Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  RICHARD HAMILTON Hommage à Chrysler Corp., 1957

  Actually, painting a car of any kind was unusual in 1957. Hamilton later reflected on how hard it was to find an image of the automobile in art – even though it was the one object that had transformed twentieth-century life more than any other. That neatly illustrated the novelty of the ideas that were coming out of those evenings at the ICA. Modernism had produced all kinds of new ways of making art, yet one thing it had failed to do was represent modern life. By the mid-1950s, Hamilton had begun to do just this. But there was a paradox about Hommage à Chrysler Corp. and similar works. This was a clever, subtle, allusive type of painting. It could perhaps be called Pop art, but it was definitely not popular. A mass audience would be no more likely to go for it than for a dingy Euston Road picture of a working-man’s café.

  The Firebird II, General Motors’ experimental gas turbine passenger car, 1956

  In the 1950s Hamilton was a prime mover in the organization of a remarkable sequence of exhibitions. Collectively, these gave a glimpse of what the future might look like, not only of art; none more so than ‘This is Tomorrow’, which opened at the Whitechapel on 9 August 1956. One of the propositions it advanced was that in times to come life might take many and varied forms simultaneously. Therefore, rather than displaying the works of individual artists – or even separate works of art – ‘This is Tomorrow’ was made up of a sequence of separate environments created collaboratively by twelve small working parties of painters, architects, sculptors and designers. Not surprisingly, the prophecies these disruptive talents came up with were very different.

  Among them, the contribution of Group 2, put together by Hamilton, John McHale and an architect named John Voelcker, made the biggest impression. This managed, if not to predict the destiny of humanity, at least to foreshadow several of the idioms that would dominate art in the next decade. Firstly it presented something that looked very much like Pop art (as opposed to the earnest discussions of popular culture in which the Independent Group had specialized). One of the most eye-catching items on show was a large cut-out from a poster depicting the character of Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet – a successful science-fiction movie of the same year. The robot was carrying a swooning blonde in the manner of King Kong, while on a smaller scale below was an image of Marilyn Monroe, her skirts flying upwards, taken from another movie poster – this one for The Seven Year Itch, which had been a hit the year before, in 1955. In front stood a giant Guinness bottle, and around the space there were collages of food advertisements, film posters, and screens showing war films and TV commercials.

  Leading up to this area, Group 2 created a space that foreshadowed elements of Op art and environmental installations. The visitor approached Robbie the Robot and Marilyn via a corridor of mind-bending black-and-white optical illusions, and there were also whirligig discs, that had been supplied to McHale by their inventor, Marcel Duchamp. The very walls on which these were placed were leaning and sloping in a disorientating manner. Fluorescent paint was dribbled around, the floors were soft and the whole space was permeated with an odour of strawberries. It was just the sort of freaky fun-house in which the 1960s would delight.

  RICHARD HAMILTON Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956

  For the catalogue, and to publicize the exhibition, Hamilton made a collage that has a good claim to be the first masterpiece of Pop art: Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956). It was composed of an assortment of images such as he and his friends had pored over in the magazines at the American Embassy library, although in this case they were culled from John McHale’s private archive of Americana.

  Prominent on the left of the picture is the figure of the body-builder Charles Atlas; across the room a bare-breasted woman with a lamp-shade on her head reclines on a sofa. Around them is a phantasmagorical array of contemporary accessories and consumer goods. On the coffee table, in place of an ornament, is a gigantic tin of ham, and below it, on the floor, is a tape recorder; the stairs are being cleaned with a vacuum cleaner. The standard lamp is decorated with the Ford logo, emblematic of the car, that most crucial of all status symbols in both 1950s Britain and America. Above, the ceiling is composed of a photograph of the moon as if to imply there is no limit to the possibilities of modern existence, whether in travel, the accumulation of technological gadgets, or sexual ostentation. In his right hand the muscle man holds a bright red phallic tennis racquet, wrapped like a lollipop, on which is inscribed in capital letters the word, ‘POP’. Hamilton’s collage is funny, memorable, bizarre, more than a little surreal and, in all those qualities, very British. In America Pop was a reflection of real life, as we have seen; in the UK it was always more of a dream.

  Another of the working parties that contributed to ‘This is Tomorrow’ – Group 6 – was made up of Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, and the husband-and-wife architectural team of Alison and Peter Smithson. They posed for the catalogue sitting on modernist chairs in an East End street. Behind them is a random sample of cars typical of London in 1956, not supplied by the Chrysler Corp and certainly not jet-powered. They look as if they had been kept going since pre-war days by cash-strapped owners. The whole picture presents the homely and dingy face of postwar Britain, grey and drab, rather than the colourful, exuberant energy associated with either the Independent Group or Pop.

  *

  This homeliness was the chosen subject of a group of young painters who – unwillingly – went by the name of the ‘Kitchen Sink School’. At the time they were more prominent by far than Hamilton, Blake or the Independent Group and they were championed by another articulate and opinionated critic, John Berger. In 1952, Berger organized an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery called ‘Looking Forward’, a title which, not coincidentally, echoed a policy document issued by the Communist Party of Great Britain, Looking Ahead. Though never a party member, Berger was closely allied with the Marxist political project. He espoused ‘social realism’, a softened, humanized version of the Socialist Realism idiom approved in Moscow.

  ‘The question I ask is,’ Berger wrote, ‘Does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights?’ This was not, it is fair to say, a subject uppermost in the minds of Bacon, Freud, Hamilton, Pasmore or Hilton, who were just some of the large contingent of contemporary painters not selected for ‘Looking Forward’. This exhibition, Berger informed the readers of the left-wing magazine Tribune, was ‘not for the critics and the Bond Street art-fanciers, but you, and all your friends, who can’t stand modern art’. If Tribune readers did indeed detest modern art, Berger went on, they were right. ‘I think it’s modern art and not you that’s to blame.’

  Accordingly, when Bryan Robertson, the director of the Whitechapel, suggested some other artists for inclusion in ‘Looking Forward’ – Freud and Coldstream among them – Berger offered his resignation by return of post. He wrote that what he admired was painters ‘who draw their inspiration from a comparatively objective study of the actual world’, which for him meant artists who were concerned with ‘the reality of the subject not the “reality” of their subjective feelings about it’. As those sneering quotation marks around the word reality imply, Bacon and Freud were among Berger’s ‘bêtes noires’; in his opinion their feelings were thoroughly bourgeois. Alberto Giacometti and Jackson Pollock were among his other targets, a fact that infuriated another critic, David Sylvester, also an ardent advocate of Bacon. This feud between critics had lasting consequences.

  Jack Smith, Edward Middleditch, John Bratby, Helen Lessore and Derrick Greaves, 1956

  Berger thought he had found some painters who displayed the correct political tendencies when he reviewed ‘Young Contemporaries’, an exhibition of work by students at the Royal College of Art, in January 1952. He picked out two, Edward Middleditch and Derrick Greaves, and praised their ‘deliberate acceptance of the everyday and ordinary’. Going a s
tep further, he suggested that their works ‘imply an acceptance of the revolutionary theories of the last forty years’. In other words, these were soundly Marxist pictures. This would have come as news to Middleditch and Greaves, as it would have done to John Bratby and Jack Smith, the two other youthful painters with whom their names were soon inextricably joined.

  They were, rather than revolutionaries, somewhat traditional painters who carried on the heritage of Sickert and his Camden Town associates. All four were shown by Helen Lessore of the Beaux Arts Gallery, a fact that led to their being given an alternative label, the ‘Beaux Arts Quartet’. None of them wanted to make a political point; they painted what surrounded them. And what surrounded them were the sorts of houses and streets to be seen behind Paolozzi, Henderson and the Smithsons in the ‘This is Tomorrow’ photograph. ‘That was my life at the time,’ Jack Smith explained. ‘I just painted the objects around me, I lived in that kind of house. If one had lived in a palace, one might have painted chandeliers.’ When Middleditch depicted Pigeons in Trafalgar Square (1954), he did so with a sky just as described by Cyril Connolly in 1947, ‘permanently dull and lowering like a metal dish-cover’.

  Bratby, on the other hand, had been much affected by a Van Gogh exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1947–48; so much so that his early work – the best – looks like a crude but energetic pastiche of what Van Gogh might have painted if he’d been living in cheap accommodation in 1950s London. Some of the results have a certain brio, if little of the great Dutchman’s sense of structure. The Toilet (1956), for example, is a choice of subject almost as unusual in art as the motor car (and almost as ubiquitous in life). His still-life pictures dwelt on other objects then hardly known in painting, such as cornflake packets, which later featured in Pop art. Bratby, though, approached these consumables not in the spirit of the Independent Group, fascinated by advertising and product design, but as part of the cheery squalor of his surroundings.

  Neither Bratby nor the others were, as Berger hopefully claimed, ‘painting with great sympathy the few possessions of the dispossessed’. They were, as young and struggling painters, dispossessed themselves. This, however, did not save them from suffering collateral damage in the battle between critics. Sylvester, irritated by Berger and taking note of his point about these painters’ nobly Marxist ‘acceptance of the everyday and ordinary’, wrote a rejoinder in the December 1954 issue of the magazine Encounter. In retrospect, he admitted his real target had not been the painters themselves but Berger, ‘a marvellous and very eloquent and persuasive writer, a much better writer than I am’, but a ‘bloody awful judge of the art of his own time’.

  Sylvester described how these painters often chose to depict nothing more interesting than ‘a very ordinary kitchen, lived in by a very ordinary family’, dwelling on ‘every kind of food and drink, every kind of utensil and implement, the usual plain furniture, and even the baby’s nappies on the line’. It was all too mundane. Bratby’s paintings, to his mind, were just ‘an enthusiastic mess’. Sylvester concluded his inventory with a rhetorical flourish. Did these painters indiscriminately throw everything into their pictures? ‘Everything but the kitchen sink? The kitchen sink too.’ And that was it; they were named. ‘The wretched critic’s term haunts us all,’ Greaves reflected bitterly, thirty years later, ‘seeking its encapsulating vengeance.’

  JOHN BRATBY The Toilet, 1956

  However, the damage was not immediate. By 1955, these four youthful painters were beginning to be known abroad as well as at home; that year they were shown in Milan and Paris. At the Venice Biennale of 1956, Bratby, Smith, Middleditch and Greaves made up four out of the five British painters represented. In 1957, Jack Smith was the very first winner of the John Moores Painting Prize, a new, lavishly funded award that was, in 1950s Britain, equivalent to today’s Turner Prize in its power to generate fame and publicity. Smith received £1,000, while Bratby won the junior award of £500. But their moment of fame passed rapidly.

  In retrospect, like many art historical labels, ‘Kitchen Sink School’ seems accidental. There was really no such movement. By the mid-1950s, the drabness of their early works had begun to brighten and – as Marty Wilde said – colours had begun to come in. The Zeitgeist was beginning to change and kitchens no longer seemed, even to these four painters, a suitable subject for modern art.

  Chapter ten

  AN ARENA IN WHICH TO ACT

  I think that if there are major turns in art history – and I don’t know if there are, I don’t even know if that’s the right way of looking at it – then what they did in America was the first major turn since the beginning of the century, since Cubism.

  Frank Auerbach, 2017

  In the late 1950s, Patrick Heron found himself in a London restaurant with an important curator. He was enumerating a list of artists – all abstract painters – that he suggested should be included in a survey of the contemporary scene. He heard from behind a sound of protest, almost feline as he remembered it, and looking round saw Lucian Freud standing there, listening, aghast, with a very beautiful companion. By that time, Freud – and indeed, Minton and most figurative painters, apart from Bacon – were rapidly going out of fashion.

  By the mid-1950s a radically new way of painting was making an impression on young and adventurous artists in London. This was why, towards the end of November 1956, at the Royal College of Art, John Minton lost his temper. The occasion was a ‘Sketch Club’, at which work by students in the Painting School was presented so that the tutors could deliver on-the-spot critiques. By this stage Minton was no longer the carefree and charming – if frenetic – figure Gillian Ayres had encountered at Camberwell School of Art in 1946. A decade later, Minton was nearing forty, his work out of fashion, his drinking out of control, his mood increasingly despairing and desperate.

  The following January he committed suicide, leaving the portrait of himself he had commissioned from Lucian Freud four years before to the Royal College, where for years he had been a senior member of staff. In retrospect this picture looks like a prediction of the psychic disintegration Minton was to suffer. He was already close to the end of his tether and his patience snapped at the sight of an outrageously up-to-date creation by a student called Robyn Denny.

  At that point in his career, Denny – then twenty-six and in his final year at the Royal College – was making works that he first painted on hardboard in a loose, wild fashion, perhaps scrawling on them words from newspaper headlines, and then set alight, obscuring the imagery. Minton’s response was a sarcastic attack on the attitudes and art of this new generation. First, he suggested, addressing his audience, ‘You put on the Nescafé and begin to paint your board on the floor not on the easel. That’s original, no one else does that! Then you jump on it, off centre, that’s to show you’re sensitive!’

  His words were jotted down by Anne Martin, one of the students present, who later recalled that Minton seemed ‘beside himself’. He railed on: ‘Then you paint a few dozen, pay someone to write a preface to the catalogue, number them, give them names.’ At this point, his eye lit on a newspaper lying on the floor, with the headline ‘Eden Come Home’ (this was at the height of the Suez Crisis, after the invasion, but before the British and French forces had begun to withdraw). Why, Minton exclaimed, you could call a picture like this anything, ‘you could call it, Eden Come Home!’

  The next day, when Denny – who had actually missed the Sketch Club – heard about Minton’s outburst, he took a fresh sheet of hardboard, brushed on the words ‘Eden Come Home’ in bitumen and then set fire to it. As a final touch, and to add insult to injury, a like-minded fellow student named Richard Smith signed the finished piece – which of course had the title Minton had suggested – in a spirit of furious scorn.

  *

  Minton’s outburst came towards the end of a pivotal year in the miniature world of London contemporary art: it was the point at which the gaze of those interested in the absolutely latest thing in painting
shifted decisively from Paris to New York. Scarcely had 1956 begun, when on 5 January an exhibition opened at the Tate Gallery with the far from sensational, not to say fusty, title ‘Modern Art in the United States: A Selection from the Collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York’. This, however, presented an exciting opportunity for ardent followers of the most modern painting.

  ‘At last we can see for ourselves’, wrote Patrick Heron in the March edition of Arts magazine, ‘what it is like to stand in a very large room hung with very large canvases by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline and others.’ In fact, these artists were only featured in the last room in the show, but it was this gallery that created all the excitement. Here was the first proper view of what came to be known as (but was not yet generally called) Abstract Expressionism, or AbEx. The art dealer John Kasmin remembers, ‘We didn’t talk about Abstract Expressionism then, we talked about action painting.’ Another term much used in the studios and arty pubs of London at the time was ‘Tachisme’. As we have seen, this was, roughly speaking, the French equivalent of Abstract Expressionism.