1Queen Mary The V&A’s ground-breaking exhibition on the ‘60s
fashion icon Mary Quant moves to Scotland this month. The V&A Dundee will host the retrospective on the British designer who captured the spirit of ‘60s London and started a fashion revolution. Quant’s shop Bazaar opened in 1955 (the year after WWII food rationing ended) with her colourful designs proving an antidote to the era’s austerity and drabness.
Mary Quant is at the V&A Dundee from April 4 to September 6.
Left Mary Quant (foreground) with models © PA Prints 2008
Right Barnett Freedman painting in Arras, 1940, © Barnett Freedman Estate
Below far right Barnett Freedman’s alphabet of letters known as ‘Baynard Claudia’, 1935, Manchester Metropolitan University ©Barnett Freedman Estate
Below right Barnett Freedman book jacket for Love by Walter de la Mare, 1943, © Barnett Freedman Estate
3to see in April
Left Mary Quant and Alexander Plunket Greene, 1960, courtesy of Terence Pepper Collection © John Cowan Archive
Below left Mary Quant with Vidal Sassoon, 1964 © Ronald Dumont/ Stringer/Getty Images
Far left Dress with epaulettes and tie © V&A, London
2Barnett fare The first major exhibition of work by Barnett Freedman (1901-1958) continues in Chichester this month, celebrating one of the greats of modern British design who was also part of the celebrated set of the artist Eric Ravilious.
Freedman rose to success after designing the cover for Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and became well known for his book jacket designs. His work on a 1938 version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and a 1951 reprint of Anna Karenina were both considered as two of the finest examples of 20th-century book design.
Freeman met fellow artists Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Edward Burra and Enid Marx at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1922. The group was famously referred to by tutor and artist Paul Nash, as ‘an outbreak of talent’. Barnett Freedman: Designs for Modern Britain continues at the Pallant House Gallery until June 14.
3Leach away The pioneering work of the Leach Pottery, founded in St Ives in 1920 by Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, is celebrated at an exhibition in the Cotswolds this month. Considered as the birthplace of British studio pottery, over the last century the Leach Pottery has been responsible for producing some of the best potters in the world.
Leach spent 11 years in Japan and the Far East before returning to Britain in 1920 when he developed a new approach to ceramics based on form and technique. Pioneers: A Hundred Years of the Leach Pottery is on at the Chipping Campden Museum in Gloucestershire, from April 25 to July 12.
Above Leach’s mark
Far left The Bernard Leach Pottery Studio, St Ives
Left A pot by Bernard Leach (1887-1979)
ANTIQUE COLLECTING 7
