JOHN TUNNARD (1900-1971) Biography
SURREALIST (founded c.1924)

Provenance

The Tunnard Estate
McRoberts & Tunnard 1961
The Artist's family to 1988

Literature

Arts Council Exhibition, John Tunnard, Arts Council 1977, pages 47-51
Herbert Read, The World of John Tunnard, The Saturday Book, volume 25, London 1965
A Peat & B. Whitton, John Tunnard His Life and Work, Aldershot 1997, page 150, catalogue number 156, illustrated plate 7

Exhibition History

London, Alex Reid, Young Artists, February 1939
London, Guggenheim Jeune, John Tunnard, Paintings and Watercolours, March- April 1939, number 16
Northampton Art Gallery, 1939, number 23
London, Royal Academy, Winter Exhibition, January 1940
London, United Artists Exhibition, January 1940
Eastbourne, Towner Art Gallery, Spring 1940
London, Hartnoll & Eyre, John Tunnard, April 1971, number 5
London, Royal Academy, John Tunnard 1900-1971, March-April 1977, number 20 and at:
Cambridge, Kettle's Yard, May- June 1977
Kettering, Kettering Gallery, June- July 1977
Manchester, Manchester City Art Gallery, July- August 1977
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Laing Art Gallery, August- September 1977
Penzance, Newlyn Art Gallery, October 1977
London, Colchester and Hull, Blond Fine Art, A Salute to British Surrealism, April- August 1985, number 80
London, Mayor Gallery, British Surrealism Fifty Years On, March 1986, number 111, illustrated page 51

Description / Expertise

One day a marvellous man in a highly elaborate tweed coat walked into the gallery. He looked like Groucho Marx. He was as animated as a jazz bandleader, which he turned out to be. He showed us his gouaches, which were as musical as Kandinsky's, as delicate as Klee's, and as gay as Miro's. His colour was exquisite and his construction magnificent. His name was John Tunnard. He asked me very modestly if I thought I could give him a show, and then and there I fixed a date.(1)

John Tunnard is an extraordinary figure in 20th Century British art. The influences and inspiration behind his paintings and drawings are derived from the wide range of activities and interests that made up his character.

As a student of design at the Royal College of Art, he worked throughout the 1920's as a designer for a number of textile manufacturers, only deciding to become a painter at the age of thirty. It was this initial training however which was to be important in the development of his own vision and which led John Anthony Thwaites to label him in 1946 The Technological Eye.(2)

John Tunnard is an individualist. For more than thirty years he has preferred to cut a path of his own through the jungle of modern art. He began his career, as a designer in the textile industry, and textiles is a craft that imposes on the artist a high degree of stylisation, even of abstraction. He had further disciplinary experience as a teacher of design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. Then in 1930, Tunnard left London and moved to Cornwall, where together with his wife he set up a workshop for hand-blocked printed silks. As soon as he was settled in this new environment he began to paint.

From the beginning there was a mastery of oil, watercolour and gouache, but gouache remained his favoured medium and of this medium he has become one of the most skilled masters in England.

Tunnard immediately found a formal language of his own, and one that is not imitative or obviously related to the style of any of his immediate predecessors... There can be no doubt that Tunnard was inspired by the prevailing `will to abstraction', but I believe his inspiration comes from a source somewhat unusual in modern art- nature.

It is well known that Tunnard is an expert naturalist- a lepidopterist, a botanist and life-long observer of all forms of animal and plant life. He had lives with nature as intimately as Gilbert White or Thoreau, and his painting is always related to the forms of nature- not so much to the outward forms, though these do sometimes do appear as identifiable images, but rather to that inner morphology which is the secret of nature. By this I do not mean anything so obvious as the structure of organisms as revealed by science, but rather the formative principle itself, a grasp of which enables that artist to create forms that are analogous to those in nature...

Tunnard is an artist who has acquired by observation a profound intuition of the workings of nature, and this enables him to imagine forms that represent the morphology of nature in its ceaseless state of flux. That intuition prevents the artist from becoming a mere manipulator of a lifeless geometry. His forms are the inventions of his imagination but that imagination is a complete world, in some sense a prophetic world. He himself has said that after he has painted a picture he will sometimes come across a form he has used without knowing that it existed in nature...

Always in Tunnard's work, however dislocated they may be, the images have an essentially organic origin, and even when the painting is organised geometrically, with the fabric designer's precision, one is still aware of a vital process, of an implicit animism.

Animism and vitalism are similar concepts, and they imply a virtue which is more mechanical- dynamism. At times this characteristic in Tunnard's compositions threatens to disrupt the organic harmony- titles like Release, Flurry, Signal, Intersection, Flux, indicate geometrical lines of force rather than organic development. But nature, at least in its cosmic aspects, is also violent, and an art that did not reflect this fact would be too tame. The ideal is to find a synthesis of growth and form; but again, the forms that develop as living organisms.

The final effect is that of a dream-landscape, but `land' must imply more than earth, and more than land and sea. The `scape' is the limits of imaginative vision. Whatever the nature of the landscape, cosmic, telluric or, as often, submarine, the world created by this artist is a credible one. His work often reminds me of Sir Thomas Browne's Garden of Cyprus, where he speaks of those `phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth praecogitations, making Cables of Cobwebbes and Wildernesses of handsome Groves'. Sir Thomas concludes: `All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematics of the City of Heaven'. A painting by John Tunnard begins in the order of nature; it traverses the phantasms of the imagination; and then ends in the order of art, which is an analogy of the mystical mathematics of the City of Heaven.(3)


1. Peggy Guggenheim, Confessions of an Art Addict
2. See Arts Council Exhibition, John Tunnard, Arts Council 1977, pages 47-51
3. Herbert Read, The World of John Tunnard, The Saturday Book, volume 25, London 1965.