Dora Carrington exhibition at Pallant House

The first major exhibition of the work of Dora Carrington (1893-1932) in almost 30 years will take place at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester from November 9 to April 27, 2025.

Entitled Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury, the exhibition will unite over 100 works by the artist and her peers, seeking to reposition Carrington in the history of Modern British art and demonstrate the relevance of her life and work today.

The exhibition will chart Carrington’s development as an artist and the formative periods of her life, underpinned by the lively evidence of her extensive correspondence. Key paintings by Carrington from major public collections and pieces from private collections never previously exhibited will be shown, including film footage, photographs, and reproductions of her decorative designs alongside archival material and her captivating letters. Taken together, these conjure up her bohemian way of life: creative, intimate and radical.

Call me Carrington

Working in a period when women artists were limited in both their personal and professional lives, Carrington defied social norms. Choosing to be known simply as Carrington (‘I dislike the Victorian sentimentality of Dora’ she declared) and being openly bisexual, the artist redefined her identity on her own terms, flouting gender and sexual conventions. She formed a distinctive personal style and as a young adult cut her hair into a bob, becoming one of the first ‘cropheads’ (a term coined by Virginia Woolf). The exhibition will explore her relationships with the people and places she loved most, in particular Bloomsbury writer Lytton Strachey and painter Mark Gertler, who were inspirations for some of her most compelling works. Her relationship with her family, including her brother Noel who later founded Puffin Books, will be explored via portraits she made during her time at the Slade School of Fine Art, London from 1910 onwards.

Slade Student

As a student at the Slade, Carrington was the only female in the group described by tutor Henry Tonks as a ‘crisis of brilliance’ – together with Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson and Mark Gertler. Carrington’s prize-winning figure composition, Female Figure Lying on her Back (1912), will be shown alongside other female nudes made in the Slade’s ‘Women’s Life Room’, and self-portraits illustrating her androgyny.

Photographs depicting the Slade years will complement works by Carrington’s contemporaries Dorothy Brett, Christine Kühlenthal and Elsie McNaught, presenting a nuanced view of the male-dominated 20th-century art world. Carrington and her peers will be revealed as key members of a generation who were described as the most innovative artists working in Britain, leading the way in art, avant-garde clothing and unconventional lifestyles.

Popular figure

Carrington was described by Paul Nash as ‘a conspicuous and popular figure’ at the Slade and both CRW Nevinson and Gertler fell in love with her. This will be the first exhibition to foreground the seminal links between the work of Carrington and Gertler, as two self-proclaimed outsiders who worked on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group. It will explore both artists’ relationships to class, highlighting Carrington’s depiction of labourers and domestic workers and Gertler’s exploration of his migrant heritage, shown in The Artist’s Mother (1913). Gertler famously confessed to Carrington that ‘every brush stroke was made for her’. Their extensive correspondence paints a picture of an equally painful, rich and significant friendship, marked by Gertler’s relentless yet unrequited desire for Carrington, but tempered by their mutual artistic support.

Complex Relationship

A collection of photographs will place Carrington within the context of major literary and artistic circles in early 20th century Britain. Carrington’s complex relationship with the Bloomsbury biographer Lytton Strachey began soon after she left the Slade when both were staying with Vanessa Bell at Asheham in Sussex in 1915. He was to become her lifelong companion despite both having relationships with others of both sexes. The exhibition will include her celebrated and sensitive portrait Lytton Strachey Reading (1916).

Highlight works from this period also include paintings Carrington made of Bloomsbury Group writers David Garnett and EM Forster, and her girlfriend, the American socialite, Henrietta Bingham – all frequent visitors to the homes she shared with Strachey: Tidmarsh Mill near Pangbourne and later Ham Spray in Wiltshire. A haven in Carrington’s short life, Tidmarsh was the first home she created for herself and Strachey, between 1917 and 1924.

Countryside Scene

Produced soon after her open marriage to Ralph Partridge, one of Carrington’s best-known paintings, Farm at Watendlath (1921) introduces the artist’s intuitive response to the British countryside as a means for expressing personal feelings. Carrington travelled to France and Spain in the early 1920s, absorbing influences from museums in Paris and Madrid, staying with close friends such as artist and writer Valentine Dobrée in Larrau, France and writer Gerald Brenan in Yegen, Spain. These visits inspired dreamy scenes, such as Spanish Landscape with Mountains (c.1924).

Home Front

The exhibition will conclude with Carrington’s time at Ham Spray house, near Hungerford, where her life was one of unconventional domesticity, creating a home for both Strachey and Partridge. Some of her most vibrant still lifes that will be on show in the exhibition date from this period.

She poured her love and imagination into playful interior decorative schemes for her and her friends’ homes. Although not all have survived, these will be evoked through reproductions of decorations made for literary scholar and theatre director Dadie Rylands’ rooms at King’s College, Cambridge (which helped inspire Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, 1928) and a trompe I’oeiI window featuring a cook, cat and canary at Biddesden House, Wiltshire. Such schemes, alongside the hand-painted HMV gramophone cabinet, conjure Carrington’s aesthetic, and her interest in decorative and folk arts. These interiors will act as a backdrop to Carrington’s last body of work; luminous glass paintings she called ‘tinsel pictures’, a final creative outlet fondly collected by friends and the public alike.

In 1932, Carrington was left heartbroken following the death of the love of her life, Lytton Strachey, which precipitated her suicide at the age of 38. And yet throughout her life it is clear she remained true to her own vision and to the friends and places that nourished her life and art.

New Perspectives

The Barbican Art Gallery held the last major exhibition of Carrington’s work in 1995 and in the same year Emma Thompson starred as the free-spirited painter in the award-winning film Carrington, directed by Christopher Hampton. Co-curated by Anne Chisholm, editor of Carrington’s Letters (2017) and writer and curator Ariane Bankes, the exhibition at Pallant House Gallery will reveal the continued relevance of Carrington’s unconventional life and remarkable work.

Simon Martin, Director of Pallant House Gallery said: “As part of Pallant House Gallery’s commitment to providing new perspectives on Modern British art, and showcasing the work of women artists, we are delighted to present this exhibition of Carrington, which will hopefully introduce a new generation to the vibrant life and work of this trailblazing artist.”