Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  Up to that point, the names Heron listed in his article about the Tate show had been largely just names. Not many people in Britain had seen their work. One painting by Pollock had been displayed at the ICA in 1953, and, Heron noted, ‘De Kooning got as near to us as Venice a summer or two ago’. A few – a very few – British artists had already crossed the Atlantic, met these artists, seen their work and returned to spread the news. Naturally there had been a good deal of discussion in the art press of this phenomenon. Even so, there are limitations to the information that can be transmitted by a photograph of a painting in a magazine. For one thing, it is hard to gauge scale, precisely the revelatory aspect of the experience that Heron stressed when he wrote about standing ‘in a very large room hung with very large canvases’. Yet, looking back, Frank Auerbach feels the impact of the Tate show has been exaggerated. ‘People always suggest that artists were influenced by exhibitions, but painters usually know about whatever it is already. I certainly knew about the Abstract Expressionists before they were shown at the Tate.’

  *

  ALAN DAVIE Birth of Venus, 1955

  One British artist who had actually stood in front of Pollock’s paintings very early on was Alan Davie, a Scot from Grangemouth, who had studied art in Edinburgh after the war and then – in the time-honoured manner – travelled in Italy to learn more about art. Ending up in Venice in 1948, he met the gallerist and collector Peggy Guggenheim, who had recently moved there from New York, and saw the pictures she owned by Pollock. These were works from the early 1940s, before Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist phase, a period when Guggenheim had the artist on a retainer. These paintings were executed with a brush and charged with psychological symbolism derived from a blend of Surrealism, Freudian delving in the subconscious and heavy borrowing from Picasso – and they made a powerful impression on Davie.

  After he returned to Britain, he began making big paintings on the floor of his studio. He explained why they had to be made like that. ‘To produce something spontaneously, one had to work very fast, and to work fast one had to use liquid paint.’ And for obvious reasons, ‘You can’t use liquid paint with a canvas on an easel’.

  Davie’s work of the early and mid-1950s was visceral, organic and, though non-figurative, somehow ominous. Stylistically it suggested not only early 1940s Pollock, but also Bacon – though a Bacon without the figures, with no recognizable subject, just a sense of urgent, menacing energy, and sometimes a hint of butchery. One was left with a suspicion of some meaning impossible to put one’s finger on. The paintings were, Davie emphasized, ‘not preconceived’. The process was more like playing a jazz solo (Davie had worked as a jazz saxophonist) than anything Poussin or Sickert would have understood.

  Davie defined his sense of painting in a way that would have made sense to a jazz musician like Charlie Parker, as well as to Pollock or Bacon. For him, painting really was about action, even if some of that action took place in the mind: ‘I was trying to produce something very spontaneous. I had an urge to paint, much like a sexual urge, or another urge that one doesn’t have control over.’ In the notes to the catalogue for his Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition of 1958, he wrote: ‘One must concern oneself with the activity of painting, be it a physical one (like a dance) or an improvisation with ideas or concepts.’

  Though he considered himself a Scottish artist, Davie was for a while based in London – he taught at the Central School – until he moved to Hertfordshire in 1954. Indeed, he was a remarkably cosmopolitan figure. With his interest in Zen, his beard and his proficiency at jazz he would have fitted in as well in California as he did in London – or better. He sold no works at all in his first seven years of exhibiting commercially in Britain, but his initial show in New York in 1956 was a sell-out. Davie was an outsider among the artists in London, but in New York de Kooning, Yves Klein and Pollock came to the opening of his exhibition.

  Another British painter who got an early view of the revolution in American painting was William Scott. He visited New York in 1953 and became, apparently, the first European artist to meet with the Abstract Expressionists. The sheer size of many works by Rothko, Kline, Pollock and de Kooning blew Scott’s mind. ‘My impression at first was bewilderment, it was not the originality of the work but it was the scale, audacity and self-confidence – something had happened to painting.’

  Certainly, as Heron reported, the AbEx room at the Tate show three years later was ‘the talk of the town’. Even The Times explained that these sensational painters had ‘gained for the United States an influence upon European art which it has never exerted before’. In January 1956, Professor Meyer Schapiro of Columbia University in New York was flown over to give a talk on BBC radio about this extraordinary new movement.

  Schapiro also ‘gave four lectures: on recent American art, particularly the abstract work’ in London, and had ‘numerous discussions with artists, critics and scholars’. This he reported to the organizer of his trip, a bureaucrat in the International Educational Exchange Service (a subdivision of the State Department), as well as giving a precise account of his flight times and confessing he had wasted US government resources by consulting some medieval manuscripts in the British Museum (these being an art historical interest of his). Schapiro was paid $256.63 for his services.

  Abstract Expressionism was thus actively promoted by the American government at the height of the Cold War as a way of extending its cultural influence and prestige. This fact – when it was eventually discovered – led to suspicion that the shift of art world attention from Paris to New York was the result of political manipulation. There is no doubt that Pollock and the others were used to increase the soft power of the USA. This would not have worked, however, had it not been for the visual impact of the pictures themselves. William Scott felt this without having to be told about it by art historians or critics. He saw the paintings, met the painters, and ‘returned convinced that the Americans had made a great discovery and that the mood in England – a longing for a nice comfortable realist art – would not last much longer’.

  So it proved, two years later, when the giant works were put on show at the Tate, followed by a series of exhibitions that displayed new American art to the eyes of London. From then on, increasingly and almost automatically, aspiring artists looked across the ocean for clues and inspiration. David Hockney, a nineteen–year-old about to do his National Service, remembered the change. Students such as himself quickly ‘realized that American painting was more interesting than French painting. The idea of French painting disappeared really, and American Abstract Expressionism was the great influence.’

  When a large Pollock retrospective was held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery at the end of 1958, Hockney hitchhiked down from Yorkshire to see it. Allen Jones, then a student at Hornsey College of Art, saw it too and his ideas were completely rearranged by the experience. Jones went to the show with Ken Kiff, a fellow student. Afterwards, he said to Kiff, ‘Ken, you know, I think we could sue the art school for fraud.’ At Hornsey College Surrealism and Futurism were ‘regarded as the most recent moment in art; but in 1958 they were thirty or forty years old’. Even those who were not drawn to abstraction, such as the young John Wonnacott, could not ignore this aesthetic earthquake: ‘Jackson Pollock at the Whitechapel had an enormous effect on me. It worried me sick, gave me a headache. I went back four or five times.’

  However, at least one visitor to those pioneering Abstract Expressionist exhibitions emerged unconvinced. Francis Bacon was ‘terribly disappointed’ by his first sight of paintings by Rothko. He had expected to see ‘marvellous abstract Turners or Monets’, and he conceded that there was ‘a marvellous vitality in the way those artists put paint on canvas. It had that living quality.’ The energy of loose, even flying paint, the creative accidents that might happen when pigment moved on the canvas, had long been what Bacon aimed at himself. And yet, when he saw them, he couldn’t admire pictures without some sort of figurative subject. To him,
they were just ‘decorative’: a dead end.

  Typically, the more prevalent the vogue for Abstract Expressionism, the more mischievous Bacon became. ‘I suppose Jackson Pollock was the most gifted, and yet, even with him, when I saw his work, I found it to be a collection of old lace.’ He was fond of this gag; on being introduced to Pollock’s nephew, he exclaimed, with his customary gender reversal, ‘So you’re the lace-maker’s niece!’ Frank Auerbach recalled Bacon going ‘so far as to say that Elinor Bellingham-Smith [a still-life and landscape painter and wife of Rodrigo Moynihan] was better than Jackson Pollock, which is fair nonsense’.

  Auerbach himself took the opposite view. To him the new American painting represented a reaffirmation of the formal qualities he responded to most deeply: ‘the wordless and subject-less tension of the structure in space’ that he had seen in the Piranesi that David Bomberg had shown him one day at the Borough Polytechnic; the frisson he had felt at the ‘tangible, three-dimensional mountain of line’. In his eyes, the developments across the Atlantic were of great significance:

  People in the first half of the twentieth century wanted something surprising. As Diaghilev said to Cocteau, ‘Surprise me!’ And I think what the Americans did was to reassert the standard of grandeur – of very grand forms, which was what Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Titian would have done.

  *

  By 1956, even if they had not actually seen it, many younger artists were thinking hard about the way Jackson Pollock worked and trying it out for themselves. William Green, another member of John Minton’s tutorial group at the Royal College, was one who did so, thereby achieving a degree of notoriety that in the long term proved highly damaging to his career. The following year, his activities – which included using a bicycle to make marks on his paintings – were the subject of a newsreel item by British Pathé films entitled Action Artist. This showed Green in his studio, placing a board on the floor, just as Minton had disdainfully described (‘That’s original, no one else does that!’). He then walked over the board, manipulating the pigment with his feet, before adding sand to produce additional texture. The commentary, though more good-humoured than Minton’s outburst, was equally ironic, ending by expressing bemusement at the information that this piece of ‘modern art’ might fetch as much as one hundred pounds.

  After this was screened in cinemas across the nation, poor Green became the target for a great deal of derision. In 1961, The Rebel, a film starring comedian Tony Hancock as an untalented would-be artist, was released. It featured a more elaborate version of Green’s process, in which the comedian, wearing a sou’wester, rode a bicycle over a large painting on his studio floor, as Green had done, while a cow stood in the background. Soon after, Green retired from the bear pit of the art world to teach in South London. Little was heard of him for decades, although he began to exhibit again shortly before his death in 2001. His experience is a counter-example to the adage that all publicity is good publicity; although it is possible that his talent was just not strong enough. Denny, on the other hand, shrugged off Minton’s ridicule to become, as we shall see, one of the most prominent artists of London in the 1960s.

  William Green, still from Action Artist, 1957

  ‘Action painting’ was most definitely not a joke. By 1956, and well before the Tate show, it had become a crucial phrase in discussions of contemporary art. In fact, it had been a hot topic ever since the American critic Harold Rosenberg published a celebrated article in the New York magazine ARTnews in December 1952, writing that:

  Tony Hancock on the set of The Rebel, 1961

  At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

  The idea travelled more quickly than the works that had inspired it, accompanied by another sort of image – photographs and film of Jackson Pollock at work taken by Hans Namuth in 1950. These had the opposite effect to the shots of Green with his bike in his cramped student’s studio; they were compelling positive publicity. The pictures of Pollock flinging paint, almost dancing as he created a picture, went around the world and helped to cement his fame.

  Gillian Ayres was fired by the news of this astonishing procedure:

  The whole idea of the canvas as an arena in which to act – an area and what one does with it; I wanted to find out about that, obsessively. I did find that tremendously exciting. But I think I took it first from what was said and written and the photographs – in fact I think I was doing it even before I saw the photographs.

  Her opportunity to do so on a grand, Pollock-like scale came within a year of Minton’s withering diatribe to his students, and almost by chance. By 1956, Ayres had moved from painting geometric abstractions with a hint of landscape about them, somewhat in the manner of Roger Hilton, to including in her work a new element of spatter and drip derived ultimately from Pollock.

  Ayres’s work was included in a large exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, a show that would prove to be one of the artistic landmarks of the decade. It was entitled ‘Metavisual Tachiste Abstract’, the first word having been thought up on the spur of the moment by Patrick Heron’s wife, Delia, who was advising Redfern director Rex Nan Kivell about the show. ‘Metavisual’ meant nothing, but ‘abstract’ and ‘Tachiste’ of course did, although their definitions were extremely loose.

  Subtitled ‘Painting in England Today’, the exhibition was a panoramic, indeed rambling, overview of the work of British non-figurative artists. A number of the older generation were included, among them Ben Nicholson, Victor Pasmore and Rodrigo Moynihan who, after a period as a ‘Euston Road’-style figurative artist had again ‘gone abstract’. Also among the twenty-nine artists selected were representatives of the next generation – Sandra Blow, Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron and Alan Davie. The following year the show travelled to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Liège, where it was given the more cautious description ‘Peinture Anglaise Contemporaine’ and works by Francis Bacon and Graham Sutherland were thrown in.

  The critic Mel Gooding observed that there are exhibitions that define a new movement, or reveal a fresh style, but that ‘Metavisual Tachiste Abstract was not one of them’. Rather, it was a demonstration of the sheer quantity of abstract painters in Britain, some of them young and radical. One of these was Robyn Denny, who was still a student and had had his brush with John Minton only a few months before. And in the largest gallery, right in the centre of the exhibition, was the work of two other young artists, little known and – in London terms – highly audacious: Gillian Ayres, by then twenty-seven, and the twenty-three-year-old Ralph Rumney.

  The latter was one of those people who contrive to inhabit the avant-garde, conceive and transmit novel ideas, but never produce a great deal of art that lasts. At twenty-one he had already set up the London Psychogeographical Association and a weekly review, Other Voices, hailed by Barry Miles as the forerunner of the underground press of the 1960s. Rumney was also the only British founding member of the Situationist International movement, an incendiary blend of anti-authoritarianism, Marxism, Surrealism and Dadaism (all the most radical ‘isms’ in one brew). He attended the inaugural Situationist meeting in Italy in the summer of 1956, along with the leader of the movement, Guy Debord.

  A little later Rumney arranged a memorable screening at the ICA of Debord’s film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (‘Howls for Sade’, 1952), which contained – unusually for a work of cinema – no visual images at all, only dialogue and lengthy periods of silence during which the screen was blank. The protests of the audience after the first performance were so loud that they were heard by those queuing up outside for the second showing. All in all, in 1956, Rumney must have seemed a figure to watch. He had certainly caught the eye of Nan Kivell, who had put him under contract to the Redfern Gallery. Once a week Nan Kive
ll sent his Bentley and chauffeur to collect the young artist from his squalid lodgings in Covent Garden, lit only by gas, and take him to the gallery to receive his cheque.

  *

  Rex de Charembac Nan Kivell, a New Zealander born in 1898, had been running the Redfern for many years, during which time he had been a staunch supporter of Modernist art. Though rich and successful, with a mansion in Morocco as well as a London residence, and eventually knighted, he was not quite part of the establishment (a term which, by the way, had just become current, following an article on the subject by Henry Fairlie in the Spectator of 23 September 1955). Nan Kivell has been described as ‘an archetypal outsider – illegitimate, homosexual, self-educated and antipodean’, and he had an affinity for mavericks.

  The impeccably dissident Rumney was just one protégé of Nan Kivell’s. Denny was also an awkwardly nonconformist character. From a rather grand background – his father was a baronet and clergyman, the Revd Sir Henry Lyttelton Lyster Denny, 7th Bt – he had spent much of his National Service in prison, having declared himself a conscientious objector. His first mention in the press, three breathless paragraphs in the Glasgow Evening Citizen of 17 April 1957, noted that Denny worked ‘always to the sound of “pop” music’:

  As he kneels or crawls round his huge, brightly coloured canvases, laid flat on the floor in his studio, a radiogram blares out rock-and-roll records. The words ‘go, go, go’ much used by skiffle addicts are scrawled over one design.