Edna Manley
Edna Swithenbank Manley, OM is considered one of the most important artists and arts educators in Jamaica. She was known primarily as a sculptor, although her oeuvre included significant drawings and paintings. Her work forms an important part of the National Gallery of Jamaica's permanent collection, and can be viewed in other public institutions in Jamaica such as Bustamante Children's Hospital, the University of the West Indies, and the Kingston Parish Church.
Her early training was in the British neoclassical tradition.
Edna Manley was an early supporter of art education in Jamaica and in the 1940s, she organised and taught art classes at the Junior Centre of the Institute of Jamaica. These classes developed in a more formal setting with the establishment of the Jamaica School of Art and Craft in 1950, Jamaica's first Art School which would eventually expand into a college, and was renamed the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, in 1995, to honour the artist's pioneering role in Jamaican Art.
Edna Manley was the wife of Norman Manley, the founder of the Jamaican People's National Party and the 1st Premier of Jamaica. She is often considered the "mother of Jamaican art".
Personal life
Early life
She was born Edna Swithenbank on 28 February 1900. Her father died when she was nine, leaving his widow to raise all their nine children by herself. Edna Manley was described as incredibly independent, rebellious and spirited, exemplified in the uproar and unrest she caused among her own family as she embraced her 'coloured' ancestry from her mother's side. This ancestry had been swept under the rug due to the possible repercussions it would have had on not only her parents but the whole family during the racially tense times of the early twentieth century.Education
After leaving high school Edna studied art at several different institutions including St. Martin's School of Art in London. She also studied privately with Maurice Harding, the animal sculptor, going on to continue her art studies at the Regent Street Polytechnic as well as the St. Martin's School of Art in London. During this time, she had intentions of becoming a zoologist.In 1921, she married her cousin, Norman Manley. The two met when Norman came to England for university, Edna was only 14 at the time and Norman was eight years her senior. They fell out of touch but later reunited after Norman finished school and while Edna was working at a pension office studying art on the side. The two had a controversial union, due to not only family ties but the obvious deepness of Norman's complexion. They went on to have two children, Michael Manley and Douglas Manley, a sociologist and minister in his brother's government, moving to Jamaica in 1922 after Douglas's birth. Edna quickly realized how different the Jamaican middle class was in comparison to the life she knew in England and kept journals of her thoughts, observations, and experiences.
Politics
The political standings of her husband and children would prove influential to her art as well as impact her life and career in a way she may have never expected. Manley was involved politically, not only through the association of her sons and husband, but also through the subject matter she addressed in her work, such as sexuality, culture and feminism. Manley's feminism influences were arguably due to her a first-wave feminist sister, Lena, who fought alongside the suffragettes for the right to vote for females. Though this did not manifest itself in the same way as her sister, she paved a way of her own unique to Jamaica. She did not fight outright for new wave feminism, but her excellence, notoriety and dominance in the predominantly male world of visual arts, fought in their way. Thoughts around socialism also preoccupied Edna's mind following the years after her marriage. As her sons and husband became more a part of the Jamaican political sphere, forming the People's National Party, Edna also became more preoccupied with Fabian Socialism ideology and avidly supported the party and its socialist democratic ideals. Politics was a large and unavoidable part of her life and would go on to be further highlighted in her works dome in the 1960s and 1970s when Jamaica was dealing with great civil and political unrest.Later years
Norman Manley, her husband, died in 1969 leaving her in ruin. She shared that 'after Norman died, the thing that saved me was my art.' In 1975 she decided to delve more into painting, giving up sculpting, due to her age and strain it placed on her body. She maintained her own identity and did not live in the shadow of her famous husband. Edna Manley died on 2 February 1987; a few weeks short of her 87th birthday. She was an amazing woman in the eyes of many; a woman who carved her path independent of the name of her husband or son and continues to influence and inspire many artists to this day.Artistic life
'''Early Artistic Life'''1900–1925
During this period of Edna's life, she faced frustration at the lack of Exhibitions in Jamaica, as well as the attitudes the people had towards art. To her, it seemed as if people only considered it to be an unimportant hobby to be enjoyed by amateurs but that did not deter her. She created her first Jamaican work that would go onto be one of her most notable, The Beadseller. Her early years were a transitional period, not only stylistically, but during this period she centred herself around adapting and understanding her new home in Jamaica. She began moving away from the academic ways of creating that she was so accustomed to, into a truer version of modernism seen in The Beadseller- inspired by these new and exciting observations of life in Jamaica. Shortly after, the Beadseller was followed up by a male counterpart, The Listener which also reflected the geometric and cubist style she was exploring. This cubist influence can be directly credited to famous artist Pablo Picasso, who disrupted the European art world with his geometric and exploitative creations. Edna Manley was not safe from his influence as she studied all the art trends and ideas circulating in Europe before her departure to the Caribbean. She brought plaster versions of both these works back to England with her in 1923, which she had cast into bronze on her arrival. This would cause her acceptance into the Society of Women's Artists and had Beadseller displayed in their 1924 Exhibition. She would continue to go between Jamaica and England seeking out exhibition spaces and artistic inspiration.Back in Jamaica in early 1924, she quickly set to work with new carving tools and produced Wisdom and then the Ape. At that time, too, she began to model realistic portraits in clay first of Norman and the two-year-old Douglas and then of a friend, Esther Chapman. Then, testing the possibilities of her new medium, she did the head of another friend, Leslie Clerk in wood.
1925–1932
Between 1925 and 1929, Manley softened some of her geometric forms, replacing them with more massive, rounded ones. Market Women, a study of two voluptuous women sitting back to back, and Demeter, a carving of the mythical Earth Mother, are indicative of Manley's late-1920s influence. The 1930s saw another change in her sculptural style. She tamed her early-1920s cubist lines with rounder forms, and produced a new, definitive style that lasted into the 1940s. She recalled the strong influence of classical art on her voluptuous sculptures. Her interest in the classical tradition was sparked by the works of Picasso's neo-classicism phase. His Two Nudes of 1906, greatly influenced the neo-classicism of her adolescence.This voluptuousness can also be seen in her work entitled , which derived from the story of the first woman mentioned in the bible. The overall dimension of the work is 2006.6 x 508mm, and was carved from a single piece of mahogany wood. The nude Eve is seen standing on a circular platform with her head facing behind her. The figure has one hand whose fingers are rolled into a fist to cover her pubis; similar to the arm gestures are a combination of the "Venus Pudica". The other hand is bent at the elbow and covers a breast while the back of the hand awkwardly rests on the shoulder with fingers curled inwards. In this pose of the arm we see the influence of Picasso's Two Nudes. The sculpture is seemingly filled with tension, as suggested by the clenching of the fists, the abnormal twist of the body and the awkward attempt to obscure a breast. The body gives a sense of youthfulness and its long hair flowing downwards onto the chest matches the curvy rhythm of her body. Wayne Brown has described the sculpture as "woman startled to look over her shoulder" an "image of nakedness surprised" yet, Manley seemed had removed all traces of expression from the face of the sculpture of her re-interpretation of Eve and instead focused the expressions into the pose of the figure. Her idea of this sculpture was to draw reference to the expulsion of Eve out of the Garden of Eden. The face looking backwards is also said to represent Eve looking back at the garden after her expulsion.
During the early 1920s, Edna Manley continuously sent her works back to England for exhibition which allowed the works to become greatly recognized by 1927. The first recognition she had received came from the French press, and her works were published in the Les Artistes D’Aujourd’Hui and La Revue Moderne. The author of the articles La Revue Moderne, Clement Morro, had significantly linked her with the modern abstractionists. In 1929, Edna Manley had returned to England with her most recently completed works namely; Eve, The boy and the reed, ''Torso, The ape. This small collection of sculptured has gained entry into the Goupil Summer exhibition which was a major event which took place annually in London.
Her move to Jamaica had a profound impact on her work. She abandoned studying zoology back in London, and her work took on a more "inspired formal elegance", according to Boxer. Manley's materials consisted mostly of native woods—she used yakka, mahogany, Guatemalan redwood, juniper cedar, and primavera. Some work dating from her first year on the island are Beadseller, and Listener. In describing Beadseller'', Boxer said, "It was as if in one fell swoop, nearly a hundred years of sculptural development had been bridged: in this, her first work done in Jamaica, Edna seems to have given expression to her ideas about contemporary British sculpture with which she had saturated herself prior to leaving England. Both pieces exhibited Manley's more progressive and cubist style.
Jamaica was facing many political changes during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Members of the African diaspora were looking to do away with the aging colonial system that remained on the island. They were ready for a new social order, and voiced their displeasure with the colonial system by incurring strikes, instigating food shortages, and promoting protest marches. Manley's work of the time reflected this civil unrest. Works like "Prophet", "Diggers", "Pocomania", and "Negro Aroused" "caught the inner spirit of our people and flung their rapidly rising resentment of the stagnant colonial order into vivid, appropriate sculptural forms," wrote poet M. G. Smith.
Her works were exhibited very frequently in England between 1927 and 1980. Her first solo exhibition in Jamaica was in 1937. The show marked a turning point in Jamaica's undeveloped art movement, and it prompted the first island-wide group show of Jamaican artists. Manley was also one of the founders of the new Jamaica School of Art. After premiering in Jamaica, her show opened in England, where it was received with much fanfare. It was the last time Manley's work would be shown in London for nearly 40 years.
Active for much of her life as an artist, she also taught at the Jamaica School of Art, now a component of the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts.