Radical Women: Jessica Dismorr and her Contemporaries

[ Exhibition )

Abstract painting featuring overlapping geometric shapes,

Discover a fascinating history of alliances and connections among the women artists of the early 20th century, centred on the pioneering work of Jessica Dismorr (1885 – 1939).

An artist at the forefront of the avant-garde in Britain – from her involvement with the Rhythm group during the late 1910s, to vorticism, post-war figuration and the abstraction of the 1930s – Jessica Dismorr (1885 – 1939) has since, unjustly, fallen into obscurity.

The exhibition will explore how Dismorr and her female contemporaries engaged with modernist literature and radical politics through their art, including their contributions to campaigns for women’s suffrage and the anti-fascist organisations of the 1930s. 80 works including paintings, sculptures, graphic art and archival materials, some of which have never been exhibited before, will be on show.

Artists included in the exhibition will be Dismorr’s fellow Rhythmists, Anne Estelle Rice and Ethel Wright; Helen Saunders, the only other female founding signatory of the Vorticists; Paule Vezelay, who showed with Dismorr with the London Group, and Sophie Fedorovitch and Winifred Nicholson who exhibited at the Seven and Five Society in the 1920s. Dismorr was one of only seven British women at D.O.O.D (de Olympiade onder Dictatuur) Amsterdam in 1936, the exhibition designed to counter Josef Goebbels’ Nazi Art Olympiad, and her work will be seen for the first time in the company of other women who exhibited with anti-fascist organisations in the 1930s, including Edith Rimmington, Betty Rea and Barbara Hepworth.

She pursued her work despite periods of debilitating mental illness, and died in London by her own hand in August 1939.

A fully illustrated book by Alicia Foster published by Lund Humphries will tell the story of Dismorr’s life and work in relation to her women contemporaries, and include a collection of her poetry.

Curated by Alicia Foster in partnership with Pallant House Gallery.

I seek the profoundest teachings of the inanimate. I feel the emotion of related shapes.

Jessica Dismorr

Book cover with abstract geometric shapes in white, grey and brown tones.

The first book to survey the significant contribution made by Jessica Dismorr and her female contemporaries to the history of British art and the literature of the period

This book is a revelation — fascinating in the tracing of Jessica Dismorr’s artistic development, and illuminating too about the careers of women artists in her day.

Jenny Uglow

Buy now at Pallant Bookshop

What the press said

This powerful exhibition celebrates a defiant group who, as the suffragette movement began to grow, claimed a new place for women in art and politics.

Chloe Ashby, The Guardian

With women’s work still woefully underrepresented in the art world, it’s heartening to see an entire floor of Pallant House given over to lesser-known female artists sitting in incontrovertible harmony with each other.

Harriet Hall, The Independent

Dismorr is now receiving her due, though, as the principal subject of a rousing, thoughtful exhibition at Pallant House Gallery.

Lucy Davies, The Telegraph