Marion Elizabeth Adnams (3 December 1898 – 24 October 1995) was an English painter, printmaker and draughtswoman. She is notable for her surrealist paintings, in which apparently unconnected objects appear together in unfamiliar, often outdoor, environments. Some of her paintings depict landscapes and landmarks close to, or within, her native town of Derby.
Painting by surrealist artist Marion AdnamsAlter Ego, by Marion Adnams, oil on board, 1945 (Derby Museums Trust)
Adnams was born on 3 December 1898 at 22 Otter Street, Derby, the only daughter of John Frederick Adnams and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Smith.[1] Her artistic interests were encouraged from an early age by her father, himself a woodwork teacher at Derby School.[2] After attending Parkfield Cedars School in Derby, she expressed a desire to study art but was instead urged to go on and study at University College, Nottingham, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Modern Languages in 1919.[1][3] Between 1927 and 1930, Adnams travelled to Belgium, France, and Italy, executing woodcuts of the architecture she encountered en route, and exhibiting them to some acclaim at Derby Art Gallery and elsewhere locally with the Derby Women's Art Club.[4] She began her career not as a language teacher, but as art mistress at Derby's Central School for Girls before being recommended for a transfer to the newly opened Homelands Grammar School for Girls, by the Derbyshire Education Committee, in October 1937.[5][3] She was appointed senior lecturer at Derby Diocesan Training College in 1948, where she rose to become Head of Art.[6]
Between 1938 and 1970, Adnams painted the surrealist works for which she is principally known, exhibiting at the British Art Centre in London, alongside Duncan Grant, Augustus John, Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein, and Eileen Agar. In 1944 she exhibited her work at the Modern Art Gallery in London, alongside Jack Bilbo and Max Ernst. In 1939, Adnams sold her first painting, The Living Tree (1939), to Manchester Art Gallery for inclusion in their Rutherson Collection of Modern Art for Schools.[1] Further sales of her paintings to Derby Art Gallery from 1945 and to the Salford Museum and Art Gallery and Nottingham Castle Museums from the early 1950s have ensured her work a measure of public presence.[7]
Adnams retired in 1960 aged sixty-one, using her time to develop her art in new directions. She acquired a second home in France, producing paintings and drawings influenced by the landscape of Provence and elsewhere.[1] In 1966 she painted a series of murals for the Immanuel Church in Stapenhill, near Burton upon Trent.[3] In 1968, at the age of seventy, she became partially blind. As her condition worsened, she was left unable to paint.[3] She died in Derby on Tuesday 24 October 1995, aged ninety-six years old. Her funeral was held at Derby Cathedral on Thursday 2 November 1995, before burial at Nottingham Road Cemetery in Derby.
1939: First Exhibition of Paintings, Sculptures, and Watercolours by Members of the British Art Centre, at the Stafford Gallery, London
1940: People and Flowers: the Fourth Exhibition of the British Art Centre, at the Stafford Gallery, London
1940: Limelight, at the Stafford Gallery, London
1943: Northern Artists Exhibition, at Manchester Art Gallery
1944: 'The World of Imagination' An Exhibition of 'Oodles', Abstracts, Surrealism, 'Merz'-Sculpture, Constructivism and Symbolism, at the Modern Art Gallery Limited, London
1971: Marion Adnams: a Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings, at the Midland Group Gallery in Nottingham
1995: British and European Surrealism, at Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Museum
In 2011, the British milliner Stephen Jones designed and created a range of hats, titled Drifting and Dreaming, inspired by the work of Marion Adnams.[9]
