In 1951, the artist and writer Barbara Jones (1912–78) organised an exhibition called Black Eyes and Lemonade at the Whitechapel Gallery celebrating the popular arts of toys, festivities, souvenirs and advertising, to reveal to a largely unsuspecting public the richness of vernacular art in Britain. The original exhibition was evidently an Aladdin’s cave of objects, from decorated pub mirrors to ships’ figureheads, horse brasses, corn dollies and needle packets. Jones crossed the boundaries of folk art, mingling the handmade with the machine-made, and the traditional with the contemporary and ephemeral.
She wrote a book about the subject, published the same year and called The Unsophisticated Arts. This has just been beautifully republished by Little Toller Books (£30, hardback), with lots more visual material, a foreword by Peter Blake and an introduction by the art director and set designer Simon Costin, who is also the founder and director of the Museum of British Folklore. In the preface to her book, Jones states that it is about ‘the things that people make for themselves or that are manufactured in their taste’. Not a bad definition of popular art.
The current exhibition at the Whitechapel is a small archive display in what was the old Whitechapel Public Library when I lived in the area, and which has now been subsumed into the Gallery. The display consists of five flat cabinets around the walls of a small room, one counter display case and two more flat cabinets in the middle of the room. There are a number of works and photographs hung on the walls and a few free-standing objects. Chief among these is an Airedale Fireplace, a dog-shaped design in biscuit-coloured ceramic tiles, which featured in the original 1951 exhibition. It’s in a poorer state today, if you compare it with photos of its former splendour, having lost a number of tiles along its back and at the tip of its tail, but it still has panache, and reminds me of the Scottie dog electric bar fire that Craigie Aitchison used to have on his south London hearth.
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