Oscar Nemon and his Pleasant Land

Today I am venturing a short distance out of town to a place known as Pleasant Land. I don’t as yet know why it is called this. I am just thinking what a wonderful name with its promise of green pastures and natural beauty, both of which are in evidence as I make the steep climb away from the busy city up to Boars Hill, an area of countryside between Oxford and Abingdon. The plot is not far from the Ridgeway and there are plenty of walkers out enjoying the clear autumnal day. What I hadn’t been expecting as I turn into a tree lined driveway and park up on the grassy verge of the turning circle at the end is what greets me. A tall, maybe two metres in height, sculpted figure of a woman holding up her child to the sky. The bond between the two signifies that this is a mother who appears to be about to engage in a game with her baby. Their eyes are locked together and for a short imagining I think I can hear them both laughing with delighted anticipation. It’s a playful, heartwarming image. And an introduction to the world I am about to enter. The world of a man little known by the public but loved by some of the most powerful people of their day; from Churchill to Queen Elizabeth II, Beaverbrook to Field-Marshal Montgomery, Harry S. Truman to Harold Macmillan. The world of the sculptor, Oscar Nemon.

I have to admit that I had not heard of him before this visit, though if you know where to look there are examples of his work all over Oxford. Born Oskar Neumann into a Jewish family living in Osijek in what was then Yugoslavia in 1906, his precocious talent for sculpture developed while he was still at school. Studying in both Vienna and Brussels, by 1931 he had become a respected portrait sculptor, his charisma and canny ability to capture the essence of the person securing commissions from among others the Belgian Royal Family, and Sigmund Freud. But by the mid 1930’s the rise of fascism and the accompanying antisemitism was making it increasingly difficult for those of his heritage to find work in mainland Europe. Changing his name to the less conspicuously Jewish Oscar Nemon, by 1939 he had settled in England, and begun a relationship with Patricia Villiers Stuart, the daughter of a wealthy English family from Norfolk. Despite her family’s disapproval – they tried to get Nemon deported on more than one occasion – the couple’s son Falcon was born in Oxford on 27 March 1941, the day Hitler authorised his invasion of Yugoslavia. 24 of Nemon’s family were murdered in the Holocaust, including his mother, brother and grandmother.

In 1948, now married with one more child and having rented for some years they bought the land on Boars Hill that Nemon was to call home until his death in 1985. Pleasant Land. It is where I am now. A large modernist white building eventually replacing the two ex-Army huts used by Italian prisoners of war that had served as both the family living quarters (another child soon followed) and his studio until 1970. Much of this is now rented out to pay for the upkeep of the Nemon Archive and Studio I have come to visit today. Curated by Nemon’s daughter in law, Falcon’s widow the poet Alice Hiller, it is open occasionally and on special request. The office space at the front is crammed full of instantly recognisable faces, fashioned out of plaster and today bathed in sunlight through the slatted blinds. There’s Winston Churchill, who became a good friend of Nemon, here’s Queen Elizabeth 11 who lent him a studio in St James’ Palace, over there a smiling bust of the Queen Mother, a regular visitor for tea while he was working. There are politicians aplenty, including Harold Macmillan and Maggie Thatcher, as well as personal acquaintances like the caricaturist Max Beerbohm who taught Nemon English when he first arrived in the country. There are sketches and photographs, a bronze head of Sigmund Freud alongside those of several Belgian children, names unknown. An extraordinary collection of a lifetime’s work, jockeying for space on the overcrowded shelves and walls.

But it is in the recreation of his studio on the lawn below that you really get a sense of the man. The single storey white structure was apparently once the library of Randolph Churchill, gifted to Nemon while his new house was under construction. This is where today we learn about Nemon’s all-important process. He only ever sculpted from life, Alice tells us, using multiple sittings to gather the inspiration he needed. An adept raconteur he would put the subject at ease by telling funny stories. And as well as making sketches he would bring a small piece of clay on a stick which he would work as they chatted to capture a 3D representation of the subject as well as his own personal response. There are dozens of these miniature lolly heads here amongst his archives. For the more famous subjects he would bring a photographer to record the sitter in action (in Dwight D. Eisenhower’s case eating a hot dog, leaning forward and laughing) and collect tear sheets from the newspapers of the person in familiar poses which he would then hang around the studio as he worked. This way he could call upon the multitude of sources to create not just a likeness but a mood.

Only after he had exhausted the life of the clay did he make the plaster cast, and even then, he would repeatedly work on the piece, shaving off bits and pieces of plaster, adding smidgeons of plasticine, until eventually the finished work would be sent to the foundry to be cast in bronze.  My favourite space in the Nemon complex is a large storage area under the house. It is filled with hundreds of plaster casts. Some half- finished, others re-workings of the same image, huge figures and tiny maquettes. Most are heads. There is a shelf of plaster hands. It’s as though someone has rescued a basket of body parts from a theatre props department and laid them out for display.

Like so many artist friends of mine, however, none of this made Nemon rich. Alice tells us the story behind the bust of Ernst Chain that stands on a plinth in the studio. Chain had been at the development stages of his work on penicillin (for which he later won a Nobel Prize) when he first met Nemon at a party in North Oxford. Some months later Nemon’s wife Patricia fell dangerously ill with pneumonia. Despairing, Nemon asks Chain if he can smuggle some of the wonder drug out to treat her, which he does. She makes a full recovery. In gratitude, Nemon pays him in kind by making the bust that I am looking at today. It was typical of a man, who could be persuaded to do jobs on the cheap in the hopes it would lead to more lucrative commissions. It rarely did. But then this was what he loved doing. It was his calling. In her book, ‘Finding Nemon’, his daughter Aurelia recalls her father returning home from London with the smell of ‘earthy clay. His fingers and hands speckled with flakes of white plaster of Paris.’ He was constantly at work, sketching, moulding, refining, and casting and forever looking for more assignments.

Of all Nemon’s portraits it is the seated figure of Freud that I find most fascinating. Legs crossed, hands on hips, brow furrowed, it is a portrait of a man struggling with what was happening in the hostile world of the 1930’s. Freud’s maid Paola was the first to see it finished, and told Nemon that she thought he had made the Professor look too ‘cross.’ On hearing this Freud is reported to have replied. ‘Oh, but I am angry. I am angry with humanity!’ Nemon had captured the psychoanalyst perfectly.

As I leave and look again at the figure of the mother and child I encountered on my way in, I feel I am now better equipped to guess at its meaning. This statue is a copy of the Memorial made by Nemon now standing in the park named after him, near to his old family home in Osijek, in what is now Croatia. Years in the making it was finally unveiled in 1965, Nemon’s response to the horrors of the Holocaust. Named ‘Humanity’, the child is modelled on his own first-born Falcon. And perhaps I begin to understand. Pleasant Land, from the poem by Blake, was maybe his way of expressing gratitude to the adoptive country that took him in. He was building a small oasis of calm in an otherwise chaotic world. And the artwork at its entrance is his hymn of hope. “Today, Man must still struggle to gain or to maintain his freedom. But his greatest need is Hope. This statue of a mother and child Symbolises Hope for all humanity, faith in the future,” wrote Nemon in 1965. “Two generations ensuring the survival of our civilisation.”

Amen to that.

For more information about the Museum and Studio

https://oscarnemon.org.uk

After running the Nemon Museum and Studio for eight years, Alice Hiller is now looking for a partner arts organisation to take on the role. Until this happens there are no plans to open it to the public in 2025.

Finding Nemon by Aurelia Young with Julian Hale is available through the website.

Postscript: After publishing this piece I received an email from Aurelia Young, one of Nemon’s daughters. She writes, “My mother was also a poet (like Alice) and a great admirer of William Blake. She was so thrilled to move out of our rented rooms on Boars Hill and into our cold and flimsy army huts that, to honour my father’s Jewish roots, she wanted to build ‘Jerusalem’ in England’s green and Pleasant Land. I remember how pleased she was to have a home of her own. My father changed his name from Neumann to Némon when he was in Brussels in the early 1930s. The Belgians didn’t like the German’s (having been invaded during WW1) and Nemon had a German name and maybe a German sounding accent. “

‘Humanity’ – this resin version of Nemon’s mother and child, stands in the turning circle at Pleasant Land, as the original plaster version would have done in Nemon’s lifetime. As space was limited in his studio many of the larger plaster sculptures were sited here, open to the elements. By the time Nemon died only a standing Churchill and Humanity were salvageable – Churchill still awaits restoration.

The modernist house built by Nemon in 1970. With the more recent memorial installation at the front.

Titled ‘flowers cut down’ a poem by Alice Hiller, this group of figures with missing stems, are placed on sections of trunk from a poplar tree planted by Nemon and Patricia in the 1950’s, which came down in the storm of October 2021. As the plasters weather and become unrecognisable they will be replaced with new casts. The installation is based on the many compositions Nemon made of mourning groups, his own way of externalising his grief after the deaths of so many of his relatives. These often showed people holding or supporting each other.

Nemon working on the head of his son Falcon. ©The Nemon Estate

The Nemon archive.

The bronzes made by Nemon here of children were purchased only recently in 2015 from a Belgian art dealer. The plasters were lost when he fled Europe. He kept few bronzes as these would remain the property of the client.

The large seated plaster of Sigmund Freud.

Nemon working on a bust of Sigmund Freud ©The Nemon Estate

A huge plaster of Winston Churchill. Nemon first met Churchill at the Hotel La Mamounia in Marrakesh in 1951. Unbeknown to Churchill Nemon had created a small terracotta bust of him based on sketches made in the hotel dining room. A mutual friend showed this to Lady Churchill who asked if she could keep it. So began a lasting partnership between the two men. It is Nemon’s full length statue of Churchill that stands in the Members’ Lobby of The Houses of Commons, its left foot shiny where MPs have touched it over the years for good luck.

Bust of Celia Cook, who studied History at St Anne’s College Oxford 1941-4. It is clear that Nemon was not the most faithful of partners.

A plaster of Sir Karl Parker, Keeper of the Fine Art Department at the Ashmolean Museum and creator of the Print Room there.

Here he is overlooking the Print Room. I came across it quite by accident when I visited recently. Modelled in 1962, it was cast in 2015 with the permission of the family in memory of the sculptor’s son Falcon Nemon Stuart.

Some of Nemon’s tools on show in the studio. And the heads on sticks he used to create his first 3D impressions of his sitters.

Nemon with Ernst Chain and the bust he made as a thank you for saving his wife’s life. ©The Nemon Estate

The garage at the Nemon Archive and Studio is filled with plasters both big and small.

Pleasant Land

Nemon, his wife Patricia and son Falcon are all buried in the local churchyard at Wootton. Special permission was granted to include Nemon’s ‘Heredity’ another of his mother and child compositions.