Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  The Daily Mail was furious that £500 had been spent on this picture, and reproduced it on its front page with the headline ‘What Price Autumn on Canvas?’ There were angry letters in the Daily Telegraph and sheaves of complaints were sent to the Arts Council. A committee of more conservative painters, including Augustus John and Laura Knight, protested publicly that the Arts Council was leaning ‘too far to the left’. Gear himself responded that people should not be afraid of being labelled ‘Bolshie’ for admiring his work. Eventually a Liberal MP asked a question in Parliament, to which the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, made a written reply, pointing out – acutely – that the public criticism was founded largely on the basis of ‘a small black and white photograph’. He added, blandly, that he’d been assured that, ‘taken together’, the five winners were ‘widely representative in style’.

  WILLIAM GEAR Autumn Landscape, 1950–51

  *

  In 1951 then, at least as far as certain sections of the British public were concerned – and some artists too – abstraction was an incendiary issue. This might seem strange, historically speaking. After all, at that point in the mid-twentieth century, the first abstractions in European painting were over forty years old. The great early Modern pioneers of the idiom – Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, Klee – were all dead, their achievements widely known for decades. There had been abstract paintings and sculptures made in London before the First World War, and many more in the 1930s by artists such as Ben Nicholson and John Piper, among others.

  The reasons for this cultural lag were complex. Britain had been cut off from the European avant-garde not only during the war, but for much of the rest of the time too by indifference and cultural conservatism. The works of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Cézanne had caused a furious reaction when exhibited in London in Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912. King George V probably spoke for many of his subjects when, standing before an Impressionist painting at the Tate Gallery, he remarked to Queen Mary, ‘Here’s something to make you laugh, May.’

  Amusement, however, could rapidly turn to rage. Gillian Ayres, who had a part-time job behind the desk at the mildly radical Artists’ International Association Gallery (AIA) in Soho, remembers ‘people saying the place ought to be burnt down and slamming the door. In those days people were terribly anti-, and I was frightened if I’m honest.’ This was a common response to any type of Modernism, but abstraction was certainly most likely to provoke it. There was also a political dimension to the matter. Abstraction was linked, in the minds of at least some of its detractors – and its supporters – with the notion of building a new and better world. This, in turn, was part of the postwar mood, the spirit of the Attlee government and the new National Health Service and Welfare State.

  In his prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag 383, Terry Frost had met and learnt from Adrian Heath, who was five years his junior but – rather than doing dead-end jobs in factories as Frost himself had done – had been to art school. After the war, Frost, already over thirty, studied at Camberwell himself and gravitated towards the heady company of Modernists: ‘I didn’t know anything about abstract art but it was going on all around me when I went to London just after the war. It was talked about from breakfast time until dawn the next morning sometimes.’

  Frost, Heath and Anthony Hill were drawn to Russian Constructivism, a movement that existed for a few stirring years after the Russian revolution, and aspired – quite literally – to construct a better future. Marx had observed that philosophers had previously interpreted the world, retorting that ‘The point, however, is to change it.’ Similarly, Constructivists were not interested in representing the world as it was, but in building a new one – preferably out of clear, geometric shapes and bold colours.

  This, Frost related, was ‘very much of a force on us’:

  In that wonderful revolutionary period when they started work – thinking they were doing it for the people – the Constructivists had terrific structure, wonderful design that went through and everything they did – ceramics, Rodchenko’s photography, El Lissitsky’s typography – it was all absolutely fantastic.

  Painting, obviously, was only a part of this project. But the utter, pared-down simplicity of Malevich’s Black Square (1915), the greatest masterpiece of Russian revolutionary art, still stopped Frost’s heart forty years later. ‘Why should it be such a knock-out?’ he asked himself, then answering his own question: ‘It comes from a period when there was great hope and great opportunity. It’s more than perfection. It’s love and it’s beauty, and it’s poetry.’

  For some, at least, the late 1940s felt like that too, a fresh beginning, a time of hope. Even for those who were not so optimistic about the future, nor so fired with idealism, abstraction seemed to provide the answer to many questions, most of all to the conundrum: what to paint and how to paint it? To ‘go abstract’, however, required a brave leap into uncharted waters, leaving behind all the traditions of painting and sculpture, almost everything that was taught at art schools. It took nerve.

  A year or so before the Festival of Britain opened, Lawrence Gowing met up with Kenneth Clark, who had just returned from a visit to Victor Pasmore’s studio in Hammersmith. The urbane connoisseur, Gowing recalled, was utterly confounded. ‘Honest puzzlement shone from his eyes. He said, “Victor really is extraordinary. Do you know he is scrawling spirals all over his pictures? Really, he is the most eccentric man! Great, rampant curlicues like nothing on earth.”’ Pasmore had ‘gone abstract’ – or, as we might put it now, ‘come out’. The resulting shock was considerable. ‘It caused a big stir,’ Pasmore remembered, ‘because I was well known as a landscape painter. I had a big reputation.’

  Victor Pasmore at work on a restaurant mural for the Festival of Britain, 1951

  In the middle of 1948, Pasmore had begun to make completely – as opposed to partly – abstract pictures. The moment of disclosure came in an exhibition later that year at the Redfern Gallery. It caused bewilderment among many of his admirers, but also engendered support from fellow artists. The first person to ring Pasmore up was Wyndham Lewis, perhaps the first British artist to paint an abstract painting, as early as 1913. Lewis said, ‘At last …’ Next David Bomberg rang to offer his congratulations, though both of these pioneer Modernists had, as Pasmore saw it, ‘gone backwards’ in their later work and become figurative painters. The last to call was Ben Nicholson, who had crossed over the same border in the 1930s, and was now resident in St Ives, Cornwall, the doyen of British abstract painters. Pasmore’s friend Coldstream and the Euston Road crowd were ‘very good about it’. Having been abstract artists themselves, briefly, in the early 1930s, they understood what he was doing. Nevertheless, Pasmore felt, ‘they were too far gone, they couldn’t change’. Only stick-in-the-muds, he implied, did not understand that abstract art was the way forward.

  Indeed, he could be as doctrinaire on this point as any prejudiced opponent of abstraction. Paula Rego, a young student at the Slade from 1952 to 1956, got, she remembers, ‘a terrible ticking off’ from Pasmore. ‘He looked my work and said, “Nobody does things like that anymore! That is total rubbish.”’ Even at this stage neither could she follow the careful measuring and reticent objectivity of Coldstream, who was then principal of the Slade. Like so many of the painters in these pages, she followed her own idiosyncratic course, working from her imagination.

  *

  The intriguing question was whether Kenneth Clark was correct in saying that Pasmore’s spirals were ‘like nothing on earth’. Were the spirals just invented shapes, ‘pure form’, or were they abstractions from something real, such as the vortex of Turner’s Snow Storm? In other words, what is abstraction, really? It is a good question, one much debated in the 1940s and 1950s – and still not really answered.

  On 26 October 1950, around the time that Clark paid his visit, William Townsend dropped in on Pasmore’s studio and found it full of abstract pictures, ‘no longer limi
ted to rectangles and triangles’ like Pasmore’s earlier abstractions had been. The painter explained he had ‘tried to invent more complex shapes “and it isn’t easy”’. Several of these new pieces, Townsend noted, were ‘composed with spirals’. He also saw the drawings and a model of Pasmore’s design for the Regatta Restaurant, one of the buildings commissioned for the Festival of Britain. This he described as ‘a vastly enlarged drawing, in black, white and grey lines, of a waterfall’. Apparently it was based on drawings of the sea done by Pasmore the previous summer at St Ives. So this, at least, seemed to be an abstraction from something seen in the real world.

  A few months later, however, in a discussion at the ICA held on 9 Janurary 1951, Pasmore insisted that his new work was the result of ‘a method of construction emanating from within’. Instead of depicting the world around him, he was working with ‘formal elements which, in themselves, have no descriptive qualities at all’. Still, he admitted, his picture The Coast of the Inland Sea (c. 1950), though it had evolved from a spiral motif, had come to remind him of ‘rocks, coast, sea and sky’.

  The distinction between ‘pure abstraction’ and images ‘abstracted from’ something real was, and is, rather confusing (indeed it seemed to baffle Pasmore himself at times). The most perplexing aspect of it was that it is difficult to create any forms or marks that do not suggest something to the human eye and mind. Our brains seem to be primed to identify even random blotches and amorphous stuff – oddly shaped vegetables, or clouds – as images of people, animals or things. Sometimes, as Shakespeare put it, ‘we see a cloud that’s dragonish’. There was, however, a way out of this conundrum for abstract artists. What if, rather than depicting the surface appearance of things – as a photograph or a naturalistic painting did – they were dealing with what Noam Chomsky has dubbed ‘deep structure’?

  One probable source for the spirals that spun through Pasmore’s art was the distinguished Scottish scientist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s book On Growth and Form, first published in 1917. This expounded the thesis that there were similarities that relate living creatures to machines, engineering and other forms fashioned by the laws of physics. Of these, the spiral, seen in sea shells and galaxies of stars alike, was one. This was an appealingly visual thesis and you could see it on the pages of Thompson’s lavishly illustrated volume.

  Two ex-students of the Slade School of Fine Art, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, both organized exhibitions based on the idea. Hamilton was the curator of a display, also called ‘Growth and Form’, which was the contribution of the fledgling Institute of Contemporary Arts to the national celebrations of the Festival of Britain. Indeed, the patterns of the natural world were all over the Festival. Diners in the Regatta Restaurant would not only have been confronted by abstract, and near-abstract, art by Pasmore, Nicholson and John Tunnard, and have eaten off plates the patterns of which were derived from the crystalline structure of beryl; as they dined they were also surrounded by textiles and wallpaper devised by the Festival Pattern Group at the urging of Dr Helen Megaw, a Cambridge scientist, based on diagrams of atomic structures.

  The notion that art could work like nature, rather than merely imitate it, appealed to many artists. One was Kenneth Martin, a painter who ‘went abstract’ in 1948–49 and henceforth produced resolutely geometric pictures and sculptures. In 1951, Martin wrote that ‘proportion and analogy’ were fundamental to an art which did not attempt to represent ‘the illusory and transient aspects of nature, but that copies nature in the laws of its activities’. ‘Abstract’ art, then, was more profoundly truthful than the other sort. However, Pasmore disliked the word, preferring to describe what he did as ‘independent painting: that is, art that is independent, like music’. An artist used basic forms in the way a composer used notes.

  *

  Abstract art could come in many forms, and suggest many things without making a literal, photographic picture of them. Gear’s prize-winning Autumn Landscape really was autumnal. Sandra Blow’s paintings, when she returned to London in 1951, had a distinct feeling of landscape about them, emphasized by titles such as Construction, Rock and Water (1953). This is not exactly a picture of boulders on a hillside, but strongly puts you in mind of them.

  A later work, Painting 1957 (1957), is much looser and its references more elemental. Along with paint, in the manner of Burri – with whom Blow was still in friendly correspondence – she included sacking and plaster in the mix. It has the look of a primeval landscape, suggesting lava flows and magma, but turned on its side the horizon runs vertically downwards.

  The lessons learned from On Growth and Form led some artists away from painting altogether. For Pasmore and fellow Constructivists such as Anthony Hill, it seemed more logical to make an object – a three-dimensional relief – than a picture, however ‘abstract’. It is hard to separate painting from illusion, though many have tried. Indeed, the quest for pictorial flatness rather than illusory space was one of the hot topics of the day. Nonetheless, as Bridget Riley has noted, ‘Depth is part of painting, to deny it is to deny part of what painting is.’

  SANDRA BLOW Painting 1957, 1957

  Any colour or tone, placed next to another, is prone to appear in front of the other or behind it. This is the ‘push-pull’ that the American artist and teacher Hans Hofmann argued any painter, abstract or not, had to work with. Many artists were trying to do so. Adrian Heath, for example – Terry Frost’s friend and prison-camp mentor – was one. He wrote of how, to him, it was the ‘process’ that was the ‘life of the painting’. The forms, the colours and their relationships all grew out of this; they came, in other words, from moving the paint around until it seemed right.

  Gillian Ayres encountered perhaps the most impressive of all abstract painters in London in the early 1950s, as she sat at her post behind the desk at the AIA Gallery, chatting and smoking. His name was Roger Hilton. She and her husband and job-sharing partner, Henry Mundy, hung one of Hilton’s paintings in the gallery, against the protests of the manager, Diana Uhlman. Ayres remembers, ‘She came in and said “What’s that up there? What the hell have you done?”’ Then, amazingly, it sold and Hilton took Gillian and Henry out to celebrate:

  He admired proper gravy, so we had to go to a French restaurant, then we had to go back to his place. There were all his paintings there, the most abstract ones – totally non-figurative. I was wildly excited by them. It was incredibly pure painting: a voiding mood.

  Ayres is echoing the way in which Hilton described the predicament of the abstract painter, who plunges ‘entirely into the unknown … like a man swinging out into the void’, a sentiment that – with the adjective ‘abstract’ deleted – would have resonated with Francis Bacon. So would another of Hilton’s reflections: ‘Very few artists know what they are doing: it is an instinctive, irrational activity.’

  Hilton, born in 1911, was even more of a late starter than Bacon. It was not until the age of forty that he began to make any headway at all, having spent the 1930s and late 1940s either at art school, on extended visits to Paris and Berlin, or working at various odd jobs. He had tried frame-making, school teaching, had worked in a telephone exchange using his fluent French, and depended a good deal on his wife’s earnings as a violin teacher. During the war years, he had fought as a commando and, as mentioned earlier, spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia. He was an arrogant, eloquent man and an extremely heavy drinker. In 1951, in the eyes of the world, he looked like a complete failure. But he was beginning to make abstract art of remarkable force. Under the influences of some contemporary French artists, he had been working in an idiom he described as ‘the sort of so-called non-figurative painting where lines and colours are flying about in an illusory space’. Then, having seen Piet Mondrian’s work in the Netherlands, he began to do something bolder and starker.

  Hilton’s art and ideas – more than anyone else’s – caught Gillian Ayres’s attention, even though his conversation could be jarringly
aggressive. Terrible experiences during the war and years of obscurity – plus large quantities of alcohol – had made him both volatile and cantankerous. She recalls:

  He was frightfully generous and nice a lot of the time, but he could also kill you with being beastly to you. I used to say he took the marrow out of your spine when he wanted to. Hilton talked a lot, and you realized that you were very ignorant. His line was: You don’t know anything. The talk was good though, with art mixed up with everything else, rather like French gravy, but a lot of things would come out.

  Among other disconcerting remarks, Hilton told Ayres that she couldn’t be a painter because she didn’t have a penis. Some of the insights he made about painting, however, were excitingly radical in early 1950s London. He talked, Ayres remembers, ‘of forms flying out of the canvas and joining up with people in the room’. Around that time, he defined his works as ‘space-creating’ mechanisms, the effect of which ‘is to be felt outside rather than inside the picture’.

  This was a reversal of the standard assumption about painting: that it created a fictional space behind the canvas. Hilton was proposing the opposite: that a picture could propel its contents out into the real world around. Of course a baroque ceiling or a mighty mural such as Michelangelo’s Last Judgement does just that: it seems to fill the air with trompe-l’œil saints and angels. But what Hilton was suggesting accepted the choice that Coldstream had outlined in his letter two decades before: if you give up the idea of painting a picture of the world, you end up making an object, ‘something to be worked as a carpenter works on a chair’.