Glyn Philpot’s sensitive portraits of Black models bring renewed interest in the artist who fell out of fashion

You could say that the seed for the exhibition Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit at Pallant Residence Gallery was planted 20 yrs ago. Simon Martin, the director of the Chichester museum, was researching at the Courtauld Institute and doing perform practical experience at Sotheby’s auction household when he to start with came throughout the artist’s sensitive portrait of a Black design known as Félix from the 1930s. He went on to write his master’s thesis on Philpot (1884-1937), and because then, he states, he has been ready for the “right moment” to place on an exhibition.

“Although we’re working with an artist’s operate from 1900 to 1937, the themes that arise are significantly relevant nowadays,” Martin states. The exhibition—the initially on Philpot’s work because his centenary display at the Countrywide Portrait Gallery in 1984—brings together a number of paintings, drawings and sculptures that have not been proven in general public for a long time, and focuses on his radical enhancement from previous-masterly portraits to a sparse Modernist model. “Based on reading his letters, I assume he felt that he was no lengthier reflecting the earth he was in and desired to make the crack,” Martin says. “He felt that he experienced come to be a type of traditionalist.”

There is nothing at all traditional about Philpot’s Black sitters, who, unlike these of some of his contemporaries, are presented with unique interest and regard. Martin has managed to resource six portraits from 1912 to 1914, as well as a recently learned portrait of Paul Robeson, the US actor and singer famed for his baritone voice. A important question has been how to handle the typically-anachronistic titles of unnamed designs. Assisting to solution it is an advisory group that involves Alayo Akinkugbe, the founder of the preferred @ablackhistoryofart Instagram account, and the novelist Alan Hollinghurst, who has prepared the introduction to the exhibition catalogue. Subsequent in the footsteps of Denise Murrell’s Posing Modernity exhibition and e book of 2018, the name and nationality of just about every sitter will be additional where by doable.

Martin hopes to give an artist who warrants better acknowledgement his due, and to transform the way we imagine about Philpot, from a portrait painter to an unique expressing ahead-considering suggestions about sexuality and race. “One of the remarkable points is tha
t he was so very thriving in the 1910s and 1920s, one of the best paid artists in Britain, and then with the transform of design everyone took a although to capture up,” Martin says. These days, with the renewed interest in the artist and his auction prices as soon as yet again on the increase, it looks we have eventually finished so.

• Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit, Pallant Property Gallery, Chichester, 14 May possibly-23 Oct