Osmund Caine; painter who invented the bikini
Hyfler/Rosner
http://www.bridgemanart.com/about/collections.asp?type=dBridgeman%20Contemporary%20Artists&topic=413
THE ARTIST Osmund Caine did not court celebrity but received
it internationally in 1996 when a newspaper reported that he
was the true inventor of the bikini. A London art dealer
pointed out that Caine's 1938 painting Bathing Beach
featured bikini-clad figures eight years before the French
structural engineer Louis Reard proposed the bathing costume
while working on the American nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll.
The octogenarian Caine recalled that he would have preferred
to have had the women wearing nothing at all -
but I had to think of the propriety of the setting. Those
three women have got the most attractive navels and I had to
find a way of showing them. Had I the wit at the time, I
would have made sure I got the patent and took all the
royalties, then I would not have had to worry quite so much
about my artistic career.
Osmund Caine was a forceful, sometimes authoritarian art
teacher who created an early, dynamic graphic design course
at Twickenham College of Technology. One of the last of the
old school, with an uncompromising skills-based approach, he
believed that commercial artists should know how to draw,
construct perspective, lay a wash or airbrush and understand
photography, graphics and three-dimensional design.
Alongside being a teacher he was a versatile artist, with
many solo and group exhibition appearances. He was a
prolific designer of stained glass for churches in Britain
and abroad.
Caine was born in Manchester in 1914, one of two sons and
three daughters of Alfred Caine, who, while working for the
Post Office in Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham and Leeds,
was organist and choirmaster in local churches. Osmund
inherited his musicality, although he chose to study at
Birmingham College of Arts and Crafts, where he was taught
by Richard John Stubington, noted for his fine stained glass
and exquisite lettering. A fellow student was Caine's future
wife, Mary Lucas.
Remembered as a formidable figure, with a bellow that could
fell an ox at 100 yards, Caine would seem well suited to the
five years he spent in the Military Police during the Second
World War. He enjoyed zooming about on motorcycles, but not
hauling back those who had gone absent without leave. Caine
had a lucky escape. He was due to go to the Far East, caught
pneumonia and was prevented from joining a troopship that
was subsequently sunk with many killed.
After the war he taught life drawing at Birmingham College
of Art. Moving to Surbiton in 1946, he initially taught at
Kingston School of Art, in the early 1950s began teaching at
Twickenham and in 1958 was asked to create the vocational
graphic design course. This was very broad-based for its
time, embracing illustration, exhibition and graphic design,
typography and photography.
Caine could now pay for lessons at the Guildhall School of
Music, exploiting his fine bass baritone voice. He sang
Lieder and choral works on the radio and in concerts. His
son Roland tells the story of his father's standing in a
bread queue while on a painting trip in Venice:
Hearing someone humming a duet from La Traviata, he launched
into a full- throated Alfredo. A rather refined lady at the
front of the queue answered with a very professional
Violetta. She turned out to be a Venetian contessa and opera
singer. The two got huge applause from the crowd that had
gathered for the performance. It was a trick he often
repeated.
Another diversion was the making with his wife of two films
in 1966, The Ruskin Country and The Glastonbury Giants.
Mary's associated book, The Glastonbury Zodiac: key to the
mysteries of Britain, appeared in 1978.
Caine stuck firmly to his belief that academic success was
not an important ingredient for a career in commercial art.
He fought the local education authority for his right to
choose the people he felt had a natural aptitude. After his
death, many ex-students wrote to say that his approach had
offered them a chance they would not otherwise have had.
Caine boasted that over 95 per cent of his students were
employed on graduation.
Osmund Caine was a complex character: irascible, obstinate
and unreasonable, yet with a good sense of humour; private,
even secretive, a man who felt things very deeply yet
preferred a straight fight to the ambiguity of diplomacy;
sometimes awesome and scary, always capable of surprise. A
Labour voter, he was fiercely against any state interference
with individual responsibility. He hated political
correctness, but was the first to fight for equal acceptance
of black and Asian students at Twickenham.
On one occasion his work was exhibited with that of a young
artist who was loud and scathing in his criticism of
Caine's, unaware that he was standing behind him. When,
shortly after, the critic applied for a teaching post at
Twickenham, Caine gave him the job.
To support his growing family, Caine worked at several jobs
at once. In addition to his teaching - he retired in 1976
(he had been offered the headship at Twickenham, but turned
it down) - he was constantly painting and drawing. "English
hill figures, British castles, monumental effigies, Kew
Gardens and France" were subjects he listed as important to
him. Religious, but with no time for piety or dogma, he was
concerned that what he and others exhibited to the world was
infused with "the Holy Spirit".
Caine showed widely in mixed shows at the Royal Academy
Summer Exhibition, New English Art Club, Royal Society of
British Artists, Royal Birmingham Society of Artists,
Victoria and Albert Museum and commercial galleries. There
were many solo shows, with a retrospective at Orleans House
Gallery, Twickenham, in 1998.
Retirement gave him the chance of to carry out more
commissions for stained glass in churches. These included
All Saints, Four Oaks; St Cuthbert's, Copnor; St Gabriel's,
Cricklewood; St Augustine's, Edgbaston; St Keyne's, St
Keyne; St Mary's, Hong Kong; and St Luke's, Wadestown, New
Zealand. In the mid-1980s he also managed to achieve a
Durham University honours degree in Medieval and Modern
History.
George Osmund Caine, artist and teacher: born Manchester 16
July 1914; married 1944 Mary Lucas (four sons, and one
daughter deceased); died Kingston upon Thames, Surrey 11
November 2004.
robertc...@yahoo.com
Hyfler/Rosner wrote:
> BYLINE: David Buckman, The Independent
>
>
http://www.bridgemanart.com/about/collections.asp?type=dBridgeman%20Contemporary%20Artists&topic=413
>
>
> THE ARTIST Osmund Caine did not court celebrity but received
> it internationally in 1996 when a newspaper reported that he
> was the true inventor of the bikini. A London art dealer
> pointed out that Caine's 1938 painting Bathing Beach
> featured bikini-clad figures eight years before the French
> structural engineer Louis Reard proposed the bathing costume
> while working on the American nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll.
An interesting obit about a real character. Good thing that he didn't
paint those young ladies in the nude. There must be thousands of such
paintings in the world. But to give them something unusual to
wear--that was inspiration indeed.
Who is sexier, a girl in a bikini or a girl in the nude? I would vote
for the former. Curiosity adds that extra bit of spice--and it really
doesn't take much to rouse curiosity.
Bob Champ
Bob Feigel
<robertc...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Isn't that what German guards used to say to prisioners in WWII
movies? Rouse! ROUSE!
"When weaving nets, all threads count." - Charlie Chan
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Wax-up and drop-in of Surfing's Golden Years: <http://www.surfwriter.net>
wats...@shaw.ca
Hyfler/Rosner wrote:
> BYLINE: David Buckman, The Independent
>
>
http://www.bridgemanart.com/about/collections.asp?type=dBridgeman%20Contemporary%20Artists&topic=413
>
>
> THE ARTIST Osmund Caine did not court celebrity but received
> it internationally in 1996 when a newspaper reported that he
> was the true inventor of the bikini. A London art dealer
> pointed out that Caine's 1938 painting Bathing Beach
> featured bikini-clad figures eight years before the French
> structural engineer Louis Reard proposed the bathing costume
> while working on the American nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll.
One of the mosaics unearthed at Pompeii shows a number of lovely young
women in bikinis. The mosaic dates from before 79 AD. Osmund Caine may
have brought the bikini into the 20th century, but obviously given this
evidence he did not invent it.
wd40
Hyfler/Rosner
Artist, teacher and stained-glass designer, he ran
Twickenham art school for 20 years
Polly Pattullo
Monday December 13, 2004
The Guardian
Osmund Caine, who has died aged 90, was an artist, teacher
and stained-glass designer. Imposing and patriarchal, he ran
the Twickenham School of Art for nearly 20 years with a
forceful integrity. A private and complex man, not at ease
with modern preoccupations, he was once, bizarrely, credited
with having invented the bikini.
The eldest of six children, he was born in Manchester, where
his father was a civil servant with the Post Office and a
church organist. Part of his childhood, however, was spent
with his grandmother, who ran a pub on the Manchester ship
canal. This experience of canalside life gave him freedom to
roam, and perhaps cultivated an instinct to pursue his own
dreams and live by his own principles.
He studied at the Birmingham School of Art, which provided
him with the skills to embark on a long career as an artist
and teacher. This was only interrupted by war service in the
military police.
After the second world war, Caine returned briefly to
Birmingham to teach life drawing, before moving to the
London suburbs to work first at Kingston School of Art in
1948, and then at Twickenham College of Technology. There,
in 1958, he became founder and head of its graphic design
school setting up pioneering, broad-based vocational
courses. He was dedicated to traditional art college skills
such as life drawing, but was also innovative, introducing
illustration, exhibition and graphic design, typography and
photography into the curriculum.
Never hidebound by the rules, he took on students without
the required academic qualifications; he also encouraged
black and Asian students. Dedicated to raising standards, he
established the school's reputation and claimed that his
graduate students always got jobs. In many ways an
authoritarian figure, his students remember him with
gratitude for his teaching skills and willingness to give
them a chance when others would have rejected them.
Throughout his teaching career, Caine continued with his
stained-glass designs and painting. His last one-man
retrospective was at the Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham,
in 1998. Much of his work addresses spiritual themes
reflecting deeply held beliefs as an - unpious - Roman
Catholic. There are also more carefree paintings - of
jam-making or washing on a clothesline; powerful portraits,
and watercolours, largely of churches and castles. Stanley
Spencer was a major influence, seen, for example, in Caine's
evocative Wedding At Twickenham, where, in the detail, a
tombstone bears his own name and that of his wife, Mary.
A major work, Spider Hutments, was developed from a pencil
sketch worked during his wartime army days in Aldershot.
Showing black and white squaddies in their barracks, it was
only finished in 1985. Sold to the national collection, the
painting now hangs at the Treasury, in the office of Paul
Boateng. A few months before Caine's death, Boateng asked to
meet the artist, and Caine was taken to see his painting in
its new setting - a recognition that he appreciated.
His stained-glass designs, first developed during his
student days, were mostly private commissions for memorial
windows. These traditional designs, often portraits of
saints, were distinguished by Caine's strong, deep colours.
Some of his stained-glass work is in the Birmingham Museum
of Art.
An unlikely moment came in 1996 when the Daily Telegraph ran
a story suggesting that Caine was the inventor of the
bikini, citing his painting Bathing Beach (1938), which
features three sunbathers showing their midriffs on an
English beach. Caine told the newspaper that he would have
preferred to have painted the women nude, but "I had to
think of the propriety of the setting". Eight years after
Caine's reclining sunbathers, the French claimed the
invention for themselves.
Retirement came in 1975, but Caine continued to live in the
large detached house on Kingston Hill, which he had bought
in 1948. This he shared with his delightful wife Mary, also
an artist, and was where he brought up his family in
bohemian disregard for modern comforts. It was poetry, music
(he was a fine bass baritone) and, of course, art that
mattered.
A Labour voter all his life, he was, however, a staunch
individualist and uncompromising in his beliefs. He was
sometimes a fiery figure, with, as one of his sons said, "a
bellow that could fell an ox at a 100 yards". But life with
Caine was full of surprises. One Christmas morning, after
mass in Westminster cathedral, he drove the family's Bedford
Dormobile through the gates of Buckingham Palace shouting
"Happy Christmas your Majesty", chased by rifle-toting
guardsmen.
He is survived by Mary, whom he married in 1944, and their
four sons, Francis, Michael, Roland and Gabriel. A daughter,
Rachel, also an artist, predeceased him.
· George Osmund Caine, artist and teacher, born July 16
1914; died November 11 2004
7be...@gmail.com
Kenny McCormack
>On Monday, 13 December 2004 01:36:32 UTC, Hyfler/Rosner wrote:
>> much better Guardian obituary:
>>
>>
>>
>> Artist, teacher and stained-glass designer, he ran
>> Twickenham art school for 20 years
>>
>> Polly Pattullo
>> Monday December 13, 2004
>> The Guardian
>>
>> Osmund Caine, who has died aged 90, was an artist, teacher
>> and stained-glass designer. Imposing and patriarchal, he ran
>> the Twickenham School of Art for nearly 20 years with a
>> forceful integrity. A private and complex man, not at ease
>> with modern preoccupations, he was once, bizarrely, credited
>> with having invented the bikini.
This guy didn't "invent" the bikini any more than Leonard Da Vinci invented
the airplane.
--
"This ain't my first time at the rodeo"
is a line from the movie, Mommie Dearest, said by Joan Crawford at a board meeting.