Morley Bury 1919-1999

Morley Bury was a painter in oil and was also a teacher. He attended Bournemouth Municipal College of Art from 1937 to 1939, where his teacher Johnny Walker was a strong influence. He then continued at Reading University from 1939 to 1940. He spent six years in the Army, with a tank regiment in the Western Desert and was then a prisoner of war in Italy and Germany, being freed by Russian troops and repatriated. After the war Bury returned to Reading University, where he met his wife, art historian Shirley Bury. He then attended Regent Street Polytechnic and Goldsmiths College.

 

 

Public collections include: 

The Victoria and Albert Museum, Salford Art Gallery, Nuffield Foundation, Cambridge University. The Tate Gallery archive holds Bury’s self-portrait. Mixed shows included the New English Art Club in 1950; the London Group, Vision and Reality, Wakefield City Art Gallery in 1957; 3 Artists, South London Art Gallery in 1961; Centaur Gallery, 1970 and the Forgotten Fifties, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield and tour 1984. Bury also showed with AIA, Hampstead Artists’ Council, Heal’s Mansard Gallery and Everyman Foyer, Hampstead where he had a series of solo exhibitions from 1960.

 

His interest in figure subjects in the 1950s changed to landscape in the 1960s, landscapes “not real but a collection of seen ideas. Gradually texture of the paint became more important.”  He wrote that “studies in the organisation of colour relationships and the optical qualities which create a sense of space” were important to him.  He lived in London.