Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1539834
66 Ede to David Jones, 31 January 1956, Kettle's Yard Archive, KY/EDE/1/8/1. 67 Ede, letter to David Jones, 21 June 1955, David Jones Papers, quoted in Fisher, p.143, fn.501. 68 A Way of Life was first published by Cambridge University Press in 1984. The most recent, second edition was published by Kettle's Yard and reprinted in 2023. music room, Gabo's stringed Linear Construction in Space No. 1 rested upon a newly purchased Steinway grand piano, with Ben Nicholson's much-travelled 1933 (musical instruments) hanging nearby. This new piano, chosen by Peter Wallfisch, had been a rich chestnut colour. Ede insisted it be stripped and painted black, better to harmonise with its surroundings. In 1973, the Edes left Kettle's Yard to live in Edinburgh. Helen, who had suffered her first heart attack in 1958, died in 1977. Jim died in 1990, aged 95. 'I HAVE CREATED MY OWN CHURCH' Writing to David Jones in 1956, Ede had described his need to regain an attitude of selflessness and to repay a debt to God for the stored-up beauty of forty years. 66 Ede, who thought much about spirituality and religion during this period, admitted 'I suppose I have created my own church'. 67 He was confirmed into the Anglican Church in 1959, having already assumed responsibility for the small, redundant Church of St Peter adjacent to Kettle's Yard, which he swept clean, placing fresh flowers on the altar and ringing the Angelus bell twice daily. Kettle's Yard was a parallel world, filled with light, flowers and the spiritually potent symbol of the circle, whether in spirals of rounded pebbles, the outlines of Pousette-Dart's brass rings, Lucie Rie's bowls, or the twinned hoops of Tam MacPhail's iron Construction (c.1968). In 1964, Ben Nicholson paid Ede's travel fare to see documenta III at Kassel in Germany, which included a concrete wall by Nicholson featuring a recessed circle. Ede would have loved to save this wall from destruction or to recreate it on a smaller scale at Kettle's Yard. He did, however, buy three black-and-white collages by Italo Valenti, which he installed as a triptych above a table bearing glass spheres, vessels and flowers. The ensemble resembled an altar. The placement of objects within Kettle's Yard, such an essential part of its aesthetic, became a bone of contention. Ede wrote painstaking instructions, and returning to visit compiled a list of complaints. In 1984 he created his own record: A Way of Life, designed as a large-format book with black and white photographs and a text by Ede. 68 Just as he had pointed out details to visitors at Kettle's Yard, he was now able to document the histories of its objects, the reason for their juxtapositions, and how their impact altered when moved by even a fraction of an inch. Beginning his tours, Ede would explain the balanced composition of Miró's Tic Tic, with its yellow circle and touches of red. Close by was a pale yellow lemon on a pewter salver. Both echoed the daffodils and crimson anemone in Christopher Wood's Flowers, hung startlingly low, by a chair. Ben Nicholson was, of course, right to identify the impossibility of maintaining Kettle's Yard exactly as it was when the Edes lived there, with their rituals of making tea and welcoming guests to concerts. But the spirit of place has endured, kept 'vital' (an Ede word) through enlightened stewardship, judicious acquisitions and a living programme of music and exhibitions. 22