Grace Pailthorpe (1883 – 1971)

Grace Pailthorpe (1883 – 1971)
16th November 1937 at 2.30pm, 1937
Oil on canvas
68.6 x 50.8 cm
The Jeffrey Sherwin & Family Collection, permanently housed at The Hepworth Wakefield

Pailthorpe was a British Surrealist painter and psychology researcher, studying Freudian analysis. She had also been a surgeon in the First World War. From 1935 she met the young artist Reuben Mednikoff, who taught her how to paint, and who she taught to psychoanalyse paintings, Pailthorpe was a strong believer in using painting as a therapeutic tool. This put her at odds with the Surrealists and eventually led to her expulsion from the group in 1940, though Breton described their work in the 1936 International Surrealist exhibition as ‘the best and most truly surrealist of the works by English artists’. Mednikoff and Pailthorpe eventually married and continued their fascinating yet unsettling partnership.

Pailthorpe’s ecstatic, organic and colourful forms often portray the inner workings of the human body and mind: hidden desires, unconscious sexual fantasies, emotional expression. In her work you can see foetuses being nourished in the womb and a morphing of human and plant reproduction organs. Her insistence of the ‘scientific’ aspect of the work is shown in the titles, named similarly to diary entries or a therapists notebook, and by the clinical comments that would be displayed with each painting or drawing.