Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  JOHN HOYLAND 7.11.66, 1966

  In these years too, drawing on his experience as a landscape and abstract painter, Victor Pasmore was redesigning whole sections of Peterlee, a New Town in County Durham. Its culminating feature was the Apollo Pavilion, completed in 1969 – part building, part abstract sculpture (and of great use, as it turned out, as a place for local teenagers to try out their skills as graffiti artists). Meanwhile, Richard Smith began to work on canvases shaped in such a way that they did not merely resemble, say, cigarette packets, but had oblong forms sticking out of the flat canvas just like the end of a giant fag carton. Smith wanted his paintings to ‘enter the real world, come out into the spectator’s space’.

  ANTHONY CARO Early One Morning, 1962

  In the case of the sculptor Anthony Caro, the opposite occurred. His sculptures took on many of the qualities of painting, such as bright colour. They looked, in fact, very much like geometric abstractions of the kind that might be painted by Smith or Robyn Denny; except the shapes in them had ‘flown out of the frame’ – just as Roger Hilton had advocated – and joined the viewers in the gallery. Caro had begun as a relatively conventional sculptor, fashioning human forms, a ‘pretend person’ from clay, plaster or bronze, as he later put it. For a while he had been Henry Moore’s assistant. Then, in 1959, Clement Greenberg visited his studio and – in an extremely rare example of a writer having a powerful effect on a visual artist – changed his art and his life. The two men were to become friends, as Caro recalled:

  I went to America soon after that, and saw a lot of abstract painting and talked to Clement Greenberg. He said, ‘If you want to change your art change your habits.’ When I came back to England, I went to the scrapyard in Canning Town and bought steel. I didn’t know anything about steel.

  Caro’s welded-metal work became light, lyrical, completely abstract and – unlike the mainstream of sculpture since the Renaissance – painted in joyful reds, greens and yellows. To start with it looked like a Noland painting translated into three dimensions; but gradually it grew, in a description Caro accepted, more and more ‘Matisse-y’. The colour and the lyricism were characteristic not just of Caro but also of a group of sculptors associated with him at St Martin’s School of Art – Tim Scott, Phillip King, David Annesley and Michael Bolus among them. The colours they used were much the same as the ones increasingly worn by young people walking around London. But this, Caro felt, was not a case of art imitating life, rather of everything blending together:

  People say that the colours we used were Carnaby Street colours, and so on. I don’t think so; that was the hopeful, optimistic attitude that was around and Carnaby Street partook of it and we did too. I think it was a very forward-looking time.

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  In mid-1960s London, fashion was increasingly echoing art and vice versa. After Allen Jones and his wife returned from New York in 1965, they settled near the area of Chelsea between the King’s Road and the river Thames known as the World’s End – the neighbourhood where, a decade before, Mary Quant had opened her first shop Bazaar on the King’s Road, in partnership with her husband, Alexander Plunket Greene. This was the first of a wave of new fashion shops that were quickly spreading from Chelsea to Carnaby Street in the west of Soho. Quant was sometimes credited with coming up with one of the emblematic garments of the decade: the mini-skirt. But Quant herself felt the garment was, effectively, crowd-sourced. She was making ‘easy, youthful, simple clothes’ in which young women could run and dance. When she made them short, the customers would say, ‘shorter, shorter’.

  By the time Allen Jones moved there, World’s End was home to other boutiques, including one with a splendidly period name, Granny Takes a Trip. In a way, what was going on struck Jones as similar to the art world, in which everybody was looking to see what the new trend was, where the benchmark had now been placed. At the weekend the Joneses would put their twins in the pushchair and perambulate down the King’s Road:

  Every Saturday was just a revelation of the move of fashion at that time, and the way the body was uncovered. There was an unspoken dialogue going on there. You went out and skirts were shorter, the body was being displayed in some new way. And you knew that the following week somebody would up the ante.

  Jones himself began to do just this, breaking some art world taboos along the way. In New York he had been irked by the implicit regulations that the critic Max Kozloff had listed – that paintings must be flat, and so forth. Back in London, he decided to paint a picture ‘that violated as many of these rules as possible’.

  One of these was First Step (1966); Jones has said that in such pictures he was trying to create ‘something very tactile and grab-able’. If the modelling was extreme enough and the contours hard enough, he felt, the picture plane itself would not disappear. This was still obviously a flat canvas; it was the forms that were coming out of it. Jones added a little shelf at the bottom of the picture just to point out that this, and the other paintings in the series, actually were on flat canvases.

  In art world terms, the way that First Step edged out into the real world was mischievous. Of course, in the eyes of most of the inhabitants of that real world, the depiction of female legs in stockings or clinging, skin-tight rubber (as in Wet Seal; 1966) was more striking than theories about flatness versus the illusion of depth. The source for the image was a mail-order catalogue sent out by a lingerie firm, Frederick’s of Hollywood (the inventors of the push-up bra). For some time Jones’s work had been increasingly concerned with gender and eroticism. In Man Woman (1963) the two figures seem to merge, or rather their clothes do, trousers, stockings, tie and high-heeled shoes all apparently adorning one multi-limbed, headless creature (much what conservative souls complained was happening to fashion in the 1960s, that you couldn’t tell the difference any more between young men and women).

  ALLEN JONES First Step, 1966

  In other words, paintings such as First Step and its companion Wet Seal were a specialized kind of Pop art. But Jones’s preoccupation with lingerie catalogues and fetishist magazines – a variety of imagery suggested by David Hockney – was eventually to get him into trouble, not only with old-fashioned puritans but also with a reinvigorated feminist movement. This did not happen, however, until his work crossed over the line from flat painting to three-dimensional sculpture. In 1969, he produced three works, which remain his most celebrated, but also his most notorious, divisive and controversial. Hat-Stand, Chair and Table represent women, fabricated in the manner of shop-window mannequins and clad in fetishist leatherwear (made by the firm that produced Diana Rigg’s costumes for The Avengers), who have been turned into figurative items of furniture.

  Advertisement for Frederick’s of Hollywood, c. 1960s

  These provoked outrage: one had paint stripper poured over it. Jones insists that he was ‘reflecting on and commenting on exactly the same situation that was the source of the feminist movement’. His misfortune, he feels, was to produce ‘the perfect image of how women were being objectified’. Whatever view one takes, it is hard to believe that paintings of the same subjects would have caused such an uproar. Sculpture occupies the real world, and that gives it greater visceral impact.

  *

  While Jones was borrowing imagery from commerce and a – rather specialized – kind of fashion, clothes designers were doing the same thing in reverse: lifting avant-garde art and turning it into wearable and purchasable merchandise.

  At the opening of ‘The Responsive Eye’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in February 1965, Bridget Riley had an unpleasant surprise. This was a global survey of a brand new movement, Op art – so fresh, indeed, that it had only been named the previous October. It was a snappier way of discussing an exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery entitled ‘Optical Paintings’. The implications of the new tag were spelled out by an art critic, Lil Picard: ‘The new mathematical art equation reads POP – P = Op. That means drop the letter P and Op we go.’ Of course, as is often
the way with such trumpeted developments, Op art was a bit of an illusion. Many of the ninety-nine painters and sculptors involved in ‘The Responsive Eye’ had no interest in optics; Riley certainly didn’t think that was what she was doing at all. ‘I never set out to paint optical paintings, even though there was no such term as that.’ As a look, however, it was the height of fashion. About half the people at the private view, Riley estimated, were wearing clothes based on her work. Photographs confirm that the dresses of many of the women present were indeed strongly reminiscent of Riley’s paintings. From her point of view, those guests were ‘completely covered in “me”’ and she tried to avoid talking to them.

  Some, it is true, were clad in designs derived from other artists’ work. Time magazine, breathlessly covering the opening, reported that Gisela Oster, then wife of the painter and scientist Gerald Oster, ‘gave her husband some dazzling competition with a turquoise and white striped dress’, but that the sculptor Marilynn Karp ‘outstriped’ her with an outfit in which the vertical black-and-white stripes on her dress continued down through her stockings and shoes. Another painter, Jane Wilson, was ‘delightfully dizzy’ in orange organdie with discs of grey and black. ‘Op outfitted ladies showed a tendency to linger near the pictures that best harmonized with their clothes,’ the author noted. Pat Coffin, a painter and modern-living editor of Look magazine, ‘wrapped herself in a giant silk stole of peristaltic black dots on a white field’ that Time claimed was designed by Bridget Riley (though this influence had been neither voluntary nor conscious).

  What Riley hadn’t appreciated, as she sat on the plane to New York, was that Op art in general and her work in particular had done something that artists in the past had often dreamed of accomplishing: it had jumped the fence around ‘fine art’ and got out into the world. But it should not happen, Riley strongly felt, in the manner she experienced in New York, where she was greeted ‘by an explosion of commercialization, bandwagoning and hysterical sensationalism’. People in New York, and soon in London, were covered in designs derived from her individual idiom. Riley’s work – or at least a pastiche of it – was all over their hats, their bags, their wallpaper, their furniture. Even, according to the British journalist Christopher Booker, their make-up. In crudely journalistic terms, Riley was a very hot artist. Her exhibition at Richard L. Feigen in New York, which ran at the same time as the MoMA exhibition, was sold out before it opened, with many works being bought unseen by collectors determined to have a Riley on their walls. But the vogue for her work went far beyond that; indeed, it was strong on both sides of the Atlantic.

  On 13 March 1965, Hella Pick reported in the Guardian that a dress designer who had previously bought one of Riley’s pictures attempted ‘with a fanfare to present her with a dress copied from the painting’. Riley stalked off without the garment. According to the American critic John Canaday, the artist’s gallery was bombarded with unwelcome offers from manufacturers of various products. ‘The most ironic proposition to date,’ he noted, ‘has come from the manufacturer of a headache remedy.’

  Fashion illustration by Antonio Lopez, New York Times Magazine, c. 1966

  At MoMA, Riley was not only surrounded on all sides by tacky rip-offs and misunderstandings of her own works. She also had to suffer the added mortification of an encounter with a member of the museum’s board who, observing her displeasure, reacted like a villain in a Bond film. ‘So, you don’t like it?’ she remembered him snarling. ‘We’ll have you on the back of every matchbox in Japan!’ Riley returned home with feelings of ‘violation and disillusionment’. Her outrage was so widely publicized that when a bill to give artists copyright in their work was introduced in the US Congress it was known as ‘Bridget’s Bill’.

  *

  Riley’s art did not try to depict the world; it seemed to change it. And the extraordinary space-warping, mind-bending ways in which it did so made her pictures a natural source for science fiction. In an American television series called The Time Tunnel, for example, time travel was effected by entering what looks very much like an extrapolation from Bridget Riley’s work Continuum (1963). This was a walk-in environmental painting, curving around itself to form a circular zone with a single narrow entrance. Once in the centre, the viewer was surrounded on all sides by darting and zinging lines. Ida Kar took a remarkable series of photographs of the artist inside her own creation: peering out, lying on the floor in the central space. Continuum was obviously a case of dissolving boundaries, of painting turning into something else, though whether sculpture, architecture or some undefined new category it is hard to say. The original work was destroyed, but Continuum was recreated in 2005.

  Bridget Riley, 1963. Photo by Ida Kar

  *

  Between 1964 and 1966 another, very different artist was at work on a painted labyrinth. Mirror (1966) depicts the artist himself – Frank Bowling – in the middle of a vortex of artistic styles: all the different ways of working in mid-1960s London at once. This picture is, like Gustave Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio(1854–55), ‘a real-life allegory’, somehow incorporating more contradictory idioms than any painting of normal dimensions should, and gathering together all the stylistic possibilities that confronted a young painter at that point.

  Robert Colbert, Lee Meriwether and James Darren, The Time Tunnel, TV series, 1966–67

  FRANK BOWLING Mirror, 1966

  It was, Bowling says, looking back, ‘a confusing time’. Though he gave this painting, which seems to describe all his choices and predicaments, both personal and aesthetic, the title Mirror, there is no looking glass among the objects on view. Presumably the whole picture is an image of the artist and his predicament. In the mid-1960s there was a clashing cacophony of styles and movements from which an artist could – in theory – choose. None of these was obviously the path into the future. Op art was, as it turned out, one of the last revolutionary styles to which a label could be given (and even this definition, as we have seen, was misleading). From now on, as Bridget Riley put it, what was needed was for each painter to till his or her own garden. But first it was necessary to choose which garden to till.

  The floor of the lower space in Mirror is an exercise in the manner of the Hungarian-French painter Victor Vasarely, one of the forefathers of Op art. The lower room itself appears to be a kitchen but one constructed – as were the interiors of Howard Hodgkin – partly from borrowed fragments of abstract painting. The doors of the cupboards, for example, could have been sawn out of a hard-edge picture by Kenneth Noland hanging on the walls of the Kasmin Gallery. The empyrean upper zone, in contrast, is painted in a freer, looser manner as if executed by Patrick Heron or Mark Rothko. The ectoplasmic self-portrait descending the stairs has a strong flavour of Francis Bacon (all three figures in the painting were based on photographs taken in situ but then transformed and distorted). Finally, the domestic fittings – the tap, the sink, the Charles Eames chair – are much as they might be depicted by a Pop artist such as Richard Hamilton or Peter Blake.

  The extraordinary thing about Mirror is that it doesn’t collapse under the centripetal force of all the dissimilar ingredients it contains. This is because at the heart of the structure is an underlying matrix of geometry. Bowling was a keen student of a treatise by Jay Hambidge entitled The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry, published in 1926. From this he extracted the twirling structure that energizes and supports the whole of his picture.

  In the centre is a spiral staircase, a real one that led from the Royal College of Art student studios upwards to the Victoria and Albert Museum. These stairs at the RCA had long been lodged in Bowling’s imagination: they seemed, he felt, ‘to symbolize something profound’ in his career. In the painting, however, the stairs do not appear in their mundane reality, but transfigured: a winding, golden pathway, apparently in the process of dematerialization like the fittings of some spaceship. A few steps up from the bottom of the staircase is Bowling himself, also in semi-disembodied form. Above, stands his wife
, Paddy Kitchen. The marriage was disintegrating while the picture was being painted and they finally divorced in 1966, just as it was being finished. At the top, swinging out into space, suspended by his arms, is the artist himself again.

  After he completed the painting, Bowling felt stymied. His marriage was over; he felt in danger of being shunted onto a branch off the mainline of artists and labelled a ‘black artist’. His work was not included in ‘The New Generation: 1964’, a large survey exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery that included almost every notable young painter in London. Instead, two years later, in 1966, he was designated to represent Britain at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. Bowling found this ‘aggressive and personally insulting’. He insisted, ‘I’m not a black artist, I’m an artist. The tradition I imbibe and the cultural ramifications are British.’ And so, in 1966, like many of his British contemporaries – Hockney, Jones and Smith among them – he moved to the United States. He settled in New York and became an abstract painter. It was not until the mid-1970s that he returned to work in London again.