Swiss Cottage

Although De Karlowska’s husband Robert Bevan was a founder-member of the Camden Town Group, as a woman, De Karlowska was excluded. She exhibited instead in the more liberal areas of London's contemporary art scene such as the Allied Artists Exhibitions, where this painting was shown in 1914. As in Fried Fish Shop, also on show here, in Swiss Cottage De Karlowska addresses the question that was absorbing many artists - how to depict the modern city. Departing radically from artistic tradition, she uses non-naturalistic colour and the deliberate naivety of primitivism, the deliberate naivety drawn from ‘primitive art’ that fascinated early twentieth-century artists.

Gallery label, February 2010

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