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9/10/2003

Kitty Garman and Co

The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall

Freud Family Exhibition


Kitty Garman, Annie Freud, Annabel Freud and May Cornet are exhibiting their work in the Garman Ryan Collection at The New Art Gallery Walsall 10 October to 8 February. This is the first time the female members of the family will collectively show their work. Kitty Garman is the daughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein and in 1947 she married the artist Lucian Freud. Annie and Annabel Freud are their two daughters and May Cornet is the daughter of Annie Freud.

Kitty Garman, now in her seventies, studied at The Central School of Arts and Crafts (now St Martin’s) in the late 1940’s under the tuition of Bernard Meninsky and has painted and embroidered throughout her life.

Annabel Freud studied at Camberwell School of Art and has also always painted with precocious ability, as a still life in the exhibition painted by her, aged 7years, demonstrates. Other work by her include a double portrait of her with her father, Lucian Freud, painting her portrait in his studio.

Annie Freud designs and embroiders textiles. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a new work, which is a large embroidery of her mother pregnant with her half sister Eve, the daughter of Kitty Garman and *Wynn Godley. Other works include photographs taken by her daughter May Cornet, including a jacket created for Graham Norton.

May Cornet, the youngest generation, has followed in the family tradition. She studied conceptual textiles at Goldsmith’s College and won a scholarship to Burano, the lace-making island in Venice. She has since worked as project assistant to Mona Hatoun and Nina Saunders and has exhibited widely including Crafts Council Gallery and this year in the Out Post exhibition at the Venice Biennial. May uses a variety of media and will be creating a new painting for this exhibition.

Jo Digger, exhibition curator, says “ The abilities of these three generations of women has long been submerged beneath the talents of the male family members. The exhibition reflects the intimate nature of the Garman Ryan Collection revealing new and unexpected insights into the many complex relationships between these three generations of women artists and their close family. The tangled web of artists and models, which lies behind the many portraits in the collection, gets even more complex and fascinating with the paintings and embroideries created by these three generations whose associations with artists such as Jacob Epstein and Lucian Freud has always before been that of passive model unacknowledged as active artists in their own right.”

The Garman Ryan Collection was given to Walsall by Kitty’s Mother, Kathleen Garman in 1973 and was a major impetus behind the building of The New Art Gallery Walsall, which opened in 2000. Kathleen married Jacob Epstein in 1955 becoming Lady Kathleen Epstein and in the 1960’s she and her friend the sculptor Sally Ryan built up the amazing collection now installed in The New Art Gallery Walsall. As well as containing works by friends of Epstein’s such as Modigliani and Gaudier Bzeska the collection contains probably the most representative collection of work by Epstein in the world, many works by son in law Lucian Freud and work by Kitty Garman’s brother Theodore Garman.

*Wynn Godley, Cambridge economist and the model for Epstein’s St Michael on Coventry Cathedral.


The New Art Gallery Walsall
Gallery Square, Walsall
tel 44 01922 654400

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