Miriam Sacks tapestries debut at Olympia Auctions
Works from eleven artists’ estates are set to go under the hammer in London, highlighting the works of internationally-renowned textile artist Miriam Sacks among others.
The From the Studio: Works from Eleven Artists Estates sale will be the fourth biannual auction at Olympia Auctions. Eight artists have already appeared in the earlier Studio sales at the auction house, but three are making their debuts in this auction on March 12: Margaret Green, Miriam Sacks and Eardley Knollys.
Miriam Sacks’ remarkable tapestries cover a wide range of themes with her work capturing a variety of images and ideas. Some are abstract, some symbolic and some realistic; all deploy vivid colours and explore diverse themes relating to man’s condition and struggles, his relationship with nature and mechanisation.
Sack’s artistic vision was inspired by her childhood in South Africa: its distinctive landscape and coastline, its fauna and flora and its ethnic diversity. Her rigorous schooling was also formative: she became a talented pianist, studied ballet and was awarded a Masters in Social Anthropology at Cape Town University. But it was a trip to New York in 1956, and a visit to The Cloisters, an outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that transformed her artistic production. At The Cloisters Sacks was captivated by the seven late sixteenth century tapestries that comprise The Hunt of the Unicorn. Immediately thereafter she embarked on her unique, highly distinctive and much-fêted method of tapestry making.
In the 1960s, Sacks’s work was included in exhibitions at the Design Centre, the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Camden Art Centre. She also had a solo exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery, then in Soho. In 1970, she shared an exhibition at Kettle’s Yard with potters Bernard Leach and Lucy Rie.
More exhibitions followed: at Royal Festival Hall (1971), the Victoria and Albert Museum (1971 & 1973), the South African National Gallery, Cape Town, the Bevilacqua La Masa Art Foundation, Venice (1972) and a series of shows at Leighton House (1977,1981, 1985, 1988). The last international exhibition of her work was at the Irma Stern Museum, University of Cape Town in 1996.
Describing the influences that shaped her work over the years Sacks wrote ‘Threads physically and spiritually interconnect with my life experiences, talents and knowledge, gained over decades. It combines sight and insight, enhanced by my knowledge… as a social anthropologist… as well as music, not to mention dance. It goes back to memories of childhood.’
Eardley Knollys worked in advertising, ran the Storran Gallery and served under Donald Macleod Matheson at the nascent National Trust, where he toured the Southwest with James Lees-Milne, a range of experiences that informed the colourful and exuberant canvases that he subsequently painted.
Margaret Green studied at the RCA she met her husband, Lionel Bulmer whose work also features in the sale. Her elegant paintings offer delightful, often contemplative, observations of quotidian post-War Britain.
Of the artists whose work makes a return to the sale in March, George Mayer-Marton from Austria and Hans Feibusch from Germany are two of the many talented émigrés who fled to England to escape the Nazis. Feibusch quickly became part of the London Group and showed with the Lefevre Gallery before establishing himself as the leading muralist in the UK after the War. In contrast, Mayer-Marton endured a succession of tragedies. His studio in Hampstead was fire-bombed and his wife died from a nervous breakdown, but he persevered despite the odds to become a much-vaunted senior lecturer at the Liverpool School of Art.
For different reasons, often of their choosing, the progress of other artists in the sale was often disrupted. After a string of gallery shows in the 1950s, James Hull packed in his easel for a role as a design consultant, only returning to paint twenty years later. Likewise, Leslie Marr, the son-in-law of David Bomberg and a member of the Borough Group of artists that formed around Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic after the War, turned his hand to photography, film production and racing cars, only returning to paint after Bomberg’s death in 1957.
The last two artists in our sale are Leo Davy (lots 88-94) and Michael Upton. Davy suffered from congenital deafness and shunned the spotlight, while Upton morphed from painting to performance and back again before retiring to Cornwall. His work was latterly recognised by The Times critic John Russell Taylor amongst others for the intimacy and control of the small and thoughtful interiors that he produced.
As well as the present catalogue, in the auction house’s concurrent Olympia Timed online sale From the Studio: Works from the Estate of Bernard Myers the auction house is offering 96 lots of Myers’ work. Olympia Auctions has featured works from Myers’ studio in each of its three previous estate sales, but the online auction of his work that runs from March 7-16 is the most comprehensive to date.