by William Boyd
Staring at square yards of these paintings two comparisons came to mind as I tried to register and evaluate their effect. First of all they seemed to possess the properties of tapestries, rather than paintings. The absence of depth of field is the clearest similarity, and the flatness of the visual plane and the diminished or non-existent perspective are very tapestry-like. So too is what might be termed the picture’s dogged egalitarianism. The very top right hand corner of Christ Delivered to the People—a branch of a tree, a wall, a neutral section of street—is rendered with precisely the same care and attention, sharpness of focus and concentration on detail as is Christ’s face! This is the democratic deadening effect of tapestry, one stitch enjoying exactly the same status as another, but is not normally a consequence of painting, except in one genre of it—which brings me to the second comparison—namely hyperreal-ism. One is hugely impressed, full of admiration, before these large Spencer pictures, almost stunned by these vast testimonials to his prodigious diligence and tirelessness, in much the same way as one is amazed how this or that airbrush-wielding hyperrealist has captured every gleam and warped reflection, every twinkle and dent, in the chrome innards of a Harley Davidson. Look at the Waking Up panel of the Port Glasgow Resurrection. Each leaf is there, every blade of grass, every petal on the primroses (yet the babies have the individuality of lumps of dough, strangely). But this sedulous industry—like hyperrealism—is in the end a facile talent, indicative more of a certain hyper-patient cast of mind than of genuine artistry or genius. And nowhere is this better illustrated than in the huge unfinished canvas (twenty feet by six feet) The Apotheosis of Hilda.
Perhaps “barely started” would be a more apt description than “unfinished,” as only the top left hand corner is actually painted, approximately one twelfth of the canvas. The rest is ready for painting, and in a way that is highly revealing of Spencer’s methods. In fact the expanse of white canvas is more like a sheet from a giant sketch pad: most of the rest of the composition has been drawn on the surface in pencil, but drawn in the most elaborate detail—even the fishnet mesh of Hilda’s gloves has been cross-hatched in. And what has actually been completed—and this is not meant to sound flippant—forcibly reminds one of an abandoned “paint-by-numbers” exercise. Looking at the painted twelfth of the picture, it is immediately obvious that the completed work would have been the Apotheosis of Detail also. Spencer has painted virtually every pebble on the ground, every brick in a wall. Here and there the white circle of an untreated face waits for later attention. The effect of so much effort is disorientating: clearly on paintings of this scale this kind of method, or something similar, has to be employed simply to get proportions right and composition exact, but it has to be said that there is something soullessly mechanical about this laboured depiction of minutiae: leaf by leaf, pattern by pattern, stitch by stitch it goes, a monstrous pseudo-Gobelin, the triumph of pertinacity over afflatus.
What is in the end so exasperating (and I think that one word sums up the complexity of response this exhibition stimulates in me) is that counter-examples abound, and not just in the rapt carnality of the Patricia Chapel. There is a portrait of Hilda Spencer—Seated Nude—which is equally fine. As with the Patrica Preece portraits, it exhibits a sensitivity to the potential and resources of oil paint far superior to anything in the large allegories or religious paintings, not just in the freedom with which the paint is applied, or reproduction of subtle skin tones, but also an awareness of how impasto and wash, highlight and shadow, of overt brushmark set beside absolute smoothness can simulate the contours of the body and properties of skin with spectacular success. The effect of the bulge of muscle over bone on Hilda’s right shoulder is achieved by thick strokes of pale coral set just below the smooth cream highlights where the skin is stretched over the deltoid. The axillary folds above her breast are painted slate grey, almost scumbled, with the white weave of the canvas allowed to show through as highlights. Over and above this technical mastery the wholly uncompromising honesty of the painter’s eye is again very powerful. It is the antithesis of idealization, but derives its power precisely from that ruthlessness. The flesh tones of the face are markedly darker than the hues of the torso, suiting the slight frown on Hilda’s brow and the odd, troubled, askance nature of her gaze. One needs no specialized biographical information to recognize this as a great picture; all its ingredients fuse superbly. As they do in the portraits of the Patricia Chapel and as they do, for example, in the three marvellous self-portraits of 1914, 1936 and 1959.
By emphasizing the achievements of these portraits over the religious and allegorical paintings I do not wish to denigrate work that we might normally and unreflectingly regard as quintessential Stanley Spencer. But the division exists, and the artistry and spirit that infuse the former seem only marginally present in the latter. Furthermore the allegories and religious paintings are heavily encoded, replete with possible interpretations. Some of them have a more public dimension—great religious themes—others remain irreducibly private. From this stem further ambiguities and problems of response. Standing before a picture that is manifestly the product of a personality at once so eccentric and idiosyncratic can be unsatisfying: one’s own emotional and intellectual comprehension seems inadequate or nugatory. What is one to make of The Chest of Drawers, for example? A large woman looms over a small man rummaging in the bottom drawer of a chest. Superficially it seems to me badly painted—textureless, hurried, faux naïf—and as for its content I suppose it might pass muster as a private joke or whimsical jeu d’esprit. However, set in the full context of Spencer’s life, buttressed and explicated by what we know of his personal history and his private needs and desires, from information gleaned from his letters and journals, the painting takes on a different significance and is judged by altogether different standards. But this is to make the picture an adjunct to autobiography—as a work of art it still seems to me deficient. By this I don’t want to imply that great or good art must necessarily have an accessible public dimension—I am not insisting that the cryptic and the obscure exclude themselves from evaluation by their very nature. On the contrary, the truly private import of, say, the Leg of Mutton Nude will probably remain for ever buried. But the picture exists for us in a way that, for example, The Lovers or A Village in Heaven don’t. If we are denied—or are uncertain of—the significance of the images in a picture then the only way we can respond to it is either through some purely private correspondence—a fortuitous subjective recognition—or else by traditional methods of evaluation. This is the case with many of Spencer’s pictures, and they suffer thereby. The same disadvantage besets the religious paintings. Suffused as they are with Spencer’s highly individual sacramental vision, the odds on chiming with it naturally and spontaneously are small. Hence the almost inevitable accusations of whimsy (the British disease) or facetiousness. No such occlusion conditions our response to the portraits.
Not everyone would agree with Frank Auerbach’s conviction that the only lasting and valid test of an artist’s worth is how he or she treats the posed human figure. Mind you, they might not agree because it is such an exacting yardstick, before which many a lesser or vainglorious talent has its inadequacies brutally exposed. However, in a slightly wider context the assertion does have a real bearing on Spencer and his corpus of work. The great problem for artists of narrative, allegorical, ideological or symbolic subjects is that, more often than not, it is the story, the allegory, the politics, or the symbol itself, which fascinate, far more than the medium through which they are rendered. Form, as the cliché has it, is sacrificed to content. Hence the enduring presence of those great eternals in an artist’s repertoire—the posed figure, the nude, the self-portrait, the interior, the still life, the landscape. Because the nature of the subject is so timeless, the balance between form and content remains in equilibrium. And it takes a real, not to say great, artist to raise the subject from the humdrum to the sublime.
The very nature of
the religious and allegorical sequences, the faux naïf Beatitudes, and the domestic scenes place them in a different category. Here are the products of a highly personalized and maverick imagination, in the line of William Blake and Samuel Palmer. It is their very strangeness, their self-contained and self-assured idiosyncrasy that either enchants—or not at all. But in the astonishing portraits and double portraits of himself and his wives and a handful of other pictures Spencer reveals himself as an artist of major and enduring stature. All great art is unsentimental, and this is art of an honesty that is transcendent and magisterial in its formal accomplishments.
1991
Robert Hughes
Looking at the “by the same author” list on the fly leaf of Robert Hughes’s latest book, Barcelona, published a few months ago, it is clear that we have been the happy recipients of an explosion of productivity. It began in 1987 with the expansive and masterly history of the discovery and colonization of Australia, The Fatal Shore, and has continued apace. It was followed by two monographs—one on Lucian Freud (1988) and one on Frank Auerbach (1990)—a new edition of The Shock of the New (1991), his survey of twentieth-century art, and a weighty collection of his articles, Nothing If Not Critical (1991). Six substantial publications in five years represents an output of Ackroydian prolixity, a veritable torrent of creative juices all the more impressive when one notes that, apart from The Shock of the New, the publication listed before The Fatal Shore’s appearance in 1987 was Heaven and Hell in Western Art, published in 1969. What had Hughes been doing during all those years between? The answer is: writing art criticism (and, doubtless, researching and writing The Fatal Shore). Hughes has been art critic for Time magazine since 1970; notching up a near quarter century as the art world’s most acute and uncompromising observer and interpreter. His position is pre-eminent and unchallenged: he is far and away the best art critic of his generation.
The reissue of the The Shock of the New provides a handy opportunity to reassess Hughes’s achievements. A swift random collation between the two books threw up no examples of editorial doctoring, except, as might be expected, in the final chapter, “The Future that Was,” which has been significantly altered. The first edition signed off in 1980 and, a decade and more further on, the scene had changed dramatically. Hughes’s conclusion in 1980 was gloomy, but one could detect an undertone that was cautiously upbeat. In the new edition his despair, not to say contempt, is conspicuous. That the worst excesses of the art market, with its obscene inflation of value, along with a frenzied hyping of reputation and image-mongering, have been played out in his own backyard, so to speak, probably explains Hughes’s dismay, but his savage indignation makes a potent fuel for his criticism. Hughes is an exceptionally fine writer and, as with many great critics, it is scorn and vituperation which set his pen bulging with spleen, but, in castigating the minor talents and ego-driven poseurs, he negatively defines what he regards as positive and estimable. As he excoriates the prancings and posturings of the contemporary art world, a credo emerges and, so I contend, sets standards of evaluation, creates parameters of excellence, which are very hard to refute. (Interestingly enough, his approbatory gaze has crossed the Atlantic and heavily favours figuration. The expanded final chapter makes it clear that Hughes regards certain British artists as repositories of those qualities he admires. As well as Freud and Auerbach the list includes Hockney, Hodgkin, Bacon, Kitaj and Kossoff.)
If the fundamental function of criticism is to make a value judgement, to establish a system of ranking, to say why this is good and that is mediocre, and in so doing to explain and justify why the critic believes this to be the case, then Hughes’s work over the years is as consistent and thorough as any. Of course all criticism is subjective, and of course it is just an expression of opinion, but in any argument the best arguer wins, other opinions are altered thereby and a consensus emerges. It is not set in cement, true, but broadly speaking, as a result of informed and intelligent critical discourse, standards are laid down and ideals are established which, if they are to be overturned by alternative criteria, have to be equally convincingly propounded and defended in their own right. This is the essence of the critical dance, if you like, and no one trips the light fantastic more effectively than Hughes.
Consider this statement, for example, which comes from Hughes’s terrifyingly effective critical demolition of Julian Schnabel:
Every significant artist of the last hundred years, from Seurat to Matisse, from Picasso to Mondrian, from Beckmann to de Kooning was drilled (or drilled himself) in “academic” drawing—the long tussle with the unforgiving and real motif which, in the end, proved to be the only basis on which the great formal achievements of modernism could be raised. Only in this way was the right to radical distortion within a continuous tradition earned, and its results raised above the level of improvisory play.
As a critical yardstick this seems to me unimprovable. Set this to work and see what it does for you. What winnowing! What wheat separated from chaff! Suddenly it feels like a window has been flung open in a hot and foetid room to admit a cool and vital breeze. Clear-eyed, refreshed, we can now see artist X and artist Y for what they truly are; stripped of obfuscation and meretricious jargon, they can be safely consigned to the crowded spielraum of fraudsters and hacks, no-talents and airheads. This is the function of good criticism; this is the crucial purpose of evaluation, and this is what Hughes has been doing for the last couple of decades with commendable rigour and unflagging energy.
It is not enough merely to expose failings and denigrate, even though, by extension, an alternative canon will inevitably emerge. But Hughes also writes with genuine enthusiasm and his tastes are eclectic and range throughout art history, as a glance at the contents page of Nothing If Not Critical will attest. But even in an area where you would expect his critical Geiger counter to be bleeping violently he seeks to extract whatever merit he can. The case of “Land Art”—the physical shaping of a terrain, the arrangement and manipulation of natural phenomena in situ—is instructive. Hughes writes of Complex One by Michael Heizer, a large geometrical hill of rammed earth, bookended by triangles of reinforced concrete set in the Nevada desert:
Seen in isolation on the desert floor, under the pale burning blue skin of the sky, with the low sagebrush stretching away to the sun-charred and eroded rocks of the girdling range, Complex One is a magnificent and gratuitous spectacle… Even its minatory look, suggesting a bunker or an abandoned installation, seems proper to the site—the edge of the Nevada nuclear proving grounds.
Whatever you may feel about “Land Art” as an aesthetic concept, you must admit that Hughes’s refusal to sneer at this Ozymandian gesture, and instead to try and capture what is impressive about Complex One, is admirable—and entirely successful. It helps, of course, if you can write as well as that. Intriguingly, in the 1991 edition, these lines have been subtly altered. The skin of the sky is no longer “pale” though it is still “burning blue,” and the sun-charred rocks have gone also, leaving only the “eroded girdling range.” “Le style est l’homme même”—Buffon’s old saw is very apposite when contemplating Hughes’s achievement. His style is not flowing and limpid, it has a knotted, intense quality, heavily adjectival and adverbial, with a large and precise vocabulary and a powerful forensic spin to his sentences. There is nothing evanescent or moody in Hughes’s writing. His approach reminds me of those lines of Seamus Heaney in his early poem Digging:
Between my finger and thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
There is something irreducibly Heaneyesque—its heft, its palpable physicality—about Hughes’s “digging” that his editorial pruning won’t ever disguise. In a fine and recent essay (a reprint of a lecture delivered at the New York Public Library, published in The New York Review of Books) about Robert Mapplethorpe (that, incidentally, fixes Map-plethorpe’s reputation once and for all as a modestly talented photographer), Hughes reveals that he is a
part-time carpenter. And there is in Hughes’s writing a true craftsman’s love of technique and precision. “I can make a drawer that slides … I love the tools, the smell of shavings, the rhythm of work,” Hughes says with justifiable pride, and I’ll bet he knows the difference between a haunched tenon and a double-lapped dovetail joint as well. Everything has its own name, and for a writer there is a magical pleasure to be gained in using it correctly. From a reader’s point of view one of the delights of Hughes’s criticism is in encountering just this facility. At random from The Shock of the New: the boat in the background of a Matisse seascape is “lateen rigged”; Bonnard is described sitting “quiet as an old tabby”; colours are “rose, madder, lilac, chrome yellow, viridian”; about Sullivan’s Guaranty Building in Buffalo we learn that “Sullivan underplayed his horizontals by recessing the face of the spandrels from the face of the piers.” We may not know exactly what it means, but it sounds wonderful and possesses the unmistakable frisson of authority.
Naturally, Homer nods from time to time, and Hughes, like any critic who is obliged to write about stuff he would never choose to see as a member of the public or art lover, occasionally falls back on tried and tested routines. Thus Sean Scully’s abstracts
fairly breathe deliberation and earnestness. Their light and colour relate to the Old Masters, in particular to Velázquez’s silvery greys and ochres over a dark ground. Their gravitas is real.
Sorry, no sale. But these moments are exceptionally rare, which is why they draw one up short, and, by and large, Hughes copes extremely well when writing about abstract painting. What more is there to say, really, in front of a Rothko or a Jackson Pollock other than record colour tones and the textures of the paint surface? It has always seemed to me one of the more telling and covert arguments against abstract painting that abstraction so reduces analytical discourse. The critic, the viewer, is left nearly wordless, like an amateur oenophile trying to describe the taste of a St Emilion. “Nice, blackcurranty, metallic … er …” Stand in front of a colour-field painting—however big and imposing, with however much gravitas—or a slashed Lucio Fontana, or an Yves Klein monochrome square, and try and analyse your feelings and thoughts in more than three sentences. Great art, good art, in any medium should stimulate complex responses. An impoverished vocabulary indicates, if not a corresponding shallowness, then a simplicity that somewhat vitiates its claims to be taken so seriously.