Full Name: Bumpus, Judith Harriet
Other Names:
- Judith Collison
- Judith Bumpus
- Judith H. Bumpus
Gender: female
Date Born: 03 November 1939
Date Died: 02 March 2010
Place Born: Wiltshire, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): British (modern) and Impressionist (style)
Career(s): art historians and authors
Institution(s): University of St. Andrews
Overview
One of the earliest radio producers on visual art; painting specialist. Collison was born to Robert Lewis Wright Collison (1914–1989), a librarian and scholar, and Mary Patricia Daws Marshall (Collison) (1911–2000), a teacher and historian. After the Second World War, Collison and her family moved to Hampstead, London, where she went to Channing School and Highgate. She attended St. Andrews University and won a scholarship to study at Universitat de Barcelona (Barcelona University). After graduating, her growing interest in painting spurred her to study art history at Madrid University with a postgraduate scholarship.
Upon returning to London in 1963, Collison worked as a junior curator in the National Art Library and education department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, while lecturing visual arts and tutoring at London University and Open University. She met and married Bernard Sydney Grahan Bumpus (1921-2004), a renowned ceramic historian and later the head of BBC International Audience Research. She then gave birth to two daughters while working full-time in 1967 and 1968. Soon after the birth of her second daughter, Bumpus joined BBC Radio as a producer in its further education department. Throughout her twenty-eight years at BBC, she produced a wide range of talks, documentaries, and dramas mostly connected with the fine arts.
Her most famous radio productions include the BBC Radio 3 series Third Ear in the 1980s, which consists of conversations with artists, and her 1992 series Dialogues on Art with Bridget Riley (b.1931), featuring guests including Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001). Moreover, her documentary on Pablo Picasso won the 1981 Spanish Ondas Prize. She published books featuring contemporary artists and Impressionists. In 1988, her book Elizabeth Blackadder documented Blackadder’s watercolors was published. Her book Impressionist Gardens was released in 1990.
Upon her retirement from BBC in 1996, she concentrated on writing and published Van Gogh’s Flowers in 1998. In the next year, she published the first major study of British painter Reginald Brill (1902-1974) and his work, titled after the artist’s name. In 2010, while writing a PhD at Birkbeck College on English landscape painting, Bumpus died of cancer.
Bumpus, as described by John Drummond, the controller of Radio 3, finds ways of talking about the visual arts in a manner that compensated for the absence of images (The Independent).
Selected Bibliography
- and Blackadder, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Blackadder. United Kingdom, Phaidon, 1988.
- Impressionist Gardens. London, Phaidon, 1990.
- Van Gogh’s Flowers. United Kingdom, Phaidon Press, 1998.
- Reginald Brill. United Kingdom, Ashgate Publishing, Limited, 1999.
Sources
- [obiturary] “Judith Bumpus: Arts Radio Producer Whose Diverse Range of Subjects.” The Independent. April 18, 2010. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/judith-bumpus-arts-radio-producer-whose-diverse-range-of-subjects-included-hockney-and-huxley-1948232.html.
- Plowright, P. “Bumpus [née Collison], Judith Harriet (1939–2010), radio producer and art historian.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. January 9, 2014.
Contributors: Yuhuan Zhang