Claudia Barbieri Childs visited Pallant House and the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft in Sussex to see their latest exhibitions.
Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists, running until 2 November at Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery, explores the many different ways that 20th and 21st-century artists working in Britain have reflected on kinship and identity by turning their artistic talents on one another.
In more than 150 paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures and installations, the exhibition follows a chronological trajectory from William Orpen’s portrait of the archbohemian Augustus John, painted in 1900, to Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas’s ongoing exchange of amicable visual insults and repartees.
“All portraits can say something about personality and the way people represent themselves,” says Melanie Vandenbrouck, the show’s curator: “But what is particularly intriguing about portraits of artists by other artists is that you have two peers looking at each other with affection, love, respect, rivalry and so much more that is not usually present.”
Highlights include Kit Wood’s 1928 evocation of his friends Ben and Winifred Nicholson with their first child and “Lilian Painting David (Painting Lilian)”, a 1929 portrait by David Bomberg of his wife Lilian Holt at work on a portrait of himself. “Being Frida”, a 2000 photographic giclee print by Mary McCartney, captures Tracy Emin transforming herself into Frida Kahlo.
Relationships are explored – Lucian Freud and Celia Paul; Paula Rego and Victor Willing; Cedric Morris, Arthur Lett-Haines and Frances Hodgkins; Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Women artists, in particular, are rescued from stereotypical male-gaze roles of muse and model, recognizing agency and achievement.
Chantal Joffe and Ishbel Myerscough have been painting one another ever since they met at the Glasgow School of Art in 1987. Myerscough’s “Two Painters” is a witty, no-holds-barred celebration of their friendship: Stripped for battle and wielding brushes like weapons, each paint literally, the other’s face. It’s a show-stopper, and in this age of the selfie, it’s totally in the zeitgeist, as indeed is the whole show.
Apart from revealing intriguing and unknown facets of the relationships between artists, the show records the networks of Britain’s artistic avant-garde and the art schools they emerged from, notably the Slade, the Royal College or the Glasgow School of Art. From Walter Sickert’s Fitzroy Street Group, it progresses through the Bloomsbury set, the Newlyn School in Cornwall, the Camden Town and London artists, the 1980s BLK group of young black artists and the 1990s YBAs.
The third and last in a trilogy of exhibitions focused on landscape, still-life and portraiture; the show fits within the gallery’s mission to develop new perspectives on British art, looking at famous relationships, hidden narratives and new connections while also giving lesser-known artists a platform for their work.
As another part of that mission, the gallery is also currently running an exhibition curated by the Bangladesh-born, London-based artist Rana Begum: Opposing Forms pairs works from the Pallant House permanent collection with sculptural installations by young contemporary artists Gillies Adamson Semple, Mary Hurrell, Zara Ramsay and Asha Vaidyanath. Begum’s own contribution is a site-specific installation: connected organic forms sculpted in multi-coloured mesh cascade down the gallery stairwell, the star piece of the show.
Another Sussex culture hub on a mission is the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, nestled in a fold of the South Downs near Lewes. Celebrating Ditchling village’s rich legacy as a centre of 20th-century arts and crafts, the Museum’s summer show, “It Takes a Village”, highlights the lives and work of the artists and craftspeople who made Ditchling their home, including members of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a unique Roman Catholic artistic community founded in 1920.
Another Sussex culture hub on a mission is the Ditchling Museum of Art +Craft, nestled in a fold of the South Downs near Lewes. Marking the Museum’s 40th anniversary, its summer show celebrates the lives and work of the artists and craftspeople who have made, and still make, Ditchling’s village and Common their home, including members of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a unique Roman Catholic artistic community founded in 1920.
Like Pallant House, the Ditchling show mixes canonical references, Eric Gill, Frank Brangwyn or the poet and painter David Jones, for example, with less widely recognized names such as the calligrapher Edward Johnston or the painter and playwright Amy Sawyer.
Also given space are works by Ditchling’s current generation of creatives, heirs to the village’s rich 20th-century arts and crafts tradition. Alongside these, a team of disabled and neurodivergent co-curators have produced a set of interactive displays bringing back to life the now-lost Gospels workshop of the pioneering weaver and dyer Ethel Mairet.
Titled It Takes a Village, the show explores “the really interesting relationship between the Arts and Crafts people and the village,” says the Museum’s director, Steph Fuller.
“This exhibition is about people, and it’s about place,” Fuller says: “Without the village, there would be no arts community, and the village has been influenced by those people to become the place it is today. There’s still a huge contemporary group of arts and crafts people living here who are a critical part of the story: It’s not only about the past, it’s also about now.”
Among the 100-odd pieces on show, some of the most intriguing are by lesser-known talents, among them a set of satirical cartoons by the wood engraver Philip Hagreen. A committed distributist who combined the Catholic faith with anarcho-socialist anti-capitalism, Hagreen expresses complex ideas with simple lines and mordant wit, in lampoons of smug gentry exploiting and oppressing working people — “Trying to make ends meet”, “Raising the standard of living”, “The whip” — his images say more than a thousand words.
For the Museum, as the repository of Ditchling’s cultural legacy, the elephant in the room is the deeply equivocal nature of its leading protagonist, Gill, a performatively pious Christian and obsessive sexual predator, not least on his own family. To Fuller’s credit, she tackles the issue head-on in a section of the show co-curated by a religious association of sexual abuse survivors.
Whether this is totally successful is open to argument. Though the expressed aim of the display is to focus on the experiences of Gill’s daughters, Petra, Elizabeth and Joanna, its exploration of their stories is sketchy. Gill, the abuser, meanwhile, is barely there, his presence limited to a pair of decent but anodyne profile portraits of Petra and Betty, a couple of at most mildly erotic religious woodcuts and a frankly mediocre mirrorscope watercolour of The Annunciation, presented as evidence of his fixation on female submission. More controversial works, including well-known nude studies of Petra and Betty in the Museum’s collection, are absent in deference to the co-curators’ sensibilities.
What remains is a cabinet of family photos, some childhood mementoes and a scattering of other memorabilia, most notably Petra’s wedding dress, hand-woven by her in Mairet’s workshop and worn for her marriage to her father’s apprentice.
As an exercise in giving his daughters a voice in their story, it remains somewhat muted.
Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 17 May – 2 November 2025
Rana Begum Curates: Opposing Forms, Pallant House Gallery, 17 May – 2 November 2025
It takes a village, Ditchling Museum of Art+Craft, 5 July 2025 – 1 February, 2026