Pleasant Land Studios | ||||||
| Having left mainland Europe just before the Second World War, Nemon moved to Boars Hill, just outside Oxford, with his young family in the early 1940s, living and working first in rented rooms and then in two Nissan huts set in a field formerly rented by the poet Robert Graves. | ||||||
| One Nissan hut was the family home, and the other Nemon's studio, where he remained until the late 1960s when he was finally able to build the current Pleasant Land Studio. Designed by Nemon in the late 1960s, but influenced by earlier Modernist architecture, its vast panes of glass are set off by bare blockwork walls, and quarry tiled floors. Elemental in its simplicity, the building is integrated with the fields and trees from which it rises, while providing a neutral and light-filled space in which to create and view sculpture. | ||||||
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| Click any of the pictures for larger versions | ||||||
| Following Nemon's death in 1985, the Studio remained closed for seventeen years. Dusty sculptures, trunks of rolled up drawings and plans, boxes of photographs and letters, and unseen maquettes and reliefs dating from the 1930s onwards waited in silence and seclusion to be rediscovered. This process is now underway. Although still in the very early stages, with much of the material as yet unexamined, what is emerging further consolidates Nemon's resonance and significance as an artist, and testifies both to the lyricism, and to the power, of his vision. | ||||||
| Nemon's studios were open to the public during 2003, and will be once again when restoration works have been completed. | ||||||
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| The Nemon Archive is currently held at the Pleasant Land Studio. Further archive material is held by the Churchill College, Cambridge, the Henry Moore Institute, the Freud Museum, The Ashmolean and within the Violet Asquith Papers. Scholars and researchers wishing to consult the Nemon Archive should contact Alice Nemon Stuart via email.
Please note that the studios are not currently open. |
From Clay to Bronze: The Process of Creation |  Nemon sculpting John Rothenstein |
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| Look at any portrait by Oscar Nemon. You will feel the movement of his hands as he sculpted the clay until it spoke the character of his sitter in a gesture, a frown, a tilt of the head. |
 Nemon sculpting Habib Bourguiba |
Nemon always modeled his subjects initially from life, meeting them either at his studio, or a location they chose - such as Chartwell, or indeed Downing Street, for Churchill, or Freud's Vienna garden. Nemon would begin a sitting by talking, telling stories, asking questions, giving his subject the space to reveal themselves, and all the time shaping the little oval of clay - small enough to lie in the palm of his hand, or be held up on a stick - which became the first sketch. He also made pencil drawings - such as those of Churchill snatched in the dining room at La Mamounia in 1951 - and cut-out profiles, to map his sitter's features, additionally collecting press photos and newspaper cuttings which captured their characteristic poses. Back in his studio, the different elements would feed into the full size clay portrait, and subsequent plaster casts. Nemon would work for months, or even years, on successive versions, and then, finally, cast into bronze. |