Nancy Carline; painter (great obit)
Hyfler/Rosner
can't find one online. If someone out there can help, would
you?
NANCY CARLINE;
PAINTER OF QUIET, ELEGIAC INTENSITY
BYLINE: RICHARD MORPHET
The Independent
THE QUIET intensity of Nancy Carline's painting enriched the
contribution of the Carlines to British art through three
generations. Its human warmth reflected her life in the
family and in her wide circle of friends.
She was born Nancy Higgins in London in 1909. Her father, a
son of the founder of Jones & Higgins, the well-known
Peckham store, was killed in action in 1917. Her Australian
mother's wide-ranging response to art, music and literature
was a formative influence, extended by education at Wycombe
Abbey.
Early talent led to her entering the Slade School of Art in
1929. During the last two years of the powerful
professorship of Henry Tonks, she responded positively to
the seriousness and technical discipline of his approach.
Grounded in drawing, it would later form the basis of her
own teaching. It was, however, individual demonstration by
Philip Wilson Steer, who remarked on her promise, that she
felt launched her as a painter. Allan Gwynne-Jones, who
joined the Slade staff in 1930, became a key influence on
the combination of keen observation with painterly touch
that would mark her mature work.
From 1933 Nancy Higgins worked for two seasons for Sadler's
Wells Ballet, where she admired the leadership of Lilian
Baylis. Unpaid, and undertaking whatever applied tasks were
required (chiefly on costume), she nevertheless found great
inspiration in the music and in the exacting requirements of
Ninette de Valois, in whose ability to draw forth effective
work she found affinities with Tonks (she got on well with
both).
Among those who praised her work at Sadler's Wells was
Vladimir Polunin, who was designing operas there. He urged
Nancy to return to the Slade, this time to his classes in
stage design. By contrast with the established fine art
tuition she had received earlier, Polunin's classes were
seen at the Slade as being "below stairs". In part this was
because they fostered keen interest in modern art. As a
scene painter for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, Polunin
had known Picasso and other innovative artists and commended
their work.
This expansion of Higgins's visual awareness had the
paradoxical result that her work with Polunin proved crucial
in the conviction she now reached that painting, rather than
theatre arts, must be her calling.
Traditional Slade teaching had encouraged a subdued palette
and correct figuration. Polunin's backcloths were painted
tacked to the floor in the old way and his student
assistants, in carpet slippers, used brushes on long sticks.
When Higgins resumed her own painting, the greater breadth
of scene painting and its freer accompanying influences had
helped liberate her fine art technique. In the late 1930s
she attended briefly the Euston Road School.
In Polunin's class Higgins met those who would become her
closest friends, notably Rosemary Allan (who married Allan
Gwynne-Jones), Annette Scott, Anthony Baynes, Elizabeth
Stephen and Aelred Bartlett (the latter two marrying in
1941). Though not studying at the Slade, Aelred's brothers
Francis (later Administrator of Westminster Cathedral) and
Anthony and his sister Josephine Paterson were part of this
close-knit group, which over the years came, along with its
many children, almost to resemble a family.
In 1934, she had met the painter Richard Carline, known to
his friends as Dick. They became increasingly close,
marrying in 1950. The Carline family home in Hampstead had
long been the centre of a wide circle of artists, including
Mark Gertler, Gilbert Spencer and his brother Stanley, the
latter an admirer of Carline's painting and, from 1925,
husband of his painter sister, Hilda.
The breadth of Richard Carline's engagement with art greatly
exceeded that in Nancy's background. He worked to spread
appreciation of African art, as well as that of child and
naive artists and of the picture postcard, and had close
friendships with inter-war American realist painters. From
the mid-1930s his own output as a painter was increasingly
displaced by his leading role in local, national and
international artists' organisations, work closely
integrated with his strong anti-Fascism.
The Hampstead Artists Council (co-founded by Dick and in
which Nancy was prominent) was strongly supportive of
refugees from Nazism. Herself apolitical, Nancy was
nevertheless keenly interested in the worlds opened for her
by Dick's contacts. She described him as not Communist but a
fellow traveller. Some friends were shocked when the
Carlines, with their young children, visited East Germany in
1963 as guests of the artist John Heartfield, whom they had
befriended in London. Nancy renewed the love for German
Expressionist painting, especially by Macke and
Schmidt-Rottluff, that she had found a revelation in the
Nazis' Degenerate Art exhibition in 1937.
In 1936 the Carline family had moved from Downshire Hill to
nearby 17 Pond Street. Nancy's Supper on the Terrace (1946)
is set there and represents four painters. Seated to the
left is Dick's mother Ann Carline (who had just died) and to
the right his sister Hilda (who lived there with her
children after the break-up of her marriage to Stanley
Spencer and during the later substantial resumption of their
relationship before her own death).
In Rosemary Gwynne-Jones's words, the picture was painted
"in a spirit of blazing love for the family". Behind Dick
(the central figure), the sky and long sloping garden are
richly lit by the evening sun, while from the left Nancy
herself enters the scene (and, symbolically, the family). At
the house in Pond Street, its rooms hung thickly with
paintings by numerous artists, friends of all generations
continued till Richard's death to receive - not least from
Nancy, who made this life possible - the warmest welcome at
parties and in lively discussion.
An enthusiastic art teacher at a school in Purley during the
Second World War, Nancy argued passionately for the
retention of art in the school curriculum. For over 25 years
both Carlines worked for several months a year as examiners
for the Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, assessing
work in various media from Britain, Africa, India and South
East Asia and helping establish more liberal criteria. But
the heart of her work was her own painting. Greatly
encouraged by Dick she, in turn, stimulated both the renewal
of his art and its increased painterliness, often in motifs
seen on their travels abroad. A key location was Venice, for
Titian and Tintoretto were major inspirations of Nancy's,
while light, water, architecture and the heightened
observation of daily life were vital to her art.
Most of Nancy Carline's pictures are land- or townscapes. In
almost all, one or more people or animals can be seen. Her
pictures fuse intuition of the spirit of a place, in all its
long continuity, with unaffected observation of everyday
activity occurring within it. It is as though each of her
pictures represents simultaneously both a specific moment
and extended time.
Her art recalls her deep admiration for Claude, in whose
canvases unity between landscape and its inhabitants is
established on every level. She, too, was inspired by both
literature and myth, enriched by love of music. Figures from
Virgil, of classical gods and in a moonlit Annunciation to
the Shepherds combine persuasive immediacy with mysterious
other-worldly light, while in late works scenes from opera
and carnival reappear.
Carline was needlessly anxious about the progress of each of
the larger easel paintings she produced at intervals, in
which well-structured composition united rich pictorial
incident and a controlled freedom of touch. Most of her
works, however, have a modesty of scale and increasingly a
directness and economy of statement that combine to be both
expressive and sustaining. Tender and elegiac in mood, and
having affinities with early Corot and with Bonnard, they
are meditations at once on particular scenes (frequently
including the family) and on the nourishment of art itself.
It was Rosemary Gwynne-Jones, again, who observed that Nancy
Carline was a poet.
She showed often, both locally and at the New English Art
Club and the Royal Academy. After Dick's death in 1980 she
moved to Oxford and in 1985 had a retrospective at Camden
Arts Centre. She resumed painting from the model and, with
close Slade friends, beside the sea (often at Portland in
Dorset). Eventually too frail to travel, she made images
from great masters her own, in small, concentrated drawn
transcriptions. These were shown in the personal
retrospective that formed part of the National Theatre's
large exhibition in 1997 of work by Dick, Nancy and their
circle. A chief joy of her last years was the developing
talent of her seven grandchildren.
Nancy Carline had a deep interest in human behaviour and a
keen sense of fun. Great caution over her often imperfect
health belied an inner toughness and endurance. Firmness,
sometimes even astringency, of view was combined with
eagerness for experience of art both new and old. One
typical letter praises Hogarth and Gabo, while another links
Sickert's drawings with those of Claude.
The inner theme of her work is continuity - in art, in
family, in compelling myth, in human activities and
pleasures. Characteristically, while in her work she is not
the centre of attention, her affirmative nature is
insistently present.
Nancy Mona Higgins, painter: born London 30 November 1909;
married 1950 Richard Carline (died 1980; one son, one
daughter); died Wallingford, Oxfordshire 18 October 2004.
Hyfler/Rosner
Nancy Carline, who has died aged 94, was a painter of moody
yet naturalistic outdoor scenes in the English romantic
tradition that stems from Constable.
Painting rapidly from nature was always crucial to Nancy
Carline's practice. But her larger compositions were
developed in the studio, often over a long period of time.
Memory played a key role, while her own reflective, private
character is mirrored in the instrospection of the figures -
usually members of her family and close friends - who
inhabit the gardens, landscapes and seascapes that were her
principal motifs.
She was born Nancy Mona Higgins in London on November 30
1909. Her father, Douglas Higgins, was killed in the First
World War; but as co-founder of the Peckham department store
Jones and Higgins, he left his wife and four young children
comfortably off in a house furnished with the prints,
watercolours and antiques that had become his absorbing
interest.
His appreciation was more than matched by the devotion to
the great classics of Western art, literature and music of
his widow, Mona, an Australian with a fervent belief in the
importance of education, culture and foreign travel.
Nancy was a ready disciple and, when still a child, she
assumed the role of mentor in the nursery, berating her
younger siblings if they failed to be sufficiently creative.
Never robust physically, and deceptively self-effacing, she
developed into a candid, resolute woman, with great reserves
of stoical endurance.
With her mother's blessing, Nancy Higgins entered the Slade
School of Art in 1928 after leaving Wycombe Abbey School. At
the Slade she was taught first by the formidable Henry Tonks
and then, from 1930, by Allan Gwynne-Jones, who became one
of her closest friends.
Tonks strove to guard his students against "contamination"
from the avant-garde, and it was not until the early 1930s,
when she was working in the costume departments of Sadlers
Wells Ballet and the OId Vic and met Vladimir and Violette
Polunin, Diaghilev's favourite scene painters, that Nancy
really became interested in modern art.
These discoveries did not, however, displace her love of the
art of the past; Bellini and Titian, Claude and Poussin,
remained as important to her as Seurat and Cézanne, Picasso,
Matisse and Bonnard. In her late eighties, when she was too
frail to visit galleries and exhibitions - a cruel
deprivation - she made drawings after favourite pictures,
and liked nothing better than to talk about art.
The precision with which Nancy Carline could recall colour
and tone attested to a remarkable visual memory. Although
she was the first to admit that she had never been "at the
cutting edge" herself, she remained open to contemporary
art, especially when, as in the case of Francis Bacon, she
sensed an equally passionate relationship to the great
tradition of painting that had always fuelled her
imagination.
In 1934 Nancy Higgins met her future husband, the painter
Richard Carline. Through him she was drawn into a more
bohemian, intellectual and politically active circle,
centred on Hampstead but with a network of international
contacts.
Stanley Spencer, whose first wife was Richard's sister
Hilda, was a dominant presence, and although Nancy admired
his work, she steered clear of his influence, which in her
view had overwhelmed the Carlines and contributed to
Richard's decision to place his own painting second to
writing about art and working for organisations such as the
Artists' International Association.
She was active alongside Carline in the Hampstead Artists'
Council, which helped to bring refugees to London out of
Nazi Germany, and through him moved in Marxist circles; but
she remained apolitical herself.
She fully shared Carline's commitment to art education and
taught art during the war in a school at Purley. After their
marriage in 1950, the couple worked for many years as chief
art examiners for the Cambridge Syndicate, and she became
involved in the research for Draw They Must (1968), his
pioneering study of the history of art education in schools.
In her own work as a painter, suggestions of incipient drama
in the expressive, impressionistic technique point to her
lasting interest in the theatre, and in old age she returned
to theatrical subjects which she had first treated under
Polunin's influence.
After the birth of her two children, she had less time for
painting, and until they grew up much of her work was done
away from home, notably in Mexico and Venice; the Carlines
were inveterate travellers, and Nancy never went without her
painting equipment. She exhibited regularly at the New
English Art Club and the Royal Academy, and in 1985 had a
retrospective at the Camden Arts Centre.
In her quiet way Nancy Carline was a very sociable person:
close friendships formed when she was at the Slade survived
until death, but she was also part of a large and always
expanding circle, and with Richard she was an enthusiastic
giver and attender of parties.
Although less of a collector than he, like him she was never
comfortable unless surrounded by works of art: in Carline
houses the walls were always thick with pictures (kitchens
and cloakrooms were not exempt), mantlepieces were cluttered
with invitations and postcards, and furniture was loaded
with books, journals and objects of all sorts.
Everything looked, and was, well-used; most things had
significant, personal associations, and anything new quickly
acquired the Carline patina. This sense of the past
inhabiting the present is paralleled in Nancy Carline's most
characteristic paintings, with their pervasive atmosphere of
nostalgic reverie.
Nancy Carline died on October 18. She is survived by a son
and a daughter.
Nancy Carline
Slade graduate with a fresh approach to mood pieces,
townscapes and landscapes
Michael McNay
Friday November 19, 2004
The Guardian
When in 1950, Nancy Higgins married Richard Carline, she was
adding her talents to a family, if not quite a dynasty, of
professional artists. Among them were the father and mother,
two sons, a daughter, and Nancy Carline herself, the
daughter-in-law, who has now died aged 94.
There is work by all of them in the Tate collection, of
which Nancy's oil painting, Supper On The Terrace (1946) is
a poignant memorial to the family. It is in a long popular
tradition in Britain of family portraits, and, by including
Richard's mother Ann Carline, who by then was dead, Nancy
was reaching back in time to when Holbein included the dead
Henry VII in a dynastic portrait of the Tudors in the reign
of Henry VIII, and Van Dyck (though this is not altogether
certain) included the dead mother of the Earl of Pembroke's
family in the great Wilton group portrait.
But Nancy's portrait is a late English adaptation of
post-impressionism to the traditional relaxed conversation
piece, a little akin to Bonnard's outdoor paintings in its
free brushwork and easy integration of figures into
landscape, with the dappled evening light shining across the
garden behind the diners on the terrace of the Carline home
in Pond Street, Hampstead; Richard and Nancy were not yet
married, but, apart from Ann, she includes herself in the
composition, together with Richard and his sister Hilda.
Nancy was born in London into a family of shopkeepers (the
Peckham store Jones & Higgins, which closed in 1980), and in
1920 went to the Slade School of Art under the domineering
professorship of Henry Tonks, a martinet who struck fear
into the hearts of students and created a drily empirical
approach to painting that survived at the Slade through the
1930s and left its mark even after the second world war.
Its least attractive aspect was its contempt for the major
achievements of the 20th century, but Carline developed
beyond this with the encouragement of Philip Wilson Steer,
an English outdoor painter who, in his best work, had been
deeply influenced by impressionism; not an example of which
Tonks would have approved.
Nancy met Richard Carline in 1934. His father, George
Carline (1855-1920), had been a realist in the manner of his
more famous contemporary, the Royal Academician George
Clausen. Richard and his brother Sydney had served with the
Royal Flying Corps during the first world war, and Sydney,
whose painting was not normally interesting, produced one
spectacularly successful pilot's eye view, now in the
Imperial War Museum, of British SE5 biplanes attacking a
Turkish column in a gorge in the Levant in 1918.
Their sister Hilda's self portrait in the Tate shows her to
have been highly promising, but her talent was submerged by
her marriage to Stanley Spencer, and the subsequent divorce
and messy post-divorce developments, which involved
Spencer's unsuccessful attempt to persuade Hilda to join him
with his new wife in a threesome.
Nancy had shown by her unscathed emergence from the Slade
that she was too tough to be submerged by anything, and,
under her influence, Richard's meticulous realism loosened
up into something more painterly. Nancy's own education in
painting had been completed, in a formal sense, when she
took a job with Sadler's Wells Ballet in 1933, the era of
Lilian Baylis and Ninette de Valois.
One of the designers was Victor Polunin, who had worked as a
scenery painter for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, working on
the designs of Bakst and Picasso, and who now also taught a
class in stage design at the Slade.
So at the age of 24, Carline returned to the Slade to learn
from Polunin; lessons which, although they were intended to
turn her into a stage designer, instead filled the holes in
her fine-art education and taught her the fresher, freer
approach to painting which yielded the mood pieces,
townscapes and landscapes with figures which were her
trademark.
This overlapped with Nancy's meeting with Richard Carline
and the Carline circle, including the Spencer brothers,
Gilbert and Stanley, Mark Gertler, and Helmut Herzefelde, a
founder member in 1919 of the Berlin Dada group, who became
internationally famous under the name John Heartfield for
his bitingly satirical, anti-Nazi photomontages.
Richard and Nancy both taught art during the second world
war, continued to paint together, and finally, in 1950,
married - late for a woman in the mid-20th century.
Together, they had a son and a daughter.
She continued to show at the New English Art Club, which had
been founded in 1886 as a pro-French counter-influence to
the stuffiness of the Royal Academy; but with a fine
indifference to history, she showed at RA summer shows as
well.
Five years after her husband's death in 1980, Carline had a
retrospective at the Camden Centre, and in 1997 the National
Theatre put on a big show of work by Richard and Nancy
Carline and their group of friends and fellow professionals.
She is survived by her son and daughter.
· Nancy Mona Carline, artist, born November 30 1909; died
October 18 2004