Norman Whitehead

For the English football player, see Norman Whitehead (footballer).

Norman Whitehead (1915–1983) was a landscape painter, working mainly around his hometown Alfreton, Derbyshire. Active mainly in the 1930s he was greatly influenced by the works of Paul Nash and the Vorticism movement, experimenting with form and developing a style which was very much his own.

Biography

In 1938 Whitehead visited London for a pacifist march. He met Mrs Jan Gordon, art critic of The Observer, who illustrated her article in the newspaper with his paintings, describing his work as 'touched by genius'.

Whitehead's pacifism was now confirmed and he passed the war years driving an ambulance in Derbyshire. Later, however, he regretted his decision not to "stand up to Fascism". This lack of action, the lost war years and the effects of a previous argument with his mother, during which a number of his paintings were destroyed, conspired to frustrate his ambition to become a professional artist and perhaps prevented his becoming recognised in British Modernist art. After 1947 he never painted again.

The majority of Whitehead's paintings were stored in a loft until shortly before his death[1] when he attempted to catalogue them. In 1998 his widow donated his work (1933–1939), perhaps a very few hundred paintings in all, to local museums.

Norman Whitehead's paintings are now on permanent display in a dedicated gallery of the Ilkeston Erewash Museum.[2]

Notes

  1. ↑ Early history, NormanWhitehead.com, accessed September 2009
  2. ↑ The contents of this article are taken with approval from a small booklet on Norman Whitehead published recently for Sherwood Forest Fine Arts.Their content was widely researched with a contribution from the Ilkeston Erewash Museum.

External links