Leeds Art Club

The Club was founded in 1908 by schoolteacher Alfred Richard Orage, (1874-1934) with journalist and bibliophile George Holbrook Jackson, (1874-1948). The ‘Club’ was a bohemian outfit, that club met weekly at its premises at 8 Blenheim Terrace in Leeds. Its discussions ranged from art, poetry, female suffrage, politics and spiritualism. Members included Emily Ford, stage designer Edith Craig, Jacob Kramer, Eric Gill, Bruce Turner and Leeds suffragette Mary Gawthorpe, (1881-1973). Isabella Ford, (1855-1924) although never a member was a very active suffrage campaigner but was always aligned with the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, which was a lawful organization that never participated in militant tactics. She was a key figure in much of their local Leeds campaign activity and undertook a wide range of non-militant campaigning.

Visiting speakers included George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yates amongst many. Percy Wyndham Lewis also attended and introduced an exhibition of ‘Cubist and Futurist Art’ in 1914. It also exhibited works by Vassily Kandinsky considered radical at the time.

In 1906 the founders left for London and the following year with financial assistance from Bernard Shaw purchased The New Age, a struggling political Christian Socialist magazine published weekly. Meanwhile, back in Leeds the Club was ‘taken over’ by Frank Rutter, the founder of the Allied Artists' Association and newly appointed Director of Leeds City Art Gallery, and Michael Sadler, the new Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. Under their leadership, the Arts Club maintained its interest in the relationship between radical politics, spiritualism and art, but this was expanded to encompass early psychoanalysis and, most significantly, abstract art. The Club ceased to operate after 1923 but during its ‘tenure’ it showed the Leeds public exhibitions such as the important and seminal Post Impressionist Exhibition. The first time it was seen outside the capital.

It should not be confused with Leeds Fine Artists Club, founded in 1874.

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