Tactics for Troubling Taste: Barbara Jones and the Blackeyes and Lemonade Exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery,London,1951

Abstract

Curated by the artist Barbara Jones (1912–1978) for the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1951, Blackeyes and Lemonade was an exhibition of popular art or, what Jones defined as, “the things people make for themselves, or that are manufactured in their taste.” The exhibits, which included a tiled fireplace in the shape of an Airedale dog, a giant anthropomorphic lemon, pub beer pulls, advertising posters, and industrially manufactured confectionary, posed a challenge to a codified and class-based conception of taste, fine art, and high culture that was prevalent in the post-war British museum. Through an analysis of the production and reception of Blackeyes and Lemonade, this paper charts the intellectual and practical battles Jones had to engage in to defend her selection and interpretation of objects, while simultaneously defining an unfamiliar branch of esthetic impulse and attempting to redirect what she called the “museum eye.” Finally, the paper explores the role of the temporary exhibition in re-opening discussions about taste, class, and gender in the museum.

A fleet of ships in bottles; a talking lemon as big as a child used to advertise Idris lemon squash; a regiment of pub beer pulls; a pile of gleaming loaves of bread; false teeth in bubble-gum, sugar mice, humbugs, sherbet fountains, fruit-drop fish, chocolate dolls, an rainbow of Bassetts’ Liquorice Allsorts isolated under a spotlight like jewels; and a tiled bedroom fireplace surround in the shape of an Airedale dog.

These were just a few of the hundreds of examples of popular and traditional art on display in the Whitechapel Art Gallery, East London, during the late summer of 1951. The exhibition, evocatively titled Blackeyes and Lemonade, was curated and designed by the British artist Barbara Jones (1912–1978) to showcase what she termed “British popular art” (over other variants of the genre such as folk art or craft, for example) and defined as “the things people make for themselves, or that are manufactured in their taste.” ¹

In early 1950s Britain such an exhibition was anomalous for several reasons. First was the fact that cultural institutions and museums of the period had a clearly defined conception of what high art and good taste were and, by extension, the kinds of people who could produce it and appreciate it—and, for that matter, curate it. When Jones declared that an exhibition of popular art would require the abandonment of “the museum eye,” she was referring to a museological mindset—an esthetic and ideological hegemony of taste and class values—which had been coalescing since the Victorian era of design reformism. ² For Jones, an exhibition was a site of investigation, rather than one of didacticism.

The second anomaly was Jones’ gender. Although many women worked in museums in the post-war period; a female curator was unusual. This, in combination with the relative social mobility she enjoyed as an artist and her flexible status as a freelancer rather than an employee, set Jones outside of, and often in antagonistic relationship with, the employment norms and social mores of the Whitechapel. In such a context, therefore, ensuring the realization of her ideas required additional labor on her part, at every stage of the curatorial and design process.

Through an analysis of its production and reception, and legacy, this article explores how Barbara Jones’ Blackeyes and Lemonade exhibition can be read as a form of disruption of the institutional, esthetic, and social conventions upon which British museums in the post-war period were founded. Furthermore, beyond the achievements of this particular exhibition, and the efforts of this particular collector-curator-designer, the article considers how traces of a curator’s working process and tactics, found in planning documents and penciled notes, might provide an alternative historical reading of how women worked in and with museums and collections in the post-war period.

Redirecting the “Museum Eye”

During the war, the Pilgrim Trust engaged artists to document, and thereby visually preserve, aspects of British architectural heritage thought to be at risk from aerial bombardment. Barbara Jones, a muralist, recently graduated from the Royal College of Art, was one of the ninety-seven selected artists and traveled the countryside producing topographical watercolors, especially of follies and grottoes in the grounds of historic houses—about which she would go on to publish a book-length study in 1953. Such work continued after the war when artists were asked to record quintessentially British traditional craft and folk art practices. This time the perceived threat was from the influence of American, urban values and industrialized mass production.

Jones tracked down exemplars of baroque fairground and canal barge decoration, technically impressive taxidermy and matchstick sculptures. Like others involved in the “Recording Britain” project, she was grateful for the work, and eager to help preserve the unique aspects of heritage, practices, and traditions that were in danger of extinction. But, as evidenced by her selections for the Blackeyes and Lemonade exhibition, Jones also wanted to preserve the quotidian and the mass-produced—things she considered at risk, not because of their rarity, but precisely because of their ubiquity, which rendered them overlooked and liable to disappear. She had a particular interest in things “made by machinery; or at least outside the village on a wholesale scale”—things that possessed “a new quality,” as she put it, “harder, cruder, brighter, much less tasteful” than folk art. ³ She therefore sought out goods that were “everyday” in their familiarity, industrially and mass-produced and currently in production, such as boxes of fireworks, advertising posters fresh from the hoardings, packets of sewing needles, printed paper bags from the bakers, and even the iced buns they contained. This was the material she parsed in illustrated articles for The Architectural Review (1944–1949), edited by Nicholas Pevsner, and which later formed the backbone of her book, The Unsophisticated Arts, published in 1951.

Paternalistic Institutional Context

In 1950, the Society for Education in Art (SEA) approached the Whitechapel’s new director, Hugh Scrutton, with the idea to stage an exhibition about traditional art to coincide with the Festival of Britain (which was planned for the following year to commemorate the Great Exhibition of 1851).

Despite the bold move of having exhibited Picasso’s anti-war painting, Guernica, in 1938, the Whitechapel Art Gallery was not known for its venturesome programming. The Gallery had been founded in the East End of London in 1901 by social reformers Samuel and Henrietta Barnett with a mission to educate the local working class community in the niceties of esthetic appreciation, as the first step of a journey toward spiritual improvement. Samuel Barnett averred that “a greater love of beauty means, for instance, greater care for cleanliness, a better choice of pleasures, and increased self-respect [. . .] The sordid character of many national pleasures and the low artistic value of much of the national produce is due to the unused powers of admiration.” ⁴

Vestiges of the Barnetts’ paternalist and didactic ambition to nurture the visual sensibilities of the East End working class, clearly lingered on at the museum even in the late 1940s. But Scrutton circumvented them by commissioning an outsider, like Jones.

By 1950, Jones was becoming recognized as an authority on popular art, she had a positive reference from the newly formed Arts Council of Great Britain, quite some experience in designing exhibitions, but she also had no compunction to uphold any of the Whitechapel’s moral tenets, nor any of the traditional values of museum curation more generally.

Disquieting, Baroque and Impermanent: A Personal Perspective on Popular Art

In the preface to her book Unsophisticated Arts, Jones enumerates the characteristics of the popular arts: “complex, unsubtle, often impermanent, they lean to disquiet, the baroque, and sometimes terror.” ⁵ While these themes also lurked beneath the surface of Blackeyes and Lemonade, when it came to creating categories for the fifteen sections of her exhibition, however, Jones chose more prosaic headings such as those used in an encyclopedia or a department store. Among them were Transport, Toys, Hobbies and Pets and The Home. To create these categories spatially in the Whitechapel Gallery, Jones used white partition wall and title placards with hand-painted lettering. Individual exhibits were captioned with small typewritten cards that were tacked directly onto the walls using drawing pins.

Larger exhibits, such as pieces of farm machinery were placed in middle of the gallery space. Banners and shop signs hung from the ceiling on hooks. Some exhibits were assembled into vignettes intended to simulate realistic domestic arrangements. Around the dog-shaped tile fire surround for example, there hung paper wall calendars—in the shape of a black cat, a lucky horseshoe, a floral basket, and so on—as well as some decorative plates and tin trays. Beside the fireplace was a table with a crocheted cloth and a lacquer-work chair. Such decisions were meant to make the exhibition feel somewhat familiar and approachable to its intended audience.

Keen that the exhibition feel active, Jones had also persuaded some of makers of the exhibits to be present and to give live demonstrations. While she was disappointed not to have a Masarella ice cream barrow included, in most other areas she got her way. Her desire for a “Pearly King and Queen . . . alive if possible” was fulfilled, and apparently without harm done to either. ⁶ Mr. McErnean, a pavement artist from Bloomsbury, chalked his images directly onto the gallery floor. A pâtissier from the RAF School of Cookery worked on his St. Paul’s Cathedral, entirely made of icing, live in the exhibition space.

The organization of the exhibition appears to have been chaotic. Jones’ first full list of exhibits was not compiled until two months before the exhibition was due to open and exhibits were being scratched and added to this list and collected from one of the ninety or so lenders, right up until the last moment. A letter dated only four days before the opening, from the Whitechapel director’s assistant, asks Bennet Bros. Ltd. to send some of their paper bags with their designs printed on them: “Could you do this as soon as possible? The exhibition actually opens on Friday and we should like to have them here in time.” ⁷

This “just-in-time” approach is not surprising considering that also during 1951 Jones was also in the midst of publishing her book, The Unsophisticated Arts, contributing illustrations for two volumes of the “About Britain Guides,” designing dust jackets for several books, and, for the Festival of Britain, designing the Coastline of Britain mural in the Seaside pavilion, a mural for the Television pavilion and consulting on the Battersea Funfair for a (sadly unrealized) water roundabout of Baroque shells operated by cat gondoliers. ⁸

The layout of the exhibition and arrangement of exhibits echoes ethnographic display conventions, where artefacts tend to be grouped by type and activity, rather than any hierarchy of value. It is also likely that Jones was influenced by shop display techniques. She had made several closely observed drawings of the contents of shop windows and interiors, plus she had first-hand experience as a child in her father’s leather goods store on Croydon High Street, and as the keeper of her own antique stall in Camden Passage. Whereas most art and design exhibitions focused on the uniqueness of an object—its aura—retail displays, by contrast, wanted to communicate abundance (especially in a period in which rationing had only recently been lifted). Likewise, in her exhibition design, Jones did not try to disguise the seriality of the mass manufactured objects; rather, she made it a feature by stacking objects and creating rows of multiples. She also used the surrealist technique of juxtaposition, in pairing unique crafted objects with the mass-produced, the enduring with the ephemeral, to create “pattern instead of sense,” as she once put it in an article for Typographica. ⁹

Jones thought, wrote, and painted by accumulating details. Lists were also key to her curatorial work. Because she was responsible for every aspect of the exhibition, Jones’ lists and notes served more than one purpose. For example, a sketch for how the ships’ figureheads should be arranged within the exhibition also includes addresses for where they would be picked up from and instructions for how they should be transported: “2 men, plenty of sacking, not straw.” ¹⁰

By 1951 Jones had worked on several other exhibitions, mostly assisting the designer James Gardner, and including the Britain Can Make It exhibition of 1946. But Blackeyes and Lemonade was different than her previous commissions, not only because this time she was curator and designer, but because the material was so personal. In an article titled “Tat Hunting,” Jones observed, “I have a house full of things. They are on the walls, shelves, the floor and in trunks in the attic.” ¹¹ And one of her students recalled “a wonderful Victorian red plush sofa, a set of carpet bowls in the hearth, a half specimen honey buzzard with a painted background and bees around the honeycomb in its beak” ¹² and in the drawers, “postcards and posters, seaside souvenirs, cigar bands and sweet wrappers, coronation novelties, scraps and playing cards.” ¹³

In her checklist of exhibits, under the heading “Souvenirs,” Jones writes, “About thirty pieces of Goss china, enough to give an impression of clutter [. . .] Seaweed art; Shell decorations; Black Lacquer lodging house napkin rings; Seaside post cards,” followed by the parenthetical addition, “Barbara Jones has all these.” With Blackeyes and Lemonade, Jones had the chance to make a three-dimensional extrapolation of the articles she had been writing and illustrating for The Architectural Review, but also to recreate aspects of her own home. For Jones, there was little separation between leisure and work, and the fact that so many of the objects in Blackeyes and Lemonade came from her own collections, and that she arranged them in the Whitechapel just as she would have had done at home, led to a blurring between what was usually the private realm of a curator and the public sphere of a museum.

Tools and Tactics for Transgressing Museum Conventions

To get mass-produced consumer objects into the Whitechapel, Jones had to personally retrieve them. This meant spending most of June 1951 in a converted London taxi with her co-organizer, Tom Ingram (who would later become her life partner) visiting manufacturers, shops, libraries, museums, and unions, working men’s clubs, and workshops. She would either gather the things there and then or make arrangements for them to be sent back to London. In a letter to the Whitechapel dispatched from Durham, for example, Jones reports: “Have seen deputy curator (not sick) of Kirk Collection in York – lending us Valentines, Xmas cards, glass domes, bead work, lusters, china figures, wax fruit, wool pictures etc. Very good haul.” ¹⁴

In addition to the physical work of hauling these objects to the East End of London from all around the country, and devising the means for their display, Jones also had to find conceptual space for them in the Whitechapel. Historian Gillian Whiteley has observed how the exhibition highlighted “the key issues at stake in the battle for cultural hegemony at an important point in early postwar Britain.” ¹⁵ And indeed the exhibition contents played their part. Mostly, however, this battle was fought behind the scenes during the planning stages, leaving its traces in the form of notes, correspondence, and edited texts.

SEA was strongly opposed to the inclusion of machine-made objects and the topic was an ongoing point of contention in the lead up to the exhibition. ¹⁶ Jones’ proposed exhibits did not derive from the village greens and leafy lanes of a rural yesteryear imaginary, but rather from specific semi-industrial bakeries, newsagents, pubs, and living rooms of East London. In a meeting agenda prepared by SEA it was observed, “the lowest levels of taste are not worth exhibiting and bring the exhibition down to a trashy level. We need not, and should not, bring in greenish hairdressers models and fluffy kittens [. . .] We suggest a higher standard of aesthetic merit as the basis of selection . . .” ¹⁷ (Their comments refer to two items on Jones’ list: in the section labeled “Simulacra,” and under the heading “Hairdressers,” “Busts of women in greenish drapery and elegant hair, there is an excellent collection of these in Southampton Row”; and in the Section titled “Pets,” under the heading “Art,” “A calendar covered with large fluffy kittens.”)

The Whitechapel responded robustly, using Jones’ penciled notes as a reference, that this “William Morris creed is unrealistic, romantic and naif.” Minutes from a later meeting summarize the temporary appeasement of hostilities: “SEA had agreed to accept BJ’s proposals for the exhibition on the understanding that BJ would make a conscientious attempt to keep the impact of hand and machine-made exhibits about equal and that, from now on, they (SEA) would raise no further controversial questions, but would leave BJ to get on with the work of preparing the exhibit.” ¹⁸

By collecting “greenish hairdresser models and fluffy kittens”—as well as a “cage of live songbirds,” an “aquarium of goldfish”—and bringing them into the Whitechapel, Jones was forcibly re-directing the museum eye, and challenging it to re-examine the relationship between making, manufacture, collecting and consumption, and between commodities and objects, artworks and artefacts.

At every stage of the production of the exhibition there was work to be done in defending the value of, and defining new measures for the esthetic appreciation of, popular art within the museum context. For example, Jones had loaned many of her own possessions to the exhibition. When, upon their return to her, she found that some of them had been broken and damaged—a luster glass candlestick was smashed, a castor was torn off the plush red sofa (that the student fondly remembered), the glass case of the marble chip and bead Victorian Villa was broken, and a piece was knocked off one of the mother of pearl papier maché chairs. Jones wrote to the Whitechapel director that she “got the impression that things were packed according to the packers’ estimate of their value and not ours.” ¹⁹

The question of how much Jones, herself, was valued, or at least was costing, the Whitechapel, was also a tense one. Her set fee for the curation and design of the exhibition, writing and designing the catalog and promotional materials, was £300 (around $9,000, today). Her role was described in the minutes of a meeting: “It was agreed that in anything affecting the planning of the exhibition or the choice of objects, Barbara Jones should have the last word. Planning was taken as meaning the whole process by which the exhibition advanced from an agreed theme to its final appearance.” ²⁰ Her expenses derived mainly from travel and use of the telephone. Penciled notes made by Whitechapel staff on Jones’ invoices betray their annoyance. When she said she would spend “£50 or less” on travel, a staff member wrote, they thought that she meant it would be less, and that they also considered that the “indirect value of publicity and reputation” was worth “a lot” and should form part of Jones’ payment. ²¹

The value of the endeavor was weighed more generously by its visiting public. Quantitatively, the exhibition was an unmitigated success. It broke all the Whitechapel’s previous attendance records—by almost a third. ²² In the two months that the show was open, 30,754 people came to see it, with a daily average of 669. This number would likely have been higher if the gallery had followed through on its intention to accommodate working hours of the local community.

The cultural worth of the exhibition was also noted by some of its many reviewers. Politician and journalist Harold Nicolson observed how Jones “has given definition to a branch of aesthetic impulse that has hitherto remained unclassified and even unrecognized.” ²³ He continued: “Her vivid sympathy for all this vanishing naivete is reflected in her [writing] style. She can describe without sentimentality or derision the horror of the storerooms of taxidermists, the crochet work around the bunks of barges, or the way in which wax works are cleaned . . . surely all this is worth the labour that has been expended upon it?” ²⁴

At least ninety articles about the exhibition were carefully clipped and filed by the Whitechapel staff. There must have been a mention or a captioned photograph, if not a review, in every regional and national newspaper and journal in Britain—from the Huddersfield Gazette to the Psychic News and the Church Times, through to The Telegraph, Studio, Vogue, and The Observer. Most reporters and critics were intrigued by the exhibition, or at least its premise, and were inspired to philosophize on the wider implications of exhibiting popular arts. But the fact that the same descriptors—“astonishing,” “amusing,” “miscellany,” “gallimaufry”—were used both in positive and negative reviews shows how unfamiliar this esthetic genre still was and how open for interpretation it could be.

Some saw the exhibition as a political statement—the materialization of social transformations and radicalizations that had taken place during WW2, evidence of rising political consciousness among women and the working class. From the perspective of the Daily Worker, for example (whose reporter noted with approval the “beautiful silk banner” loaned by Bethnal Green Branch of National Union of Railwaymen “which clearly shows the influence of William Morris”), the exhibition was “intended to show how art and design enter daily life without distinguishing good from bad.” ²⁵ Harold Nicholson also noted how the exhibition was a “demonstration of proletarian aesthetics.” ²⁶ Likewise, The Freethinker recommended it to “all progressively minded people.” ²⁷

Others categorized it as an ethnographic exercise. A reviewer in the Listener referred to it as “an exhibition for the aesthetic sociologist,” and Patrick O’Donovan, writing in the Observer, compared the visual effect of the gallery to that of looking into “a small Hindu temple of very recent construction in, say, Singapore.” ²⁸

Notes Toward Exhibitions

Historiographically, the curatorial work and collecting practices of women artists and designers like Barbara Jones and her contemporaries Enid Marx and Margaret Lambert, have been positioned marginally in relation to the design canon, and their contributions often chronicled as “intangible.” ²⁹

But tangibility and inclusion in the canon represent only one measure of significance, the one based on a patriarchally determined and absolute sense of taste and its “epistemologies of mastery,” to use ecofeminist Lorraine Code’s phrase. ³⁰ An exhibition is a contingent, relational, and socially constructed entity. In the case of Blackeyes and Lemonade, Jones’ preparatory notes and draft checklists, the ideas exchanged via letters and jotted in the margins of documents, the sketches, doodles, crossings outs, and revisions, provide a glimpse of another version of the exhibition that might have been realized in all of its ambitious, precise, and idiosyncratic glory. For example, one of her type written checklists includes, under the heading “Snacks,” the following exhibit description: “A display of prepared foods as seen behind a popular snack bar counter. Arrangements of pickled onions, lobsters, crabs, cheeses and salads, particular attention being paid to the shell fish.” The short paragraph has been crossed out in pencil, indicating that somewhere along the line it was nixed but through its vivid description, it is part of the history of this exhibition, and of curating more generally.

While the history of museums and exhibitions tend to focus only on what was actually staged, using for their sources the photographs, press reviews, and catalogs; in fact, in order to correct gender injustice in these studies, we should also take into account the entire process of exhibition preparation, including those shadow versions as they were envisioned by their curators but that languish in the archive. These “paper” exhibitions may not have been physically built, but they are nevertheless integral to the processes and products of curation. Studying them might prove useful not only in gaining a more nuanced historical understanding of exhibitions in the past, but also, as museums seek to make their collections more diverse, inclusive, and accessible, for those being conceived in the future.