Harry Thubron

Harry in his studio in Kingston, Jamaica

Harry Thubron OBE (Henry James Thubron, 1915–1985) was an English artist and art teacher. He made radical innovations in art education.

Thubron was born on 24 November 1915 at 7 Victoria Avenue, Bishop Auckland, Co. Durham, the son of Percy Thubron, journeyman joiner (and later a newsagent and tobacconist), and his wife, Martha Ada, née Thompson (d. 1929/30). His mother, who died when he was fourteen, would shut him away in a room to paint from the age of seven.

Having attended Henry Smith Grammar School, Hartlepool, he went on to Sunderland School of Art (1933–38) and to the Royal College of Art, London (1938–40). Thubron served in HM Armed Forces (1941–46) at the Army Bureau of Current Affairs Newsletter.

On 6 March 1940 he married, in Battersea, London, Joan Sawdon, a schoolteacher, daughter of Frank Sawdon, a hairdresser. Following his divorce in 1962, he married, on 4 August 1965 in Lancaster, Elma Askham, an artist and lecturer, daughter of William Marsh Askham.

In the 1978 Birthday Honours he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services in art education.

Thubron died at home in Lewisham, London in April 1985.

Thubron started to create figurative works, which soon changed to abstract, not only in painting, as in reliefs in wood, metal or resin. After 1965, he devoted himself mainly to collages and assemblages with materials found on the street, usually from industry.

Out of the turbulence of the years after his divorce Thubron produced comparatively few works of art, but these, based on a dialogue between old and new materials, and painting and collage, were treasured by friends and colleagues who rightly judged them to be sensitive and beautiful. With Dennis Harland as technical adviser he produced a fine relief in plastics for the exterior of the Branch College, Leeds (1963–4; removed), which fulfilled his ambition to make art for public, architectural settings. He showed work in Leeds at the Queen Square Gallery in 1967, and again that year with Elma Thubron. Later, in 1976, he showed paintings and collages at the Serpentine Gallery, London. He was also included in major surveys, among them 'British Art' at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1974, and 'British Painting, 1952–77' at the Royal Academy, London, in 1977.

After 1969 he concentrated more on his own painting, and funded by an Arts Council grant spent the following year in Spain. He spent part of 1971 in Jamaica before beginning an association with Goldsmiths' College, New Cross, London, as part-time teacher. He continued making paintings and collages during the last eight years of his life, though experiencing ever-deteriorating health.

He lived his most creative time between London and the south of Spain, in the 70s and 80s, very interested in the work of Kurt Schwitters and Antoni Tàpies, and with particular admiration for Paul Klee, who advocated art as a means of self- development and self-discovery, combining experience and instinct in the creative act.

Examples of his work are in the Tate collectio in the Tate Britain, Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds University Gallery, and the Museum of Hartlepool, co. Durham, among other regional and private collections.

Thubron's wartime experience of teaching soldiers via the text of the Army Council of Current Affairs Newsletter gave him a vision of a "new post-war world" and the rhetoric to achieve it. On demobilisation in 1946 he realised that in art also a new start was required. While teaching at Sunderland School of Art from 1946, he began to elaborate new courses (from 1948 onward), contributing (from 1954) to those directed by John Wood of North Riding county council, which allowed for greater innovation.

On his move north in 1956, Victor Pasmore also worked with wood. Pasmore had worked at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, on the basic design course, instigated in 1949 with William Johnstone and Arthur Halliwell. These developments owed much to the Vorkurs of the German Bauhaus, but Thubron was always careful to dissociate his own methods from those of others and in his own teaching insisted on freedom, openness, development, and research. These chosen phrases gave expression to his perception of rapid contemporary changes in technology and society, and he rejected the label "basic design" which he thought was given too freely to radical modernist teaching.

At Leeds Thubron also established close links between the art college and the School of Fine Art at the University of Leeds, which allowed the University's Gregory Fellows in Fine Art to start teaching at Leeds College of Art. He also helped to create a prototype for Britain's Polytechnics by sending his students to work on collaborative projects with engineering students from Leeds College of Technology, out of which Leeds Polytechnic was formed. This was also a time when Thubron organised a series of summer schools in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, through which his ideas on art education were shared with artists, art teachers and art students from all over the country, thereby spreading his philosophy.

In 1964 Thubron left Leeds and became a lecturer at Lancaster until 1966. He subsequently became Head of Painting at Leicester College of Art, although he only held this post for three years (until 1968) due to increasing ill health. He still continued some teaching after this, as a part-time tutor at Goldsmiths' College, London, between 1971 and 1982.

Thubron's specific innovations in art education are still controversial. While he is remembered for his warm personality and vivid use of the spoken word, an extensive documentary record of his work as a teacher is held in the National Art Archive, Bretton Hall, Yorkshire.

“If we, ourselves, don't take jobs in colleges, take leadership roles; then nothing will ever change." – Harry Thubron.

During the 1950s and 60s Thubron was a familiar name in education for his pioneering experiments in post-school art education. He taught at Sunderland College of Art from 1950 to 1955, and then became Head of Fine Art at Leeds College of Art. During his ten-year tenure in Leeds he helped to revolutionise art education in England by establishing the Basic Design Course, a programme inspired by the German Bauhaus college and the theoretical writings of Herbert Read. In this programme, art and design students were not taught specific skills for any of the disciplines of art and design, but visual literacy in the use of colour, establishment of form and construction of space. Out of this, and similar experiments undertaken by Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton at Kings College Newcastle, a new introductory course for art, design and architecture students emerged, called the Foundation Course, which went on to become the standard degree course-entry qualification for art, design and architecture students in many countries, including Britain, Ireland, Canada and elsewhere.

Thubron also organised by this time a series of "summer schools" in Yorkshire and Norfolk, in which he shared his ideas on art education with teachers, students and artists who came from all over the country, markedly influencing an entire generation of creators as Hoyland, Sausmarez, Bridget Riley and Michael Kidner.

With Thubron, students first engaged in communal exercises making marks or collages on inexpensive paper laid on the floor in an atmosphere of invention. They experimented, for example, with families of forms whereby a square could by repeated modification become an oval; or, given a blob of red paint, a student would be directed to mix and place next to it on the paper what he or she perceived to be the most enhancing green. The traditional study of natural form as structure remained central to his students' development as did that of the human figure, but drawn in movement.

Thubron's strength of character could overdetermine student responses, and his enthusiasms yawed abruptly from philosophy to mathematical sculpture or to expressive painting. Young followers whom he appointed to the staff found themselves with much reading. With their preconceptions under assault by his methods and their ideas at the mercy of his forceful personality, some students, perhaps particularly women students, foundered.

Left: Harry Thubron, Tom Hudson, Wendy Pasmore and Victor Pasmore.
Photo: Collection of Mark Hudson

Harry and colleagues at either Leeds or Lancaster, date unknown.

1978 – Order of the British Empire; for contributions to the arts and art education

1946–50 – professor of painting at West Hartlepool School of Art

1950-5 – Head of Fine Art, Sunderland College of Art

1955–64 – Head of Fine Art, Leeds College of Art

1964-5 – Head of Find Art, Lancaster College of Art

1965-6 – Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois, US

1966-8 - Head of Painting School at Leicer College of Art

1968-9 – Arts Council grant; visitor and adviser to International School in Spain

1969–70 – Director of Studies at the Kingston School of Art in Jamaica

1971-3 - Summer Schools, International School, Spain, Ronda

1971–1982 – part-time teaching, Fine Art Department, Goldsmiths' College London

1976 – awarded Arts Council Bursary

Lectures: Thubron lectured widely throughout Great Britain and the US (including at Harvard, Yale, Chicago, and Kansas City), 1965-6.

One-man exhibitions:

1961 – Frauenfeld, Switzerland

1963 – University of Leeds

1964 – Lords Gallery, London

1965 – Lords Gallery, London

1967 - Queens Square Gallery, Leeds

1976 – Serpentine Gallery[7]

1976 - Peterloo Gallery, Manchester (6–22 July)

1978 - Jordan Gallery, London

1980 - Harlow Play House, Harlow New Town

1981 - Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

1983 - Curwen Gallery, London

Harry Thubron and Susanna Richmond in Ronda, c. 1972

The following photographs were taken by Harry in the environs where we lived near Ronda, Spain, circa 1974/5, and are in the collection of the National Arts Education Archive at Bretton Hall, Leeds

The house in this photograph is where Harry and Elma Thubron lived, the two facing windows are of his studio.

I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that the British Art School system is the best, most extensive, and the most comprehensive in the world. Much of the responsibility for this is due to the gentleman above. Harry Thubron was a revolutionary in the world of art education. He re-organised the whole fabric of how 'art' is taught. It was Harry who introduced the idea of a 'Foundation Course', to give students the widest possible introduction to all branches of the art world over the period of one year, before they finally chose what subject they wanted to study at degree level. On my own Foundation Course I studied everything from welding, to pottery, to plastic vacuum moulding, to woodwork, to graphic design, to using all sorts of dangerous machinery, and just about everything else you can think of. It was a wonderful year of discovery before finally deciding which discipline I wished to study for the following three years. Prior to Thubron, Art Schools were places where one sat, day in day out, bored out of your mind, drawing from classic Greek sculpture, or life models. Whilst teaching at Leeds College of Art between 1955-64, Thubron totally changed all that, introducing a quasi-Bauhaus philosophical attitude to painting and sculpture, which soon spread to all other UK colleges. So I must thank Mr Thubron retrospectively. Without him I would never have learned oxy-acetylene welding, how to transform lumps of stone into shaped lumps of stone, or even how to develop and print my own photographs. Thank you Sir; I salute you. 'Cro Magnon', 2016 . Left: Harry at home in Lewisham, 1983