Birmingham Surrealists
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Birmingham Surrealists
The Birmingham Surrealists were an informal grouping of artists and intellectuals associated with the Surrealist movement in art, based in Birmingham, England from the 1930s to the 1950s. The key figures were the artists Conroy Maddox and John Melville, alongside Melville's brother, the art critic Robert Melville (art critic), Robert Melville. Other significant members included artists Emmy Bridgewater, Oscar Mellor and the young Desmond Morris. In its early years the group was distinguished by its opposition to a London-based vision of surrealism epitomized by the English exhibitors at the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, that the Birmingham group saw as inauthentic or even anti-surrealist, preferring instead to build links directly with surrealism's France, French heartland. As World War II approached, however, and the London-based British Surrealist Group fell under the influence of European exiles such as E. L. T. Mesens and Toni del Renzio, the ideological ap ...
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Surrealist
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or ''surreality.'' It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media. Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and '' non sequitur''. However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost (for instance, of the "pure psychic automatism" Breton speaks of in the first Surrealist Manifesto), with the works themselves being secondary, i.e. artifacts of surrealist experimentation. Leader Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a r ...
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Trocadero, Birmingham
The Trocadero, 17 Temple Street, Birmingham, England, currently a pub, is a dazzling demonstration of the use of coloured glazed tile and terracotta in the post-Victorian era of architecture. Formerly the Fire Engine House for the Norwich Union Insurance Company (1846, Edge & Avery), it was altered in 1883 to make the Bodega wine bar. It was given the current colourful glazed front in 1902 when it became the Trocadero. It is Grade II listed. The pub is noted as a meeting place for the Birmingham Surrealists The Birmingham Surrealists were an informal grouping of artists and intellectuals associated with the Surrealist movement in art, based in Birmingham, England from the 1930s to the 1950s. The key figures were the artists Conroy Maddox and John Me ... group of artists and intellectuals associated with the city from the 1930s to the 1950s. References Sources * *''Pevsner Architectural Guides - Birmingham'', Andy Foster, 2005, Grade II listed buildings in Birmingham< ...
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Birmingham School Of Art
The Birmingham School of Art was a municipal art school based in the centre of Birmingham, England. Although the organisation was absorbed by Birmingham Polytechnic in 1971 and is now part of Birmingham City University's Faculty of Arts, Design and Media, its Grade I listed building on Margaret Street remains the home of the university's Department of Fine Art and is still commonly referred to by its original title. History The origins of the School of Art lie with the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, who founded the ''Birmingham Government School of Design'' in 1843. George Wallis (1811–1891), Wolverhampton-born artist and art educator, was its Headmaster in 1852–1858. In 1877, the Town Council was persuaded by the school's energetic headmaster Edward R. Taylor to take the school over and expand it to form the United Kingdom's first municipal college of art. With funding coming from Sir Richard and George Tangye, the current building was commissioned from architect J H ...
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Pre-Raphaelite
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner who formed a seven-member "Brotherhood" modelled in part on the Nazarene movement. The Brotherhood was only ever a loose association and their principles were shared by other artists of the time, including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes and Marie Spartali Stillman. Later followers of the principles of the Brotherhood included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John William Waterhouse. The group sought a return to the abundant detail, intense colours and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian art. They rejected what they regarded as the mechanistic approach first adopted by Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. The Brotherhood believed the Classical p ...
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Birmingham Group (artists)
The Birmingham Group, sometimes called the Birmingham School, was an informal collective of painters and craftsmen associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement, that worked in Birmingham, England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All of its members studied or taught at the Birmingham School of Art after the reorganisation of its teaching methods by Edward R. Taylor in the 1880s, and it was the School that formed the group's primary focus. Members of the group also overlapped with other more formal organisations, including the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, the Ruskin Pottery and the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts. The Group formed one of the last outposts of late Romanticism in the visual arts, and an important link between the last of the Pre-Raphaelites and the new Slade Symbolists. History They began to form in an informal manner in the 1890s. Many were later to become teachers in Birmingham (especially the great Birmingham Municipal School of Art under Edward R. ...
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Birmingham Central Library
Birmingham Central Library was the main public library in Birmingham, England, from 1974 until 2013, replacing a library opened in 1865 and rebuilt in 1882. For a time the largest non-national library in Europe, it closed on 29 June 2013 and was replaced by the Library of Birmingham. The building was demolished in 2016, after 41 years, as part of the redevelopment of Paradise Circus by Argent Group. Designed by architect John Madin in the brutalist style, the library was part of an ambitious development project by Birmingham City Council to create a civic centre on its new Inner Ring Road system; however, for economic reasons significant parts of the master plan were not completed, and quality was reduced on materials as an economic measure. Two previous libraries occupied the adjacent site before Madin's library opened in 1974. The previous library, designed by John Henry Chamberlain, opened in 1883 and featured a tall clerestoried reading room. It was demolished in 1974 aft ...
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Birmingham Post
The ''Birmingham Post'' is a weekly printed newspaper based in Birmingham, England, with a circulation of 2,545 and distribution throughout the West Midlands. First published under the name the ''Birmingham Daily Post'' in 1857, it has had a succession of distinguished editors and has played an influential role in the life and politics of the city. It is currently owned by Reach plc. In June 2013, it launched a daily tablet edition called ''Birmingham Post Business Daily.'' History The '' Birmingham Journal'' was a weekly newspaper published between 1825 and 1869. A nationally influential voice in the Chartist movement in the 1830s, it was sold to John Frederick Feeney in 1844 and was a direct ancestor of today's ''Birmingham Post''. The 1855 Stamp Act removed the tax on newspapers and transformed the news trade. The price of the ''Journal'' was reduced from seven pence to four pence and circulation boomed. Untaxed, it became possible to sell a newspaper for a penny, and the ...
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Henry Green
Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke (29 October 1905 – 13 December 1973), an English writer best remembered for the novels ''Party Going'', ''Living'' and '' Loving''. He published a total of nine novels between 1926 and 1952. Life and work Green was born near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, into an educated family with successful business interests. His father Vincent Wodehouse Yorke, the son of John Reginald Yorke and Sophia Matilda de Tuyll de Serooskerken, was a wealthy landowner and industrialist in Birmingham. His mother, Hon. Maud Evelyn Wyndham, was daughter of the second Baron Leconfield. Green grew up in Gloucestershire and attended the New Beacon School in Sevenoaks and then Eton College, where he became a friend of fellow pupil Anthony Powell and wrote most of his first novel, ''Blindness''. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford and there began a friendship and literary rivalry with Evelyn Waugh of Hertford College. At Oxford Yorke and Waugh were ...
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Stuart Gilbert
Arthur Stuart Ahluwalia Stronge Gilbert (25 October 1883 – 5 January 1969) was an English literary scholar and translator. Among his translations into English are works by Alexis de Tocqueville, Édouard Dujardin, André Malraux, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Georges Simenon, Jean Cocteau, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. He also assisted in the translation of James Joyce's ''Ulysses'' into French. He was born at Kelvedon Hatch, Essex, on 25 October 1883, the only son of a retired army officer, Arthur Stronge Gilbert, and Melvina, daughter of Randhir Singh, the Raja of Kapurthala. He attended Cheltenham and Hertford College, Oxford, taking a first in Classical Moderations. He joined the Indian Civil Service in 1907 and, after military service in the First World War, served as a judge in Burma until 1925. He then retired, settling in France with his French-born wife Moune (née Marie Douin). He remained there for the rest of his life, except for some time spent in Wales du ...
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Walter Allen
Walter Ernest Allen (23 February 1911 – 28 February 1995) was an English literary critic and novelist and one of the Birmingham Group of authors. He is best known for his classic study ''The English Novel: a Short Critical History'' (1951). Life and career Allen was born in Aston, Birmingham; he drew on his working-class roots for ''All in a Lifetime'' (1959), generally considered his best novel. He was educated at King Edward's Grammar School and the University of Birmingham, graduating in 1932—his friends at that period included Henry Reed and Louis MacNeice. He taught and took numerous temporary academic positions. In 1935, he was a Visiting Lecturer in English at the University of Iowa, Iowa City; from 1955-56 he was Visiting Professor of English at Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa; from 1963-64 he was Visiting Professor of English, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, and in 1967 he was at University of Kansas, Lawrence, and University of Washington, Seattle. ...
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