LILIAN HOLT (1898-1983): RETROSPECTIVE IN CHARCOAL AND OIL EMILY FUGGLE COMMISSIONED BY OLIVER BROOKE-WALDER
DATE 24 February 2025, revised July 2025.
Essay to accompany the exhibition: Lilian Holt (1898-1983): Retrospective in Charcoal and Oil, Brooke-Walder Gallery, 2025. Written by Emily Fuggle. Commissioned by Oliver Brooke-Walder. ‘At last she is emerging as an artist in her own right’ exclaimed curator Agi Katz on the occasion of Lilian Holt’s exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery in 1980, forty-five years ago.1 The Ben Uri’s exhibition followed Holt’s first monographic show which had taken place at the Woodstock Gallery in 1971. Curated by Richard Cork, whose biography of Holt’s husband the artist David Bomberg remains the standard reference work on both their careers, that show introduced Holt’s ‘pacific and meditative’ works, demonstrating their ‘spontaneity and assurance’ and connecting dots between Bomberg’s practice and Holt’s own. 2 With the acquisition by the Tate Gallery of Holt’s painting Tajo, Ronda (1956) from the Ben Uri’s exhibition (the Tate also acquired David Bomberg’s Lilian Painting David (Painting Lilian) (1929) a short time later), the couple’s ‘creative partnership’ was celebrated. 3
Yet Holt
repeatedly felt compelled to correct misunderstandings of her practice even twenty years after the death of her husband: ‘I have never been a student of David’s’, she stated, ‘I have been misrepresented in this respect. I worked with him as an artist in my own right.’4 Holt reflected further on this problem when asked whether she agreed that feminist art histories were necessary, ‘yes’ she affirmed and referencing Linda Nochlin’s well-known essay ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’, replied: ‘it’s simply that women have not been given the same opportunity to paint….’5 Reviewing Lilian Holt’s body of work – drawings, landscapes and more rarely seen portraits - allows us to renew our attention on her singular vision. The remarkable individuality, as well as the technical accomplishments, of Holt’s practice emerge. Experiments in Charcoal Lilian Holt was born in London in 1898. After the death of her mother at the age of 7, she lived with her ‘devoted’ father, the youngest of four children. 6 Holt trained initially for the civil service before attending Putney Art School for one term in 1913/14. Following the interruption of the First World War (spent in the Land Army), she took evening classes at the Regent Street
1
Press Release, Lilian Holt: Paintings and Drawings, Ben Uri Archive: Art/02/75. Katz capitalised this sentence in the press release. 2 Richard Cork, ‘Introduction’, catalogue to Lilian Holt: Paintings and Drawings, Woodstock Gallery, 28 June – 17 July 1971. 3 Press release for the acquisition of Ronda, Tajo by the Tate Gallery. Tate Gallery Archive: Papers relating to Lilian Holt: TGA 201024/4/1. 4 Sue Arrowsmith, ‘A Conversation with Lilian Holt’, Art Monthly, 1 Mar 1981, p.3. 5 Ibid., p.6. 6 Ibid., p.3.
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Polytechnic.7 Holt’s preferred medium was charcoal, through which she could ‘express my particular sensitivity.’8 However she found these classes restrictive, recalling: ‘I was not happy in both instances …At the Putney School they taught shading – meticulous lines – academic beyond words! At Regents Street, I was unhappy with having to draw from plaster casts…I was only happy in the life class.’9 Regardless she emerged a talented draughtswoman, a portrait of David Bomberg executed in 1928, shortly after the couple met, often cited as evidence of her ability.10 Holt did not return to sustained artistic practice again until the 1940s, when she began explorations of the human figure and London’s buildings, working alongside David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic, where he taught from 1945 until 1953. There she became a founder-member of the Borough Group, a collective comprising Holt, Bomberg and several of his students, including Dorothy Mead, Miles Richmond, Dennis Creffield, Cliff Holden and Edna Mann. The oft-quoted ‘spirit in the mass’ (a dictum which appeared in the preface to the Third Exhibition of the Borough Group) emphasised the group’s philosophy, described by Bomberg as working towards: ‘the representation of all our feeling about a form’.11 Bomberg, who also taught drawing at the Bartlett, encouraged his students to sketch nearby monuments and cathedrals such as Westminster Abbey, interpreted as testaments to the city’s resilience and rebuilding in the aftermath of the Second World War. 12 This project was cemented when Bomberg and Holt travelled to France in the spring of 1953, intending to renew their personal and artistic relationship.13 They visited a number of French cities, making architectural drawings at Notre Dame, Vézelay and Chartres. Richard Cork notes: ‘Chartres was perhaps the most inspiring subject they found. Lilian remembered how at one point they both occupied the same stone ledge overlooking the cathedral “and drew different aspects of it, sitting apart.’’’14 In the drawing Chartres Cathedral (1953), the imposing structure of the cathedral dominates the upper three-quarters of the paper, its surroundings erased. As with London, it recalls how Chartres Cathedral remained standing among the ruins of a city which had suffered heavy bombing in wartime. As Terence Mulally in The Telegraph remarked of Holt’s work when it was exhibited at the Ben Uri: ‘In her drawings we are reminded not just
7
In 1922. See Sue Arrowsmith, ‘A Conversation with Lilian Holt’, Art Monthly, 1 Mar 1981, p.3. Sue Arrowsmith, ‘A Conversation with Lilian Holt’, Art Monthly, 1 Mar 1981, p. 5. 9 Sue Arrowsmith, ‘A Conversation with Lilian Holt’, Art Monthly, 1 Mar 1981, p.3. 10 Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, pp.176-177. This charcoal drawing is now held in the collection of Reading Museum. 11 Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, p. 260. 12 Ibid., pp.254-255. 13 Ibid., p.294. 14 Ibid., pp.295. 8
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that objects, a French Cathedral or barges upon the Thames, suddenly loom large in the eye but also that they, for a period, can occupy the emotional awareness’.15 Art Facilitator Lilian Holt first met David Bomberg shortly after completing her art schooling. They both maintained a shared passion for thinking through and expressing their creative practice, on one occasion ‘discussing his work for a total of three and a half hours’ during his exhibition at the Mansard Gallery in 1923.16 The pair met again in 1928, following Bomberg’s return from Mandate Palestine and Holt’s divorce from the art dealer Jacob Mendelson, the father of her daughter Dinora. Lilian was married to Mendelson from 1923 until 1928, during which time she would accompany him to dinner at artists’ studios, including a visit to Bomberg, as well as to parties for their circle of artists. When David and Lilian reunited, Holt recalled: ‘He realised that I was interested in painting and could help him through my personality. We recognised the total commitment to art in each other.’17 Nevertheless, their creative life suffered for lack of funds. In 1981, Holt recalled: ‘The circumstances were to preclude my painting as well; money was very short and I had to go out to earn money’.18 Holt’s letters to Bomberg in the 1930s testify to this struggle: ‘About work I trudged around and tried Sainsburys and others – too old for clerical jobs they said they want youngsters – but given time and a chance to get my appearance right I may be able’.19 As well as providing the regular income to support their lifestyle, Cork documents the numerous occasions when Holt shaped Bomberg’s art practice over this period. Where Cork charts Bomberg’s stylistic move from a more naturalist representational style to a looser freer expression in the 1930s, he quoted Holt: ‘I was a nonentity in the art world and he was a painter who had a reputation’, she remembered. ‘I felt shy about telling him how I thought about the very representational paintings, but I did it subtly, carefully criticising the work he was doing.’ 20 It was Holt who initiated Bomberg’s series of portraits in 1937 of Lilian and her daughter Dinora, following the rejection of four of his works by the Tate; and she directed his ‘Flower paintings’, sourcing and proposing the subject matter and providing the conditions for his practice.21 Having accompanied Mendelson on his business engagements with artists throughout the late 1920s, Holt had refined an ability to critically assess and inform art produced, in the manner of the art dealer. The modern work of 15
Terence Mulally, ‘The satisfaction in oil painting’, The Daily Telegraph, 17 June 1980, p.15. Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, p.145, p.175. 17 Ibid., p.179. 18 Sue Arrowsmith, ‘A Conversation with Lilian Holt’, Art Monthly, 1 Mar 1981, p.6. 19 Letter from Lilian Holt and David Bomberg, Nov 1938. Folder of letters from Lilian Bomberg, née Holt to David Bomberg, 1929-1957, Tate Gallery Archive: TGA 878/1/8. 20 Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, p.179. 21 Ibid., p.248. 16
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art has been subject to renewed study as a product of this ‘interconnectivity’ as a new kind of professional emerged in London in the early twentieth century: the art dealer ‘possessing a highly desirable expertise’.22 Holt shouldered this role in her relationship with Bomberg, anticipating what kind of work might be artistically fulfilling and liaising with Bomberg’s patrons and associates, such as (the painter) Harry and Anna Barr, with whom she discussed sales on Bomberg’s behalf.23 Holt’s efforts to promote Bomberg’s work after his death testify to her astute negotiations to secure his reputation, as David Sylvester has stated: ‘Lilian Bomberg fought for it and went on and on fighting for it. We are very much in her debt’. 24 In a letter to Bomberg in 1938, Holt asserted their partnership in explicit terms and acknowledged that Bomberg agreed with her assessment, writing: ‘But since we give equally and enjoy equally of each other’s mind and body as revealed by your letters and our ten year’s companionship then I am happy it should always be so.’25 Painting and the Borough Group Through Mendelson, Holt had met artists including Jacob Epstein, Jacob Kramer and Walter Sickert. Of these, Sickert stood out - Holt found him to be ‘very kind and understanding’.26 Cork has remarked on David Bomberg’s early ‘bias in favour of line and volumetric organisation’ suggesting the influence of Sickert (Bomberg’s teacher) in nurturing Bomberg’s embryonic interest in the Impressionist style.27 The warm colours and volumetric outlines of Sickert’s Camden Town nudes, their thematic content notwithstanding, seem to have impacted on Holt’s work and those of the Borough Group. Sickert’s sense of bodily volume was transported to the Group’s experiments in the life class at the Borough Polytechnic, traceable in works by Holt such as Nude (1947), which was exhibited at the Ben Uri Gallery in 1980. Similar forms are explored in its companion (also entitled Nude, oil on board, 1947) which furthered Holt’s experiments in life drawing. The following year, the Borough Group participated in the London County Council’s open-air exhibition at Embankment Gardens, for which Holt was interviewed with Borough student Cliff Holden on the BBC’s In Town Tonight, representing the Group’s ideas and explaining their practice. For Holt her way of working was
22
Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, ‘Introduction: The State of the Field’ in Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich (eds.) The rise of the modern art market in London, 1850-1939, Manchester University Press, 2013, p. 22. 23 Letters from Lilian Holt and David Bomberg, Folder of letters from Lilian Bomberg, née Holt to David Bomberg, 1929-1957, Tate Gallery Archive: TGA 878/1/8. 24 David Sylvester, in David Bomberg: A Tribute to Lilian Bomberg, Fischer Fine Art, 1985, p.7 25 Letter from Lilian Holt to David Bomberg, 25 Nov 1938. Folder of letters from Lilian Bomberg, née Holt to David Bomberg, 1929-1957, Tate Gallery Archive: TGA 878/1/8. 26 Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, p.177. 27 Ibid., p.15.
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instinctive. Of her method, Holt explained: ‘I work rapidly usually completing a painting in two or three hours. I don’t believe in going on and on with a painting…it’s either right or it isn’t’. 28 Holt’s work of this period was favourably received – the Art News and Review commented that her pictures ‘stood out’ with a ‘general level of execution [which] is high’. 29 Holt’s paintings can be placed in dialogue with fellow members of the Borough Group, sharing commonalities with nudes by Leslie Marr and Miles Richmond, for example.30
These figure studies speak
emphatically to the Borough Group’s 1949 statement, articulated at the group’s third exhibition: ‘Our interest lies more in the mass than in the parts; More in movement than in the static; More in the plastic than in the decorative.’ 31 Holt’s paintings from the Borough years indicate the creative exchange with Bomberg which she enjoyed in this period. Compare Bride’s Head (1948) - perhaps depicting Holt’s daughter (and Borough Group artist) Dinora Mendelson on the occasion of her marriage to fellow member Leslie Marr - to Bomberg’s series of self-portraits and paintings of Holt and her daughter (made at Holt’s suggestion).32 The Borough Group continued to exhibit together until 1950. They were succeeded by the short-lived Borough Bottega founded in August 1953, to which Holt was also affiliated, along with an altered membership of Bomberg’s student-artists, now including Gustav Metzger. The exhibition Drawings and Paintings by the Borough Bottega and L Marr and D Scott took place in November that year, where Holt exhibited her work Mother of the Poet (1953), marking the beginning of several portraits in oil.33 The success of this work has been acclaimed by Cork, who celebrated the painting as ‘meditative and uncannily stilled. Instead of emphasising the dynamic bulk of a terrain, it seems to dissolve the corporeal presence of the figure almost entirely and concentrate on spiritual essence alone.’34
28
Sue Arrowsmith, ‘A Conversation with Lilian Holt’, Art Monthly, 1 Mar 1981, p.3. Arts News and Review (March 1949) quoted in Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, p.280. 30 See, for example, Marr’s Nude in Landscape and Miles Richmond’s Nude Study both illustrated in the exhibition catalogue Spirit in the Mass: The Borough Group with Bomberg 1946-1951, Fine Art Associates, London, 1989. 31 Cliff Holden, WORK IN PROGRESS (1999, self-published), p.21. 32 For example, David Bomberg, Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 1937, Arts Council Collection. 33 Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, p. 298. 34 Richard Cork, “Catalogue Introduction to the Exhibition of Lilian Holt, Lilian Holt: Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Ben Uri Gallery, 1980. 29
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‘The Organic Character of Mass’35 In February 1954, Bomberg and Holt moved to Ronda in Spain. Holt had first visited the town in 1929, following a dispute between the couple in Toledo, which led Lilian to travel on alone. The pair had returned to Ronda, via Cuenca, in 1934-35, when Holt was pregnant with the couple’s daughter Diana, leaving when the stirrings of the Spanish Civil War prevented their stay. Edward Richards has remarked on the biomorphic forms that feature in Holt’s later drawings, suggesting that the bodily remains of the violence of the Spanish Civil War can be traced in the couple’s landscapes.36 Both Holt and Bomberg maintained antifascist commitments - they had been members of the Communist Party37 and on their return from Spain, Bomberg had attempted to encourage the London Group to protest events by allying more closely with the political activities of the Artists International Association and the Surrealist Group.38 Some twenty years later, the couple returned to Ronda to set up a painting school at their home, Villa Paz, ‘established by David Bomberg’ and ‘assisted by Lilian Holt’.39 Unfortunately a dispute with landlords obliged the couple to move to La Casa de la Virgen de la Cabeza, on the outskirts of Ronda. They attracted few students. Instead, both artists nurtured an appreciation for Ronda’s mountainous terrain, expanding earlier experiments depicting similar landscape in Cyprus.
Holt described this pursuit, stating that:
‘green…doesn’t suit my temperament. I need to go in search of more primitive landscape with large mountainous regions and unusual rock formations.’40 To one critic looking at the work in 1980, Holt’s landscapes stand out for their demonstration of ‘distinguished… splendid colour sense….imaginative way with compositions and a robust earthy sensitivity.’ 41 She combined this with a repudiation of scale – the mountains’ size was not something which interested Holt.42 In this way, the paintings of the mountains at Ronda speak to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘aura’, which he located in the ‘natural’ surroundings as the ‘phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon…you experience the aura of those mountains’. 43 35
David Bomberg, ‘Foreword’, Drawings and Paintings by the Borough Bottega and L Marr and D Scott, Berkeley Galleries, 1953 cited in Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, p.298. 36 Edward Richards, ‘Alora Andalucia: David Bomberg and Lilian Holt in Spain’, ART UK, 14 August 2024 at https://artuk.org/discover/stories/lora-andalucia-david-bomberg-and-lilian-holt-in-spain 37 Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, p.196. 38 Ibid., p.220. 39 Brochure for the School at Villa Paz, Ronda, 1954. Papers relating to Lilian Holt, Tate Archive, TGA 201024/4 40 Sue Arrowsmith, ‘A Conversation with Lilian Holt’, Art Monthly, 1 Mar 1981, p.4. 41 Lilian Holt review in ‘Critic’s Guide to the Arts’, The Sunday Times, 1 June 1980. 42 Sue Arrowsmith, ‘A Conversation with Lilian Holt’, Art Monthly, 1 Mar 1981, p4. 43 Water Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, Fontana Press, 1936 (trans: Harry Zohn), p.216.
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Benjamin contrasted the aura found in the work of art with our contemporary ‘desire…to bring things closer spatially’ through the camera and lens.44 By using this prism, we might observe that Bomberg and Holt’s paintings at Ronda, at close range, acted as a means to reimagine the aura of the work of art in the face of the changes wrought by modernity, empowering viewers to know and critically reflect on our environment.45 As Cork has remarked, we view these works differently now with the hindsight of a threatened climate. 46 Yet in their writing, Bomberg and Holt affirmed their own respect for ‘the organic character of mass’. 47 As Bomberg’s student Dennis Creffield described, the couple sought to capture: ‘that animating principle found in all of nature – its living vibrant being’.48 Ronda Looking back, Lilian reflected in 1981, ‘My whole career is different from David’s. There are similar routes of course, and it is difficult to be specific about the differences’ but in attempting to define these, Holt asserted: ‘I’m very sensitive to ‘poetical’ feeling, which doesn’t preclude strength.’ 49 Holt executed a series of portraits whilst she and Bomberg lived in Ronda in 1954, which include works entitled Carmencita (1954), Anna La Gitana (1954) and Zaharan Gypsy (1954). These portraits represented local people in Andalusia. Holt spoke Spanish – and felt herself adept at ‘working with people on natural terms’ 50 meaning she often scouted for models for David Bomberg51 and presumably, her own pictures as well. Both artists’ work includes several representations of the local Roma population, who had faced discrimination in Spain, particularly in the nineteenth century when many were forced to leave their homes in towns and cities for the more remote mountainous regions of the country. 52 The works by Bomberg speak to the depiction of the ‘gypsy’ as a vessel for his own ideas. As Bardi has suggested
44
Water Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, Fontana Press, 1936 (trans: Harry Zohn), p.216. 45 Morris employs this lens in his consideration of the mountain motif in music and cinema in Christopher Morris, Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera, Cinema, Ashgate Publishing, 2012. 46 ‘How I discovered Bomberg: A Conversation with Richard Cork’, talk, London South Bank University, 3 October 2013. 47 David Bomberg, ‘Foreword’, Drawings and Paintings by the Borough Bottega and L Marr and D Scott, Berkeley Galleries, 1953 cited in Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, p.298. 48 Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, p. 263. 49 Sue Arrowsmith, ‘A Conversation with Lilian Holt’, Art Monthly, 1 Mar 1981, p.6. 50 Ibid., p.4. 51 Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, p.307. 52 Sarah Carmona, The Representation of Roma in Major European Museum Collections. Volume 1: The Louvre, Council of Europe, 2020, p.71.
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the ‘gypsy’ was an ‘other’: ‘peculiarly available for signification’ 53 who could act as ‘a repository of anti-values…’ a figure standing ‘for a possible redemption for a broken Europe’. 54 For Bomberg, in works such as Soliloquy Noonday Sun (1955), the model, Concita, ‘a housewife in her thirties’ is ‘a springboard for his imagination’ 55 whilst Tate’s Vigilante (1955) saw Bomberg employ as a model ‘Eduarda’, whom Holt had sought out, depicting her with ‘black bars’ over her face, which, as Cork notes, ‘robs her of a specific personality which she would otherwise have revealed.’56 Eduarda was of Romani descent. Holt described her in some detail, as: ‘very old, elegant, refined, and very dignified, somewhat remote, with gaunt, weather-beaten features, and a kind of masculinity, yet very gentle. She had traversed the mountains on foot, most of her life, selling her wares from village to village, and David’s painting of her came out this way.’57 As Cork concludes, ‘Bomberg wanted this figure to express the spirit of watchfulness, and the outcome exposes just as much about himself, as about Eduarda…the broken autumnal colours signify that corporeal dissolution is imminent’. 58 The painting was completed just a couple of years before Bomberg’s death, in 1957. Holt’s work differs from Bomberg’s here, as her reflections on their stay in Spain reveal. Holt recalled: ‘He didn’t have much to do with the Spanish people, nor indeed with anyone who lived in the countries where he worked. He never learned Spanish or any other foreign language. David didn’t need people the way most of us do…’.59 By contrast, Holt’s proximity to local people is evident in her paintings. In Zaharan Gypsy (oil on board, 1954), the attentive position of the cradling figure, emanates care, whilst the halo of darker paintstrokes convey strength. Her picture entitled Carmencita, whose sitter regards us with a direct, graceful gaze, may reference the famous Andalusian dancer. Where paintings of Carmencita by artists such as John Singer Sargent emphasise a theatrical identity, Holt’s subject is more introspective. Anna La Gitana (oil on board, 1954) may reimagine the famous Flamenco dancer, Ana Amaya Molina - ‘Aniya La Gitana’ - who was born in Ronda of Romani heritage and immortalised in Federico Garcia Lorca’s poetry. Bomberg and Holt drew inspiration from poetic texts in their painting, citing Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar as an inspiration during their stay in Instow in
53
Abby Bardi, ‘The Gypsy as a Trope in Victorian and Modern British Literature’, PhD Thesis, University of Maryland, 2007, p.2. 54 Sarah Carmona, The Representation of Roma in Major European Museum Collections. Volume 1: The Louvre, Council of Europe, 2020, p.72. 55 Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, p.303. 56 Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987, p.304-7. 57 Ibid., p.307. 58 Ibid., p.307. 59 Ibid., p.186
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Devon in 1946.60 It is possible Holt had read Garcia Lorca’s exoticised evocations of the Roma communities of Andalusia laid out in his famous Gypsy Ballads. Through these sources and through the use of local sitters, Holt employed a variety of ideas about Andalusian and Romani people in her paintings, with whom she felt herself to hold affinity. 61 Her works reject sexualised tropes of Romani women, which appear in the work of modern artists such as Matisse, having more in common with the romanticised portrayals espoused in paintings such as Manet’s Woman with a Cigarette (1878-80).62 Yet the critic Mel Gooding concluded that Holt’s work is ‘infused by poetic empathy with its subjects – people or landscape – that comes of passionate involvement, hard-won and disciplined.’63 ‘Cosmic’ Landscapes64 In later portraits, Holt’s approach shifted, reworking figures such as Zaharan Gypsy in the painting Figural Portrait (oil on canvas, 1955). In the latter picture, Holt adopts the rich colours of the Spanish landscape to render her subject, drawing on the palette of her topographical study ‘Zahara in Andalucia…a weighty expression in gold and red’. 65 The same brushstrokes are developed and employed in works such as Topaz Gold (1970). Holt once remarked: ‘I need the conditions to inspire me. This is the same whether it’s a portrait, mountain scenery to in fact anything I choose to paint’.66 These ‘conditions’ seem to enmesh both person and place and mark a moment in her own stylistic trajectory. After Bomberg’s death, Holt’s work through the 1960s and 1970s turned to more overtly abstract and ‘cosmic’ works as her sources of inspiration grew in breadth.67 Holt travelled to Morocco, Mexico, Montenegro and Turkey in her later years.68 Two of Lilian Holt’s landscape paintings recently featured in the Whitechapel Gallery’s landmark exhibition: Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 (2023). Despite this renewed interest, there has been no recent critical review of Lilian Holt’s practice. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, Richard Cork’s account of her work evolved from demonstrating how ‘faithfully’ Lilian drew on Bomberg’s
60
Ibid., p.269 Ibid., p.268. 62 See examples of works depicting the Romani community in Candy Bedworth, ‘Remarkable Romani – Astonishing Works By and About the Community’, Daily Art Magazine, 13 January 2025: https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/roma-art/ 63 Mel Gooding, ‘Bomberg and Family’ in Arts Review, 6 November 1981, p.492. 64 Sue Arrowsmith, ‘A Conversation with Lilian Holt’, Art Monthly, 1 Mar 1981, p.4. 65 Linda Talbot, ‘To some, a brazen effort’, Ham and High Express, 22 July 1983. 66 Sue Arrowsmith, ‘A Conversation with Lilian Holt’, Art Monthly, 1 Mar 1981, p.4. 67 Ibid., p.4. 68 Richard Cork, “Catalogue Introduction to the Exhibition of Lilian Holt, Lilian Holt: Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Ben Uri Gallery, 1980. 61
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artistic principles69 to defining her ‘independent identity’.70 Here we have continued to renew our understanding of Holt’s ‘indomitable spirit’71 and to explore her ‘mystical vision’ on its own terms.72
69
Richard Cork, ‘Introduction’, Paintings and Drawings by David Bomberg and Lilian Holt, Reading Museum and Art Gallery, 1971. 70 Richard Cork, “Catalogue Introduction to the Exhibition of Lilian Holt, Lilian Holt: Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Ben Uri Gallery, 1980. 71 Dinora Davies-Rees, typescript ‘Opening speech’, Lilian Holt: Memorial Exhibition, Gillian Jason Gallery, 1983, Tate Gallery Archive: TGA 201024/4/2/2 72 Richard Cork, ‘Lilian Bomberg’, Art Monthly, June 1983, p.20.
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Selected Publications Sue Arrowsmith, ‘A Conversation with Lilian Holt’, Art Monthly, 1 Mar 1981, pp.3-7. Abby Bardi, ‘The Gypsy as Trope in Victorian and Modern British Literature’, PhD Thesis, University of Maryland, 2007 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, Fontana Press, 1936 (trans: Harry Zohn). Sarah Camona, The Representation of Roma in Major European Museum Collections. Volume 1: The Louvre, Council of Europe, 2020. Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, 1987. Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 18501939, Manchester University Press, 2013. Alicia Foster, Tate Women Artists, Tate Publishing, 2003. Martin Gayford, Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters, Thames and Hudson, 2019. Linda Nochlin, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’, 1971, reprinted Thames and Hudson, 2021. Online resources Kate Aspinall, ’Artist vs Teacher: The Problem of David Bomberg’s Pedagogical Legacy’, Tate Papers, No.33, 2020: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/33/artist-versus-teacherproblem-david-bomberg-pedagogical-legacy Emily Fuggle, ‘Art Unlocked: A David Bomberg Legacy: the Sarah Rose Collection’, Art UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWgV1IZOPWo Cliff Holden, Work in Progress, http://www.cliffholden.co.uk/documents_1999_10.shtml
(1999,
self-published):
Edward Richards, ‘Álora Andalucia: David Bomberg and Lilian Holt in Spain’, ART UK, 14 August 2024: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/lora-andalucia-david-bomberg-and-lilian-holtin-spain Selected Exhibitions With the Borough Group and Borough Bottega: Exhibition of Paintings by the Borough Group, Archer Gallery, Westbourne Grove, June 1947. Borough Group: Second Annual Exhibition, Archer Gallery, Westbourne Grove, June 1948 Third Annual Exhibition of the Borough Group, Arcade Gallery, Westbourne Gallery, March 1949
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Drawings and Paintings by the Borough Bottega and L Marr and D Scott, Berkeley Galleries, November 1953. --Paintings and Drawings by David Bomberg (1890-1957) and Lilian Holt, Reading Museum and Art Gallery, 4 June – 17 July 1971 Lilian Holt: Paintings and Drawings, Woodstock Gallery, London, 28 June - 17 July 1971 Lilian Holt: Paintings and Drawings, Ben Uri Gallery, London, 1980 David Bomberg and Family, Ben Uri Gallery, London, 1981 David Bomberg, Lilian Holt, Leslie Marr: Paintings and Drawings, Campbell and Franks Fine Art, London, June 1980 Lilian Holt Memorial Exhibition, Gillian Jason Gallery, London, 1983 Ten Decades: Careers of Ten Women Artists Born 1897-1906, Norwich Gallery, 1992. Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970, Whitechapel Gallery, 2022. Lilian Holt works in public collections [Note: list of oil paintings taken from ART UK (in 2025) and drawings based on a list (c. 1980s) compiled by Dinora Davies-Rees and deposited at Tate Gallery Archive and the Women Artists Slide Library, Goldsmiths, University of London.] Ben Uri Gallery and Museum: Ronda in the Sun, Andalusia, Spain, oil on canvas, 1955 Ben Uri Gallery and Museum: Lilian Holt, Ronda and Tajo, charcoal, 1956 Boston Museum and Art Gallery: City Construction, charcoal, 1971 Dorman Museum, Middlesborough: Ronda, Spain, charcoal, 1956 Graves Gallery, Sheffield: London River, Cranes and Barges, charcoal, 1964 Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool: Irgos, Turkey, charcoal, 1970. Pallant House Gallery: Spirit of Ronda, Andalusia, Spain, oil on canvas, 1955 Reading Museum: David Bomberg, charcoal, 1928. Reading Museum: St Hilarion and Black Mountain (recto), oil on canvas, 1948 Reading Museum: Study for St Hilarion and Black Mountain (verso), oil on canvas, 1948 Reading Museum: The Canyons of Chihuahua, Mexico, oil on canvas, 1964. Reading Museum: Bougalmr, Atlas Zahara, oil on canvas, 1971 Reading Museum: Nebulei, oil on canvas, 1971. Tate Gallery: Tajo, Ronda, oil on canvas, 1956 Wolverhampton Art Gallery: Magdelenian Nude, charcoal, 1947. Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum: Chartres Cathedral, charcoal, 1953. Sources: Art UK: https://artuk.org/discover/artists/holt-lilian-18981983 London, Tate Gallery Archive: TGA 878/1/8 List of works by Lilian Holt Written to accompany the exhibition Lilian Holt (1898-1983): Retrospective in Charcoal and Oil held at Brooke-Walder Gallery, 2nd Floor, Duke Street St James’s, London, SW1Y 6DB. 26 March – 26 April 2025 Emily Fuggle 24 February 2025, revised July 2025.
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