Harold Stanley Ede (called Jim)

The curator, collector, and friend of artists Jim Ede was an early promoter of the European avant-garde in Britain and, through the donation of his house and collection to the University of Cambridge in 1966, a key figure in securing the legacy and visibility of modern art in British culture.

Kettle’s Yard was the Cambridge home of Ede and his wife, Helen (born Schlapp), between 1958 and 1973. It contains several hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, ceramics, and other objects by such figures as Constantin Brancusi, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Barbara Hepworth, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, and Christopher Wood, all of whom were friends or acquaintances of Ede. The house has been open to the public since the time of Ede’s gift, serving as the university’s principal gallery of modern and contemporary art. Ede’s approach to displaying the collectioninvolved intermingling distinct aesthetic languages and integrating artworks with the architecture and furnishings of the house; the installation is preserved to this day.

Born in Wales, Ede attended school in Taunton and Cambridge while also spending a year in Caen, France. After leaving school at age fifteen, he studied painting under Stanhope Forbes in Cornwall and then attended Edinburgh School of Art, where he met Helen in 1913. Ede served as an officer in the British Army during the First World War, returning to Cambridge for a brief period in 1916 after sustaining physical and psychological trauma on the Western Front. Following the war, he resumed his studies at Slade School of Art, London, before taking up the posts of photographic assistant at the National Gallery in 1921 and then assistant keeper at the Tate Gallery in 1922, which he held until 1936. During his tenure at the Tate, he also served as secretary to the Contemporary Art Society.

Throughout the 1920s and first half of the 1930s, Jim and Helen lived in Hampstead, where they frequently played host to the artists, writers, actors, and musicians that Jim met through his work and began to form the friendships that shaped the collection at Kettle’s Yard. The wider circle of figures known to have been hosted by the Edes in Hampstead during this period includes such artists as Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore, dancers Sergei Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky of the Ballets Russes, the actors John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier, and the patron Helen Sutherland.

It was also during this time that Ede began collecting art. Most of the works in the collection were acquired directly from artists, either as gifts or exchanges, or for relatively small sums. The £250 he received in wages from the Tate were his only source of funds, and he was therefore unable to purchase major works by established artists. Instead, he functioned as a patron for the artists with whom he enjoyed his closest relationships, providing them with a modest but reliable source of financial support by purchasing their work on a semi-regular basis, as well as an opportunity for sustained intellectual exchange. For example, in his book A Way of Life: Kettle’s Yard, Ede recalls acquiring paintings from Ben Nicholson that the artist had not been able to sell “for the price of the canvas and frame,” and purchasing Alfred Wallis’s paintings in bulk in the late 1920s and 1930s. While the collection and installation of artworkswas Ede’s purview, the found natural objects in the collection, such as the pebbles and shells eventually placed around Kettle’s Yard, were selected and arranged by both Jim and Helen.

Upon joining the Tate, Ede abandoned his fledgling career as a painter and began writing about and collecting contemporary art. He also had a number of important encounters with artists. After a formative first meeting with the Nicholsons in 1924, Ede visited artists such as Brancusi, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Miró, and Pablo Picasso on regular trips to Paris as part of his work for the Tate. He later claimed to have been responsible for the first hanging of Picasso’s work at the museum. Through the Nicholsons, Ede also met a number of modern British artists who would become his close friends and recipients of his patronage, including David Jones, Alfred Wallis, and Christopher Wood.

As Ede’s collection grew, he was in turn able to provide his friends access to international art that was not otherwise available in Britain for much of the twentieth century. Cubism and the European avant-garde as a whole had been broadly viewed with skepticism in Britain and was scarcely represented in public and private collections. Ede’s collection was therefore a small but significant exception that helped to shape the course of British modernism. For example, Miró’s Tic Tic (1927; Kettle’s Yard), a gift to Ede from either the artist himself or the dealer Pierre Loeb, was in Ben Nicholson’s possession for long periods when Ede was out of the country and had a profound impact on the artist’s understanding of abstraction. Major examples of continental modernism in the collection include a cement cast of Brancusi’s Prometheus (1911; Kettle’s Yard) and a number of sculptures by Gaudier-Brzeska, such as the plaster carving Bird Swallowing a Fish (1914; Kettle’s Yard).

Ede’s acquisition of the estate of Gaudier-Brzeska’s partner, the writer Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska, in 1927 was perhaps his most significant contribution to the visibility of modernism in Britain. Ede purchased the estate from the British Treasury for £60, with the Tate and the Contemporary Art Society accepting small numbers of works on permanent loan and the remainder entering Ede’s private collection. Using the documents included with the estate, including some of Sophie’s unpublished writings, he wrote A Life of Gaudier-Brzeska (1930), titled Savage Messiah: A Biography of the Sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in later editions beginning in 1931. Ede sought to further secure the artist’s legacy by controversially producing a large number of posthumous casts, which were subsequently sold or donated. In addition to his donation of Kettle’s Yard, he made substantial gifts of Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture to the Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, in 1965 and to the Tate in 1966, as well as numerous donations to public collections around the world and university collections in Britain.

Ede resigned from his posts at the Tate and the Contemporary Art Society in 1936, a decision he later attributed to the perceived failure of the museum to significantly expand its collections of modern and non-British works. He then moved to Tangier with Helen and, between 1937 and 1952, frequently toured the United States giving lectures on art. During this period Ede befriended and acquired works by the American painters Richard Pousette-Dart and William Congdon.

The Edes relocated to Cambridge in 1956 and soon acquired the four nineteenth-century cottages that would become Kettle’s Yard. The “open houses” held for university students, and an arrangement that allowed students to borrow works for their college rooms, recast the Edes’ private holdings as a teaching collection, exposing a new generation to international modernist art and design. While the Edes gifted the house and its contents to the University of Cambridge in 1966, they remained in residence for several years, with Jim being given the title of “honorary curator” by the university.