Born in Manchester 1919, Cliff Holden was educated at Wilmslow Modern School and Reaseheath School of Agriculture and continued with various jobs on farms. Before establishing himself as an artist he was engaged in politics, religion and the study of philosophy.
Lived in London exceeding the exploits of George Orwell in "Down and Out in London and Paris”. When this activity gave way to art, and painting became his life, instead of seeking security within the establishment, he took odd jobs to survive. He worked at fruit -picking in the autumn and hoeing by the acre in the spring, salmon fishing in Scotland, he worked as a circus hand, as a model, commercial screen-printer, and various other labouring jobs.
Having started to paint without guidance or direction, and at the same time attending lectures in philosophy at the City Literary Institute, he found David Bomberg, joined his drawing classes and became virtually apprenticed to him. He was joined by Dorothy Mead and Edna Mann in 1945 and followed Bomberg to the Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank University).
Intense discussions with Bomberg over this two-year period culminated in Holden conceiving the idea of the Borough Group, which, with Bomberg's approval, he organised and established in 1946. Taking part in the first exhibition at the Archer Gallery in 1947 were Lilian Bomberg, Cliff Holden, Christine Kamienieska, Edna Mann, Dorothy Mead, and Peter (Miles) Richmond.
The purpose of the group was to further extend and develop Bomberg's ideas and to provide a platform for promoting those ideas. Bomberg suggested Holden as President. In 1948 the group was extended to 11 members and after 5 years of intense activity and 7 major exhibitions, the Group was dissolved in the spring of 1951. In the autumn of the same year Holden exhibited at the Parsons Gallery, London together with Dorothy Mead, Dennis Creffield and Miles Richmond.
A Swedish painter-sculptor, Torsten Renquist, saw this show and invited the four to exhibit in Stockholm. The exhibition took place in 1952. It was a critical success. Cliff and Dorothy stayed in Sweden for nine months and then painted in Spain for two years. Returning to London, Holden was invited back to Sweden in 1956 to have shows in Gothenburg and Stockholm. This stimulated him to promote cultural exchanges between the two countries. He became a sort of “cultural ambassador” introducing the sculptors, Moore, Chadwick, Armitage and Butler, negotiated the purchase of a major work of Moore’s for the city of Gothenburg. Toured exhibitions of British Graphic and was instrumental in bringing the work of Evert Lundquist to international attention.
Holden stayed on in Sweden, met the two textile designers Lisa Grönwall and Maj Nilsson . He created the triumvirate Marstrand Designers, a design unit for flat surface design whose “way of working became unique in the world – a combination of techniques; drawing, painting and ‘mobile’ silk-screen printing”. The techniques, developed by Holden, put emphasis “on physical activity, on movement, and on space as defined and indicated by the almost spontaneous tache or mark”….” Forms from nature are not only forms that we love, they symbolize and in fact create a feeling of space, light and air, so that our designs, in textiles, wallpapers and our large scale decorative murals, not only embellish architecture but revitalize and extend the architectural space.”
Marstrand Designers gained an international reputation, winning 10 national and international awards, including Holden's best design of the year award 1962 from Prince Philip at the Design Centre. In the middle sixties, after 11 years of designing textiles, wallpapers and carpets, Holden and Lisa Grönwall, now his wife and partner ,began to be commissioned by architects for large scale projects for the public domain. This meant working to a brief, creating murals for Swedish Consulates and Embassies, hotels, ships, hospitals etc. They are represented in hundreds of public buildings all around the world from Moscow to Washington. Now joined by Holden’s son, Thomas, the studio provided a living not only for the three in the unit, but also for assistants and students working as a team.
In design, Holden, contrary to his belief and practice in painting, exploited detail and worked in a planned way. He explained,- ”We knew what we should do, we knew how to do it, we knew what it was for, and how it would function. That is the difference between art and handicraft.”
Instead of the visual delights that he creates in design, in painting he stresses the importance of a meaningful idea, investigating space and form through the sense of touch. "What a painter has to do is not to recognize either the object or the image but to recognize the kind of sensation that has produced the image.”
Holden endorses the following quotation written by his colleague Miles Richmond.
“Painting matters to me since I know no better means for exploring the connections between our inner and outer worlds and presenting evidence of that exploration.”
Exhibitions
Amongst others too numerous to list here:
2004 Wendy Levy Gallery, Manchester; mixed summer exhibition
2004 Tate. Display “Bomberg and the Borough”.
2000 Falkenberg, Sweden; Holden’s 80th birthday celebration
1995 Solo with Gothenburg’s Town Art Society.
1975 Two exhibitions, the Mälar Gallery, Stockholm.
1963 Crane Kalman Gallery, London; “Figurative Painting in Sweden”. With Staffan Hallström
Axel Kargel , Evert Lundquist, Inge Schiöler, and Gustaf Sjöö.
1961 Gummesons Gallery, Stockholm.solo show.
1960 & 1959 John Moores Liverpool exhibition.
1959 & 1955 Manchester Library; silk-screen prints & paintings
1956 Gummeson’s solo show Stockholm
1956 Lorensberg Gallery, solo show, Gothenburg
1952 Gummeson’s Gallery, Stockholm; with Creffield, Mead and Richmond, invited by Torsten Renquist
1951 Parsons Gallery; with Dennis Creffield, Dorothy Mead, and (Miles) Peter Richmond.
Public Collections:
Arts Council of Great Britain.
Victoria & Albert Museum Textile Archives
Whitworth Gallery, Manchester; houses many examples of wallpaper designs.
MMU, Manchester College of Art.( Graphic section) .
Tate Gallery, London
Museum of Modern Art, Edinburgh.( Graphic section.)
Manchester City Art Gallery (Rutherston Collection)
.Museum of Modern Art. Stockholm,
National Museum, Stockholm,( Graphic section )
Laholm's Museum of Drawings.
Museums of Gothenburg, Luleå, Eskilstuna, Borås, Karlstad
Private Collections:
America, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland & U.K.
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