Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  I think it would be more exciting to be one of a number of artists working together, and to be able to exchange … I think it would be terribly nice to have someone to talk to. Today there is absolutely nobody to talk to. Perhaps I’m unlucky and don’t know those people. Those I know always have very different attitudes to what I have.

  *

  Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that it took Bacon so long to get his nerve up. He was ‘a late starter in everything’, he told David Sylvester, ‘I was kind of delayed’. He was also, as we have seen, a self-taught outsider in the world of painting. The consequence, not surprisingly, was paralysing self-doubt. He had begun his career as an artist – as he would eventually continue it – with a burst of improvisatory brilliance. In early 1933, when he was only in his mid-twenties, he came up with one of the most extraordinary British paintings of the era. It was entitled Crucifixion (1933) and represented a strange figure with sticklike arms, a pin head and the ectoplasmic body of a ghost or spirit. This was openly influenced by Picasso’s work of around 1930, but had an eerie quality. The trademark uncanniness of Bacon was already there.

  This Crucifixion found a buyer and – an extraordinary honour – was immediately reproduced in a book by the leading modernist critic in Britain, Herbert Read. This publication, Art Now (1933), presented Bacon’s painting on a double-page spread opposite a contemporary picture by Picasso, thus pointing out the connection between the two, but also implying, ‘here is Picasso’s leading British disciple’. Then, within a year, Bacon had disappeared from view.

  His first one-man show, self-organized, at the Transition Gallery in 1934, had not been a financial or a critical success. It received an acerbic review in The Times and few works sold. Bacon’s reaction was to destroy all the rest, including a picture entitled Wound for a Crucifixion, which a collector had wanted to buy (and which he himself later regretted discarding). From 1936 Bacon effectively gave up painting and produced nothing more that survives until 1944, although it is rumoured that he destroyed many, perhaps hundreds of works. It is not unusual for artists to edit their work by weeding out weaker examples. Lucian Freud also did this, perhaps having got the idea from Bacon. But the latter’s tendency to reduce to obliteration his own pictures is hard to parallel in art history. From Bacon’s output of the early thirties, the initial phase of his artistic career, almost nothing survives.

  Bacon’s lofty ambitions were one of the reasons he destroyed such an extraordinarily large proportion of his works (since, to his mind, few, if any, of his pictures lived up to those expectations). And self-doubt was certainly another. In combination, these two factors resulted in critical standards that were stratospherically, masochistically high. Little or nothing he did – or, for that matter, anyone else did – was good enough. (One of the very few works he remained relatively pleased with was Painting 1946, of which he said, ‘I don’t like my paintings for very long. [But] I have always liked that one, it goes on having power.’) In some ways, this attitude was salutary, as Frank Auerbach observed:

  Nietzsche says people who scorn the second-rate are to be valued. Francis scorned almost everything, including his own work – genuinely, although he did his best. He never thought that what he had done was good enough. Which, after all, is the only healthy frame of mind, because how are you going to go on unless you are fed up with what you have done already?

  By the mid-1940s, Bacon was little more than a rumour. A few people who had been around the art scene in the early 1930s remembered him, notably Graham Sutherland, whose pictures had hung side by side with Bacon’s in a mixed exhibition at Agnew’s in 1937 (Victor Pasmore was one of the other painters included). It is even possible that Sutherland was influenced by his brilliant younger contemporary at this early date (as he certainly was later on). Figures in a Garden (c. 1935), one of the handful of Bacon pictures from the 1930s that still exists, looks like a prophecy of all the aggressively spiky, Triffid-like vegetation painted by Sutherland and his followers over the following decade.

  Few people knew more about Bacon than could be learnt from looking at the reproduction of Crucifixion in Art Now. Even that had its effect. John Richardson, later to become the biographer of Picasso, was then in his early twenties and fascinated by modern art. He and his friends ‘worshipped this plate’, but ‘none of us could find out who this Francis Bacon was’. Eventually, one evening by chance Richardson noticed a ‘youngish man with a luminous face’ going into a house opposite his mother’s on South Terrace, off the bottom of Thurloe Square in Kensington. It turned out to be this mystery man, Francis Bacon, carrying canvases from his studio on Cromwell Place to his cousin Diana Watson’s house. From what he could see of these paintings, Richardson deduced they were by the same artist as the Crucifixion. He effected an introduction and soon he and Bacon became friends.

  The anecdote is significant because it demonstrates how gradual, even by the mid-1940s, Bacon’s emergence really was. John Russell’s description of the exhibition of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, and the reaction of those who saw it, suggests the work must have made an enormous impact. In fact, it seems many – even those who were keen followers of the latest developments in painting, including Richardson and his circle – managed not to notice this showing at all.

  It was Painting 1946 that truly marked Bacon’s arrival, and largely because of the impact it made on Graham Sutherland. Lucian Freud was not the only person he sent along to see Bacon. Kenneth Clark had visited Bacon’s studio in 1944, accompanied by Sutherland, although his reaction was initially disconcerting. Clark looked at Bacon’s work, remarked, ‘Interesting, yes. What extraordinary times we live in,’ and left. ‘You see!’ Bacon exploded, ‘You’re surrounded by cretins.’ Later on, Clark gave his verdict to Sutherland: ‘You and I might be in a minority of two, but we will still be right in thinking Francis Bacon has genius.’

  Another visitor to Cromwell Place was Erica Brausen, an expatriate German art dealer. Having fled her native country in the early 1930s, she had spent time in Paris where she mixed with Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró, then moved on to London. In 1946, bankrolled by a wealthy collector named Arthur Jeffress, she was considering opening her own gallery. She liked Painting 1946 so much she bought it for £200, which was a large sum for an almost unknown artist at the time. Two years later she sold it to Alfred H. Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

  So, in gambling terms, Bacon had broken the bank. With one wild throw of the creative dice, he had gone from obscurity to a place in the world’s greatest collection of Modernist art. His reaction to the initial sale of the painting, however, was characteristic. Shortly afterwards, late in 1946, he departed for the French Riviera. He did not complete another picture – one that survives, at any rate – for two years. Having briefly appeared, as far as the London art world was concerned, Bacon had vanished again.

  Chapter three

  EUSTON ROAD IN CAMBERWELL

  People feel that it is very important for artists to have an aim. Actually, what’s vital is to have a beginning. You find your aim in the process of working. You discover it.

  Bridget Riley, 2002

  In the autumn of 1945 so many would-be artists flocked to the Camberwell School of Art in South London that extra buses had to be put on from Camberwell Green. The new Labour government was taking action against the five Great Evils enumerated in the Beveridge Report of 1942: ‘WANT, DISEASE, IGNORANCE, SQUALOR and IDLENESS’ (all set out in monumental capitals). Many people felt that, despite the devastation wreaked by the war, things were finally looking up, and a surprising number turned to art.

  The school’s capacity, pre-war, had been between eight and nine hundred students. Now there were nearly three thousand. Among these were many ex-servicemen – including Terry Frost, released from Stalag 383, an ex-Grenadier Guards officer named Humphrey Lyttelton and Henry Mundy, who had fought in the Far East. The directive from the Ministry of Education, the
principal William Johnstone remembered, was ‘to fit in as many servicemen as possible, to keep them quiet and happy’, as the new government was keen to avoid a ‘recurrence of the disillusionment following the First World War’. Frost, who had left school at fourteen and done a series of dead-end jobs in his native West Midlands, was a beneficiary of the new spirit of democratic opportunity after 1945:

  It was so different from before the war when you had to doff your cap to people across the road and you daren’t put your foot out of line or you got the sack. But the doodlebug didn’t differentiate whether you had been to Oxford or elementary school. Bullets didn’t differentiate. I found it a wonderful period, everybody helped each other. But it was destroyed.

  At Camberwell illustration was taught for three days a week by John Minton. One of Minton’s pupils was Humphrey Lyttelton, whose ‘dramatic and romantic’ drawings of scenes in books such as George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss caused Minton to ‘laugh most uproariously’ – this would have been more gratifying, Lyttelton felt, ‘if they had been intentionally humorous’. Lyttelton resolved to concentrate on comic art, but by and by switched from that to playing the jazz trumpet. In 1948, he formed a band with a fellow student, Wally Fawkes, and they began to perform regularly in a cellar club at 100 Oxford Street. A large contingent of supporters followed them from Camberwell, including Minton who was, according to Lyttelton, ‘among the most formidable and dangerous’ of the dancers. Gillian Ayres recalls ‘Minton always at those evenings, dancing; later he got sad and sour, but he was quite unlike that in 1946 to ’48 at Camberwell, he was full of life.’ In 1949, Minton made a drawing of a scene at the club – known as ‘Humph’s’ – for an arts magazine. He put his own, slightly frantic, features in the bottom right-hand corner, surrounded by a mass of wildly gesticulating, euphoric young people (many of them members of the all-male circle known as ‘Johnny’s Circus’).

  Ayres arrived at Camberwell in the autumn term of 1946, sixteen years old and determined to become a painter. She too remembers the atmosphere of hope and optimism despite the havoc wreaked by the war: ‘It felt absolutely wonderful. There was tremendous enthusiasm. I think everybody felt that they could make a new world that was quite different.’ However, her ebullient personality and intuitive way of working soon came into conflict with the prevailing method of instruction, confusingly referred to as the ‘Euston Road School’. This was an approach to painting and drawing that took its name from a defunct private school of art that had briefly flourished near King’s Cross station in the years before 1939. After the war it became the most influential artistic method taught in Britain, characterized by a way of working that was slow, inclined to be dingy in colour, and claiming to be unemotionally ‘objective’; it is little surprise that Ayres found this approach stifling. Seventy years later, recalling many of her tutors at Camberwell, she still fumes: ‘They were fascists, you were meant to work like them. I’m really horrified by them to this day.’

  JOHN MINTON Jam Session, cover drawing for Our Time, July–August 1949

  *

  The distinction between the ‘Euston Road School’ and less restrictive methodologies was the topic of earnest discussion on 17 October 1947 beside a canal in Peckham. There, three painters – William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore and William Townsend – went for a walk between the afternoon and evening teaching sessions at Camberwell, where they were all members of staff. The first two were among the most talented British artists of their generation, and contemporaries of Francis Bacon’s: they were both born in 1908, Bacon in 1909. In contrast Townsend, these days, is remembered less for his pictures than for the voluminous diary that makes him the Pepys of the 1940s London art world.

  Townsend made a detailed note of the conversation on the towpath that day: ‘We talked about the difference of attitude, especially of attitude to the objective world, between realist painters of our kind and the contemporary romantics or the idealists of the École de Paris.’ By ‘contemporary romantics’ Townsend meant what are now termed the Neo-Romantics – painters such as John Craxton, Graham Sutherland and (as most people would have assumed in 1947) Bacon; while by the ‘idealists of the École de Paris’ Townsend presumably meant Picasso, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse and the Surrealists.

  Coldstream, characteristically taking the lead in this discussion, took an example from the twilit landscape around them. He pointed to ‘a crane, folded against one of the warehouses across the canal’, using it to illustrate a lucid statement of his position. There was, he believed, ‘a fundamental divergence between the painter interested first in a world outside himself and the painter interested in a world of his reactions’. This was the difference between someone trying to map the real world and an artist painting from inside – like Bacon – the images that, as he said, dropped into his mind ‘like slides’, or were suggested by the random splatter and slither of the paint itself. Coldstream explained:

  They start where we leave off. They believe they can draw that crane without any difficulty, the only problem is where to place it and in what picture. We are not sure we can draw it as we see it and the whole picture is our attempt to do so and we consider we have done well if we get somewhere near it.

  This might seem a modest aim – representing an ordinary piece of industrial equipment through marks on a piece of paper – but it was much more challenging in practice than it sounds to non-painters. It runs directly into what David Hockney has termed ‘the problems of depiction’ which, he points out, are ‘permanent, meaning you never solve them’. These difficulties are inherent in the process of making a flat picture of a world that is three dimensional, in constant flux, and interpreted in various ways by human psychological and physiological systems.

  A decade before, Coldstream – in a quandary about how to paint and what to paint – gave up the struggle for a couple of years altogether. Instead he worked happily with the General Post Office Film Unit, cooperating with the brilliant director John Grierson on documentaries about such subjects as the GPO Savings Bank and the procedures of telephone exchange operators. It was, however, a much more creative interval than these subjects might suggest. Benjamin Britten wrote the soundtracks for some of the films, and W. H. Auden the scripts. Meanwhile Coldstream continued to give private lessons in painting at the weekend. In February 1936, he received a letter from his old professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, Henry Tonks, advising him on how to instruct a pupil, a Mr Snipey of Birmingham.

  Of course encourage him also in expressing himself in what way he likes, but behind all this there must stand the expression of solid (three-dimensional) form upon a flat surface.

  This, epigrammatically stated, was what could be called the Tonks doctrine. It had been taught to generations of British painters at the Slade – Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Gwen John, David Bomberg and Winifred Knights among them. It descended, through the French classicism of Ingres, from Raphael and the Florentine Renaissance, and was still being passed down in the late 1940s and early 1950s to a young Bridget Riley by her teacher at Goldsmiths’ College, Sam Rabin, another pupil of Tonks.

  The issue around putting ‘solid (three-dimensional) form upon a flat surface’ is that, strictly speaking, as we all know from arithmetic lessons, two into three won’t go. Geometrically, there is no perfectly accurate and objectively correct way of representing the three-dimensional world on a flat canvas, panel or piece of paper, any more than there is a perfect solution to the problem of how to map a round globe on a flat atlas. Every way of doing so is an approximation or, you might say, an abstraction.

  This is the basic problem, and – as Tonks’s throw-away concession concerning Mr Snipey, who could, of course, express ‘himself in what way he likes’, made clear – self-expression was a by-product of the struggle to condense three solid dimensions into a flat picture. This could no more be done without alteration, Coldstream’s friend Lawrence Gowing once remarked, ‘than an orange skin could be pressed flat on a table withou
t splitting’.

  Nothing further was heard about Mr Snipey and his work, but Coldstream himself took Tonks’s advice very much to heart. Previously, as a student, and afterwards, as he strove to find his way as a painter, he had attempted a number of different idioms. He was brought up short by a dilemma that also presented itself to many others (and still does) and one that he had set out in a letter to a friend in 1933, before temporarily abandoning the effort in despair. On the one hand, Coldstream wrote, ‘the logical development of the mainstream of European painting has led to photography’. He clearly believed that the world looks like a photograph; he admitted to ‘amusing himself’ with a reflex camera, through which ‘everything looks wonderful’. On the other hand, in that case, what was the point of figurative painting? It could do no more than aspire to look, as much as possible, like a photograph. Some artists concluded that the answer was to give up the attempt to make pictures of the world altogether. The objective truth about paintings was that they were made of paint. A friend of Coldstream’s argued that the logical response was to regard the canvas itself as an object, ‘something to be worked as a carpenter works on a chair’. Yet if one did that, Coldstream thought, one had ‘shelved’ the question of painting altogether ‘and become a sculptor’.