Designer and Modernist
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DESIGNER AND MODERNIST THE IMPACT AND INFLUENCE OF LINEN DESIGN ON THE WORK OF COLIN MIDDLETON One volume DICKON HALL School of Art and Design of Ulster University Ph.D. March 2019 I confirm that the word count of this thesis is less than 100,000 words. i TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Abstract iii Abbreviations iv Timeline – 1870-1945 1946-1985 Introduction 1 Chapter One – Charles Collins Middleton 45 Chapter Two, Part One – John Hewitt 79 Chapter Two, Part Two – John Hewitt (continued) 112 Chapter Three – John Middleton Murry 149 Chapter Four – Victor Waddington 180 Chapter Five – Colin Middleton 220 Conclusion 263 Bibliography 272 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Karen Fleming and Dr Joseph McBrinn, for their support, advice and encouragement throughout the research and writing of this PhD thesis, as well as Dr Justin Magee and many other staff at Ulster University for their guidance and assistance at every stage. I am very grateful to Kim Mawhinney for giving me such generous access to the Colin Middleton Archive held by NMNI and also to their collection of his works, and to her colleagues at the Ulster Museum, Anne Stewart, Anna Liesching and Mary Dornan, who have been so helpful. I would also like to acknowledge the Deputy Keeper of the Records, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. Many other people have kindly assisted with my research in various ways and I would like to thank them and to apologise to any whom I have inadvertently left out: Nelson Bell, Terry Boyd, John Breakey, David Britton and Karen Reihill, Anne de Buck, Chris Caldwell, Professor Mike Catto, Dr Riann Coulter, David Foster, Dr Brian Kennedy, Sean Kissane, Dr Paul Larmour, David Lennon, Linda Logue, Emer Lynch, Eamonn Mallie, Charlie Minter, Shelagh Parkes, Dr Jackie Reilly, Alison Smith, Claire Walsh and Ian Whyte. I would also like to thank the many private collectors who have allowed me to see paintings and drawings by Colin Middleton over many years. Ailie O’Hagan designed the timeline for this thesis and I very much appreciate all the time she has taken with this at various stages. Jane Middleton Giddens, Colin Middleton’s daughter, has been invaluable with her help and advice throughout many years of researching and writing about her father’s life and work, and I am immensely grateful to Jane for all that she has made possible. I would also like to that the Department for Employment and Learning, whose funding has made this research possible. iii ABSTRACT Colin Middleton (1910-1983) was regarded as one of the most significant painters working in Ireland throughout his career, yet the assessment of his reputation is now confused and problematic. Middleton’s unique characteristics as a painter and his complex development throughout a long career have not been easy to place within histories of Irish art and as a result he has become a more peripheral figure. This thesis aims to counter certain critical perceptions of Colin Middleton and to provide a more appropriate and accurate context for his work. Central to this is the construction of a detailed biography, within which I have given prominence to the environment of his youth in late industrial Belfast. This is crucial in understanding the relationship between his training and work as a designer within the linen industry and his continuing development as a painter. It also demonstrates the need for a reassessment of the history of art in Ulster, including its relationship to industrial development, as well as to indigenous cultural traditions and contemporary art in Britain and Ireland. By bringing together a detailed analysis of primary and secondary material with a wide- ranging examination of his work, I assert the centrality of Middleton’s position within Ireland as a painter whose work responds to many aspects of the society in which he lived. I will be looking at significant figures within Middleton’s life, such as John Hewitt, John Middleton Murry and Victor Waddington, as well as artists who were his contemporaries such as John Luke, Nevill Johnson and Daniel O’Neill. I intend to demonstrate the unity of his work across his career and to present the coherence in his development by explaining the personal motivations that drove changes in style and subject matter. In particular, I will connect these to the enduring dialectic between Middleton’s changing creative personalities as a designer and as an artist, analysing his achievement as a modernist painter working in a provincial location throughout the twentieth century. iv ABBREVIATIONS ACNI Arts Council of Northern Ireland BMAG Belfast Museum and Art Gallery CEMA Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts CM Colin Middleton (in timeline) IELA Irish Exhibition of Living Art IMMA Irish Museum of Modern Art KM Kathleen Middleton (in timeline) PRONI Public Record Office of Northern Ireland RHA Royal Hibernian Academy RUA Royal Ulster Academy UAA Ulster Academy of Arts UU Ulster University 1 INTRODUCTION 0.1 Colin Middleton (1910-1983) is widely accepted as one of the most significant painters working in Ireland during the twentieth century. In 1954 the Dublin critic Edward Sheehy wrote in The Studio, “Within the past five years Colin Middleton has established himself as one of the foremost of contemporary Irish painters”1 and more than thirty years later the poet and curator John Hewitt (1907-1987) described him as “one of Ireland’s few painters of stature”.2 In relation to his contemporaries, S.B. Kennedy judged that he “was the most important of the group of Northern artists who came to prominence at the Living Art exhibitions”.3 Yet critical assessments of his work and his place within a history of Irish art have struggled to identify the unity of his achievement and therefore to accord him an appropriate place within this canon. It is natural that most writers on Middleton’s work approach him by addressing the range of his work and the diversity of styles within which he worked across fifty years. Bruce Arnold described him as remaining “richly diverse in his approach to his art”4 in a review of a 1968 exhibition, and S.B. Kennedy, continuing a balanced assessment, noted his versatility and his “adoption of external influences”, asking whether “at each stage of his development he refused to consolidate his achievement”?5 Middleton occupied an unusual and perhaps unique place within Irish art history, closely associated with the emergence during the 1930s of a group of modernist artists working in Northern Ireland in a manner closely associated with contemporary English theory and practice, before becoming more aligned with a traditionally Dublin-based perspective on developments in Ireland in the post-war period, during the period of six years when he exhibited with the Victor Waddington Galleries as part of a loosely defined group of Irish painters. Between the 1960s and his death in 1983, despite 1 Sheehy, Edward, ‘Colin Middleton’, The Studio, 1954, p.74 2 Hewitt, John, Colin Middleton, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1976, p. 26 3 Kennedy, S.B., Irish Art and Modernism, Institute of Irish Studies, Q.U.B., Belfast, 1991, p.128 4 Arnold, Bruce, ‘Diversity of Colin Middleton’, Sunday Independent, December 1968 5 Irish Art and Modernism, p.129 2 continuing to exhibit regularly in Dublin, Middleton became once more predominantly associated with Northern Ireland, re-establishing a problematic national reputation while, conversely, becoming as an artist an increasingly individual and isolated figure. This position is perhaps best demonstrated by the auction of the contents of Middleton’s studio held in London by Christie’s two years after his death, which was first previewed in Belfast and Dublin, demonstrating the extent of his popularity and reputation as well as the lack of a specific sense of where he and his work belong. The dialogue between Middleton’s art and that of his contemporaries and near contemporaries in Ireland, Britain and Europe is often the prism through which critics have approached him, but Middleton’s own dialogue with himself, that between the painter and the designer, has been largely neglected, despite its significance and the role it had in shaping his work. Middleton worked for twenty years as a damask designer in a small partnership his father had set up in the early years of the twentieth century with Hugh Page. The training and work that occupied him between 1927, when he left school, and 1947, when he left Northern Ireland predominantly in an attempt to make a new start away from design, had complex and often ambivalent or contradictory effects on his life. Middleton himself appears to have been conscious early in his working life of what one might call these two creative identities, the artist and the designer, as well as the dialectic that they established. This dialectic is arguably more crucial to Middleton’s development as a painter than his awareness of other artists and his position amongst his contemporaries, yet it has not been examined in any detail in relation to the broader context of his work. In driving the evolution of his work even decades after he had stopped working as a designer, arguably it remains central to understanding the reasons for the diversity that has often become a barrier to accepting his achievement. An analysis of the literature concentrating on Colin Middleton and Irish art in the period during which he worked often raises additional issues, some of which cross over into parallel fields of cultural enquiry. While pure art historical writing on Middleton has been limited and on occasions misdirected by incorrect or restricted factual knowledge, it is also important to note that the various fields of study that would provide a more complete sense of his role and significance are in some cases only 3 beginning to be explored.