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John
Tunnard/Works and
biography
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Psi
1938 |
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John Tunnard was born on May 7, 1900, in Bedfordshire,
England. He graduated with a diploma in design from
the Royal College of Art in London in 1923 and for the
next four years worked as a textile designer in Manchester.
In 1929 he gave up commercial work to become a painter,
supporting himself as a part-time teacher of design
at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.
Tunnard showed for the first time in 1931, at the Royal
Academy of Arts and continued to exhibit annually with
the London Group until 1950, becoming a member in 1934.
Tunnard’s first one-man show was held at the Redfern
Gallery in London in 1933. Most of the works presented
depicted the landscape of Cornwall, where the artist
and his wife had settled and established a hand block
printed silk business. Tunnard began at this time to
revive his early interest in natural science, collecting
entomological specimens on the moors for the British
Museum of Natural History and observing the minutiae
of nature that provided a source of imagery for his
art. Although he never formally joined the Surrealist
movement, Tunnard participated in several of the group’s
exhibitions in the 1930s, including Surrealism, held
in 1939 at Gordon Fraser Gallery in Cambridge, which
featured works by Max Ernst, Klee, Magritte, Miró
and others. In March 1939 Peggy Guggenheim gave Tunnard
a show at her gallery Guggenheim Jeune in London.
Tunnard enlisted as an auxiliary coast guard in 1940
and served for the duration of the war. During this
period he participated in group shows in London at the
Redfern Gallery, the Zwemmer Gallery and Alex Reid and
Lefevre. The British Council included his work in three
survey exhibitions in Australia and South America between1940
and 1949, and in 1944 the artist was given a one-man
show at the Nierendorf Gallery in New York. Tunnard
resumed teaching design in 1946 at Wellington College,
Berkshire, and two years later at Penzance School of
Art, Cornwall. Also in 1946 he was featured in Contemporary
British Art, which travelled to the Toledo Museum of
Art, Ohio, the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, and the
City Art Museum, St. Louis. In 1949 his work was shown
at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in
Paris. The artist designed a mural for the Festival
of Britain in 1951 and the following year he showed
at Durlacher Brothers in New York, where he would have
a solo exhibition in 1960. Tunnard was elected an associate
of the Royal Academy in 1967. In 1971 he was represented
in The British Contribution to Surrealism at Hamet Gallery
in London. The artist died that year on December 18.
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