Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  DAVID HOCKNEY Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968

  The near-photographic Hockneys were few in number. But his greatest achievements of this period – which would become milestones in British and European art – owed something, albeit only a little, to images he took with his camera. These were the sequence of double portraits he painted over the following years. Back in California in 1968, he thought he would paint two friends, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, together. This, and the other portraits of couples that followed – American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) (1968), Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969), Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970–71) and George Lawson and Wayne Sleep (1972–75) – are complex amalgams, in part highly naturalistic and in part not naturalistic at all.

  Hockney has described the way he went about painting Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. First he made numerous drawings of the two sitters, ‘to get to know their faces and what they are like’. Next he took ‘a lot of photographs of them in a room, trying to get a composition’. He arranged a little still life of books and fruit on the table in front of them. But the actual painting was not done in Isherwood and Bachardy’s house, but in a little apartment that Hockney and Peter Schlesinger had rented a few blocks away.

  The picture, then, is a complex mixture: to some extent done from life, but also based on photographs, as well as being a formal invention of the artist’s making. Reconciling these varying elements meant that these big double portraits involved Hockney in a lengthy struggle. He began to paint Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy in late spring of 1970, having made some drawings for it the year before. It wasn’t finished until February 1971, some ten months later.

  Hockney’s aim was to represent ‘the presence of two people in this room’, but to do so generated numerous technical problems. He noted that to paint tones accurately, you have to ‘look and look’ at the subject in a certain space in a specific light. This was how a painter such as Freud, Uglow or Coldstream would work, yet Hockney’s picture was not done like that at all. Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark posed frequently, but in Hockney’s studio, this time in Powis Terrace. The whole matter was further complicated by the fact that the composition was contre-jour – against the light – so that the window had to be the brightest zone, and everything else keyed in to that. Consequently, although Hockney felt this was the closest he came to ‘naturalism’ – a word he preferred to realism – in certain ways the painting wasn’t naturalistic at all, but a brilliantly realized intellectual recreation of appearances. Hockney doubted that ‘you could ever actually stand in the room and take a photograph like that, see it like that’.

  The evolution of Hockney’s work in the ten years from 1960 had been astonishing and, from the point of view of Modernist theory, utterly retrograde. As we have seen, he had begun with Abstract Expressionism, then run through a range of idioms. First he had added a personal element in the form of words, then figures, objects and landscapes. The results were steadily more naturalistic.

  In the spring of 1970 Hockney had had his first large retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. His work of the previous decade filled the entire building. The artist had helped, with Kasmin, to select the pictures for the show. In advance of the opening he felt trepidation, worrying that the earlier paintings, which he often hadn’t seen since they were made, would look terrible and the whole affair would be an embarrassment. In fact, when he saw them, he was relieved, feeling that the majority held up well enough. What struck him most, however, was how ‘protean’ his work appeared.

  In Frank Auerbach’s view, Hockney belongs – like Bacon and Freud – to a British line of artistic mavericks, ‘people who did exactly what they wanted to do, such as Hogarth, Blake, Spencer, Bomberg’. And, as Auerbach points out, what Hockney wants to do is continually changing: ‘He has never donned a uniform, just as Bomberg refused to sign the Vorticist manifesto, early on, even though he was supposed to be a sort of Vorticist.’ To this day, it is impossible to say what kind of painter Hockney is, except that he is his own sort. He has carried on breaking the rules and seeing what lies around the next corner for over half a century now.

  Chapter seventeen

  SHIMMERING AND DISSOLVING

  It was a period of hope. When the Seventies came along, it was a bit more real. The Sixties was more a dream: Kennedy, getting to the moon, all that stuff.

  Anthony Caro, 2013

  While Hockney was still at the Royal College of Art, on a showery evening in the autumn of 1961, Bridget Riley was hurrying home from her job at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in Berkeley Square when she took refuge from a rainstorm. The doorway on North Audley Street that she selected turned out to be the entrance of an art gallery, Gallery One. She peered in the window and the owner, Victor Musgrave, invited her to step inside and have a proper look round. Musgrave was a stalwart of bohemia. A poet as well as an art dealer, he preferred to dress in a corduroy suit with a pullover and no tie. He and his wife, Ida Kar, a passionately forceful woman of Russian-Armenian extraction and an outstanding photographer, had an open marriage (at one stage in the 1950s she shared one bedroom above the gallery with Musgrave’s assistant Kasmin, while he occupied another). Gallery One had presented some of the most uncompromisingly avant-garde exhibitions in postwar London. But Musgrave’s most important discovery would be Riley herself.

  She gave him ‘a very stiff review’ of the work on his gallery walls; he, in return, wanted to know what made her so sure, asking her, ‘What have you got in that bundle?’ Riley was carrying some black-and-white gouaches that couldn’t have been more different from what she had to produce for J. Walter Thompson. Advertising was of great interest to other artists of the period – Richard Smith for one – but not to her. What Musgrave saw led him to offer her an exhibition the following spring, the first show she had ever had that was entirely devoted to her own work. She had just found her true path as an artist.

  After six years as an art student, firstly at Goldsmiths’ College then the Royal College of Art, Riley had left in 1955 with no sense of direction. ‘I was at such a loss that I was quite desperate, that gave a real urgency to trying to find out what I could do, and how I could do it – whatever it was, about which I had no idea.’ She described the next two years tersely as the ‘continuation of a longer period of unhappiness’. She spent her time nursing her father after he was injured in a car accident, then suffered a serious breakdown, got a job as a shop assistant, and finally accepted the post at J. Walter Thompson. The question that tormented her constantly was what to paint:

  That is actually a very common state, one that happens to nearly all artists in the absence of a tradition. Because the tradition provided you with subject matter, and ways in which you could measure your degrees of competence – or not. It provided you with patrons. When none of that is there – which it isn’t – it makes it even more important for you to find a way through.

  Like many others she was galvanized by seeing the Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Whitechapel in 1958. It was clear, she concluded, ‘that modern art was alive and I had something to react to’. The following summer Riley went on an art course in Suffolk led by Harry Thubron, a charismatic teacher at Leeds College of Art who based his teaching on the doctrine of the Bauhaus. His emphasis on the analytic study of colour and form proved to be just what she needed.

  Riley studied the works of the Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla, who had found ways to represent movement through rhythmic lines flickering like multiple exposures on photographic film. She also set herself a task: to copy a small landscape by Georges Seurat, choosing his Bridge at Courbevoie (1886–87), which analysed a quiet stretch of the river Seine into a tessellation of coloured dots. The object of Riley’s exercise was to grasp the Pointillist master’s thought process:

  Seurat is clear. You can follow what he thinks, and what he was thinking about was how to rationalize Impressionism. One cannot find a firm foundation
in confused thinking. You need to know what you are trying to do if you are going to be at all serious and not waste your time.

  Clarity – clear thinking, logical structure – obviously appealed deeply to her. Just as important to Riley’s work as this careful analysis, however, was an emotional maelstrom. At the summer art course in Suffolk she met Maurice de Sausmarez, a colleague of Thubron’s at Leeds. He was a mature artist sixteen years her senior, originally from Australia, whose own work consisted of landscapes and still lifes that splintered into geometric facets. De Sausmarez became both her artistic mentor and her lover.

  In 1960, they went on a journey to Italy. She saw the work of Balla, Umberto Boccioni and other Futurists in Milan. In Pisa she experienced the tiger-striped medieval architecture of the Baptistery and the Duomo: Romanesque buildings throbbing with alternate bars of black and white stone. Another epiphany came in Piazza San Marco in Venice, when she watched the geometric pattern of the paving transformed by a sudden flurry of rain. She was fascinated by ‘seeing something that was whole, temporarily shattered, then whole again’.

  Outside Siena she painted the egg-shaped hills, just before a fierce storm erupted. The result, Pink Landscape (1960), is a buzzing mass of yellow, blue and pink dabs of paint like pixels or swarming insects. It was an attempt to capture the sensation of this gently undulating piece of countryside ‘under intense heat, shimmering and dissolving, all the topographical structure simply fragmenting and disappearing’. Many would find the result beautiful; for Riley, however, it was a failure. This picture ‘didn’t vibrate, it didn’t glitter, it didn’t shine and it didn’t dematerialize’.

  The year ended with another kind of tempest. Riley and de Sausmarez split up in the autumn and she felt everything had ended: not just the romance, but her new take on twentieth-century art and how she might add to it. So she decided to paint one last picture, a mourning canvas, all in black. When she had finished she looked at it and a ‘small voice’ said that this didn’t work. It didn’t express anything; there was no contrast. So in the next picture she added an area of white, suggesting a meeting – or parting – of two forms, an upper one with a gently curved lower edge, like the contour of a body, and a lower rectangle. These are very, very nearly touching, but not quite. There is an immensely thin zone of white separating the two and the attenuation of that tiny space makes the whole picture taut. Riley called it Kiss (1961). When she looked at it, the picture seemed to suggest further possibilities. So she said to herself, ‘“OK, just one more painting.” I was off.’

  BRIDGET RILEY Kiss, 1961

  BRIDGET RILEY Crest, 1964

  Slowly Riley discovered that the best way to make a picture that shimmered and dissolved was to proceed the other way round; that is, not to paint a real sight as she had with Pink Landscape, but to start with forms and rhythms on canvas that vibrated with energy:

  Gradually I got the ingredients to completely reverse the order. I found that sometimes things did shine and sparkle and dematerialize although I hadn’t set out to discover how to produce those effects. They came out of the dynamism of the visual forces that I was using.

  Consequently, her works had a tremendous physiological and psychological charge. These were equivalents in abstract terms to the most powerful of visual sensations: not a placid rustic scene, but a landscape swirling in heat, just like the hills outside Siena before the thunderstorm broke.

  *

  Riley’s exhibition at Gallery One opened in April 1962. The works were still entirely in black and white, but more complex than Kiss. In one painting, Movement in Squares (1961), a chequerboard of black-and-white squares becomes progressively thinner in one zone so that a vertical fissure seems to open up in the solid surface in front of you. It is beautiful and a little scary. When he ‘came within range of Riley’s violent black and white dazzle’, the critic Andrew Forge felt as though he had been transformed into a television set (a TV screen was then, of course, made up of black-and-white lines); his ‘whole visual field’ began to ‘jump and flicker’. Forge felt it was as if the artist had reached out and ‘started to twiddle with knobs on one’s box’.

  Rather than a picture to look at, or into, this was work that did things to you. Stand in front of Crest (1964), for example, and the world begins to quiver. Something you normally expect to be static and stable – a panel covered with painted lines – undulates and pulses. In addition to black and white, the pigments Riley actually used, other colours – faintly luminous pinks, turquoises and greens – appear and disappear.

  The artist was once told, to her intense irritation – ‘as though it were some sort of compliment’ – that ‘it was the greatest kick’ to smoke dope while looking at Fall (1963). People seeing Riley’s work did not necessarily think about drugs, but many stood in front of a picture such as Fall or Crest and saw a vision of the future. Here was art, Jonathan Miller wrote, half-approvingly, in a review of Riley’s work, clearly made ‘by dint of ruthless mathematical calculation, whereby in pitting carefully calibrated patterns of stimuli against the rhythmic action of the observer’s brain and retina a fantastic vibrato is established’. Miller – a qualified neurologist as well as a performer and author – assumed Riley’s art to be derived from ‘the striped, dotted or chequered cards used in experimental optics’.

  Riley resented the notion that she was some sort of white-coated boffin, as much as she did the suggestion that her pictures were an ideal backdrop to getting high. In 1965, she made a public statement, expressing her surprise that anyone should think that her work represented ‘a marriage of art and science’. In painting her pictures, she insisted, she had never ‘made use of any scientific theory or any scientific data’. Nor had she studied optics, and her use of mathematics was ‘rudimentary’: merely a matter of halving, quartering, simple arithmetic. In other words she was not a scientist; she was an artist.

  It was perfectly true that her works were built, element by element, in the way a technician might design a machine, as she herself acknowledged: ‘I set out like an engineer to build from lines, from black and white – those being the most simple and strongest contrast – from lines, circles and triangles; and to find out what they could do.’ But the poise and sense of inner structure in her pictures did not derive from science or technology; rather, it sprang from the most traditional of disciplines – life drawing.

  At Goldsmiths’ Riley had been taught by an artist named Sam Rabin, as noted before, who had asked her questions such as:

  ‘What is the model doing?’ You would think it was quite obvious, because you were both looking at her. He was hoping for an answer such as ‘She’s standing’, or ‘She’s sitting’. Then he would say, ‘And is your drawing standing?’ He meant, was the balance and structure and weight articulated there?

  In her student drawings that sense of equilibrium or otherwise, what she calls ‘analysis of structure’, are all visibly present. Those qualities are still there in her work of a decade and more later; it’s just that the body is no longer present – the grin without the cat. Riley agrees with Ad Reinhardt, who said ‘that abstraction could be practised only on the basis of life drawing’.

  This was a time when excitement was in the air. Harold Wilson, the new leader of the Labour Party, spoke of the ‘white heat’ of the coming scientific revolution: ‘Since the war the world has been rushing forward at an unprecedented, an exhilarating speed. In two decades, the scientists have made more progress than in two thousand years.’ In the early 1960s the future seemed to be arriving at an unprecedented rate. The signs were all around in the Russian and American space programmes, as well as more local phenomena such as the Post Office Tower in London – the construction of which began in 1961.

  BRIDGET RILEY Nude, 1952

  However traditional her artistic roots, Riley had come across a way of making pictures that was, almost accidentally, in tune with the Zeitgeist. Another glimpse of the future seemed to be found at the gallery that Kasmin ope
ned at 118 Bond Street in April 1963. For Richard Morphet, whose advertising agency was just around the corner, stepping into it was like walking into the Space Age. You entered via an ordinary door, from what was then quite a normal shopping street, leading into a narrow corridor – ‘a slightly claustrophobic introduction’. Then, suddenly, space expanded in a Tardis-like fashion: ‘it all opened up, and it was very bright and white’.

  Kasmin’s was an outlandish space in comparison with most interiors in 1960s Britain. Visitors were fascinated as much by the room as the art shown in it. Indeed, Kasmin was slightly irritated that so many seemed to come in to examine the ribbed rubber floor. On this were placed two elegantly minimalist chairs by Mies van der Rohe – and that was it for furniture and fittings, except for the art. The first exhibition was of pictures by the American colour field artist Kenneth Noland, resembling gigantic targets or Catherine wheels of colour. This was the most audacious kind of colour field painting – utterly flat and yet dynamic. However, Kasmin wrote to the American critic Clement Greenberg, although ‘the world of painters’ was ‘very excited and keen’ on seeing Noland’s work, it was slightly disappointing that ‘the general public mostly discussed the beauty of the gallery and its lighting’.

  *

  In 1960s London previously solid boundaries were becoming porous and dissolving. Other distinctions that were starting to become blurred were those between painting, architecture and sculpture. John Hoyland was the youngest painter to exhibit in the ‘Situation’ exhibition. His paintings from the mid-1960s were made up of squares and lozenges of soft red, orange and green. There was a connection with the Abstract Expressionism of Mark Rothko, but Hoyland’s pictures do not have the looming, spiritual quality that Rothko managed to impart to his oblong patches of colour. They do have an imposing grandeur, but in a more architectural way than Rothko’s. Hoyland’s paintings from 1966, a particularly productive year for him, though clearly ‘abstract’, read like simple structures in space. They demonstrate the truth of an observation by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, that it is hard to put down a few rectangles and not have someone say, ‘This looks like a house’. A picture such as 7.11.66 (1966) looks like an interior with walls and a partition: a virtual room.