Laura Freeman on Jim Ede
Monday 29th May 2023
St Peter's Church, Broad Street, Ely, Cambridgeshire CB7 4BB
7pm
7.30pm
Kettle's Yard is a local institution. The work and legacies of Jim and Helen Ede are not just incredible on a local level, however, but in changing the very face of the twentieth-century art world.
The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard artists represent a thrilling tipping point in modernism: a new guard, a new way of making and seeing, and a new way of living with art.
The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line.
Jim Ede is the figure who unites them. His vision continues to influence the way we understand art and modern living. He was a man of extraordinary energies: a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists.
For Ede, works of art were friends and art could be found wherever you looked - in a pebble, feather or seedhead. Art lived and a life without art, beauty, friendship and creativity was a life not worth living.
Art was not for galleries alone and it certainly wasn't only for the rich. At Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, he opened his home and his collection to all comers. He showed generations of visitors that learning to look could be a whole new way of life. In this first biography of the Kettle’s Yard artists, Laura Freeman reveals the life of a visionary who helped shape British art.
"The beautiful, revelatory biography of Jim Ede and Kettle's Yard that we have been waiting for. I loved it" Edmund de Waal
Laura Freeman is chief art critic of The Times. She has written for the Spectator, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, TLS, Apollo and World of Interiors. Her first book, The Reading Cure, a memoir about hunger and happiness, addiction, obsession and recovery, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2018. She studied history of art at Magdalene College, Cambridge.