From guardian.co.uk
Henry Rothschild
Leading figure in contemporary British crafts and design
- Andrew Greg
- The Guardian, Wednesday 10 June 2009
Henry Rothschild, founder of the Primavera gallery, who has died aged 95, was the most influential entrepreneur in the field of contemporary crafts in Britain from the late 1940s to the 1970s. His shop, with its branches in London and Cambridge, and the major selling exhibitions he organised launched the careers of some of Britain's most important studio potters. He brought a European sensibility to the world of British crafts. This, combined with his passion and energy, made him a unique, even idiosyncratic, force which some found hard to deal with.
For Bernard and Janet Leach in the 1950s, Rothschild was "the most active person in London" in the crafts, and Primavera the "only craft shop in England". His rapid expansion into the contract furnishing business, and into postcard publishing, and the effect he had on the creation of local education authority and museum craft collections illustrate his wider concern, which was to influence the public appreciation of contemporary craft and design in his adopted homeland.
Rothschild was born in Frankfurt into a family of industrialists, the youngest of four. He had been expected to join the family business and initially studied chemistry and physics at the University of Frankfurt. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933 he was sent to England and read natural sciences at Cambridge University. He became a British subject in 1938 and joined the Territorial Army's Signal Corps in 1939.
It was Rothschild's war experience that set his life on its new path. Serving in the British army in Italy, he discovered the traditional weavers and potters of Tuscany and Bologna. On his return in 1944, he began to search out the English equivalents of the Italian crafts- people he had so admired. With the advice of the Rural Industries Bureau he met the few surviving traditional basket makers and country potters as well as the newer artist potters: Bernard Leach in St Ives, Leach's pupils Harry and May Davis, Ray Finch, an apprentice of Leach's contemporary Michael Cardew, and Lucie Rie, with her more urban style.
Immediately, Rothschild began trading, opening Primavera in Chelsea's Sloane Street in 1946. In the dark postwar years the shop was a beacon of eclectic good taste, combining ceramics, glass, textiles and furniture. By the mid- 1950s, Primavera was attracting architects and interior designers and had developed a strong range of contemporary furniture by young designers such as Nigel Walters, whose standard lamp became an icon of modernist design.
Rothschild's successful collaborations with designers led him to create Primavera (Contracts) Ltd in the late 1950s, which won many large furnishing contracts in the booming university building programme of the late 1950s and 1960s. Its student furniture was flexible and multipurpose, although the beds were infamously narrow.
Back at the shop, Primavera began its sequence of selling exhibitions that launched the careers of some of Britain's most important studio potters with their first solo exhibitions, most famously giving Hans Coper his first one-man show in 1958. Rothschild nurtured a generation of potters using handbuilding and sculptural techniques including Dan Arbeid, Ian Auld and Gillian Lowndes, Ruth Duckworth, Gordon Baldwin, Ian Godfrey and Ewen Henderson.
Primavera was of course a commercial gallery, but Rothschild was never very good at making money. It was his wife Pauline who worked to ensure that his enterprises paid their way, that his tempests were calmed and that sacked staff were reinstated. Perceptive potters such as Alan Caiger-Smith recognised that it was worth cultivating the friendship of the only professional customer who would criticise his work.
Rothschild also had a significant role in that idealistic phenomenon of the postwar decades - the school art collection. Education authorities from the Greater London Council to the West Riding were building up loan collections of art and craft for circulation to schools. Primavera became a trustworthy port of call for LEA art advisers. Important museum collections of studio ceramics, such as the circulation department's at the Victoria and Albert Museum and that at Paisley Museum, also benefited from Rothschild as an informal adviser.
The opening of Primavera on King's Parade, Cambridge, in 1959 (where it still survives under new ownership) allowed for a different direction, showing more painters and with more of a regional focus. When, in 1971, Rothschild closed the London shop, which had been in Walton Street since 1967, his own ambitions also changed. He diverted his energies into creating a remarkable series of large selling exhibitions at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge and across Germany.
Rothschild was unique among his peers in energetically promoting British crafts in Europe. In 1968, at Primavera in London, he had mounted a pioneering exhibition of six leading German potters, who still, 40 years later, show together as the London Group.
In 1980 Rothschild handed over Primavera to his manager Ronald Pile. He began to think about the future of his own collection, built up slowly over 50 years. Principally comprising ceramics and perfectly reflecting his personal taste, the much-handled collection of nearly 400 pieces was kept on tobacco-stained shelves and stacked in cupboards in Henry and Pauline's small, architect-designed house in Cambridge.
In the early 1990s Rothschild developed a fruitful relationship with the Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead which enthusiastically accepted many loans and gifts, and in 1995 organised a touring exhibition, Primavera: Pioneering Craft and Design 1945-1995. Most recently he had been working with the gallery to create a study centre devoted to more than 300 pieces from his collection.
Spontaneous and intuitive, with strong views but great integrity, Rothschild was inevitably not a good committee man and was suspicious of the craft bureaucracy. His only notable formal position was as the first secretary of the British section of the World Crafts Council in the mid 1960s.
In 1990, Rothschild founded and developed the Cambridge charity Wintercomfort, for the city's homeless. He married Pauline, who had worked at Primavera, in 1952. She predeceased him in 2008. He is survived by a daughter, Liz, and two grandchildren.
• Henry Rothschild, craft promoter and gallery owner, born 21 November 1913; died 27 May 2009 |
From Times on Line
From The Times
June 3, 2009
Henry Rothschild: gallery owner
Henry Rothschild was the founder of the Primavera Gallery, the leading retail outlet for craft from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s and considered by many to be the finest craft gallery in Britain. His activities in the years after the Second World War made him one of the most influential figures in the craft world and his support of innovative studio ceramics was crucial to its development.
Henry Rothschild was born in 1913, the fourth child in a prosperous Frankfurt family. His paternal grandfather had emigrated to the US and founded the successful family firm dealing in scrap metal. His mother loved culture, and the young Henry began collecting all sorts of diverse objects — buttons, snail cases, miniature cotton reels — and spent hours in Trödelmarkt in Frankfurt. He wished to study art history or architecture, but his father wanted him to join the family business and he was sent to Frankfurt University to read chemistry and physics.
When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, Rothschild went to England to continue his studies, first at Chelsea Polytechnic and then at Cambridge where he read natural sciences. After a brief period of working for his family in London and New York, he became a British subject in 1938 and later joined the Signal Corps of the Territorial Army where he served as an ordnance officer in Italy. His wartime experience — particularly his contact with regional crafts in Italy — was to become an enduring influence.
He returned to England in 1944 and immediately began to scour the country in search of the finest craftsmen. In February 1946 he opened Primavera at 149 Sloane Street with the declared intention of showing “the best things whether hand or machine made”. Primavera was innovative and eclectic and was greeted with enthusiasm in the austere environment of postwar Britain. The gallery showed a diverse range of craft and design, including folk art from many countries, rush-seated chairs by Edward Gardiner, traditional baskets, toys (most notably by Sam Smith), and textiles by handweavers such as Ethel Mairet as well as manufactured fabrics from firms such as Edinburgh Weavers.
In 1959 Rothschild opened a second shop in King’s Parade, Cambridge, which had previously been the home of the Cambridge Society of Designer-Craftsmen. This was run along the same lines as the London shop, but there was a much greater emphasis on fine art and regional work as well as dresses and jewellery. It particularly supported fine East Anglian artists such as the painter Mary Potter and the sculptor Geoffrey Clarke.
Primavera quickly became a mecca for fine textiles from all over Europe, but it was in the showing of studio ceramics that it was most influential. Rothschild had a gifted eye and was able to select the finest work.
As well as functional stoneware from the Leach Pottery, the Winchcombe Pottery, Harry Davis’s Crowan Pottery and Lucie Rie, there were pots from Henry Hammond, Helen Pincombe, Michael Cardew, Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie, Hans Coper and nearly every other leading potter working at that time. Rothschild’s support of the fine tin-glaze makers such as William Newland and Stephen Sykes (whom Bernard Leach disparagingly called “Picassiettes”) and, particularly, the radical new handbuilders was vital to the development of studio ceramics. Rothschild exhibited work by Dan Arbeid, Ruth Duckworth, Ian Godfrey, Gillian Lowndes, Gordon Baldwin, Bryan Newman, Ian Auld and others.
Primavera was almost alone until the explosion of craft shops in the late 1960s, and some of these artists would probably have stopped potting had it not been for his support.
Rothschild also had an important role in building up museum and education authority craft collections — particularly studio ceramics. He is responsible for many pieces in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Greater London Council, the Leicestershire Education Authority and others. The ceramic collection formed in the 1960s by the Paisley Museum and the fine Bristol schools’ collection particularly show his influence.
Another successful Rothschild enterprise was Primavera (Contracts), a company he set up to supply and design furniture for universities and colleges. His first contract was supplying furnishings for Goldsmiths College in the late 1950s and many other commissions followed. By the mid-1960s Primavera designs included several types of modular seating, a range of elegant and simple wooden furniture manufactured by Gordon Russell, a number of printed fabrics and the “university” blanket-bedspread which won the Design Centre Award in 1965. Rothschild believed in flexibility and individuality and that students needed to be able to express their own taste.
As the postwar university expansion slowed and universities began appointing their own furnishing officers, Rothschild gradually ran down this side of his activities. The London shop moved to Walton Street in 1967 and was eventually closed in 1970. Rothschild then concentrated on the Cambridge shop (which he finally handed over to Ronald Pile in 1980) and on his impressive programme of exhibitions.
This began with three shows in 1953: two continental potters, Francine Del Pierre and Albert Diato, at Primavera; a large show of British baskets at the Tea Centre in Regent Street; and Engelse Ceramiek for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Over the next 30 years he organised more than 100 exhibitions of craft — many at Primavera, others at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, (the gallery attached to the home of the collector Jim Ede) and at museums at home and abroad.
By far the most influential of these exhibitions were those of ceramics. While he showed nearly every top British potter, Rothschild’s regular exhibitions of the new handbuilders were most groundbreaking. He also exhibited many foreign potters in England, most notably the German potters Beate Kuhn, Karl and Ursula Scheid and Margarete Schott.
Probably most important were the series of big exhibitions of British potters he organised in German museums in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These were selling exhibitions with illustrated catalogues and not only did they effectively promote British studio ceramics abroad but they also catalysed the international reputation of a number of our finest potters. Some, such as Colin Pearson, are now as well known in Germany as they are in Britain.
Over the years Rothschild built up a substantial personal collection of postwar ceramics which was exhibited at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1976; much of it he later gave to the Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead.
Rothschild met his wife, Pauline, when she worked at Primavera, and they celebrated their 50th anniversary in 2002.
He was a larger-than-life figure who never lost his non-Englishness. He could be warm and friendly and rude and insulting all at the same time. He was known both for his extreme generosity and for his occasionally sharp dealings. Whatever his mood, he was always enthusiastic, energetic and inspiring. He was once described as a “one-man Crafts Council”. It certainly would be difficult to think of anyone who did more for British crafts.
Rothschild’s wife, Pauline, predeceased him. He is survived by their daughter.
Henry Rothschild, gallerist, was born on November 21, 1913. He died on May 27, 2009, aged 95
From The Times
June 12, 2009
Lives remembered: Henry Rothschild
Philomena Guillebaud and Nicky Padfield write: Your otherwise splendid obituary of Henry (June 3) made no mention of his concern for the plight of the homeless in Cambridge which led to his setting up Wintercomfort for the Homeless, a Cambridge charity still doing excellent work.
In the late 1980s Henry and Pauline (his wife) visited night shelters in Norwich, Peterborough and Bury St Edmunds before embarking upon a campaign to create something equivalent in Cambridge. It soon became apparent that no support would be forthcoming from the city authorities, who held that a night shelter simply deflected financing from the more important goal of providing permanent housing.
In this negative atmosphere anybody but Henry would have given up, but, backed by Pauline, he started, in January 1990, a small operation, using only volunteers to provide food and (whenever feasible) shelter in the evening hours, in the expectation that it would grow and eventually result in the creation of a permanent night shelter.
Thanks to the meetings Henry organised, volunteers poured in. Pauline organised the food supplies, others collected and distributed blankets and sleeping bags. Henry was everywhere.
In January 1991 Wintercomfort operated its first temporary night shelter for six weeks, housed first in the parish house of the Unitarian Church in Emmanuel Road and later St Laurence’s Catholic Church in Milton Road. It was entirely run by volunteers, people slept on foam rubber mats on the floor, and Pauline and others got up at dawn to cook magnificent breakfasts. It was heroic, but somewhat shambolic, and it was soon clear that professional support was needed.
Three things then occurred in 199l: Wintercomfort acquired the status of an official charity, it received a grant from the Department of the Environment to hire a social worker as project co-ordinator, and in October, Henry, aged 78, suffered a severe heart attack.
He reluctantly yielded to the urging of Pauline and his doctors and resigned from the committee of management, but remained for the rest of his life passionately concerned for Wintercomfort. In 1994, after five years of being itself homeless and shifting from one unsatisfactory venue to another, Wintercomfort acquired its own premises at Overstream House in Victoria Avenue.
Henry was a man of vision with amazing qualities: extraordinary determination and energy, great empathy — his rapport with the clientele of Wintercomfort was striking — and an ability to make people do much more than they thought they could, all washed down with a mischievous sense of humour. With Pauline, quiet, organised and practical, they made an amazing team.
He was a constant reminder that we should all go that extra mile.
|
