Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  As the spectators moved around the space, new works – or parts of works – came into view. Roger Coleman, the young critic who wrote the catalogue essays, expounded the theory of a ‘game environment’ through which the viewer could plot his or her own path: ‘“Place” can be looked at, through, over, between, in or out.’ Every path through the labyrinth resulted in a different experience. And the whole show added up to make one environment, what came to be called an installation. It was an intriguing conception, but the veteran critic Eric Newton, writing in the Observer, did not enjoy this game. He greeted ‘Place’ as ‘the silliest exhibition I have ever seen in my life’. Nonetheless, it troubled him. ‘To ignore it would be unforgivable,’ Newton conceded, but ‘to praise it would be impossible.’

  Even leaving aside the challenging presentation, ‘Place’ was disconcerting viewing for anyone with conventional expectations of what painting could do. For one thing, the works in it were all ‘hard-edge’ abstractions. This was a term that, though he had not exactly invented it, Lawrence Alloway had picked up from a passing reference in an American catalogue, refined and then publicized with brilliance. These were paintings made up of flat forms with hard, sharp contours. There was no illusion, no fictional space. The edge was a ‘clear hinge, unsoftened by atmosphere, unbroken by overlapping’. A hard-edge painting with a round form in the middle was not a picture of a disc: it was a big, unified sight that confronted you, an object in itself.

  Hard-edge painting aimed to do away with the distinction between figure and field, subject and background; and the young Denny and his friends were not the only ones to promote it. For example, 15 – 1959 (Red Saturation) (1959) by Alloway’s close friend William Turnbull has a form at its centre, a round area of slightly deeper red. But are we looking at a circle or a sphere – the red planet, for example – or a disc-shaped void in a crimson surface? The relationships flicker in the manner of the duck/rabbit illusion. Now you see a hole, now a sphere.

  This was not an image, but a thing: a flat, coloured, abstract sculpture made with paint. Indeed, earlier in his career, Turnbull had been known as a sculptor; in 1952 Herbert Read had included him in an exhibition at the Venice Biennale called ‘New Aspects of British Sculpture’. In 1958 and 1959, Turnbull produced a series of hard-edge paintings, often simply numbered and dated rather than titled. He was cutting painting down to a minimum. Less of everything – except scale – was more; accordingly, he used only two colours, or even just one, per picture. No. 1 1959 (1959) is almost six feet square, and all the same mustard yellow, with variety and interest provided by the brushstrokes. It was like a very big Van Gogh with no discernible subject: Sunflowers without the sunflowers.

  WILLIAM TURNBULL 15 – 1959 (Red Saturation), 1959

  As an ideal, however, flatness was as difficult to achieve as most of the other objectives painters set for themselves. Even Turnbull’s Red Saturation, whether you see it as a red planet or a void in an orange plane, has a little bit of space in it. The darker red either recedes or bulges out; and the edges are slightly hazy, suggesting the tiniest hint of atmosphere. Predictably, American painters were ahead in the race to be flattest. Some, such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, made paintings that were remarkably lacking in any suggestion of depth. The British found it harder to expel the last hint of Turnerian haze: there is even a shimmer of it in the all-yellow No. 1 1959.

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  Hard-edge painting was perhaps too austerely – or, for its detractors, aridly – lacking in content to reach a mass audience. It was, though, in tune with the mood of the times in one way: modern art, instead of being a joke or an outrage, was beginning to become a hot ticket – what Robyn Denny had described as ‘future-orientated’.

  A sign of this came that same year, in 1959, when Denny was asked by the men’s outfitters Austin Reed to create a mural for the lower-ground floor of their flagship shop at 113 Regent Street in London. A middle-of-the-road – not to say staid – retailer, Austin Reed had become alarmed by a new type of competition: clothes for men that were hip, flamboyant, in a (new) word, trendy. Shops selling this unheard-of novelty were advancing towards Regent Street with alarming rapidity. In 1957, John Stephen, son of a Glaswegian shopkeeper and in the vanguard of this army, opened a branch of His Clothes, the ultra-fashionable boutique he ran, on a previously quiet backwater of western Soho, Carnaby Street. A visitor described it as full of ‘fantastic daring colours [in] loads of different styles and fabrics’. Despite the Menswear Association’s condemnation of Stephen for selling the ‘codswallop fashions of perverted peacocks’, by 1967 he had ten shops on Carnaby Street alone, and the address was world famous as shorthand for ‘swinging London’.

  Searching for a response, Austin Reed commissioned a firm of architects – Westwood, Sons & Partners – to brighten up and modernize its image. The architects thought of Denny, perhaps because he had already designed a mosaic mural, consisting of a jumble of letters and numbers, for a nursery school in South London. The artist’s brief was to produce a work ‘adopting the signs of metropolitan novelty’. Denny began with a cubist collage with a distinctly abstract look, incorporating a few broken phrases – as Picasso and Braque had done – but turning it into something far more brash and direct: a bold word-soup of positives and superlatives, jostling with each other and painted in the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. The mural’s title was Great Big Biggest Wide London. When a pop group from Liverpool hit town a few years later, one of their first photo-shoots was in Austin Reed, in front of Denny’s mural. The Beatles look entirely in context there.

  The Beatles in front of Robyn Denny's Austin Reed mural, 1963

  Clothes were increasingly part of the way artists, and even critics, promoted an image. Alloway and Coleman favoured smart imported American suits in futuristic Dacron (polyethylene terephthalate). Turnbull had returned from a trip to New York – where he had met Newman, Rothko and others – with an electric-blue gangster suit. Gordon House, a graphic designer and painter of the hard-edge school, favoured the ‘Madison Avenue’ look from Cecil Gee; while Denny himself went in for preppy cool.

  Hand-in-hand with this forward-looking attitude in painting went the desire to work on a large scale. Great, big, bigger canvases were the common factor in an artist-run show that opened in the early autumn of 1960. ‘Situation: An Exhibition of British Abstract Painting’, at least in the minds of the artists involved, stood for ‘the situation in London now’. Their predicament was that they were producing these huge pictures – but no one was exhibiting them, let alone buying them. Accordingly, in the words of William Turnbull, one of the prime movers, they took ‘their destiny into their own hands’ and organized their own show.

  The galleries of the Royal Society of British Artists on Suffolk Street were available in September that year, so they booked them, formed a committee and organized the exhibition. The main criterion for including a work was that it should be abstract and ‘not less than 30 feet square’: that is five feet by five feet, rather large for most walls in private houses and thus, from the art market’s point of view, a tricky proposition.

  It was, in its way, revolutionary. Denny, who was the Secretary of the committee, hoped it would enable artists to be ‘independent of all the normal channels for exhibiting and informing’. Alloway, the Chairman, wrote in ARTnews that ‘the purpose of “Situation” is to make public what the public has not been seeing’ (among this ‘public’ he included the art critics). There were all these huge abstract pictures stacking up in studios, but kept from view by the filter of the commercial galleries. Let them be seen!

  In that respect, in the short term at least, ‘Situation’ was almost a complete flop. Over the month of the show, Denny noted, just 885 visitors came and 621 catalogues were sold. Many of those who did come probably did so on the opening night. Otherwise, the footfall was very low. Gillian Ayres remembers, ‘We rented this divine gallery, and we paid for it thinking people were going to burst in, but
they bloody didn’t! If you went in there, you were lucky if one person was walking round. We were just left with this enormous bill.’ She was still sending Denny cheques for her share several years later.

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  GILLIAN AYRES Cumuli, 1959

  If abstraction was the norm, it was a language that numerous painters were tempted to subvert by transforming it back into an image of something real. The boundary was always porous. Is that stripe in a Heron picture actually a sunset or just paint? Part of the ambiguity came from the fact that paint is inherently prone to look like something. That is part of its charm and its nature. Any brush mark put down on a surface is liable to resemble an object – a face, a tree, a cloud, a muddy excavation. This fact is the basis for, among other traditions, the kind of landscape painting practised by Turner, Constable, Claude and Poussin.

  Not only was Gillian Ayres the sole woman artist included in ‘Situation’, she was also the closest to being a painter whose abstractions seemed actually to represent something (although it is an intriguing and insoluble conundrum whether they do or not). In 1959 and 1960, Ayres produced a sequence of paintings varying in size between large and gigantic, whose titles – Cumuli, Cwm Bran, Cwm, Unstill Centre, Muster, Nimbus – refer to geological features and atmospheric phenomena. At the time, she and her husband, Henry Mundy, would often travel – when they were not going to Paris to look hard at paintings – to go walking in the mountains of Wales.

  In retrospect Ayres admits that a certain feeling – of being high in Snowdonia, looking down at the landscape beneath or the sky above – might have ‘got into’ particular works. Yet, despite their titles, she feels those pictures ‘weren’t landscapes in a way’. They were purely abstract and, to an extent, the effects in them were random.

  HOWARD HODGKIN Memoirs, 1949

  I used to say they painted themselves, I would throw turps over the whole bloody thing, go and have coffee, and who knew what it might do. It was quite mad. There were these sorts of runs it used to make … In those days that one was on top of mountains, I was probably quite full of these things inside, but it was never a literal thing. It was almost like – if the mist does that, then probably if you chucked turps over the whole bloody lot why can’t the turps do it too? It went together. In a mad sort of way I saw nature like paint. And so probably did Turner.

  During the early 1960s Ayres taught part-time at the Bath School of Art and Design, based at Corsham Court in Wiltshire. Among a number of other notable painters assembled to teach at Corsham by Clifford Ellis, the principal, was Howard Hodgkin. Ayres was living in Barnes at the time, while Hodgkin and his wife had a house at Addison Gardens in Kensington. Often, Ayres and Hodgkin would drive down to Wiltshire and back – a journey that took two or three hours – talking about painting all the way.

  The pair had known each other since art school. Ayres remembers the young Hodgkin at Camberwell in 1948, ‘walking around wearing short trousers, looking’ (the shorts were probably a hangover from his time at Bryanston School, where short trousers were worn into the sixth form). Hodgkin described the experience of being at art school as ‘like being squeezed out of the wrong end of a tube of toothpaste’. But it was there in 1949, at the age of seventeen, that he painted Memoirs – a little picture representing a man and a woman in a room. He sits on a chair, his head turned to her; she is lying on a sofa with her head, so to speak, out of shot. Her hands, conversely, are greatly enlarged. It is an indoor setting, though not one depicted naturalistically: a precocious anticipation of a kind of picture that was to occupy Hodgkin for much of his career, an ‘emotional situation’ in an interior, tense with elusive undercurrents, situated in a border-territory between abstraction and representation. One day, William Coldstream asked the teenaged, and perhaps still short-trousered, Hodgkin why he had painted Memoirs. Hodgkin answered that he didn’t know – a perfect answer if, like Auerbach, Bacon, Kossoff and many other artists, you believe that to do something good you must go beyond your conscious knowledge.

  Howard Hodgkin, c. 1965

  Hodgkin and Ayres are not often grouped together, art historically. But they occupy positions that are quite close – each just to one side of the invisible frontier between abstraction and representation. Ayres did not consciously imitate a real sight, but was willing to allow chance and the paint itself to create rhymes and metaphors for things – a mountainous landscape, for example. To Hodgkin, on the other hand, a subject – a real sight, or more often how he felt about people or places – was crucial. He always began with ‘a very firm – or very exact – visual memory’. But in the process of the painting’s evolution, sometimes extremely prolonged, this memory was metamorphosed into something quite different: circles, rectangles and triangles, swirls and brushstrokes that – at first or even second glance – might look completely or partly ‘abstract’.

  In 1960, Howard Hodgkin portrayed Robyn Denny and his wife Anna in an idiosyncratic portrait. Denny wears a vertically striped jacket, horizontally striped tie, his face is yellow, his glasses red. He and Anna appear against a field of curving blue and white shapes: a hard-edge couple in a hard-edge world. This looks like an in-joke: a playful depiction of an artist in terms of his own work, in which Denny’s militantly abstract idiom is transformed into a quirky kind of portraiture. Even so, Hodgkin observed that it was also ‘a good likeness’.

  Mr and Mrs Robyn Denny (1960) is one of the first mature paintings Hodgkin painted. He was twenty-seven in 1960, but – like Francis Bacon – a late developer, belonging to no movement or group: ‘I felt a complete outsider everywhere, someone who did not really much exist. I was a total non-joiner. I didn’t know where I could possibly join.’ It took him a long time to find a personal style. No works at all survive from several years in the mid-1950s. He continued to feel like an outsider, and be treated like one: ‘The 60s was when somebody pointed out to me that I appeared in a book on Pop art. I looked up my name, and it said “he wasn’t one”. Everything was very slow.’ Yet that did not prevent him from being one of the more distinctive and memorable painters of the decade.

  HOWARD HODGKIN Mr and Mrs Robyn Denny, 1960

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  It was a strange irony that the close alliance between Alloway and his carefully assembled team of hard-edge painters was finally shattered partly at least because of a portrait – and a much more naturalistic one than any by Hodgkin – painted by Alloway’s wife, Sylvia Sleigh.

  Although few went to ‘Situation’, there was a reprise of the show – with changes and additions – the following year, at the smart Marlborough New London Gallery, an off-shoot of the main gallery intended to showcase the cutting-edge art that was now appearing, unexpectedly, in this previously staid city. For the catalogue of the second ‘Situation’ exhibition, it was proposed there should be a frontispiece: a group portrait of the artists by Sleigh, a figurative painter who – though she was already in her mid-forties – had not gained much attention up to that point. The picture depicted Alloway’s ‘team’ as it was in March 1961, or at any rate most of the principal players: Mundy and Ayres are at the left, Denny, wearing glasses, centre right, Alloway himself is in the bottom right-hand corner.

  Several of the painters were extremely unhappy about this picture – so far from abstract, instead rather quirky and almost naive in style – being at the front of their resolutely hard-edged, contemporary catalogue, with its own hard-edge typography and design by Gordon House (front centre in Sleigh’s painting, next to Alloway). Henry Mundy described what happened next:

  People were a little bit scared of Alloway, because he was so powerful. But at some time or other several painters got together and said they didn’t want it. I had heard they were going to come out with it, and was very pleased about that. It was a terrible painting.

  Ayres concurs with this verdict, although she adds that the head of Alloway in the portrait is ‘a bit less bad’, Sleigh having spent more time on it. They had a point, since the painting is spatiall
y incoherent – all the figures obviously studied separately and stuck awkwardly together. According to Ayres, Sleigh herself reacted by saying ‘that all the men were being beastly because they were men’. She too had a point, since the ‘Situation’ team, whatever else they were, were unquestionably overwhelmingly male. Looking back, Ayres feels that it was outrageous that she was the only woman among a long roster of male painters – that Tess Jaray, for example, a prominent hard-edge painter, wasn’t included too.

  SYLVIA SLEIGH The Situation Group, 1961

  Alloway later argued that it was the idea of being swept up willy-nilly into a team of ‘Alloway’s boys’ that caused the trouble: ‘They felt I was taking over their art. I lost all my friends in one go.’ The artists were so negative that Alloway refused to write the catalogue essay, and withdrew from the group completely.

  He and Sleigh moved to the United States, where he became a curator at the Guggenheim and she became a prominent and successful figure in the women’s art movement of the following decade, her painting gaining confidence and brio from the change in continent. Her portrait was a portent of things to come. Abstraction remained an important idiom, but content – sexual politics, sex without politics, politics without sex, humour, individual identity – was about to flood back into art (if, indeed, it had ever really gone away).

  Chapter twelve

  THE ARTIST THINKS: HOCKNEY AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES