Origins The existence of a distinctive Birmingham group of surrealist artists dates from the meeting of
Conroy Maddox and
John Melville in 1935, after an exchange of letters in the
Birmingham Post about what they saw as the excessively conventional art scene in the city. Melville had been one of the "harbingers of surrealism" in Britain, producing a
Surrealist Nude by 1930 and being described as a surrealist by critic
R. H. Wilenski in 1932. Maddox had become a convert to surrealism after discovering one of Wilenski's books in
Birmingham Central Library in 1935. Maddox and John Melville had an obvious link as artists practicing in the surrealist genre, but Melville was eclectic in his tastes and lacked Maddox's unwavering commitment to the surrealist cause. As a result Maddox also formed a strong attachment to John's brother
Robert Melville, who was later to become a widely published critic and whose understanding of surrealism's theoretical basis was to provide much of the group's intellectual underpinning. Surrealism was supposed to be more than a style of painting and Maddox and the Melvilles courted controversy to bring their disruptive aesthetic and political influence to bear across the city - using the resources of the relatively forward-looking
Birmingham Group to sidestep the established
Pre-Raphaelite and
Arts and Crafts consensus that still reigned at
Birmingham School of Art and the
Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, in favour of more radical and subversive artistic movements.
Continental links Possibly as a result of the 1936 snub, no Birmingham artists were invited to exhibit at the major London surrealist exhibitions of 1937 and 1938 - the group instead continuing to exhibit with the Birmingham Group in the Midlands, with Maddox and Robert Melville focusing on building relations with what they saw as the more authentic surrealists of continental Europe. Despite his limited French, Maddox travelled to
Paris repeatedly between 1936 and 1939, frequenting surrealist meetings at
Le Dome Cafe and the
Académie de la Grande Chaumière Maddox's continental contacts were to greatly improve relations between the surrealists of Birmingham and London after mid-1938, when the London Gallery - the nerve centre of London surrealism - fell under the directorship of Mesens, who had been involved with continental surrealism since its inception in 1924. Maddox was invited to the October 1938 meeting of the
British Surrealist Group at the personal insistence of Breton, and Mesens invited both Maddox and John Melville to exhibit in the next major London Gallery exhibition - 1939's
Living Art in England. Despite a heavy Birmingham presence also at del Renzio's November 1942
Surrealism exhibition, Maddox and Robert Melville split from del Renzio over their associations with the
New Apocalyptics movement and its Birmingham-based pioneer
Henry Treece. Partly as a result of this the Birmingham group sided strongly and decisively with Mesens when he in turn split acrimoniously with del Renzio over the leadership of the Surrealist Group in England in 1944. and
Desmond Morris (already producing surrealist artworks as a teenager in
Wiltshire) enrolling at the
University of Birmingham in 1948 and quickly discovering what he termed "Conroy Maddox's surrealist court". The profile of Birmingham artists within wider the wider surrealist movement remained high, with Maddox and Bridgewater featuring among only six English artists selected by Breton for the last major international surrealist group exhibition, the
Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme at the Galerie Maeght in
Paris in 1947 Maddox himself, frustrated at his inability to reinvigorate English Surrealism from Birmingham, moved to London in 1955, where he continued to advocate the surrealist cause throughout the rest of the 20th century. In 1978, Maddox made contact with the surrealist revival on the West Coast of the U.S., and members of that movement visited London to show at Maddox's
Surrealism Unlimited exhibit. The
Arsenal anthology (1989), was dedicated to Maddox. In 2013 Desmond Morris was interviewed by
Stewart Lee as part of a
BBC Radio 4 documentary about the movement. ==References==