If ever a book is compiled of the good deeds of the white man for
the black in the twilight days of colonialism, Frank McEwen's name should
be inscribed there — though his is a story beyond race and skin
color. His life was devoted to the belief that the highest spiritual
values lie enshrined within every individual, and that creating art
can draw them out-and especially from the untrained.
Francis Jack McEwen grew up with a collection of West African art,
much of it high quality, which his father had picked up as curios in
the course of business trips there. He went to Paris in l926 to study
art history at the Sorbonne and the Institut d'Art et d'Archaeologie
under Henri Focillon, who was a pioneer in the study of so called "primitive"
art. Focillon was much admired by living artists and this led McEwen
to friendships with Brancusi, Braque, Matisse, Picasso and Leger. He
also absorbed the great respect of these artists for the teachings of
Gustave Moreau, who had died in 1898 , and who believed in drawing out
of people an art which was individual to themselves.
Focillon advised McEwen, with these interests, to be a man of action
in art, rather than a lecturer. McEwen decided to be a painter, quarreled
with his family, was left with out a sou, and set out on his wander
years, working his way around the museums of Europe by menial work at
power stations. He spent most of 1928-1929 working in Flanders, and
painting in his spare time - wild flowers were his specialty, since they
sold quite well: he exhibited back in London at the Goupil Salon and
the New English Art Club.
Returning to Paris, McEwen, with Focillon's help, apprenticed himself
to an art restorer, working on Louvre pictures, and soon had a studio
in Paris and his own restorer's business. In 1939 he moved to Toulon
and started an art workshop, strictly for the untrained, on Gustave
Moreau's lines. After the fall of France in 1940 McEwen sailed by fishing
boat to Algiers, believing that the French colonies might hold out.
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Sculptor at work, Rhodesia
August, 1968
photo by Adele Aldridge
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He was soon disillusioned but his contacts with the Resistance and
the French government-in-exile enabled him as a fluent French speaker
to join Allied Forces Headquarters after November 1942 as a civil assistant
to General Innes Irons. In January l945, while the war was still on,
he joined the newly-created British Council. Among the first questions
that arose for it was that of an appropriate exhibition of British art
for France, something that the chauvinist French art world of that day
would not laugh at. McEwen's solution was a show of some of Herbert
Read's child art collection, largely gathered from Marion Richardson's
Moreau-type experiments in teaching - and ahead of French practice at
the time. McEwen selected about 60 of Read's thousand or so, with an
eye to the school of Paris point of view - some like little Matisse,
Bonnards, even Picasso and Lager's: such non-national art was an enormous
success, even tempting Brancusi out of his studio as well as Picasso
and Bonnard.
After this good start for Anglo-French relations, London inflicted
a show of modern British artists which was a dismal failure. Then McEwen's
introduction of Henry Moore, who had been over to Paris to stay with
him three times, to Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, and the leading French
critics and museum administrator, led to the show of Henry Moore in
Paris at the end of 1945.
Shows of Turner (McEwen had helped put Turner watercolors between
sheets of blotting paper at the Tate after the flooding of 1927) Blake,
Sutherland and Chadwick followed. McEwen's belief that the way to support
British art in Paris was to show French art simultaneously in London,
worked well: Picasso and Matisse were shown at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in l945, Braque and Rouault in l946 and Leger and Dufy in l947.
(The hundreds of letters of protest to The Times about the Picasso show
caused much merriment to Picasso when McEwen translated them to him.)
Around l952, McEwen felt that the School of Paris was getting trivial
in its content. He had been taking more interest in African culture,
and when the idea of founding the Rhodes
National Gallery in Salisbury, Rhodesia, was formed, McEwen was
consulted. He went out to Rhodesia for a month in l954 for consultation.
He found no art going on there, black or white, to impress him: and
anyway, the intention of the museum's board was to stock it with European
old masters. African art was not to be considered.
McEwen's past experience suggested to him that a gallery would only
thrive on exchanges of art — that there had to be some sort of
local art going on. When a director was subsequently sought - before
the building of the gallery — McEwen applied, encouraged by Picasso
and Herbert Read, and to his surprise was selected. He asked for a year's
grace, resigned from the British Council, and sailed his beloved boat
from Paris down the Seine to Mozambique via Brazil and round the Cape.
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