Jessica Dismorr trained at the Slade from 1902-3, under the American painter Max Bohm in Etaples in 1904, and in Paris in the early 1910s at the Academie de la Palette, where the teachers included Metzinger, de Segonzac and J.D. Fergusson. During her career she exhibited with the London Group, the 7 & 5 Society and Abstraction-Creation. But it is for her involvement in Vorticism, alongside the only other woman member of the group, Helen Saunders, that she is now remembered, even though few of her works from this period have been traced. She joined the Rebel Art Center in 1914. was a signatory of the manifesto in the Vorticist publication Blast in that year and contributed to the group's exhibitions.
Urban space is often the subject of Dismorr's Vorticist art and writings. For Dismorr and Saunders, the Vorticist rejection of the status quo and embrace of the modem age chimed with their desire to radically rework women's role.
In 1925 Dismorr had her first solo exhibition at the Mayor Gallery. London. During the late 1920s and 1930s she made portraits. She painted the artist Katherina Dawson Giles, whom she had met in Etaples in 1904 and whose family home in London she shared for a number of years in the 1930s, and also made a series of drawings of young poets, including Dylan Thomas and Cecil Day Lewis. Her later paintings, such as Related Forms (1937, Tate), moved again towards abstraction: cool arrangements of soft green-grey and putty colors. The work of Dismorr and Giles was seen together at a joint exhibition at the Fine Art Society, London, in 2000. The accompanying catalogue by Quentin Stevenson gives an overview of their lives and careers. |
