Robert Medley British, 1905-1994
David and Jonathan, 1990

£750

Mixed media on card
Signed and dedicated (on card affixed to frame (verso))
17cm x 11cm (32cm x 26cm framed)

A student of the Royal Academy Schools and the Slade School and subsequently in Paris in the 20s, in the 1930s he worked with Group Theatre, designing sets and costumes for plays by W. H. Auden (who was Medley's lover for a time), T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, and Louis MacNeice. In WWII he worked mainly on camouflage in the Middle East. Before and after the war he taught at Chelsea School of Art, then in 1951–8 taught stage design at the Slade School. From 1958 to 1965 he was head of the Department of Fine Art at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts.

In 1979 he summed up his stylistic development as follows: ‘Early influences until 1939 were the Bloomsbury Group and the École de Paris, though from 1932 Surrealist and political pressures also exerted their influence. After the war my work was concerned with the movement of human figures in space…and with industrial landscape…” He continued working and exhibiting until the end of his long life and in the year of his death he won a prize for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy summer exhibition.