Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  I used to look at slightly historical things, like a decorative art book from 1932, or ‘continental’ interiors from 1961. They were distanced from me, slightly out of my time, or maybe in my time but from when I was young. I suppose you could be more objective if you didn’t feel that you were painting what was around you.

  French recipe card used as source for Santa Margherita Ligure

  But neither was Caulfield, as he pointed out early on, a Pop artist. This was true in that his sources were not advertising, films or comic strips. Caulfield claimed that his clear bold line was inspired not by cartoons but by looking at the heavily restored ancient Cretan mural at Knossos on his first foreign holiday.

  Holidays were a theme that underlay Caulfield’s work, but not in any straightforward fashion; he didn’t, for example, paint the places he visited. Instead he depicted the idea – the dream – of a continental holiday as he, and increasing numbers of British people in the 1960s, experienced it. ‘The subjects are imaginary,’ he wrote in 1970, ‘so that they are particular yet stereotyped images.’ And the dream in question was of southern Europe; America never much interested Caulfield.

  Santa Margherita Ligure (1964) was based not on a visit to Liguria in northern Italy, but on a French recipe postcard, with the characteristically vivid but unreal hues of early colour reproduction. A sailing boat has been inserted at exactly the right point to punctuate the composition. And Caulfield did not imitate the photographic look of the postcard, but instead stretched the sea into an expansive field of ultramarine, with the distant harbour reduced to a few stray lines. The rest of the scene has been translated into the artist’s individual language of firm lines and Mondrian-like chromatic simplicity: just red, white, yellow, blue and black. The proportions have been altered and refined, and the image made more ambiguous. In the postcard the bouquet of roses is clearly placed in the setting: it’s on a table, and the table is on a balcony overlooking the bay. Caulfield introduces doubts about that. The flowers, vase and table appear to be outside the framed sea view, and the latter is oddly tilted as if painted on a window – or is it another picture, a poster perhaps, leaning out from the wall?

  PATRICK CAULFIELD Santa Margherita Ligure, 1964

  The answer is that this is a dispatch from Caulfield-land. By his own account, Caulfield came from ‘nowhere’. This was his way of describing his native Acton, in West London; ‘It isn’t awful, it just doesn’t exist.’ To be precise, he explained, he hailed from a part of South Acton known colloquially as ‘Bagwash City’ because of the ‘damp rather attractive smell’ of soap and water, mixed with drying and ironing smells. His mother worked there in a laundry. ‘Nowhere’ is a good place for dreaming, and the sixteen-year-old Caulfield dreamt of being an artist, having seen Moulin Rouge – John Huston’s 1952 film about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – in an Acton cinema.

  When he left school aged fifteen, Caulfield was faced with a succession of ‘ghastly jobs’, such as drilling holes in gas rings in the Park Royal Industrial Estate area of north-west London. He also worked in the design department of the food production company Crosse & Blackwell, ‘mainly washing brushes and varnishing chocolates for display’ (the latter, an exercise in creating an elaborately lustrous still life, turned out to be a good preparation for Caulfield’s later career as a painter).

  Caulfield emerged a fledgling painter and a unique kind of dandy. ‘No matter how apparently casually he is dressed, he is also immaculate,’ his dealer, Leslie Waddington, once said. ‘He is the sort of man whose jeans have to be ironed.’ This was the legacy, perhaps, of those early years spent in the atmosphere of the laundry; on the other hand, he expressed his horror of questioning and interviews – like all dandies, he liked to be detached – by complaining that the process made him feel as if his soul were being dry-cleaned. He had one thing in common with Lucian Freud: what Frank Auerbach described as ‘a very strong sense of the self-preservation of his talent’. Caulfield explained it thus:

  I never let anybody see my work in progress. If somebody sees it and they make a comment, I lose it. If they say it’s terrible, I lose it; if they say it’s marvellous, I lose it; or, if they say you ought to have more blue – it doesn’t matter. You’ve got to concentrate on the feeling you have. I think it was Cézanne who said that you have to retain your own sensation. That’s very important. It’s difficult to do that.

  As a painter Caulfield abundantly bore out the truth of Lucian Freud’s dictum that ‘anyone marvellous is full of jokes’. In a painting called Wine Bar, he explained, he inscribed the word ‘Quiche’ on the blackboard menu as a private message to his friend the painter John Hoyland. The latter was a great frequenter of wine bars but, on the other hand, a person who would have thought the slogan ‘real men don’t eat quiche’ a biblical truth.

  These private jokes, which will pose insoluble conundrums to the art historians of the future, aren’t the point of the pictures, however. ‘They’re merely reasons to help me do the painting,’ says Caulfield. ‘Because, if you’re imagining something, you need lots of mental crutches en route to help you to do it. If you think somebody would think that was funny if they could see it, it helps.’ Some of his paintings were in fact remarkably close to being of nothing, that is to say, to being abstract. Indeed, they come into the category Frank Bowling defined as ‘jokes about abstraction’. For this reason, Caulfield’s painting of the 1960s is sometimes very close, in formal terms, to paintings from the same period by John Hoyland.

  PATRICK CAULFIELD Corner of the Studio, 1964

  Caulfield’s Corner of the Studio (1964) is almost minimalist. The surface is nearly entirely monochrome: a field of blue, with a couple of roughly triangular forms scattered on it, plus a sprinkling of jagged lines and bubble-like circles. This is just enough to create a space. But Caulfield goes one step further and places just off-centre a bright red stove, outlined in firm dark lines like those used by Hergé to draw the Adventures of Tintin.

  Thus with the sparest of means Caulfield creates an atmosphere, an ambience, a sense of a time that isn’t quite the present, but not quite the real past either. The stove, as can be seen in a contemporary photograph, isn’t quite like the one that Caulfield himself had in his studio, which was a more up-to-date paraffin-burning model. It’s an older, coal-burning type, the sort that heated the office of Inspector Maigret or might have warmed an artist of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Mondrian or René Magritte, both of whom Caulfield much admired.

  *

  It was not just artists such as Kitaj and Caulfield who were prone to romanticism. For good or ill the mid-1960s were a romantic era. The tastes of what had been dubbed ‘Swinging London’ in a celebrated Time magazine article were similar to those of the original nineteenth-century decadents: dandyism, excesses of every kind, indulgence in what Baudelaire called ‘artificial paradises’. Looking back, Caulfield reflected that he personally had seen little of it – ‘it’s difficult to swing if you haven’t got any money’. He had spent the early 1960s as an art student, working in the holidays – as he had when he left school – in such places as the Pepsi-Cola factory in North Acton. What little he saw of Swinging London was through his dealer, Robert Fraser.

  Fraser’s gallery was as prominent as Kasmin’s; they were jointly the most fashionable places to see new art in London. But while Kasmin was an advocate of abstract art – with a few exceptions, notably David Hockney – Fraser was the principal London dealer in Pop, though he too showed some abstract painting. Among the artists he represented at one time or another were Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Bridget Riley (who had moved from Victor Musgrave’s Gallery One), Derek Boshier, Richard Hamilton and Caulfield.

  Fraser had a fastidious eye. Bridget Riley tells the story of how she and he were hanging an exhibition of her ‘very small drawings, using blacks, whites, greys and pencil notes’. These looked lost against the walls and they did not know what to do. She came back later in the day, and found Fraser ‘had painted the enti
re place black – walls, ceiling, all the woodwork, everything was completely black. And so these little light, pale studies, very fragile pieces of paper, shone, and were set off in an amazing way.’

  This acute sense of visual style was applied not only to contemporary art but to the covers of rock LPs. Fraser was a good friend of Paul McCartney and the other Beatles, as well as the Rolling Stones, and in the habit of dropping into McCartney’s house on Cavendish Avenue in St John’s Wood for dinner and chatting late into the night. He was instrumental in persuading the band to commission Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth to design the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles had already commissioned another image, but Fraser persuaded them it was ‘bad art, badly drawn’. The American Pop artist Claes Oldenburg felt that ‘Robert really had an eye for draughtsmanship: very few dealers have.’

  As a dealer Fraser had many virtues, though paying his artists, or other bills, was not among them. However, in other ways, he was recklessly extravagant, drawn to excess in every way. Caulfield recounted an occasion when they had arrived too late for the opening of an exhibition in Milan because of having missed their plane. Since they found themselves in Italy, Fraser suggested they went on to Rome, where they ended up in the luxurious palazzo and beachside villa of a rich actor. The people, and the setting, were those of Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita (1960): everyone on drugs, except Caulfield, who instead was drinking as much as he could and absorbing the ‘absolute luxury’. ‘It would appear glamorous from the outside,’ Caulfield reflected, his irony kicking in, ‘but it wasn’t glamorous at all. It was rather painful.’ The reality of it consisted of not sleeping, getting sunburnt, and not being able to talk to anybody because he didn’t speak Italian (Caulfield was equally unimpressed by swinging parties in which everybody sat in stoned silence).

  This Italian journey was not as painful, however, as what happened to Fraser in 1967. On the evening of Sunday 12 February a group of friends were gathered at Redlands, a country house near West Wittering in Sussex owned by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. With Richards were Mick Jagger, his then girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, George Harrison, the antiques dealer and collector Christopher Gibbs and Fraser. These were the stylistic leaders of Swinging London. Gibbs was an old Etonian like Fraser, and perhaps the first man to wear flared trousers and floral shirts.

  On that Sunday evening at Redlands, Harrison had just left when, as Gibbs recalled, they were ‘rudely interrupted by a lot of people from the West Sussex Constabulary’. Everybody was bemused when all these people wearing identical clothes knocked at the door. Although most of those present were high in one way or another, there was no actual evidence apart from a box of white pills in Fraser’s pocket. In his gentlemanly way, he explained to the police that these had been prescribed for a medical condition; they, however, insisted on taking a few away for analysis. They turned out to be pure heroin, a surprise to other members of the party, and very bad news for Fraser in particular.

  On 22 June, Jagger, Richards and Fraser appeared in court in Chichester. A few days later, they were found guilty and, after a night in Lewes Prison, were taken back to court for sentencing. Jagger and Fraser were handcuffed together, with Jagger additionally shackled to a policeman. A photographer named John Twine took their picture through the window of the police van as they raised their shackled hands. Fraser was given six months’ imprisonment, Richards a year and Jagger three months. The photograph made a strong impression on Richard Hamilton, who was badly upset by what had happened, feeling as he did that ‘Robert’s was the best gallery I knew in London’ and that he had been unfairly treated: ‘The gallery was empty, poor Robert was in jail, it was an awful mess. And so unjust, the British legal system seemed to me to have treated him particularly badly.’

  RICHARD HAMILTON Swingeing London 67, 1968–69

  The secretary of Fraser’s gallery had kept a file containing every reference to his name in print, sent by a press-cuttings agency. Eventually, she handed it over to Hamilton, who found it – in the words of Richard Morphet – ‘a mine of extraordinary information’ that included ‘innumerable reports of the same incident, varying at the whim of reporters’. Initially, Hamilton made a lithographic print from a mosaic of these cuttings. Then he honed in on one: the photograph by John Twine of the two men handcuffed in the police van. This was the basis for six paintings, done the following year. The original image was obtained from the Daily Mail, trimmed and edited, then silkscreened over oil paint. In some versions this was conventionally worked in an academic manner, in others he treated it much more broadly.

  The image itself is ambiguous. It might seem that Fraser and Jagger were lifting their hands to shield themselves from view, but Fraser later claimed they were so outraged by their treatment that they brandished the handcuffs for the world to see. This, then, is an image of defiance and – one would guess – was orchestrated by Fraser with characteristic visual flair. Hamilton called his series of pictures Swingeing London 67 (1968–69). This was a reference to the trial judge’s comment, ‘there are times when a swingeing sentence can act as a deterrent’. The two men’s hands bring to mind The Times leader by the new editor William Rees-Mogg that came out shortly after the sentencing under the headline, ‘Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?’ The shackled hands seem to flutter, at once defensive and protesting.

  Swingeing London 67 is a piece of Pop art in that it is about mass media, but no longer in the cool ironic, celebratory fashion that Hamilton had famously defined as ‘witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business’. The coolness and irony were still there, but this was work that was also angry and political. The mood of the age was shifting from romance to rebellion; and art was changing too. The following year, again at Fraser’s suggestion, Richard Hamilton designed a cover for the Beatles’ next record – known as the White Album. Instead of filling it with imagery, as Blake had done for Sgt. Pepper, Hamilton elected to leave it completely blank. Painting, temporarily, was on its way out and ideas were coming in.

  EPILOGUE

  I know that Duchamp thought he had made figurative painting impossible; and that something has been made impossible is an exciting thought. It makes one feel that one is doing something secret, something that might almost be illegal.

  Lucian Freud, 2004

  In the 1970s Kitaj visited the prehistoric cave paintings of Altamira in northern Spain with his children. He was expecting to be bored. Instead, he was ‘shocked at the quality of drawing, at how wonderful it was’. So, he concluded, ‘it’s been like that ever since the beginning’ and, moreover, ‘they’re never going to stop drawing the human face with two eyes and a mouth’.

  In these few words Kitaj expressed what might be called the ‘steady-state’ theory of art history. This appeals to painters, particularly figurative ones, for an obvious reason. They are, essentially, still trying to do what the artists of Altamira were doing superlatively well tens of thousands of years ago. It is hard to argue that painting has progressed, in terms of quality at least. Gary Hume, a successor of the painters discussed in this book, said in 1999, ‘I’m a caveman still, in my cave, painting the world out there.’

  Against the steady-state theory is the artistic version of the Big Bang thesis. That is, that art began in a certain time and place – effectively, the caves – and has been shooting away from that point ever since. And the direction of travel cannot be reversed. Thus, you could not in the twentieth or twenty-first century work like Giotto, or Caravaggio. To do so would be an act of pointless copying, and not creative at all. Many others, including numerous artists, would go further and argue that certain techniques, idioms and genres simply become outmoded. Therefore, painting – certainly figurative painting – was and is widely held to have been rendered obsolete by the advent of photography.

  It is not necessary here to adjudicate between these two points of view – except to say that the last claim can’t be quite true. Some of the most glorio
us achievements in the annals of painting came after Daguerre’s announcement in 1839 – Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Rothko, Pollock, Matisse. And also, of course, those recorded in this book.

  The currents of history are felt and understood differently in particular times and spaces. The German painter Georg Baselitz noted recently, ‘If you had painted works in the style of Freud or Auerbach in Germany after the war, you wouldn’t have had a chance.’ The notion that abstraction was the inevitable end point was, according to Baselitz, universal in postwar West Germany.

  Even in London, however, many believed in the unassailable triumph of abstraction. As Victor Pasmore said to Paula Rego at the Slade in the early 1950s (wrongly as it turns out), ‘Nobody paints like that anymore!’ Furthermore, though Freud and Auerbach survived in 1960s London, they could scarcely be said to have been thriving. Still, London proved more resistant to the triumph of the modern than many places.

  No doubt there were many reasons why this was so. One was the conservatism of British art education. Consequently, the painters we have been considering were sometimes taught by people, such as Bomberg and Coldstream, for whom working from life was not an academic exercise, but a matter of the utmost urgency and excitement. Others, including Riley and Hockney, were instructed in the tradition inculcated by Henry Tonks at the Slade in the early twentieth century. This was derived from the methods of nineteenth-century French masters and, ultimately, from the Renaissance. This perhaps was why people in London, Kitaj believed, ‘draw better than anyone in the world’. The Modernists and Mavericks in these pages were, however, among the last to be trained in this way; in the 1970s serious instruction in drawing was largely dismantled, thus severing a lineage that stretched back to Altamira.