Birmingham Surrealists

As a result Maddox also formed a strong attachment to John's brother Robert Melville, who was later to become a widely published critic and whose understanding of surrealism's theoretical basis was to provide much of the group's intellectual underpinning.

[1] John Melville had six of his paintings banned from an exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1938 as being "detremental (sic) to public sensibility", and in 1939 Robert Melville challenged Professor Thomas Bodkin of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in public debate, arguing that "Picasso's work invalidates conventional ways of thinking, for it is the work of a free man, he has enlarged the idea of reality".

[4] The exhibition was also attended by Birmingham-born artist Emmy Bridgwater, whose work was transformed by the experience and who made contact with the group through John Melville on her return to Birmingham.

Despite his limited French, Maddox travelled to Paris repeatedly between 1936 and 1939, frequenting surrealist meetings at Le Dome Cafe and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière[3] and forming long-lasting relationships with Man Ray and Georges Hugnet, whose influences were quickly to become apparent in his work.

All four were subsequently frequent contributors to the Mesens-published London Bulletin and in November 1939 Maddox's work was exhibited alongside that of Breton, Georges Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, René Magritte and Marcel Duchamp at the Guggenheim Jeune Gallery.

Maddox played an organizing role in 1940s Surrealism Today exhibition at London's Zwemmer Gallery and designed its highly provocative window display with John Banting,[5] while Robert Melville played a key role in the conception of Arson: An Ardent Review - Toni del Renzio's attempt ‘to provoke authentic collective Surrealist activity’ that featured all of the major Birmingham figures among its contributors.

Maddox had long harbored ambitions to own a surrealist house - suggesting spaces filled entirely with bricks and rooms furnished with life-sized chess pieces as possible decorative schemes.

When a property was finally found in Autumn 1946 a less ambitious, though still eccentric, design featuring a giant loom, mandolins and wallpaper hand-printed on an adapted washing mangle was adopted.

I attended carousals there with other undisciplined children, women in Gypsy dress, poets, communist intellectuals from the University of Birmingham, and early postwar Caribbean immigrants ...

Some of their activities involved a crucifixion, the naked but bespectacled Maddox its victim, while the nun drank from a two-pint bottle of the local brew, Mitchell's and Butler's.

Its call for the formation of an "active surrealist group" to reject the "patriotic myths, official pedagogy, the debris of moral rationing which constitutes much of the art, poetry and philosophy of our time" was not without irony though: English surrealism was increasingly looking like a spent force and the manifesto had a far from galvanising effect on local artists.