FINDING FRANK

I like art galleries, but I can’t eat a whole one.  I will often cover my eyes and study my shoes while walking through acres of space crammed with beautiful works of art to get to the artist or area I’m interested in, simply to avoid overload. 

With exhibitions, the task is similar. They may choose to present several strata of one artist’s development, or how a group of artists share a common approach, philosophy or epoch, but I usually need just one or two works to ‘uncork the bottle’ and make the pieces accessible. 

And sometimes it can be a close call. 

It took me a second lap of the Hayward’s major 1973 Munch exhibition before finally finding one self-portrait, flanking the exit, that unlocked his work for me and brought it ‘online.’ A last minute 'save' that was repeated, almost blow-for-blow, by my companion at the 1990 Giacometti exhibition at the Reina Sofia in Madrid.

An art fair is not a gallery or an exhibition, and the 2026 London Art Fair, with 120 galleries featuring over a thousand artists, was a massive haystack in which to find just one or two pieces to prick my interest. Foot-sore and brain-overloaded (far too many open stair-cases at the Business Design Centre to cover my eyes) I was beginning to despair of my essentially goal-less quest when I glimpsed a self-portrait, tucked away in a corner, ‘attributed’ to an artist I had never heard of before.

But what a self-portrait. It was like meeting the artist in person, face-to-face, or rather, eye-ball-to-eyeball, up-front and personal, angry and critical, holding me to account and finding me lacking.

Don’t look for it on-line. Pixels can't deliver anything like the same depth of experience as pencil. But the artist it was ‘attributed’ to is well worth a search (or twenty).  What a life. What a story!

Sir Frank William Brangwyn, RA, RWS, RBA (12 May 1867 – 11 June 1956) was born in the same month that Nobel patented dynamite, and died in the month that Gene Roddenberry left the LAPD to seek out new life and new worlds; to boldly go where no cop had gone before.

Brangwyn himself was an explorer par excellence. Born in Bruges, Belgium, when his Welsh parents moved back to England he was apprenticed to William Morris, the titan of the British Arts and Crafts movement, and spent 1882 to 1884 designing carpets and wallpaper in Morris’s Oxford Street store. A brilliant training for any aspiring young artist, but not young Brangwyn.  In 1885 he left London for a ‘youthful vagabondage,’ labouring on the Kent coast and working as a deckhand on a schooner; a maritime fascination which led, in very short order, to his painting ‘Bit of the Esk near Whitby,’ being accepted for the Royal Academy Summer exhibition. Brangwyn was seventeen years old. The painting caught the eye of a shipowner. After the shipowner had purchased the painting, Brangwyn persuaded him to bankroll his continued artistic development, by paying for the young artist to travel around the Mediterranean and Istanbul on a freighter.

Like his travels, Brangwyn’s work would eventually span the world, from the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, to the Rockefeller Centre in New York and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in New Zealand.  But his artistic range even surpassed its geographical. From stained glass (for Tiffany) to furniture, lithographs, ceramics and woodcuts, it is estimated that he produced between 10,000 and 12,000 works of art in his lifetime.  His mural commissions alone covered two thousand square metres. But in spite of his immense success, you didn’t always know what you were getting from Brangwyn. In 1924 he was commissioned to paint murals for the House of Lords, to commemorate the peers who had died in WWI, but his original designs, featuring grisly battle scenes, were deemed too gloomy for the Palace of Westminster. So Brangwyn then turned on a sixpence and turned in sixteen pieces, ‘The British Empire Panels,’ which were then considered ‘too colourful, lively’ and ‘indelicate’ for the solemn debating chamber -so they were shipped out to the Guildhall Complex, Swansea, in 1934.

Of course, to those in the art world, Brangwyn is regarded as a hugely influential figure, as I discovered when I visited my fellow Arts and Cultural Network member, Niall Fairhead, at his amazing stand downstairs at the Art Fair (Niall is the person to see if you want to buy a Picasso or Matisse, a Hockney or Chagall, or simply listen to the most amazing anecdotes).

But what was it that led me to Brangwyn?

I had no clear (extrinsic) objective in walking around the Art Fair, just a sense that, as with Roddenberry’s intergalactic star-hoppers, there might be something interesting out there. 

But also, more importantly, for the personal (intrinsic) pleasure of simply seeking something out, whatever that 'something' might turn out to be.  A fondness we share with our relatives:

‘Studies in non-human primates have shown that they actively work to obtain information, even when that information cannot change a future outcome.  Their brains treat this information as an intrinsic reward, with midbrain dopamine neurons firing in response to informative cues just as they would a drop of juice.  Moreover, neurons in the prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex in particular, calculate the specific value of the information, allowing the monkeys to make sophisticated economic decisions about whether to ‘pay’ to resolve their uncertainty. Finally, novelty can provide an intrinsic bonus and enhance salience signals in the posterior parietal cortex independently of reward.  Notably, the zona incerta (ZI), a small structure in the sub-thalamus, has been demonstrated to be critically involved in novelty seeking and exploration behaviour in both mice and monkeys. The ZI’s extensive connections with motor centres in the basal ganglia and the brainstem, alongside its connections to the thalamus, a key region for attention and sensory gating, form a potential circuitry for driving these behaviours.’ *

Who knows how many wonders like Brangwyn await us in some distant corner of our aimless explorings?  Because like most pursuits in The Business of Pleasure, it’s not the arrival but the getting there that matters.  Or, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson with James Tiberius Kirk’s (final) words:

“It was… fun. Oh my...”

DT

23 January 2026

*How Intrinsic Motivation Underlies Embodied Open-Ended Behaviour

Rubén Moerno-Bote, Ralf Hefner, Jordi Galliano-Landeira, Tainming Yang and Pedro Maldonado, AXiv 15 January 2026

DT with Niall Fairhead (www.fairheadfineart) Mark Walmsley and Isobel Arden Connector-in-Chief and Executive Assistant at the Arts and Cultural Network (https://www.linkedin.com/company/arts-and-culture-network/)