Maurice Sumray; St. Ives painter
Hyfler/Rosner
Terrific obit, by the way. From The Independent.
Maurice Sumray
Offbeat St Ives painter
Portrait of Sumray:
http://www.michaelstrang.com/port09.htm
23 July 2004
Maurice Sumray, painter and engraver: born London 26
December 1920; married 1952 Pat Twinn (two sons, two
daughters); died Carbis Bay, Cornwall 21 July 2004.
The meticulously drawn figurative paintings of Maurice
Sumray, in which crowds of bald or scantily clad women dance
or play piggyback in mysterious carnival-like arrangements,
seemed out of place in the predominantly abstract or
landscape-inspired art colony of St Ives, Cornwall, where
Sumray moved permanently after leaving his native London in
1968.
Yet Sumray, an immensely gifted and probing draughtsman who
sometimes took a year to complete a large and detailed
composition, pursued his imaginative vision with single-
mindedness, in spite of periodically falling prey to bouts
of melancholia and self-doubt about the whole enterprise of
being a painter. "Painting for me is a battle," he said,
"and I find the medium difficult."
Born in London in 1920, the son of an East End Jewish
tailor, Sumray was largely self-taught, though he showed
during the Second World War (during which he served in the
Ministry of Economic Warfare) in mixed exhibitions at the
Whitechapel Art Gallery. After establishing "Sumray
Textiles", specialising in hand-printed cottons, he studied
with his twin brother, Harman, at Goldsmiths' College,
London, between 1949 and 1953.
While at Goldsmiths' in 1950 the precocious 30-year-old
artist was described by Wyndham Lewis in The Listener as one
of the "best artists in England". The author of The Demon of
Progress in the Arts (1954) saw in Sumray's well-crafted
figuration and humane naturalism a foil to what he saw at
the time as "that contagion that hurries an artist to zero"
and led to the bogus extreme of advanced abstraction.
Sumray's early paintings such as The Old Jew (1948) and The
Hunchback (1950) indeed eschewed abstraction, sharing with
Wyndham Lewis sombre colour and stylised, mask-like faces.
Sumray's melancholic figures were however closer to toys
than to Lewis's mechanical tyrants. Despite early
recognition Sumray abandoned painting in 1953, destroying
all works in his possession, and dedicated his time to
developing a printing business.
His workshop and engraving studio in Fitzroy Street was
technically innovative, developing the flexographic process
for wallpaper printing and packaging materials. South of
Fitzroy Street, in Soho, he became a familiar figure at such
haunts of artists as Muriel Belcher's Colony Room.
Financially secure, he moved in 1968 at the request of his
wife, Pat - who came from a West Country naval family - to
St Ives, where, after a 20-year hiatus, he resumed painting.
He revisited an old theme in Lovers (1971), the double act
peering back at the spectator with the touching pathos of
early Picasso and articulated with the sharp lines and
cylindrical anatomy of Léger and Helion.
Perhaps recognising the problematic nature of earning a
living from painting alone, this intellectual cockney with a
bluff, lovable exterior and a street-wise disposition
alighted in Cornwall entirely on his own terms. In 1980 he
became a full member of the Penwith and Newlyn art
societies, exhibiting his complex and detailed crowd scenes
in eclectic exhibitions. In 1981 he was selected for a Tolly
Cobbold touring exhibition which visited museums in Oxford
and Cambridge before coming to the ICA, London. In the same
year he enjoyed solo shows at the Newlyn Orion Gallery in
Penzance and at the Montpelier Studios, London.
A Penwith Society retrospective in 1984 was well received
and the catalogue for his Falmouth Art Gallery retrospective
in 1997 contained eulogies from friends such as the poet Al
Alvarez and the BBC journalist Brian Barron.
Sumray's compositions contain the inscrutable and distanced
quality of a dream, the mysterious figures summarised by
Alvarez as "emblematic, like the kings, queens and jacks in
a pack of cards". (Like Alvarez, he was a keen poker
player.) From the male perspective at least, the subjects
contain an offbeat, blatantly sexual symbolism, the sturdy
thighs and voluptuous bodies confronting the spectator - who
is reduced to voyeur. The rhythm and ornamental richness of
decorative detail recall Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer.
The sombre, melancholic realism of Sumray's early portraits
contrast with the purely imaginative concoctions of the
later dancing women, circus performers and peopled
interiors. There was however, an underlying rhythmic energy
common to both early and late work, the early pictures
recalling the Vorticism of Jacob Kramer, Wyndham Lewis or
C.W. Nevinson, the later figure compositions closer to
William Roberts.
In latter years Sumray lived in a flat overlooking Porthmeor
beach, not a bad fate for an artist from the East End with a
keen feeling for social justice. (When last year he moved to
a large suburban house in nearby Carbis Bay, he felt sadly
estranged from the bustle of the sea front.)
Within the art life of St Ives he championed the cause of
the underdog and the neglected, among whose ranks this
talented and distinctive outsider belonged.
Peter Davies