by Ann Wroe
The vision has become fuzzy, perhaps inevitably. James Lees-Milne regretted that some National Trust houses where the families had moved out now had the appearance of museums, with souvenir shops. Wandering around the rooms decorated and arranged with “suave good taste”, it was difficult to imagine that anyone had once actually lived there. Reaching for his most devastating barb, he said it was “just very faintly suburban”.
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein, who turned comics into art, died on September 29th 1997, aged 73
The first of Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-book paintings were produced to please his children. Or so he said. But he also said on another occasion, “I wouldn’t believe anything I tell you.” He, in common with many artists, would have preferred not to have talked much about his work. The language was all in the painting. But when he became famous there were interviews to give. “So what started you into this comic-book theme, Mr Lichtenstein?” “It was my children.” It might even have been true. At least the story offered a clue to a vast American middle-class audience eager to understand the new pop art so as to discuss it in a seemingly informed and sympathetic way.
Unlike the abstract impressionists who had preceded pop art, it was clear that Mr Lichtenstein could draw. Not for him the abstractionists’ random brush-strokes and drips; he had a meticulous line and a careful use of colour. Before he became a pop artist, he had an oeuvre of representational painting that anyone could appreciate. He was an artist to respect. You could warm to him. He had fought in the war. Then, in 1965, Life magazine asked: “Is he the worst artist in America?” The question was not so much a provocation as confirmation that he had become the most famous artist in America.
His name was made in two tumultuous years: from a show in the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1962 to his public epiphany by Life and others. Critics at the Castelli show were both approving and hostile. But everyone agreed that marrying comic images to fine art was sensational. He had started something. A genre was born. Every artist seemed to turn to pop. Andy Warhol tried to rival him with his paintings of tins of soup, but Mr Lichtenstein was the pioneer. He was able to give up his part-time teaching jobs. In the next three decades he never stopped experimenting in various media, including sculpture, and became rich as his work sold for increasing, and eventually astronomical, prices. But it was for his work in the 1960s that he has a place, of whatever size, in the history of art.
For most Americans the news that Roy Lichtenstein had died this week came in a tribute by President Clinton. America has been both proud and defensive about the flowering of its art in the post-war years. New York, it was said, had replaced Paris as the innovative centre of the art world. Plucking up its courage, America sent to Paris and other European cities a number of exhibitions of its best and brightest, taking the precaution of secretly bribing some critics and other influential people to give them a good reception. But for all this care, masterminded, it is said, by the CIA, Paris has mostly given American art the raspberry.
The likes of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko are seen as unworthy successors to Matisse and Braque. And Marcel Duchamp and other Dadaists had elevated the banal objects of everyday life to art back in the 1920s. The French view is not shared elsewhere in Europe. Mr Lichtenstein, particularly, is liked for his sense of fun. Sometimes he has seemed to be mocking the era of art in which he had been so successful. His father, a property dealer, had told him stories of the peculiarities of the marketplace, and no market is more peculiar than art.
Mr Lichtenstein reflected that you could hang a rag on the wall of a gallery and it would be taken seriously as a work of art. He seemed to be lampooning his success with his picture captioned, “Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece! My,soon you’ll have all of New York clamouring for your work.”
He once said that his own work was too despicable to hang. Who would want to have in their living room a huge comic picture of a fighter pilot saying “Whaam!” (one of Roy Lichtenstein’s most famous pieces)?
His technique was certainly not despicable. His art school training, followed by experience as a draughtsman, was evident in the precision of his work. He started with small pencil sketches which he enlarged on to canvas with a projector and then filled in the colours. He used stencils and other mechanical aids to help with the shapes. Assistants helped with the boring bits. These are the techniques of commercial artists who produce magazine covers and advertisements. In this sense Mr Lichtenstein was the most successful commercial artist who ever lived.
Mere workers at the coal-face, the artists who laboured away on the comic books that Mr Lichtenstein copied, did not think much of his paintings. In enlarging them, some claimed, they became static. Some threatened to sue him. Whatever the justice of their complaints, in fact Mr Lichtenstein did them a sort of favour. Comic books these days are often taken seriously, the subject of theses (or a sign of growing illiteracy). But this is to miss the point of Roy Lichtenstein’s achievement. His was the idea. The art of today, he told an interviewer, is all around us. It is not Impressionist painting. “It’s really McDonald’s.” Of course, you don’t have to believe everything he said.
Walter Lini
Walter Hadye Lini, a voice of the Pacific, died on February 21st 1999, aged 56
One of Walter Lini’s minor pleasures was to get the better of the French. His country, Vanuatu, was for 74 years jointly run by Britain and France. It might have been thought that there were enough islands in the South Pacific for the colonial powers to take their pick without getting in each other’s way. But both the British and the French fancied the New Hebrides, as Vanuatu was then called, and refused to budge. The two European administrations ran separate legal, educational and security systems in an atmosphere of mutual dislike, which persisted after the country’s independence in 1980.
Mr Lini’s first betterment of the French was in securing independence at all. France was reluctant to pull out and after Britain insisted gave covert support to a rebellion led by French settlers. Mr Lini put down the rebels in a skirmish, which briefly, if grandly, was called the “coconut war” by foreign newspapers.
Mr Lini could not afford to hold grudges: about a third of the population of 170,000 spoke pidgin French (and numerous local languages). All the same, he was one of the strongest voices in the Pacific region against French nuclear testing in Mururoa and against colonialism. From time to time Mr Lini expelled a French ambassador, seemingly just to remind Paris that he was keeping an eye on its artful ways. The French still remain in New Caledonia, French Polynesia and a number of other islands, the last of the European colonialists in the Pacific, and seemingly unshiftable. But, partly as a result of public opinion led by Mr Lini and others, they have stopped testing their nuclear weapons there. In Vanuatu (Our Land Eternally) Mr Lini sought to integrate the British and French communities on the 83 islands and their ways of doing things, a process that is still going on. Parliament is largely based on the British model. Among the better-off in the capital, Vila, French cuisine is generally preferred.
Along with Bibles and hymn-books Christian missionaries carried to the Pacific European ideas about culture, property and politics. God set them a daunting task: even now some islanders still believe in the cargo cult dating from the second world war when American soldiers distributed goodies with divine abandon. But the missionaries were undeterred. The island where Walter Lini was born is called Pentecost, commemorating the missionaries’ landing on Whit Sunday. Young Walter was a keen Christian. He was educated at a missionary school and sent to New Zealand to study for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1970. He returned with ideas about nationalism and joined an independence-minded party supported by the Anglican church. (The French-speaking Roman Catholics had a political party with similar aims.) Walter Lini was the obvious choice to lead the independent state’s first government.
Belonging to a world-wide religion helped Mr Lini to overcome the sense of remoteness felt by Pa
cific islanders. Unlike the strident (though at present muted) countries of the Pacific rim, the island-states are lonely specks in the ocean with few natural resources. Mr Lini appreciated that copra and cocoa, plus a
dollop of international aid, were not going to do much to raise living standards. He turned to the dodges of the capitalist world. Vanuatu became a tax haven and a place to register a flag of convenience. In the 1980s Vanuatu sold licences to Russian fishing boats to trawl in its waters and there was talk of Soviet warships using its ports. America, which regarded the Pacific as its private pond, seemed about to offer tempting counterproposals when, sadly for Vanuatu, the Soviet Union collapsed.
Lonely they may be, but the island-states are among the world’s most peaceful places. Nothing much happens there. Even their occasional troubles– Bougainville’s rebellion, Fiji’s military coup – seem mere frolics in a world of Kosovos and Iraqs. Under Mr Lini, Vanuatu became one of the most desirable tourist destinations in the South Pacific, rivalled perhaps only by Tahiti. Rich Australians, especially, have villas there and pop over for the weekend.
Walter Lini gave an impression of modest confidence. There were no guards, not even a policeman, at his official residence when the writer of this article visited him. Yes, he believed in material progress, but it should be unhurried. He favoured small government, and not just for a small country. Any medium-sized nation, he said, could be run efficiently by a political leader and half a dozen able civil servants. Perhaps because of such views, his critics called him a dictator. But when his party was defeated in a general election in 1991, he stood down after 11 years as prime minister. Subsequent governments have been coalitions of parties linked to both the French-speaking and English-speaking communities. He served them as justice minister. The French were not at all bad, he said, those that had ethnic roots in Vanuatu.
Joan Littlewood
Joan Maud Littlewood, a theatrical prodigy, died on September 20th 2002, aged 87
Mention Joan Littlewood and those that still remember her may murmur, “Oh! What a Lovely War” and perhaps hum a few notes of its theme tune. The play was first put on in 1963 and some 40 years later remains a powerful snub to the propaganda of war. It has had a worldwide audience. Not only was it seen in theatres in London, elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, but it was made into a film that reached the millions who never go to a theatre.
Its strength was that it was hugely entertaining, featuring the immensely tuneful songs of the first world war. But just as a nostalgic number was captivating its audience, a news flash would read, “Battle of the Somme ends. Casualties, 1,332,000. Gain, nil.” The play spared no one, especially those in command. A British general prays, “Well, God, the prospects for a successful attack are now ideal … And I ask for victory, oh Lord, before the Americans arrive.” The anti-war feeling of the 1960s that Miss Littlewood captured has endured, and the task of the war propagandist has never been harder.
“How I loathed those songs,” Miss Littlewood said. They recalled a childhood of “photos of dead soldiers in silver frames, medals in a forgotten drawer”. But she also loathed the commercial success of the play, and of other plays she conceived and produced that went on to make heaps of money. Many ordinary mortals would be delighted that a production that started life in a tiny theatre had gone on to do well. But Miss Littlewood was not ordinary and to her admirers there was something a bit immortal about her as well.
It wasn’t the money she objected to: for much of her life she was hard up, and many of the plays she produced were put on with little money. What she feared was that her work would be tainted by its connection with conventional theatre. She once said that Laurence Olivier was “the most stupid ham that ever conned people into taking him for an actor”. She dismissed a young Michael Caine with her gravest insult: “You will only ever be a star.” Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” was the sort of play she couldn’t stand. Understandably, many in conventional theatre didn’t much care for her either.
At the start of her autobiography, “Joan’s Book”, Miss Littlewood describes a childhood of poverty in London and how at the age of six she was a bridesmaid when her mother finally married. But prodigies have a way of surviving unpromising beginnings. A church school and the local public library provided her with the rudiments of education. At 16 she won a free place to Britain’s leading acting school, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1934, when she was 20, she joined a company called Theatre of Action, founded by Ewan MacColl, a folk singer she later married. It performed in the streets of Manchester and was one of several dozen such troupes in the north of England.
They modelled themselves on German theatrical troupes which were parodying the recently-installed Nazi government, and whose members would soon be rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Miss Littlewood’s plans for a “people’s theatre” stem from this time. Bertold Brecht, a German dramatist, was one of her heroes. In Oh! What a Lovely War there are echoes of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, of 1928, with its film clips and messages on cards. But revolution had to be put on hold during the second world war, when Miss Littlewood worked for the BBC, making a soap for transmission to American listeners called “Front Line Family”. It was about “everyday people” and at the BBC “I was the only one who’d had contact with such glamorous creatures.”After the war, bursting with ideas and with a new husband, Gerry Raffles, nine years her junior, whom she had met when he was a teenager, Miss Littlewood once again set out to show ordinary people the magic of theatre. The trouble was, ordinary people were not much interested. “There was an audience for us somewhere, but where?” she said indignantly. In 1953 she and Raffles rented and later bought a once-graceful but now dilapidated theatre in Stratford, not on Avon but in rundown east London. Surely the locals would support the revival of one of their old playhouses, proudly called the Theatre Royal? They did not.
But her company did become famous abroad. It toured throughout Europe. Three plays the company did at a Paris festival in 1955 won rave reviews in French newspapers. The Stratford theatre was “discovered” by London critics and its seats were soon filled by middle-class people. They tolerated the classics, such as Ben Jonson’s “Volpone”, and loved musical productions such as “Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be”. Several were transferred to theatres in central London.
When Gerry Raffles died in 1974, Miss Littlewood gave up most of her theatre work. He had in many ways been her wife, taking on the domestic tasks she had no time for. For much of the rest of her life she lived in France, near Vienne, where he is buried. Joan Littlewood shook up British theatre, but only briefly. Seeing a play remains mostly a middle-class pleasure. “Private Lives” was recently revived with great success.
Christopher Lloyd
Christopher Lloyd, an iconoclastic English gardener, died on January 27th 2006, aged 84
VISITORS to Great Dixter, an old, rambling, timber-framed house among the steep woods and pastures of the High Weald, on the borders of Kent and Sussex in the south of England, would find it haunted by several tutelary spirits. One, with pipe in mouth and owlish mien, was the shade of Sir Edwin Lutyens, who after 1910 laid out the gardens in what had been a cattle yard. Another, with pebble-spectacles, trug and boots, was the ghost of Gertrude Jekyll, whose principles of gardening first informed the place. And then – short, stout, moustachioed, and looking at first sight as though he might empty a blunderbuss on you as soon as invite you to tea – was Christopher Lloyd. If he was not there, his familiar spirits Yucca, Canna and Dahlia, short-tempered dachshunds, kept guard over the turf.
Save for short spells at Rugby School and Cambridge, Mr Lloyd lived at Great Dixter all his life. He learned gardening there, helping his mother prick out seedlings as a child, and found he never wanted to do anything else. In a country devoted to gardening, Mr Lloyd thus became its best plantsman. With his invaluable head gardener, Fergus Garrett, he stomped round his five-acre domain, ceaselessly experimenting with trees,
shrubs and flowers. Each plant would be inspected twice daily, and each experiment recorded in a weatherproof notebook. The fruits of his observations became columns in Country Life, Gardens Illustrated and the Guardian, and were turned into more than 20 books.
“Christo”, as everyone called him, was a great believer in such discipline, which he said he had learnt from the Japanese. But it was only half his philosophy, and not even the more important half. His strongest belief was in freedom and fun. He advised gardeners to plant what they liked, throw out what they didn’t, discard all previous notions of colour, arrangement and taste, put up two fingers to horticultural rectitude and “Go for it”.
In the staid, quiet world of English gardening, this was dynamite. Not so far from Great Dixter, at Sissinghurst Castle, lay the epitome of English taste in Vita Sackville-West’s White Garden, surrounded by equally soothing beddings in blue, lilac and mauve. Mr Lloyd waved it aside. What about “Challenging Orange” or “Nothing to Fear Red”? What about a great big bush of mauve-pink Daphne mezereum underplanted with a carpet of Crocus x luteus, in bright orange-yellow? “The two colours may be shouting at each other,” he wrote, “but they are shouting for joy.”
