Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  Journalistically speaking, Denny was a startling manifestation of anarchic youth.

  Gillian Ayres, who also struck a chord with Nan Kivell, recalls how receptive he was of her huge paintings covered with puddles, spatters and dribbles of paint:

  I used to go into the Redfern with these bloody great things – six foot strips of hardboard – and Nan Kivell started to like all this stuff. I don’t think it was about sex in the least, because he was gay, but he was tied up with Galerie Maeght in France and he knew about Tachisme. We became very friendly, and he said, ‘Bring them in dear! Bring more in!’ So I kept carting them along.

  When Nan Kivell made the decision to give Rumney and Ayres the main room in the ‘Metavisual Tachiste Abstract’ exhibition, she remembers him saying, ‘We’re going to annoy the older ones.’ He was entirely correct. ‘When they saw it, the other artists were all furious; Patrick Heron burst into the Artists International Association, absolutely livid.’

  Rumney’s exhibit, The Change (1957), was executed on the floor, like much new painting of the time. Rumney later claimed this was simply the only practical way to work in his cramped flat on Neal Street. He was unwilling to acknowledge the direct influence of Pollock, preferring to see himself aligned with a European tradition of political engagement and dissent. This was in fact truer than he intended. The Change does not have the looseness and energy of Pollock or his American contemporaries. Somehow, despite his use of drip and splatter, a grid of lines has made it into the finished work, like the ghost of Mondrian. In retrospect, it looks a little stiff, dry, even old-fashioned.

  In contrast, Gillian Ayres’s works of the late 1950s were, visibly, the creations of someone in love with paint – its fluidity, its variable consistency or, as Rumney put it, its matière – its rich thick substance and potential to create space and movement. At least one visitor to the exhibition was impressed, a young architect named Michael Greenwood, who was doing some work for South Hampstead High School for Girls in North London. The sight of Ayres’s expansive paintings gave him an idea.

  Murals, like public art, were in the air, part of a prevalent vision of a new Jerusalem. In 1956, writing in a prospectus for a new and better world entitled The Future of Socialism, the rising Labour Party intellectual Anthony Crosland had called for ‘more murals and pictures in public places’ as one element in a long list of desirable improvements to Britain. Assuming the years to come would see an unending improvement in prosperity, Crosland argued that Socialists should turn their attention to ‘personal freedom, happiness and cultural endeavour’. Ayres recalls how Greenwood approached her about doing a mural for the school in Hampstead:

  This architect was my age. He just came into the AIA and said, ‘I’m redecorating this school and let’s do a mural in the dining room. He got all the materials, and these panels prepared, and they were all very good too. I used Ripolin enamel paint, simply because Picasso used it. I thought what was good enough for him … It was a top French household paint, and there was a shop on the King’s Road that sold it.

  She made no formal preparations, no sketches. ‘I would have hated to do a little bit on paper to blow up. I want to feel it.’ Her methods were, like Davie’s and Pollock’s, essentially, improvisatory. There was no blueprint, no preliminary ideas worked out in advance, as painters making big public works had done from Giotto’s time to Picasso’s. The big scale was a given, not out of an urge to imitate the New York painters, but simply because of the size of the walls in the school dining room. ‘I lay awake wondering how on earth I was going to deal with that size.’

  GILLIAN AYRES Hampstead Mural, 1957

  In the event she took, as Pollock did, an initial leap and then started from the way – partly chance – the pigment had fallen. ‘I just threw all the paint and turps all over the surfaces.’ After that there came contemplation, adjustment, additions and subtractions. This way of working, she has explained, is a process of ‘evolving something, rather in the way perhaps that a bar of music or a line of poetry follows from the last, developing and changing’. This is not entirely a matter of chance, more of intuition. Action does indeed come into it too. Ayres has used the analogy of tennis. ‘You can suddenly sense that you are going to make a shot better than you usually do, and then you can’t do it again.’ ‘Abstract’ is an inexact word to describe this kind of painting, but it is the one that has stuck in our collective vocabulary.

  Ayres’s working methods caused the assembled decorators and school staff as much consternation as Minton had felt about Denny’s and the makers of the Pathé newsreel about Green’s: this struck them not as art but as insanity. She was working in one of the schoolrooms on a hot day in July, with the windows open. To begin with she covered all four panels with an initial layer, throwing on the paint and turps. At that point, ‘the workmen came in, took a look and rushed out’. After another hour Michael Greenwood came in and said, ‘They’ve all gathered out there; they think you’re a madwoman.’ So they opened the door and the assembled workmen were all there listening. ‘We just laughed.’

  The process of beginning with chance marks as an imaginative starting point has been used by painters since the fifteenth century: Leonardo da Vinci described how he could see faces and battles in the stains on an old wall. In works by Ayres or Pollock there is nothing so specific. There are, though, suggestions. Dancing figures seem to emerge in the latter’s pictures; looking at the Hampstead mural puts one in mind of blossoms, vegetation reflected in water, flowers, the night sky, many things in fact, but it does not exactly depict any of them. Although public art works – even strikingly modern ones – were fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s, it is hard to think of any quite as radical as Ayres’s Hampstead Mural (1957). Its four large panels add up to one huge work: a masterpiece, though not one that has often been seen, except by the staff and pupils of the school where it still enlivens the walls.

  Gillian Ayres at her studio on Chiswick Mall, London, August 1958

  Chapter eleven

  THE SITUATION IN LONDON, 1960

  Abstract painting, that is painting that is not about subject matter, if it is any good should be as diverse, and complex, and strange and unaccountable and unnameable as an experience, as any painting of any consequence has been in the past.

  Robyn Denny, 1964

  Early in 1959 the Tate Gallery held another exhibition, this time more simply titled ‘New American Painting’. By this date there was little question that the USA was the principal fountainhead of exciting new developments in art. Lawrence Alloway was enthused: ‘No other country in the world could put on an exhibition of postwar paintings’ to equal this, he wrote. He remarked, crushingly, that a similar display of British work would, ‘to put it mildly’, lack the ‘purpose, power and vitality’ demonstrated by these artists from across the Atlantic.

  John Kasmin, then a junior employee working for various London art dealers, was inspired by the sheer scale of their work: ‘I was interested in big, bold pictures, the whole idea of aiming for the sublime and painting things bigger than the easel paintings that fitted into ordinary houses.’ He began to think of opening his own gallery, to promote ‘big American paintings and the kind of English artist who admired that sort of painting, if not painting in exactly the same way’.

  Increasingly, this was the type of painting that was the height of art world fashion. The second John Moores Painting Prize competition, held in 1959, was won by Patrick Heron with his abstract Black Painting – Red, Brown and Olive: July 1959 (1959). The work of both the runners-up, William Scott and Peter Lanyon – scooping awards of £500 and £400 – was at least somewhat abstract too. Heron’s winning canvas consisted of large, fuzzy rectangular forms in the colours listed in the title. In contrast, Scott and Lanyon tended to retain vestiges of – respectively – still life and landscape in their work, while the human figure had reappeared in the paintings of Roger Hilton, who was only awarded a prize of £100. The lesson seemed to be that abstr
action now ruled, and the more resolutely non-representative the better. Something had shifted; the Zeitgeist had changed imperceptibly in the second half of the 1950s. Robyn Denny defined the new mood: ‘Suddenly art was future-orientated; it was no longer historically-oriented.’

  One day in that same year, 1959, Heron had a shock while walking down the street in St Ives. There, in this little seaside town on the north coast of the furthest tip of Cornwall, was the very last person he would have expected to see: Francis Bacon. ‘Good God! Francis!’ Heron exclaimed, ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ Heron’s astonishment was understandable. St Ives, of course, was then a headquarters for the abstract wing of British art, while Bacon, as we have seen, disdained non-figurative art as merely ‘pattern-making’, ‘an illustration or accident about nothing’. As we have seen, ‘decoration’ – as opposed to violence, tragedy and making a powerful effect on the viewer’s nervous system – was something Bacon despised; Heron, in contrast, thought decoration was ‘the height of art’.

  In addition, the abstract art of St Ives was often derived from landscape. That was mostly the point of living in such a remote spot, in close contact with the sweeping sea and granite hills. Bacon’s views about landscape can be gauged from his response to a suggestion he might live in Switzerland: ‘All those fucking views!’ Nonetheless, there he was in Cornwall, with his then partner, a young man named Ron Belton. ‘We’ve just come from Penzance,’ Bacon explained to Heron, ‘which we simply loathed so we thought we’d come here.’ ‘To stay here?’ Heron echoed in even greater amazement. ‘Well, you see,’ Bacon explained, ‘I had to get away.’

  At that point in his career, Bacon certainly had plenty of reason to go somewhere quiet to work. His life, and art, had been in crisis for some years. His relationship with Peter Lacy had always been turbulent, abusive and alcoholic; eventually, it had proved impossible. Lacy was now in Tangiers, playing piano in a bar and drinking himself to death. Bacon also had an important deadline coming up. He had left the Hanover Gallery, whose proprietor Erica Brausen had long nurtured his career, and signed instead with the larger Marlborough Fine Art, which had offered to pay off all his debts. His first exhibition at Marlborough was to be in March 1960 and, as yet, he had very little work to show (Lacy had cut one batch to ribbons on Bacon’s last visit to Tangiers).

  What is not so clear, however, is why out of innumerable out-of-the-way spots he had selected St Ives. Did he want some contact with those despised abstract painters? If so, he denied it to Heron – ‘I had no idea that you were all here, dear!’ – though this was almost certainly a tease. In 1959, Bacon was in transition as a painter. His work of the early 1950s was magnificent but almost monochrome. By the latter part of the decade he was searching for something new; in 1957 he had produced a series based on Van Gogh’s lost Self Portrait on the Road to Tarascon (1888, destroyed). These were obviously derived from his experience of the powerful sun of Morocco; however, he was not happy with the result. Bacon didn’t like his Van Gogh paintings, he admitted to the critic Angus Stewart. Perhaps he intended to reboot his work, and thought abstract art might provide some clues.

  At that moment Heron and abstraction were in the ascendant, while privately Bacon might well have harboured fears he had lost his way. According to the Irish painter Louis le Brocquy, on spotting Heron in a London gallery, Bacon announced ‘Look! Here comes the Prince of Painters and he simply loathes me.’ Bacon’s disdain was doubtless genuine, but relations between the two were cordial enough for Heron to invite Bacon and Ron to Christmas dinner at his house, Eagles Nest, on the cliffs above the village of Zennor. Heron, a gifted mimic, could do a vivid impression of Bacon volunteering to light the pudding. He swayed rather unsteadily to his feet, and sloshed most of a bottle of brandy over it with the unsettling words, ‘I’m very good at starting fires!’

  Bacon joined in the St Ives social life with his usual amiable combativeness. He drank, like the other painters, in the Sloop Inn. William Redgrave, a local artist, overheard an exchange with the notoriously heavy-drinking and cantankerous Roger Hilton, who remarked: ‘You are the only non-abstract painter worth consideration, although of course you are not a painter – you don’t know the first thing about painting.’ ‘Good,’ replied Bacon, ‘I think my work is perfectly horrible. Now we can get together; you teach me how to paint and I’ll lend you my genius.’

  The notion that Bacon might have learned something from Heron and the painters of St Ives is not as fanciful as it might seem. His reaction to Rothko and Pollock had been one of disappointment because he had expected to like them more. Several of the painters whom he admired were also idols of Heron’s, Pierre Bonnard being one. The painter and critic Giles Auty spent a sunny afternoon with Bacon in St Ives, drinking whisky and talking mainly about Bonnard, until one of Bacon’s other activities intervened. ‘The discussion was interrupted by the return of Ron, who fingered his belt and enquired, “Are you ready for a thrashin’ yet, Francis?”’

  Bacon, unlike his friend Lucian Freud, had an appetite for strong colour. He had praised the chromatically rich paintings of the veteran Matthew Smith. From this point, Bacon, like Heron, painted colour fields – but colour fields inhabited by the human figure. He rented a spacious late Victorian place to work – No. 3 Porthmeor Studios – almost next door to Heron, who occupied Ben Nicholson’s old workplace at No. 5. It would be hard to imagine more different working conditions from those in his cramped London studio, which was only thirteen feet square. Here, Bacon got down to work on some pictures quite unlike his paintings of a few years before – and quite possibly affected by those of his neighbour Heron. The Bacon scholar Martin Harrison has pointed out that in a sketch from c. 1959 a reclining figure is splayed out in front of three abstract, horizontal zones that look very much like the horizontal stripe paintings Heron had recently been producing just two doors away.

  If Bacon learned something from his neighbours in Cornwall, they, in return, don’t seem to have thought much of his efforts. One is rumoured to have recycled unfinished Bacons, left behind when he returned to London, as a backing for his own pictures; another to have used some of Bacon’s paintings on hardboard to mend a hen-house roof.

  It seems that – no matter how much he scorned abstraction – its relationship to his own art of brutal fact and tragic despair continued to trouble Bacon after his return to London. The threat it posed was that his work, which had seemed novel and astonishing a decade before, might be starting to look old-fashioned. An encounter with his then friend Frank Bowling in 1960 gives some insight into Bacon’s state of mind. Bowling had temporarily been expelled from the Royal College of Art for marrying the assistant registrar, Paddy Kitchen, and sought solace from Bacon. The older painter invited Bowling up to his studio and cooked him an omelette, much to Bowling’s delight: ‘I’ve never eaten another omelette quite like it, so beautiful and tasty, he was a very good cook.’ Bacon, in avuncular spirit, offered as consolation the notion that Robin Darwin – the principal who had kicked Bowling out – was the worst painter who had ever lived. He took the view that Bowling should pay no attention to the art school establishment, which had been after all his own strategy, and concentrate on his own way of painting. Then, after quite a bit of drinking, Bowling and Bacon ‘locked horns’ about two- and three-dimensional space. Bowling recalls:

  I said that Modernism had come to underline that, in painting, the task was to manoeuvre the material – paint – on the canvas across flat space. The dynamics of the picture had to be all over, and the space flat. It was the first time I had articulated something I was feeling instinctively. Bacon’s space, I was convinced, was Renaissance space – a stage with figures on it. I carried on like that, unaware by how disturbed he was by my saying this.

  Their friendship ended soon afterwards, and the fact that Bowling had been saying – in effect – that Bacon’s work was outmoded may well have been the underlying reason. It cannot have gone down well.

 
These issues around space, and flatness, in painting were the vital questions of the moment for artists. For some avant-garde tastes, even Heron’s John Moores prize-winning work was still a bit too European, too English. Though resolutely non-figurative, it still had an atmospheric haze, a lingering hint of air and cloud. Perhaps, also, at around three feet by four, it was on the small side in comparison with the epic scale of American painting. Size – like flatness – was becoming a critical matter.

  PATRICK HERON Horizontal Stripe Painting: November 1957–January 1958, 1957–58

  Also in 1959, the same year the Tate was showing ‘New American Painting’ and Heron won the John Moores, an exhibition called ‘Place’ was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. It consisted of work by three younger painters: Robyn Denny, Richard Smith and Ralph Rumney. To them Heron and his contemporaries looked old-fashioned and American art much more exciting. But ‘Place’ was radically unconventional as much – or indeed more – for the way the paintings were presented. Instead of being hung on the walls, they were bracketed back to back, and arranged in two parallel zigzags. There was even a map of the floorplan on the reverse of the invitation card. It was a maze of pictures. Roger Hilton had talked about ‘things flying out of the canvas and joining up with people in the room’. Here were paintings that were actually jostling with the viewer for space, looming close and personal, almost trapping the spectator.

  FRANCIS BACON Sketch of reclining figure, c. 1959

  ‘Place’ was planned as a sort of game. The rules were agreed by the three painters before they began work: each exhibit would be a panel of seven feet by six feet, colours would be restricted to three – red, green and black – which could be used singly (since monochrome pictures were now a possibility) or in any permutation the artists saw fit. Within these restrictions, the participants were to work as close to their usual idiom as possible.