Lavender's Blue: Raising the amazing to a stellar stratosphère

Deep Calls To Deep

Dame Mary Martin and Elsa Schiaparelli share a fearless surrealist approach to fashion that transcends mere apparel. The very now British fashion artist and the late Italian fashion artist both treat the human body as a canvas for storytelling and spectacle. “I studied Schiaparelli for my fashion degree,” says Mary, “and while I love her work I have my own distinct style. Her show at the Victoria and Albert Museum is amazing!” Still, Mary Martin London channels the Schiaparelli legacy by empowering her clients to dress with bold theatricality.

A thread of surrealism winds its way through both fashion houses. Schiaparelli famously collaborated with Salvador Dali to create wearable art such as Woman’s Evening Coat, 1937, which features a line drawing of a goblet on its back. Or is it the profile of two faces? Mary Martin London’s Cecil the Lion Dress, 2018, is a tribute to the Zimbabwean lion killed by a trophy hunter. Fluffy black tulle around the neck and shoulders of the dress represents a lion’s mane.

Elsa used fashion to evolve from a young woman who was told she was ugly into an avant garde visionary of the 20th century. Mary has used fashion to evolve from an undereducated young woman into – guess what? – an avant garde visionary of the 21st century. “I’ve a deeper sense of call,” Mary shares, “I am determined to use my God given creativity to teach and inspire the next generation of designers.”

Two Temple Place London + Sussex Modernism

Retreat and Rebellion

“It’s a virtue of the venue,” affirms Dr Hope Wolf. “There should be friction between an exhibition and its setting.” A lecturer at the University of Sussex, Dr Wolf is the curator of a major London exhibition on Sussex Modernism. It explores two questions. Why were radical artists and writers drawn to rural Sussex in the first half of the 20th century? Why was their artistic innovation accompanied by domestic, sexual and political experimentation?

That venue. Now owned by The Bulldog Trust, Two Temple Place is an extraordinary neo Gothic mansion nestling next to Victoria Embankment. Its tip to toe carvings and coloured glass form quite a backdrop to, say, the De La Warr Pavilion architectural model. “It’s mostly a contrast but sometimes there’s less than you think,” she points out. “The Victorian emphasis on arts and crafts is a connection that runs through to Eric Gill’s work.” What a brilliant juxtaposition in the staircase hall though: three musketeers atop newels gazing down on Salvador Dalí’s Mae West Lips Sofa!

“Designed by John Loughborough Pearson to satisfy William Waldorf Astor’s fantasies, Two Temple Place is something of a dream house. But his vision is demure when compared with the explicitly sexual imagery on display.” The curator acknowledges this tension in her choice of first exhibit. It’s a marble mini coffer decorated with an eroticised nude and filled with poems by the likes of Ezra Pound. In 1914 he and five other young poets presented to the Sussex writer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, whom Ezra called “the last of the great Victorians”. The admiration wasn’t mutual. “Wilfrid was a traditionalist. He hated the artwork and poems,” says Dr Wolf. “He kept the coffer but positioned it facing a wall to hide the nude.”

Retreat and Rebellion is a multimedia exhibition. While Dr Wolf lectures on British Modernist Literature and is a Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies, she has a background in history. “The University of Sussex takes a multidisciplinary approach to learning. This exhibition was a chance to include literature and music as well as art. There’s lots of media in the upstairs gallery but all the artists – Serge Chermayeff, László Moholy-Nagy, Henry Moore, John Piper and Eric Ravilious – actually knew each other.”

Those questions. This exhibition argues that a rural retreat provided an escape from the metropolis to explore alternative living. It illustrates how the regional setting both amplified the artists’ and writers’ contrary energies and facilitated their attempts to live and represent the world differently.

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