Margaret Green; painter
Hyfler/Rosner
Margaret Green
Inspired painter of a brighter, gentler postwar England
Ian Collins
Tuesday November 11, 2003
The Guardian
Margaret Green, who has died aged 78, was a woman of singular style, talent
and conviction. But almost from the moment she met fellow student Lionel
Bulmer, at the Royal College of Art in the 1940s, two creative spirits
merged. They went on to share a remarkable personal and painterly journey;
in even the largest houses, there is usually space for only one artist - but
Bulmer and Green could work in complete harmony in one small room. When
Bulmer died in 1992, his widow was utterly bereft. She never produced
another picture, at best half-heartedly revising old ones.
Margaret was born in West Hartlepool, County Durham, the elder daughter of a
stock-taker in a steel plant, who was also secretary of the local art club.
From the outset, her parents encouraged her to paint. On holiday in a
popular sketching area of north Yorkshire, the 16-year-old Margaret was
drawn by the young Patrick Heron, who happened to be staying next-door. The
encounter confirmed a second artistic calling.
From Hartlepool Art School, Margaret won a scholarship to the RCA, at the
time relocated to its wartime home in the Lake District. Romance with Lionel
Bulmer, her senior by seven years, bloomed, and when the college returned to
South Kensington the pair were inseparable.
Margaret carried off most of the prizes at the RCA, including a £160
travelling scholarship, which allowed the partners to spend several months
roaming in France. Here they established the pattern of living simply but
well, within a fulfilling framework of mutual support and creative labour.
From the start, their pictures showed a savouring of small things - a
mantelpiece assembly leading to the scarlet gash of a single red flower, a
table composition centred on the golden globe of an oil lamp. Both artists
tackled the subject of female figures lost in wonderment amid the
spectacular hats and dresses of a shop trying out the New Look after years
of wartime utilitarian wear.
Back in London, they were pioneers of the revolution in taste and style that
emerged as wartime rationing gave way to the continental flavours championed
by Elizabeth David. Living in Chelsea, first in a rented room in Elm Park
Gardens and then in a Lucan Place studio, they found human and scenic
subjects in nearby squares, parks and embankments for the paintings they
would produce from almost adjoining easels back at home.
While these works were suffused with a growing, glowing light, they also
often offered a view through fog to ice: the winter of 1947 was among the
coldest on record, and the window between victory celebrations and cold war
was snapping shut. In the deceptively innocent paintings of Bulmer and Green
from this period, there may lurk a sense of the need to claim freedom from
menace.
The couple found part-time teaching posts in London art schools, Margaret in
Walthamstow. Before being lured to the Royal Academy schools by Peter
Greenham, she loved working with the life-model Quentin Crisp.
But the priority remained their work and time together. They took to touring
the Sussex countryside and south coast at weekends, then rented a spartan
room above a boathouse overlooking the Arun estuary at Littlehampton.
Inhabitable only in summer, this eyrie prompted a flow of gloriously
patterned paintings - with foreground girls dressed in flattering, 1950s
fashions giving way to crowded beach scenes.
They found a permanent base in a dilapidated medieval hall house in a
Suffolk hamlet beside the river Rat. They restored the wreck themselves,
adding a light-filled studio and creating an artists' garden from
wilderness.
Their painter friend Fred Dubery recalls how, over home-grown meals (with
Chateau Bulmer quince wine or home-brewed beer), they would discuss the fact
that their work was moving from the similar to the indistinguishable. So
they agreed that one of them must change tack, and that Lionel should
explore the pointillism of Seurat in sunburst canvases.
Margaret adored painting views of the house and garden in winter. But on
summer days the partners were likely to be found sketching side by side at
Walberswick or Southwold. These were to be the images for which they were
best known in New English Art Club shows until, with Lionel's death, their
names faded.
But London retrospective exhibitions for both artists, at Messum's in Cork
Street, have been hugely successful in the last two years. Margaret still
had a radiant beauty when she attended private views.
· Margaret Green, painter, born March 7 1925; died November 4 2003