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Nancy Mayhew Youngman, b. Maidstone, Kent 28 June 1906; OBE 1987; d. Cambridge 17 April 1995.
Nan Youngman is remembered primarily as a painter, but her life was a selfless, vigorous crusade for art through education. From before the war to the mid-1960s she was an influential figure in art education, as a teacher, an author and an impressively efficient organizer of exhibitions.
...trained at the Slade (1924-27). Needing to finance her career as an artist by teaching, she went on to the London Day Training College. There she was taught by Marion Richardson, who introduced her to Roger Fry and awakened her interest in children's art. From 1929-44 she divided her time between painting and teaching; she lectured for the London County Council, gave practical art classes for schoolteachers and taught part-time. The organization of exhibitions became an important part of her strategy for increasing children's awareness of art.
The death of her friend the artist Felicia Browne in Spain in 1936 altered Youngman's political outlook. She joined the left-wing Artists International Association and organized Browne's memorial exhibition. AIA group shows became a focus for her painting, though politics never entered her own work. It was Nan Youngman who in 1939 famously asked a workman in from the Whitechapel High Street to open the AIA's exhibition Art for All.
...Her very individual painting defies conventional categorization.
...Her letters were full of her love of life and always contained a joke or funny sketch. She made everybody laugh. Every studio visit ended with her saying "Let's go and have a drink''. In life, as in her pictures, she looked always outwards. In recent weeks, unwell and unable to see properly, she never complained about her own physical problems.... Characteristically she left instructions that her send-off include champagne and a sit-down lunch for her many friends.
(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-nan-youngman-1617353.html) undefined