Kettle’s Yard.

A row of once-dilapidated cottages in Cambridge is now a temple of British modern.

Above a cider press screw and two glass decanters in the sitting room at Kettle’s Yard is a small and very lovely Miró. Seemingly random lines and shapes in black, red and yellow and the words ‘TIC TIC’ float over an ultramarine ground. Place a finger, however, over the black spot at top right and the rest of the work slides into the left-hand bottom corner. Or cover the small red dot in the centre and everything else flies to the edges. Uncover and again, harmony is restored. 

 

A Miró painting at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.
The extension at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.

A masterclass in balance, the Miró is a metaphor of sorts for Kettle’s Yard. A single lemon sits on a pewter plate, also in the sitting room, echoing the bright yellow dot in the painting. The cider press screw, a post-cursor to the spiral staircase in the adjoining entrance, recalls some of the bases used by Constantin Brancusi, whose smooth black Prometheus rests gently on the Bechstein piano upstairs. Remove the lemon or the cider press screw and the room’s composition shifts.

Kettle’s Yard was the brainchild of Jim and Helen Ede, who took a row of dilapidated workers cottages in Cambridge and crafted what is today one of the greatest pilgrimage sites for British modern. It contains Jim’s extraordinary collection of British and European modern art, from Ben Nicholson and Alfred Wallis to Barbara Hepworth and Constantin Brancusi. As amazing is the homely and unpretentious nature of the setting. In a 1956 letter to artist David Jones, Ede laid out his vision for the house, imagining it as “a living place where works of art would be enjoyed, inherent to the domestic setting, where young people could be at home unhampered by the greater austerity of the museum or public art gallery, and where an informality might infuse an underlying formality.”

The drawing room at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.

Pictures by Christopher Wood and Ben Nicholson hang just inches above the skirting board of a bay window so they are best admired from a low-slung chair on the other side of the tiny room. (Today, visitors  are encouraged to sit and enjoy the collection from all such vantage points.) A sofa is fashioned from single mattresses on the floor, covered with a plain white dhurrie and flanked by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska sculptures. A concrete plinth between two Windsor chairs contains a Henry Moore. 

Greenery and found objects abound. For Jim, the “divine beauty” of a stone was equal in value to that of a masterpiece. “Stones,” he said “are strange expressions of miracles.” Just as the domestic nature of Kettle’s Yard challenged the notion of how we can live and interact with art, so too the mixing of natural objects and artworks challenged traditional ideas of what art is and could be. Almost as much has been written about the spiral of stones sitting on the round table in Jim’s bedroom—an arrangement of 76 circular pebbles collected from a beach in Norfolk, resembling a mandala—as the more illustrious ‘works’ hanging on the bedroom walls. 

Christopher Woods self portrait, Kettle's Yard.
A spiral of stones found on the beach at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.

Kettle’s Yard takes its name from the Kettle Merchant family, residents of the area from the 11th century. However, the story of the site in its current form begins in London in 1921, when Jim, then curator and assistant to the director of the Tate Gallery, met Ben and Winifred Nicholson. “The Nicholsons opened a door into the world of contemporary art and I rushed headlong into the world of Picasso, Brancusi and Braque,” said Jim, who was one of Ben Nicholson’s few admirers at the time. Often unable to sell his work, Nicholson would offer paintings to Jim for the price of the canvas and frame. As a result, Kettle’s Yard now contains around 40 works by Ben Nicholson, as well as others by Winifred. 

This circle of artist-friends swelled within a few years to include Kit (Christopher) Wood, Barbara Hepworth and David Jones, all of whom are well represented in the collection, as well as the self-taught St Ives fisherman-turned-painter, Alfred Wallis. Wallis would post his work, much of which was done on cardboard, to Jim in London, sometimes 60 paintings at a time—the collection now includes around 100 of his naïve depictions of the Cornish coast—prices set by size at one, two or three shillings. He met Miró, Brancusi, Chagall and Picasso while visiting Paris in 1924 and formed his friendship with Henry Moore after moving to Hampstead in 1928, then home to a burgeoning colony of avant-garde artists.

A significant milestone, also in the 1920’s, occurred when a great quantity of sculpture by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was “dumped” in Jim’s office at the Tate. “It was ten years after Gaudier’s death and all this work had been sent to many art experts for their opinion. It had become the property of the Treasury and the enlightened Solicitor General thought that the nation should acquire it, but no, not even as a gift. In the end I got a friend to buy three works for the Tate and three for the Contemporary Art Society, and the rest, for a song, I bought.” 

With this mass of work by Gaudier-Brzeska as its backbone, by the time Jim left the Tate to live in Morocco in 1936, he’d amassed a collection astounding in both breadth and interest. The next two decades were relatively quiet on the acquisition front, although important bonds were formed with American artists, Richard Pousette-Dart and William Congdon in the early 1940’s, while Jim was making a two-year tour of the USA, lecturing on art to raise funds for the war effort. 

Jim Ede's bathroom, Kettle's Yard.
Jim Ede's bedroom, Kettle's Yard.
A work by Alfred Wallis, Kettle's Yard.

It was while abroad, in 1954, that he found himself dreaming of the future Kettle’s Yard. “I wanted, in a modest way, to use the inspiration I had had from beautiful interiors, houses of leisured elegance, and to combine it with the joy I had felt in individual works seen in museums and with the all embracing delight I had experienced in nature, in stones, in flowers, in people.” The couple’s search for a stately home in or close to the university town proved fruitless and in the end, the president of the Cambridge Preservation society recommended the cottages. 

Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.

From its inception, one of the most important aspects of Kettle’s Yard was its audience. Jim believed they brought fresh energy to the collection through everyday interaction. He kept open house every afternoon of term, welcoming visitors into his home for a cup of tea and a tour, Miró’s balance being a favourite topic of discussion. The couple also hosted concerts—Helen was a musician—first in their minuscule upstairs living room, alongside Prometheus, and later in the modernist 1970 extension designed by architect Leslie Martin. Jim brokered a deal with Cambridge University, who took over the running of Kettle’s Yard in 1966, on the proviso that it remain open to the public, although the couple continued to live there until 1973 when they relocated to Edinburgh, Helen’s home town. 

Jim Ede at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's Dancer at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.

Born of generosity, with Jim either buying at low price or being gifted much of the collection, Kettle’s Yard encapsulates the reciprocal and democratic spirit of its creator, who even went as far as establishing a loan programme whereby students could borrow works to hang in their rooms. “Perhaps from it other ventures of this sort may spring. There should be a Kettle’s Yard in every university.”

Kettle’s Yard is open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am – 5pm. To book tickets, please go to kettlesyard.digitickets.co.uk

Castle Street, Cambridge CB3 0AQ +44 (0)1223 748 100

Photography: ℅ Kettle’s Yard.

From a story originally published in Reflektor Magazine.

Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.