Just googled Mitzi Cunliffe, and you'll never guess whose article I stumbled across:
Time to look after our public art
Several works of art on major buildings are getting shoddy treatment in Manchester. Eddy Rhead pleads their cause
It is doubtful that anyone will miss Moberly Tower once it isdemolished. A university hall of residence building, it sits on Oxford Road right next to the Waterhouse quad. It has always looked incongruous and even in 1969 Pevsner rightly described it as ‘deplorably unsubstantial next toWaterhouse’.
There should, I suspect, be no objections to its removal and hopefully a better quality building will replace it. But before demolition commences we should stop, crane our necks a little and look up. For on the north side of the building is a wonderful relief panel by Mitzi Solomon Cunliffe. What is to become of this panel once the building it sits on is taken down?
Not only that - it is just one of several interesting and important modern pieces of public art that are being at best overlooked and at worst woefully neglected.
Mitzi Solomon Cunliffe was born in New York in 1918 but has strong associations with Manchester, having lived in Didsbury for many years and having done much of her most important work in those years. She studied first in New York, then Paris and finally in Sweden. In 1949 she married Marcus Cunliffe, a lecturer of American History at Manchester University and a native of Rochdale. Mitzi moved to England and set up home in Didsbury, having one son and two daughters.
In 1951, along with 15 other painters and sculptors, Mitzi was commissioned to provide work for The Festival of Britain, commissions that sealed her reputation as an expressive and lively producer of architectural sculpture and set her apart in an almost exclusively male domain.
She did many pieces for educational buildings, mostly in the north, including work at Liverpool and Leeds
Universities, Manchester High School for Girls and at Moberley Tower in Manchester. In 1959 the newly formed Society of Film and Television, later to become the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, commissioned her to design an award and it is Mitzi Cunliffe’s ‘hollow eye’ trophy that is still handed out at the BAFTA awards today.
Her most notable built work however is in Manchester and forms part of what is now a listed building. Heaton Park pumping station is part of the system that brings water the 82 miles from the Lake District to Manchester. It was built in 1955 by the City Engineer's Department, and for it Mitzi Cunliffe provided a relief panel, designed to be seen from below, that depicts the bringing of the water from
Haweswater and includes figures commemorating those who built the pipeline. It is a remarkable piece of public art on such a mundane industrial building and is testament to the public officials who incorporated art into their buildings with such verve in the post war period. Heaton Park pumping station was listed in 1998.
No one is suggesting that Moberley Tower be listed simply to preserve a piece of work by a noted artist, but it does draw questions on how pieces of art (for that is what they are) are treated on otherwise unremarkable buildings. Cunliffe’s relief panel at Moberley Tower can and should be removed prior to demolition and either repositioned in the new building or retained by the University and treated in the same way they would treat any of their other precious artefacts.
Just because an artist’s work happens to be attached to an unloved building does not make the piece any less worthy aesthetically. Financially, the owners of the building would be foolish not to preserve Cunliffe’s work as it doubtless has a monetary value, should they wish to sell it.
Whilst the future of Cunliffe’s relief panel is still in doubt, two other works, both in University buildings, are perhaps not being treated with the dignity they deserve. Across Oxford Road from Moberley Tower, on Brunswick Street, the Chemistry building has an interesting relief by Hans Tisdall from 1967. Called The Elements, the panel is made up of large circular forms designed to represent, as the title suggests, the elements.
Hans Tisdall was born in Germany in 1910, and settled in England in 1930. He was later to design many distinctive and influential lettered book jackets for Jonathan Cape in the 1950s. Known not only for his graphic design Tisdall was also renowned for his sculpture, paintings and tapestry work in public buildings, most notably at Plymouth's main Council building from 1954.
Unfortunately The Elements has suffered a crude and clumsy intervention. The relief was originally sited on a wall along a small terraced area. Recently, to create a café space at the entrance to the Chemistry building, an extension has been built with the front glass wall dissecting the terrace, and Tisdall's work. Half of The Elements is now inside the café, the other exposed outside. Whilst an effort has been made to save the sculpture and work around it, the piece can no longer be viewed in its full entirety, thus diminishing its impact.
This begs the question that if this work was, for example, a painting, would a wall be placed right down the centre of it, cutting it in half?
At the Renold building, on the UMIST campus, another work by a noted artist is suffering from neglect and a Philistine attitude. In the impressive entrance hall there is a mural entitled Metamorphosis by Victor Pasmore from 1968. Pre-war Pasmore had a figurative and slightly Impressionist style, but post war began to adopt a more abstract approach, moving from flat to relief paintings. In 1950 he gained the opportunity to work with many of the day’s best architects, after winning a commission to paint a mural for The Festival of Britain.
From this he developed a growing interest in architecture and in 1954, after moving to teach at The University of Newcastle, he was appointed Consulting Director of Urban Design for Peterlee New Town in County Durham. His vision was to shape the look and landscaping of the new town. Pasmore's most prominent, and controversial, contribution to Peterlee is the Apollo pavilion, a huge cubist, concrete sculpture designed to bring a focal point to the contrived community.
Unfortunately it proved a focal point for certain sections of the community to carry out youthful pastimes such as drinking, petty arson and graffiti. Calls for its demolition were thankfully drowned out by calls for its retention and its future now looks secured.
As at Peterlee, Pasmore’s contribution at UMIST seems to be receiving an equally similar mistreatment, not this time from indiscriminate vandalism but something worse - institutional vandalism. Metamorphosis fills one entire wall of the Renold building’s entrance and communal chairs have been pushed hard against the painted mural. Another problem is the modern plague of obtrusive wires and cables, spread by lazy contractors, now threatening the mural, with fire detection equipment thoughtlessly intruding on the space occupied by the piece.
As with The Elements and its bisecting wall, would any other important artefact have chairs pushed up against it and cables run through it? It seems that simply because these works make up the fabric of the buildings they are as robust and replaceable as the materials they are attached to and can be treated as such. This is simply not the case and, with the artists now dead, remedial work carried out, once these works are damaged, diminishes their worth.
Buildings come and go and sometimes their loss is mourned, but to destroy works of art is inexcusable. We should start being a little kinder to our public art. Out of the safe confines of a gallery these works have to face up to constant punishment and mistreatment. The architects who commissioned these pieces deserve to be applauded for the contribution they make to the urban landscape and the least we can do, as testament to that, is look after them a little more thoughtfully.