Tag: Arthur Giardelli

Vincent Charles Arthur Giardelli MBE, artist, 1911 to 2009 – part 2

by Christine Trevett

Part Two: Changing the face of Art in Wales

In the years of war, and in the 1950s and beyond, Arthur Giardelli, the evacuee to Merthyr, would prove to be very active for art and artists in Wales. In 1956 with artist Heinz Koppel and others he  was a founder member of firstly the South Wales Group (later The Welsh Group) of artists and then in 1956 of the 56 Group Wales. (https://56groupwales.co.uk/Arthur-Giardelli.html ).

He soon became its president and remained so until 1998, when he was made life president. At the time art in, and from, Wales got little attention and kudos among the art establishment. The 56 Group forefronted modernism in Welsh art and Giardelli, Koppel and others had helped to bring wider European trends to it. Through such groups Welsh artists got opportunities to exhibit in country wide touring exhibitions, so bringing attention to work from  Wales. There was regular lobbying of institutions and politicians on behalf of art and artists, so that art galleries, museums and private collections came to have many more items by such contemporary Wales based artists. Giardelli’s conversation was sometimes peppered with phrases in other languages and phrases from Dante and Racine and he had collected European artwork since the 1930s. Here was a well travelled linguist and the man who helped to facilitate exhibitions in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and elsewhere, as well.

So what of his own work as an artist?  By the end of the 1940s he had moved from the Merthyr area but he was still ardently promoting adult education and the accessibility of art. He taught for the WEA and for University College Cardiff. In 1979 he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of University College Aberystwyth, for apart from his many other activities, now based in west Wales he had taught in that university’s Department of Extra Mural Studies in the 1960s and 70s.  He lectured extensively overseas too, was a committee member of CASW (the Contemporary Art Society for Wales, founded 1937) and from 1965 to 1975 was on the Welsh Arts Council arts committee. More than one film was made about him and for services to the Arts in Wales Arthur Giardelli was awarded MBE in 1973.

His own art was not being neglected. At the same time he was creating and exhibiting his own work in galleries in London, Oxford and Wales. A clue to an aspect of his style lies in the title of a film which BBC Wales made in 1967. It was See What the Next Tide Brings. This conjures up not just the importance of the sea for him in the landscape where he then lived in Pendine, Carmarthenshire but also the serendipity of the finds from which he had created artwork since the latter half of the 1950s. There were abstract constructions in relief, formal in style, collage and utilizing both found natural objects and scrap manmade objects. Shells, slate and wood, watch parts and glass, cut up brassware, string, paper and other materials figured. The works evoked nature and the seasons. His ‘Pembrokeshire Panel’ can be seen in Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery in Merthyr Tydfil. His work is found in galleries from the Tate in London to others in Prague, Dublin, New York and elsewhere, in museums and private collections, whether in pen and ink, mixed media or construction from found objects.

Arthur Giardelli at work

In 1969 Arthur bought the former school house ‘The Golden Plover’ near Warren, Castlemartin in Pembrokeshire, as a home, a studio and a gallery space. There he lived with his second wife, artist Beryl (Bim), née Butler. Given Giardelli’s Christian pacifism it seems ironic that nowadays Estate Agents highlight The Golden Plover’s spectacular view over a Ministry of Defence Training area. This talented man, cosmopolitan in outlook, devoted to communicating art and promoting modern artistry in Wales, had found his feet and confidence as an artist in our Merthyr Tydfil County  Borough.

See many examples of his work on the Mutual Art website (free to log into).

https://www.mutualart.com/Artist/Arthur-Giardelli/9EE7775ED81C701B/Artworks

Read Arthur Giardelli obituaries in the Guardian and Independent newspapers

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/nov/11/arthur-giardelli-obituary

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/arthur-giardelli-painter-steeped-in-the-avantgarde-who-used-found-objects-to-evoke-the-forces-of-nature-1815655.html

Vincent Charles Arthur Giardelli MBE, artist, 1911 to 2009 – part 1

by Christine Trevett

Part One: Coming to South Wales 

“When the train finally pulled into Merthyr, I felt I’d come home”
(Arthur Giardelli to Meic Stephens)

There were, a few years ago, still people of very mature years around Merthyr Tydfil who remembered Arthur Giardelli as a teacher of music and language in Cyfarthfa Castle secondary school. One or two I met did not know that he was also (or especially) an artist, and a significant one in the history of 20th century art in Wales. They knew him only as a Cyfarthfa teacher. In 1940 he had arrived in Merthyr with his school as an evacuee teacher, coming from Folkestone. It was the start of a remarkable story for the man who made Wales his home and who had loved Wales ever since family holidays in Pembrokeshire in his teenage years.

Arthur Giardelli was a Londoner, son of an English mother and an Italian father, a father who had become determinedly ‘English’ and had abandoned things ‘continental’. His son Arthur was highly intelligent and talented. He studied modern languages at Oxford and in parallel did some study at Ruskin School of Art. He was also passionate about music and  would use his viola and piano  playing skills (and those of his first wife Phillis, a very talented pianist) to good effect in due course. Unlike his father’s indifference, Arthur became steeped in knowledge of the European scene and of avant garde art. Above all he was a good communicator and widely read, a man who wanted to see the arts appreciated by everyone and accessible to all. Art in Wales would gain from that passion.

In 1940 his wartime pupils from Folkestone’s Harvey Grammar School shared Cyfarthfa Castle school with the local classes on a ‘split day’ basis. Arthur Giardelli soon found himself  unemployed, though, a married man with two young children, sacked by Folkestone Education Authority. This was due to being  a pacifist  and an  admirer of Gandhi and now declaring himself a conscientious objector (C.O.). Fortunately the Dowlais Educational Settlement was on his doorstep and it had been involved in adult education and social care since 1929. Giardelli had been volunteering there. Its Warden, the sculptor and Londoner John Dennithorne was a Quaker, pacifist and fellow admirer of Gandhi. With the agreement of the Settlement’s Quaker committee he took the Giardelli family into Trewern House (the Settlement base), provided a maintenance grant while the result of the teacher’s Tribunal appearance was pending and employed him as a teacher. In Merthyr Central Library, in one of the boxes housing the John Dennithorne papers is a copy of the letter Dennithorne wrote on April 10th 1941, to the the Chairman of the Appeals Tribunal at Cardiff.  He was advocating Giardelli’s unconditional exemption from service because he was valuable as an educator and on other fronts. Through the Settlement, for example, he had oversight of a newly-formed mixed-sex social club for young factory workers; he led members of Settlement classes in a new allotment scheme in which produce would  also be shared with the elderly, infirm and those feeling the loss of their gardening menfolk who were now away at war. As he reported himself, Arthur Giardelli was also a part time fireman. Interestingly, in his letter John Dennithorne made no reference to Giardelli as an artist, for that was not how he was known at the time.

Arthur was exempted from war service. It would be some time before he regained a teaching post, in Cyfarthfa school where he taught music, languages and English. At the time there were objections to the Education Committee from people who felt someone who had been a C.O. should not be given such employment.

Through the war years Giardelli with his wife provided very regular classical music recitals and recital lectures at The Armoury, Dowlais (advertised in the Merthyr Express, free entry but contributions welcome to defray expenses), and with Mervyn Fry (another Settlement employee) provided recorded music sessions, lectures about musicians, painters and the interrelation of music, painting and literature, while John Dennithorne the Warden gave scheduled lectures on the theory and practice of sculpture. It was all part of the morale building activity which the government wanted to see. Significantly during the war Arthur Giardelli also worked with CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), the forerunner of the Arts Council. It sent art exhibitions and theatrical performances around the country at this time, including to Merthyr and Dowlais, with very well known artists and performers. Among the artists exhibiting were Cedric Morris, who was already part of the story of the Dowlais/Merthyr art scene in other ways, and he had encouraged Giardelli.

In 1940 Dowlais must have seemed an unpromising place for an evacuee but there, Giardelli said,  he had encountered ‘a whole mixed body of people’, not just evacuated teachers and Merthyr’s middle and professional classes but miners who gathered to view art, ‘people of all classes’, as he recalled in an interview included in Derek Shiel’s 2001 published study of him (Arthur Giardelli: Paintings, Constructions, Relief  Sculptures, Bridgend: Seren).  In Dowlais, though, his own art work and move to a professional artist’s life had been encouraged.

To be continued…..