Keith Clements; artist & biographer of Henry Lamb
Hyfler/Rosner
Artist and biographer of Henry Lamb
11 December 2003
Here are some examples of his work
http://www.sussexartists.org.uk/Keith/keithfront.htm
Keith Clements, artist, teacher and writer: born Brighton, Sussex 9
May 1931; married 1957 Jackie Sinclair (one son, one daughter); died Hove,
East Sussex 27 November 2003.
Keith Clements was an artist, teacher and writer for whom the creator and
his particular geographical and social environment held an unending
fascination. It was encapsulated in his 1992 Bloomsbury Workshop exhibition
"Bloomsbury Revisited", subtitled "People and Places".
Many landscape studies in that show were inevitably of Sussex, Clements's
home county, the changing face of which he was diligently to capture over
the years. Among the portrait studies was one of Lady Pansy Lamb, widow of
the painter Henry Lamb, whose enthusiastic support had underpinned the
writing of Clements's much-needed 1985 biography Henry Lamb: the artist and
his friends, which had illuminated the life of the painter who for most
people remained an enigmatic outsider.
Keith Clements was born in Brighton in 1931, the only child of Cecil
Clements, a dental mechanic. Keith needed an inner drive to achieve. His
wife Jackie, a psychotherapist, recalls that "his father never once praised
him, and perhaps was envious of him. Keith was very frightened of success."
After attending Brighton College of Art, he did his National Service in the
Highland Division, based in Perth, then from 1955 to 1958 taught art in
Orkney, seeking to get as far away as possible from his home environment as
possible. He peripatetically taught at two local schools, then the grammar
school in Kirkwall.
Keith was so outraged when his future wife cycled defiantly through the
island's only halt sign that he protested at "the silly bitch" whom he was
soon to marry:
Keith said that I had never paid any attention to halt signs since. He
should have noticed the process early on!
The Clements moved to Sussex in 1958, Keith becoming assistant teacher of
art in Steyning. He was next head of art at Forest School, Horsham, from
1962 to 1964.
From the mid-1960s Clements doggedly climbed the academic ladder. He
achieved his Advanced Diploma in Art Education at Birmingham University and
College of Art, becoming senior lecturer in art at Eastbourne College of
Education, 1965-76, and then principal lecturer in art at East Sussex
College of Higher Education, 1976-78.
Whereas some art teachers cease to exhibit, he felt that by practising he
nourished his teaching. While in Orkney, he had two solo shows at the County
Library; others followed later when he was back in Sussex, including the
National Film Theatre, 1972, the Alwin Gallery, London, 1974, and Castle
Rushen, Isle of Man, 1978. Clements also showed at the universities of
Sussex, London and Southampton, at the Royal Academy, on Arts Council tours
and elsewhere.
From 1978, Clements was senior lecturer in art history at Brighton
Polytechnic, sharing a show with his colleague David Chapman there in his
retirement year, 1988. Clements had conducted some popular courses for the
Faculty of Art's foundation studies programme - including Arts and War,
British and European Art and Design Between the Wars, and Artists and the
Spirit of Place.
Clements had contributed articles to art publications and in the mid-1980s
began two series for The Artist magazine: "Artists and Places" and "Artists
and Sitters". His biography of Henry Lamb stemmed from his doctoral thesis.
Seven years' research went into this, an offshoot being the 1984 Henry Lamb
retrospective exhibition at Manchester City Art Gallery and national tour.
Lamb had long been known as a fine painter, who had produced the
unforgettable 1914 portrait of Lytton Strachey, now in the Tate Gallery.
Apart from a scarce 1924 book of reproductions of his work, however, little
was known of this very private man. His many connections included the Slade
School of Fine Art, New English Art Club, Camden Town Group, Fitzrovia and
Bloomsbury, as well as Dora Carrington, Augustus John, Lady Ottoline Morrell
and Stanley Spencer.
Clements's book has a huge list of acknowledgements, including his wife who
"acted as interpreter for the Breton dialect". Lamb had produced some of his
most sensitive and impressive works while staying in 1910-11 with the
Favennec family at Doëlan, a tiny port on Britanny's southern coast. Among
them was another icon of 20th-century British painting, the Tate Gallery's
Death of a Peasant, based on the death of Madame Favennec.
By the time that Keith and Jackie arrived in Britanny the Favennec family
was running a small hotel, where they stayed. One of the Favennec daughters
who had developed a crush on Lamb, was still alive, now an old woman. At
first, remembers Jackie, the family denied all knowledge of Lamb, but a
visit by one of the brothers changed that:
Then it emerged that she had known Lamb and he encouraged her to talk,
overcoming the family's innate reticence about personal matters. Before
Keith and I left, she dressed up in her Breton wedding outfit and became
very vocal.
Redcliffe Press published the Lamb book, and Clements further demonstrated
his versatility when in 1994 it republished the Labour Member of Parliament
Maurice Edelman's The Minister. Clements produced a suitably brooding cover
for this devastating novel of political life.
Retired, Keith Clements was able to concentrate on his own artwork. While
researching Lamb, he had made pencil and pastel portraits of several of
Lamb's sitters, hence the inclusion of, among others, Duncan Grant, Lady
Pansy, Diana Mosley, Bryan Guinness (Lord Moyne) and Quentin Bell. In
addition, Clements wrote in the catalogue,
being a frequent visitor to Monk's House, Charleston and Berwick inspired
me to look afresh at these much-painted subjects and, with a little
impertinent whimsy, hint at the occasional haunting presence of Bloomsbury
personages.
From his student years Clements had drawn and painted Sussex, but he began
to feel that he had "become increasingly seduced by the notion of Olde
Sussex, succumbing, sometimes sentimentally, to childhood memories, caught
up in waves of nostalgia". Thus in his show at Pallant House, Chichester, in
1996, entitled "New Vistas: Sussex from the bypass", he sought to
admire, indeed applaud, the bold, imaginative sweep of the new A27 through
the lately resolved Southwick tunnel, an instant masterpiece that might well
have had an approving nod from Brunel.
Clements's last solo exhibition was at the Thebes Gallery, Lewes, in 2002.
Despite a long illness, he contributed six pictures to the just- finished
Salon at Sablé-sur-Sarthe, in France, where only one foreigner a year is
invited to exhibit.
David Buckman