Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  The illusion of the art centre tends to drift from one place to another. Back in the ’60s I thought that London was where it was going to settle.

  Robert Rauschenberg, 1997

  Changes in the Zeitgeist tend to take place gradually. This certainly applies to the slow brightening of British life over the years that followed 1945, as we have seen. It was in part a literal alteration in clothes and interior decoration, in which greys and browns were replaced by ever-stronger reds, greens, yellows and blues. But it was also a shift in mental attitude. By the end of the 1950s, young people in their early twenties could barely remember the war. To them, it seemed natural that life should become better and better, fuller and fuller of opportunity. They had grown up in a Britain that was becoming steadily more prosperous. In 1957, the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan observed, with some justice, that most of the population had ‘never had it so good’. Enough clearly agreed to re-elect him in 1959.

  Although such shifts happen incrementally, over time, there is often a moment when they suddenly become obvious. One such episode took place in the Royal College of Art life-drawing studio one afternoon, suitably enough, exactly as a new decade was dawning. In September 1959, a fresh batch of students had arrived in the RCA’s painting school, among them Frank Bowling, Derek Boshier, R. B. Kitaj, Peter Phillips, Allen Jones and David Hockney. These would become, over the course of the 1960s, ‘artists who dominated the decade in British art’, to quote Allen Jones. However, that was not how their teachers saw it. According to Hockney, the staff thought this particular intake of students was the ‘worst they’d had for many, many years’.

  That afternoon, Jones was working in the life-painting studio ‘investigating Fauvism’, as he saw it. This was not, on the face of it, a revolutionary thing to do – the Fauves had caused consternation in Paris over half a century before with their vivid, non-naturalistic colour. But, even in 1959, this was a long time ago, before the First World War. By and by, the teacher, Ruskin Spear, came in, looked at the painting on Jones’s easel and exclaimed, ‘What’s going on here? What’s all this bright colour? Look, this is a grey room, with a grey model, it’s a grey day, it’s a grey prospect. What is this green arm and red body?’ But to Jones and his contemporaries, the world wasn’t necessarily grey: ‘I thought he was joking, then I realized that actually he was serious about this, and I was appalled. He just said, “Decoration!” and went off to berate somebody else.’

  Jones’s painting The Artist Thinks of 1960 is organized around a crashing colour chord of red and green. The self-portrait at the base of the composition is assembled from stripes and swirls, mainly in blue and grey. Jones borrowed the ‘thought bubble’ convention from cartoons, using it to suggest the thoughts within his head, which seem to consist not only of clouds of colour, but also – as is hinted at by the green breast-like mounds – of sex.

  Clearly Jones, and several of his contemporaries, were also thinking hard, and with great self-confidence, about what art could be. This was not something that more senior members of the Royal College of Art necessarily did, at least not in the deep and intellectually ambitious fashion of some of their students. Malcolm Morley, who attended the RCA from 1954 to 1957, recalls that although he loved the painters – such as Ruskin Spear and Carel Weight – who were teaching there, describing them as ‘terrific painters’, ‘the Royal College of Art was a dreadful place in terms of education. You didn’t learn a damned thing. What you learned was how to hold your drinks with the teachers.’ It was not until Morley moved to New York in 1958 (and thus out of the terms of reference of this book) that he encountered ‘really philosophical thinking’ about art, having arrived in America ‘without ever hearing who Marcel Duchamp was’. Other students at the RCA noted the same failure to treat painting as a subject for hard thought. Frank Auerbach recalls that Robert Buhler, ‘who was in a sense a really bad painter’, once ‘more or less suggested that Monet and Van Gogh were all simple souls sloshing away, and a few of them had something in their genes that made their work grand or remarkable’.

  ALLEN JONES The Artist Thinks, 1960

  RODRIGO MOYNIHAN Portrait Group, 1951

  The senior instructors at the RCA had not changed much since Rodrigo Moynihan had painted them in Portrait Group (1951), a gloomy depiction of the painting school staff that was his submission for ‘60 Paintings for ’51’, though it did not win any prizes. Moynihan painted the despondent figure of John Minton seated on the left, with Carel Weight – bespectacled and teddy-bear-like – standing contemplating him. The others in the picture included Robert Buhler, Colin Hayes and, on the right, Ruskin Spear, bearded and seated with his legs stretched out on a chaise longue.

  Moynihan’s group portrait is a distinguished work in its way, perfectly capturing the drabness of postwar London. Moynihan himself was far from being an unthoughtful or unadventurous artist and by 1959 he had turned back to abstraction. But the contrast between this picture and Jones’s The Artist Thinks – chromatically, emotionally, conceptually, historically – is total.

  Allen Jones in his studio, London, c. 1965. The painting in the background is Man Woman, now in the Tate collection.

  Unlike Moynihan, the new crop of painters at the Royal College took abstraction as their starting point. This was one of the things that infuriated both Spear and Weight, who was head of the painting school, and who summoned all the students together and underlined that in the first year they didn’t expect anyone to be experimenting. That was reserved for later on. Weight told Frank Bowling that if he painted abstracts, he would be thrown out. But abstraction, Allen Jones remembers, ‘was the thing you cut your teeth on, you had to deal with it. I still come out of Abstract Expressionism really but I misuse it for figurative ends. I’ve never been able to dump the figure.’ This attitude was doubly irreverent, thumbing its nose equally at the standard methods of figurative painting and the avant-garde approach of Pollock, Rothko and Newman. Bowling describes his contemporaries as all ‘making jokes about abstraction’. Sometimes this group of younger painters at the RCA is termed the second generation of British Pop artists, though few accepted the ‘Pop’ label happily or for long. But they were willing to bring to the epic solemnities of Abstract Expressionism their own mix of humour, sex and humanity, ingredients that The Artist Thinks contains in abundance.

  *

  In 1960, opportunities seemed to be opening up for more and more sections of the population, and while social barriers of class, gender and race still existed, they were beginning to weaken or be broken down. In the coming decade, creative people – artists, designers, photographers – came to be seen as a class in themselves, a group defined not by their origins, but by talent and energy.

  At the Royal College, Derek Boshier’s circle, for example, was full of such individuals: David Hockney, with whom he shared a studio, the future film director Ridley Scott, who was studying graphic design, and Ossie Clark, who would become one of the leading fashion designers of the 1960s (he was briefly Hockney’s partner and the subject of one of his most celebrated portraits, Mrs and Mrs Clark and Percy, 1970–71). Another close friend of Boshier’s was Pauline Boty, who was studying stained glass, having been discouraged from applying to the painting school because she was a woman. Within a few years, however, she had given up stained glass to become one of the most innovative painters in London.

  Many of these students were from backgrounds in which art did not play a prominent part, and often they did not come from London. Boshier himself was from Portsmouth and had been intending to take up a post as a trainee butcher in a branch of Dewhurst when his art master suggested he should go to art school instead. At eight years old, in his home town of Bradford, Hockney had watched his father reconditioning old bicycles, dipping his brush into paint and putting it on; the child had loved something about the process, the feel of ‘a thick brush full of paint coating something’. He knew that there were pictures made with paint, which could be seen in museums an
d books, but he could not conceive that anyone could make such things for a living. He ‘thought they were done in the evenings, when the artists had finished painting the signs or the Christmas cards’, or whatever it was they did to earn their wage.

  Naturally enough, given the concentration of talent at the RCA in 1959, the new students were impressed by each other. Jones saw himself as ‘rather a slow learner compared with the students around me’. Their achievements, he felt, seemed to be more significant than his at the time. On the first day of the term in September that year, he had noticed one pupil in particular, partly because of his age: ‘There was this older man, a real-life American, Kitaj – when you are twenty-one or twenty-two someone who is twenty-seven seems much older – who was painting along the corridor in a little booth.’

  Ronald Brooks Kitaj – usually ‘R. B.’ for public purposes and ‘Ron’ to his friends – was much closer to being a mature artist than the rest of the new arrivals. He was also married, with a child on the way. Kitaj was brought up in Cleveland, Ohio, but was by instinct, and choice, an expatriate wanderer. As a teenager he had alternated between periods as a merchant seaman and intervals studying art at the Cooper Union institute in New York and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, with journeys to Spain in between. After being drafted into the US Army in the early 1950s (spent peacefully in France), he took advantage of the GI Bill, opting to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford, partly because he liked the idea of being an American in England, like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Henry James before him.

  His teacher at the Ruskin, Kitaj remembered fondly, was ‘a gentle Cézannist called Percy Horton, who had been a protégé of Degas, who had been a student of [Louis] Lamothe, who had been a student of [Jean-Auguste-Dominic] Ingres – all that lineage’. He also encountered the distinguished Oxford professor of art history, Edgar Wind, known for his interest in iconology – the study of the history of images – who sent him in turn to the Warburg Institute Library, where he researched quirky byways of the visual past. From the beginning, he was interested in the meanings of pictures and not just their form.

  Kitaj, Hockney remembered, was ‘a great influence stylistically on a lot of people, and certainly on me’. It was not only a matter of what he did, it was Kitaj’s attitude that impressed Hockney: his seriousness about painting. This quality made him slightly ‘formidable’. ‘He used to put up a kind of front against people as though he couldn’t tolerate fools.’ He and Hockney struck up a friendship based on the fact that, in Kitaj’s words, they were both ‘great readers’ and young socialists – with a lower case ‘s’ – by upbringing as well as inclination. Kitaj’s grandfather had routinely read the Daily Forward in Yiddish back in bleak, industrial Cleveland; Hockney’s father, Ken, had read the left-wing Daily Worker in gloomy, industrial Bradford. Kitaj felt that he and Hockney ‘were both ambitious exotics’. One was American, partly Jewish, wholly cosmopolitan, the other a Yorkshire homosexual; both were instinctively intellectual and loaded with talent.

  Initially, Hockney had been overawed by the admissions process for the RCA: ‘I naturally thought I wouldn’t have a chance, because all the London people would be better than me.’ Having been accepted, he still felt ill at ease: ‘At first I didn’t know what to do, so I spent about three weeks doing two or three very careful drawings of a skeleton. Just for something to do.’ When Kitaj saw them, he was struck by the work of this boy ‘wearing a boiler suit’:

  I thought it the most skilled, most beautiful drawing I’d ever seen; I’d been to art school in New York, and in Vienna, and had quite a lot of experience, and I’d never seen such a beautiful drawing. So I said to this kid with short black hair and big glasses, ‘I’ll give you five quid for that’, and he looked at me and thought I was a rich American, as indeed I was: I had $150 a month on the GI Bill to support my little family.

  Hockney’s skeletons, his first works at the RCA, did indeed already demonstrate the clarity and subtlety of line that made him one of the great exponents of drawing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His skills had been honed by four years spent studying drawing at Bradford School of Art. Such spectacular ability to do what artists traditionally were supposed to do protected Hockney from clashes with the college authorities. At the end of the third term, when the principal, Robin Darwin, demanded expulsions, one of those selected was Allen Jones, but the equally awkward Hockney was too brilliant a draughtsman to be given the boot. Looking back, the latter surmised: ‘Being the way they were, they thought, he can draw; if he can draw then there’s something there.’ Frank Bowling concurs: ‘If David hadn’t drawn those skeletons he’d have been sacked.’

  *

  After the first few weeks of settling in, Hockney began, like several other students – Peter Phillips for example – by painting big, loose paintings in an Abstract Expressionist idiom. He did some twenty of these in a style he summed up as ‘Alan Davie cum Jackson Pollock cum Roger Hilton’. ‘I thought, well, that’s what you’ve got to do,’ but then he ran into a dead end. He couldn’t carry on; it seemed pointless, ‘barren’. ‘I used to think, “How do you push this? It can’t go anywhere. Even Jackson Pollock’s painting is a dead end.”’

  Having reached this point, Hockney had a crucial conversation with Kitaj, who pointed out that the younger man was interested in all sorts of things – politics, vegetarianism – so why didn’t he paint those? Hockney thought: ‘It’s quite right; that’s what I’m complaining about, I’m not doing anything that’s from me.’ He needed to make pictures about something that mattered to him. And this was what he began to do, cautiously at first, because the dogma of abstraction was then so powerful that, to start off with, he dare not depict actual human figures. Ironically, the staff at the Royal College would have welcomed that, though not perhaps in the way that Hockney eventually did so.

  Hockney proceeded warily. His initial solution was to smuggle personal messages into his pictures in the form of words. A word, he felt, was like a figure, in that it was something human. When you put a word on the surface of a painting, the viewer immediately reads it and it becomes ‘not just paint’. One of the first words to appear in his work was ‘Tyger’ from William Blake’s poem of the same name (1794). Hockney’s fellow-students would come to take a look at what he was doing and say, ‘That’s ridiculous, writing on pictures, you know, it’s mad what you’re doing.’ But Hockney was thinking, ‘I feel better; you feel as if something’s coming out.’ In fact, it was he who was coming out.

  David Hockney and Derek Boshier in front of Hockney’s We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), 1962

  His paintings of the next few years became increasingly confessional, the words on them referring to his life as a young gay man – and revealing that that was what he was. The Third Love Painting (1960) contains phrases from the lavatory wall at Earl’s Court Underground station, as well as the artist’s exhortations to himself: ‘Come on David, admit it.’ Just as outrageously, the figure reappeared in his work, in pictures such as We Two Boys Together Clinging and Doll Boy, both from 1961. Rough and raw, these paintings are a gallimaufry of diverse influences – from Jean Dubuffet to Francis Bacon, Abstract Expressionism to Kitaj – yet something individual, and remarkable, was slowly emerging.

  *

  Despite his expulsion, Jones was chosen to be secretary of the 1961 edition of the annual ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibition. This initiative, ironically under the circumstances, had originally been suggested by Carel Weight in 1949. He proposed that the RBA Galleries in Suffolk Street – the venue for the ‘Situation’ exhibition – would be a good place for a regular show of work by art students. To begin with, it had been dominated by work from the Royal College, but members of other art schools infiltrated over the years.

  Peter Phillips was president of the committee; the treasurer was Patrick Procktor, a student from the Slade. Jones and Phillips were in charge of the hanging but, as Jones remembers, their first attempt at it l
ooked like a jumble:

  After we had hung the show, Peter Phillips and I looked at each other and said, ‘This just looks like Sketch Club.’ We thought, ‘Why don’t we hang all the stuff which we think is good painting on one wall?’ and faced them off against, essentially, the Slade paintings.

  They gave one wall to Kitaj, who was evidently considered the most significant artist among them. Then they hung as a group the other paintings by students from the Royal College, with the Slade pictures – all, Jones recalls, influenced by Bomberg and Auerbach – on the opposite side of the gallery. Hockney remembers the arrangement slightly differently, recalling that Procktor – with whom he became friendly – called attention to his own works and suggested they should be put in a more prominent place.

  It was clear, as soon as the exhibition was unveiled in January 1961, that something exciting was going on at the Royal College. Hockney thought ‘it was probably the first time that there’d been a student movement in painting that was uninfluenced by older artists in this country’. Lawrence Alloway, who was on the selection jury – with Anthony Caro and Frank Auerbach – wrote the catalogue essay. He defined the connection between the artists on show in a more measured manner. These artists, he argued, ‘connect their work with the city’; they incorporated such elements as commercial design and graffiti, giving their work ‘urbanity’ and ‘contemporaneity’.

  The exhibition created, as Hockney put it, ‘quite a stir’. John Wonnacott, then a student at the Slade, remembers talking to Frank Auerbach, one of his tutors, about Hockney’s recently completed series of ‘love’ paintings. ‘I said, “What on earth is this?” I’d never seen anything like it. Frank said, “Yes, they are very good.” There was a strange sensibility in them.’ Visitors began coming into the Royal College to see – and perhaps buy – the work of the students that could be seen there. Soon Hockney had a dealer, Kasmin – a brilliant and charismatic new presence on the London art scene. Allen Jones’s career also suddenly took off. He was put under contract by Arthur Tooth & Sons and Peter Cochrane of Tooth’s brought E. J. ‘Ted’ Power – one of the few wealthy collectors of contemporary art in Britain – to Jones’s studio. ‘This gruff Northerner came in, put his hand out and said, “Power’s the name”; it was a great thing to say. I wanted to reply, “Mine’s Poverty”.’ But this would not be true for long, either for Jones, or for his contemporaries.