Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  The interview in Scene, despite its archaic sexism, contained a memorable statement of how Boty saw her art. Many people, she explained, were nostalgic about the past – Victoriana – whereas she and her circle felt ‘a nostalgia for NOW’. It was, she went on, ‘almost like painting mythology, but a present-day mythology’. The contemporary equivalents to Mars and Venus, she believed, were film stars like Marilyn.

  The phrase ‘nostalgia for NOW’ pinpoints one distinction between what Boty was doing and the work of American Pop artists such as Warhol. He wasn’t interested in nostalgia, more in worship (his pictures of Marilyn are related to the icons of the Eastern Catholic Church to which he belonged) and the way the images of the famous are created and multiplied by the mass media. Boty’s approach, in contrast, was distinctively British. Nostalgia is a warm and romantic emotion; Boty’s images of stars, though based on photographs, are softly evocative, as if publicity shots were turning back into flesh and blood. Like Peter Blake, her mentor in painting (he was in love with her, but she was not with him), she sometimes painted as an ardent fan. With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo (1962) is a love letter in paint, in which the French actor – who played the doomed, criminal outsider hero in Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle (1960) – is crowned by roses and surmounted with pulsing red and green hearts.

  Like Blake, Boty also made herself the subject of her pictures, but took this one step further. Working with her photographer friends Lewis Morley and Michael Ward, she posed with her paintings, acting out the part of model. Thus she was her own work of art, come to life. With her painting of Belmondo as a backdrop, she posed naked as Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1482–85) and François Boucher’s nude Mademoiselle O’Murphy (1751). It seems that in such photographs, Boty was presenting herself as model and creative force in one.

  In Boty’s art we can see a new subject – sexual politics – emerging from the template of Pop art. This was no longer art about advertising or packaging, but about who you were. Appropriately, one of her most memorable works uses an image that more than any other came to symbolize the changing sexual mores of the 1960s. It was entitled, Scandal ’63. There was no need to explain which scandal.

  On 4 June 1963 the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo MP, confessed that he had ‘misled’ the House of Commons and resigned from office. He had been accused of having an affair with a young woman named Christine Keeler, who had also had a liaison with Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London and a spy. Early in 1963, rumours began to circulate about this heady mix of politics, espionage, high society and the possible leaking of state secrets across the pillow. The Profumo affair was about many things – impatience with a ruling class who seemed corrupt, old-fashioned and hypocritical, as well as weariness with a government that had been in power for over a decade. But it was more than anything else about sexual hypocrisy, in a climate of increasing openness.

  In the autumn of 1963, an unknown patron commissioned Boty to paint a picture about the Profumo scandal. She began work, using as her principal source a newspaper photograph of Keeler leaving her flat; halfway through, however, she changed this for what became a much more celebrated shot, one that had been taken by her photographer friend Lewis Morley in May that year. It had been intended as a publicity still for a film about the Profumo affair, with the film’s promoters insisting that Keeler should pose naked. She was reluctant; eventually, as a compromise, Morley suggested that she take her clothes off, but hid most of her body – modestly yet provocatively – behind the back of a modernist Jacobsen-style chair.

  Boty’s painting is a collage in paint like some of Peter Blake’s works. The red zone that fills much of the picture is reminiscent of a bedspread as well as a news placard; Keeler floats in front on the chair, with an array of figures and faces around her like the ghosts of a wild party. In an early version of the painting, Keeler walks across space rather as Marilyn Monroe does in The Only Blonde in the World, but then Morley showed Boty the contact prints from his photo session. From those she chose an image, not the famous shot in which Keeler rests her head on both hands, but a more tentative alternative.

  At the top of the picture, on a strip of blue space, are the heads of the leading male characters in the drama – not only Profumo and Stephen Ward, who had introduced the cabinet minister to Keeler, but also Rudolf Fenton and a jazz singer named ‘Lucky’ Gordon, two black men who had been caught up in the scandal and unjustly imprisoned. There, again, is a touch of protest. Everybody in the picture, in one way or another, was a victim of hypocrisy. A further layer of complication was added by the fact that Boty posed in her studio, her body hidden by the finished painting, perhaps making an implicit comparison between herself and the star of the scandal, Christine Keeler. The picture itself has disappeared. No one knows who commissioned it and why, or where – if it still exists – it now is.

  Pauline Boty posing with Scandal ’63, 1964. Photo by Michael Ward

  Boty was on her way to becoming a genuine star herself in the years before her early death. Perhaps, had she lived, she would have combined all her talents and activities – as actor, painter, social commentator – to become a new kind of artist, one who did not yet exist. A decade later, the notion of the artist as ‘living sculpture’ was patented by Gilbert & George, while Cindy Sherman presented herself in a series of works acting out roles from art history. In the early 1960s the idea of performance art did not exist in London, but Boty did have a flourishing second career as a performer on stage and in film (although she told the writer Nell Dunn that painting came first, if she had to choose). As it is, hers was a poignantly brief career, cut short just as it was beginning. She died of cancer, aged only twenty-eight, on 1 July 1966.

  Frank Bowling in 1962. Elements of his art theory are painted on the wall behind him.

  *

  If David Hockney and Peter Blake had travelled a long distance geographically and culturally from, respectively, Bradford and working-class Dartford to reach the RCA, Frank Bowling had moved even further. He was born in February 1934 in Bartica, a small town in British Guiana. His father was a policeman, his mother ran a shop – called Bowling’s Variety Store – in the main street of New Amsterdam, a port about sixty miles from the capital, Georgetown, where the family moved while he was a child.

  Frank boarded a ship for Europe in 1953, and the moment he arrived in London he knew he was home. His trajectory into art, however, was oblique. Almost immediately on arrival he joined the Royal Air Force, but left three years later having acquired an interest in painting from a fellow recruit. Subsequently he worked as an artists’ model before moving to the other side of the easel and studying at Chelsea and the RCA.

  Bowling progressed through many idioms over his student years and those that followed. In the mid-1960s, however, he briefly worked in a highly idiosyncratic version of Pop. Cover Girl (1966) is in a way a quintessential product of Swinging London. Its principal source was a cover of the Observer colour magazine. The image showed the model Hiroko Matsumoto wearing a dress by Pierre Cardin. This in itself was a manifestation of a newly globalized world. Matsumoto, Cardin’s muse at the time, was the first Japanese mannequin to work for a Parisian couturier. The clothes she was wearing were startling to the eyes of mid-1960s Britain; the Observer reporter commented that Cardin’s design was ‘rather a shock’. His rival, André Courrèges, had produced a range that the press dubbed ‘Space Age’ and he had called ‘Couture future’; Cardin had countered with a unisex look in which both male and female outfits consisted of tunic and hose.

  The target motif on the dress in Bowling’s painting looks very close to paintings by Kenneth Noland (shown in London in the Kasmin Gallery). Thus, Bowling translated the photograph of Matsumoto into a painting, much as Boty had done, but added an extra layer of irony by transforming the outfit back into a colour field painting, setting it against a sequence of stripes that look rather like a work from the ‘Situation’ exh
ibition.

  Bowling’s choice of colours – red, gold, green, white and black – by accident or design were those of the flag of the newly independent nation of Guyana, the land of Bowling’s birth, which first flew in May 1966, just as he was painting this picture. The building to be seen in the background, in the manner of a silkscreened photograph in a work by Andy Warhol, is Bowling’s Variety Store in New Amsterdam. The artist calls this building ‘mother’s house’.

  FRANK BOWLING Cover Girl, 1966

  Bowling’s Variety Store, New Amsterdam, Guyana

  The photograph on which it is based was taken on a doubly significant day, 2 June 1953: the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and also the day that Bowling first landed in London. Times were changing, the old world and the new were merging together. ‘Pop art’ could express many things – dreams, protests, hopes, fantasies, fears or, as here, disguised autobiography.

  Chapter fifteen

  MYSTERIOUS CONVENTIONALITY

  London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my bloodstream. It’s always moving – the skies, the streets, the buildings. The people who walk past me when I draw have become part of my life.

  Leon Kossoff, 1996

  Despite the vogue for Pop and the artists of Situation, in London, perhaps more than anywhere else, many painters remained engaged with the great past: the old masters, the Renaissance. If the Kasmin Gallery on Bond Street, mainly showing colour field abstraction, its white space expanding like Doctor Who’s Tardis, seemed to stand for the future, then the opposite pole of art and taste was represented by the Beaux Arts Gallery on Bruton Place. Richard Morphet remembers that ‘It was like stepping from the humdrum urban scene into a shrine or a temple. The moment you entered the gallery you seemed to be leaving the world you’d been in and entering a much longer timescale.’ The art critic Andrew Forge was one of many who described the atmosphere that awaited the visitor who climbed the dark staircase from the street into the upper gallery, looking down on a larger space below, with creaky boards and a smell of paraffin stoves. The desk of the owner, Helen Lessore, was on the right, ‘and she was almost always there, pale, beaked, a melancholy bird’.

  Lessore was also a painter and, years later, after the gallery had long been closed, she painted an imaginary group portrait of the artists who were close to her heart. She called it Symposium I (1974–77). Starting with the sole sculptor, Raymond Mason, at the top left and travelling clockwise, it portrayed Lessore’s son John, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Euan Uglow, Myles Murphy and Craigie Aitchison. The people in this picture probably never all gathered together in one room, drinking wine and talking. Some barely knew each other. There was no one way of making art that bound them all together. Some worked from living models, some from imagination, a few from photographs – or perhaps a blend of all three. The bonds that connected them – apart from showing, at one time or another, with the Beaux Arts Gallery – were loose. These artists belonged to several overlapping circles, both social and stylistic. Apart from the fact that they were all figurative artists, no generalizations fit every person in the group. They weren’t excited by the thought of America and what it had to offer, as Jones, Hockney and Smith so clearly were. Popular culture was not an interest. On the whole, they were more engaged by art from the European past – Rembrandt, Velázquez, Piero della Francesca – than the American present. But even in that, there were exceptions: Frank Auerbach, as we have seen, revered the work of Pollock and de Kooning.

  HELEN LESSORE Symposium I, 1974–77

  The artists gathered around Helen Lessore’s imaginary table were, more or less, those who were included in a nebulous grouping known as the School of London. In the 1960s, one thing that they did have in common was that, with the exception of Bacon, they were all deeply unfashionable. The painter John Virtue, who began studying at the Slade aged seventeen in 1965, remembers that in those days ‘pared back, brilliantly coloured, hard-edge painting was everywhere’. Conversely, the paintings of Uglow, Andrews and Auerbach – all among his teachers at the Slade – were considered ‘fringe activities associated with the past, reactionary art; Lucian Freud was regarded as a slightly eccentric irrelevancy’.

  In retrospect, of course, the landscape looks different. Freud, like Bacon, now seems a towering figure in the recent history of painting. So too does Auerbach. The others – Andrews, Kossoff and Uglow in particular – have perhaps still not been given the position they deserve.

  *

  Another, slightly different, group portrait with a smaller but similar cast was made in March 1963 – just as the long winter was easing and the Profumo affair was about to come to a head. The location for the photograph was Wheeler’s restaurant at 19–21 Old Compton Street, Soho, and the subjects were arranged around two sides of a table, a champagne bottle and ice bucket in the middle. At the end, on the left, was Timothy Behrens, an expressionist painter who stylistically had little to do with the others; next to him is Lucian Freud, in conversation with Francis Bacon, then Frank Auerbach chatting to Michael Andrews on the far right. The photographer was John Deakin, a habitué of Soho who would often have been found seated at the table himself. But like many good photographs, this one was staged, part of a photo shoot for Queen, a glossy magazine favoured by younger members of the British Establishment, known as the ‘Chelsea set’.

  Timothy Behrens, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews at Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho, London, 1963. Photo by John Deakin

  Frank Auerbach recalls:

  Francis Wyndham – who worked for Queen – thought that there was some sort of group of people who knew each other and painted, and he commissioned John Deakin to take a photograph of us at 11 o’clock in the morning. The table was laid but we weren’t going to have a meal. We all turned up rather bad-tempered, and Deakin got up on the bar and took photographs, which were rejected because they weren’t entirely in focus.

  Apart from the inclusion of Behrens, Francis Wyndham was not mistaken. There was a group of painters, who all knew each other, met quite frequently, and were dedicated – though in very different ways – to painting something highly elusive: life. Such lunches really did take place, quite frequently. Wheeler’s was a very good place to eat. It specialized in oysters and fish, and maintained an excellent wine cellar even during the war. Lucian Freud remembered that ‘we all went there a great deal, and we all had accounts’.

  According to Auerbach, the photo shoot at Wheeler’s ended early: ‘Tim Behrens, thinking that this was going to be some sort of party, suggested that a bottle should be opened. Rather grudgingly, because he realized he’d be paying for it – not that he would usually have minded that – Francis agreed. Then we all went away before lunch.’

  *

  One of the places they might well have ended up later that day was the Colony Room, just round the corner from Wheeler’s at 41 Dean Street. This was a drinking club that functioned – like the Beaux Arts Gallery and Wheeler’s – as an informal headquarters for a certain circle of painters but not the whole ‘School of London’ group. Leon Kossoff, for example, seldom, if ever, ventured there. For Francis Bacon in particular it was a perfect environment: bitchy, drunken, with all inhibitions left at the door. It was like – in the words of John Minton – ‘being in an enormous bed, with drinks’. John Wonnacott encountered the Colony Room as a nineteen- or twenty-year-old art student. Nearly sixty years later, he still feels it was ‘extraordinary’:

  On the one hand, it was a bit like the Eugene O’Neill play The Iceman Cometh, about alcoholics in a New York rooming house. There were all these people who looked semi-derelict, who hung around at the Colony, with Francis ordering champagne for everyone all round. On the other hand, it was full of people who otherwise you only heard of as names – Anthony Burgess, John Hurt, the Bernard brothers, Jeffrey and Bruce.

  It was a coterie, almost a family. If there was not much talk about art, the world of So
ho provided plenty of raw material for it. Many of Bacon’s major pictures of the late 1950s and 1960s depicted the trio grouped near the centre of Michael Andrews’s painting Colony Room I (1962): Henrietta Moraes, Freud and Muriel Belcher, founder and proprietor of the establishment.

  MICHAEL ANDREWS Colony Room I, 1962

  In the early 1950s, Michael Andrews, a shy art student and son of a Methodist insurance salesman from Norwich, had ventured into this Soho world. Bruce Bernard remembered meeting him around this time, describing him as a ‘thoughtful, dedicated and, in his way, very ambitious painter, but … also socially quite manic, drinking and behaving with an engaging, and of course entirely sensitive, recklessness.’

  Andrews’s picture shows a typical scene at the Colony Room, with its throng of drinkers deep in conversation. It is evening or, perhaps, late afternoon; the curtains are drawn, the conversation roaring, the speakers closely packed, and possibly in some cases swaying. Muriel Belcher is perched on her stool next to the bar, Francis Bacon turned towards her on one side, Lucian Freud next to him, looking outwards. To the left of Freud is Bruce Bernard, who later recalled that Andrews had first made him the central figure, then wounded his vanity ‘by bringing in Henrietta Moraes to obstruct the view’. Bruce’s brother Jeffrey leans nonchalantly smoking against the bar on the left; the diminutive John Deakin is standing next to him, his back to the viewer. To the right of Bacon, and behind the bar, are Belcher’s lover Carmel Stuart and the barman Ian Board.