Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  Coldstream’s friends Rodrigo Moynihan and Geoffrey Tibble went down this path, and produced pictures they called ‘objective abstractions’ – the kind of thing that later, in postwar New York, were called ‘Abstract Expressionist’ and, in Paris, ‘Tachiste’; pictures consisting of loose, visible brushstrokes; pictures about nothing but paint. Coldstream had a go too but, he reported, ‘it came to nothing’. Victor Pasmore, Coldstream’s friend and companion that day on the towpath in 1947, did not, at this point, get as far as total abstraction, but rather worked on the problem by painting a number of what he later described as ‘imitation cubist and fauvist pictures’. Like Coldstream, he decided that this was leading nowhere:

  You can do about a dozen of those brushstroke pictures, and that’s about it. You wonder what’s going to happen next. We came to the conclusion that there was no future in it, that it was far too subjective, totally subjective. So we needed something to get back to an objective standpoint.

  The only solution they could think of, as Pasmore put it, was going back to ‘the old masters’. By that he meant painting a subject in the real world, something seen. He and Coldstream did so, however, in different ways. Pasmore carried on painting flowers, nudes and landscapes with a delicate romanticism that harked back not to Samuel Palmer, but to James Abbott McNeill Whistler and, most of all, his hero J. M. W. Turner.

  Coldstream eventually – after his spell making documentary films – came up with his own, idiosyncratic way out of the impasse they found themselves in. As Pasmore recalled of an occasion in the 1930s when he sat to Coldstream for a portrait:

  Bill arrived with a plumb-line and ruler, I sat down. Instead of starting as you usually do, with an outline of the head then put in the eyes, he started with the eye then measured the distance to the next eye. He measured up every detail.

  From then onwards, Coldstream did not paint as an old master or an Impressionist would: by looking at the subject, analysing it, and placing the product of this thought and observation on canvas. Having fixed on a system that was, as far as possible, totally objective, his paintings slowly condensed from a mass of delicate slanting sable brushstrokes.

  The process is described by Coldstream’s biographer, Bruce Laughton, as a mass of mainly straight, parallel marks, ‘like a radar screen’, scanning areas ‘that either reflect or block the light’. To make these readings, he turned himself, as far as possible, into a human measuring instrument. Lawrence Gowing, a student of his at the time, went to see him while he was engaged in painting an interior of St Pancras station in 1938. Gowing wondered how he would find Coldstream amid ‘that vast elevation of terracotta gothic’ until he saw, through a window, ‘a rigid horizontal arm gripping an exactly vertical brush handle, up which a square-cut thumbnail was creeping in minute adjustments of the length to the angle subtended’.

  Christopher Pinsent, a student of Coldstream’s in the 1940s, described the process with precision: the brush was held at arm’s length, either horizontally or vertically, ‘in such a way that it is in a place at right angles to the line from the artist’s eye to whatever part of the subject he is looking at’. The thumb was then moved up and down to quantify a distance, and subsequently could be used to record a measurement – the distance from the bottom of a mouth, for example, to the chin – that could be compared to others on the subject’s head, or elsewhere in the picture. The point was not to record a single measurement, but tirelessly to compare the scales of the objects in view.

  WILLIAM COLDSTREAM St Pancras Station, 1938

  William Coldstream painting Bolton, 1938. Photo by Humphrey Spender

  The results of the endless measurements were left on the finished picture, rather as someone doing a maths test might jot the workings-out of a problem on the margins of the paper. These little spots and dashes – humorously dubbed ‘dot and carry’ – recorded the inner proportions that Coldstream discovered even in the most mundane view or model: ‘a sure sense of interval’, as Pinsent put it, such as is found in architecture and music. Through a totally, almost robotically, objective method, Coldstream found a secret beauty that was – effectively – abstract.

  The rigours of his approach gave his students a sense of moral probity, as Anthony Eyton who studied at Camberwell from 1947, reflects: ‘We Coldstream pupils were rather bigoted lot. It was a close society. We felt we had something to hold onto: the certainty of drawing and the fact that you had to suffer a bit for it. You felt a bit you were on the track of the holy grail, but we didn’t take in modernity.’

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  Nevertheless, Coldstream himself was afflicted by doubts about what he was doing – where to start, and how to carry on. As a result, he later confessed, he found it helpful to have a portrait subject, a paying customer, turn up at his studio, expecting to be depicted. ‘If you have great difficulty in making yourself work, as I do, if the sitter’s really going to arrive you’ve jolly well got to be there and be ready to paint whether you feel like it or not.’ Confronted with an actual person’s face, he found himself ‘cornered into a problem which, although like all problems in painting is infinitely wide, in one sense appears to be narrower’. It was narrower in that there was a sitter present, so he could not spend time thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’, a question which threw up ‘so many alternatives’.

  Coldstream’s approach to painting was, in its way, as idiosyncratic as Bacon’s, though in most other respects it was as far removed as it could be. Bacon’s art expressed existential rage, fear and horror with maximum drama; Coldstream’s pictures reflected his own self-deprecating reticence, doubt and precise observation. There was one other important difference. Bacon’s work was effectively inimitable; Coldstream’s approach, though also the product of a unique temperament, proved highly teachable. Gillian Ayres remembers: ‘Coldstream said that he could take anyone off the street and teach them to draw, if they did what he told them to do. And up to a point it was absolutely true.’

  He began teaching in this way at a private school of art, set up in October 1937, and known from its address as the Euston Road School (later to give its name to the method so disliked by Ayres). The prime mover in the initiative was a fellow painter and friend of Coldstream’s, Claude Rogers; Pasmore also gave lessons there, but Coldstream was the strongest influence among the teachers. After the war Pasmore, Rogers and Coldstream all found themselves on the staff at Camberwell, and then, from 1949, Coldstream was principal of the Slade School of Fine Art. In the 1950s and 1960s his numerous pupils, and the pupils of his pupils, spread the method far and wide. As Frank Auerbach remembers, ‘Euston Road’ slowly changed from being a private language into a national cliché:

  There were slacker versions of Coldstream’s drawings promulgated by almost all art schools. That is, the handwriting and the dot and carry, without the rigour and without the sensibility; without the fanaticism, and the nervous quality that Coldstream’s own work had.

  Euston Road painting had a downbeat, low-key mood: the colours were drab, there was an air of gloom. This was a feature of pre-war paintings such as Coldstream’s St Pancras Station (1938), but it also matched the postwar mood. The obverse of the feeling of optimism, felt by Ayres among others, that after the war Britain could be a better place, was the reality of rationing, economic austerity and a sense, right or wrong, of national decline.

  In 1947, Cyril Connolly, in a characteristically despondent Horizon editorial, described the London of that year as ‘the saddest of great cities’, with ‘miles of unpainted half-uninhabited houses, its chopless chop-houses, its beerless pubs’. It was, he went on, a place full of ‘care-worn people’ who ‘mooned’ around cafeterias, ‘under a sky permanently dull and lowering like a metal dish-cover’. To a student such as Gillian Ayres, with an instinctive yearning for light and colour, the Euston Road painters seemed positively to revel in the dinginess of South London in the 1940s:

  A working man’s café and a tea-urn was what they most loved. They loved thei
r models too, who were possibly lovable, they were a certain type of London woman. And they loved Camberwell, literally, opening a window and painting it.

  Painting that reality had always been important to Coldstream and several of his Euston Road associates, including Claude Rogers and a South African painter named Graham Bell. The attitude had originated in the years before the outbreak of war, when the threat of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy permeated. According to Pasmore:

  The only really powerful, full-blooded opposition was the Communist Party. Their Social Realism began to infiltrate into London, so there was a division in the art world. The School of Paris, Picasso and abstract painting was felt to be completely ‘ivory tower’.

  Yet there was a hidden paradox. Paintings of working-men’s cafés in exquisitely dingy greys and browns did not necessarily appeal to the viewing public. When more and more people began to attend art exhibitions in the 1950s and 1960s, it wasn’t Coldstream or Rogers they queued up to see. It was Picasso and Bacon.

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  In the 1930s, Pasmore remembered, ‘Coldstream got mixed up in the political mood’. In contrast Pasmore did not, as he was too busy working as a clerk at the London County Council offices. Unlike Coldstream and the others, he had not been to art school. His father, a doctor, had died when he was a teenager, and instead of going on to further education, after school at Harrow he went straight into a lowly office job, painting in the evenings and weekends. ‘I was in an office, working full-time, so I had no time to monkey about with politics and worry about whether art was ivory tower or not.’ Eventually Kenneth Clark came to his rescue, giving him a small income in exchange for pictures, and he supplemented this by teaching at the Euston Road School.

  I was just interested in being able to do pure painting all day, for the first time in my life. I couldn’t care less about this political stuff. I refused to have anything to do with it. Although I was in the Euston School, I insisted on painting a bowl of flowers, if you know what I mean. I ought to have paid more attention to politics, probably, but I had no time.

  At Camberwell after the war, it was Pasmore who was Gillian Ayres’s favourite teacher. ‘Victor was woolly-headed, delightful, imaginative. His friends all saw him as a sort of genius. And he could be belligerent to them, but by nature he wasn’t really like that. He was fuzzy, intelligent and wayward.’

  In the latter days of the war, after a short period in prison for deserting from the army, Pasmore was painting delicately romantic landscapes. The Quiet River: The Thames at Chiswick (1943–44) is a masterpiece that looks backwards to Whistler and Turner, but also forwards. It is, as William Hazlitt said of Turner’s Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (exhibited 1842), a picture of nothing, ‘and very like’. Not quite a void, it is true, but certainly an image of nothing much: mist, a hint of pink in the sky, a gleam on the water, a few posts, someone cycling by. These marked off the inner harmonies of the painting, much like Coldstream’s dot and carry. But there was a difference: Pasmore’s painting was not based on obsessively careful measurement; it was more like Wordsworth’s definition of poetry, ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. He looked at a subject, such as mist hanging on the river, which was by its nature elusive, something on the way to turning into nothing. Then he went away and invented a picture.

  The process was recorded by William Townsend in his diary, after a long conversation with Pasmore on the evening of 2 February 1947. They had sat and talked in the glazed terrace of the latter’s new house on Hammersmith Terrace, while the light faded on the river and riverside gardens outside. Pasmore was not like their friend Bill (Coldstream), Townsend mused, ‘who is never happy when his eye is not fixed on the subject he is painting’. In contrast, Pasmore began by looking at people, things and places, but at a certain point retired to his studio, where he carried on, making alterations and additions, painting what was now more of an idea or – Townsend wondered – ‘a memory carried away, pure, of the object’. He might have added that this object was in the process of vanishing, like the Cheshire cat, leaving only an opalescent vagueness behind.

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  One of the attitudes of the – predominantly male – Euston Road crowd that particularly riled Gillian Ayres was their claim to be impersonal.

  They were obsessed with this thing of subjective and objective, and they claimed that they were objective. They were always on about it. Coldstream and co. meant it, and I suppose up to a point some of them really did it, for a time. It was the opposite to Van Gogh in a way. It probably even extended to masculine and feminine with them if you were emotional – because you were supposed to be coldly objective and follow these rules.

  VICTOR PASMORE The Quiet River: The Thames at Chiswick, 1943–44

  Although the position was slowly changing, art and art schools were still extremely masculine worlds. A photograph taken at the opening of a student exhibition shows Ayres, sitting next to Henry Mundy – who was to become her husband – with a half pint in front of her while the men drink full pints. There are two other female students present, but the picture suggests the art world was full of chaps with ties and corduroy jackets.

  To get to Camberwell, Ayres had had to blast her way through opposition from her headmistress and parents. Afterwards, she continued to override a welter of discouragement:

  The Walmer Castle pub, near Camberwell School of Art, with Gillian Ayres (centre) and Henry Mundy (to the right of Ayres), 1948

  I remember a woman saying, if you are female and you want to get on, you’d better teach needlework or graphic design or something. You certainly won’t get a job teaching painting. And I can remember women saying that they wanted to give up their lives for their boyfriend, who was a great artist. I was always very ratty if there was any of that sort of thing.

  In the mid-1940s another young woman artist named Prunella Clough was crisscrossing London in a quest for suitable starting points for pictures very similar to those drab urban scenes of which the ‘Euston Road’ painters were so fond. As it happened, cranes – Coldstream’s practical example in the conversation on the towpath in Peckham – were among her choice of subject matter.

  Clough visited the London docks to find material for her paintings. When she got there, her biographer Frances Spalding points out, it was the details of the scene – even more than the large pieces of equipment – that attracted her: lorries arriving and departing, men loading and unloading, at work and at rest. Spalding writes, ‘She closed in on the drivers in their cabs, catching moments of waiting, when the driver takes a nap or reads a newspaper, while pressing in on all sides are hints of the larger environment, a coil of rope, ladders, a factory chimney or segment of a crane.’

  Her itineraries were very different from those of an artist such as Turner, in his search for ‘Picturesque Views in England and Wales’. Clough’s notebook records a series of journeys in search of unpicturesque sights, in nondescript suburbs and outer urban industrial zones. First she took trips to docklands along the Thames: Wapping and Rotherhithe, Greenwich and Gravesend. Then followed sights such as Battersea power station, Fulham gasworks, coke yards at Woolwich, cooling towers at Canning Town and chemical works at Redhill. She also made forays to Wandsworth, Pinner, Kensal Green, Willesden and Acton East. With her friend, fellow artist and Marxist art critic John Berger, she sketched at Willesden railway marshalling yards, drew the Peek Frean biscuit factory in Bermondsey and the light industry on the outskirts of the capital where London blends into Kent.

  All of these dingy, workaday spots – and her close friendship with the eloquently left-wing Berger – might suggest that Clough was in search of the idiom approved in Moscow, Socialist Realism. Yet that was very much not the case. She painted cranes, cooling towers and gasworks because she liked them and they were familiar (as Giverny was to Monet). She explained in an interview for Picture Post in 1949:

  Each painting is an exploration in unknown country, or as Manet said, it is like throwing oneself
into the sea to learn to swim. Anything that the eye or the mind’s eye sees with intensity and excitement will do for a start; a gasometer is as good as a garden, probably better; one paints what one knows.

  Clough’s origins were curiously similar to Francis Bacon’s; born in 1919, she was descended on her mother’s side from minor Anglo-Irish gentry (‘very minor’ she would insist). But this was the only thing she had in common with the flamboyant Bacon. Clough was resolutely low-key. ‘I like paintings’, she said, ‘that say a small thing edgily.’ Her early pictures have a distinctly Neo-Romantic flavour: fishing boats and spiky plants on the shore, a dead bird (a subject chosen around the same time by the young Lucian Freud). By and by, however, she found her starting points in Wapping and Woolwich. It was not their grimy atmosphere or the heroism of labour that she fixed on, but the structure of what she saw. ‘The original experience must be reconstructed; it grows as a crystal or a tree grows, with its own logic.’ That, and seeing the familiar afresh, as unfamiliar.

  These were goals that many artists shared. Like Clough, some were eventually to find their way into a realm of art in which the inner logic of the forms became the most obvious subject of the picture. A form of art that, for want of a better word, we call ‘abstract’. Clough was travelling on a similar trajectory to Victor Pasmore’s, from urban landscape into something much harder to define.

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  At Camberwell, one Saturday morning, Gillian Ayres was working in Pasmore’s still-life class on a painting of a skull, rather glumly because ‘the still-life subjects they had were so boring’. There was a skull ‘that stayed there forever’ and a wax orange. Then Pasmore came along and said, ‘I suppose you’re painting this because you really feel something about it!’ When he moved on, she thought, ‘I don’t feel a bloody thing about it!’ Here was that essential issue again: what to paint and how to do so. It was a question to which there were numerous answers; as many as there were individual and intelligent painters. Pasmore’s remark shook Ayres ‘rigid’, because it was so fundamental. Looking back, she conjectures that, in posing the question, Pasmore ‘knew what he was doing at least subconsciously, because it was right at the time he went abstract’.