Surrealist Conroy Maddox (Times & Independent)
marilyn...@aol.com
theoretical purity
http://www.artnet.com/artist/160451/Conroy_Maddox.html
http://www.jameshyman.co.uk/pages/modbrit/thumbnails/66.html
from London Times:
THE artist Conroy Ronald Maddox was the last survivor of the prewar
phase of the Surrealist movement in Britain.
Conroy Ronald Maddox was born in 1912 in Ledbury, Herefordshire. His
father, Albert George, helped to run the long-established family
agricultural seed business. Maddox's education began in a ramshackle
elementary school run by two sisters, "the Miss Wades", where he
won an art prize, and continued at the local grammar school. The 1929
Depression forced Albert George to move, with his wife, Eleanor, and
his two children, to Chipping Norton, to run the Blue Boar hotel.
Maddox converted a stable into a studio and spent his free time
painting landscapes.
After a couple of years, the family moved to the Birmingham suburb of
Erdington, where Albert George started a wine and spirit importing
company. Maddox, in his early twenties, found work as a clerical
assistant in a solicitor's office, then as an assistant in an
analytical laboratory, as a designer in a car-mascot casting firm and,
by 1935, as a designer of trade-fair exhibition stands.
It was at this time that he discovered Surrealism by chance, while
leafing through art books in Birmingham City Library. "It was a
turning point, one of those doors that suddenly swings open to reveal a
totally new direction," he said later, and marked his lifelong
commitment to Surrealism.
He found himself in an artistic vacuum until the late 1930s, when he
met two kindred spirits: the painter John Melville and his brother
Robert, a writer and art critic. With them he joined "the Surrealist
Group in England" in 1938 and took part in the exhibition Living Art
in England at the London Gallery, the nerve centre of Surrealism in
Britain.
In search of Surrealism at its source he paid several visits to Paris,
where he met and worked with leading Surrealists. His last visit in
1939 was cut short: "Seeing all the sandbags going up around the
monuments, I decided it was time to get out." He caught the last boat
but one back to England before the outbreak of war, and found a
"reserved" profession with the Birmingham firm Turner Brothers,
manufacturers of aircraft parts.
The war in no way diminished Maddox's artistic enthusiasm and in 1940
he played a key role in the momentous exhibition, Surrealism Today, at
the Zwemmer Gallery, in London. He designed a window display in which a
child's cot with rumpled sheets was transfixed by a dagger.
Passers-by were shocked and the display was dismantled. Later Scotland
Yard seized his paintings on suspicion of their containing coded
messages to the enemy.
That his work was arousing controversy made Maddox certain that he was
on the right track as a Surrealist. Not only was his output at its
height during the war, but it was also at its most subversive. One of
his striking works was the Onanistic Typewriter (1940), which has
vertical nails on each of its keys. The paper coming out of the roller
reveals a streak of blood. Maddox explained that his aim was a
"disturbance and demoralisation against the commonplace and rational
". He also developed the semi-automatic process of écrémage - it
involved skimming paper across water-dotted oil paint - as a
contribution to the cache of unconscious Surrealist techniques such as
coulage, fumage, grattage and decalcomania. In 1943 Maddox met
Wilhelmina Nancy Burton, whom he married in 1948, by which time the
couple had had two children.
As a Surrealist, Maddox was on a mission against all that limited the
freedom of the mind. For him, religion and clerics were at the top of
his hitlist: "No longer do I allow myself to see religion as anything
but a brutal insignia of a slow moral decomposition," he once wrote.
Admittedly, much of his anti-religious work amounted to irreverent
jokes. He once staged a series of photographs in which he seduced a
young woman dressed as a nun.
Maddox's search for mental liberation took many paths. He explored
madness, humour, the defamiliarisation of the commonplace.
"Surrealism," he said, "is a difficult outlook to propose, but it
offers a way out of the type of society in which we live." He clung
to the belief that "society will change one day and we will escape
from our incessant monotony, from this kind of life where we don't
link our dreams to reality".
And he was indefatigable. Apart from organising and participating in
hundreds of exhibitions, he also championed the theoretical purism of
the movement.
When the Hayward Gallery put on the Dada and Surrealism Reviewed
exhibition in 1978, he was furious that, as he saw it, Surrealism had
not been properly represented, and promptly mounted a corrective
counter-exhibition, Surrealism Unlimited.
Maddox never relinquished his vision of a transformed world but he
realised that he might not live to see its vindication: "The work of
Surrealism can never be conclusive," he wrote. "It is more of an
exploration, a journey, and a struggle. Paintings are signposts. To
find where they lead I will have to carry on following them despite the
continual obstacles that block the way. For that reason I will remain
on my quest for surrealism until my last breath."
Maddox's wife and son predeceased him; he is survived by his
daughter.
Conroy Maddox, Surrealist artist, was born on December 27, 1912. He
died on January 14, 2005, aged 92.
from Independent:
15 January 2005
Conroy Maddox, painter, collagist, writer and lecturer: born Ledbury,
Herefordshire 27 December 1912; married 1948 Nan Burton (one daughter,
and one son deceased; marriage dissolved 1955); died London 14 January
2005.
Conroy Maddox enjoyed the distinction of being the last surviving
Surrealist painter from the original pre-war avant-garde. He also
proved to be one of the movement's strongest and most unreformed
aficionados.
Maddox's dogged 70-year commitment earned the tribute from his
colleague Desmond Morris that he was "the most undiluted, unwavering
Surrealist" in Britain. He bolstered the English wing of what was
essentially a French movement inspired by Symbolist poetry and spawned
within the Dadaism of the First World War and its roaring, decadent
aftermath.
Conroy Maddox was born in Ledbury, Herefordshire in 1912, the son of a
seed merchant. His father, George Albert, served as a Sergeant in the
Durham Light Infantry in the First World War. One of Conroy's earliest
memories was of visiting his wounded father in a Manchester hospital,
from which experience developed a strong and lasting anti-war stance in
keeping with his future involvement with the Surrealist revolution.
During the Second World War, Conroy Maddox escaped military duties
through his "reserved" occupation as a draughtsman of aircraft parts
for a Birmingham design firm.
While attending a local grammar school, Maddox showed natural graphic
aptitude and by early adulthood was set on the romantic but unsure
career of an artist. His home life provided an inadvertent influence,
his father's anti-clericalism fuelling in Conroy Maddox a lifelong
suspicion of organised religion that would prove as congenial as the
anti-war stance to the purposes of Surrealism. Maddox senior was also
an intrepid collector of artefacts acquired from rural house sales and
the strange, multifarious ornaments that adorned the Maddox household
also proved seminal in the development of Conroy Maddox's improbable
iconography of discordant objects assembled in strangely disquieting or
dream-like environments.
Following a short interlude in Oxfordshire, when his parents ran an
inn, Maddox moved to Birmingham in 1933. Aged 21 and still living at
home, Maddox positively gorged on city culture, regularly visiting the
large library and Birmingham City Art Gallery. It was the chance
discovery, in the library, of books by the celebrated art critic R.H.
Wilenski that led to Maddox's earliest awareness of modern art in
general and Surrealism in particular.
His own artistic development took a more doctrinaire course, while a
job between 1935 and 1940, designing trade fair exhibition stands,
educated his eye and hand. What Maddox later termed "the contrived and
false reality of the exhibition stand" proved as influential on the
development of his mature style as were the inspirational paintings of
Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte and Salvador Dali.
For all this, Birmingham was a provincial, Quaker city with limited
opportunities for a contemporary artist. By falling in with a group of
like-minded Birmingham artists - among whom were John Melville and his
brother Robert, later a renowned art critic - Maddox overcame second
city inferiority and tackled the art scene in London, which during the
late 1930s found itself in the forefront of both Surrealist and
Constructivist wings of the international avant-garde.
The key event was "The International Surrealist Exhibition" at the New
Burlington Galleries in 1936 at which Dali famously almost suffocated
inside a diving suit. Too young then to have contributed to this lofty
ensemble, Maddox nevertheless established his own Surrealist
credentials when he questioned the inclusion in the event of impure
elements from English romanticism.
Although admitted into the Surrealist circle in 1938 and finally
invited to exhibit alongside major artists at the Guggenheim Jeune and
the London Gallery, both in Cork Street, London, Maddox made several
pre-war pilgrimages to Paris, the home of Surrealism, in order to
establish an authentic rapport with the inner Surrealist sanctum.
Through the collagist George Hugnet, Maddox met Man Ray, whose
influence was immediately apparent in Maddox's Onanistic Typewriter
(1940), a typical if unoriginal piece of Surrealist subterfuge in which
a ready-made typewriter is rendered useless by its keyboards being
transformed into spikes. Maddox stayed in touch with Man Ray who later
created a cartoon-like portrait of him in 1963. Also through Hugnet,
Maddox was introduced to the work of Hans Bellmer, whose macabre
distorted mannequins influenced Maddox's enigmatic Cloak of Secrecy
(1940), a standing figure of truncated and dismembered fragments.
On the home front, English Surrealism flourished in an insular
incubation after the fall of France in 1940. The leaders of the English
movement - the Belgian E.L.T. Mesens and the English painter Roland
Penrose - ensured the purity of Surrealism's central tenets. As under
André Breton, the movement's high priest in France, there were
expulsions, purges and ideological splits within the English movement
and it was Maddox who often proved the keen whistleblower.
Maddox married Nan Burton in February 1948 and had a son Stefan and a
daughter Lee. These major events were reflected in the autobiographical
The Engaged Couple (1949), a Magritte-like composition of the kind that
would increasingly characterise much of his painted work. The family
moved to Willesden Green, in north London, in 1955 and Maddox spent
much of the next 15 years working as a designer for advertising and
media publicity agencies.
Throughout this time Maddox, whose marriage to Burton ended in 1955,
changed address many times until he purchased a maisonette in Belsize
Park in 1965. Setbacks and personal sadnesses like the death of his son
in 1971 only strengthened his resolve, although his work temporarily
veered away from strict Surrealist orthodoxy while flirting with
informal abstraction during the late 1950s and "pop" art during the
1960s.
By the early 1970s, Maddox re- established his firm allegiance to
Surrealism which, in the case of canvases depicting lions, tigers or
other exotic creatures on the loose in arcades or deserted city
squares, took on a distinctly "retro" look. Many of these showed his
debt to Magritte and de Chirico while the more spontaneous collage and
works on paper became the playground for plastic and psychological
experiment.
The "frottage", "fumage"' and "decalcomania" techniques of Max Ernst,
Oscar Dominguez and Wolfgang Paalen were extended into Maddox's own
pseudo-textural "invention", a water-based blotting technique he called
"écrémage". His reinvigorated activities as a Surrealist from the
1970s onwards owed much to the cultural pluralism of the post-modern
years of the end of the 20th century, in which retro suddenly seemed as
au fait as strictly contemporary.
Maddox's status was honoured and elevated with increasing regularity
throughout the late years. The large survey "Dada and Surrealism
Reviewed" at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1978 not only included
Maddox but gave him a reborn role as purist and guardian. Challenging
the thesis of the exhibition that Surrealism was passé, Maddox mounted
an alternative group survey, "Surrealism Unlimited", at the Camden Arts
Centre, London, which looked at the development of the movement since
1968. In 1979 he published a book on Salvador Dali. He was included in
the 1986 touring show "Contrariwise". Maddox enjoyed a touring show of
his own in 1995, "Surreal Enigmas", accompanied by a study by Silvano
Levy which anticipated a major monograph, The Scandalous Eye, by the
same writer in 2003.
As well as Desmond Morris, Maddox attracted loyal supporters like
George Melly and the collector Jeffrey Sherwin. He also enjoyed the
company of a devoted and much younger partner Deborah Mogg, a testament
to his own indefatigable sense of mischief and fun.
Peter Davies