30 Facts About Jessica Dismorr

Jessica Stewart Dismorr was an English painter and illustrator.

Jessica Dismorr was one of only two women members of the Vorticist movement and exhibited with the Allied Artists Association, the Seven and Five Society and the London Group.

Jessica Dismorr was the only female contributor to Group X and displayed abstract works at the 1937 Artists' International Association exhibition.

Poems and illustrations by Jessica Dismorr appeared in several avant-garde publications including Blast, Rhythm and an edition of Axis.

The family moved to Hampstead in the 1890s, where Jessica Dismorr was educated at Kingsley College and where she became head girl.

Jessica Dismorr's mother suffered from extended periods of ill health but her father's income meant the family were free of financial worries and Jessica was able to travel extensively in Europe.

Jessica Dismorr attended the Slade School of Art from 1902 to 1903, before training under Max Bohm at Etaples in 1904, and at the Academie de La Palette in Paris, between 1910 and 1913, where she studied under Jean Metzinger and was in the circle around the Scottish Colourist, John Duncan Fergusson.

In Paris, Jessica Dismorr shared a studio with the American artist Marguerite Thompson.

In 1911, Jessica Dismorr contributed several illustrations to John Middleton Murry's avant-garde Rhythm magazine.

From 1912 to 1914 Jessica Dismorr exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in Paris.

In 1912 and 1913, Jessica Dismorr exhibited Fauvist influenced work with the Allied Artists Association.

Jessica Dismorr met Wyndham Lewis in 1913 and by 1914 had become a member of the Rebel Art Centre.

Jessica Dismorr maintained a studio in the Kings Road, Chelsea, London, as well as taking frequent trips to France.

Jessica Dismorr was a signatory to the Vorticist manifesto published in the first issue of their literary magazine, Blast in 1914, and contributed illustrations and a written piece, Monologue, to the second issue in 1915.

Jessica Dismorr shared the group's depiction of the dynamics of the machine and their desire to challenge the public's conservative views on art but little of her work from this period survives.

Jessica Dismorr exhibited with the Vorticists again in New York in January 1917 at the Penguin Club.

Lechmere claimed that on one occasion Jessica Dismorr stripped naked in Oxford Street to demonstrate she would do anything Lewis asked of her.

Robin Ody, a close friend and the executor of Jessica Dismorr's will, summed her up as "the Edwardian phenomenon of the new woman".

Early in 1920 Jessica Dismorr had a handful of paintings shown, in group shows, at both the Mansard Gallery and the New Art Salon.

Jessica Dismorr had a nervous breakdown in 1920 and received medical advice not to paint.

In 1924 Jessica Dismorr began a series of water colour paintings of music hall performers, a popular subject at the time.

Jessica Dismorr recovered and between 1927 and 1934 exhibited some twenty-six figurative pieces with the London Group.

Jessica Dismorr exhibited with Charles Ginner and Barbara Hepworth in the London Group, as well as with Ivon Hitchens and Ben Nicholson in the Seven and Five Society, having joined both groups in 1926.

Jessica Dismorr showed with the anti-fascist Artists' International Association in the early 1930s and again in 1937.

Jessica Dismorr was one of seven British women artists included in the 1936 Die Olympiade ouder Dictatwar exhibition in Amsterdam which aimed to counter the Nazi condemnation of Modernism and modern art.

Jessica Dismorr produced several pointillist self-portraits alongside portraits of her mother and female friends.

One of these was of the artist Catherine Dawson Giles, whom Jessica Dismorr had known since 1904 when they met in Etaples.

For several years Jessica Dismorr had lived at the Giles family home in London and had a studio at Giles' cottage at Alfriston in Sussex.

Jessica Dismorr contributed her work, "Related Forms" to Axis magazine in 1937.

Jessica Dismorr died by suicide by hanging in London on 29 August 1939, five days before Britain declared war on Germany.