Interviewed as she reached her eightieth birthday for the Royal Academy Magazine (Autumn 1987) the painter and gallery director Helen Lessore recalled her childhood: 'I had a great aunt who used to give me books of Titian, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck and Murillo... I had been brought up to the idea that I would be a painter as a matter of course because my mother thought I had talent.'
During the 1920s the young Helen Brook had been a prize-winning Slade student- She wanted to teach, but found 'it was not possible in those days for a woman to teach in an art school', and instead became a secretary at the Beaux-Arts Gallery, London. She married the gallery's owner Frederick Lessore, taking over his death in 195]. Helen Lessore slept in a bed in the centre of the gallery surrounded by the figurative art she loved, by artists including Frank Auerbach, Sheila Fell, Lucian Freud and R.B Kitaj.
Lessore was one of only four women among the forty-five artists included in Kitaj's seminal show of contemporary figurative art, The Human Clay, held at the Hayward Gallery in 1976. She exhibited a pencil Study of Frank Auerbach (1974), which is now owned by the Arts Council, as is her Self-Portrait II (1966), a painting of her strong profile In Symposium /some of the artists she worked with are seen conversing on the island of Patmos, a reference to Lessore's belief in the enduring legacy of classical Mediterranean culture, which she explored further in her book A Partial Testament Essays on some Modems in the Great Tradition (London 1986). Her influence was celebrated in the 1984 Tate exhibition. |
