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'Noise' at Kettle's Yard

and coverage of the opening of Linderism

Photomontage and Linderism




LIGHT AND LINDERISM


Reviewed by ANDRE BEAUMONT


The opening of Linderism on Valentine's Day 2020 did not provide access to the Kettle's Yard house - gifted with all its contents by Jim and Helen Ede four and a half decades before - just the exhibition gallery spaces so I returned to visit the house in late February where Linder had, in what must be described as a discrete manner - given the forceful vigour of her work - positioned a few of her own works.


The opening of Linderism was followed by the opening a month later of an exhibition by Linder at Murray Edwards College, formerly New Hall College - to which its title refers - of Bower of Bliss: An Improper Architecture but given the emerging Covid-19 situation I made no attempt to attend it and a lockdown in Britain followed nine days later.


I have always remembered Kettle's Yard largely for Sir Leslie Martin's exciting modernist toplighting of the gallery spaces and the scattering around the house of really interesting twentieth century art given to the couple or acquired in other cases for relatively little. The display is a little busier and the paint used on the walls a subtlely different shade of white from in the days the couple were around to keep an eye from afar but essentially the house is as it was left.

Kettle's Yard in well documented elsewhere and an ambitious new museum publication, Linderism, is also available together with merchandise so I will mainly confine myself to providing photographs of my visit to the house.




French cider press bought by Jim Ede for £1 with Miro's Tic Tic above. We were told years ago it was a gift from the artist but later Ben Nicholson said it was probably a gift from dealer Pierre Loch

The Miro ensemble is like Linder's photomontage - three cultural items and the house together make a unique statement but you see them first as things. For me, as with the Soane Museum, the house made up of the land of more than one property is the most important of the artistic objects and forms an intentional home museum, in which the layout is intended to endure. Like the Soane Museum, Kettle's Yard is custodian of the drawings collection of an artist, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, as the Soane Museum is of that of Robert Adam. The council would have let these cottages be demolished were it not for Jim and Helen Ede's rescue. Literally across the road David Roberts recreated a similar domestic scale idiom at Magdalene College, work since listed.


You could imagine living here


Henri Gaudier-Brzeska,
Dog (with a tale), 1914






You would have never have said this was a set of cottages; Leslie Martin, Sandy Wilson and David Roberts represented a brilliant side of Cambridge modernism in the 60s and 70s. New Hall College designed by Powell & Moya just up the hill was very imaginative


Concert space


Linderism makes an entrance





Up to search for a window - to find it's raining


Would you have known?


In most places you could switch off the lights in daylight hours and it's the tour de force in lighting a home as a gallery I'm here for


*****


There are Ben Nicholson works well worth seeing at Kettle's Yard then make your way to see this unusual curved one in Antwerp:



Ben Nicholson, Still Life (Curved Oval), 1950, KMSKA