April 18, 2013

Finest Hour 153, Winter 2011-12

Page 44

Cover Story – All Edwina, All the Time

Edwina Sandys Art, by Caroline Seebohm. New York: Glitterati, hardbound, illus., 224 pages, $75, Member price for inscribed copies $60.

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By Richard M. Langworth

When something exciting happens in the world, I want to jump in and get involved. It’s in my blood.” When Edwina Sandys says things like that, one thinks of her grandfather, dashing off as a young subaltern to cover the slightest hint of a war in the peaceful Victorian 1890s. Like Sir Winston, Edwina has always been in the thick of the action—and now her career is documented with a marvelous coffee table book encapsulating nearly all of her works large and small.

Churchillians will be drawn to the early parts of the book tracing the artist’s early years, set off with brilliant color plates like “Winston at Work” (cover this issue), inspired by her youthful visits to Chartwell and its master.

Edwina was the second child of Duncan Sandys and Diana Churchill, born in London two months after Munich. She was too young to recall much of the Blitz, which was well, since “evacuation was not an option for Winston Churchill’s grandchildren.” Her father served as Minister of War, her mother joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service and served betimes as an air raid warden. Edwina remembers collecting bits of shrapnel in London parks on her daily outings.

She credits her grandfather as her inspiration to be an artist (and later a sculptress, a skill they also shared, witness WSC’s famous bust of the sculptor Oscar Nemon, done while Nemon sculpted him!)

Her grandfather was the first painter she saw at work: “When he was painting, he was totally absorbed. I think—well—I know for myself—that painting uses a different part of your brain and your whole being. So it was a great outlet for him, a complete contrast to the affairs of state.”

One thing that is clear from his paintings, she continues, “is his love of life. He went at it with relish and gusto.” As an example she offers “Bottlescape”: a still-life of “decanters and bottles mostly open, and a fine disarray of half-filled glasses….This is one of my favorites and it later inspired my own painting ‘Romeo Revisited.'”

Churchill’s nephew Peregrine once recalled to this writer how “Bottlescape” was conceived: “My uncle received a huge bottle of brandy one Christmas and I remember it well. He sent us children rushing round Chartwell, ordering us: ‘Fetch me associate and fraternal bottles to form a bodyguard to this majestic container!'” Adds Edwina: “You know exactly what each bottle holds, and how what’s in it tastes. You can almost smell the cigars in the cedarwood boxes stacked up at the side of the canvas.” Another of her portraits, “Chartwell, 1983,” was the first color cover of Finest Hour, in issue 43 for Spring, 1984.

Subsequent chapters trace Edwina’s expansion into sculpture, inspired by her sculptor friend Susanna Holt in 1974: “Suddenly,” writes Seebohm, “with stunning rapidity, while continuing with her two-dimensional drawings and paintings, and using the same themes of characters in moods or situations—such as a woman playing cards, smoking or putting on mascara— Edwina made more than twenty sculptures that revealed her talent in rapidly evolving forms.” Her feminist instincts are represented with evocative female forms expressing liberation. From bronze she moved into marble, inspired by Italian friends: “If I close my eyes and run my hands over the sculpture, I know if it’s right. If it’s working.”

One set of marbles, “Adam & Eve,” reminds us of “Breakthrough,” the forms Edwina cut into a piece of the Berlin Wall—her most powerful statement. It stands in front of America’s Churchill Museum at Westminster College in Fulton site of WSC’s “Sinews of Peace” speech in 1946.

Edwina had long wanted to present a work of art to the museum, which she serves as a trustee and a prominent promoter. Glued to the television in 1989, as Germans proudly hacked through that symbol of repression, she and her husband, Richard Kaplan, decided to go to Berlin and obtain a “decent sized chunk.”

Getting it wasn’t so easy, but she knew exactly what she wanted to do with it. At dinner in Berlin she made a sketch of human forms breaking through the barrier, “physically, as well as metaphorically.” Their German friends looked at the sketch. “Ahh, Durchbruch,” they said in unison. Durchbruch means “Breakthrough,” and Edwina had her title.

Made from eight sections of communist cement, “Breakthrough” is graffiti-bedizened on the western side. The eastern side was and remains blank; while it stood, with armed guards watching, no one dared approach it.

Edwina’s book, her only “collected work,” is crammed with colorful prints ranging over the full gamut of her paintings, prints and sculpture. The critic Anthony Haden-Guest, in his foreword, reminds us that Edwina was never “shoehorned into an Ism. And what was more unusual was that she clearly didn’t care.” People thought of her as a “remarkable oddity [which] I am happy to report she remains.” He describes her feminist theme as “in-your-face in its femaleness…but there is nothing of the abject in it.” Sometimes, he adds, “her figures seem as immovable as the Stonehenge menhirs she references, but more often they look poised to kiss, to dance, to fly.”

Anyone who marvels at Winston Churchill’s talents as an amateur will be enthralled by what one of his grandchildren inherited to become a professional: a kaleidoscopic collection that would have intrigued him, as his own “daubs” once intrigued her.