Croydon’s original art world outlaw

I’ve lived in Croydon long enough to get bored of all the sniping. So it’s fair to say that I’m really, really enjoying its ‘emergence’ as an art world upstart. Following exploratory forays to God’s own borough by Banksy and more recently Artangel, a new joint exhibition of Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) and Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) opens in the beleaguered Whitgift Shopping Centre, also home to longstanding art space Turf Projects.

Croydon’s form as an art world trailblazer is much older. I don’t just mean the art school, which in the 1960s was attended by David Bowie, Malcolm McLaren, and Ray Davies of The Kinks, and had Bridget Riley on its staff. In 1965, a polyester-trousered leap across the Croydon Underpass would have brought you to a shopping precinct crouched under the now abandoned Nestlé Tower, where art dealer Nicholas Treadwell had just opened Art and Design, the jewel in the crown of a mini empire that boasted a fleet of three mobile art galleries.

“Oh my God, Croydon was tough”, Treadwell told me with feeling on a video call from Austria, where he has lived since 2000. “I made the mistake of going into this terrible precinct – St George’s Walk was a wind tunnel, and, well, it was very, very tough going.”

With a shop located in a permanent vortex in one of South London’s least attractive shopping parades, you might imagine that business was not brisk. But by the time he opened Art and Design, he had been running the mobile galleries for long enough to gain the many loyal customers needed to set up a permanent address. “My ex-wife worked the bus. I worked the biggest of the trucks, and I had a student working the smallest of the trucks,” he explained.

Though his own sales soon proved sufficient to cover the running costs of the entire operation, for a while he closed the shop at 5.30 pm to go door to door. “Every night of the year I used to go knocking on doors, even when it was snowing.” To begin with, he booked evening appointments when husbands weren’t home yet. When they did arrive back, “they would say, ‘Hey, fuck off. I don’t want any art.’ So I then decided to start at 6.30 pm when the husband was already home.”

Appearance was everything: “I thought I’d better look like an expert, so my ex-wife used her eyebrow pencil to draw a beard – she thought it looked quite good so I grew one, and changed my glasses.”

“I’d say, ‘The mobile art gallery is just outside, come and have a look’”, he continues. “And when they’d say, ‘Oh, I like that piece’, I’d say, ‘Well, let me show it to you inside [your house]’. And that’s what I did. I went inside, showed it over the sofa, over the mantelpiece, and I’d say ‘Doesn’t that look great?’. I mean, I’ve never found a better way to sell art”.

These days, mention of Nicholas Treadwell elicits only the faintest glimmer of recognition among Londoners with long memories. One gallerist, whom I hazarded might be in the ballpark demographic, described seeing “disturbing and awful” works in the Treadwell Gallery, but was otherwise tight-lipped. Even the man himself is somewhat coy about the precise nature of the works that he says led to “establishment galleries” branding him as a purveyor of “bad taste and vulgarity.”

Treadwell’s descent into infamy began in 1968 when he opened a gallery (the worst in London according to Time Out’s Sarah Kent) on Chiltern Street in Marylebone – not Mayfair, granted, but a long way from Croydon. Here Treadwell began to develop the concept of Superhumanism, which sounds like a eugenics project but is actually “the first people’s art movement – a movement, first and foremost, inspired by life, as opposed to inspired by art.”

Adrian Searle used more expressive language in 2004, when he noted that a sizeable proportion of the “truly terrible art” included in Mike Kelley’s Tate Liverpool show ‘The Uncanny’ was by artists from the Treadwell stable – “works I had hoped never to see the first time, let alone again”.

John Holmes was the first of Treadwell’s “provocative” artists: “He [Holmes] was a meat market porter and at 12 o’clock, he’d go back to his studio at Whitechapel and paint – when I met him in 1964 he was doing a series on Jack the Ripper.”

Surely this wasn’t what he was selling to the eager housewives of Purley and Sanderstead? “I had a few of the tamer ones in there [the mobile gallery]”, he told me. With no obvious references to butchery or serial killers, the paintings seen in a photograph of the artist’s 1967 Croydon show may constitute “tamer”, but they’re certainly not your usual suburban living room fits.

Appealing to more mainstream tastes, Sadanand Bakre (1920-2007) and Francis Souza (1924-2002) were among the mobile galleries’ top-selling artists. Both had been involved with the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, which promoted a specifically Indian modernism in the wake of independence in 1947. “Both of them used to make townscapes, which were very sellable”, said Treadwell, who also championed the Guyanese artist Aubrey Williams (1926-1990), now represented by October Gallery.

It turns out that affluence and the empty walls of new homes built in the post war suburban housing boom were a winning combination, that took Treadwell as far as Beaconsfield, on the opposite side of London, where he found “my best ever housing estate where at almost every other door I sold art – they were rich, big, posh houses.”

The suburbs were home to countless useful connections, including the chairman of John Lewis: “He gave me a workshop on retailing”, the art dealer told me. The advice may not have stuck, because in 1968, he left Croydon – by the back door. “I did a midnight flit”, said Treadwell, whose long and unorthodox career has been punctuated by unreliable cashflow.

He must have been relatively flush in the 1970s, when he took over an old mansion house in Kent, which he set up as a museum for his by then considerable art collection. It was an incredible place by all accounts, that staged performances and hosted artists’ dinners in an atmosphere of good-natured bohemianism.

Whatever you think about Treadwell’s taste in art, his willingness to appal is surely to be applauded. For him, taste has always been held hostage by money and class, and his mobile galleries and Croydon shop were the first acts in a lifetime of championing art from the margins – including working class, Black and Asian, feminist and female artists – and making it available to all. It’s a sentiment entirely in keeping with the new Jafa / Leckey show, which as the result of a public-spirited collaboration between Croydon-born gallerist Gavin Brown and low-cost studio project Conditions brings two celebrated video works to the Whitgift Shopping Centre.

Beginning with a truck, from about 1980, Treadwell turned his hair, shoes, glasses – everything – pink, “the most vulgar colour I could find”, in a characteristically bizarre and defiant act that marked the beginning of the end of his life in the UK. He left in part because he simply got fed up with being branded vulgar – a sentiment that all of us in Croydon can identify with. Solidarity!