Emmy Bridgwater

Emma Frith Bridgwater (10 November 1906 – 13 March 1999), known as Emmy Bridgwater, was an English artist and poet associated with the Surrealist movement.

Based at times in both Birmingham and London, she was a significant member of the Birmingham Surrealists and of the London-based British Surrealist Group, and was an important link between the surrealists of the two cities.

Michel Remy, professor of art history at the University of Nice and author of Surrealism in Britain, describes her influence as "of the same importance to British surrealism as the arrival of Dalí in the ranks of the French surrealists".

Biography Emmy Bridgwater was born in the upmarket Edgbaston district of Birmingham, the third daughter of a chartered accountant and Methodist. Showing an early interest in painting and drawing, she studied under Bernard Fleetwood-Walker at the Birmingham School of Art for three years from 1922 before further study at a local art school in Oxford paid for by work as a secretary.

Bridgwater’s career was hindered by her geographical location, income, and class. She had limited contact with the London Surrealist Group, and her father’s limited financial support only allowed her to attend the Grosvenor School of Modern Art intermittently. Due to her limited income, Bridgwater was forced to undertake secretarial work while working as an artist and was unable to travel to Paris until after the War.

Emmy Bridgwater, Necessary Bandages (1942), oil on panelBridgwater's aesthetic direction was transformed by attending the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, where she met Conroy Maddox, John Melville and Robert Melville - the key figures of the Birmingham Surrealists. From this point on her work began to explore the more fearful sides of the subconscious, often using automatist techniques. Studying for periods at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London during 1936 and 1937 she retained a base in Birmingham and exhibited as a member of the Birmingham Group throughout the late 1930s, also exhibiting at the London Gallery after being introduced to owner E. L. T. Mesens by Robert Melville. In 1947, Bridgwater was one of six English artists chosen by André Breton to exhibit at the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme at the Galerie Maeght in Paris - the last major international surrealist group exhibition. Ceasing work in the mid-1980s, she died in Solihull in 1999. In 1946, she contributed to Free Unions Libres, a collection of texts by French and English surrealists and edited by Simon Watson Taylor.

Robert Melville described Bridgwater's paintings as depicting "the saddening, half-seen 'presences' encountered by the artist on her journey through the labyrinths of good and evil ... although they are dreamlike in their ambiguity they are realistic documents from a region of phantasmal hopes and murky desires where few stay to observe and fewer still remain clear-sighted."

Her obituary in The Independent said "Her paintings show an ability to enter a personal dream world and transform the visions she experienced there into bold, unselfconscious, emotionally charged landscapes which more often than not strike into the very depths of one's mind. Using a limited palette and painting thickly, she was able to bring together seemingly unrelated objects which she used to fill desolate landscapes, giving the paintings a narrative quality of her own making."