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Your support makes all the difference.An important part of Andrew Forge's life is missing from Cathy Courtney's obituary [12 September], writes Paul Trewhela: the period in which he approached the master/apprentice legacy of David Bomberg.
This was in between his tuition by William Coldstream in the Euston Road manner in 1947 and his later turn towards abstraction (and academic work and residence in the United States) following the American Abstract Expressionist exhibition at the Tate in 1959.
His approach towards the work of Bomberg accompanied a tortuous relationship with Dorothy Mead, who had painted and studied with Bomberg since 1944 and was a founder member of the Borough Group (1946-51). They met at the Slade during the mid-1950s while Forge was teaching there and Mead a very confident and influential student. (Bomberg had asked Coldstream to enrol her and Dennis Creffield as students when he finished teaching at the Borough Polytechnic.)
Largely at the urging of Mead and her previous partner, Cliff Holden, who had been first president of the Borough Group, Forge curated the first serious serious tribute in London to Bomberg's life's work, at the Arts Council in 1958, in the year following his death. Over the next several years Forge exhibited with Mead, Holden and Dennis Creffield in a number of London exhibitions, and wrote about their work. All have work in the Arts Council Collection.
At this time he was referred to by his friend, colleague and rival David Sylvester as (with Joe Tilson) one of "five Bomberg School painters" exhibiting in London, though the "least malerisch of the group". The ending of his relationship with Mead, who became President of the London Group shortly before her death from a brain tumour in 1975, was roughly contemporary with the abatement of his appreciation of Bomberg.
A powerful painting by Mead, owned by Holden in Sweden, imagines her and Forge in a tense and distanced setting in her flat in Ladbroke Grove.
Forge's "ethical" approach to teaching (discussed by David Cohen [13 September]) was something worked through with Dorothy Mead, who in this sense was his tutor, drawing on her experience with Bom-berg at the Borough Polytechnic. For Bomberg, the ethical was central in the teaching and in the imaginative creation of the work.
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