The exhibition Gladys Hynes: Radical Lives, opening this month at Charleston in Lewes, is a rescue mission for a forgotten artist. Commissioned by the Bloomsbury-focused gallery to fill a gap in the history of the group\u2019s Omega Workshops, the show aims to resurrect the five-decade career of Gladys Hynes (1888-1958) a protean rebel slaloming through early 20th-century Britain\u2019s avant-garde circles.<\/p>\n
Born into an Anglo Irish family in India in 1888, the heyday of the British Raj, Hynes trained as a landscape and figure painter in Newlyn, Cornwall, with Stanhope Forbes, and in London with Frank Brangwyn and William Nicholson. Roger Fry recruited her to design for Omega. She caroused and argued with Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, while Ezra Pound commissioned her to illustrate a collectors\u2019 edition of his Cantos. Hynes was a winner of multiple prizes and was chosen to represent Great Britain at the 1924 Venice Biennale.<\/p>\n
A party girl, she mixed with the likes of Harold and Laura Knight, Dod Procter and Nina Hamnett. In Cornish landscapes and London society scenes she painted friends including the androgynous artist Gluck and the lesbian poet and novelist Radclyffe Hall.\u00a0As an Irish nationalist, Hynes was close to the revolutionary politician and poet Desmond FitzGerald. She was a supporter of the Catholic Women\u2019s Suffrage Society; marched for women\u2019s political rights; painted Surrealist anti-war and anti-capitalist visions during the Second World War; and campaigned to defend Pound during his post-war imprisonment for treason.<\/p>\n
Yet Hynes\u2019s name is near enough absent from the published biographies and other histories of the period, and only one of her paintings is in a British public collection. Crucifixion (1939), held by London\u2019s Royal Air Force Museum, is a memorial to her younger brother Patrick, who was killed in the First World War.<\/p>\n
Her erasure \u201cis a mystery\u201d, says the show\u2019s curator, Sacha Llewellyn. \u201cShe\u2019s never been in any exhibition. I\u2019ve spent my career writing about women artists who merit a rediscovery but Gladys\u00a0Hynes takes it to a new level. She\u2019s just completely non-existent.\u201d<\/p>\n
Antisemitic and racist tropes in some paintings may partly explain her eclipse, Llewellyn says. Still, she adds, \u201cI don\u2019t believe in cancellation culture, and I hope to open up a lot of interesting conversations about not only her politics but also the politics of the people she was involved with.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was important enough to represent Britain at the Biennale and for Pound to commission her to illustrate his Cantos,\u201d Llewellyn says. \u201cHer work merits attention.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bringing together 120 paintings, drawings, graphic designs and sculptural pieces, the show will set 40 works by Hynes in a context of paintings by friends and collaborators. \u201cA lot of detective work has gone into this,\u201d Llewellyn says.<\/p>\n
Four Hynes paintings, including The Fowler (around 1917-19) and a portrait of Hynes\u2019s sister Sheelah by Dod Procter, have been loaned by the Wolfsonian in Florida, where the show will go on tour next year.<\/p>\n