In the summer of 1933, Jim and Helen Ede gained a new lodger at their house on Elm Row in Hampstead, where they lived from 1925 to 1936. It was Margaret Gardiner (1904-2005) who had been recommended by the Ede’s friend Barbara Hepworth as a candidate to fill the recently vacated top floor flat.
By her own admission, Gardiner moved into Elm Row in a ‘state of despondent apathy’ following a broken love affair; but in the new ‘light and airy rooms’, and with her good friend Hepworth living nearby at Parkhill Studios, Gardiner soon cheered.[1]
While living with the Edes at Elm Row, Gardiner made frequent appearances at their Sunday gatherings of friends and acquaintances. These were lively discussions and performances of music in the rooms of their home that were decorated with modern art.
On 7 January 1934 Ede’s appointment diary records a Sunday at home in Hampstead with guests including Gardiner with the pianist Vera Moore and the artist Ivon Hitchens.
On 28 January and 4 February Gardiner’s name appears alongside that of the Indian-born engineer Najmuddin Tyabji (1912-2001) who was studying in England at the time.
On 25 February the artist and curator Nicolete (née Binyon, 1911-1997) and her husband, the art historian Basil Gray (1904-1989) were guests alongside Gardiner. In March, Gardiner’s name appears with another frequent guest of the Edes at that time, the artist David Jones (1895-1974) and in June with the poet Cary Ross (1903-1951).
In October 1934, Ede’s diaries record a Sunday at home with Gardiner and – among others – the figurative painter Graham Bell (1910-1943) and the art critic Adrian Stokes (1902-1972). [2]
Gardiner clearly thrived in this artistic and sociable atmosphere, having – as Stokes later described – a ‘genius for friendship’.[3]
She had first met Hepworth in 1930 through their mutual friend, the zoologist and collector of modern art, Solly Zuckerman. The two women relished living near each other in Hampstead. Gardiner recalls many evenings spent at Hepworth’s studio smoking, talking, drinking tea and, evidently, grilling steaks to eat at midnight. [4]
From Hepworth, Gardiner learned to appreciate sculpture, and she was godmother to her and Ben Nicholson’s three children – triplets – born in October 1934. Gardiner came from a wealthy family, and she purchased work from the couple in order to support them, as well as works from Naum Gabo and Alfred Wallis. As Gill Hedley describes, Gardiner’s purchases were not intended to amount to ‘a formal collection’ but rather stand as ‘evidence of personal connections.[5]
Gardiner moved into her own house in Hampstead in 1937, where she raised her son, Martin Gardiner Bernal (1937-2013). She was a founding member of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1946 and continued to buy works by the younger generation of St. Ives artists she encountered, including Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, Margaret Mellis, John Wells and Roger Hilton.
Throughout her life, Gardiner campaigned for intellectual and political freedom. In the 1930s she was active in groups such as For Intellectual Liberty and during the Second World War by working with the Artists Refugee Committee which supported artists in danger of being sent to concentration camps in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s with the International Confederation for Peace and Disarmament. As scholar Joanna Gardner-Huggett describes,
‘What remained a constant theme in Gardiner’s activism is how she believed in avant-garde art as a model for social change.’[6]
In 1956 – just as Jim and Helen Ede themselves had returned to England to look for a house which would become Kettle’s Yard – Gardiner first visited Orkney with her son, purchasing an abandoned cottage on the island of Rousay. She enjoyed spending time there and ultimately decided to donate her art collection to the people of Orkney, leading to the founding of the Pier Arts Centre in 1979. When Ben Nicholson commented that her gallery was so far away, Gardiner’s rejoinder was
‘It all depends where you start from’.[7]
The collection of the Pier Arts Centre contains the work of many artists who are also represented in the collection of Kettle’s Yard – Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Roger Hilton, William Scott, Italo Valenti to name but a few. These echoes between the institutions of course reflect the friendships shared between Margaret Gardiner and Jim Ede in London in the 1930s. In their foundational aspiration to be of benefit to the public, both Kettle’s Yard and the Pier Arts Centre also reflect the utopian idealism of that decade before the Second World War that so influenced both Gardiner’s and Ede’s thinking throughout their lives.
Footnotes
[1] Margaret Gardiner, Barbara Hepworth: A Memoir (Edinburgh: Salamander Press, 1982) pp. 20-21.
[2] Jim Ede’s pocket diary, 1934. Papers of H.S. ‘Jim’ Ede. KY/EDE/6.
[3] ‘Margaret Gardiner’, obituary in The Times, 10 January 2005.
[4] Margaret Gardiner, Barbara Hepworth: A Memoir (Edinburgh: Salamander Press, 1982) p. 10.
[5] Gill Hedley, ‘Margaret Emilia Gardiner’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2017)
[6] Joanna P Gardner-Huggett, ‘Margaret Gardiner: Collecting as activism’, British Art Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, Autumn 2005, p. 78.
[7] Gill Hedley, ‘Margaret Emilia Gardiner’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2017)
