The House Collection

 

Kettle's Yard House Guide

Published in 2002, this completely revised house guide is the ideal publication to prepare for a visit. Jim Ede's introduction to the 1970 handlist, in which he describes his motives in setting up Kettle's Yard, is followed by a new introduction tracing Ede's life and the history of the house, and a room by room description of the house.

The guide is generously illustrated with photographs of the rooms and individual works, and plans of each room. It includes biographical notes on artists represented in the collection.

 

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Kettle's Yard and its artists

This new and expanded edition draws on the Kettle's Yard archive, bringing together writings by Jim Ede and many of the artists represented in the collection including letters from Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, David Jones and Constantin Brancusi.

Ede's writings include extracts from his radio broadcast, A Room to Live in, where he describes the principles underlying his arrangement of living space, his ideas about the role of a work of art and his job specification for his successors!

 

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Savage Messiah

When Jim Ede's biography of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Savage Messiah, went out of print, Kettle's Yard and the Henry Moore Institute - which holds the original manuscript in its Leeds archive - joined forces to produce a new, expanded edition. Originally published in 1930 in 300 deluxe copies with the title A Life of Gaudier-Brzeska, a year later the 'popular' version, re-titled Savage Messiah, became a surprise bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. In the following decades the book, which played a major role in establishing Gaudier's reputation as a key figure of modern European sculpture, was reissued several times, and was also adapted for the big screen by Ken Russell in 1972.

Based mainly on Gaudier's correspondence with Sophie Brzeska and on her writings and journals, the book tells the story of the couple from their meeting in Paris in 1910 to the sculptor's death in the trenches in 1915, aged only 23. In compiling the book Ede used the materials available to him quite selectively, omitting for example extensive passages from the letters (often because too offensive or salacious) and later reducing the number of illustrations.

The new edition, curated by Sebastiano Barassi and Jon Wood and with contributions from Evelyn Silber, the foremost expert on Gaudier-Brzeska, presents for the first time an apparatus offering new readings of the book and framing it historically. In addition to the original text, it includes footnotes providing names and dates where these are now known and clarifying obscure references and passages; two essays exploring the genesis of the book, its critical reception and Ede's selective use of sources; three appendices with the passages omitted from the letters, a full list of sources and other unpublished material. The set of illustrations is significantly larger than in previous editions, resuming the selection devised by Ede for the deluxe version of 1930, which he considered 'the real book' mainly because of the quality of the images.

The publication was made possible by grants from the Henry Moore Foundation, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Gordon Fraser Charitable Trust.

 

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Light Spells

Photographs taken at Kettle's Yard by Kathryn Faulkner and Graham Murrell with an afterword by Ian Jeffrey

While Kettle's Yard remains the house that Jim Ede created, its rooms are constantly animated by the changing light of a particular time of day or season and by the eye of each visitor. Over the course of a full year, from shortest day to shortest day, Kathryn Faulkner and Graham Murrell took photographs inside Kettle's Yard, capturing those one-off moments and the continuing sense of human occupation.

In Graham Murrell's black and white photographs the stillness and abstract qualities of the house are played off against the fleeting incidents or accidents of light.

Kathryn Faulkner used two approaches. By exposing printing-out paper behind or sometimes beneath objects she created beautifully coloured, ghost-like images, as immaterial as memories. At the same time she took black and white photographs with a pin-hole camera, placing the camera on a table or a chest to give an object's eye-view of the room. These photographs, taken with long exposures, distil the light and atmosphere of a room over an hour or more.

'This beautiful book, filled with light from end to end. These are marvellous photos - Jim would love them, they are full of things he saw.'
Quince Graveson, Jim Ede's grand-daughter