Gladys Hynes Gets a Long-Delayed Spotlight at Charleston
A painter who moved easily through Britain’s avant-garde circles, won major prizes, and represented Great Britain at the 1924 Venice Biennale is finally getting a substantial museum-style reassessment. This month, Charleston in Lewes opens Gladys Hynes: Radical Lives, an exhibition that gathers 120 paintings, drawings, graphic designs, and sculptural works by Gladys Hynes (1888-1958), an artist whose name has largely slipped from the standard histories of early 20th-century British art.
The show was commissioned to address a gap in the story of the Bloomsbury-associated Omega Workshops, where Hynes was recruited by Roger Fry to design. It also restores the wider arc of a five-decade career that moved from training in Newlyn, Cornwall, with Stanhope Forbes, to further study in London with Frank Brangwyn and William Nicholson. Along the way, Hynes crossed paths with Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, and Ezra Pound later asked her to illustrate a collectors’ edition of his Cantos.
Her circle was wide and often combustible. Hynes mixed with Harold and Laura Knight, Dod Procter, and Nina Hamnett; painted friends such as Gluck and Radclyffe Hall; and remained politically engaged across shifting causes, from Irish nationalism and the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society to anti-war and anti-capitalist imagery during the Second World War. She also campaigned for Pound during his postwar imprisonment for treason.
Yet despite that visibility in her own time, Hynes is now almost absent from published accounts of the period. Only one of her paintings is held in a British public collection: Crucifixion (1939), at London’s Royal Air Force Museum, a memorial to her younger brother Patrick, who was killed in the First World War.
Curator Sacha Llewellyn calls that disappearance “a mystery,” and says the exhibition is the result of extensive detective work. Forty works by Hynes will be shown alongside paintings by friends and collaborators, giving viewers a clearer sense of the networks that shaped her practice. The presentation also does not sidestep the harder questions: Llewellyn has pointed to antisemitic and racist tropes in some works as one possible reason for Hynes’s eclipse, while arguing that the artist’s politics and associations deserve open discussion rather than silence.
Four works, including The Fowler, have been loaned by the Wolfsonian in Florida, where the exhibition will travel next year. For Charleston, the project is less a rediscovery than a correction — an attempt to place Hynes back into the visual and political life of British modernism.
Gladys Hynes: Radical Lives is on view at Charleston, Lewes, from May 2 to October 11.
