Biography
The Mansard Gallery was originally opened in 1917 by Sir Ambrose Heal (1872-1959), great-grandson of the founder of Heal's department store where it was situated on the fourth floor. It became a landmark destination for shoppers, art-lovers and design enthusiasts throughout the 20th century.
The first show held at the Mansard Gallery was, Poster Pictures curated by Heal's close friend, and managing director of the London Underground, Frank Pick (1878-1941) with whom Ambrose had founded the Design and Industries Association (DIA) in 1915 to better promote links between design, manufacturing and retail.
The exhibition featured the work ofthe American designer Edward Mcknight Kauffer who later designed the poster to advertise a collective show by The London Group founded in 1913 to provide those shunned by the conservative Royal Academy a chance to exhibit their work. They held a number of shows at the Mansard Gallery throughout the 1920s which included work from Walter Sickert, Jacob Epstein and Ethel Sands.
Sacheverell Sitwell curated Exhibition of French Art 1914-1919 which brought together works by Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani whose painting Le Petit Paysan (The Little Peasant, 1919) was the artist’s first to be exhibited in the UK. The exhibition was praised by artist and critic and Bloomsbury Group member Roger Fry, who subsequently curated his own exhibition An Exhibition of Works Representative of the New Movement in Art there. Also, one of the founding members of The London Group, Wyndham Lewis attempted to revive the Vorticist movement (a form of British modernism that had flourished before the war) with the Group X show featuring amongst others William Roberts, Cuthbert Hamilton and Kauffer in 1920.
