Another reason, perhaps, was the simple existence of Francis Bacon. He was, without question, the most successful British painter, internationally speaking, yet his work was defiantly figurative. His example demonstrated that there were, at the very least, exceptions to the laws of art historical progress.
*
The painters of London all made their own idiosyncratic accommodations with history. Bacon himself took the view that photography had fundamentally altered the rules of the game, making the detailed copying of appearances – what he termed ‘illustration’ – outmoded and pointless. Hence his opinion that painting now was a desperate struggle against almost impossible odds, a battle to find a configuration of paint that felt like reality without imitating it.
Uninterested in, but also unthreatened by photography, Freud had found his own criterion. In the present situation, he felt, all a painter could do was search for truth. Of course, this is as elusive a measure as any, but Freud recognized it when he encountered it, and to him it was more a metaphysical quality than a stylistic attribute. ‘For myself, I am only interested in art that is in some way concerned with truth. I could not care less whether it is abstract or what form it takes.’
Less dramatic, and more irreverent in his revolt against the ‘manifest destiny’ doctrine of Modernism, Hockney – writing in 1976 – declared that he had ‘come to see that a great deal of the work passing itself off as modernist was junk’. If you come to a dead end, Hockney concluded, ‘you simply somersault back and carry on’.
For his part, Auerbach firmly believes in the pointlessness of replicating what has already been done – if you did not paint in a new manner, the result would just ‘look like a picture’. To that extent, he accepts the ratchet effect of time on art. But, rather than see history as an inexorable march ever onwards, Auerbach decided that it was best, in effect, to divert the arrow of time into a loop:
There were certain painters, Kandinsky is a prime example, who painted in a not very distinguished way, then at the point of turning towards abstraction painted some distinguished pictures. But when he’d crossed over they become for me rather mediocre again. So it’s the process of abstracting that makes for the tension and excitement. So I thought the thing to do is to cross that border again, and again and again.
Interestingly, Bridget Riley, though her work is very different from his, concurs. The point at which she, for her part, has elected to pause is slightly different – after the early Modernists passed the frontier into abstraction:
Something that has bedevilled art in this century is the idea of progress, which is based on a reading of the history of early Modernism that is in fact not quite right. There was at one stage a great deal that needed to be cleared up, and many doors that needed to be opened. But after those doors had been opened, there weren’t more and more doors that also needed opening, or at least there weren’t any real doors. What was needed was to till the garden! By that I mean it was necessary to investigate the territory that had been opened up.
*
By the mid-1970s, abstraction had ceased to look like the inevitable future and become a type of picture making. Increasingly, the crucial distinction was between painting and other ways of making art. Moreover, it was the latter – land art, performance, installation, video – that now looked like the future. Even Tate curators, those bellwethers of changing taste and fashion, had begun to declare painting – once more – dead, over and out. It was true that the majority of the most impressive artists who emerged in London in the 1970s and 1980s – Richard Long, Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Gilbert & George among them – were sculptors rather than painters, in so far as their work could be classified in traditional terms at all.
Yet Bacon’s ascent into the pantheon of art history was undisturbed by this development. In 1971, in his own view at least, his career culminated in a retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. But perhaps the most profound works of his career came just afterwards: a series of triptychs concerned with the suicide of his lover, George Dyer, a day and a half before the opening. In these, the two poles of his art – visceral realism and tragic drama – were finally fused.
Unaffected by fashion, Hockney’s renown continued to spread. He ceased, however, to be a London painter, having been based in the city, at least intermittently, through the 1960s. In 1972, tired of English life and unhappy with the naturalism of his work – which he had begun to see as a ‘trap’ – he moved to Paris and, at the end of the decade, back to LA. Here he stayed for twenty years, exploring Cubism, theatrical design, photography and its shortcomings, in a myriad of manners, with tremendous intellectual vitality and – just like Bacon – in a manner no bossy critic or historian would ever have predicted.
In 1974, Freud had an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. From then on, he felt, things got better, and a lot more so in the 1980s. It was not until the 1990s, when Freud was in his seventies, however, that he began to be seen as a towering figure in painting across the ages. In 1970, that would have seemed an astonishing idea.
Gillian Ayres, like many of the others who have featured in these pages, also carried on regardless. Fellow teachers at St Martin’s used to warn the students: ‘Don’t listen to her, she’ll make you want to paint!’ Her reaction was to use pigment on canvas with ever more abandon. She produced paintings of enormous length, then others of astonishing thickness and interwoven complexity, then yet another new idiom of unprecedented freedom and power. She, and such dedicated abstract painters as Riley and Bowling, had long, distinguished and productive careers ahead of them. They demonstrated the continuing vitality of abstraction: there remained plenty of possibilities in this way of working.
The same could be said of Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, Allen Jones, Howard Hodgkin, Peter Blake, Euan Uglow and Patrick Caulfield. All these cultivated their own, quite different, garden plots, to use Riley’s metaphor. Nobody told artists what to do any more, as Hodgkin put it; no critics or curators, or at least increasingly few, declared that painting had to be this or that. This, Hodgkin felt, made it very much more difficult in some ways, but, on the other hand, meant that painters had enormous freedom.
However, not all the artists of the 1960s had such a flourishing future. Some years ago, I was lining up to go into the lunch given in honour of the artist representing Britain at the Venice Biennale. I fell into conversation with an elderly man whose face I couldn’t quite place who was standing behind me in the queue. After a bit he remarked in a melancholy tone, ‘In 1970, this lunch was given for me’. It was Richard Smith.
For a while in the late 1960s and early 1970s Smith and Robyn Denny continued to occupy centre stage in London. ‘I was the right kind of artist for that kind of time’, Smith recalled in 2001, ‘I just expected to be in international group shows. Then … I don’t know.’
He had a major Tate retrospective in 1975, then bit by bit, faded from prominence. Much the same happened to Denny, who was more optimistic about the situation than Smith. ‘Robyn Denny keeps saying, “Our time will come, Dick. Our time will come. And he’s been saying this for years and years. Years and years and years.”’ It never happened during their lifetimes, which does not necessarily mean it never will. This period is still close; in art, judgments and reputations always remain provisional. Artists can disappear, as Freud did in the late 1950s and 1960s, but also reappear as he did in the 1980s and 1990s.
*
When, in 1976, Kitaj used the phrase ‘School of London’, people immediately ‘jumped on it’, as he remembered. There were attempts to characterize it, and also to deny it existed. As we have seen, there was no common factor. The major painters of London were all idiosyncratic mavericks, even when they were Modernists. Clearly, there were interconnections and overlaps – social, stylistic, temperamental – sometimes crossing the frontier between figurative and non-figurative. Several artists, notably Auerbach and Hodgkin, effectively set their tents up on the border zone itself.
> None of this, however, contradicts Kitaj’s fundamental outsider’s insight: ‘I just found myself in a city where a lot of wonderful painters were working; I felt that I had observed something.’ In that, I hope the reader will agree, he was absolutely correct.
Notes
Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Frank Auerbach, Gillian Ayres, Georg Baselitz, Frank Bowling, Anthony Caro, John Craxton, Dennis Creffield, Jim Dine, Anthony Eyton, Terry Frost, David Hockney, Allen Jones, John Kasmin, James Kirkman, R. B. Kitaj, John Lessore, Richard Morphet, Henry Mundy, Victor Pasmore, Robert Rauschenberg, Bridget Riley, Ed Ruscha, Richard Smith, Daphne Todd, John Virtue and John Wonnacott are from conversations with the author, 1990–2018.
Full publication details for works cited in abbreviated form below can be found in the Bibliography.
Chapter 1
11‘He was totally alive…’: quoted in Warner, 1988.
11‘The destruction in the West End…’: quoted in Clark & Dronfield, 2015, p. 177.
11‘The silence, the absolute dead silence…’: quoted in Yorke, 1988, pp. 124–25.
14‘exotic and somewhat demonic aura’: Bernard, 1995, p. 45.
14The critic John Russell: Russell, 1974, p. 7.
14‘one of the greatest portrayers…’: Bernard & Birdsall, 1996, p. 7.
15‘genius of painting hovers over Paris…’: Sickert, 1947, p. 183.
19‘Through his singular talent…’: Bernard & Birdsall, 1996, p. 9.
Chapter 2
22‘being young and extremely tactless…’: Smee, 2006, p. 9.
23In the words of John Russell: all quotations from Russell, 1971, pp. 10–11.
23‘nearer to what I feel about the psyche…’: Chris Stephens, ‘Francis Bacon and Picasso’, http://my.page-flip.co.uk/?userpath=00000013/00012513/00073855/&page=5
28Kathleen Sutherland, who dined there: Berthoud, 1982, p. 129.
28‘Actually there is no paint at all…’: Sylvester, 1975, p. 192.
30‘this way and that across his stubble…’: Richardson, 2001, p. 12.
31‘to be one of the very few English painters…’: Rothenstein, 1984, pp. 161–62.
31‘real painting is a mysterious…’: ibid.
31‘mysterious because the very substance…’: ibid.
33‘complete interlocking of image and paint…’: ibid.
33‘It was like one continuous accident…’: Sylvester, 1975, p. 11.
34‘If you go to some of those great stores…’: ibid., p. 46.
35‘The moment the story is elaborated…’: ibid., p. 22.
35‘our quarrel was with Michelangelo’: Hughes, 1997, p. 495.
36‘I think it would be more exciting…’: Sylvester, 1975, p. 65.
Chapter 3
40The directive from the Ministry of Education: Johnstone, 1980, p. 203.
41One of Minton’s pupils was Humphrey Lyttelton: Spalding, 1991(1), pp. 90–91.
43‘We talked about the difference of attitude…’: Townsend, 1976, p. 75.
43It runs directly into what David Hockney: Hockney & Gayford, 2016, p. 19.
43A decade before, Coldstream: Laughton, 1986, pp. 109 ff.
44‘Of course encourage him…’: ibid., p. 116.
44This could no more be done without alteration: Gowing, 1981, p. 24.
45On the one hand, Coldstream wrote: Laughton, pp. 109–10.
45Yet if one did that: ibid., p. 110.
45Coldstream had a go too: ibid.
46The process is described by Coldstream’s biographer: ibid., p. 119.
46Gowing wondered how he would find Coldstream: Gowing & Sylvester, 1990, pp. 15–16.
49Nevertheless, Coldstream was afflicted by doubts: the following quotations from Coldstream are from David Sylvester’s interview with the artist, recorded 1962, in ibid., p. 25.
50In 1947, Cyril Connolly: Horizon (April 1947), quoted in Sandbrook, 2006, p. 253.
52The process was recorded by William Townsend: quotations in this paragraph from Townsend, 1976, p. 72.
54When she got there, her biographer Frances Spalding: quotations and information in following passage, Spalding, 2012(1).
55‘Each painting is an exploration…’: Yorke, 1988, p. 293.
55Clough’s origins were curiously similar: Spalding, 2012(1).
55‘I like paintings…’: Yorke, 1988, p. 297.
56‘The original experience…’: ibid.
Chapter 4
61‘Although I had painted most of my life…’: Cork, 1988, p. 41.
61‘What David did for me…’: McKenna, 1993.
62‘I look upon Nature…’: Cork, 1988, p. 19.
63‘prodigious speed and certitude’: ibid., p. 32.
63‘the artist’s consciousness of mass…’: ibid., p. 34.
63‘The sense of Touch and associations…’: ibid., p. 40.
64‘poetry in mankind…’: ibid.
67‘Once I watched him draw…’: Sylvester, 1995, p. 17.
Chapter 5
69‘One wants to do this thing of…’: Sylvester, 1975, p. 28.
69‘the dirt and weariness…’: Horizon (April 1947), quoted in Sandbrook, 2006, p. 253.
71‘Corsica is proving very exciting…’: Spalding, 1991(1), p. 110.
73‘an impression of great fragility…’: Cressida Connolly, obituary of Kitty Godley Guardian, 19 January 2011.
76‘I take readings from a number of positions…’: Gowing, 1982, p. 60.
77‘dead birds, hares and monkeys…’: Melly, 1997, p. 89.
78‘painstaking exactness…’: Townsend, 1976, p. 82.
78There was no hesitation: Melly, 1997, p. 70.
79‘some heads which I like better…’: Peppiatt, 2006, p. 144.
79Bacon wrote that he would be back: ibid.
80‘the whole world…’: Harrison, 2005, p. 81.
81‘newspaper photographs and clippings…’: ibid., p. 83.
81‘people walking over them and crumpling them…’: ibid., p. 81.
82‘slightly out of focus…’: ibid., p. 59.
82‘as a snail leaves its slime…’: quoted in Peppiatt, 2006, p. 65.
82‘liquid whitish accents…’: Harrison, 2005, p. 104.
85‘impervious to interpretation…’: ibid., p. 56.
86‘there was an aspect of his work…’: Albert Hunter, quoted in Peppiatt, 2006, p. 64.
86‘I can’t explain my art…’: Gruen, 1991, p. 8.
Chapter 6
88‘The church was bombed…’: Blow, National Life Stories: Part 3.
91The Daily Mail was furious: for the following quotations, and the Gear affair, see Massey, 1995, pp. 14–17.
93‘Here’s something to make you laugh, May’: Wilson, 2005, p. 156.
94Gowing met up with Kenneth Clark: Walker, 2016, p. 56.
96Paula Rego, a young student at the Slade: Eastham & Graham, 2011.
96On 26 October 1950: Townsend, 1976, p. 90.
97A few months later: Walker, 2016, pp. 57–58.
98One was Kenneth Martin: Garlake, 1998, p. 104.
100‘Very few artists know what…’: Caiger-Smith, 1993, p. 10.
101‘the sort of so-called non-figurative painting…’: ibid., note to cat. 15.
101Around that time, he defined his works: ibid.
103:‘capable of carrying not only himself…’: see Alloway, 1954, p. 30.
103The nine divided: see Alloway, 1954, passim.
104‘very often in the course of working…’: Garlake, 1998, p. 205.
104He wrote to Terry Frost: ibid., note to cat. 11.
106Pasmore was characteristically quixotic: Moffat, 2014.
Chapter 7
108In a later interview with the American critic: Gruen, 1991, pp. 6–7.
108While struggling to explain to David Sylvester: Sylvester, 1975, p. 182.
108Bacon had said much the same earlier: ibid., p. 48.
111With Lacy, Bacon experienced: see Peppiatt, 2015, pp. 7
4-75, also for following quotations.
111According to John Richardson: Richardson, 2009.
111On another occasion: ibid.
112As Bacon later reflected, ‘People say…’: Peppiatt, 2015, p. 74.
113‘He was not secretive…’: and following quotations, Albert Hunter, quoted in Peppiatt, 2006, p. 64.
114‘I had dinner with [Francis Bacon] nearly every night…’: Peppiatt, 1996, p, 193.
114There is at least one account of Bacon and Freud getting into a fight: Luke, 1991, p. 183.
114He would generally go round to Bacon’s studio: Smee, p. 16.
114Posing for him: Wishart, 1977, p. 36.
117First he defined himself: Freud, 1954, p. 23.
118‘Since the model he so faithfully…’: ibid., p. 26.
120Even so, Diamond was ‘slightly miffed’: Gayford, 1993, p. 24.
120‘My work is purely autobiographical…’: Russell, 1974, p. 13.
120‘it can only be like a travel book’: Gowing, 1982, p. 56.
121‘could he portray…’: Russell, 1974, p. 27.
121This represented the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill: see Berthoud, 1982, pp. 183–200.
122On occasion Sutherland used photography: ibid., p. 189.
122Years later, on the last occasion: Farson, 1988, p. 172. It seems from this account that the incident occurred in the 1960s.
122Strangely, Lucian Freud was eventually commissioned: see Smee, 2006, pp. 22–23.
122‘my eyes were completely going mad’: Feaver, 2002, p. 27.
122‘He talked about packing a lot of things… ’: ibid., p. 28.
123It was after this, in 1959, that Freud was approached by Time magazine: for his account of this, see Smee, 2006, pp. 22–23.
Chapter 8
125‘I remember the extraordinary effect…’: Lessore, 1986, p. 55.
127‘awful but also rather beautiful’: Higgins, 2013.
127‘like the moon’s capital…’: Bowen, 1945, p. 173.
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