Partners in life and art for 60 years

On the evening of Armistice Day, November 11 1918, a bohemian young couple threw a party at their Chelsea home. The man of the house, 24-year-old Arthur Lett-Haines, was already on his second marriage and these high-spirited end-of-war festivities were about to blow that one apart too. Among the guests was a handsome artist called Cedric Morris and shortly afterwards the two men started a relationship that lasted the rest of their lives.

Portraits of the two currently hang side by side in Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, Suffolk, where an exhibition is dedicated to their work. Both pictures are by Cedric Morris, the better known of the two. Lett-Haines, painted in 1925, is dressed in a fitted tweed jacket, his long handsome face vignetted against a map of Morocco; Morris in 1930, in his early 40s, with a fine head of wavy hair, his head tilted perhaps towards a mirror as his self-portrait takes shape. They are a compelling pair of early 20th-century aesthetes.

“I first became aware of Morris at the Chelsea Flower Show,” says London dealer Philip Mould, who will be showing one of the artist’s flower paintings, “September Diagram”, at Frieze Masters (October 9-13). “He was as much a horticulturalist as a painter, and someone was showing bearded irises that Morris had bred. After seeing those exquisite flowers, I really started to notice his work.” In “September Diagram”, a white vase is filled with an arrangement of yellow, blue and orange flowers in a Cubist interior. The painting, made in the 1940s, is typical of Morris’s best-known work.

The exhibition in Suffolk, though — Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines — shows a whole lot more. It begins in 1920, when they arrive in postwar Paris; the plan had been emigration to America: the second Mrs Lett-Haines sailed off alone. There, Morris was inspired by Pierre Bonnard’s passion for colour and refusal to follow the decorative rules, by Cézanne’s remembered landscapes.

His “Café la Rotonde” is a riposte to Renoir’s immersive bar scenes — Morris’s is all abrupt angles and almost infinite perspective. Like fellow British Modernists, he believed that contemporary art required both flat fields of colour and decoration, as well as texture, taking this to an extreme in “Experiment in Textures” (1923). A Cubist abstraction of forms and colours that radiate from the centre of the canvas, thickly spackled patches of paint create near three-dimensional forms.

For Lett-Haines, Surrealism was the thing and dominated his artistic career until his death in 1978. He had seen Giorgio de Chirico’s work in Italy and Wyndham Lewis’s in London and kept those memories close. Weird things happen in his paintings — blue dancing figures; a lilac horse that wouldn’t look out of place on a Kandinsky. Further into the exhibition, in “Vue d’une Fenetre” (1967), a cyclops-headed naked man is chased by powerful penis-like creatures. Brilliant white highlights streaked on the man’s orange flesh give the work an extraordinary, if overwrought, sense of movement.

Equally, for those familiar with Morris’s lovely flowers, his portraits will come as a surprise. Not so much unflattering as unsentimental, sitters including the writers Antonia White and Rosamond Lehmann stare wide-eyed in the headlights of his gaze. (Completed works tended not to enhance his relationships with his subjects.) He did not work from preliminary sketches but developed a process of starting with the inner corner of the sitter’s left eyebrow and working up and then down the face. Nearly 90 years later, their immediacy prevails.

If you are wondering quite how they got away with all this unconventionality, of both lifestyle and output, the answer lies in Suffolk. In 1929, after criss-crossing the Channel, they took a lease on a property called The Pound in Higham, Suffolk, and shortly after left London for good. This allowed them to live in a rural bohemian bubble, resistant to society’s judgment of them, as well as prevailing London trends. But they were not entirely removed from social reality. Morris often returned to his native Wales and was appalled by the social injustice and deprivation he saw there, while early environmentalism eventually crept into his art. Outraged by the damaging use of pesticides, his 1960 “Landscape of Shame” depicts a field of dead birds, like corpses on a battlefield.

Believing in the power of art and education, in 1937 Morris and Lett-Haines opened the East Anglian School for Painting and Drawing in Dedham, Essex. Lucian Freud became their most famous student; in 1940 Morris painted Freud, then in his late teens, as a full-lipped, wan youth, and apparently Freud loved it.

Once they moved to nearby Benton End, not far from Sudbury, in 1939 — after Freud had (possibly apocryphally) burnt down the school with a lazily extinguished cigarette — their best-known student was Maggi Hambling. “It was the opposite of my home life, which I suppose was pretty conventional,” says Hambling in the exhibition catalogue. “It seemed very exotic. It wasn’t just the cooking, it was the whole atmosphere.” But the cooking and the wine were exotic and very much Lett-Haines’s occupation. Cookery writer Elizabeth David was a regular visitor; Morris’s deliciously pastel-coloured painting of eggs (1944) became one of her book covers.

By the late 1960s, the school had run its course, allowing Lett-Haines to return to the making of art. Alongside his increasingly sexual watercolours is a series of mini-sculptures that he called Humbles or Weirdies. “I have Lett-Haines paintings,” says Philip Mould. “But it is these objets trouvés that are far and away his best work.” Collecting detritus on his ironing board — crab shells, chicken bones, pencil shavings, matchsticks — and drying it in the Aga, Lett-Haines collaged these bits and pieces into fantastical forms. Otherworldly beings dredged from the depths of imagination, they are the apotheosis of the surreal. And Mould is right, they are his best work.

To November 3, gainsborough.org