from the
Modernist
Journals Project (modjour.org)

She was born in Gravesend,
Kent. Her family moved to Hampstead in the 1890s.
She was at the Slade

School in 1902 and 1903, and later studied with Max
Bohm. In 1910 she was in Paris, where she

attended the Académie de la Palette, where she
worked with Metzinger, J-E Blanche, and J. D.
Fergusson. She did illustrations for the magazine Rhythm
in 1911, but then moved back to London where she met
Wyndham Lewis and joined his Rebel Art Centre, later
signing the Vorticist manifesto and exhibiting with
the Vorticists. She also published poetry and prose
in Blast. During World War I she served as a
volunteer in France, and after the war her work
became more and more abstract. She was elected a
member of the London Group in 1925, and showed with
the Allied Artists’ Association in their abstract
show in 1937.

(The MJP information
above is partly drawn from Penny Dunford’s Biographical
Dictionary of Women Artists in Europe and
America since 1850, Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1990.)

Modernism,
Magazines, and the British avant-garde: Reading
Rhythm, 1910-1914 by Faith Binckes
covers Dismorr’s connections with Anne Estelle Rice,
J.D. Fergusson, et al and Rhythm magazine.  In
Footnote 32, we find quotes from hard-to-find
Dismorr gallery exhibition catalogues:

Jessica Dismorr
  (London: Mayor Gallery, 1925)

In the catalogue notes to the one solo exhibition
Dismorr held during her lifetime, R. H.

Wilenski commented upon the artist’s “courage,
discrimination,  and… sense of her ability to
play a part in the most typical artistic experiments
of her generation” . ‘Foreword’ , Jessica
Dismorr (London: Mayor Gallery, 1925) (unpag.)



Jessica Dismorr,
1885-1939: Paintings and Drawings 
(London  Mayor Gallery, 1965).


In a retrospective, also held at the Mayor in 1965,
William Lipke observed that:

 “The
significance of this exhibition is not confined to
the obvious aesthetic merit to be found in these
works, but includes as well the unique opportunity
for the spectator to trace the development of
British Art from the fauvist work of Rice, Peploe,
and Fergusson … Jessica Dismorr’s work presents
a continuity of effort which illustrates in
capsule form the stylistic development of 20th
century British art.”  [from Binckes, Footnote 32]

_________________

Modernism,
Magazines, and the British avant-garde: Reading
Rhythm, 1910-1914,

by
Faith Binckes; Oxford
University Press (2010-07-08) ISBN 10: 0199252521 /
ISBN 13: 9780199252527

Below: samples of header and footer drawings for Rhythm,
by Jessie Dismorr and her American artist friend
Margaret Thompson.  Dismorr and Thompson both
attended the art school La Palette, along with William
Zorach, who later became Thompson’s husband. 
Thompson (later Zorach) and her husband both exhibited
in the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York City.