Harry Thubron

Harry Thubron OBE (Henry James Thubron, 1915–1985) was an English artist and art teacher.

He made radical innovations in art education which are still controversial today.

Thubron was born on 24 November 1915 at 7 Victoria Avenue, Bishop Auckland, Co. Durham, the son of Percy Thubron, journeyman joiner (and later a newsagent and tobacconist), and his wife, Martha Ada, née Thompson (d. 1929/30).

His mother, who died when he was fourteen, would shut him away in a room to paint from the age of seven.

Having attended Henry Smith Grammar School, Hartlepool, he went on to Sunderland School of Art (1933–38) and to the Royal College of Art, London (1938–40).

On 6 March 1940 he married, in Battersea, London, Joan Sawdon, a schoolteacher, daughter of Frank Sawdon, a hairdresser.

Thubron served in HM Armed Forces (1941–46) at the Army Bureau of Current Affairs Newsletter.

On demobilisation in 1946 he realised that in art also a new start was required.

While teaching at Sunderland School of Art from 1946, he began to elaborate new courses (from 1948 onward), contributing (from 1954) to those directed by John Wood of North Riding county council, which allowed for greater innovation.

Pasmore had worked at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, on the basic design course, instigated in 1949 with William Johnstone and Arthur Halliwell.

These developments owed much to the Vorkurs of the German Bauhaus, but Thubron was always careful to dissociate his own methods from those of others and in his own teaching insisted on freedom, openness, development, and research.

These chosen phrases gave expression to his perception of rapid contemporary changes in technology and society, and he rejected the label "basic design" which he thought was given too freely to radical modernist teaching.

At Leeds Thubron also established close links between the art college and the School of Fine Art at the University of Leeds, which allowed the University's Gregory Fellows in Fine Art to start teaching at Leeds College of Art.

He also helped to create a prototype for Britain's Polytechnics by sending his students to work on collaborative projects with engineering students from Leeds College of Technology, out of which Leeds Polytechnic was formed.

This was also a time when Thubron organised a series of summer schools in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, through which his ideas on art education were shared with artists, art teachers and art students from all over the country, thereby spreading his philosophy.

During the 1950s and 60s Thubron was a familiar name in education for his pioneering experiments in post-school art education.

He taught at Sunderland College of Art from 1950 to 1955, and then became Head of Fine Art at Leeds College of Art.

On his move north in 1956, Victor Pasmore also worked with wood.

With Dennis Harland as technical adviser he produced a fine relief in plastics for the exterior of the Branch College, Leeds (1963–4; removed), which fulfilled his ambition to make art for public, architectural settings.

In 1964 Thubron left Leeds and became a lecturer at Lancaster until 1966.

Following his divorce in 1962, he married, on 4 August 1965 in Lancaster, Elma Askham, an artist and lecturer, daughter of William Marsh Askham.

After 1965, he devoted himself mainly to collages and assemblages with materials found on the street, usually from industry.

Out of the turbulence of the years after his divorce Thubron produced comparatively few works of art, but these, based on a dialogue between old and new materials, and painting and collage, were treasured by friends and colleagues who rightly judged them to be sensitive and beautiful.

He showed work in Leeds at the Queen Square Gallery in 1967, and again that year with Elma Thubron.

He subsequently became Head of Painting at Leicester College of Art, although he only held this post for three years (until 1968) due to increasing ill health.

After 1969 he concentrated more on his own painting, and funded by an Arts Council grant spent the following year in Spain.

He spent part of 1971 in Jamaica before beginning an association with Goldsmiths' College, New Cross, London, as part-time teacher.

He continued making paintings and collages during the last eight years of his life, though experiencing ever-deteriorating health.

He lived his most creative time between London and the south of Spain, in the 70s and 80s, very interested in the work of Kurt Schwitters and Antoni Tàpies, and with particular admiration for Paul Klee, who advocated art as a means of self- development and self-discovery, combining experience and instinct in the creative act.

Examples of his work are in the Tate collection in the Tate Britain, Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds University Gallery, and the Museum of Hartlepool, co. Durham, among other regional and private collections.

Thubron's wartime experience of teaching soldiers via the text of the Army Council of Current Affairs Newsletter gave him a vision of a "new post-war world" and the rhetoric to achieve it.

He still continued some teaching after this, as a part-time tutor at Goldsmiths' College, London, between 1971 and 1982.

Thubron's specific innovations in art education are still controversial.

While he is remembered for his warm personality and vivid use of the spoken word, an extensive documentary record of his work as a teacher is held in the National Art Archive, Bretton Hall, Yorkshire.

“If we, ourselves, don't take jobs in colleges, take leadership roles; then nothing will ever change." – Harry Thubron

He was also included in major surveys, among them 'British Art' at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1974, and 'British Painting, 1952–77' at the Royal Academy, London, in 1977.

Later, in 1976, he showed paintings and collages at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

In the 1978 Birthday Honours he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services in art education.

Thubron died at home in Lewisham, London in April 1985.

Thubron started to create figurative works, which soon changed to abstract, not only in painting, as in reliefs in wood, metal or resin.