A world apart

John Tunnard: Inner Space to Outer Space
until 6 June

St Ives and Beyond
until 31 May
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

John Tunnard (1900–71) is one of that shamefully extensive body of distinguished 20th-century British artists whose work is largely unfamiliar today. For reasons best known to itself, the Tate doesn’t see it as its duty to bring such artists before the public for reassessment, so the job is left to others. Thankfully, there are smaller museums in this country with the necessary initiative and interest, notably Pallant House in Chichester, currently mounting the first museum show of Tunnard in more than 30 years. This is a broadly chronological survey which begins in the mid-1930s when Tunnard was already a mature artist, and examines his achievement thematically through three rooms and over three decades.

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Tunnard was a bit of a character, a semi-professional jazz drummer and party-thrower, given to wearing loud checks and a pink tie and to smoking a pipe. His friend Julian Trevelyan said he had ‘a face that’s a mixture between a fox’s and a giant panda’. Tunnard enrolled as a design student at the Royal College of Art in 1919, with textile design as his specialism. In the 1920s he worked for textile and carpet manufacturers and became the fabric selector for John Lewis. But he wanted to paint, and to this end he moved to Cornwall with his wife and settled in Cadgwith. Both husband and wife designed and hand-block printed silk to make a living, and Tunnard painted. His early work has strong affinities with Miró and Klee, and he is often associated with the Surrealist movement. But he deliberately kept his distance, and looked first to the natural world and then to space travel for his inspiration, rather than following the dictates of the subconscious as the Surrealists preached.