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

Sarah Lucas: ‘Everything Is Language’

Sarah Lucas. From left: Sugar, 2020; Bunny, 1997; and Cool Chick Baby, 2020

I recently visited a retrospective of the work of artist Sarah Lucas. (‘Happy Gas’ is at Tate Britain, London until 14 January.)

'My maxim would be: Do what you like… It’s not always easy to know what that is though.'

Lucas emerged as one of the key players in the Young British Art scene of the 1990s. This movement had a lot in common with advertising – the good and the bad. It was bold, immediate, funny and accessible. But it could also be vulgar, simplistic and shallow.

Lucas’ current show provides an opportunity to step back and take a broader look at her work over the Britart period and the decades that followed.

'I don’t tend to preach in my work. It’s more about having a look around at what’s going on…Very surprising when you open your eyes.’

She has spent her career considering consistent themes: sex, swearing and smoking; food and toilets; the expressiveness of ordinary things.

Sarah Lucas: Self Portrait With Fried Eggs, 1996

In the exhibition there are blown up photos of crude tabloid stories; of Lucas eating a banana and holding a huge salmon. There are naked body-casts and erect penises; a masturbating mechanism and a pair of chicken knickers. There’s also a big concrete sandwich. And each piece is given a wry, playful title.

Lucas clearly has had a fascination with smoking and mortality. A crash helmet made of fags sits on a charred armchair. Cigarettes poke out of navels and backsides. They decorate a burnt-out car, broken in two.

‘When I first started using cigarettes in art, it was because I was wondering why people are self-destructive. But it’s often destructive things that make us feel most alive.’

© Sarah Lucas, Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: © Nick Turpin

Over the years Lucas has returned again and again to her chair sculptures - which she calls her ‘Bunnies.’ Stuffing tights with shredded newspaper, kapok, cotton or wool, she created faceless female figures with writhing limbs; with multiple, saggy and lightbulb breasts. She gave them daft names - like Fat Doris, Honey Pie and Zen Bomb - and arranged them in platform shoes and kinky boots, perching on armchairs, side chairs and office chairs. They are insolent, saucy, suggestive. And seen together, they have their own distinct characters.

‘The purpose of chairs (in the world) is to accommodate the human body sitting. They can be turned to other purposes. Generally as a support for an action or object. Changing light bulbs. Propping open a door. Posing. Sex.’

Lucas encourages us to interrogate objects for their meaning. Things derive associations and resonances from their various functionalities; from their use and abuse; from their physical similarities to other forms; from their constituent materials, their ownership, history and location. Everything means something.

‘Everything is language, including objects. There’s an infinity of ‘stuff.’ How to invest any of it with meaning?’

Sarah Lucas: Is Suicide Genetic?
helmet, cigarettes, burnt-chair, cigarette packets. 1996

Of course, Lucas is coarse. You need a robust constitution to navigate her work. Nonetheless I left the exhibition reflecting on the artist’s big themes.

For all our complexity and sophistication, we are united in our basic instincts: our carnal drives and emotional impulses. These appetites can be disturbing and contradictory, uplifting and amusing; and they can often surprise.

‘It’s a paradox that happiness reminds us of sadness, and that a sad story can be uplifting, or that something magical can come about through something mundane. I suppose that, when I’m making things, I’m looking for some kind of transcendence from everyday stuff into something surprising.’

'I'd work very hard, but I'm lazy.
I can't take the pressure and it's starting to show.
In my heart you know that it pains me,
A life of leisure is no life you know.
Waking up and getting up has never been easy,
Oh, I think you should know.
Waking up and getting up has never been easy,
Oh, I think you should know.
Oh, I think you should go.
Make a cup of tea, and put a record on.’

Elastica, ‘Waking Up’ (B Duffy / D Greenfield / H Cornwell / J J Burnel / J Frischmann)

No. 447

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

Female Abstract Artists: If You Want To Change the Product, Change the Process – And If You Want To Change the Story, Change the Narrator

Helen Frankenthaler, April Mood, 1974 © 2023 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy ASOM Collection

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the work of women abstract painters from the 1940s to the early 1970s. (‘Action, Gesture, Paint’ is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London until 7 May.)

On entering the gallery, you’re greeted by Helen Frankenthaler’s ‘April Mood’, a joyous choreography of colour: royal and pale blue, purple and radiant pink, set against a base of sandstone and tangerine.

‘A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image.’
Helen Frankenthaler

There follows a selection of work by some 80 artists from all over the world. Big, bold, vibrant canvases. Audacious expressions of raw experience: joy, awe, anger and despair. Emotional responses to a world in crisis and to the beauties of nature.

'I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me - and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed.’
Joan Mitchell

These artists were liberated from the constraints of tradition and convention. As Ida Barbarigo declared, they wanted to ‘unlearn painting,’ to forget academic teaching.

I was particularly struck by the inventiveness of their working methods.

Some layered the paint on thick. Some scraped it and scratched it. Others spattered, splashed and sprayed; and liberally added dribbles and stains. Their gestures were occasionally spontaneous and occasionally controlled. Some mixed their paint with other materials: sand, sawdust, cigarette ash and cement; lacquer, chalk and carpenter’s glue. 

Work, 1958-62, by Yuki Katsura. Image: Courtesy Alice and Tom Tisch, New York © Estate of Yuki Katsura

‘My paintings are collaged bits of time from my past and present experiences.’
Wook-kyung Choi

Frankenthaler achieved her fluid, organic effects by thinning her paint and applying it to unprimed canvas. Gillian Ayres worked at speed, pouring paint straight from the can, or squirting it directly from the tube. Lee Krasner integrated into her work cut-up fragments of newspapers, burlap and discarded drawings. Yuki Katsura placed wet washi paper on painted canvas and then overpainted it. Franciszka Themerson tilted her paper so that the enamel flowed in loose, curving calligraphic forms. Janet Sobel trickled pigment from a pipette (well before Jackson Pollock adopted his celebrated ‘drip technique’). 

The exhibition repeatedly confirms a truth that pertains to any creative endeavour: if you want to change the product, change the process.

‘To me, art - colour in art – is wonderfully indulging… I don’t see why you shouldn’t be filling yourself up, making yourself happy. Enjoying yourself. Feasting on beauty. I want an art that’s going to make me feel heady, in a high flown way. I love the idea of that.’
Gillian Ayres 

Lee Krasner, Bald Eagle, 1955 (Credit: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation)

One wanders through the exhibition with a faint sense of recognition. Many of these ideas, themes and approaches are familiar to us. But, with a few exceptions, the works and the artists are not.  

The story of Abstract Expressionism, the art movement that emerged in New York in the late 1940s is classically written around titanic male figures like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. 

There were women artists on the scene, but it was a notoriously machismo culture. Corinne West painted under the name Michael West so as to disguise her gender. Elaine de Kooning signed her work with her initials to evade comparisons with her husband. Grace Hartigan became George and Lena Krasner became Lee.

'It’s quite clear I didn’t fit in. With relation to the group, if you are going to call them a group, there was not room for a woman.'
Lee Krasner 

Elaine de Kooning The Bull 1959 (1) - Whitechapel Gallery

Over time the women abstract artists were marginalised or written out of the movement’s history. Recent retrospectives have included few females.

The Whitechapel exhibition endeavours to right this wrong. Regarding the past through a different lens, it changes our perception of something we thought we knew. And in so doing it has quite an uncanny effect. It is at once both familiar and fresh. 

The show demonstrates that if you want to change the story, you should consider changing the narrator.

'… Sitting at this party,
Wondering if anyone knows me,
Really sees who I am.
Oh, it's been so long since I felt really known.
… Living in the wake of overwhelming changes,
We've all become strangers
Even to ourselves.
We just can't help,
We can't see from far away,
To know that every wave might not be the same,
But it's all apart of one big thing.
… Oh, it's not just me, it's not just me,
It's not just me,
It's everybody.’ 

Weyes Blood, 'It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody’ (N Mering)

No. 409

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 Aftermath: How Postwar Artists in Britain Responded to Collective Experience

Full Stop (1961) The Estate of John Latham/Tate 

‘Am I standing on my head, or is the world upside down?’
Franciszka Themerson

I recently visited an excellent exhibition of art created in Britain in the wake of the Second World War. (‘Postwar Modern’ is at the Barbican, London until 26 June.)

The show features the work of 48 artists: paintings, sculpture, photography, collage and installations. We witness how, over a twenty-year period, a creative community responded to the world around it - initially with shock and horror at the recent past, and then with growing confidence about future possibilities.

On entering the first gallery, we are greeted by a sombre symphony in black. There’s an agonised Christ on the cross by Francis Newton Souza. There are the vaporized heads of Eduardo Paolozzi. And there’s a big bleak ‘Full Stop’ by John Latham – like a bullet wound or an eclipsed planet or a black hole. 

It’s grim stuff.

Perhaps that’s entirely understandable, given the upheaval and destruction that people had witnessed. The war had blitzed cities and blown away certainties, leaving an anxious world under a nuclear cloud. Britain had become a home for refugees from Nazism and migrants from its now crumbling empire.

‘The 1950s found most of us in London, each of us independently examining the images left in our minds and souls in the aftermath of World War II. In some sense we felt that new images might help us to prevent the repetition of the inhuman and unseemly past. It was with some excitement, then, that we approached the new and tried to erase the old.’
Magda Cordell

Artists depicted the dereliction, damage and decay that they saw all around them. William Turnbull, who had been a fighter pilot, created desolate relief landscapes in bronze. Bill Hardy photographed kids playing in urban bombsites. Elizabeth Frink sculpted strange, monstrous, menacing birds. 

‘They actually became something else…They became like bits of shrapnel and flying things…with very sharp beaks.’
Elizabeth Frink

There are not many portraits of people here. Rather artists reconfigured the human body from abstract shapes and machine parts. Magda Cordell painted pulsating internal organs in bold crimson. Inspired by television and science fiction, John McHale imagined a family of wired cyborgs. 

‘We extend out psychic mobility. We can telescope time, move through history, span the world through visual and aural means.’
John McHale

First Contact, 1958 by John McHale

Some sought a completely new visual language, experimenting with industrial materials like sheet metal, Perspex and household paint. Mary Martin created pure white reliefs, austere, abstract geometric forms. Victor Pasmore abandoned figurative painting and threw himself into work prompted by science, geometry and mathematics. 

‘Today the whole world is shaken by the spirit of reconstruction… In painting and sculpture, as also in architecture, an entirely new language has been formed.’
Victor Pasmore

In time artists began to document the budding new society that was rising from the rubble. Jewish refugees Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff presented the city under construction, in thick layers of earth-toned paint. Eva Frankfurther portrayed ordinary workers at the Lyons Corner House, weary and pensive. Shirley Baker photographed the street life of multicultural Manchester and Roger Mayne celebrated London’s emergent youth culture – poor, but cool and fun-loving. 

‘West Indian Waitresses’ by Eva Frankfurther c1955. Photo Courtesy of the Ben Uri Gallery.

And there was a spirit of righteous rebellion in the air. Francis Bacon and David Hockney referenced their homosexuality in their work, despite the fact that it was still illegal.

‘What one must remember about some of these pictures is that they were partly propaganda of something that I felt hadn’t been propagandised… homosexuality. I felt it should be done.’
David Hockney

Gradually colours became brighter and bolder. Patrick Heron painted radiant abstract landscapes. Gillian Ayres produced intense organic shapes, full of feeling and possibility.

‘A shape – a relationship – a body – oddness – shock – mood – cramped – isolated – acid – sweet – encroaching – pivoting – fading – bruised.’
Gillian Ayres

Detail of Gillian Ayres, Break-off

And so we arrive in the ‘60s, a decade of fearless innovation and wild experimentation; of mobiles, installations, auto-creation and rotating sculptures. The shadows of the war have for the most part departed.

We often characterise artists as solitary individuals, ploughing their own furrows, expressing their own unique perspectives. But what struck me about this exhibition was the extent to which the creative community was responding, together, to the times in which they were working. These artists were challenging social norms and being challenged by collective experience. They were fully immersed in their environment.

In the sphere of commerce, brands sometimes seem to exist in their own secluded space; articulating their own particular point of view, untouched by cultural or competitive forces. This show suggests to me that brands must breathe the same air as their consumers; they must feel their anxieties, share their enthusiasms. Brands must participate in society, not stand aloof from it. 

‘Postwar Modern’ deals in the aftermath of war. Aftermath is an appropriate word. It was originally an agricultural term: ‘a second crop or new growth of grass (or occas. another plant used as feed) after the first has been mown or harvested.’(OED).

Aftermath suggests rebirth and renewal. Even in the darkest times, there is hope.

'Yes, we're different, worlds apart.
We're not the same.
We laughed it away
At the start, like in a game.
You could have stayed
Outside my heart,
But in you came.
And here you'll stay,
Until it's time for you to go.’
Buffy Sainte-Marie, 'Until It's Time for You to Go'

No. 370

The Fertile Metaphor: Louise Bourgeois and ‘The Woven Child’

Louise Bourgeois: The Good Mother (detail), 2003 © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021. Photography by Christopher Burke

'I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.'
Louise Bourgeois

I recently attended a fine exhibition of the fabric art of Louise Bourgeois. (‘The Woven Child’ is at the Hayward Gallery, London until 15 May.)

The show collects the textile-based work Bourgeois created in the last two decades of her life: a multiplicity of sculptures, installations, collages and embroidery that revisit the traumas of her childhood and her complex feelings about her family. It is all the more powerful given the age of the artist and the distinctiveness of her chosen media.

‘My subject is the rawness of the emotions, the devastating effect of the emotions you go though.’

Bourgeois, born in 1911, grew up in the Parisian suburb of Choisy-le Roi, where her parents ran a workshop that repaired antique tapestries.

‘My mother would sit out in the sun and repair a tapestry or a petit point. She really loved it. This sense of reparation is very deep within me.’

Louise Bourgeois: Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), 2001

In her eighties and living in New York (which had been her home since 1938), Bourgeois took her mother’s old clothes and some of her own, and redeployed them in her art. Delicate white camisoles, underwear and nightgowns; a pale pink blouse, a red apron and a little black dress were suspended from hangers, hooks and bones, in oppressive constructed rooms and cages, accompanied by two large white marble spheres, a small model of her childhood home and lurking spiders. 

‘You can retell your life and remember your life by the shape, weight, the color, the smell of the clothes in your closet.’

These are rather disturbing domestic pieces - claustrophobic, soaked in secrets and lies; memory and loss. Bourgeois was haunted by her childhood: by her father’s brazen infidelities with a string of women, including her governess; by her sick mother’s quiet acceptance; by her own sense of impotence and confinement.

‘Sewing implies repairing. There is a hole…you have to hide the damage…you have to hide the urge to do damage. There is a background of drama here… that something bad you must have done must be undone. I sew… I do what I can.’

Bourgeois repeatedly returned to the metaphor of fabric and weaving. Throughout her work she included scissors, bobbins, threads and needles; scraps of fading tapestry. Sewing implies mending. Seams are like scars. Clothes suggest second skins. Stuffed fabric prompts associations with soft flesh and fragile emotions. 

‘The needle is used to repair the damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It’s never aggressive, it’s not a pin.’

And though her spiders seem at first sinister and threatening, for Bourgeois they represented creation, restoration and motherhood.

'The spider is a repairer. If you bash the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.’

Bourgeois made stuffed heads covered in bright, colourful material: wincing, screaming, kissing; sometimes seeming masked and gagged. The pained head of her brother Pierre, who was institutionalized with mental illness, is loosely stitched - as if to suggest he is coming apart at the seams. 

‘I had a flashback of something that never existed.’

Louise Bourgeois: Pierre

There are twisted torsos hanging limp, copulating couples, body parts sagging with age. There are embroideries of flowers and clocks, collages of abstract patterns and spider’s webs. Bourgeois arranged cushion-like shapes in neat columns, perhaps trying to impose order on a chaotic world.

‘It is a world that is not going to disappoint me because I am building it myself. I am the author of my own world with its internal logic and with its value that no one can deny.’

What particularly struck me about the exhibition was that Bourgeois had been inspired to such variety of thought and depth of feeling by one broad theme. Weaving is a fertile metaphor. 

This may resonate with those of us working in the fields of commercial creativity. When we invent brand worlds and campaign ideas, we should fully explore the opportunity for texture and nuance. A well-chosen metaphor contains layers of meaning. It suggests a diversity of interpretations. It offers rich rewards.

Louise Bourgeois

‘My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery and it has never lost its drama. I refuse to let go of that period because, painful as it was, it was life itself.’

In the late 1930s Bourgeois ran her own gallery in Paris. In 1945 she had her first solo show. In the 1950s she exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists in New York. And yet she was marginalised by the art establishment. Only gradually through the 1970s did she receive recognition, and only in 1982 was she given her first retrospective - at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

'You learn for yourself, not for others, not to show off, not to put the other one down. Learning is your secret, it is all you have, it is the only thing you can call your own. Nobody can take it away.'

Bourgeois died in 2010, aged 98. She finished her last pieces the week before. Although her work had explored pain, anxiety and loss, she consistently returned to a message of repair and restoration. We all deserve a second chance.

‘The repair of a tapestry or a costume is precisely a plea in favor of a second chance, it is a plea in favor of x and against y.’

'Back through the years
I go wonderin' once again
Back to the seasons of my youth.
I recall a box of rags that someone gave us,
And how my momma put the rags to use.
There were rags of many colors,
Every piece was small.
And I didn't have a coat,
And it was way down in the fall.
Momma sewed the rags together,
Sewin' every piece with love.
She made my coat of many colors
That I was so proud of.’

Dolly Parton, ‘Coat of Many Colors'

No. 367

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

Durer’s Travels: The Advantage of a Curious Mind

Albrecht Dürer, Head of a Woman, a drawing 1520/1520

‘Human curiosity can be so sated by an excess of all worldly things that it becomes weary of them, with the sole exception of knowing a great deal, of which no one tires.’
Albrecht Durer

I recently attended an exhibition of the work of the German artist Albrecht Durer. (‘Durer’s Journeys’ is at the National Gallery, London until 27 February.)

At the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries Durer painted deeply felt religious paintings and stunning portraits and self-portraits. He also created a vast number of drawings, engravings and woodcuts - most famously his exploration of mythical subjects set in precisely observed depictions of the natural world.

The winged angel Melencolia sits with her head in one hand awaiting inspiration. Saint Jerome works away in his study, a dog and lion slumbering side-by-side on the floor in front of him. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse trample all before them. A Knight rides alongside Death and the Devil, resigned to his fate. 

'An artist of understanding and experience can show more of his great power and art in small things roughly and rudely done, than many another in a great work.’

One can’t help but be struck by Durer’s acute eye for detail: the bark of a tree, the foliage on a branch and the rocks in a ravine; the tension in a muscle, the curls in long hair and the folds in a fabric are all rendered with meticulous care and attention.

'Sight is the noblest sense of man.'

Clearly Durer’s prodigious natural talent was fuelled by a curious mind, a passion for understanding, an appetite for travel. 

'Art is embedded in nature and they who can extract it, have it.’

Albrecht Dürer, 'The Knight, Death and the Devil', © The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge

Durer was born in 1471, the son of a Hungarian goldsmith who had settled in Nuremberg. He learned his father’s trade and was apprenticed to one of the town’s leading painters. From 1490 to 1494, as was the custom at that time, he embarked on a Wanderjahre - in effect, gap years – in order to acquire skills from artists in other regions. His trip took him along the Rhine to Strasbourg, Colmar and Basel.  

'Love and delight are better teachers than compulsion.’

On his return to Nuremberg, aged 23, Durer got married. But he must have been bitten by the travel bug. That same year he set off on the first of two major trips over the Alps to Italy (1494-5, 1505-7). In Venice he met the elderly Giovanni Bellini and learned to be more confident in his use of colour. From Jacopo de' Barbari he discovered the new developments in perspective, anatomy and proportion. 

In 1520-1 the intrepid Durer journeyed to the Low Countries, visiting Antwerp and Aachen, Mechelen and Bruges. In Ghent he admired van Eyck's altarpiece. In Brussels he marvelled at Aztec gold and the animals in the zoo. He met up with royalty, artists and intellectuals. He collected prints and Lutheran pamphlets. He sailed for six days to see a beached whale in Zeeland and was almost killed in a storm.

A 1521 drawing by Dürer of Livonian women in winter dress

‘I was amazed at the subtle ingeniousness of people in foreign lands.’

In the course of his travels Durer kept journals containing numerous drawings in silverpoint, chalk and charcoal. He sketched nobles and nuns, soldiers and servants, dogs and wildlife. He made a note of local landscapes, contemporary fashions and architectural details.

There is a lesson for us all here. At whatever stage we are in life or career, we must find food for thought, catalysts for ideas. We need to look, discover, observe and understand in order to stay fresh. We must continue to learn.

'As I grew older, I realized that it was much better to insist on the genuine forms of nature, for simplicity is the greatest adornment of art.’

Durer died back home in Nuremberg in 1528. He was just 56 years old, but he had led a full and active life. Perhaps he appreciated that the better he understood the world around him, the better he understood himself.

'Some think that they know everybody, but they really don't know themselves.'

'Travel round,
I travel round.
Decadence and pleasure towns,
Tragedies, luxuries, statues, parks and galleries.
Travel round,
I travel round.
Decadence and pleasure towns.’

Simple Minds, ‘I Travel’ (D Forbes / C Burchill / M Macneil / B Mcgee / J Kerr)

No. 354