Angela Flowers Obituary, Death – The year 1936 marked Geoffrey and Olive Holland’s relocation into the home in Surrey’s Reigate neighborhood that they had custom-built for themselves. Angela, their daughter, might be able to recollect that it was listed in Pevsner’s county guide at some point. The backhanded conclusion of the gazetteer was that the home was “much less gauche than most 1930s houses.” The first British commission of Frederick Curtis, a refugee from Nazi Germany, the home, which they called Peverel, was somewhat more courageous than that. [Curtis] had fled Nazi Germany.
The collection of art that it contained, which included, among other things, pieces by dangerous luminaries of the avant garde such as John Piper and John Minton, was also rather remarkable. When the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Holland founded a gallery in London forty years later, she did so with the awareness that collecting required a certain amount of bravery. Angela Flowers, who passed away recently at the age of 90, was certainly not lacking in that regard. She had been working as an accountant at the Institute of Contemporary Arts when in 1970 she moved into a small apartment located above the Artists International Association gallery at 15 Lisle Street in Soho, which is located in the central London neighborhood of Soho.
Flowers, who was virtuously poor, was granted the attic room rent-free because the AIA was established in the 1930s as a left-wing cooperative. It came as a surprise when her gallery started doing quite well financially very quickly.
“We’d have these dreadful meetings in which people would cry,” Flowers later recounted with a cheery tone of voice. “The AIA had a grudge against me.” The next year, she moved the Angela Flowers Gallery to Portland Mews, and then in 1979, she transferred it to Tottenham Mews. This was after the association had been dissolved. It became an established part of the London art scene very fast.
Aside from the fact that her family had a gallery when she was growing up, Flowers’s history didn’t point to her having a future in the art business. She was born in Croydon, which is where her family had resided for many generations prior to her birth; her father received a bequest a few years after her birth that enabled him to build the mansion in Surrey. The Second World War broke out when Angela was still a little child, right in the middle of it. Angela was sent to boarding school at both Westonbirt, which is located in Gloucestershire, and Wychwood, which is located in Oxford.
Geoffrey was an intelligence officer and served in Italy during World War II. Olive (née Stiby) volunteered for employment in a weapons factory. After that, they received their certificate from the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. After a rough beginning in the acting world in 1952 (she played a Dagenham Girl Piper in the first Benny Hill film), she crossed up with the photographer Adrian Flowers. Flowers was her first love. It was a leap year, and Angela made her marriage proposal to him on February 29. However, he declined her proposal. After some time had passed, Adrian finally gave up. Soon after that, his new wife discovered that she was expecting a child. By 1970, the couple already had a daughter named Francesca as well as three sons named Adam, Matthew, and Daniel.
