, Margaret Mellis the artist reached maturity.
Colour was from the first her element (she remembered being bathed as a child in a blue-and-white china basin with dragons on it), but Nicholson and Gabo made her concentrate on structure, and think in a different way. Her work after that developed a strong constructivist leaning while maintaining a fruitful and intimate dialogue with colour. Mellis’s life moved on after the war. Her marriage to Stokes broke down, she met and married the poet Francis Davison, and they went to live in the south of France before settling in deepest Suffolk in 1950. Here they lived in a primitive though idyllic cottage near Diss, growing barley because it was subsidised and keeping hens to sell the eggs. A move to Southwold on the coast in 1976 prompted Mellis to make the first of the driftwood constructions she was to become famous for, and after Davison’s death in 1984 she entered upon an immensely productive phase which lasted until 2001. The current exhibition at UEA covers most periods of her work, but concentrates on these late and beguiling constructions.
The exhibition is downstairs at the Sainsbury Centre, approached down a corridor ramp, one wall of which is hung with a whole sequence of small paintings on unprepared canvas from the 1970s and 80s. These are float-mounted in box-frames so you can see the frayed edges. Roughly geometric in design, they are painted in bright, vibrant colours, the squares, triangles and ellipses dancing down the walls in wedges and spokes of energy. Some are restricted to black and white or grey and white, and explore structure more than colour, others burgeon into orange, purple, green, lilac. They are wonderfully informal and unprecious, the paint spontaneously brushed on (not tidied up later), with the canvas frequently showing through. A particularly enticing example is ‘Multicolour Structure (Version 3)’ from 1981, on orange linen. The viewer is at once transported to the middle of Mellis’s world and propelled forward into the body of the exhibition by its dynamic.
Here we track back in time to 1940 and the early collages — including quite a good one borrowed from the Tate, ‘Sobranie Collage’ (1942). Then, in striking contrast, a group of expressionistic still-lifes appear in which realism is substituted for abstraction, though these assume an increasingly formal rigour of construction until they develop into more abstract boat and sea pictures from 1952–4. These are altogether more assured, a particularly fine example being ‘Boat and Quay at Night’, with its pale carmine quadrant at lower left. According to this exhibition, the 1960s was a fallow time for Mellis, and the tempo only picks up with the hard-edged geometric wall-reliefs of the 1970s, the white ones offering the most scope for admiration. A cabinet of Mellis’s envelope drawings — coloured drawings of flowers on the insides of opened-out envelopes — comes at this point to indicate another rewarding line of enquiry.
Of the reliefs, there’s a lovely subtle one called ‘Lilac Lemon Diamond’ (1970), but generally I find the colours of this period harder to take. The main section of the exhibition is then devoted to the driftwood sculptures, most from the 1990s. Among them are such delights as ‘Oceanic’, which seems to have a certain slantwise kinship with Diebenkorn’s ‘Ocean Park’ series of abstract paintings, and is composed of evocative blues and yellows with touches of red and pink to set them off. Mellis occasionally modified her found driftwood, by washing or painting it, but most of her effects were achieved by chance juxtapositions, and shifting combinations tried over long periods. The four constructions from the 1980s are more obviously illustrative, and two of them ‘Dancing Man’ and ‘Dreaming Woman’ have a post-Cubist, Ceri Richards feel to them. The later ones are more abstract, with rich chromatic variations and a tendency to exploit angles, undersides and unexpected edges. They can get a little too like African fetish figures (bristling with nails), but the best have a remarkable poise and presence.
A 65-minute documentary film about Mellis called A Life in Colour (the exhibition took the same name) has been made by Sue Giovanni and Jules Hussey, with illuminating interviews and much footage of the colourful artist. You can see excerpts from the film on a monitor in the show, and it will soon be available on DVD (£19.99). The exhibition is a survey rather than a retrospective, which allows it to be partial in its coverage of Mellis’s life. Thus there are certain emphases here that a more balanced account of her career might redress. The show certainly makes an argument for the centrality of the late wooden constructions, as if these are Mellis’s supreme artistic legacy. Yet it may be unwise to assume this. I would have liked to see more of the paintings and the early collages. I particularly missed the presence of ‘1st Collage’ and ‘3rd Collage’, from July 1940, both of more interest and originality than the Gabo-derived compositions with ovals included here. There is a clarity and inventiveness of placing in these early collages which seem to prefigure in an unusual way the dispositions of the later constructions. Margaret Mellis’s work offers a rich subject for further elucidation.
In the ground-floor gallery is a selection from UEA’s extensive collection of abstract and constructivist art, developed in response to architect Denys Lasdun’s concrete campus, and focusing on the ordered and rational environment many thought appropriate to the modern world. Thus we have a room kitted out with Isokon furniture with a couple of Cecil Stephenson drawings on the walls, Marcel Breuer’s plywood Long Chair centre stage, and a sumptuous copper-covered electric fire by Wells Coates to the rear. There’s also a lovely Adrian Heath abstract, entitled ‘Growth of Forms’ (1951). Elsewhere, chairs play a major role in this display, with examples by Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Gerrit Rietveldt, Eames, Tatlin and El Lissitsky. There is also a wealth of classic constructivist art — Victor Pasmore, Kenneth and Mary Martin, Gillian Wise-Ciobotaru — as well as less obvious things by Bomberg, Ozenfant and Paule Vezelay. Next to Vezelay’s ‘Three Forms on Pink and Brown’ (1936) is Margaret Mellis’s ‘Transparent Construction’ (1940), thus positioning her usefully in a wider context. Look out for Alan Reynolds’s exquisitely subtle drawing ‘Modular Study 70B’ and the painted aluminium boxes of Stephen Gilbert. The show peters out on the wilder and more arid shores of constructivism where nothing grows among the bleached squares and aluminium flaps, but you might find a small, burnt object by Roger Ackling.
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