'Sussex Modernism' (Towner Eastbourne, until September 28 2025): Magical Modernist Mystery Tour

Ivon Hitches, Day's Rest, Day's Work, 1960, Sussex University © the artist's estate

Sussex Modernism feels like an oxymoron. The counties - rural, rolling, coastal, chalky - have a determinedly timeless provincial appeal. The well-known art they generated in the twentieth century from the washed-out greens of Eric Ravilious to the middle-class flowers and furnishings of the Charleston set are safe and back-waterish. You might think of Ditching and then decide to unthink it as the name Eric Gill hovers into your mind. The Towner curators are determined bring the two words together, by sticking with admirable rigidity to their location and, perhaps less successfully, by bombarding their visitors with a wealth of examples from the late nineteenth century through to the present day, defining Modernism very much as an extended time period rather than a set of values. Curator Hope Wolf has talked about modernisms in the plural and perhaps that would have been a better title, justifying the range of styles she choses to display. This is an exhibition which leaves no stone unturned: generous, inclusive and inventive in its juxtaposition of objects, media and makers.

The Vorticist magazine is a literal Blast in the centre of the first room around which swirls a disparate selection of works. LS Lowry is here, incongruously, with a windmill, Ravilious too, alongside Edward Wadsworth, who sits more comfortably within the modernist canon.  Gluck is represented by one of their huge-skied landscapes, peacefully serene and empty, and there are less familiar names: Peggy Angus, whose view of cement works is as pallid as if covered with a dusting of the stuff and Margaret Benecke's icily abstracted Glacier Forms. This first display sets the tone, both in its range of materials - including ceramics - and the focus on overlooked, regional figures. The second room delves deeper into that regionalism, acknowledging the sisters who established a modernist gallery in Lewes (here painted by Cedric Morris) and Mary Stormont, a founder-member of Rye Art Club.

Amy Sawyer, Gentle Spring Brings
Her Garden Stuff to Market, 1896,
Russell Cotes Museum, Bournemouth 

Modernism proper comes into the equation with the Ditching-focused display: Jacob Epstein's sculpture and Ethel Mairet's textiles, jazzily displayed against blue, with Ivon Hitchen's dramatic polyptych and William Gear's Vertical Feature popping exuberantly off the wall. Yet this is modernism undercut by magic, mythology and romanticism, and the same is true as you confront four female figures against their blood-red background. Amy Sawyer, Jennifer Binnie, Edward Burne Jones and Alexi Marshall's works are not set-up in opposition to each other, but rather in a sisterly solidarity which coheres the disparate styles and collapses a century of change. It is one of the best hangs I've seen in long time. Before that we have gone into full 'Season of the Witch' territory with darkly trippy landscapes by Carlyle Brown and Pavel Tchelitchew.

The final room shifts mood, from elegy to energy with the Pop Art vibe of Jeff Keen's LAFF, the dynamic co-operatism given off by two panels of the Eastbourne International Workers' Mural and the future-now optimism of László Moholy-Nagy's Pavilion Bexhill on Sea. Edward Burra did his share of eerie, empty landscapes but is here represented by jokey, jazzy etchings and the exhibition ends with pop and popular - Sophie Barber's Kendrick on his Way Back from Camber Sands. This is not the triumph of the new, however, and the introspective, retrospective mood lingers with Julian Bell carrying on the family name and David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes channelling that same restless, rural oddity. 

Bowie's video is just one of several film pieces and the great achievement of Sussex Modernism is not just the range of media but the successful integration of the display. Strict chronology or theme are eschewed in favour of aesthetic considerations as the curators invite you to enjoy the art, setting up sight-lines, and formal and colour juxtapositions which enhance and elucidate. Whether this is art which is unique to Sussex, I am not sure: Neo Romanticism is a broad movement in 20th century Britain and the curators themselves acknowledge the impossibility of tying artists to specific regions. More problematically, the label of 'modernism' is at the very least disingenuous and constrictive. As Philip Hoare's recent book William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love demonstrates, these artists trace a lineage back not just to the late 18th century, but to folk traditions and prehistoric forms. Whilst I can applaud the curators' desire to deconstruct the term, and create a user-friendly title to advertise their show, it is arguably much better to forget it the moment you enter the exhibition. Modernism condemned British artists to a backwater, this show proves that they should be mainstream.

Sand, Sea and Sculpture

Antony Gormley, Another Place, Crosby Beach (WikiCommons)

In 2005 Antony Gormley’s one hundred life-sized cast-iron figures were erected on Crosby Beach, Merseyside. Initially, a temporary installation, which had already been exhibited in Norway, Belgium and Germany, the local council agreed make their presence permanent in 2007. Another Place, or the Iron Men as they are affectionately known, has become a major tourist attraction and is perhaps the best known example of seaside sculpture. But all along the British coast, holiday resorts have turned to art to bring in visitors and put themselves on the map.

Some coastal towns have long established artistic connections. In the nineteenth century, with the rise in popularity of painting plein air (outside), ‘colonies’ of artists decamped to the coast, where living was cheap, the light was pure and traditional subjects abounded. Places as far afield as Newlyn in Cornwall and Cockburnspath, south of Edinburgh, became home to artists, art schools and exhibition societies, and many still trade on that tradition today. St Ives was probably the most famous of them all, home to successive generations of artists including Marianne Stokes, Laura Knight and Barbara Hepworth. It now boasts not only a museum dedicated to Hepworth but Tate St Ives which sits right on the beach: there is literally sculpture everywhere.

Not surprisingly the success of Tate St Ives has led other seaside towns to follow suit. Margate built the Turner Contemporary on the site of the boarding house frequented by the great nineteenth century landscapist, JMW Turner, who was a regular visitor to the town. Local artist Ann Carrington’s Mrs Booth, Shell Lady monumentalises a tourist souvenir in twelve foot high bronze and names her after Turner’s landlady. In theory, Mrs Booth is an ideal seaside sculpture – relevant, engaging and populist – although the reality is that she seems forlornly marooned at the end of the harbour. Morecambe similarly, but more successfully, gives pride of place, not to past mayors or benefactors, but to its famous namesake, comedian Eric Morecambe. His statue, plinth-less and approachable, brings sunshine and smiles as he dances in an ungainly action pose on the seafront.

Like Margate, Bexhill on Sea invested in culture by redeveloping their 1935 Art Deco De La Warr Pavilion as an arts centre in 2005. They always have contemporary sculpture on show outside, at present Tschabalala Self’s Seated. Self’s larger-than-life polychromatic bronze of a black female figure turning in her chair, exemplifies a different approach to seaside sculpture. Neither the artist nor the work has any direct relevance to the town or the coastal location, but it is hoped the presence of the work itself (even though it might be controversial) will attract visitors. Seated was vandalised in 2023, an event which made the national press and led to huge numbers of local volunteer cleaners. Damien Hirst’s Verity has been on long-term loan to Ilfracombe since 2012: the stainless steel, heavily pregnant woman, skin partly flayed to reveal her internal organs, is the ultimate marmite sculpture, loved and loathed in equal measure. One thing it does prove is that size isn’t everything. Verity, including her raised sword, stands over twenty metres tall and dwarfs the harbour, making it look like Toy Town.

Most towns play it safer. Newlyn promenade is dominated by a three metre high figure of a fisherman poised on the act of casting a rope. Commissioned from a local artist, Tom Leaper, and focussing on the traditional industry of the town, this sets itself apart from hundreds of similar pieces by the solid force of its presence. On one hand it is a traditional memorial, commemorating fishermen lost at sea, but it also cleverly channels the spirit of the nineteenth-century artists, like Stanhope Forbes, who put Newlyn on the map. This is ordinary man made heroic. Tintagel’s Gallos also successfully suffuses culture and location. The shredded, hollowed-out figure of a knight, stands sentry-like on cliffs by King Arthur’s legendary castle. Despite the scale (2.4m) and solidity of the bronze, the work feels both ancient and fragile, only half present, like the myth itself, and as eroded as the rocks around it. That relationship between sculpture and surroundings, also achieved by Gormley’s Iron Men, is one of the keys to creating a successful seaside sculpture.

Non-figurative works can be just as involving. The most famous example is probably Maggi Hambling’s 2003 memorial to Benjamin Britten, Scallop, which rises directly out of the shingle on the beach at Aldeburgh. Subject to repeated vandalism and campaigns to have it removed, it is a work which has to be experienced in the round and in situ, where it becomes less a representation of a shell and more a series of interesting forms and silhouettes against sky and sea. At Cleveleys in Lancashire, a huge stainless steel spiral conch, Mary’s Shell, sits on the sand, submerged at high tide and big enough to walk inside. The shell is part of a sculpture trail based on local legends, but its real strength is the interaction between installation and environment, with the waves creating a soundscape as they meet the structure, barnacles and limpets colonising it, and the sand shifting around. This is surely the aim of any beach sculpture – to be distinctive yet also to integrate into its surroundings.

There are thousands of sculptures and hundreds of sculpture trails along the length of the British coast. Most are not memorable enough to draw visitors in their own right. Many are not significant works of art. Plenty have been derided by critics and opposed by the local population. Even when seaside sculpture does succeed, it cannot in itself bring regeneration and wealth: Margate still contains some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Kent, despite increased visitors and a cachet of ‘coolness’ associated with the Turner Contemporary. Yet, when an artwork does strike a chord either because of its local associations or its visual impact, it can really put somewhere on the map. Another Place has transformed Crosby Beach into a tourist destination. Thanks to Gormley's Iron Men there is no other place like it.

This is a version of an article which first appeared in Erato Magazine in July 2024