Fig 1. ‘Letter from the President’, The Griffin, May Week 1980. Introduction
Prerona Prasad
Eleven years after a human set foot on the moon, the first women under graduates crossed the threshold of Downing College to take their places as full members. Downing’s own ‘one small step for a man’ would take some years to become a leap for humankind as the first three years of the undergraduate intake took about twenty women each year, with men outnumbering them nearly five to one in each round of admissions. The cover of the student magazine, The Griffin, for Easter Term 1980 (the last term before the women arrived) featured a terrified Elizabeth Allen in the vampirical embrace of Bela Lugosi, in a still from the 1935 film Mark of the Vampire, with a banner declaring ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ across the bottom right corner (Fig. 1). The only reference in the magazine to the change on the horizon was an assurance that:
The visible impact of co-residence on College will be negligible, amounting to a few subtly placed shower curtains and the addition of an extra laundry behind ‘T’ staircase.1
In a previous issue, an anonymous contribution entitled ‘The Advent of Women’ bemoaned the fact that the College bar was now attracting ‘a harvest of women from all over the city’ as a result of mood lighting and artistic additions to the decor. For the author, the main purpose of the bar was: ‘for drinking, not canoodling with women, who, as everyone knows, can rarely get past four or five a night.’2 Anon. goes on to say that, with the Kenny blocks having been turned into ‘Downing’s very own hen coop’ replete with washbasins in every room, the ‘marvellous comradeship’ built on communal ablutions would be lost. In an unexpected act of generosity, our mystery interlocutor concedes that the arrival of women may ‘blow a breath of fresh air through the college’s cobwebs’. The first assessment of the impact of women on Downing came in 1984, in an article by Roz Carrol, who assessed that ‘the earth did not move, the neo-classical face of Downing was not altered beyond recognition…; the status quo was left largely intact,’3 Keen not to downplay the achievements of her recent foremothers, Carrol nonetheless ended her article with the conclusion that ‘Plus ça change…’
It is clear that the last men to experience a single-sex environment at Downing were interested in how the arrival of women would (and had, already) altered the physical spaces in College. The expectation of widespread change was
Dr. Prerona Prasad is Exhibitions and Programming Manager at The Heong Gallery and curator of WE ARE HERE. 7 Fig 2. The mummy of ‘Hermione Grammatike’, 1st century AD, Hawara, Egypt. not met in the early years, but the expectation itself indicates nonetheless that shared residential and recreational areas were contested spaces and change of use or users caused some disquiet. Since the lawless days of the early eighties, Downing women have occupied all positions in student government and the Fellowship of the College stands at thirty-four percent female. However, the representation of women on the walls of the College has moved at a glacial pace since 1980: a small series of paintings of College scenes by local artist, Liz Moon, is the only addition in the communal areas, as well as a portrait of Dr Alan Howard and his wife, Grace, in the foyer of the Howard Theatre.4
Why does it matter whether or not there are representations of women and their work in the communal areas of Colleges? College art collections, after all, are made up largely of historical gifts from alumni and donors, alongside commissioned portraits of Heads of House and prominent Fellows. It would follow that collections amassed over hundreds of years would take some time to reflect the modern make-up of members. However, while College art reflects the history of Colleges, its audience consists of current members, for whom Colleges are home for at least twenty-nine weeks every academic year. Learning and living in a space with male-only portraits and artworks is akin to living in a home where photographs of grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers, and husbands are the only ones deemed appropriate for display. The arguments against changing the displays of College art in communal spaces range from invoking tradition to citing the cost of buying artworks that are more representative of the College body. For places steeped in centuries of history, it is surprising that some Colleges cling to fairly recent practices like the commemoration of all Heads of House in portrait form in dining halls – only the norm from the second half of the nineteenth century – at a time when others have embraced the challenges of inclusivity in novel ways.
Unsurprisingly, some of the earliest examples of women in art at Cambridge Colleges come from historically women’s colleges. Well before the fight for access to degrees was won in 1948, Girton and Newnham were commissioning portraits of their Mistresses and Presidents as well as of prominent Fellows (Pl. 9). Their collections expanded to include works by women artists who supported their cause but who were too old to have been members, such as Christiana Herringham (see pages 27-33) and descendants of benefactors, such artists Winifred Nicholson and Kate Nicholson (Pl. 13, Pl. 14). One particular acquisition, the Roman-era mummy of ‘Hermione Grammatike’ discovered in Hawarra in 1911 by William Flinders Petrie, was acquired for Girton by alumna and benefactor Gwendoline Crewdson (Fig. 2). She felt it was fitting that the only known mummy identified as that of a female teacher (or ‘literary lady’) should come to the College which produced the ‘first senior Classic’. Fourteen years earlier, Girton student Agata Frances Ramsay had created a stir in the Classics fraternity by becoming the only student to
9 Fig. 3 Downing College Dining Hall, ca. 1951. achieve a first class in the Classical Tripos of 1887.5 Crewdson and her supporters wanted to claim a lineage for women scholars that stretched back to Antiquity, with Girton its culmination.
Decades before it admitted women undergraduates, King’s College was a locus of creative activities by Bloomsbury women, including Vanessa Bell and Lydia Lopokova (See pp 17-25, Pl. 4). In 1946, the John Maynard Keynes’ art collection came to King’s upon the death of the famous economist. Lopokova was both muse and advisor when it came to the Keynes collection and had been instrumental in the establishment of the Camargo Society (a forerunner of the Royal Ballet) and the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (later Arts Council).6 King’s was the third men’s College to vote to accept women, after Churchill and Clare, with all three welcoming women undergraduates in 1972.
In 1946, the same year that King’s received the Keynes Bequest, Downing College received a portrait of Lady Margaret Downing from her descendant Philip Loyd, Bishop of St Albans. Lady Downing had long been established as villain-in-chief in College lore. First committed to print in 1899, the charge against her was one of refusing to relinquish the estates of Sir George Downing, 3rd Baronet (d. 1749), to executors charged with setting up a College in the former’s name in the event that a ‘Male Heir of the Body’ had not been produced. She not only held on to the properties in her lifetime, but also dissolved immovable assets such as the grand Cambridgeshire pile, Gamlingay Park, and, ultimately, bequeathed the disputed estates to her nephew. Her will is particularly notable for its large gifts of money to female relatives, and her portrait travelled down the female line for three generations.8 The portrait hung in Downing’s dining hall for nearly four decades before being relocated to the relative safety of the Senior Combination Room after it was discovered to be a genuine Gainsborough.9 In the latter years of her presence in the dining hall, she had become the target of food throwing, a feeble act of damnatio memoriae against the formidable nemesis from the College’s past (Fig. 3).
An artist who grew up at the fringes of University life was Gwen Raverat, whose childhood memoir Period Piece recalls her life at Newnham Grange, the home purchased by her father George Darwin, Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the University.10 Raverat’s mother was a member of the Ladies Dining Club, a pro-suffrage group of women, many of whom were members of Newnham College, while others were wives of male Fellows.11 Although known primarily for her wood engravings – she was a founding member of the Society of Wood Engravers - Raverat produced a series of small views of the River Cam after a stroke rendered her incapable of making engravings. Eight of these became part of the collection of Darwin College, established in 1964 in and around Newnham Grange (Pl. 16, Pl. 17). Darwin was the first graduate College established at Cambridge and was also the first founded as a co-educational institution from the start.
11 While art by women entered most men-only College collections incidentally, Churchill College boasted work by artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Bridget Riley from the mid-sixties onwards. Seeking art that would complement the modernist vision of architect Richard Sheppard, the College borrowed monumental bronze sculptures by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and others.12 At the suggestion of the College’s Curator of Art, the work included in WE ARE HERE is a print by American artist Louise Nevelson made the year that Churchill voted to admit women undergraduates. A recent gift to the College, the work reflects the artist’s sculptural sensibility through the juxtaposition of rich planes of flat colour and blind embossing and recalls Churchill’s early appreciation of monumental sculpture in its 1960s heyday.
A new and modern space was also a challenge for New Hall (now Murray Edwards), which moved into its Chamberlain, Powell, and Bon designed premises on Huntingdon Road in 1965.13 The site was a gift from another member of the Darwin family, the great man’s granddaughter Nora Barlow, a naturalist in her own right. New Hall was slow to acquire an art collection; funding for women’s institutions remained a struggle, as it had been in the days of A Room of One’s Own.14 The empty walls were seen as an opportunity and a challenge by visionary President, Valerie Pearl, and the curator Ann Jones, who wrote to prominent women artists to ask for donations of works for the College (see pp 65-71). What started with the gift of Extase (1986) by feminist artist Mary Kelly, who had been billeted at New Hall as part of a residency at Kettle’s Yard, has become the largest collection of works of art by women in Europe and the second largest in the world. The New Hall experiment also demonstrated that College art could do more than echo the past of an institution; it can create broader networks of belonging, foster creativity, challenge, provoke, and stimulate discussion. WE ARE HERE focuses on works from the Dome, the college’s arresting dining hall. At Murray Edwards, this most communal of college spaces features large-scale works by Mary Kelly, Maggi Hambling, Lubaina Himid, Maud Salter, Eileen Cooper, and others. Without a single portrait of a benefactor or former Fellow, the display invites members of the College to join exceptional and diverse lineages of female achievement, not unlike the millennia-old portrait of Hermione at Girton College.
College art collections are forever expanding, providing thereby opportunities to address the debates about inclusion and representation that already inform decisions about diversity in other aspects of College life. Women’s Colleges (current and former) are still at the forefront, collecting works by alumnae and commissioning works to commemorate the 150-year long struggle for access. During her artist residency at Girton College in 2016-17, Yelena Popova made the tapestry For Mind, Body and Spirit for the college (Pl. 15). The form of the tapestry recalls the banner made by students of Girton and Newnham for the 1908 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies procession (pp. 28) and other protest banners from the early twentieth century. In 2019, Popova produced a limited-edition print and other merchandise using iconography derived from the tapestry, this time in college colours, to celebrate Girton’s 150th anniversary. In 2018, Newnham College unveiled a monumental bronze frieze by Cathy de Monchaux on the seventieth anniversary of the first degree ceremony to include women. Inspired by A Room of One’s Own, its hope for women to be able ‘to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream’, and its exhortation to women to ‘write all kinds of books’, Beyond Thinking is a thirty-five-foot tower of books, each volume with a female form at its centre simultaneously growing from it and nourishing it (Pl. 1).15 Making connections between Woolf and her own creative process, Cathy de Monchaux said:
I find in my own creative process, when I am somehow overfilled by my thoughts and confused about how to move forward, I can only unravel what I am trying to create when I find a way to stand back and draw breath. It is the hardest thing to arrive at – a condition where you have so much in your mind that you become for a moment ‘beyond thinking’ – and somehow, an answer or inspiration of how to move forward in an idea comes to you. It is not a condition you can manufacture, as Virginia Woolf explained. For women, it was a question of having the right social and educational conditions to allow the space for inspirational thought to grow.16
In the last decade, several Colleges have commemorated forty years of co- education by commissioning portraits of female members. Jesus College was ahead of the trend by commissioning a portrait of its first female Fellow, Professor Lisa Jardine, in 2015 (Pl. 7). This lively and informal portrait smiles down from its prominent position behind High Table, the sitter poised as if about to proffer a friendly greeting to the viewer. Earlier in 2015, the College invited artist Agnes Thurnauer to replace three portraits of Jesuans in the dining hall with portraits of Victorine Meurent and the barmaid at the Folies-Bergère after Edouard Manet – women who ‘stare back at the viewer… and refuse to comply with what is expected of them’.17 In 2017, the College’s Sculpture in the Close exhibition was women-only, featuring among others Alison Wilding’s Tooth and Claw, a sculpture in two parts made from the fallen branch of an oriental plane tree in the Fellow’s Garden (Pl. 19). The tree grew from a seed from the site of the Battle of Thermopylae, a byword for tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds.
Recently, Cambridge Colleges have also provided the setting for the making of art that envisions the University as a place where plurality is the everyday. Melanie Manchot’s series The Ladies was commissioned by Kettle’s Yard for its
13 re-opening exhibition Actions: The Image of the World Can be Different (Pl. 11).18 The artist was introduced to a group of local women of Bangladeshi origin, who were then invited to pose for photographs in iconic University locales, including the dining hall at King’s College, The Wren Library at Trinity College, and the Debating Chamber at The Cambridge Union. Visualising ‘the ladies’ in these places, at home and at ease in their hallowed surroundings, forced viewers to examine received notions about the sort of person who belongs in the University. King’s College purchased an edition of the photograph of ‘the ladies’ in its dining hall, where it was displayed before moving to the well-visited student café. Elsewhere in this catalogue, artist Sophie Seita, who created My Little Enlightenment Plays during a research fellowship at Queens’ College, explores what it means to be an academic at the University with an artistic practice that draws on original research (see pp 73-5). Her practice speaks to the way women are redefining the purview of the academic life at the University, despite it not offering degrees in performing and fine arts.
Returning to the case of Downing College, the foundation of the Heong Gallery has given the College the possibility of looking beyond its own collections and the usual cultural, social, and conceptual limitations of College art. Ida Applebroog, Gillian Ayres, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Louise Bourgeois, Prunella Clough, Jane Dixon, Helen Frankenthaler, Elisabeth Frink, Barbara Hepworth, Susan Hiller, Jenny Holzer, Marcia Kure, Ellen Lanyon, Kim Lim, Ato Malinda, Natalie Mba Bikoro, Mali Morris, Nandipha Mntambo, Zanele Muholi, Aïda Muluneh, Winifred Nicholson, Nnenna Okore, Yoko Ono, Cornelia Parker, Amalia Pica, Carol Robertson, Paula Rego, Kay Rosen, Betye Saar, Kiki Smith, and Alison Wilding have all broadened the range of visual associations with the College for visitors, students, staff, fellows, and alumni. The Gallery, in turn, has attempted to expand the understanding of artists and their works through scholarly symposia and talks.
In recognition of the exhibition Larger than Life and the first ever symposium dedicated to the artist, the College was given twenty-six prints by Elisabeth Frink by the Trustees charged with dispersing her estate. Downing College was the only beneficiary that had no historical association with Frink or the late Lin Jammet, her son and executor. These works are now part of the College art collection and are destined for Fellows’ rooms, where generations of students will take inspiration from them in supervisions. For Frink herself, drawn as she was to depicting muscular masculinity and the mute power of animals, Antony and Cleopatra would have been a challenging commission (Pl. 2). As it happened - and as was remarked by theatre critics at the time - she captured the coiled intensity of the petite Helen Mirren bending the ‘bear-like’ Michael Gambon to her will.19 Looking at this charged image, one can wonder whether Margaret Downing might have relented about the founding of the College, had she had a presentiment of the talented and compelling women populating its halls and the walls. 1 ‘Letter from the President’, The Griffin, May Week 1980.
2 Anonymous, ‘The Advent of Women’, The Griffin, Michaelmas Term 1979.3
3 Roz Carrol, ‘Feminists in Drag!!!’, The Griffin, Easter Term 1984.
4 Paul Brason, Alan and Grace Howard, 2010. Oil on canvas.
5 Felicity Hunt and Carol Barker, Women at Cambridge: A Brief History (University of Cambridge, 1998), p. 9.
6 Judith Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina (Orion Books Ltd, 2009), pp 309-23, 381-2.
7 H. W. Pettit Stevens, Downing College (F. E. Robinson, 1899), pp. 37-63.
8 Ibid. pp. 38-36. Letter from the Right Reverend Philip Loyd to Sir Herbert Richmond, Master of Downing College, dated 19 December 1945 (Downing College Archives).
9 Hugh Belsey, Thomas Gainsborough: The Portraits, Fancy Pictures and Copies After Old Masters (Yale University Press, 2019), vol. I, no. 267, p. 261.
10 Gwen Raverat, Period Piece (first published 1952 by Faber and Faber Ltd).
11 Anne Kennedy Smith, ‘The Ladies Dining Society’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.109658
12 See Churchill Review III (1966) for a feature on Henry Moore’s visit to Churchill College. See also https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/news/2017/jan/13/sun-moon-stars-barbara- hepworth-churchill-college/
13 Chamberlain, Powell, and Bon later went on to build the Barbican Estate.
14 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Hogarth Press, 1929). See Chapter I, pp. 5-37.
15 Ibid. p. 164.
16 https://www.newn.cam.ac.uk/newnham-news/new-tower-of-books-sculpture-by-cathy-de- monchaux-celebrates-education-at-cambridge/
17 https://www.staff.admin.cam.ac.uk/general-news/female-portraits-oust-men-in-jesus-college
18 https://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/events/actions/
19 https://www.rsc.org.uk/antony-and-cleopatra/past-productions/productions-1953-2003
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