Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  Although Andrews made studies – including a delicate pencil drawing of Bruce Bernard – much of the picture seems to have been done, as Paul Gauguin used to say, de tête, out of his head, from memories. That explains some of the anomalies of the completed image: the way, for example, in the finished version Bruce’s face seems to grow out of the back of Henrietta Moraes’s head. The painting conveys how it feels to be part of a crowd in a club; jostled, slightly drunk, exhilarated.

  For a while, social occasions – the energy, the interaction of egos, of what Bruce Bernard called the ‘Soho merry- and sorry-go-round’ – became Andrews’s subject in a series of ‘party’ paintings of which Colony Room I was the first. This social interaction is the true subject of the Colony Room picture and of the large paintings that followed: The Deer Park (1962), All Night Long (1963–64) and Good and Bad at Games (1964–68). In the last of these, realism is vanishing and the figures, portraits of friends, seem to dangle in the air like more or less inflated balloons. The effect recalls a phrase Andrews discovered in a book by Alan Watts on Zen Buddhism, the ‘skin-encapsulated ego’.

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  Few painters find it easy to complete a picture, but Andrews found it more than usually difficult. Frank Auerbach commented that his paintings ‘were very ambitious, but appeared very rarely, one or two a year’. His second exhibition was scheduled to be held at the Beaux Arts Gallery early in 1963, just before the photograph at Wheeler’s was taken. The Colony Room picture was one of the works intended for inclusion. The problem, as John Lessore remembers, was that ‘Mike was so neurotic that he couldn’t finish anything’. With the exhibition due to open within weeks, Helen Lessore issued an ultimatum. The gallery would shut for two weeks over Christmas, and during that time she proposed Andrews would paint every day in the gallery and get everything ready. She offered to provide ‘coffee and sandwiches and anything else you need’.

  So for two weeks Andrews painted – while John Lessore watched:

  There were no distractions of any kind apart from me, and I wasn’t really a distraction. It was phenomenal. He could paint quite complicated things from memory, the tone and the colour absolutely beautiful. Then he’d think, ‘Oh, I don’t know’, scrape it off and do another version. Then he’d scrape that off, go back to the first version, repaint it again. He knew it all by heart.

  In January 1963, reviewing the exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery, Andrew Forge mused that Andrews seemed to be trying to achieve ‘a neutral style, a language without overtones’. His motive, Forge thought, was ‘to evade style, to make what is represented doubly real by removing all tension and all mystery from how it is represented’. In 1960, Andrews had used a phrase that perfectly summed up what he was seeking to achieve: ‘mysterious conventionality’.

  His technique as a painter owed a good deal to William Coldstream, by whom he had been taught at the Slade. But the point of Andrews’s pictures was not so much to record just what he was seeing and where it was located – like Coldstream did – as to capture what it felt like, physically, psychologically, viscerally. In that, he was far closer to Bacon, Kossoff, Auerbach and Freud. He wanted to paint the world around him as it looked, but also something more – deeper than that – something that he called ‘the nature of being’. ‘Art is a revelation of life’, he insisted, ‘as it really and truly is.’ Not only was he ‘mysteriously conventional’ but he was also something approaching a mystical realist.

  In Andrews’s portrait of Tim Behrens, the subject steps into a room in the manner of a messenger, handsome and melancholy. As was often the case, Andrews spent a long time agonizing over how to achieve a sense of harmony in his pictures. Originally, John Lessore remembers, it had ‘this green lawn outside and he could not make it work. Then one day it snowed and he painted it white. It was wonderful.’ Andrews combined the reticent impersonality of Coldstream’s painting – the subtle, beautiful touch – with Bacon’s insight that painting should be about matters of vital importance: life, death, tragedy. But, of course, Andrews understood that such matters are subjective; ‘truth’ was a question of ‘what ones sees’ filtered by ‘one’s interpretation’ of that sight.

  MICHAEL ANDREWS Portrait of Timothy Behrens, 1962

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  The Colony Room was not the only forum in which talented and diverse figurative artists could co-exist. At the Slade School, William Coldstream, the principal, was a gifted administrator and talent-scout. John Wonnacott, himself a student there, remembers:

  Bill knew who all the best painters were. He got Auerbach, he got Uglow, he got Mike Andrews, anyone who was any damn good, to run a room. They’d come in over a period of, say, a month, virtually as many days a week as they wanted.

  The result was that many ways of picture-making were to be seen, side by side, in the corridors off Gower Street. Some students, like Wonnacott, were attempting to be like Van Gogh or Cézanne, others were doing pastiches of Franz Kline or de Kooning. In one life room, for a month, you might have Auerbach being enthusiastic, in another Andrews being tentative. Daphne Todd, another Slade student in the mid-1960s, thought Auerbach’s life room ‘probably the most high-powered’, but she also found it ‘a fearsome place … it was very dark and there was paint all over the walls and piles on the floor underneath everybody’s easels. Nobody spoke, and they grunted while they painted. It was very intense. There was no colour.’

  Todd was more affected by Euan Uglow, not so much because of what she learnt from his formal teaching, but by being turned into a work of art, in other words posing for a painting. The picture in question, Nude, 12 vertical positions from the eye (1967) is, you might say, the opposite of a Jackson Pollock: a masterpiece of inaction painting. In order to keep Daphne’s head and body in precisely the correct position, always crucial to Uglow’s pictures, he placed her neck between two pegs, and suspended a plumb line in front of her.

  In addition, for the picture of Todd, he constructed what was essentially a purpose-built viewing structure with steps at six-inch intervals, corresponding to lines marked on the wall behind the model. In this way he could map the naked body of the young woman in a fashion never before attempted. Todd herself stood on a large box. Uglow later described the procedure in detail:

  I climbed up and down, my eyes focused successively on the nearest part of her body and the nearest division on the board. These distances are indicated by a sort of code based on the dull yellow bands: the broader the band behind her, the further that part of her body projects from the board. In order to make the various distances between body and board still clearer I introduced arrow shapes, and to enhance the two-dimensional form I used the plumb line to enable me to view the body from two slightly different angles.

  For her part, Todd found this arrangement uncomfortable, but not as excruciating as his first idea:

  He originally tried me out in a pose bent double with my arms running down my legs. Of course within five minutes my legs were completely dead. It was horrible: really, really painful. Looking at some of his pictures it’s hard to understand how anyone could have posed for them. At least I was just standing upright, with my weight on one leg admittedly. The painting took a year and a half. We did eight painting hours a week.

  Despite the discomforts of the process, however, Todd feels she learnt more from posing for Uglow ‘than from anything at the Slade’. Uglow, as many of his students would testify, was an inspiring teacher.

  The objective of Uglow’s extraordinary procedure was to eliminate the distortions caused by viewing the subject from a single fixed position. Not all painters would find this as much of an issue as Uglow did, nor begin to contemplate such a tortuously complicated solution. The quandary was generated by Coldstream’s method of attempting a precise measurement of the position of each item he was painting. For him – and for Uglow, who had been his pupil – the model represented a problem that, Coldstream resignedly noted, ‘is infinitely wide’. Strictly speaking, what both men were attempting was
geometrically impossible. By measuring a three-dimensional scene at arm’s length, the painter was effectively surveying a concave, curved arc of space. Once, while painting a reclining nude, Coldstream became agitated, explaining to his model, ‘I’ve lost some inches somewhere and I will have to dock you together like a spaceship.’

  Uglow took these anomalies much more seriously than Coldstream did, scrutinizing what was in front of him with the ingenuity of an amateur scientist. His home studio in Clapham was filled with set-ups for paintings, invariably with a plumb line dangling from above, as with the Daphne Todd picture, so that he could get his eye ‘in the right place’. By which he meant precisely the same place every time. He would then make observations using an instrument of his own devising, which had begun life as a music stand. With this contraption resting against his cheek, and one eye closed, he could take sightings of relative measurements of the model’s anatomy – or perhaps a still life of a pear or peach – with the precision of a sailor with a sextant.

  EUAN UGLOW Nude, 12 vertical positions from the eye, 1967

  Obsessively accurate though the measurements were, the final image was anything but naturalistic. As a result of Uglow’s struggle to transcribe exactly what he perceived when he looked at Todd, she grew from her actual height of five feet nine inches to an elongated giantess of seven feet in the painting. But, curiously, realism was not the point.

  In some ways, what Uglow was doing was far from naturalistic, as he explained: ‘If the pictures are not abstract, they’re no good at all; they’ve got to have that basis, not of abstraction as in “abstract art”, but of a thing living in itself. ’ Achieving this was like solving a complex equation. Uglow’s painting had to be based on direct experience. For example, he would not use photography as a starting point, because he loved ‘the poignancy of the right light at the right time hitting a bit of colour’. The colours had to ‘ring’. On the other hand, the jazzy striping caused by Uglow’s code for representing his measurements of Todd’s naked body, unconsciously or not, gave the completed painting a strong period look: a spiky, hard-edged abstraction seems to be encroaching on the figure.

  There was a strong element of Piero della Francesca in Uglow’s artistic make-up, and a considerable amount of Euclid too. His works were based on geometry in a more rigorous fashion than any by Mondrian – or Robyn Denny. He began with the proportions of the canvas, which he preferred to be either a perfect square or a ‘golden rectangle’ – that is, one where the sides are related according to the golden ratio, 1.618. Alternatively, he liked rectangles proportioned according to the square roots of numbers. His nudes were thus attempts to cram the subtle complexities of human flesh into a mathematical theorem, while also mapping their convolutions with the utmost precision. Psychology didn’t really come into it, except that Uglow’s own mentality – like that of most outstanding artists – was highly unusual.

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  As well as professional and social groupings, the painters of London were bound together, by friendships that did not necessarily follow stylistic lines: Uglow was close to his fellow ‘Euston Road’ disciple, Patrick George, but also to Kossoff; Auerbach was seeing Bacon on a weekly basis and had also developed a deep bond with Freud. On first sight, Auerbach’s paintings had struck Freud as ‘the most appalling, threatening kind of mess’. In time, though, he grew into a fervent admirer. ‘I just love Frank!’ he once exclaimed, and he wrote of the other painter’s work as ‘brimming with information conveyed with an underlying delicacy and humour’, all qualities that he himself rated extremely highly.

  Auerbach and Freud remained friends for over fifty years, a relationship that lasted longer than Freud’s with Bacon or Auerbach’s close collaboration with Kossoff. Indeed, it was a close bond between two great painters almost without parallel in art history, an alliance founded on mutual respect and admiration for each other’s work. It endured for long periods in which neither artist was in fashion nor, consequently, had much money. This did not prevent Freud from behaving generously and gracefully, observing his own, idiosyncratic moral code, as Auerbach describes:

  I was really poor for a considerable time. I didn’t think about it much, but I was not in any sense prominent. Lucian was very kind to me, and would give me something that I thought was enormously luxurious at Christmas like a bottle of Rémy Martin. He was often not well off himself, and there was no call for it. As far as I was concerned, although it sounds soppy, Lucian performed innumerable acts of kindness.

  Auerbach’s lover Stella West moved to Brentford in 1961 and he would regularly take the train there to visit her; occasionally Freud would come too. She remembered those evenings: ‘We had the Saturday Night Nosh. I used to put the joint in the oven, turn it low, and then model for him [Auerbach] for a couple of hours, by which time the joint was done; sometimes my kids would bring their boyfriends; we had this big table in the room, Frank would sit at one end and I at the other, and it was wonderful.’

  In the early 1960s, Auerbach twice painted Stella standing in the garden at Brentford, with two of her children, one daughter holding a guinea pig, the other a cat (among the rare occasions when he painted people partly from photographs). One of the versions of the picture hung in Freud’s hall until the day he died. It is a picture that contains the most compelling sense imaginable of a person: her weight, presence, mass, gaze and personality summoned up in front of you in a way that is almost eerie.

  Several of the so-called ‘School of London’ painters also had in common an affection for certain places: not just the metropolis itself, but – often – particular districts within it. In 1954, Auerbach had taken over from Leon Kossoff a small studio situated in North London between Mornington Crescent and Regent’s Park. It was not a luxurious place: ‘it had no indoor loo, no hot water, it was just a nineteenth-century box’. But it was an austere brick cube with a certain pedigree. Before Kossoff, Gustav Metzger had worked there, and – with an interval of occupation by a ‘slightly dodgy actor’ – the painter Frances Hodgkins before that.

  In the early twentieth century Walter Sickert and his circle, the ‘Camden Town Group’, had given the area a place in the history of painting. By the mid-1960s Auerbach had already been painting there for a decade, and had established routines and patterns of work to which, another half-century later, he still adheres. His pictures fall into two categories. Firstly, there are pictures of people done in the studio from a small circle of models, who are friends and intimates as well. Then there are landscapes, also executed in the studio but on the basis of drawings made on walks around this neighbourhood, which Auerbach knows so intimately well. This process of walking and drawing is a means of importing new impressions – a daily set of data – back to the easel. It is a way of getting himself started, and also a fresh starting point:

  I quite often feel washed up and stymied in the morning, because I wonder what to do. Then I go out, and do drawings and it feels quite different because you get this marvellous, refreshing rush of perception. And when you take the drawing in, you remember what sensations the picture’s about. To work without that kind of input seems to me altogether too separated and scholarly to be interesting. One wants some kind of quotidian life in the painting.

  FRANK AUERBACH E.O.W., S.A.W. and J.J.W. in the Garden I, 1963

  FRANK AUERBACH Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s Father-in-Law III, Summer Morning, 1966

  The places Auerbach has painted in this way are naturally all within walking distance – some very close, others, such as Primrose Hill, a little further away. The subject of a series of pictures from between 1965 and 1967 was the road junction outside Mornington Crescent Underground station where three roads join: Camden High Street, Crowndale Road and Mornington Crescent itself. This is not exactly subtopia – it is a bit too close to the centre – but certainly an urban jumble typical of London.

  The critic Robert Hughes listed the sights and smells that assailed him on exiting the Tube st
ation en route to visit Auerbach: ‘gooseneck streetlights, traffic signals and metal v-barriers laid over a background of fish-and-chip shops and off-track betting shops amid the roar and stink of traffic’. Behind, and beneath, all this confusion and clutter are some older structures including a music hall, the Underground station itself, an ex-cigarette factory and a statue of the nineteenth-century politician Richard Cobden. Auerbach likes to mention the last of these, where relevant, in his titles, as ‘Sickert’s father-in-law’ – a random artistic link to the past.

  From all this sensory and architectural chaos, Auerbach managed to distil a series of paintings as ordered in their way as any by Mondrian. Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s Father-in-Law III, Summer Morning (1966) is scarcely naturalistic, though it is based on daily observation. Sky, road and pavement alike are ochre. Much of the image consists of lines – vehement brushstrokes – in red, blue and black, which pulse with rhythm. But the painting is also packed with preserved experience: feel of the sunshine, the hot London air. It is not necessary to go to a lot of different places to paint many landscapes. Paul Cézanne and John Constable extracted large numbers of masterpieces from a small acreage. Auerbach has done the same. After all, Camden Town is no worse a place than any other in which to examine the world. The same could be said of Willesden, a little further north and the haunt of Auerbach’s friend Leon Kossoff.