Rosemary Simmons, artist and founding editor of Printmaking Today, will reflect on her lifelong passion for prints in a display of her personal collection at the Quest Gallery, Bath, this summer.
Simmons studied graphic design at Chelsea College of Art in the 1950s where she had mastered etching and lithogr aphy under the tuition of Julian Trevelyan RA and painting with Ceri Richards. On graduating she joined the Curwen press, which was established in 1958 by Stanley Jones as a collaborative lithographic service, where she worked alongside established names such as Graham Sutherland and John Piper. Simmons remembers Jones as ‘a wonderful man, capable of coaxing out of artists what they did not know they had, and enabling them to realize what they really wanted.’
Artists who collaborate on printed editions are often allocated prints entitled PP, or printer’s proofs, and these prints would have formed the early nucleus of her collection. Collaborative printers often have anecdotes about the artwork like a parent for a child. Simmons recalls struggling to deliver prints for signing to Barbara Hepworth’s studio in St Ives when her car failed to go uphill unless she drove it backwards. She also recalls innovations in the print studio, with a move to drawing on transparent grained plastic rather than zinc, a technique which Henry Moore exploited in his series of prints such as Four Reclining Figures – Caves.
In the 60s and 70s, Simmons’ involvement in printmaking deepened, with teaching, writing and forming networks of colleagues in the print world. It was a natural extension of her knowledge and discerning aesthetic to be involved in curating shows at the Curwen Gallery in London from 1965-1975 and establishing the Bradford International Print Biennial in 1968. This gave her ample opportunity to get to know many of the printmakers of the time: David Hockney, Elisabeth Frink (a fellow Chelsea graduate), Michael Rothenstein, and Gertrude Hermes, many of whom gave her prints as gifts, or exchanged work with her, or whose prints she bought for her collection.
Simmons contributed a regular column about printmaking to the magazine Arts Review, and by the end of the 1980s, feeling that there was not enough understanding as to why artists make prints – and working on a typewriter at her kitchen table – started Printmaking Today, the first four issues of which were funded by the Henry Moore Foundation.
18 June – 10 August 2013
Quest Gallery
7 Margaret Buildings
Bath
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