Julie Lawson was one of nine women Barbara Steveni included in her project Conversations Between Ourselves. In this series of interviews, Steveni highlighted the often unacknowledged work of women supporting and administrating the Artist Placement Group and later O+I. Here, Lawson’s close friend Jane England reflects on her life.
Julie Lawson (1920-2020) had a long and fascinating life and a gift for connecting people, recognizing talent, and “making things happen”. Through her various roles at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art from the 1940s to 1970s, and her involvement with The Elephant Trust and AICA UK, she made and maintained friendships with artists and curators around the world.
Julie was born in Indonesia in 1920 as Maria Juliana Thomas. Her mother was Chinese and she was of Armenian descent on her father’s side. The family lived in a rural part of Java and Julie, already nicknamed ‘Tommy’, was sent away to board at a convent school run by Dutch nuns.
Julie married a Dutch pilot who was killed in 1943 while serving with the Allied forces in the war. She rarely talked of the brutal treatment and deprivation she received during her internment in a camp in Java during the Japanese occupation from 1943 until September 1945. She became a ‘displaced person’ after being evacuated to Singapore early in 1946, and later that year friends assisted her to get a temporary visa to the UK and passage to England on a troopship. In 1948, by then living in London, she met a Scottish ex-RAF pilot, Alastair Lawson, and they married in October 1949 – and were together until his death in 2014.
In October 1948, Julie joined London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in Dover Street, Mayfair. Ewan Phillips, (the first Director of the then newly formed ICA) was looking for an assistant, and Julie got the job after a mutual friend suggested she should apply to work at this new organization dealing with the arts. Julie said later that her ability to speak several languages helped her be chosen for the position.
At first, her job was primarily office and membership work and she recalled that she was “usually working till late at night” and was even too exhausted to go to the ICA opening party in Dover Street in December 1950. Julie did not get to know ICA co-founder and major guiding force, Roland Penrose in those early years, however, by the early 1960s, she had become Penrose’s loyal and trusted personal assistant at the ICA. She became close to Penrose and his wife, the photographer, Lee Miller, and in 1964, Julie and her husband purchased a cottage neighbouring Roland and Lee’s home in Sussex, Farley Farm.
At Dover Street, Julie worked with Dorothy Morland who became the ICA’s Director from 1953 to 1968. Morland coordinated the liaison between the ICA management and the Independent Group: those painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics who held meetings, exhibitions and a public programme of events at the ICA between 1952 and 1955, and are now regarded as being the precursors to Pop Art in Britain. Julie was actively involved behind the scenes in the administration of arranging and facilitating the Group’s activities at the ICA, and formed long-lasting friendships with many of those involved, including Richard Hamilton and his wife Rita Donagh.
Julie Lawson was appointed Deputy Director of the ICA in 1967, with responsibility for the Visual Arts, and coordinated, administered, and initiated aspects of the exhibition programme. She arranged lectures, debates, film seasons and activities linked to the exhibitions, including special activities for the young. She raised funds and support to enable exhibitions to be presented, dealt with incoming exhibition proposals, and was always generous with her advice – as when she helped and encouraged Sue Davies, then a secretary to Penrose in the 1960s, to go on to found The Photographers Gallery in 1971.
Roland Penrose obtained Arts Council support and arranged two fund-raising auctions to make it possible for the ICA move to Carlton House Terrace in The Mall in 1968. Julie recalled that “the opening exhibition, The Obsessive Image, was Roland’s idea, but the title was mine”. She helped Penrose with some of the key exhibitions he arranged, including Illusion in Nature and Art and Man Ray – Inventor, Painter, Poet. Penrose did not want the administrative pressures as the ICA evolved and expanded, and resigned in 1976, although he returned in 1980 to be the president of the ICA at the invitation of then Director, Bill McCallister.
The Elephant Trust was created in 1975 when Roland Penrose contributed the proceeds from selling Max Ernst’s major painting, The Elephant Celebes to the Tate Gallery. Penrose had originally intended to give this money to support the ICA, however Julie persuaded him to put it in a Trust instead as she knew from practical experience that the money would just be absorbed into the organisation without any permanent results due to the ICA’s constant financial stress. Penrose and Lee Miller were the Founders of the Trust, which aimed to “develop and improve the knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the fine arts in the United Kingdom” through giving grants and bursaries. Jeremy Hutchinson, a longstanding trustee, felt that Julie “knew Roland and all his ideas better than anybody”, and said that Julie was the “absolute centre of the Trust”, that she ran it and did most of the work, dealing with the administration and the volume of applications for over three decades.
Julie was also a Trustee for the APG (Art Placement Group) which was initially conceived in 1965 by Barbara Steveni (then married to John Latham) as a way of involving art and artists in commercial and industrial organizations.
– © Jane England
Barbara Steveni: I Find Myself is at Modern Art Oxford until 8 June 2025.