Theme: Jim Ede's vision for Kettle's Yard

There are things that you can learn about particular pictures which you can pass on as information. I think Jim’s approach was very subtle, quite informal and quite spontaneous so that he wouldn’t stand and say the same thing about the same object to every person who joined him. I mean, to some extent what he said was interactive, depending on what you said. He might tell you, standing in front of the Christopher Wood ‘Boat Builders’, which of course used to be in the old house before the extension was built, he would find a point of connection between you and the picture and it might be that you’d been to Brittany, it might be that you recognised some stylistic affinity in the picture. My art historians friends would say, that looks like somebody who looked at Gauguin, and then you’d be off on Gauguin and Brittany and Jim would make those connections. But he’d never let anyone rest at the point of comparison. It was always the object in front of you that was important and what you might learn from it. Of course, because he’d known all of the artists in Kettle’s Yard personally, whether it was Wood, Jones, Nicholson, there was always the element of personal reminiscence and of, ‘What he, the artist, said to me, Jim Ede’.

I used to be the go-between between him and the University and I remember talking to him about, when the extension had been built, I remember talking to him about how he saw the thing in 50 years time, I was deliberately provoking him. I’d just been to Paris and I’d been to the Couloncourt Museum. I said, you know, ‘do you imagine in 50 years time that it’s all going to be like this? You know, how do you see it? Is it going to develop? Is it going to take in new objects?’ He was struck, as if to say, ‘well of course its going to be like this in 50 years time’. I said, ‘well, it can’t be the case. You’re not going to be here in 50 years time, nor am I, who is going to look after it? What’s it’s function going to be? Is it going to be dead?’ Like the Musee Couloncourt, sorry, it’s the Musee Carnavalet in Paris, it’s that museum of the city of Paris. I said ‘I’ve just been there and I’ve seen, you know, bits of Napoleon’s memorabilia and dusty objects and the whole thing looks extremely sort of grimy. He took this in and he came back and said, ‘well, we have to have an exhibition gallery, something that’s moving all the time as well as something that’s static. So the house was eventually the static area and he gave the new young curators quite a hard time over it. You weren’t allowed to move things. Things had to stay the way they are.

I guess I was never critical of it, which some of my contemporaries were and it was quite a shock to begin with and then I began to see, well there are actually other things in the world and this isn’t the whole truth about everything. I remember particularly Peter Nisbet, who’s now the curator at the Busch-Reisinger in Harvard, wrote a piece in Broadsheet magazine, which was one of the student papers, called ‘Black Kettle’ which was a list of criticisms of Kettle’s Yard and that was all quite a shock, you know, I thought, do people really think that? He was at Clare College so I knew him quite well and he had a way of writing these pieces. He’d already rubbished several exhibitions that I’d put on. But I think this is historically quite interesting that, the idea that all the arty students in Cambridge all sort of flocked there, was beginning to be disproven. It might have been the same at earlier periods, there might have been arty students in Cambridge who thought Jim Ede was pretentious, that the whole thing was a bit of a sham before, but I hadn’t heard of them.

He once went back, I think it was when Jeremy Lewison started to be curator. Having not been back for ages, I was there some of the time with him. He was very excited about Jeremy starting and he rushed around getting things back to normal, which they weren’t. I don’t remember who was in charge before, whoever it was, and whoever it could be, it would always have been like this, that Jim had lots to do tidying it all up and getting it the way it ought to be. I mean, even if a saint had been looking after it, that would have happened. But before that, in Edinburgh, the first week or so, he was very happy that he’d left Kettle’s Yard and felt all was well and then he began to worry and he became extremely miserable and Mummy became extremely miserable too of course. So, at any rate, that cheered him up, this visit to Kettle’s Yard to get things right for Jeremy’s starting. But he didn’t get over these miseries really. There was a lot of argument about the Gaudier drawings upstairs in the attic. He was constantly putting the dilemma to me at any rate and I found it very difficult to know what to say. You know, there’s some method of doing something that he thought was right and nobody else did, or not many people did, and should he insist on this course that was right or should he adapt? Well, he never wanted to adapt. It made us not enjoy his company for a while because he was behaving as somebody bereaved.

Kettle’s Yard gets under your skin. Kettle’s Yard, especially if you experience it the kind of way I did, alters the way you look at things and my guess is that in the rooms of most of the people that you’ve interviewed, if you’ve interviewed them in their own settings, you will have been able to see bits of the Kettle’s Yard aesthetic and it’s more than just pebbles, it is a distinct aesthetic. That actually is one of the extraordinary things about Jim’s achievement and one of the things that Kettle’s Yard gives and offers – it produces or promotes an aesthetic which was not fashionable at the time he created it, it has becomes fashionable and I think he is not the only exponent of it, but there is something very influential about the conversion of those four little cottages. So, you’re likely to see echoes of it if you’re a visually aware person all over the place, all over the world, and that’s something that Kettle’s Yard has given me that I don’t have any regrets about. Jim was human and the mistake about Jim Ede is to put him into a position of suggesting that he isn’t human, or wasn’t human. He had his flaws, I was unlucky enough to be exposed to them big time but that didn’t take away from the fact that he had very great gifts.

Realising that light, and how you position things, and having time and quiet to look at something can be actually very therapeutic. I think that’s what we found because, although nursing in midwifery you think it’s all joyous but actually there can be terrible tragedy in midwifery and I think we just enjoyed looking at stuff and it lifting your spirit out of perhaps something that was quite troublesome at the time so I think that’s what we enjoyed. And since then I’ve met other people and we are actually now involved with just that actually, it seems really weird that all these years later. So, then I had somebody from the National Gallery talking about art and taking it to the bedside and I just suddenly began to put these things together, remembering how I used to feel coming here, made you think, yes that can happen. You can look at something and by looking you suddenly see something and seeing is a very opening idea and I think I did learn it here, you know, all those years ago. But now we’re seriously putting it into practice with Kettle’s Yard, taking art to the bedside of patients that are very unwell on the oncology ward at Addenbrooke’s and doing really what I did here, all those years ago, is showing people something and being able to say, well, what do you think? what do you see? what do you think? Art’s about communication, that’s all it is ever about I think so you see what you want, what does it matter?

Jim liked to say that we really shouldn’t worry about the name of the artist who made a picture or the title or anything before we approach the picture. It’s the basic principle at the foundation of what he wanted to do here at Kettle’s Yard, to allow people or encourage people to have a very personal, direct relationship with the artwork that’s not mediated by art historical data and also that’s not necessarily based upon the importance of the work, but rather on whether we like it or not. That’s what mattered to him a lot. Obviously that sounds quite old fashioned nowadays. It’s based on ideas developed in the twenties and thirties and formalist approach, the idea that a work of art can speak for itself whereas nowadays museums very much approach the presentation of collections by providing information and offering activities around the objects. Jim had a very different vision and sometimes those two visions clash, especially when you get visitors, and it’s not infrequent, visitors do complain about the absence of labels and information. I mean, we do provide information through the house guide and above all through the invigilators so that’s a way of retaining that personal relationship with the housekeeper in a sense.

I tend to be a quieter rather than a noisier person and so being able to go to the house and just sit was something very special and that remains true. It’s busier now and it’s public, but it still remains true, that it’s a special place. One of the things that I wasn’t aware of at the time but again I am now, was that he shared with a lot of the artists a thread of OCD, you know, the placing of things and the arranging of things and so on, is very much to do with how you control what is inside your life and outside and so if things are bad, then you line up the paperclips on the table in a row or arrange the stones in a spiral on the windowsill or whatever. I hooked into that completely and I think a lot of people do. It’s very hard to recognise that we all have this kind of thread, that actually we’re vulnerable and the only way we can deal with the chaos of the world is arranging the pebbles but, it’s an important factor and it’s something, I think, that united him with the artists and it’s why he tended to recognise in some of the cooler artists, like Ben Nicholson and so on, this desire to arrange. So the pictures on the wall weren’t just where they were because that was covering the damp spot or because that was where there was a gap. It’s because that’s where it was right.

One or two paintings would be at a very low level. For instance, the Wallis’ have always been at a level, and you can often sit to absorb the paintings and dwell, to enjoy the paintings, not from standing eye level, but from sitting eye level, which encourages contemplation. The great majority of displays of this sort, if you like, lack places to sit and it is very nice. In our extension, the piece of furniture I enjoy most, almost, is the long white sofa on the north wall downstairs and usually has only one painting behind it so there is a lot of wall space which is relatively empty. It works wonderfully for concerts when the piano, or there is a quartet playing and particularly the younger members of the audience, well the students I’ve seen, and they gravitate to this sofa and sort of bunch up and recline, they are practically horizontal. Part of the enjoyment of Kettle’s Yard is to do with the fact that you’re encouraged to linger and you are seeing it in a different way, I think, and the way that even a painting sitting on the floor can look extremely successful and can be observed in a different way.

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