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Published: 12 January, 2012
by PETER GRUNER

During his lifetime, Islington artist Cyril Mann was so poor he painted on old newspaper and wrapping paper because he couldn’t afford the price of a canvas.

Today, with a centenary exhibition of his paintings at the Business Design Centre at the Angel this month, prices for his work range from £10,000 to £50,000.

Mann (1911-1980) lived with his Dutch-born wife Renske in a small, one-bed council flat at the top of seven-storey Bevin Court, Cruikshank Street, in Finsbury, a block designed by legendary architect Berthold Lubetkin.

A graduate of the Royal Academy School, Mann famously captured the unique atmosphere of London emerging from the Blitz in a series of paintings called “Bombsites around Paul Street”, but he was virtually unrecognised in his own lifetime.

He died aged 68.

Eight of his works completed in the 1950s are being sold at the London Art Fair at the Design Centre, from next Wednesday until Sunday, January 22.

Renske, who was 29 years his junior, speaking about her late husband, said it is time for a complete retrospective of his work and a plaque at Bevin Court.

They met while Renske was a student of 19 and Mann was teaching at Kingsway Day College (when it was in High Holborn) in 1959.

“We lived on the seventh floor of the Bevin Court, off Amwell Street, and although there were lifts, they were constantly breaking down. We were very poor. He would paint on anything that you didn’t have to pay for. He’d paint on newspaper, wrapping paper and his canvases were often second hand.”

Renske, who now lives in West London, added that today Mann is finally getting some recognition.

She said: “He was described to me recently as the artist’s artist. Sadly, the fashion when he was alive was against his style of figurative art, or art that you can recognise.”

They married at Finsbury Town Hall and Mann’s best man was a local librarian.

Renske recalled: “Islington in our day was not the upmarket place it is today. There were a lot of slums around us with six families to a house. Children played in the streets and there were still bombsites everywhere even in the early 1960s.”

Dr Robert Travers, of Piano Nobile gallery, who are selling Mann’s work on behalf of his estate, said that the bombsites still around in the 1960s and 1970s eventually became the site for the luxurious Barbican.

Dr Travers argues that Mann should be acknowledged as a major post-war artist, on a global scale.

In his foreword to The Sun is God, the life and work of Cyril Mann, by John Russell Taylor, Dr Travers wrote: “His ability to create a new dimension and vitality to figurative work has ensured that Cyril Mann can be numbered among the outstanding painters of his time.”

Mann’s work is now represented in major private and public collections, including the Guildhall Museum and Art Gallery and the William Morris Museum, Waltham Forest. The British Museum department of prints and drawings has five of his drawings.

Mann left two daughters, Sylvia (now deceased) and Amanda. His first wife, Mary, is also dead.

• The London Art Fair 2012 is at the Business Design Centre, Upper Street, Islington, N1, from January
18-22, www.londonartfair.co.uk