Galleries - November 2018

and is full of terrific things including a never previously seen early masterpiece ‘Greenwich from the Royal Observatory’ (1958) and several examples of perhaps his best known project –the large scale drawings of all the English cathedrals that he completed between 1988 and 1990. It is hard to know quite where to begin in assessing the importance to the London art world of Annely Juda Fine Art since it first opened 50 years ago in Tottenham Mews on 16 June 1968. That's some 342 shows in all and most of them absolute crackers as they say. How on earth to celebrate? David Juda, Annely's son who was with her from the start and has been running the gallery since her death, aged 91 in 2006, has had the neat idea of picking one work from each year – 50 works for 50 years – to give a snapshot of a gallery that has, more than most, always run shows by contemporary artists alongside aspects of 20th century Modernism. The modernism though, was of a kind you simply couldn't find elsewhere in London at the time, the Non-Objective Abstraction of the great Russian, German and Dutch artists c1910-40, often seemingly more of an educational crash course than a commercial gallery sometimes, as well as providing a hugely revelatory foil to the abstract bent of so many of the contemporary artists they were also showing – Caro, Clough, Turnbull, Denny, Max Bill, François Morellet et al. In short Annely Juda was always the first place you checked out – and it still is. There are plenty of entertainers who practice art as a sideline, and indeed got into music via art school – Bob Dylan, Ronnie Wood and Pete Townsend among them – but not many for whom it became of equal creative significance. However that certainly seems to be the case for Jim Moir aka Vic Reeves of the comic duo Reeves and Mortimer, who has had a steady succession of major one person shows at serious London galleries over the last five years. His latest is at the excellent contemporary gallery in Deal, Linden Hall Studio where he is having a joint exhibition of painting and prints entitled 'The Sound of Cutlery,' with designer Steven Thomas, he of the Biba visual image fame. Nicholas Usherwood collage reliefs constructed out of 'found' industrial metal items, pieces that extend Surrealist practices in a nicely contemporary fashion. R B Kitaj once described Dennis Creffield's work as “Britain's most closely guarded secret”. A little over the top perhaps, but given the originality and power of the work Creffield consistently produced from the late 1950s, his name for some reason has never been one to conjure with in quite the same breath as his artistic comperes such as Auerbach and Kossoff. Like them, powerfully influenced by David Bomberg who had taught him at the Borough Polytechnic in the early 50s as a teenager, Creffield nonetheless always enjoyed a degree of critical and curatorial success – John Berger and Herbert Read among them – and had some successful public shows at the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine. Never to quite the same degree with commercial galleries, until the last two decades of his life at least, when Flowers Gallery and James Hyman both showed him, and finally, just before his death in June this year, Waterhouse & Dodd took him on. A major exhibition of his work there this month has thus become something of a memorial show – though one senses that a full scale retrospective in a public gallery may not be all that far behind – NOVEMBER 2018 GALLERIES 9 from left N igel Hall ‘Spirit’ Annely Juda Fine Art Lucy Doyle ‘Matryoshka Fox’ Discerning Eye Dennis Creffield ‘The Lovers’ Waterhouse & Dodd Julian Trevelyan ‘The Artist’s Garden’ Bohun Gallery Jim Moir ‘Francisco Lezcano, Philip IV of Spain’s Jester’ Linden Hall Studio Telfer Stokes ‘Assassin’ Redfern Gallery G old stars In memory Cutting edge