John Craxton: The Heroic Hedonist

Still Life Sailors (1980-85) Estate of John Craxton

I recently took the train to Chichester to see an excellent exhibition of the art of John Craxton. (Pallant House Gallery, until 21 April 2024)

Though born and raised in England, Craxton produced much of his work in Greece. There he portrayed an Arcadia of ordinary folk living under a hot sun, amongst olive trees and asphodels, wild cats and frolicking goats. He painted young men smoking in the morning, sleeping in the afternoon and dancing into the night. His art is full of colour, light and movement. It is a joyous celebration of life, and prompts us to consider our own attitudes to work and play.

‘As a child I enjoyed a happy, near-Bohemian home life in a large family.’

Craxton was born in London in 1922. When his father, a pianist and composer, scored his only hit - ‘Mavis,’ sung by the legendary Irish tenor John McCormack - he took his wife and six children down to Selsey on the south coast and bought a shack above the beach.

Craxton had an idyllic childhood.

‘In what now seems like a succession of endless, if not cloudless, summer days, I ran barefoot, rode ponies, shrimped at low tide, collected fossils from the Bracklesham Beds, went to the movies, carried milk from the farm (which still had a working windmill) and had family picnics on the beach.’

Craxton decided as a young boy that all he wanted was to be an artist. He attended various schools, but emerged with no qualifications. A naturally independent spirit, he didn’t fancy the discipline of formal creative training either. And so he was largely self-taught, occasionally dropping into art schools to pick up equipment and a little drawing tuition.

Boy on a Blue Chair, 1946 John Craxton

Having failed an army medical, Craxton was excused war service. Always rather charming, witty and spontaneous, he fell in with various sponsors, lovers and artists, and one patron funded a studio in St John’s Wood that he shared with Lucian Freud.

His early work featured quiet country lanes, twisted trees and dead animals; solitary souls in melancholy, menacing landscapes. During the war years he was given his first solo exhibitions in London, and was commissioned to produce book designs – a line of work that served him well for much of his life.

But Craxton was keen to get away from Britain. As a teenager he had been enchanted by the ancient Greek figurines and pottery he encountered at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Dorset. He aspired to a Mediterranean idyll.

‘The willow trees are nice and amazing here, but I would prefer an olive tree growing out of a Greek ruin.’

John Craxton by Felix H. Man
bromide print, 1940s© estate of Felix H. Man / National Portrait Gallery, London

Immediately after the hostilities ended, there were still strict restrictions on travel. So Craxton and Freud embarked on a painting expedition to the Scilly Isles, and then stowed away on a Breton fishing boat bound for France. They only got as far as Penzance. 

The following year Craxton made it to Zurich, where he met the wife of a British ambassador at dinner. She offered him a lift to Athens in a bomber she had borrowed for a curtain-buying trip. 

And so, aged 23, Craxton arrived in Greece and immediately fell under its spell. He settled first in Poros, and then Crete, and he would stay there, on and off, for the rest of his life.

‘It’s possible to be a real person – real people, real elements, real windows – real sun above all. In a life of reality my imagination really works. I feel like an émigré in London and squashed flat.’

In Greece Craxton created romantic landscapes populated by shepherds, peasants and a pipe-playing Pan. He painted the azure sea and cyan sky; bare footed young men in white cotton trousers and striped tee shirts - working, relaxing, dancing arm-in-arm. His art has vibrant colours and a gentle cubism. And by contrast with his previous work, there’s an exultant spirit, a dreamy languor, a warm conviviality. We meet a rugged herdsman, a smoking butcher, a grey-bearded octopus fisherman. Here are moustached mariners tucking into a meal of seafood and salad at the local taverna. A sign on the wall behind them warns against breaking plates.

‘The most wonderful sound in the world is of people talking over a good meal.’

Craxton was fond of saying that 'Life is more important than art.’ He relished the freedom he had on the Greek islands - to ride his Triumph Trophy motorcycle along dirt roads and mountain tracks; to talk and laugh at the dockside bars, as he drank ouzo and feasted on cuttlefish and calamari; to lead an openly gay life. 

At the time Greece was a more tolerant place than Britain - although Craxton's interest in young men in uniform did prompt the authorities to suspect he was spying. When homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK in 1967, he sent the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, a picture.

As well as painting, Craxton designed book jackets for the travel writer Paddy Leigh Fermor; and created stage sets for Frederick Ashton at the Royal Ballet. But he was not particularly industrious. His friends joked that he suffered from ‘procraxtonation.’

Pastoral for PW John Craxton

Craxton suggests that a creative life need not be fuelled by anxiety and pain. It doesn’t have to be all about struggle and denial. Rather we can choose to follow our dreams; pursue our passions; seek out the sun. 

Craxton, who was made a British honorary consul in Crete, was never concerned by artistic fashion or the opinions of the establishment. He carried on painting in his own individual style into his later years, and he rode his motorbike until nearly 80. When he died aged 87, his ashes were scattered in Chania harbour. 

His biographer Ian Collins described him as ‘a heroic hedonist.’

 
'My life, my life, my life, my life in the sunshine.
Everybody loves the sunshine.
Sunshine, everybody loves the sunshine.
Sunshine, folks get down in the sunshine.
Sunshine, folks get 'round in the sunshine.
Just bees and things and flowers.
My life, my life, my life, my life in the sunshine.
Everybody loves the sunshine.
Feel, what I feel, when I feel, what I feel,
When I'm feeling, in the sunshine.
Do what I do, when I do, what I do,
When I'm doing, in the sunshine.
Sunshine, everybody loves the sunshine.'

Roy Ayers, 'Everybody Loves The Sunshine' 

No. 453

Philip Guston’s Art of Anxiety: Not Inventing, But Revealing

Dawn (1970), Philip Guston, oil on canvas. Glenstone Museum, Maryland

‘Well, it could be all of us. We’re all hoods.’
Philip Guston

I recently visited a fine exhibition of the work of Philip Guston. (Tate Modern, London, until 25 February)

Guston was a fiercely political artist, raging at injustices he saw all around him. He articulated his anger and anxiety through narrative murals and allegorical paintings, through abstract works and depictions of dark cartoonish nightmares. He was a restless soul who believed the role of the artist was not to invent fictions, but to reveal truths. He pleads with us to care, and prompts us to reflect on the enemy within – within our society and within ourselves.

‘I feel that I have not invented so much as revealed in a coded way, something that already existed.’

He was born Phillip Goldstein in Montreal in 1913, the youngest of seven children. His Jewish parents had fled persecution in present-day Ukraine. In 1922 the family moved to Los Angeles, where, struggling to make ends meet, his father, a scrap collector, hanged himself in the shed - and 10 year old Phillip found the body. 

Philip Guston in New York, in 1952 Martha Holmes/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images

As a child Goldstein was interested in cartoons and Renaissance art. At 14 he began painting, and enrolled in the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School where he met Jackson Pollock, who became a life-long friend.

‘I grew up politically in the thirties and I was actively involved in militant movements and so on, as a lot of artists were… I think there was a sense of being part of a change, or possible change.’

Goldstein became politically active as the United States saw the rise of racism and antisemitism; and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. He joined a group of artists creating large-scale narrative murals supporting workers’ rights and resistance to fascism and oppression. 

'Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.’

In 1935, at 22, Goldstein moved to New York where, concerned about the climate of antisemitism, he changed his name to Philip Guston. He was deeply affected by the war in Europe and the Holocaust. And so he turned to his easel and painted the bombing of Guernica; children playing and fighting in ruined townscapes; haunted camp inmates.

‘That’s the only reason to be an artist… to bear witness.’

Martial Memory Philip Guston, 1941, Oil on Canvas

In the late 1940s, suffering a crisis of confidence, Guston destroyed everything he’d been working on. Perhaps he felt figurative painting could not do justice to the horrors that had so recently taken place.  

‘I began to feel that I could really learn, investigate, by losing a lot of what I knew.’

He decided to change course, and immersed himself in New York’s emerging Abstract Expressionist scene, hanging out with Rothko, de Kooning and Kline. 

‘The trouble with recognisable art is that it excludes too much. I want my work to include more. And ‘more’ also comprises one’s doubts about the object, plus the problem, the dilemma, of recognising it.’

Standing close to the canvas, Guston painted forms coming into existence – perhaps you can detect a body or a head - using gentle, complementary colours. Critics dubbed him an ‘abstract impressionist.’ His favourite shade was cadmium red, and it would continue to feature strongly in his work for the rest of his career. 

‘I like pastrami. I just like it. I couldn’t tell you why.’

Beggar's joys, Philip Guston, 1954–1955 oil on canvas

In the late ‘60s Guston was deeply moved by the Vietnam War and the political upheaval in the United States. 

‘The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?’

Feeling that his art had to make more overt political statements, Guston made a dramatic return to figurative work.

‘The hell with it. I just wanted to draw solid stuff.’

He had always liked comics, and his new images drew on George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. He painted cartoonish, blood-spattered Klan figures driving around town in a childish car, pointing at the sights, the legs of a man projecting from the boot. He depicted similar hoods relaxing at home with a cigarette by the window; in the courtroom, at the office and drawn on blackboards - suggesting they were part of the curriculum.

'Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.’

Where previously Guston had shown Klansmen conspiring, in the act of racial assault, here they were engaged in the mundane activities of everyday life. It was as if he was saying: evil is all around us; it is institutional, systemic - in our courts and schools and on our streets; it is hiding in plain sight.

‘My attempt was really not… to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me… I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and plot?’

Most striking among these works was a picture of a hooded artist at work in the studio, painting himself. 

‘I perceive myself behind the hood.’

The Studio, Philip Guston, 1969 Oil on canvas

Guston implies that we are all complicit in the injustices we see around us. We carry with us our own prejudices and partialities; our unconscious biases; our inertia and failure to act. We should turn our critical faculties on ourselves.

'There is another man within me that’s angry with me.’
Thomas Browne

Guston presented his startling new work at the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1970. But the show was not a success and he only sold one painting. Critics were hugely disappointed that he had deserted the abstract cause, and he lost friends as a result. 

‘There is nothing to do now, but paint my life; my dreams, surroundings, predicament, desperation, [my wife] Musa – love, need.’

Depressed at the response, Guston turned to painting strange dreamscapes populated by objects that meant something to him – mental junk that he called ‘crapola.’ Repeatedly he depicted cigarettes, irons, clocks and steaming kettles; clocks, blinds and bare bulbs; sinister dangling light-pulls. And everywhere there were old shoes and severed legs - echoes of the Holocaust.

'The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.’

In 1973 Guston painted himself: pastrami-pink, indolent, smoking in bed with a plate of ketchupped chips on his chest and a stack of shoes at his side. There’s a bare light bulb and a light-pull. His paintbrushes sit unused. It’s a desolate image. 

Interviewer: Do you think of yourself as kind of pessimistic?

Guston: I don’t think it’s pessimistic. I think it’s doomed.

In 1980 Guston died of a heart attack, in Woodstock, New York. He was 66.

Smoking, Eating . Philip Guston (1973). Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam/The Estate of Philip Guston

Guston was clearly a melancholy figure. But he demonstrated that, even at our lowest ebb, we can find some solace in art. He teaches us to be restless; to embrace radical change when we’re running out of steam; to see the enemy within; and to turn our critical judgement on ourselves. 

‘Probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change.’

'People just ain't no good,
I think that's well understood.
You can see it everywhere you look,
People just ain't no good.

It ain't that in their hearts they're bad.
They can comfort you, some even try.
They nurse you when you're ill of health,
They bury you when you go and die.
It ain't that in their hearts they're bad.
They'll stick by you if they could.
Ah, but that's just bullshit, baby.
People just ain't no good.

People they ain't no good.
People they ain't no good.
People they ain't no good at all.’

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds,'People Ain't No Good’ (N Cave)

No. 445

Manet, Baudelaire and the Flaneur Strategist

Manet, ‘Music in the Tuileries’ 

‘Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent - that half of art of which the other is eternal and immutable.’
Charles Baudelaire

Édouard Manet painted the vibrant modern world that was emerging around him in mid-nineteenth century Paris. Working in his own simple, direct style he created a bridge between Realism and Impressionism, and he is considered by many to have been the first modern artist. Some also think he was an archetype for Baudelaire’s ‘flaneur’: a debonair, detached onlooker, wandering the metropolis making acute observations on contemporary life.

Manet prompts us to reflect on our own engagement with change, culture and the city.

'Every new painting is like throwing myself into the water without knowing how to swim.’
Édouard Manet

Manet was born in Paris in 1832, into an affluent middle-class family. His father Auguste, a judge, wanted his son to follow him into the law. Then, when the young Édouard struggled at school, he suggested a maritime career. But a voyage to Rio de Janeiro culminated in failed Navy exams. Finally Auguste relented and allowed his son to pursue his long-held ambition to train as an artist. 

Whilst Manet was a great admirer of the Old Masters, particularly the Spanish School, he was not fond of the Romantic art that dominated French painting at his time. Religious, historical and moral themes seemed less relevant to him than the Realism recently pioneered by Gustave Courbet.

Manet’s inclination towards Realism may have been inspired by the phenomenal structural and social change that was going on around him in his home town. France had been in constant upheaval since the revolution of 1789. When in 1848 Napoleon III became Emperor, he set out to transform Paris from a cramped medieval city into a vibrant modern capital. The Emperor commissioned Georges-Eugène Haussmann to carry out a massive urban renewal programme - demolishing existing streets to create space for a network of interconnecting boulevards, lined with cafes, restaurants and theatres; for new parks and railway stations; for gaslight and improved sanitation.

'I paint what I see and not what others like to see.’

Édouard Manet

Portrait of Charles Baudelaire in Profile by Edouard Manet

Around 1855 Manet became close friends with the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire. Each day they would stroll together through the new boulevards and parks of Paris, discussing the emerging industrial age, the thrill of modern city life and the responsibility of the artist to depict it.

In his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (published in Le Figaro in 1863) Baudelaire celebrated the work of Constantin Guys, the  war correspondent, water colourist and illustrator. In particular he drew attention to Guys’ mastery of the fleeting moment; of passing fashion; of the here and now.

'He has sought, everywhere, the passing beauty of present-day life, the fleeting character of that which the reader has allowed us to term modernity. Often bizarre, violent, excessive, but always poetic, he has succeeded in concentrating, in his drawings, the flavour, be it bitter or heady, of the wine of Life.'
Charles Baudelaire

In the same essay Baudelaire also described the flâneur, the artist-poet of the modern metropolis.

'The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world... The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family…The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.'
Charles Baudelaire

Manet shared Baudelaire’s enthusiasm for realism, modernity and the city (though he articulated his passion with fewer words).

'One must be of one's time and paint what one sees.’
Édouard Manet

His 1862 work ‘Music in the Tuileries’ presented contemporary Paris at leisure. We see a crowd of smartly dressed dignitaries, intellectuals and socialites, seated, standing and promenading under the chestnut trees. They rejoice in their fashionable clothing, in seeing and being seen. 

We must assume from the title that a concert is taking place, but we can see no orchestra. Manet painted the assembly with loose strokes of the brush, distributing the figures across the picture as if in a frieze, with no obvious focal point. Most of the faces are just a blur. This is a brief passing moment; a story half told. 

In amongst the throng in ‘Music in the Tuileries’ we can identify the painter’s brother Eugène, along with other family members and friends - including the musician Jacques Offenbach, the artist Henri Fantin-Latour and Baudelaire. Manet himself stands at the far left of the picture, impeccably dressed and holding a cane, a participant in the scene, but also slightly detached from it. 

Edouard Manet - Le Chemin de fer (The Railway)

'It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.’
Édouard Manet

Baudelaire’s description of the flaneur and Manet’s evocation of it may still resonate with us today. 

We can imagine the Flaneur Strategist: a wandering observer, immersed in contemporary urban life. Someone who engages in culture and change; celebrates the new, the innovative and the fashionable. And yet also stands to one side – watching, witnessing, taking notes – alone in the crowd. 

But the concept of the Flaneur Strategist also poses a challenge. With new technology we increasingly hide behind screens, pods, buds and beats. With maturity and success there is a tendency to withdraw; to cocoon ourselves in comforts. We retreat to the country, to bigger houses and better cars; to our own private bubbles. 

If we want to sustain our careers over the longer term, we would do well to stay in touch with ordinary people; with the rhythm of the city, the clamour of the crowd, the commotion of change – participating in culture, reviewing it from the inside, not the outside.

‘Genius is childhood recovered at will.’
Charles Baudelaire

When it was first exhibited ‘Music in the Tuileries’ was poorly received – by both journalists and the general public. They were uncomfortable with Manet’s contemporary subject matter, his unusual composition and loose technique. Although the artist was fiercely independent, he was always sensitive to criticism.

Édouard Manet - Un bar aux Folies Bergère

'The attacks of which I have been the object have broken the spring of life in me... People don't realize what it feels like to be constantly insulted.’
Édouard Manet

Nonetheless, Manet persevered. ‘Music in the Tuileries’ was followed by more masterpieces: 'Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe', ‘Olympia’, 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère;' by vital pictures of social events, and street and café scenes; by enigmatic portraits of fashionable people. He became the quintessential artist of the contemporary city; and something of a father figure to the Impressionists - socialising with them in city cafes and offering advice.

What we do not know is whether Baudelaire approved of Manet’s work. The writer remained curiously silent about his friend’s output. Perhaps Manet was not quite ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ that he had in mind.

 
'Some time,
Great times,
Troubled time.
Fire for the times,
Ringing out footsteps,
Calling out steel-heels.
Promised land.
Great times in commotion.
Here comes every day,
It only lasts an hour,
Unhappy the land that has no heroes,
No! Unhappy the land that needs heroes.’

Simple Minds, '20th Century Promised Land' (B Mcgee / C Burchill / D Forbes / J Kerr / M Macneil)

No. 441

Edward Hopper: The Lonely City

Edward Hopper - Automat (1927)

'All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.’
Edward Hopper

I recently watched an insightful documentary about the artist Edward Hopper. (‘Hopper: An American Love Story’ (2022) by Phil Grabsky)

Hopper painted beguiling pictures of ordinary folk and everyday lives - individuals lost in thought; groups of people, each isolated and remote; private dramas played out in public places. He created a brooding world of alienation and ennui, and distilled a truth about the modern urban experience: that we can be living and working in a vibrant, bustling city, surrounded by entertainment, community and opportunity – and yet still feel terribly empty and alone.

'In every artist’s development, the germ for the later work is always found in the earlier. What he once was, he always is, with slight modifications.'

Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, New York, the son of a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in an affluent, intellectual Baptist household, and from an early age he was encouraged to draw by his mother. Having enrolled at the New York School of Art and Design, he subsequently took up a career in commercial illustration, a job he detested.

‘Well, illustration really didn’t interest me. I was forced into it by an effort to make some money, that’s all.’ 

Edward Hopper - Office At Night (1940)

In his early 20s Hopper made three trips to Paris, where he pursued his studies in literature, language, architecture and art. Naturally conservative, while in the French capital he avoided the avant-garde. He was a tall, shy, awkward young man, whose first romantic encounters were overwrought and frustrating. In 1910 he returned to the United States, and thereafter never left.

'I am very much interested in light, and particularly sunlight, trying to paint sunlight without eliminating the form under it, if I can.'

From the outset Hopper was fascinated by light and shadow, and he often painted urban and architectural scenes - stairways and window frames; porticos and pavements; turrets, towers and mansard roofs. His city pictures were sparsely populated, or devoid of people entirely. They had an eerie stillness.

Hopper’s early work was poorly received, rarely exhibited and seldom sold.  He remained on the margins for many years. This was all to change in 1923, when, on a summer painting trip in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the 41 year old encountered Josephine Nivison, whom he had known at art school. She was his opposite - short, talkative and sociable - and she set about taking this intense, introverted man in hand.

Nivison persuaded the Brooklyn Museum to include some of Hopper’s work alongside her own in a forthcoming show. One picture was purchased by the museum for $100, and from that point on he was set fair. 

Hopper and Nivison married in 1924 and settled into his Washington Square apartment in Greenwich Village, where they resided for the rest of their days. He was at last able to give up his job as an illustrator.

'The only real influence I've ever had is myself.’

Edward Hopper - Room in New York, 1932.

Hopper’s most celebrated paintings present seemingly mundane moments in the lives of ordinary people. They have a voyeuristic feel and sometimes their subjects are as if spied from a distance. (In his youth Hopper had enjoyed observing life in the streets, offices and residential buildings as he travelled by train into New York.) The viewer is invited to speculate: Who are these characters? What are they thinking about? What is really going on here? 

A bald fellow in a white shirt with sleeve garters sits on the sidewalk smoking a cigar, absorbed in his own private world. A middle-aged man methodically rakes the lawn of the garden adjoining his clapboard house. It’s 11-00AM and a woman with long dark hair leans forward in her armchair to stare out of the apartment window. She is naked but for a pair of flats. At the automat a lady in a cloche hat and jade green coat concentrates on her coffee. A woman in a pink slip perches on her bed and soaks up the morning sun. A pensive female usher, in smart blue uniform, leans against the wall of the movie theatre, her blond hair illuminated by a side lamp. 

There’s a cinematic quality to Hopper’s work. No surprise perhaps as he and Nivison often took trips out together to the movies or the theatre.

'When I don't feel in the mood for painting I go to the movies for a week or more. I go on a regular movie binge!'

When Hopper paints more than one subject, the characters rarely interact, touch or look at each other. We see them assembling in the hotel lobby, dining at the restaurant, reading on a train. They are together, but apart. An executive works at his desk, while nearby his assistant silently gets on with her filing. Three customers sit at the cherry-wood counter of a diner. Drinking coffee, eating a sandwich, smoking a cigarette. Each seems preoccupied. A smartly dressed couple relax at home. He reads the paper intently, she half-heartedly plays a few notes on the piano. 

There’s a melancholy sense of disappointment in these images; of boredom and bewilderment. What has happened? How did I get here? Is this it?

'Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.’

Edward Hopper - Self-Portrait (1925–1930)

In the mid-1930s Hopper and Nivison built a summer-house in South Truro on Cape Cod and they went on field trips for fresh material in their 1925 Dodge. They had a troubled, but enduring marriage. She subordinated her career to his, managing his appointments and sharing his reclusive life-style. He was generally withdrawn and aloof, and was rather dismissive of her art. He nonetheless used her as the model for all his female characters - just changing the faces.

Hopper was a slow, meticulous painter and he made many compositional sketches before he was comfortable with a scenario. His output could be as low as two pictures a year.

‘One good picture is worth a thousand inferior ones.’

He didn’t like interviews and he avoided explaining his work.

‘The whole answer is there on the canvas. If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.’

Once, when asked what his artistic objective was, he simply replied:

‘I’m after me.’

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this silent, secretive, introspective man was presenting us with his own sense of alienation and isolation; his own interior sadness.

'So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect. But these are things for the psychologist to untangle.'

Edward Hopper - New York Movie (1939)

It struck me that in the world of work we make many assumptions about our colleagues’ wellbeing and state of mind. We imagine that - because ours is a youthful, vigorous, convivial industry; because the city is such a dynamic, inspiring, populous place – our fellow employees are fulfilled and satisfied, content and connected. We put on parties, inductions and talks to fuel their enthusiasms. We send upbeat missives and promote unifying values. We celebrate success. But we too often fail to understand that many of our colleagues feel remote and detached. They are lost in the lonely city.

'I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.'

Hopper died in his Washington Square studio in 1967. Nivison passed away ten months later. One of his last paintings simply presented sunlight and shadow falling across an empty room.

'Mother, I tried, please believe me.
I'm doing the best that I can.
I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through,
I'm ashamed of the person I am.
Isolation, isolation, isolation.’
Joy Division, ‘Isolation’ (S Morris / I Curtis / B Sumner / P Hook)

No. 435

Gwen John’s Interior Lives: Seeing People As They Are, Not As We Would Want Them To Be

Gwen John, The Convalescent 1920-23

'If it isn’t right, take it out!’

I recently visited an excellent exhibition of the work of artist Gwen John. (‘Art and Life in London and Paris’ is at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 8 October.)

John painted pensive women in austere rooms, in soft light and closely related colours. Her portraits have a haunting stillness. They capture her sitters somber, at ease, in repose. Perhaps we see something of their true selves, their interior lives.

‘I may never have anything to express, except this desire for a more interior life.'

Born in Haverfordwest, Wales in 1876, and raised in Tenby, John was the daughter of a dour solicitor and a frail, artistic mother who died when Gwen was 8. Educated by governesses, she studied at the Slade in London, the only art school in Britain that accepted female students at the time.

In 1904 John settled in Paris, finding work as an artist’s model and falling in love with the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Six years later she moved to the suburb of Meudon to be close to him. She would remain there for the rest of her life. 

'Decide on the subject, before sleeping, for the unconscious mind.'

Young Woman in a Red Shawl. Gwen John (1876–1939)

John’s women look contained and self-possessed. Often they sit with their hands on their lap and a slight tilt of the head; with dropped shoulders and a blank expression. A young brunette holding a black cat stares into the distance. A convalescent in a plain blue dress examines a letter, a pot of tea at her side. A woman reads a book by a gingham-curtained window, relishing the seclusion. 

John created moods of quiet isolation, of fragile presence, her sitters almost blending into their surroundings. Sometimes she added chalk to her paint to enhance the muted effect.

‘People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.’

When, after a decade, John’s affair with Rodin ended, she turned to Catholicism. She painted a series of portraits of the nuns at the local convent in Meudon, including a commissioned series of the order’s founder, Mère Marie Poussepin. These works perhaps provided the ultimate test of her art. The sitters’ habits and wimples suppress their individuality, but their personalities shine through in their eyes and expressions.  

Gwen John, Mère Poussepin 
© The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Univeristy of Birmingham

‘In talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words. I don't pretend to know anybody well.’ 

From what we know of John, she was sociable and given to intense, passionate attachments, to both men and women. But she also clearly treasured solitude, as a subject for her art and as a precondition for her creative process.

‘A beautiful life is one led, perhaps, in the shadow, but ordered and regular, harmonious. I must stay in solitude to do my work.’

John began one notebook of 1912:

'Rules to Keep the World Away
Do not listen to people (more than is necessary)
Do not look at people (ditto)
Have as little intercourse with people as possible
When you have to come into contact with people, talk as little as possible
Do not look in shop windows’

For much of her life John was overshadowed by her flamboyant younger brother and fellow artist Augustus. In the exhibition there are two portraits, side-by-side, of Dorelia McNeil, Gwen’s friend and Augustus’ lover. Augustus painted her at the outset of their relationship, in 1903, with flushed cheeks and sensuous gaze, a yellow posy in her hands. In Gwen’s portrait from later that year, Dorelia, arms folded and wearing a simple black dress, looks straight at us with an expression of silent strength. 

We get a sense that, while Augustus painted the woman he wanted to see, Gwen portrayed her as she was.

There is a lesson for us all here. We carry around with us impressions of our friends and colleagues. We regard them through the prism of our own tastes, preferences, experiences and expectations. But often our assumptions do not tally with reality, and this can lead to misunderstanding, resentment and disappointment. Perhaps we should endeavour to regard our acquaintances and associates as subjects, not objects; to see people as they are, not as we would want them to be.

'I cannot imagine why my vision will have some value in the world. And yet I know it will. I think I will count because I am patient and recueilli (contemplative) in some degree.’

For much of John’s career her sole patron was an American lawyer and art collector, John Quinn. After he died in 1924 she struggled financially and her work tailed off. She stopped painting entirely around 1933 and took to gardening. 

In September 1939, as war descended on Europe, John wrote her will and travelled without any luggage to Dieppe, a town she had visited a number of times before. She collapsed in the street and died in hospital 8 days later. She was 63.

 
'Wish you gave me your number.
Wish I could call you today, just to hear a voice.
I got a long way to go,
I'm getting further away.

If I didn't know the difference, living alone would probably be OK.
It wouldn't be lonely.
I got a long way to go,
I'm getting further away.

A lot of hours to occupy, it was easy when I didn't know you yet.
Things I'd have to forget.
But I better be quiet now.
I'm tired of wasting my breath,
Carrying on and getting upset.'

Elliott Smith, 'Better Be Quiet Now'

No.431

Berthe Morisot: ‘Wanting to Capture the Smallest Thing’

Berthe Morisot - Young Woman Watering a Shrub

'It is important to express oneself... provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.’
Berthe Morisot

I recently attended an exhibition of the work of Berthe Morisot. ('Shaping Impressionism' is at The Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until 10 September.)

Morisot was a pioneer, a founding member of the Impressionist movement. Constrained from painting in public, she created works of private reflection and quiet calm. She teaches us to treasure brief moments and small gestures, stillness and restraint.

‘My ambition was limited to wanting to capture something of what goes by, just something, the smallest thing.’

Morisot was born into an affluent family in Bourges, France in 1841. Her father was a civic administrator, her mother was related to the Rococo painter Fragonard. Since the art schools of the time were closed to female students, she was taught privately by tutors who included the landscape painter Corot. Copying works in the Louvre, always chaperoned, she met Renoir and Fantin-Latour; Degas, Manet and Monet, and became part of a lively artistic set. Manet painted her portrait on at least 11 occasions, transfixed by her intense gaze, her dark hair, eyes and dress. 

'Dreams are life itself – and dreams are more true than reality; in them we behave as our true selves – if we have a soul it is there.’

In 1864 Morisot began submitting her work to the Paris Salon. In 1874 she married Manet’s brother Eugène and participated in the first Impressionist exhibition. She went on to exhibit at all the subsequent Impressionist shows, except that of 1878, when she was recovering from the birth of her daughter, Julie. 

'Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.’

Berthe Morisot - In the Apple Tree

Whereas the male Impressionists often painted the bustling life of the city’s streets, cafes and clubs, Morisot was restricted by her class and gender to domestic scenes. Her work captured women and children at home and in the garden: secluded private moments, intimate interior lives.

Morisot’s sister Edma waters her shrubs in her long white day dress. Two girls play at catching a goldfish in a basin. Madame Escholier regards us with her clasped hands resting on a writing desk. A young woman in a glamorous silk gown inspects herself in the mirror as she adjusts her hair, a precious instant of tranquility before the night ahead. Here’s Julie perched on the bough of an apple tree; Julie playing the mandolin; Julie toying with a pet chicken in her lap at the feet of a tired young maid. (Julie appeared in nearly 50 of Morisot’s canvases before the age of 12.)

'A love of nature is a consolation against failure.’

Morisot didn’t have a studio, painting instead in the living room and bedroom. Her brush strokes were loose and light, quick and free. One critic dubbed her ‘the angel of the incomplete’. She certainly had a knack for capturing the fleeting moment. 

Social norms may have prevented Morisot from painting grand public scenes. But she made a virtue of this constraint and was quietly resolute. 

'I do not think any man would ever treat a woman as his equal, and it is all I ask because I know my worth.’

Berthe Morisot - Woman at Her Toilette, 1875/80

She demonstrates the subtle force of the informal and intimate, the personal and private; the emotive power of ‘the smallest thing.’

In 1893 Morisot lost her husband and her hair turned grey with grief. She painted Julie dressed in mourning black, staring straight at us, a greyhound at her feet and one hand planted firmly on the sofa. 

Two years later Morisot contracted influenza while nursing her daughter. Aware that she was fading fast, she wrote a letter of farewell to the 16-year-old.

'My dearest little Julie, I love you as I lie dying; I shall still love you when I am dead. I beg of you, do not cry; this parting was inevitable. I would have liked to be with you until you married – Work hard and be good as you have always been; you have never caused me a moment's sorrow in your little life. You have beauty, good fortune; use them well. I think the best thing would be to live with your cousins in the Rue de Villejust, but I do not wish to force you to do anything… Do not cry, I love you more than I can tell you.’

Morisot died soon after. She was 54.

Berthe Morisot - Julie Manet and her Greyhound, Laertes, 1893

'A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces,
An airline ticket to romantic places,
And still my heart has wings.
These foolish things remind me of you.
A tinkling piano in the next apartment,
Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant,
A fair ground's painted swings.
These foolish things remind me of you.
You came, you saw, you conquered me.
When you did that to me,
I knew somehow this had to be.
The winds of March that make my heart a dancer
A telephone that rings, but who's to answer?
Oh, how the ghost of you clings!
These foolish things remind me of you.’

Ella Fitzgerald, 'These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)’ (H Link / H Marvell / J Strachey)

No. 417

The Plump Roman General: Recognizing the Enduring Power of Show and Tell

Winslow Homer - The Country School
Oil on canvas , 1871

‘Why did the Roman Republic ultimately fall, Mr Carroll?’

My venerable Tutor was a kindly soul, but she had a sharp mind and an intense gaze. I shifted nervously in my seat.

‘Well, I think it was fairly complicated. An ever expanding empire, cheap foreign labour, lack of land reform, increasing social inequality, restless veterans…Erm…’

‘Well, yes, all of those things, Mr Carroll. But what fundamentally was at the heart of the decline?’

‘There was also the in-fighting amongst the ruling elite, crime and corruption, opportunistic populists, private armies…’

With a sigh the Tutor reached for a dusty tome and opened it on a picture of an ancient Roman statue. It was of a rather portly, bald man in uniform, sitting on what I imagined was a resentful horse.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t recognize him,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t matter. He was a little known Consul in the late Republic, who went on to lead the Rhine army. What do you see?’

‘I don’t know. He does look quite plump. Not very military.’

‘Exactly. The Roman Republic and its ruling classes had grown flabby – physically, mentally, functionally, spiritually. They were rotten to the core.’

Of course, today we may regard the Tutor’s remark as somewhat lookist. Nonetheless, the point she was making stayed with me. I think I found it compelling because it was so simple and visual.

'The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.’
Marcus Aurelius

I read recently (The Guardian, ‘Cool Leaf’, 14 November, 2022) that chimpanzees sometimes present each other with an object with no other reason than to share their interest in it.

Researchers at the University of York studying the Ngogo chimpanzee community in Uganda filmed an adult female grooming a leaf - plucking it, peering at it and stroking it - and then holding it out to her mother to inspect.

‘She’s not offering it for food. She doesn’t want her mum to do anything. She just wants them to look at it together, and be like ‘Oh, cool, nice!’’
Prof Katie Slocombe (co-author) 

In another random perusal of the papers, I came across an article about children’s first words (The Times, ‘Baby’s First Words?’, 2 January, 2023). Researchers at Cornell University have established that, after ‘mama,’ babies’ first meaningful utterances across many different cultures tend to be ‘this’ and ‘that.’ (‘Dad’ comes further down the list.) Early use of such demonstratives indicates that they are eager to share attention. Look at this! Look at that!

To my mind these studies confirm that there is something primal and powerful in the age-old teaching method of Show and Tell: the practice of showing something to an audience and describing it to them. Typically this classroom activity is used to help young children develop presentational and storytelling abilities. The kids describe an item that means something to them. They explain why it’s important. And they thereby learn the fundamentals of communicating to a larger group.

So often in the world of work we present arguments in intricate detail and arcane language. So often we confuse and complicate.

We would do well to remember that one of the most effective forms of communication is also one of the most straightforward: a simple visual reference that illustrates a clear, comprehensible theme. Look at this. Look at that. Show and tell!

'He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.’
Epictetus

It’s a good many years since I studied ancient history at university. Reflecting now on the demise of the Roman Republic, it’s reassuring to think that at least today we don’t have their problems…

'These are the hands that can't help reaching for you
If you're anywhere inside.
And these are the lips that can't help calling your name
In the middle of the night.
Oh, and here is the man who needs to know where you stand.
Don't you know I've done all I can, so decide.
Oh, show and tell.
It's just a game I play, when I want to say
I love you.’
Al Wilson, 'Show And Tell’ (J Fuller)

No. 404

Glyn Philpot: It’s Never Too Late to ‘Go Picasso’

‘Acrobats Waiting to Rehearse’ Glyn Philpot

Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton

I recently visited a fine exhibition of the work of artist Glyn Philpot. (‘Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit' is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 23 October.)

Philpot was a successful society portraitist who, at the age of 46, shook off convention to embrace modernism. He was a model of mid-life reinvention.

Born in Clapham in 1884, the son of a surveyor, Philpot grew up in Herne in Kent. Having studied at the Lambeth School of Art and the Académie Julian in Paris, he first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1904. 

Philpot painted the elite of his day: aristocrats, ambassadors and actors. He had a talent for making his subjects look rather elegant and refined, beautifully dressed and coolly composed. His style was influenced by the Spanish and Italian Old Masters, whom he greatly admired. 

‘I am not one of those who think we should begin by striking out methods of our own. I feel that is a gift which only comes afterwards – if it comes at all.’

Mrs Henry Mond by Glyn Philpot (1884-1937)

In 1923 Philpot was elected the youngest Royal Academician of his generation. And by the end of the ‘20s his endeavours had earned him a grand London studio on fashionable Tite Street, a chauffeur-driven car and a country house in Sussex. 

Philpot could afford to travel to France, Italy, America and North Africa, and to explore other artistic avenues beyond professional portraiture. He painted classical and biblical images; scenes from the street, the theatre and the circus. And, exceptionally for an artist at that time, he painted sensitive studies of Black subjects, never characterising his sitters as either stereotypical or subservient. 

Perhaps, as he approached his mid-40s, Philpot felt he needed a change.

In 1930 he served on a panel judging an art competition in Pittsburgh that awarded the Gold Medal to Pablo Picasso for his ‘Portrait of Olga.’

On his return from America Philpot hired a studio in Montparnasse, Paris and furnished it with chrome Bauhaus furniture. He set aside the rich colours and traditional glazes that had characterised his work to-date. Employing a cool, dry colour palette, his brushwork became loose and light, sparse and spare. He was a convert to modernism.

‘I am evolving a new way of painting to meet the new things I want to do.’

Philpot gave up the lucrative society portraiture that had made his name. Instead he embraced a broader range of subjects and themes. 

Henry Thomas, Glyn Philpot (1884–1937). Pallant House Gallery

In a mood of mystical calm, two muses stand at the tomb of a poet. A doorman, dressed smartly in red coat and white top hat, ushers his customers into the nightclub with a sideways glance. A Jamaican man sits in profile, like a Florentine prince, against a batik backcloth. A group of women in Marrakech, wrapped in their big burnous cloaks, blend into the blue and pink background - almost abstract shapes. Two male acrobats waiting to rehearse, one with his arms folded, regard us in silence.

The critics of the time, confused by Philpot’s change of direction, thought it a serious mistake. The Guardian observed that: ‘a studio in Paris among the wild men of art is disturbing to an Old-masterish painter.’  A 1932 review of a Philpot exhibition in The Scotsman was headlined:

‘Glyn Philpot ‘goes Picasso’.’

Group of Women, Marrakech. Glyn Philpot (1884–1937). Jerwood Collection

Sadly Philpot’s modernist phase did not last long. He died from a stroke in 1937. He was just 53. 

As tastes evolved and his celebrated sitters receded into history, Philpot lapsed into obscurity. Only decades later did the art establishment reappraise his work and recognise him as a key figure in British modernism.

Philpot teaches us that, whatever age we are, wherever we are in our career - if we are open to stimulus and alert to inspiration - we can still adjust our style and transform our output. We can ‘go Picasso.’ 

It’s never too late to change.

'It's never too late
For rainbows to shine,
For whispering violins
And bubbles in the wine.
Let your heart stay young and strong.
Just one note can start a song.
So don't worry about how long
You've had to wait.
It's never too late.
It's never too late.’
Tony Bennett, ‘Never Too Late’ (R Evans / J Livingston / D Rose)

No. 385

The Odd Couple: What Warhol and Basquiat Teach Us About Collaboration

Andy: We’re very different…You’re all spontaneous and wild and so deep and mystical… and I’m still a commercial illustrator really, a photographer, obsessed with the surface of things.

I recently enjoyed ‘The Collaboration’, a play by Anthony McCarten that explores the period in the mid-1980s when artists Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat worked together.

We open in a New York gallery. Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger is expressing to Warhol his concern that the output of the celebrated master of Pop Art is becoming rather familiar.

Bruno: I mean all the brand names, the icons, reinterpreting things we see or use everyday. Everything silkscreened. As great as they are, they’re expected from you now. Forgive me, but when was the last time you picked up a brush and actually painted?

The ageing Warhol has not been focusing on his work. Rather he has been hanging out at Studio 54, partying with aristocrats, models, actors and rock stars. Bischofberger proposes a collaboration with hot young talent, Basquiat.

Bruno: It might be good for you, Andy. You can learn a lot from the young.

In the next scene Bischofberger puts the idea of a collaboration to a sceptical Basquiat.

Bruno: This could be incredible for you, Jean. Your name linked, as equals, with the most famous living painter in the world.

Jean: Is he living?

At length Warhol and Basquiat are persuaded. They begin work together, hesitantly at first. 

Warhol is cool, cautious and considered. Basquiat is daring, instinctive, fluid. Warhol sets up his tracing projector machine and sketches the outline of the General Electric logo. Basquiat adds bold blocks of colour, enigmatic scrawls and a smiling figure with its arms in the air. 

As they apply themselves to the task, they discuss their differing views of art. 

Warhol explains his fascination with commerce.

Andy: One of the things I hope history will remember me for, if there’s any justice, is that I’ve broken down the walls between business and art. Business is art, it’s the best art. And art has always been business. It’s all commerce now.

Warhol also rebuts the criticism that his work lacks passion.

Andy: I am commentating. In a neutral way. No one ever gets this, but I’m trying to make art that forces you to ignore it…the same way we’re ignoring life.

Basquiat, by contrast, believes that the best art has mystical properties.

Jean: Paintings can have supernatural power if you imbue them with them. These symbols, these images. Wherever they come from, they have a power. They’re like… incantations.

He suggests that art should have meaning and purpose.

Jean: Art should disturb the comfortable…comfort the disturbed.

Inevitably, with such contrasting opinions on their craft, there are occasional flashpoints.

Andy: I make beautiful things. Carefully. Very carefully. I produce out of what I see.

Jean: ‘Produce’? You re-produce.

Nonetheless the Odd Couple work well together. Despite their differences, or perhaps because of them, they gain energy and inspiration from each other. They revel in the exchange of ideas and approaches. They enjoy the challenge. 

Eventually Warhol picks up his brush again and paints.

Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (General Electric II)
acrylic, oil pastel and silkscreen ink on canvas

Looking back on this collaboration that took place nearly 40 years ago, one can’t help but be struck by the chasm in age, career stage, style and perspective. Warhol was world famous, but stuck in a rut. Basquiat was in the ascendant, but with a lot to learn. Warhol was concerned with brands, media and fame; with surface and repetition. His work was aloof and distant. Basquiat’s art was populated by skeletons and skulls, masks and symbols. It was vibrant, dreamlike and magical.

Jean: Don’t you need a new challenge? You can’t just screenprint your life away.

Perhaps in the world of commercial creativity we should spend more time plotting irregular collaborations. Successful team alchemy is not just a matter of putting together like-minded soul mates. It is achieved by combining diverse skillsets, temperaments and outlooks; by creating the conditions for provocation and exchange, discovery and inspiration.

By the end of the play Warhol and Basquiat have produced enough paintings together to fill the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Bischofberger is satisfied. It’s time to move on.

Andy: I think we’re done. Don’t you? Let’s just say we are. That’s the great thing about contemporary art – who can fucken tell?

'We came the long way,
And I thought you knew,
It was the long way.
My darling, I thought you knew.
We came the long way.
So don't break my heart. 

We been through the desert
Where no water flows.
We've walked streets and highways
Where kung fu is afraid to go.
It was the long way.’

Junior Byles, ‘It Was a Long Way’ (W Boswell / J Byles)

No. 363

‘Trying to Trap the Fact’: The Distorted Truth of Francis Bacon

Head VI

‘We are all animals if you care to think about it. It’s just that some people are more aware of the fact than others.’
Francis Bacon

I recently visited an excellent exhibition of the work of Francis Bacon. (‘Man and Beast’ is at the Royal Academy, London until 17 April.)

It was an unsettling experience.

Bacon painted crucified carcases, snarling Furies, beast-people caught in cuboid cages; dogs, chimpanzees and owls trapped and snared, howling and baying; bullfights, bestial heads and screaming Popes; writhing, twisting, tormented lovers; butchered meat, muscle and sinew, blood and bone. 

‘We are meat, we are potential carcases.’

Bacon’s work was all physical pain and mental anguish; violence and voyeurism. He wanted to convey to us that the veneer of civilisation is thin and fragile; that we are driven by carnal impulses; that we are essentially beasts. He revealed the animal within, caught between rage and fear, in tortured isolation. His aim, he said, was to ‘unlock the valves of feeling and return the onlooker to life more violently.’

Sometimes the horror in his paintings is brought home by the presence of the everyday: of flowers, umbrellas and hats; of chaises longues and tubular steel furniture. (Bacon spent a brief period in the late 1920s as an interior designer.) This is the banality of evil.

‘Most people live a kind of veiled life and tend to disguise what they are, what they want, what they really feel.’

Fragment of a Cucifixion

Bacon’s fascination with man’s animal nature and his dark vision of life were perhaps shaped by his upbringing in County Kildare, Ireland. Born in 1909, he was the son of a retired army officer who trained horses, had a violent temper and a taste for field sports. The young Bacon suffered from chronic asthma, a condition that was triggered and amplified by contact with animals. 

‘The whole horror of life, of one thing living off another.’

No doubt Bacon was also influenced by the slaughter of World War I; by the debauchery he saw in the clubs, bars and brothels of Berlin and Paris between the wars; by his time spent as an ARP warden during the Blitz, recovering bodies from London bomb sites; by consciousness of the Holocaust and the atom bomb; by his trips to the bush in southern Africa; by his adventures in the dark alleys of Soho.

‘I have looked at books of wild animals… because those images excite me and every so often one of them may come up to me and suggest some way to use the human body.’

Bacon was also inspired by his diverse interests. He was an enthusiast for art history, admiring Michelangelo, Velazquez, Rembrandt and Goya. He treasured Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering studies of animal motion. He read anatomical texts and medical manuals, magazines of wildlife photography and books on big game hunting and bullfighting. He had a passion for Egyptology and classical literature.

‘Reading translations of Aeschylus opens up the valves of sensation for me.’

Study of a Dog 1952

Bacon channelled all this stimulus into his work. For example, his repeated representations of a primal scream were informed by Poussin’s ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ and the terror-stricken shriek of the nursemaid in Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin.’

‘I did hope one day to make the best painting of the human cry.’

I was particularly struck by the lateral leaps Bacon took from inspiration to execution. A 17th century Velasquez painting of Pope Innocent X, in all his pomp and power, becomes an expression of existential pain and panic. A barn owl in flight becomes a crucified figure. A diving pelican becomes a Fury. Two wrestlers become two lovers. 

There is a lesson for us all here. We should not expect inspiration to be literal and logical. Rather it catches us off guard, from out of left field. It creeps up on us where and when we least expect it. We often talk about creative leaps. Strategists must leap too.

At first Bacon’s work seems all contorted, twisted and warped. But then we realise that with all this distortion he is seeking to capture a brutal truth about sensation. What he is saying is crystal clear.

‘I think the very great artists were not trying to express themselves. They were trying to trap the fact.’

'I never thought that this day would ever come
When your words and your touch just struck me numb.
Oh and it's plain to see that it's dead.
The thing swims in blood and it's cold stoney dead.
It's so hard not to feel ashamed
Of the loving, living games we play
Each day.
The hardest walk you could ever take
Is the walk you take from A to B to C.’

The Jesus and Mary Chain, 'The Hardest Walk’ (J & W Reid)

No. 360