Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists

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Jim the collector was a terrific character. However reading between the lines, his restless networking which was so engaging when he was young, I quite see must have been irritating in his old age. You can understand why Henry Moore began to feel hunted. MB: The book leaves the impression that Jim was an unconventional member of the art world aristocracy – he dropped artwork, couldn’t afford to serve wine at his own parties, worked low-paid jobs, wore the wrong clothes and made decisions that nobody believed in – yet he carved a space for himself. I’m curious what you think this says about him, and the art world?

Ways of Life is a portable Kettle's Yard, an entrancing book of immense and curious beauty” ― Ruth Scurr Art critic Laura Freeman, who has written a new biography of Jim, which she will discuss at the Cambridge Literary Festival, has spent years delving into Jim’s archives and interviewing people who knew the collector and curator, whose passions inform every part of the house and gallery.I think Jim probably made her life quite difficult,” says Laura. “She would say, ‘I can’t put my knitting down anywhere!’ Helen and Jim Ede: Courtesy of Kettle's Yard

He often did down his time at the Tate because I think he was rather unhappy as an employee,” says Laura. Laura Freeman’s biography of Ede is in part a life of the objects that he collected and the stories they tell. Each of her chapters begins with a picture of a Kettle’s Yard treasure and takes flight from there. Freeman, chief art critic at the Time s, writes with an exact enthusiasm about the things she describes. Ede thought of his paintings and sculptures as favourite house guests, and the reader of this book might well come to imagine them in that way too. In the great flood at the Tate in 1928, Ede was up to his waist in water trying to save the Turner seascapes

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For Ede, works of art were friends and art could be found wherever you looked – in a pebble, feather or seedhead. Jim’s plan was to “make it all that I can of lived in beauty, and each room an atmosphere of quiet and simple charm and open to the public (in Cambridge to students especially)”.

But when funds did not stretch this far, they eventually settled on four almost derelict cottages that were to become Kettle’s Yard. Jim Ede in Kettle's Yard: Courtesy of Kettle's Yard 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. He [Jim Ede] left this house that people still make a pilgrimage to. I think we don’t necessarily die, so long as the books, the art, the places we create go on living” – Laura Freeman A place of beauty’: Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, showing a Buddha from Thailand (13th or 14th century) and works by Mario Sironi, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Ben Nicholson. Photograph: Paul AllittAnyone familiar with it will recognise the jarring significance of Freeman’s “pebble” description – there are no imperfect pebbles at Kettle’s Yard. Those selected specimens that feature among the found and natural objects on display are arranged in a spiral, or nested in a basket. Meticulously researched, sympathetically told, the book is infused with the spirit of Kettle's Yard * i * LF: Part of the reason the book is called Ways of Life is because it’s very hard to say what Jim did or was. He’s not an artist, he’s an author, but he’s also a collector and a curator, and also a lecturer. He made his own way of life. He worked out what he wanted to do, but there’s no obvious path. I think it is true that it is incredibly hard to become a senior, or even junior curator today. There’s an expectation that you’ll have done an undergraduate and an MA and a PhD, and you’ll do an unpaid internship. Who can afford to do that when paying rent in London? LF: Maybe a misconception we take away from Kettle’s Yard is this idea that Jim is this serene figure at ease in this beautiful setting. I think the biggest thing I’d love other people to take away is that he was fun. He was brilliant company and his letters are funny. He’s excitable, he’s temperamental. He’s neurotic. He was a dandy. He was a party guy in his youth. There are so many different sides to him. The beautiful, revelatory biography of Jim Ede and Kettle's Yard that we have been waiting for. I loved it -- Edmund de Waal

The beautiful, revelatory biography of Jim Ede and Kettle's Yard that we have been waiting for. I loved it Edmund de WaalJim 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. Freeman has done a wonderful job here in conveying with absolute precision why Ede mattered and what made him different from his Bloomsbury contemporaries * Sunday Times * The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard artists represent a thrilling tipping point in twentieth-century 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.