Ken Powell; Collector of post-war British art
Hyfler/Rosner
08 September 2006
Peyton Skipwith
Ken Powell
Collector of post-war British art
Kenneth Tyson Powell, art collector: born York 2 February
1923; married 1963 Ruth Cameron (one son, three daughters;
marriage dissolved 1979); died London 18 August 2006.
Ken Powell was a born collector and, like all true
collectors, he not only had to have the best works available
in the field, he also had to be amongst the leading
authorities on the subject, though he always wore his
scholarship lightly and with self-mockery.
When I first met him more than 30 years ago he collected
work by the Camden Town artists, particularly Gilman, Gore
and Bevan. However, his Camden Town collection had been
preceded by other collections including Chinese blue and
white porcelain and Georgian glass, but, as each area
outstripped his modest means, they had been disposed of in
their entirety and his eye and mind refocused to a fresh
area which had caught his interest. The same thing happened
again when the price of the best works of the Camden Town
Group put them beyond his grasp.
Powell was born in York, but spent much of his childhood in
Keswick, where his grandmother ran the King's Head, and
where his ashes have now been scattered. It was these
holidays in the Lake District that infected him with a love
of the countryside and a lifelong interest in bird-watching.
After attending preparatory school in York he went to St
George's, a co- educational boarding school in Harpenden.
War service in the RAF found him stationed on Islay in 1945
and he jokingly liked to boast that he and his confrères
nearly set fire to the entire whisky-soaked island with the
giant bonfire they built and lit to celebrate VE Day. After
being demobbed he went up to Queens' College, Cambridge,
where, being of a scientific bent, he read Microbiology,
before joining the chemicals division of Distillers.
This division - British Industrial Solvents - was later
hived off and taken over by BP, for whom he continued to
work as a manager in the Distribution and Purchasing
Department until his retirement in 1979. His reputation as a
relaxed, jovial and clubbable colleague, happy to fraternise
and play indifferent golf with his colleagues, was amply
born out by the number of his former associates who attended
his funeral.
Fortunately for Ken Powell, who claimed that he had started
collecting the day he received his first pay- packet, BP
Chemicals had its head office in Devonshire House,
Piccadilly, directly above Green Park Tube Station,
conveniently close to the RAF Club, and in dangerous
proximity to the West End galleries.
It was an exhibition at Agnew's in Old Bond Street, only a
few hundred yards from his office, that kindled his
enthusiasm for the Camden Town Group and, in the early
1960s, precipitated the sale of his collection of Chinese
porcelain. This change of direction coincided roughly, but
coincidentally, with his marriage in 1963 to Ruth Cameron, a
marriage that lasted for 16 years and produced four children
before they divorced - though they enjoyed a close
friendship, indeed love, until the end.
Referring to Ken's reputation for scattiness, their daughter
Sally, speaking at his funeral, said that it was lucky she
was a person rather than a picture, otherwise she "might
have been left on a train or given in part-exchange".
Unbeknownst to Ruth, Ken had remortgaged their house in
Bedford Park in the late 1960s, taking out a loan of £3,000
in order to purchase four paintings by Spencer Gore.
At that point he knew he was hooked, and that his love
affair with art had turned into something more obsessive.
Ruth, happily, can still laugh about two Duncan Grants that
Ken had supposedly given her, which suddenly disappeared
without consultation, to be replaced by a large painting by
Prunella Clough incorporating a J Cloth. She is equally
bemused by the lists he left of paintings marked "In the
pipeline", which, as far as she was concerned, never
materialised. Former BP colleagues recall his office as a
miniature art gallery.
As prices for the best Camden Town Group paintings escalated
out of his reach, a chance visit to the Annely Juda Gallery
alerted him to the quality and range of works available by
British constructivist and abstract painters of the 1950s.
These works were largely overlooked at that time: they were
old enough to be out of fashion, but too recent to have
taken their place in history.
One of his first purchases from Annely Juda*, in 1975, was
an uncompromising 1954 piece, Construction with Aluminium
Plates, by Stephen Gilbert; this was quickly followed by
Anthony Hill's 1950 Composition, Adrian Heath's Climbing
Composition Green and Blue, of the same year, and a raft of
works by Prunella Clough, which formed the largest single
group in his collection, and Pru Clough became a close
friend, as did many of the other artists, who appreciated
his enthusiasm and patronage.
These friendships added an extra dimension to this, his
final collection, which was celebrated in an annual summer
party for scholars, collectors, critics, museum curators
and, of course, artists. They were memorable gatherings. In
addition to his other attributes Ken Powell was a fine cook
and keen gardener, winning prizes at the RHS for his
camellias, and in 2000 remodelling his garden to celebrate
the millennium, so that his guests would move seamlessly,
glass and plate in hand, between the inside and outside
worlds.
Collecting was undoubtedly Powell's primary obsession, but
he never let it detract from his other interests. He was an
inveterate traveller (often in later years in company with
his childhood friend and partner Patsy Blackmore),
photographer, cook, gardener, ornithologist and bon viveur.
It was always his hope that after his death a number of the
works on paper from his collection should find a permanent
home in the British Museum, whilst the major part should go
to Edinburgh, which city had had conferred on him the
ultimate collector's accolade.
Late in 1992 his terrace house in Chiswick was virtually
stripped bare as over 70 works of art were removed for an
exhibition, "New Beginnings", at the Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art. The introductory essay for the
catalogue was written by Professor Alastair Grieve and
dedicated to the memory of Adrian Heath who had organised
the seminal 1954 exhibition "Nine Abstract Artists", and
without whose activities, as Grieve says "we would have no
context in which to study post-war British abstract art".
The same can now be said of "New Beginnings": a lasting
tribute to a dedicated collector of modest means.
Peyton Skipwith
*Annely Juda died August 13. See obituaries I posted.