Gray, Nicolete (1911–1997)

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Gray, Nicolete (1911–1997)

British art historian and designer of lettering who organized the first international exhibition of abstract art held in England and who designed and carved the tombstone of Agatha Christie and the façade lettering of Sotheby's. Born Nicolete Mary Binyon in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, on July 20, 1911; died in London on June 8, 1997; daughter of Laurence Binyon (1869–1943, a poet and literary critic) and Cicely Margaret (Powell) Binyon; had two sisters; married Basil Gray, in 1933; children: two sons, three daughters, including Camilla Gray Prokofiev (a Russian art historian, d. 1971).

Selected writings:

A History of Lettering: Creative Experiment and Letter Identity (Boston: D.R. Godine, 1986); Rossetti, Dante and Ourselves (London: Faber and Faber, 1947); Jacob's Ladder: A Bible Picture Book from Anglo-Saxon and 12th Century English MSS (London: Faber and Faber, 1949); Lettering as Drawing (NY: Taplinger Publishing, 1982); Lettering on Buildings (London: Architectural Press, 1960); Nineteenth Century Ornamented Typefaces (rev. ed. London: Faber & Faber, 1976); "The Palaeography of Latin Inscriptions in the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Centuries in Italy," in Papers of the British School at Rome (Vol. 16, 1948).

Born in the summer of 1911, during the final years of Edwardian England's unchallenged supremacy of the globe, Nicolete Mary Binyon was the daughter of Cicely Powell Binyon and Laurence Binyon, a gifted poet and literary critic who worked at the British Museum as a curator of oriental prints and drawings, and whose broad intellectual interests included William Blake, the English watercolorists, and all aspects of oriental art and culture. She was christened Nicolete after Aucassin's beloved in the medieval French lyric Aucassin and Nicolete.

Nicolete grew up in London's Chelsea district, and while she was born too late to encounter Oscar Wilde, who had lived on her street more than a decade earlier, the renowned painter John Singer Sargent was a neighbor of the Binyon family. Even before she began her formal education, Nicolete was exposed to the world of the arts and literature by her father, to whom she would always remain close. Besides being constantly stimulated by a home environment that invariably included many of the leading artists and writers of the day, the precocious girl was able to spend countless happy hours at the British Museum as well as at numerous art galleries and bookshops. Enrolled at London's prestigious St. Paul's School, Nicolete was an excellent student and active in extracurricular activities including taking her classmates to galleries, museums, plays and the ballet. She also had a keen sense of public affairs, running on the Labour Party ticket in the school's mock elections, using as her slogan "Vote for Binyon and a Better Britain."

After graduating with distinction from St. Paul's School in 1929, Nicolete was awarded a scholarship to study history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. At Oxford, she quickly discovered that she had a deep affinity for the early centuries of medieval history. Her deep interest in the middle ages, an age of belief, was not purely intellectual in that her reading of Christian theologians, particularly the works of St. Augustine, drew her inexorably toward a personal religious faith, and in 1931 she converted to Roman Catholicism. In 1932, Nicolete was awarded a scholarship by the British School at Rome to study post-classical inscriptions in Italy. Traveling throughout Italy on her own, she went from town to town, monastery to monastery, making papier-maché moulds by brushing wet paper into the crevices of ancient inscriptions.

In 1933, Nicolete returned to England one year ahead of schedule in order to marry Basil Gray, who worked as an assistant keeper in her father's department of the British Museum. Nicolete Gray became a loyal partner to her husband, helping him rearrange the museum's Indian Room. Her rapidly growing knowledge of lettering enabled her to write several chapters in her husband's 1937 book The English Print (her name does not appear on the title page, given the fact that he was the volume's sole contracted author).

In 1936, Gray revealed a new facet of her many talents when she organized a large-scale art exhibition entitled "Abstract and Concrete," which opened in Oxford and then moved to Cambridge, Liverpool and London. For the first time, many Britishers were exposed to the startling new artistic visions of foreign artists revealed in paintings by Kandinsky, Miro and Mondrian, sculpture by Giacometti, a mobile by Alexander Calder, and constructions by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Naum Gabo. To illustrate the universality of these new artistic impulses, the exhibition also provided space for the creations of contemporary British artists including Moore, Nicholson, Piper, and Barbara Hepworth . The entire exhibit had been organized on a minuscule budget because at that time Christie's declared the art works to have only a minimal market value, thus virtually eliminating problems from insurance or Crown customs officials. Despite—or perhaps because of—Nicolete Gray's love for medieval civilization, she was always responsive to new ideas and stimuli, and was enthusiastic about contemporary art, which she was convinced marked the fact that they stood "at the beginning of a new civilisation." To show her strong commitment to modern art, she purchased a Mondrian painting. Her first book, published in 1938 under the title Nineteenth Century Ornamental Types and Title Pages, quickly became accepted as a classic work of scholarship and appeared in an extensively revised edition in 1976.

By the middle of World War II, Gray had given birth to five children. She spent the war years at Oxford, where she and her family had been evacuated from bomb-threatened London, not only ministering to her large brood but working for the Ministry of Food, where she kept busy "dispensing timber and steel to jam manufacturers." The amount of work taken on by Gray during the war was staggering, including caring for five children with little domestic help, working for the Ministry of Food, and attempting to keep several research projects alive. Soon after the war, she suffered a physical breakdown but fully recovered. Despite all, she was able to publish Rossetti, Dante and Ourselves (1947), a concise but brilliant study of romantic love as depicted in art.

In the 1950s, as her children were rapidly maturing, Gray was able to devote ever more time to her investigations of lettering. Sometimes she left library work behind to go on "inscription crawls" in the British Isles and abroad, invariably returning with large number of photographs. In 1953, Nikolaus Pevsner asked her to contribute articles on lettering to the Architectural Review. Collected and published in book form in 1960 as Lettering on Buildings, these essays were immediately acclaimed as representing another definitive study of an important and hitherto underappreciated topic. At this time, Gray also taught courses in medieval history at Sacred Heart and Sion, local convent schools.

Starting in 1964, she began teaching lettering at the Central School of Art and Design. Until her retirement in 1981, she taught popular courses there, also founding and rapidly building up at the school a major archive, the Central Lettering Record, which collected photographic and other data relating to every aspect of lettering, historic as well as contemporary. If it is clear that many of Gray's students learned an immeasurable amount from her during the years she taught lettering at the Central School of Art and Design, it is also certain that she was able to learn much from them. In particular, her Asian students were able to teach her at firsthand the countless nuances of Oriental scripts.

In 1976, Gray's classic 1938 work on 19th-century ornamented typefaces was published in a new and greatly enhanced format, earning universal acclaim. A decade later, her last book A History of Lettering: Creative Experiment and Letter Identity was released to an eager public. Once more, praise came from all corners, noting that the work would not only serve for many years as a superb textbook, but as a deeply felt artistic credo about the artistic quality and communicative function of letters. Refusing to separate academic knowledge from practical skills, Gray mastered the art of letter-cutting in the 1950s. During the next several decades, she created a number of notable works including the wall of writers' names at the Stratford Shakespeare Centre, the facade lettering of Sotheby's, several works for Westminster Cathedral, and the tombstone of Agatha Christie .

After the retirement of Basil Gray from the British Museum in 1969, both he and Nicolete lived at Long Wittenham on the Thames, where she continued to write and regularly commuted to London to teach. The last decades of her life were full of the rewards of continuing hard work and lifelong friendships, as when Gray was chosen to be the first woman member of the Double Crown, a previously all-male dining club of printers and typographers. Many friends young and old would visit the Gray home, and a fictionalized sketch of the effervescent intellectual life that flourished there is to be found in Margaret Drabble 's novel Jerusalem the Golden. But there was also tragedy. Gray's eldest daughter Camilla, a brilliant historian of Russian art who was married to Oleg Prokofiev, son of the great composer, died in 1971. And even before her husband's death in 1989, Nicolete Gray's health had begun to decline. Over the next years, she bore the burdens of a failing memory and Parkinson's disease in a spirit of acceptance, dying in London on June 8, 1997.