This exhibition is devoted not to one artist but to many. It aims to bring together a broad collection of work with Dartington Hall School as its common factor.

Part of a unique social experiment, from 1927 - 1987 Dartington Hall School was in the vanguard of a new style of progressive education. The school was central to the Dartington venture and through a more personal and creative form of education it hoped in the long run to help create a better society. Many practising artists, some of them refugees fleeing Europe such as Naum Slutzky of the Bauhaus, taught there and in the arts centre on the estate.

The combination of the professional arts and education was far-sighted and original. The School rapidly became a Mecca for imaginative parents and their children. Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Lucian Freud, Breon O’Casey, Oliver Postgate and Susan Williams-Ellis all in their different ways played a part in the Dartington story. Over a span of two generations the creative artists who were touched by the School’s ambitious vision are too numerous to name individually. At present we have around 150 potential exhibitors.

The exhibition will hopefully include works on loan from the Dartington Trust, some of which have never been exhibited publicly before. Built up by Dorothy Elmhirst, one of the School’s founders, this collection shows the extraordinary wealth of artists teaching in the early years, such as Cecil Collins, Mark Tobey, Willi Soukop, Bernard and David Leach and Hein Heckroth, who later won an Oscar for his set designs for “The Red Shoes”. Dorothy Elmhirst was a committed patron of the arts. She believed profoundly in what the arts could contribute to the fulfilment of the individual and equally, to the well being of any community or society. Above all, she was interested in supporting the work of young artists who had not yet been afforded substantial public recognition.

There will also be a photographic exhibition documenting the life of the school in black and white including rare pictures from the Trust archives.

The exhibition is to be hung in Aller Park. An interesting building in its own right, it was built between 1929 and 1931 as the teaching space for the nursery and junior sections of Dartington Hall School. It will make a fitting backdrop as it is being specially brought back to life from years of dormancy for the duration of the exhibition and will understandably generate plenty of curiosity from people longing to see inside it.

With the support of the Dartington Hall Trust the exhibition will open during the reunion weekend in September 2011, and will run for two weeks. The Trust has generously offered us stewards on site and the use of the main building at Aller Park.

We are looking for funds to mount the main exhibition at Aller Park and the photographic exhibition to be held at the Gallery on the Dartington estate.
We are especially looking for funds to print a catalogue of all the artists who, with the benefit of Dartington’s philosophy, made a name for themselves. For such a small school and with no formal alumni records (all records were thrown away when the school was closed) this will be an invaluable source book. We hope you will support this project as a way of celebrating a remarkable cultural legacy.