A Lowry Summer in an autumn deluge

‘You never see the sun in my work … because I can’t paint shadows. I kept trying for years’.

So said LS Lowry. But, in Salford on Tuesday to see A Lowry Summer, the exhibition mounted by The Lowry to mark the artist’s 125th birthday year, I thought maybe the real reason was that the sun never bloody shines in this city. I know that’s a base calumny on Manchester, but the rain was coming down like stair rods (northern colloquial, archaic: look up on Google), and had been for nearly 48 hours without pause. This wasn’t a Lowry summer: it was a deluge.

Actually, with almost the whole of the Lowry Collection on display, alongside paintings on loan which have never previously been displayed at The Lowry, this exhibition is something of a Lowry deluge. It is a truly comprehensive survey of the artist’s output – warts and all.

In the early seventies, when my generation were establishing ourselves after university, a common sight inthose first flats was an Athena poster of a typical Lowry northern industrial landscape. Popular recognition had come late for Lowry (he was in his 80s by then), but for a while his star was definitely in the ascendant (in 1967, Status Quo’s first hit single had popularized his ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’ and in 1976 he received an honorary DLitt from my old uni, Liverpool).

Of course, we now know – largely thanks to the exhibitions mounted by The Lowry since its inception in 2000 – that Lowry painted a lot more besides industrial landscapes populated by tiny stick people. He painted continuously throughout his adult life, keeping the activity secret for over forty years while working as a rent collector in Salford. This exhibition showcases all aspects of his work – the industrial townscapes alongside early drawings, portraits, through to later rural landscapes and seascapes.

More than anything, though, the exhibition causes the viewer to question some common assumptions about Lowry – the man and the artist. To what extent do those scenes of working class northerners at work and play represent a benign view of the people portrayed? How significant an artist is Lowry – and which of his works represent his greatest achievements? Walking around this extensive – and exemplary – exhibition, the inescapable conclusion was that the works on show ranged from the great to the truly awful. Indeed, one wonders whether Lowry would ever have wanted some of his late caricatures to be put on public display.

I am tired of people saying I am self-taught. I am sick of it. I did the life drawing for twelve solid years, and that I think is the foundation of painting
– LS Lowry, 1968

The show features many early pencil drawings and portraits which reveal his artistic skill. Among some excellent early portraits in pencil and oil on show here are ‘Portrait of a man looking right’ (1914), ‘Male Model’ (1908), ‘Model with headdress’ (1918), ‘Boy’ (completed in 1913 and depicting a family friend killed in First World War), ‘Artist’s Mother’ (c1920) and ‘Seated Male Nude’ (1914).

These are fine works, rightly valued by Lowry just as much as his more well-known paintings. They show that Lowry was adept at handling line and tone. Lowry was always irritated by people who thought he was an amateur painter, self-taught and untutored: ‘Started when I was fifteen. Don’t know why. Aunt said I was no good for anything else, so they might as well send me to Art School…’. In a profile of his career on The Lowry website, his early training and influences are summarized:

In 1905 he began evening classes in antique and freehand drawing. He was to study both in the Manchester Academy of Fine Art and at Salford Royal Technical College in Peel Park. Academic records show him still attending classes in the 1920s. Lowry knew from his teachers – people like the Frenchman Adolphe Valette – how French Impressionism had changed the painting of landscapes and the modern city. He knew from exhibitions in Manchester what the current trends in modern art were, and deeply admired Pre-Raphaelites like Ford Madox Brown and Rossetti. Far from being a naïve Sunday painter, Lowry was an artist looking for his own distinctive way of painting and drawing – and for a subject matter he could make his own, preferring eventually the view from the Technical College window to that of the posed model.

A View from the Window of the Royal Technical College, Salford (above), a pencil drawing made in 1924, shows the view from the art school balcony (now Salford University Peel Building) and has been described as ‘the pinnacle of the artist’s achievement with the pencil …The composition is stunningly daring and the whole work a synthesis of every shade of technical mastery from tightly controlled to brilliantly free loose drawing’.

Lowry continued to draw compulsively until the last years of his life, producing a huge range of works including highly finished drawings of a life model, careful portrait studies, rapid sketches made on location and charming sketches of children and dogs. Lowry did not merely see drawing as a means to an end in producing his paintings, but as a significant and worthwhile medium in its own right.

But, as this exhibition reveals, these pencil portraits in later years turned into caricatures and grotesques. By the 1960s he was producing caricatures in drawings and paint of people with enlarged moon faces, such as ‘Man in a Trilby’, 1960.

There are many of these on display, most of them execrable (‘Man in a Trilby’ is actually one of the more acceptable ones). One critic of these late drawings complained that Lowry was producing ‘ . . . derogatory caricatures . . . which may well be intended to disclose a tenderly humorous attitude to his fellow creatures [but] seem to me to be distressing documents of a breakdown in communication, not really intended for exhibition.’

In 2000, on the ocassion of The Lowry’s opening, Jonathan Jones, wrote a searing critique of the late portraits – and Lowry’s work in general – in The Guardian:

Lowry’s late portraits are very bad. They lack any sense of idiosyncrasy or attention to the person painted; they have big, mad, staring eyes, are grotesque, sentimental

As Lowry became older his fascination with the people he saw on the streets, or from a bus, focussed increasingly on the oddest or most bizarre characters.

There’s a grotesque streak in me and I can’t help it . . . They are very real people, sad people . . . I’m attracted to sadness, and there are some very sad things.

Lowry was by this time a well known and successful artist and many people, including collectors and dealers, found these works too challenging a departure from the industrial scenes they were familiar with. In drawings made towards the end of his life – and probably never intended for exhibition – figures transform into surreal animals or ghost-like shapes. ‘Isn’t it awful that l have to create them?’ he asked, ‘Why do l do it?’ I feel more strongly about these people than I ever did about the industrial scene … There but for the grace of God go I.’

It’s an attitude seen in his earlier ‘The Cripples’, painted in 1949.

Lowry said of this painting, ‘The thing about painting is that there should be no sentiment. No sentiment’. But his friend Hugh Maitland surprised him by declaring that there was no compassion in these late paintings.

Perhaps Lowry’s best-known work outside of the urban landscapes is ‘Head of a Man’, completed in 1938. It’s an arresting work, described by one critic as ‘like a reflection one might catch of oneself after a sleepless night, all healthy vigour drained, leaving only strain, tension, physical discomfort and utter despair’, and it is indeed a portrait of inner disturbance and unhappiness.

I started a big self-portrait and then I thought, ‘What’s the use of it. I don’t want it and nobody will’. I turned it into a grotesque head, I’m glad I did, I like it better than a self-portrait.

The painting was one of several completed in the 1930s which reflect a period of trauma and unhappiness in Lowry’s life. Lowry was an only child and lived with his mother and father. His mother always insisted that she had wanted daughters and that her son disappointed her. As for his father, their relationship had always been cold and strained. In 1932, his father died of pneumonia and his elderly mother took to her bed, making constant demands on Lowry who cared for her withjout any additional help until she died in 1938.

Not only was Lowry required to be at his mother’s beck and call, he also discovered that his father had run up sizeable debts which it took Lowry a year to settle. With the strain of work and looking after his mother, Lowry’s health deteriorated. He later said of the period:

I think I reflected myself in those pictures. That was the most difficult period of my life. It was alright when he [his father] was alive, but after that it was very difficult because she was very exacting. I was tied to my mother. She was bedfast. In 1932 to 1939 I was just letting off steam.

Completed in 1950, ‘A Father and Two Sons’ (seen at the top of this post) has something of the same psychological aura.

‘Britain at Play’, painted in 1943, is a painting I hadn’t seen before (it’s on loan from the Usher Gallery in Lincoln). It’s a vibrant canvas, a classic example of Lowry depicting city crowds on holiday. It teems with tiny figures, is part imaginary, part based on real locations. Like his other urban landscapes, it is, I think, a celebration of the northern industrial working class experience. However, others see differently. For example, Howard Jacobson has stated that when we see these paintings this way we are guilty of a major misunderstanding. ‘We have taken Lowry’s matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs’, he says, ‘to be warmly appreciative, nostalgic evocations of the teeming street life of Manchester and Salford’. This is wrong. In the 2007 Lowry Lecture he stated:

Dwarfed by the mills, the chimneys and the chapels, they are foreground without function, the very peremptoriness with which they’re drawn – for why would one reduce the various and abundant fleshiness of humanity to a matchstick silhouette? – the proof that their individuality is not what matters to Lowry. They are a crowd, a cluster, a congregation, viewed by someone who is not of them – not contemptuously or satirically, but from somewhere they are not – figures of loneliness themselves, congregating and yet separate, a mystery to the painter. And that’s the subject – not their street-corner, ragamuffin heritage vitality, and not their servitude to capitalism – but their mystery.

Lowry’s work is, according to Jacobson, a brutal consideration of the modern world and the lack of communication between people, he argues, and is reminiscent of the work of the playwrights Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.

There is a painting held here in the Lowry Centre entitled ‘The Lake’. Had Lowry called it The Waste Land or Golgotha or A Vision of Hell, he might have found appreciation for it, and for works on a comparable scale, much sooner. […]

Visionary is the only word for a painting like ‘The Lake’. Apocalyptic, even. Indeed I am not sure that a more visionary or apocalyptic painting has been painted by an English painter in the last 100 years. In the background the city belches its smoke – the whole city, not a glimpse of Agecroft or Pendlebury, but Manchester viewed panoramically as a Canaletto might have designed it – its public buildings, the town hall, the cathedral, of equal standing with the factories, and at first sight belching smoke themselves – but seen allegorically, too, as Blake might have conceived it, Manchester the black and golden city, almost a parody of Jerusalem, coughing out its chaotic promises into a sky that is neither day’s nor night’s. In the centre of the painting a rotting lake – not a lake made by nature, but seemingly a lake of effluence and seepage into which the land is steadily sinking and which appears to be encroaching upon the black and golden city itself. Boats are half submerged in this lake, posts and dead trees and other debris protrude from it. In the foreground, telegraph posts and palings echo the chimneys further back, but they also resemble crosses – hence my alternative title, Golgotha. And among the crosses are what appear to be tumbled down gravestones – the dead granted no more beauty or dignity than the living. The dead disregarded, disrespected, on the very edge of this toxic lake – poisoning it and poisoned by it.

Had ‘The Lake’ been painted in east Germany by an expressionist we would have known where we stood with it. “Sterility, anguish, impotence, redemption promised in the deceiving luminosity of the polluted sky, the unnavigable waters of ruination, the Styxian lake of abandonment and despair…” I have the essay half finished as we speak.

But that’s not how we talk about Lowry. It probably isn’t how we should talk about anybody, but you take my point … In fact, the usual reading of Lowry’s more familiar industrial landscapes has hindered our understanding not only of the more desolate, evacuated paintings, but of the better-known Lowrys too. They are all essentially, in my view, paintings without people in them, even when there are people in them; all – whether they contain gravestones or symbolic crucifixes or not – landscapes of isolation.

LS Lowry Coming from the Mill 1930 — LS Lowry: Coming from the Mill, 1930

‘Coming from the Mill’ (1930) is typical of Lowry’s urban landscapes, a vivid record of life in industrial northern England. Lowry thought it his most characteristic Northern industrial landscape. Based on a pastel drawing made in 1917, it is one of his first ‘composite’ industrial scenes. By this point, his use of spindly figures, had become the characteristic feature of his work. In the early paintings, each ‘matchstick’ figure was carefully and individually depicted. But as the years went by the figures in the big townscapes became less distinctive, more anonymous members of the crowd. That fact, perhaps contributes to the interpretation of these canvases conveying a sense of bleakness, rather than affection. As noted in this exhibition, Lowry used a limited palette of drab colours to portray urban buildings, overcast skies, and smoking factory chimneys – further reinforcing the atmosphere of desolation.

In his critique of Lowry’s work in 2000, Jonathan Jones wrote:

The Lowry paintings worth looking at are the ones everyone knows. There’s no point trying to turn him into a well-rounded artist because he wasn’t one. He was a melancholy compulsive who painted the industrial north of England through deeply disturbed eyes, and caught aspects of it no one else was prepared to look at. It is easy today to sneer at matchstick men but no one can ignore the real authority of a painting like ‘Coming From the Mill’ (1930). It’s a terrifying vision. The lowering buildings are so much more real than the people. Windows repeat themselves in a thudding, monotonous rhythm that is continued by the people trudging along. This is not an angry painting; it is numb. Lowry has internalised what he feels is the city’s spiritual death.

Lowry painted the social world of Salford and Pendlebury systematically, illustrating how the factories produced people deprived of identity. His most disturbing images of the working-class crowd depict moments of supposed freedom and leisure: a drawing from 1925 of the bandstand in Peel Park shows people gathering like maggots around a piece of food, while above them the chimneys tower. Again and again he paints the crowd’s attempts at leisure as feeble reproductions of the discipline of the factory. ‘Going to the Match’ (1953) makes supporting the local football team seem a desperate ritual. One of his scathing images of a crowd trying to forget the factory is called ‘Britain at Play’ (1943).

LS Lowry Going To The Match 1953 — LS Lowry: Going To The Match, 1953

‘Going To The Match’ won a Football Association competition in 1953. Depicting people going to watch Bolton Wanderers at Burnden Park, the painting sold at auction in 1999 for the then record price for a Lowry of two million pounds.

LS Lowry Piccadilly Circus 1960 — LS Lowry: Piccadilly Circus, 1960

Lowry was always interested in the places where people came together – a football match, a bandstand in the park, playgrounds, fairs, the seaside – anywhere where crowds gathered. Many such paintings are on view here. ‘Piccadilly Circus’, painted in 1960 and from a private collection, is a rare London view, while ‘Coming Out of School’ (1927) is not a depiction of a particular place, but is based on recollections of a school seen in Lancashire.

Most of my land and townscape is composite. Made up; part real and part imaginary […] bits and pieces of my home locality. I don’t even know I’m putting them in. They just crop up on their own, like things do in dreams.

LS Lowry Coming Out of School 1927 — LS Lowry: Coming Out of School, 1927

In 1939, John Rothenstein, then Director of the Tate Gallery, visited Lowry’s first solo exhibition in London and later wrote: ‘I stood in the gallery marvelling at the accuracy of the mirror that this to me unknown painter had held up to the bleakness, the obsolete shabbiness, the grimy fogboundness, the grimness of northern industrial England.’

‘Lancashire Fair, Good Friday, Daisy Nook’ (1946) depicts visitors at the annual Easter Fair at Daisy Nook, a rural beauty spot on the River Medlock near Oldham. Echoing Howard Jacobson’s words, Lowry’s figures intermingle with each other, yet remain strangely isolated. Lowry once said: ‘All my people are lonely. Crowds are the most lonely thing of all’

LS Lowry: Lancashire Fair, Good Friday, Daisy Nook, 1946

‘Going To Work’ is a 1959 watercolour. Lowry painted only a small number of watercolours. This picture returns to one of his favorite themes: a swarm of workers funnelling towards the factory gates to start their working day, against a landscape of terraced houses, looming structures and smoky chimneys

I wanted to paint myself into what absorbed me […] Natural figures would have broken the spell of it, so I made my figures half unreal. Some critics have said that I turned my figures into puppets, as if my aim were to hint at the hard economic nescessities that drove them. To say the truth, I was not thinking very much about the people. I did not care for them in the way a social reformer does. They are part of a private beauty that haunted me. I loved them and the houses in the same way: as part of a vision.

Something I didn’t know was that from 1942 to 1945 Lowry was an Official War Artist. Though he produced very few works, there is one striking painting in this exhibition – ‘Blitzed Site’ from 1942, in which a lone figure stands amidst the ruins of what is probably his home, staring stunned at the shattered remains.

LS Lowry Blitzed Site, 1942 — LS Lowry: Blitzed Site, 1942

Another interesting work is ‘The Lodging House’, painted in 1921, and perhaps revealing something of the influence of Adolphe Valette, his tutor when he attended evening classes at Manchester Municipal College of Art in the years before the First World War. A note informs that this was the first work Lowry sold – to a friend of his father for £5.

The exhibition offers a rare chance to see several works from private collections – including ‘Election Time’ (1929), ‘The Orator’ (1950), and ‘Punch and Judy (1943).

‘After the Fire’ (1933) is another painting from a private collection. It depicts the aftermath of the destruction of a mill by fire, and stands alongside other ‘incident’ paintings such as ‘The Removal’ (an eviction) or ‘An Accident’ (actually a suicide) and ‘A Fight’ (1935).

LS Lowry A Fight 1935 — LS Lowry: A Fight, 1935

‘The Pond’ (1950) is one of Lowry’s largest works, one which he considered to be his finest industrial landscape. It contains many features typical of Lowry’s work – smoking chimneys, terraced houses and his ‘matchstick’ people who mill about in the city streets and open spaces.

In a letter to the Tate in 1956, Lowry wrote:

The idea originated in the Rochdale area, but it is not meant to represent a particular spot. This is a composite picture built up from a blank canvas. I hadn’t the slightest idea of what I was going to put in the canvas when I started the picture but it eventually came out as you see it. This is the way I like working best.

On the right, in the middle distance, is Stockport Viaduct:

It’s with me all the time – somewhere, just waiting to appear. It haunts me.

The viaduct appears again in ‘The Viaduct’ (1954), typical of many of his later urban landscapes from which people have largely been removed, leaving only stark, empty panoramas, with perhaps an isolated building – in this case, a Greenall’s pub, the White Star Hotel. This painting was once owned by Alec Guinness. In his Diaries, he recalled a journey through deserted city streets where ‘a few thin clerks … hunched themselves against bitter wind, walking stifflyand alone … like the figures in a Lowry industrial landscape’. Other works of this kind include ‘Derelict House’ (1952) and ‘The Waste Ground’ (1949).

There are rural landscapes, and seascapes, too – mainly, though not exclusively painted in the post-war years. Not many of those are included in this exhibition, but notable works of this kind on display include ‘A Landmark’ from 1936, ‘Seascape’ from 1943 and ‘The Sea’ painted in1963.

LS Lowry A Landmark — LS Lowry: A Landmark, 1936

‘Seascape’ originated following a trip to Anglesey in the early 1940s. Lowry later spoke about the painting’s origins and its psychological significance:

I couldn’t work … a month after I got home I started to paint the sea. But a sea with no shore and nobody sailing on it … Look at my seascpes, they don’t really exist you know, they’re just an expression of my own loneliness.

After the death of his mother in 1939, Lowry lived alone for almost 40 years.

In later paintings such as these there is a sense of infinite empty space. All signs of human activity are removed. Only solitary buildings or monuments suggest the presence of people. But, Lowry is no Turner – his landscapes and seascapes do not record the effects of light or weather. The light is usually cold and even. Hills and fields are reduced to simple repeated patterns.

LS Lowry Seascape — LS Lowry: Seascape, 1943

The sea especially was a source of inspiration. In the 1960s Lowry was a regular visitor to the northeast, staying at the Seaburn Hotel in Sunderland in a room from which he could see the North Sea.

It’s all there. It’s all in the sea. The battle of life is there. And fate. And the inevitability of it all. And the purpose.

LS Lowry The Sea 1963 — LS Lowry: The Sea, 1963

At the very end of the exhibition was a painting I had never seen before – ‘Flowers in a Window’, completed in 1956. It seemed very different to everything that went before.

LS Lowry Flowers in a Window 1956 — LS Lowry: Flowers in a Window, 1956

Turner Monet Twombly: To be beautiful

In my appreciation of Robert Hughes the other day, I quoted Hughes as maintaining that the purpose of art is:

To be beautiful. To manifest beauty. People need beauty. There’s a hunger for it.

Well, there’s plenty of beauty on show at Tate Liverpool’s exhibition Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings, and, judging by the throngs filing through the rooms, a great deal of hunger for it, too.

This is a truly impressive show, awash with brilliant Turners and featuring a selection of Monets that will probably not be seen again together in the UK for many a year (there are five of his water lily paintings, two of which haven’t been in this country before). Indeed, as someone remarked (I can’t remember where I read it), it’s like a very good Monet exhibition constantly interrupted by Turners and Twomblys. I’m not sure I agree – I think Turner gives Monet a pretty good run for his money here. But Twombly? I admit that before this exhibition I knew next to nothing about Twombly, so the title had a kind of falling to bathetic sound, especially having seen Turner Whistler Monet at Tate Britain in 2005 which had a decidedly more convincing ring to it.

I’ll admit, too, that my reaction at first on seeing the first Twombly of the exhibition – Untitled 1992, a canvas splattered with dabs, doodles, and lines scrawled in a childish hand – was probably akin to the hostile scepticism that greeted many of the Monets present here when they were first exhibited, with expletives added.

But, though I still didn’t leave the exhibition wholly convinced about Twombly – at least up against Turner and Monet – I did begin to have an understanding of his technique and his intentions – and of the thinking behind the show. The Tate describes the exhibition as a centuries long conversation between the three painters, ‘questioning and challenging each other as though each were present in the same room at the same time’ and demonstrating that these artists, for different, often very personal reasons, continually returned to the same themes and techniques:

Through the juxtaposition of their work, the exhibition also aims to underline the modernity and undiminished relevance of Turner’s and Monet’s work while simultaneously revealing the strong classical traits in Twombly’s paintings and sculptures.

The hanging is austere: there are no information panels. If you want to understand the exhibition’s logic you will need to read the gallery guide or pick up an audio guide. Otherwise you will be faced with a succession of startling visual juxtapositions, for the arrangement is not chronological, but thematic.

The exhibition begins on the ground floor with a room devoted to the first of seven organising ideas. In ‘Beauty, Power, Space’ the aim is to show how each of these three artists have expressed the sublime. Edmund Burke defined the sublime as anything that excites ideas of terror, pain or peril in the mind of a person who is safe in the knowledge that they are not in fact subjected to danger, while Ruskin declared the sublime to be ‘the effect of greatness upon feelings… whether of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty’. So here, on one wall, is Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander, while displayed directly opposite is Twombly’s painting of the same name. In the myth, Leander drowns as he swims across the Hellespont to visit his lover, Hero, and the paintings in this room are an expression of awe or terror when faced with the sublime power and beauty of the sea.

There’s another strand of the conversation at work here, too. This pairing reveals that both Turner and Twombly engaged with history and mythology. The epic themes addressed by Turner include the stories of Dido and Ulysses, whilst Twombly’s works include allusions to the myths of Bacchus and Orpheus. And, just as Twombly adds handwritten words on his canvases to complement the visual references, so Turner also incorporated text in the form of verse which he exhibited alongside some of his paintings.

Jeremy Lewison, the curator of the exhibition, explained the concept in the Tate magazine:

Quoting the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Twombly inscribes Untitled 1992 with the words ‘outside, an Amazing Space on the other Side of AIR’, suggesting the vastness of the universe beyond the air that we breathe. This large-scale painting, in which a highly inflected surface of white and grey with touches of red and blue evokes sky and sea, seems to take up where Turner left off in a painting such as Rockets and Blue Lights (close at Hand) to warn Steam-Boats of Shoal-Water, where the evident power of nature is pitted against a foundering sailing boat. Both artists suggest the immensity of nature and the inconsequence of man before it. At the top of Twombly’s painting is an inscription from Charles Baudelaire’s Journaux intimes, ‘I have felt the wings of the wind of madness,’ which, in the original source, follows hard on a passage where Baudelaire discusses his fear of the void.

The next theme to be examined is ‘Atmosphere’: Turner once said, ‘Atmosphere is my style and indistinctness is my fault’. When Turner died in 1851 he left several unfinished paintings in his studio. With the hindsight gained from Impressionism, these paintings have come to be appreciated as highly as his finished works – appreciated, indeed, as if they are finished works.

In The Thames above Waterloo Bridge c.1830–5, Turner shrouds the river in a blanket of pollution, with chimneys belching out smoke. In their late works, both Turner and Monet played with simultaneously obscuring and revealing the image. In Turner’s unfinished view of Venice with the Salute 1840–5, the city can barely be distinguished as it emerges from the delicate shimmer of a morning mist.

Similarly, Waterloo Bridge, Monet’s painting of 1902, depicts the bridge as hardly visible in the dense London fog, a splash of pink late afternoon sunlight illuminating the Thames before it. Monet painted London in the winter specifically to capture the visual effects of the city’s polluted air. Waterloo Bridge Pink Effect is as pure a study of the fall of light on cloud, stone and water as you will ever encounter.

Challengingly, these works are displayed alongside Twombly’s Orpheus (1979), the exhibition guide noting that ‘the mist obscures the name of the eponymous hero who, in the Orphic myth, travelled to the underworld to retrieve his wife Eurydice, who is perhaps also alluded to here by the small letters ‘eu’.

Twombly’s Paesaggio 1986 (below) is positioned with Monet’s Morning on the Seine, Giverny 1897 (top), encouraging us to see how both contrast woodland and water and explore effects of light.

The ‘Fire and Water’ section gathers paintings – several of sunrise and sunset – that reflect the artists’ attempts to capture the mood evoked by a particular quality of light. In Houses of Parliament, Sun Breaking Through Fog, 1904, Monet reveals the how sunlight reflected on the surface of the Thames is refracted by the morning mist. He’s reacting to Turner’s own similar attempts and later Twombly (who included a Monet exhibition catalogue amongst his prized possession) continues the experiment.

Monet is known to have seen Turner’s paintings in the London galleries with Camille Pissarro during their stay in 1871, and then on subsequent visits over the following decades. Monet shared Turner’s fascination with light and the effects of the elements, though his interest was motivated less by drama and romanticism than a desire to capture nature as he experienced it. He observed and recorded his subject matter systematically and objectively, often returning to the same motif again and again to paint it in different atmospheric conditions (for example, the façade of Rouen cathedral – a couple of studies of which are in this exhibition).

The drama and romanticism of Turner’s approach is revealed in the crashing surf, burst of white rockets and glow of blue lights in Rockets and Blue Lights, which, like so many of Turner’s late paintings – such as Rough Sea painted in the early 1840s – represents the elemental forces of nature.

Breakers on a Flat Beach (below) derives from the late 1820s, the period when Turner made regular visits to the then-fashionable resort of Margate. There, he particularly prized the coastal light, claiming that the skies over the Isle of Thanet were the most beautiful in Europe.

Similarly, Monet had an intense and long-lasting relationship with the Normandy coast. The canvases he
painted at Fécamp, Pourville, Varengeville and Etretat between 1881 and 1886 came to form a major part of his output. In these locations, he positioned himself as the solitary explorer, face to face with the elements, his canvases increasingly preoccupied with the ﬂeeting effects of weather and atmosphere. Many of his visits were out of season enabling him to record more hostile weather conditions and rougher seas. The Sea at Fécamp places the viewer close to an overhanging rock face where the sea pounds the cliff. Curving brushstrokes of blue, green and white build to form the lines of waves moving towards the cliff. The spray is a ﬂurry of lighter, more tangled marks as the water breaks over the more densely painted rock.

Opposite, is a wall on which are displayed five small oil paintings by Turner from the 1840s. These paintings, as delicate and ethereal as watercolours, are exquisite. Their titles, when listed, read like lines of a poem:

sea and sky
ship in a storm
red sky over a beach
shore with breaking waves
calm sea with distant grey clouds

In the section entitled ‘Naught so Sweet as Melancholy’, the curators have brought together some of Turner’s late Venetian paintings, executed after his final trip to Venice in 1840, with Monet’s paintings of the same city, begun on a trip with his second wife Alice in 1908. Many of Monet’s canvases were only finished after the death of Alice in 1911, when Monet returned to them as a way to come to terms with his loss.

The centrepiece of ‘The Seasons’ is Twombly’s Quattro Stagioni, painted 1993–5. These four panels were where I began to appreciate Twombly. I liked these paintings with their echoes of Chinese landscapes, and their colours reflecting emotion. In this sequence Twombly mourns the passing of time and youth, but celebrates life. Like many poets and painters before him Twombly links the progress of the year with the life cycle, each season representing a different stage in life.

Here the seasons are hung in a different order, beginning with Autumn (above) to reflect the cyclical nature of life; this was a suggestion, the exhibition guide notes, that Twombly welcomed in discussions with the curator shortly before his death last year. Autunno (Autumn), ‘drenched in the colours of harvested grapes, marks the moment of panic, when winter begins to draw in and mortality rears its head’. The reds and burgundies of Autumno, deep and saturated, suggest the season of ripeness and maturity.

Primavera (Spring) ‘conjures the energy of plants springing into life and is full of vigour’. Fiery Estate (Summer, above) is tinged with the knowledge that – in lines from George Seferis embedded in the paint – ‘youth is infinite and yet so brief’. Inverno (Winter) is sparse and cold, like evergreens in snow with ‘ forms and words dissolving in silvery tones’. Twombly incorporates into these panels lines from Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegy, while in Estate, lines from George Seferis’s ‘Three Secret Poems’ have been altered by Twombly, with the words inked on the canvas in Twombly’s inimitable, childish scrawl:

the shard of white . . .
trembling with white light
with white flat sea
distant in memory
between the deluge of life
our dearest, our white youth
our white, our snow white youth
that is infinity . . .

Monet also recorded seasonal changes in his series of poplars in the 1890s, paintings imbued with a strong sense of time.

The final section, ‘A Floating World’, is dominated by Monet’s late paintings of the water lily pond in his garden at Giverny.The exhibition guide comments:

Painted during the First World War and after a period of intense mourning, a sense of human mortality pervades them by contrast with the everlasting endurance of nature. Time appears to stand still in these paintings although glints of sunlight reflected on the surface of the pond imply the time of day. Surrounded by paintings in his studio, Monet created his own consoling world, to heal the psychic pain of bereavement.

Here, too, are Turner’s studies for the commission by Lord Egremont, owner of Petworth House in Sussex.

They make little distinction between water and sky, as all dissolves in the diminishing glow of the sun. Trees and shrubs collapse into patches of paint and the whole becomes a liquefied mass. The Petworth paintings were begun either shortly before or shortly after his father’s death. Their emphasis on the setting sun may also express intimations of mortality. The final paintings have a certain air of despondency. These images remind the viewer once again of finality and provide another link to Twombly’s Quattro Stagioni, and its classical reference to death: ‘Et in Arcadia ego.’

Alongside these masterpieces we find Twombly’s monumental painting Untitled 2007, that appears to depict peonies, although Twombly apparently disclaimed the idea. The guide notes:

The peony is associated with Japanese Edo-period screen paintings and, like such a screen, Twombly’s painting is split into panels. The red paint trickles down the canvas, like blood or tears. Transience and regret are central themes in this work, but it is also a hymn to sunlight, sexuality, and regeneration. A Japanese haiku on the right evokes the erotic and the morbid, exuberance and joy.

On the panel, Twombly quotes Takarai Kikaku, whose haiku was inspired by the 14-century samurai Kusunoki Masashige:

Ah! The peonies
For which
Kusonoki
Took off his armour

Presumably the beauty of nature, epitomized here by the wild peony, inspired a momentary pacifism in the warrior.

Jonathan Jones, in an article in The Guardian, commented on the dangers of positioning Twombly’s work within range of Monet’s:

The curator has hung some splashy, multicoloured splurges next to ravishing Monet garden scenes. Never work with children, animals, or Claude Monet. The quiet Frenchman is a great upstager. […] Near Twombly’s Four Seasons hangs an utterly scintillating flower painting by Monet. It seems to have more colours in one spot of its surface than Twombly can muster across an entire epic. You do not need the Hellespont to drown in: Monet’s pond is deep enough.

Absolutely. Having said that, I did leave with a higher appreciation of Twombly’s work. I just don’t think it measures up to the other two, though.

Here’s a slideshow of the paintings I enjoyed most in the exhibition

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Man with a Blue Scarf: conversation, silence and time

I’ve been reading Martin Gayford’s account of having his portrait painted by Lucian Freud – Man with a Blue Scarf. Gayford – whose previous book, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney I described in an earlier post as one of the best books on art that I have read – has done it again, this time telling of the 40 times he sat for Lucian Freud between November 2003 and July 2004. The result was the portrait ‘Man with a Blue Scarf’ that I saw earlier this year when it was included in Lucian Freud: Portraits, the major retrospective of Freud’s life’s work as a portraitist.

For the lay reader, Gayford has an easy, accessible style, free from the obfuscations of much art world discourse. Naturally, Gayford is interested in Freud’s method of tackling a portrait (which is highly unusual) and in what it feels like to sit for a portrait over an extended period of time. But, like the Hockney book, this becomes a sustained reflection on the art of painting by both artist and interlocutor, a record of their conversations and the writer’s inner thought. The book provides a unique and fascinating insight into the working habits of a great painter of the human form in all its boundless variety.

Gayford, an art critic and writer, had known Freud for several years when one afternoon, over a cup of tea, he tentatively suggested that Freud might like to paint him:

After years of writing, talking and thinking about art, I was attracted by the prospect of watching a painting grow; being on the inside of the process. Even so, when I made that modest proposal, I didn’t really expect LF to accept. Probably, I thought he would say something politely noncommittal along the lines of, ‘That’s a nice idea, perhaps one day.’ Instead, he responded by saying, ‘Could you manage an evening next week?’

This was how it began: the intense experience – ‘somewhere between transcendental meditation and a visit to the barber’s’ – of turning up at Freud’s studio, posing for several hours, and going out for a meal afterwards (one of the rituals of sitting for Freud was to be taken for a meal). What follows is a kind of journal, each entry dated, of the sessions in which the portrait grew.

There are observations of Freud’s painting technique, about what it’s like to sit for a portrait and worry whether it will turn out looking like you too much or too little – and whether Freud might decide (as he sometimes did) that the painting is going nowhere and abandon it. What makes the book so interesting and worthwhile is that, although there were periods of silent intensity, for much of the time conversation flourished and we learn a great deal about Freud’s likes and dislikes in art (‘the awful Mona Lisa‘; Gabriel Rossetti ‘the nearest painting can get to bad breath’) and exchanges of opinion between Freud and Gayford about writers and painters.

Their conversation embraces reminiscences about the rich variety of people Freud had known: from Greta Garbo to Auden and Picasso, the Kray twins (and their even more terrifying associate Eddie the Killer who committed entirely motiveless murders: Freud thought about painting him, but decided against it after Eddie said to him, ‘You’re a strange bloke, Lu. You never tell me where you live’). There are plenty more entertaining anecdotes, like the one about Freud having to step in when Francis Bacon drunkenly heckled Princess Margaret while she sang, accompanied on piano by Noël Coward.

This is the first entry in Gayford’s journal, dated 28 November 2003, 6.30 pm:

Lucian Freud indicates a low leather chair and I sit down. “Does that pose seem reasonably natural?” he asks, “I try to impose my ideas on my sitters as little as possible”. It’s a cold late autumn day and, I am wearing a tweed jacket and a royal blue scarf. Perhaps, I suggest I could keep the scarf on for the picture.

LF agrees, but on certain points it soon turns out his will is law. I had thought that perhaps I could read while sitting, and had brought a book along with me, but no. “I don’t think I’m going to allow you to do that. I already see other possibilities.” He must have registered them almost instantly.

At this point LF makes chalk marks on the floor boards around the legs of the chair so that each time I come to the studio, we can replace it in precisely the same position with reference to the overhead light and his easel. Behind, he positions a battered black folding screen: the backdrop to my head.

Then he searches around for a suitably-sized canvas amongst the various ones leaning against the studio wall. The first he finds is discarded as it has a dent, which he says would sooner or later cause the paint to flake off. Then LF fishes another out of the corner and sets to work immediately, drawing in charcoal.

So it begins. This is how hour after hour will be spent, stretching for months into the future. Sitting in a pool of light in the dark studio, I start to muse and observe.

I have long been convinced that Freud is the real thing: a truly great painter living among us. When one afternoon over tea I – very tentatively – mentioned to him that if he wanted to paint me I would be able to find the time to sit, my motive was partly the standard one of portrait sitters: an assertion of my own existence. For various reasons, I was feeling rather down and being painted by Freud seemed a good way to push back against circumstances.

The other reason was a curiosity to see how it was done. After years of writing, talking and thinking about art, I was attracted by the prospect of watching a painting grow; being on the inside of the process. Even so, when I made that modest proposal, I didn’t really expect him to accept. Probably, I thought, Freud would say something politely non-committal on the lines of “That’s a nice idea, perhaps one day”. Instead, he responded by saying, “Could you manage an evening next week?”

I had known him for quite some time before that day, getting on for a decade. We had talked for many hours as friends, and as artist and critic. I had eaten innumerable meals in his company; together we had visited exhibitions and listened to jazz concerts. Dozens of times I had visited his studios, to look at recently finished pictures and work in progress. This, however, was different. This time, I was not looking at the picture, but being it – or at least its starting-point.

Gayford observes closely how Freud works: the way he has of seeming to dance as he works, muttering to himself, moving towards the application of a stroke of paint, and then pulling back like a horse rearing at his own looming shadow. He notes how Freud doesn’t,begin the portrait with an outline of the face. He begins where he begins, almost randomly, with a little dab of detail on the canvas. Then, little by little, it widens out, but not in any predictable way. Gayford is fascinating by this modus operandi: it’s as if Freud is making it up as he goes along.

Freud has no clearer idea than Gayford whether the sittings will continue for weeks, months or a year. ‘Each painting,’ he says, ‘is an exploration into unknown territory’. Gayford sometimes notices with alarm how his portrait seems to stand still, or even go backwards, while at other times it evolves quickly, changing in minute, subtle ways:

For several sittings the portrait has not seemed to change very much, although it has been constantly strengthening and adjusting. At the end of the last session my mouth suddenly appeared, if only as a thin red line. This was an indication that Lucian was ready to move down from the frontier – roughly across my face from my upper lip – at which work had halted a couple of weeks before, like an army held up in its advance.

Now , at last, things do move onwards. My whole mouth appears and, to my surprise, seems almost to be smiling – a very unusual expression for a Freud sitter. This image, as it gradually appears, is becoming a sort of alter ego. It is also a revelation of how LF sees me, or to be more precise, what possibilities he sees in me to make a picture.

Gayford muses whether human identity can ever be fixed in a single image. In the end, his portrait is a kind of synthesis of his myriad facial expressions, as well as – to his dismay – of more obvious signs of ageing, every muscular twitch or centimetre of sagging flesh scrutinised, remembered and re-created in paint by the sharp-eyed Freud.

Even in the short-term, painting is always a matter of memory. LF looks very closely at me, making a measuring gesture, then he turns to the canvas and puts in a mark – or, just as possibly, stops at the last moment, reconsiders and observes again. Sometimes he wipes out what he has done with a piece of cotton wool or cloth. There is an interval, however short, between the observation and the act of painting, then another pause for consideration. During that time, the original sight has been passed through LF’s eyes, nervous system and mind, then he has contemplated in relation to all the other notations he has made. This process is repeated hundreds, indeed thousands, of times. Thus a painted image, certainly one by LF, is different in nature from an instantaneous image such as a photograph. David Hockney puts it like this: the painting of him by LF has over a hundred hours ‘layered into it’ and with them innumerable visual sensations and thoughts.

I once devoted a post to Lucian Freud’s portraits of dogs, so I was interested to read about the discussions that took place between Gayford and Freud on the subject of animals. In one entry, Gayford observes:

LF has a conception of life that embraces the human and the animal as aspects of the same thing. ‘When I’m painting people in clothes I’m always thinking very much of naked people, or animals dressed.’ Some of his most memorable pictures are of people and animals – generally their owners – together: Girl With a White Dog (1950-51), Guy and Speck (1980-81). In Double Portrait (1985-6) paws and hands, whippet legs and forearms, doggy and female noses are juxtaposed in an intimate mesh, giving a powerful sense of shared existence.

While Freud was painting Gayford’s portrait, in another studio he was also working on a painting of his assistant David Dawson lying naked on a bed with his dog Eli. They have several conversations about animals, and Gayford notes that, while Freud is extremely interested in animals, ‘it would not be quite accurate to call him an animal lover’. It’s more a question of Freud having strong reactions to distinct animal personalities (just as he had to humans).

For horses he has a deep affinity, but cats, for example he finds irritating. ‘I don’t like their chichi affected air of independence, nor the way that they come and sit on your lap with an air of “Now you may stroke me”.’

Dogs he has often depicted, and owned. The late Pluto was a sitter for a number of works over the years, both paintings and etchings, with and without human companions. Now Eli, David Dawson’s dog – a relation of Pluto’s – is an equally frequent model.

A year before the sittings, Freud had painted small picture depicting the patch of his back garden where Pluto is buried – a few leaves, the little wooden grave marker that David Dawson painted Pluto’s name on: ‘I was rather excited by that painting because it’s almost of absolutely nothing, so how the actual paint went down has just never been as important.’

During a conversation about human ageing, Gayford recalls the etching which Freud made of Pluto when the dog was old, arthritic, losing its sight and close to death. Freud added a hand, almost disembodied like the hand of God in medieval art, because he felt the creature needed company.

Pluto aged twelve — Pluto Aged Twelve, 2000

The book will be especially valued for Gayford’s fascinating observations of the way that Freud went about his craft. So, for instance, on 3 December 2003 he writes:

LF has worked standing up since a moment in Paris in the 1950s, before which he always sat down. This makes his working procedure, which may involve three sittings a day and as much as ten hours’ work, quite an arduous one for a man of very nearly eighty-one (his birthday is in five days’ time, on the eighth). LF makes green tea and we talk for a while, then we go upstairs to the studio and the sitting begins.

This is the first moment when paint will actually go on the canvas. There is, it emerges, a preliminary ritual when LF is using pigment. First, he rummages around and finds a palette, thickly encrusted with worms and gouts of dried pigment. Then he spends a considerable amount of time carefully cleaning a zone at the bottom left near the thumbhole. There follows more casting around for suitable brushes and tubes of paint that lie around in mounds on a portable trolley and on top of a cupboard near the wall. From the pile ofold ragged sheets in the corner of the studio he selects a clean section, tears off a square and tucks it into his waistband, like a very informal butcher or baker.

These rags are another element in the arrangement of the studio. They lie around in piles in the corners of the room. In a couple of paintings of a decade and a half ago, two nudes of the same model entitled Standing by the Rags (1988-89) and Lying by the Rags (1989-90), they are an important part of the visual architecture, billowing like the clouds in a scene of saints in heaven by Titian or Veronese, but real. When LF lived in Paddington, at one point he lodged above a rag-and-bone shop, ‘and I discovered the rags were of great use to me’. They’ve been part of his equipment, and the furnishings ofhis studios, ever since.

The rag-apron is used for wiping brushes and occasionally the palette knife. The larger palette scrapings are wiped on the walls, where they radiate in areas, and on the doorframe. Blobs of pigment have been trodden into the floor and telephone numbers and cryptic words scribbled on the plaster. […] The effect of the paint-smeared interior is very much like certain kinds ofabstract painting, or – changing the metaphor – a nest which LF has slowly, almost accidentally, constructed through the routines of his work. The walls themselves, apart from the starbursts and crusting of vigorously trowelled paint, are washed in a neutral brown.

Outside the studio, up and down the stairs, little patches and speckles of stray pigment also proliferate It is a strange effect in this otherwise perfect mid-eighteenth-century house; one that LF accepts, I presume, because it humanizes – personalizes – the spaces. ‘Sometimes someone goes to the bathroomupstairs, and I quite like the way they leave traces.’

There is a great deal more in this fascinating and entertaining book. The index includes an entry, which may be unique in the history of indexing, for ‘eggs, personalities of’, that refers back to a conversation about a still-life by Freud of some eggs. Freud said that painting it he ‘discovered that on close examination each showed distinct personal traits’.

On 4 July 2004 Man With a Blue Scarf is finished and Gayford writes that it is, in part

A painting of my own fascination with the whole process of being painted. I see that intensity of interest in the picture. It’s me looking at him looking at me. […] There are many elements caught in this image: time, passing moods, feelings. It’s a record of all those hours of conversation, and of just silently being together in this room.

But it’s not quite over: ‘After a gap of a month, and a holiday, we began all over again on an etching. But it was not the same …’

Portrait Head, as the etching came to be called, turned out to be a very different kind of portrait revealing Gayford contemplative and tense, whereas the painting ‘was a social portrait – me looking outwards, engaged with my surroundings’.

In July 2011, six years after the final sitting and two years since Gayford wrote the final words of this book, Lucian Freud died. For this 2012 paperback edition, Gayford adds an Afterword which includes this eulogy for the artist:

His had been an epic life, full of achievement. I shall miss him – his wit, his presence, his intelligence – tremendously. But because he was an artist, and an extraordinary one, quite a lot of his thought and his feelings survive, embedded in his paintings. I continue to think about them, and particularly – of course – the two he made of me.

Martin Gayford’s portrait was one of those exhibited earlier this year in the National Portrait Gallery’s tremendous show, Lucian Freud: Portraits. It was displayed next to the portrait of Andrew Parker Bowles titled The Brigadier, which Freud had just finished when he began Gayford’s portrait, and opposite Freud’s portrait of David Hockney, whose conversations with Gayford are recorded in his book A Bigger Message.

Helen Clapcott: where two rivers meet

While I’m on about painting Stockport’s viaduct, I must mention a local artist who has painted it repeatedly in recent years in wonderful paintings that record Stockport’s urban landscape, often with the Mersey snaking sinuously between the viaduct’s pillars, the mills, motorways and derelict sites of the town.

Her name is Helen Clapcott and, although born in Blackpool in 1952, it was moving to Stockport at the age of ten that ultimately became the inspiration for much of her work. Like I did, she tracked the Mersey to its end to study in Liverpool in the sixties, taking Fine Arts at Liverpool Polytechnic. After a spell in London, she returned to live in Macclesfield where she now paints works that depict the mutation and evolution of a once industrial valley, now a commuter corridor. In her paintings we can see how Stockport has been dominated by ‘the three Rs’ – river, rail and road – and now boasts a motorway, a congestion of roundabouts, sliproads and a pyramid. She is one of the few artists working in egg tempora, a traditional medium that mixes pigment and water with egg which was used by painters in the Renaissance.

This is Helen talking about how Stockport and the Mersey have been her inspiration (you can listen to her talk here):

My connections with Stockport, I moved here when I was ten with my family, in 1962 and spent sensitive adolescent years exploring the town and taking the train to Manchester, where I scraped just enough O Levels to get me to art school. There’s a wonderful view of the valley, as the train travels across the viaduct. In the 70s you could see the river, inaccessible, walled by red brick edifices winding into the Cheshire plane. And the King Mill where the Pyramid now stands stood loud and grand in the centre of this landscape, with the sun chasing round the numerous chimneys, that was the view that inspired me to paint.
I was in my late teens when I saw that view on an almost daily basis and I think it just sank slowly in. Until the mid 70s when I came back to Stockport and began painting. It was the view of the chimneys and the sun chasing round the valley. The sun silhouetting the mills was just a very inspiring sight, especially in Autumn when that white light would chase across the grounds.

The river was always black. The river was inaccessible. The mills stood all along the river and you couldn’t get to the river. There is so little access to the river, the town planners seem to prefer to cover it up rather than use it as an asset. I think very many local people don’t even know the river exists. Even though I grew up in Stockport and went to college in Liverpool, I never related the Mersey in Liverpool to the Mersey in Stockport. In Liverpool there was, at that time, ‘Ferry Across the Mersey’ and I was reading Helen Forrester’s Tuppence to Cross the Mersey. I couldn’t, I couldn’t possibly relate it back to Stockport. It was romantic in Liverpool, it was something that was hidden in Stockport.
Stockport has changed enormously in the time I’ve known it, I’ve seen the motorway built right through the middle of the town. I’ve seen the great mills demolished and the land used for car parks and department stores and the river covered over. The Mersey is now retired in Stockport. But the river’s cleaner than it used to be and I can see creatures in the water as well as supermarket trolleys and tyres. Crayfish, look like lobsters, they’re quite big too.
It has given Stockport its names, Merseyway, Mersey Square and it’s written in the official handbook of 1966 that all roads lead to Mersey Square. So perhaps the river is there just to give name to its present, perhaps to remind us where it came from. I don’t know if the river could be important to the town again. It would be lovely to see the Mersey brought into its, its own again. It would be lovely to see a natural feature in a more natural state.

The river is central to a lot of my paintings. The river structured the town and in my paintings the river structures my paintings. It’s a kind of white line that runs through the middle of each piece of work. I’m painting the Mersey because it is still there, you can still see it. Surprisingly as the mills come down so one can get access to bits of the river that one couldn’t get access to previously. There is a walk along towards Brinksway that now has a wall where you can look over and see the river, that certainly wasn’t possible in the past.

The best view of the Mersey was from the top of the viaduct as the train went across. There was a train strike many years ago and that meant I was able to walk across the viaduct and take photographs of the Mersey. Some of my friends who enjoy photography would deliberately take the train back and forth across the viaduct just to take that shot. If you could do it again today, you would see an awful lot of road, you would see the motorway, you would see the river, really dominated by roads. Back then the river was framed by the mills and with the sun shining, reflecting the light, the river would look sparkling and bright, a white line running through the town.

It’s strange because the opposite applies now. It’s looks duller now but it’s cleaner. I suppose my favourite spot on the river is on the West side by Brinksway Bridge which is a lovely stone bridge which stands next to the motorway slip road. It seems to crop up in a lot of paintings, though it’s very small. There’s a beautiful spot I’m painting at the moment which is in Tin Brook where the plane came down in 1967, which has a lovely stone culvert. Tin Brook runs underneath the stone culvert. It’s extremely attractive.

Lowry in Stockport

When I reached Stockport on the Mersey walk the other day, I took a stroll around the town and ended up in the Art Gallery on Wellington Road where a new exhibition had just opened. Street Scene: Artworks from Stockport’s Art Collection features the work of well-known artists with local connections such as L.S. Lowry, Alan Lowndes and Harry Rutherford alongside the lesser known painters. The common theme in all the works on display is that they depict life in the streets of Stockport – street parties, demonstrations, carnivals and parades.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is A Street in Stockport – Crowther Street (above), painted by Lowry in 1930 and bought by the gallery in 1935 for 35 guineas. It’s been a favourite of mine since I first saw it displayed at the Lowry Centre in Salford a few years ago. It might just be the depiction of a scene by a well-known artist nearest to the place where I grew up – Poynton, ten miles to the south.

What the gallery didn’t realise until they examined the painting was that they were getting two Lowrys for the price of one. Also on show is a reproduction of an unfinished painting that was discovered on the reverse of the canvas. A Crowd Scene must have been started by Lowry before his painting of Crowther Street. An intimate crowd scene, it is in quite an advanced stage, but there is no evidence as to why it was abandoned. The two faces of the painting were conserved by the North West Museums and Galleries Service in 1992. There are lighter oblong patches visible on the reverse image where labels from various exhibitions have been removed.

Afterwards, I went to see Crowther Street, which survives about half a mile away, near the centre of town. I took the photo above which reveals the artistic licence taken by Lowry in sharpening the angle of the curve of the street, and depicting the terraced houses sporting white and red washes rather than the plain brick. What is missing from the photo are the people – today Crowther Street is a quiet, half-forgotten lane lacking the bustle and animation of Lowry’s picture. There is a plane, though: every three of four minutes one follows the flight path over the town centre on the approach to Manchester airport.

There was one other Lowry in the exhibition – a pencil drawing made in 1929 of Meal House Brow. It shows the view from Stockport Market Place looking down towards Underbank. This is the view of Meal House Brow today. Lowry’s drawing is reminiscent of the much later one above – Old Steps, Stockport – made in 1969.

Lowry on Wellington Steps, Stockport, 1962 <i>(C) Crispin Eurich contact The First Gallery, 1 Burnham Chase, Bitterne, Southampton SO18 5DG Tel. 023 80 462723 email <a href="mailto:Margery@TheFirstGallery.com">Margery@TheFirstGallery.com</a></i> — Lowry on Wellington Steps, Stockport, 1962 *(C) Crispin Eurich contact The First Gallery, 1 Burnham Chase, Bitterne, Southampton SO18 5DG Tel. 023 80 462723 email Margery@TheFirstGallery.com*

Two photos – the above and the one below – show Lowry in Stockport in 1962. Prominent in both photos is the famous railway viaduct that Lowry incorporated into many of his paintings which, although the composition might be imaginary, often incorporated elements of real places into the view.

Lowry sketching Stockport Viaduct, from Wellington steps. (C) Crispin Eurich contact The First Gallery, 1 Burnham Chase, Bitterne, Southampton SO18 5DG Tel. 023 80 462723 email Margery@TheFirstGallery.com

Stockport Viaduct seems to have haunted the artist. In The Viaduct (below), for example, it appears as the backdrop to a fairly desolate urban landscape containing only two rows of terraced cottages and a large pub, towards which three men are resolutely making their way. The Viaduct was once owned by Sir Alec Guinness.

In Industrial Landscape (below), painted in 1955, the viaduct can be seen in the middle left of the picture. But on the whole the image presents a generalised impression of an urban environment, dominated by smoking chimneys, factories, roads, bridges and industrial wasteland. These features seem to overwhelm the human presence in the scene, limited to tiny figures in the foreground going about their business in a terraced street and on wasteland.

The title of Stockport Viaduct (1958, below) might suggest a realistic depiction, but again the scene is an imaginary composite.

Again, in the 1969 drawing below, The Viaduct Stockport, Lowry has neither realistically portrayed the details of the scene, nor accurately rendered the viaduct’s proportions.

Alan Lowndes, who has two paintings in this exhibition – Stockport Street Scene and Love Lane Corner, both seen below – was a local artist who painted many scenes in and around Stockport, including the view of Stockport Viaduct in 1973, also below. Born in 1921 in Heaton Norris a, suburb of Stockport, Lowndes was the son of a railway clerk. He left school at 14, and was apprenticed to a decorator. After serving in the Second World War, he studied painting at night school, but was largely self-taught. He began to achieve success with his scenes of northern life in the late 1950s and early 1960s, just at the time when interest in northern culture was at its height.

Harry Rutherford, whose September, Mottram (below) is on show in the exhibition was born in the Stockport suburb of Denton in 1903, the youngest of four sons of a hat trimmer. The manufacture of hats was one of Stockport’s main industries (gone now, but the town still has a Hat Museum), based in the town centre and in nearby Hyde, and it was to Hyde that the family moved in 1905. Today there is Blue Plaques to Harry Rutherford at 17 Nelson Street where he lived. While he was still at school Harry attended Saturday morning classes at the Hyde School of Art. He left school at fourteen but continued to develop his skills through evening classes at the Manchester School of Art, where he met L.S. Lowry who was attending the same classes.

In 1925 Walter Sickert came to Manchester to open an art school at the invitation of a local art dealer. The class had places for thirty pupils, and Harry was both the first and youngest to enrol. Rutherford and Sickert became firm friends and Sickert’s influence on Rutherford’s technique was very strong. Harry’s painting Saturday Afternoon, now called Northern Saturday (below), depicting Hyde town centre, is arguably his most famous. It was acquired by Hyde Corporation in 1948. Tameside Council has a web page with information about Rutherford here. More paintings by Harry Rutherford can be seen on the BBC Your Paintings website here.

Edward Burra: The Unquiet Landscape

I want to return to the subject of Edward Burra and his paintings. A few days ago I wrote about the retrospective exhibition currently on show at the Djanogly Gallery in Nottingham. After returning from the show, my attention was drawn to the chapter in Christopher Neve’s book, Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th Century English Painting, Faber 1990, in which Neve, in his limpid prose, seems to inhabit Burra’s consciousness, probing the psychological roots of Burra’s strange and sometimes disturbing late landscapes:

Burra paints the hill as a looming pneumatic slope. Often it is things we dread that most attract us.

The big house and the sickly boy. It was a big house, with a large porch and dwarfing mantelpieces. It was threatened from the front by voluminous trees. For the past ninety years the drive had grown narrower and more tortuous as the trees grew larger. At the back there was a lawn and a terrace and a circular formal pond. All this was at Playden, in Sussex, on the last rise before Rye. The house, called Springfield, had belonged to Burra’s family since 1864. He had been sent away to prep school but, being constantly ill, had received the rest of his education at home. He was a sickly child who worked at watercolours in this bedroom. He lived at home and would continue to work in his bedroom, going up the enormous staircase to draw after breakfast each day until he was nearly fifty.

The trees that stood close to the windows were almost his first subject, especially a gigantic cedar, the level upon level of whose blue branches seemed to be hiding something. A Miss Bradley, in Rye, gave him drawing lessons. He was small and weak. It was his imagination that grew.

Jazz records, 78s in brown cardboard covers, had energy. He painted to jazz. The allegro negro cocktail shaker. Negroes seemed to have the vitality he could not have. Films and novels about low life in the Mediterranean gave him a taste for the louche world he had never seen, the blue curasao with which to subvert the straight-laced barrister’s household in Sussex.

Standing next to a small youth at the entrance scholarship examination at the Royal College of Art, in London, Eric Ravilious could not help noticing that he had made no attempt to draw the life model on the unaccustomedly large page. Burra spent the day drawing just one eye, in the middle of the paper, in meticulous detail.

When he drew landscapes they were imaginary settings for bizarre figures, the sailors and divorced contraltos of his imagination, in watercolours of which the characteristic colour was a glowing aubergine.

When he went to Marseilles, he was observed by Anthony Powell to keep always out of the sun, so that he had the complexion of a prisoner or an invalid, which he was. He spoke hardly at all, but always with withering aptness. What he liked to draw best were: waiters, seedy decor, nightclubs, cheap suits. He enjoyed the brash and racy. A lifelong exhaustion made him prey on other people’s fun, especially (what he really savoured) bad behaviour, unkind laughter, mendacity, waspishness, all-out malicious enjoyment and any kind of excess. Bad feeling motivated him. It gave his work the energy he did not have.

It was an obscure knack. Through the people he struck out in a leisurely way for the landscape as though in search of absent thoughts, absent causes. When he was younger (though he looked old) he would sit at a corner table, either in reality or in imagination, at some dive like Issy Ort’s and commit the bird-women and negroes to memory so that he could draw them afterwards, hearing the same side of a favourite 78 repeatedly, feeling its elation and vitality in the saxophone solo each time. As he got older he began to see through people. The carnival skeletons and waitresses danced off into the distance. That tinny noise of a Mediterranean festival band, conscripted from boys in the local town, faded. When the people had dragged their smiles away, he was left with the landscape, a big empty distant dreamlike landscape with electric air and the threat of thunder promising relief and a wash of rain.

For the last fifteen years of his life he concentrated chiefly on painting landscapes which are odder and more potent than anything else he did. He denied ever having loved anybody, and now the people were gone. Conrad Aiken, Paul Nash and Malcolm Lowry had added to his ideas as if to a postcard collection or a surreal montage. He had blocked his window with hardboard in order to avoid seeing the view across Rye. A picturesque town of old rippling roofs and cobbled streets, a tea-shop place was the last thing he needed. While he was at the cinema matinee in his head, his idea was to avoid coming out, blinking, into the sunlight.

Never liking it, it was typical that he should live in Rye all his life. He preferred the gravel pits and sheds on the road to the harbour. He liked the high view down on to the recreation ground, the fisty trees, the debris generated by the workshops and fishing boats on the winding estuary. He liked the way the slug of Stone Hill crept across the far side of the Marsh.

In 1953 he left Springfield at last and moved into the disliked town, to a house built on the site of a Methodist chapel bombed during the war. From here, high up, he could look across the Marsh with its snaking river, razor~sharp dikes and flashes of lying water.

From side to side his eye shot, but mainly into the far distance unclouded by mist and atmosphere. Like a cockroach creeping up on an outsize ham, he had approached landscape via people. Now he began to paint an extraordinary sequence of panoramic views, quite bereft of figures, which seem as though the feverish child shut in his old bedroom at Springfield, tiring finally of waspishness and gossip, had put his eye down to the level of his eiderdown and looked along it.

A great deal of what he knew of painting figures he brought to landscape. Views that might normally have provided consolation seem in Burra to convey profound unease. Pictures which on the face of it suggest those cheerful expanses unrolling in posters before the Bank-holiday tandem cyclist or traveller by Greenline bus become suddenly distasteful. The metamorphoses which, in paintings of people, had turned a nose into a Venetian beak, now made the most inoffensive landscape feature dilate uncomfortably and strain at its constraining skin. All the senses, not just his visual sense, were heightened, taut. As to an adolescent, or someone aping insanity for fun, the physical world seemed unnaturally bright, unnaturally actual. The smallest event could become an intense and terrifying adventure. […]

The extreme oddness of these pictures is very difficult to come to terms with. When they confront you they are quite different from their effect in reproduction. For watercolours, they are abnormally large, very big indeed, often built up by joining several sheets together as the design, like the landscape, took on a life of its own and seemed to expand. They have a dreamlike clarity of surface because they were painted flat on a table with all contrasts of tone deliberately exaggerated and a very careful attention to edges, or rims, so that forms approach each other and stop short in a worrying way that is not at all the way of forms in the real world. This produces a look of glassy clarity and clean air which makes vision boundless as if to the magnetic mountain. […]

The working method which contributed to this strangeness was developed in his bedroom as a child and never varied. He could work anywhere, on rickety tabletops in hotels if necessary. He explained this as being the least taxing method possible, because he was almost permanently tired and would have worked lying down if that had been practical. Beginning on one page at the bottom right-hand corner, he progressed upwards and to the left in an arc, adding subsequent sheets when necessary until the drawn design was complete, and then filling it in. The process of selection he used was mainly the effect of memory. He did not paint on the spot but sometimes used drawings made after seeing a view. Because the drawings were done after seeing the landscape, and the painting from them was often not begun until many months later when the scene had come to the boil in his mind, there were two clear intervals between seeing the subject and making the picture during which his imagination had the chance to act on it. There was yeast in his imagination, as there is in nightmares. The effect was often that two or more swollen or stretched views were combined while giving the impression that the picture was one landscape painted from direct observation.

He would sit in a car, watching. All over England, people park cars at strategic high points and sit looking at extensive views as though the act of looking is somehow self-justifying. The separateness of a view emphasizes your own impotence. There is little you can do with a view except to stare at it. Beginning in 1965, Burra was driven on regular car journeys around England by his sister Anne. It was she who chose where to stop. They went to empty places where he could see a long way, in East Anglia, on the Yorkshire moors and in the Welsh borders. He sat wherever she chose and watched impassively from lay-bys, just as he had watched human antics through the fumes of nightclubs, memorizing the faces of waiters so that a long time later he could make accurate and compelling pictures from what he had seen.

Was it disenchantment with people that led him repeatedly to paint these empty places, or a fascinated disenchantment with the places themselves? He seemed to dread them. They swell, stretch, curve, crease. Bruised clouds stack over them and break open. Floods and fields make their puddles of watercolour. Trees are abruptly lit up in negative as if by a nuclear blast. Rock outcrops are swollen with disease. Chasms dwarf. Bile-yellow and a punishing green can hardly contain themselves. […] Imagine a purple cabbage cut crisply through in section: the curving, vivid edges and faultless intricate divisions are the vegetable shapes in Burra’s landscapes, perfectly adapted to watercolour. But what gives the pictures their emotional potency is their raking depth to the horizon, their roller-coaster perspective.

I suppose it was always a long way down one of his bars, but by 1960 he could do almost anything with perspective. Perspective became his longest suit. Romney Marsh may have given him the idea but he found countless ways of extending it. Railway tracks, motorways, dikes and lines of pylons cut directly up his designs from bottom to top. They sink into dead ground and reappear climbing distant slopes. They go over ridge after ridge and still the atmosphere is clear enough to see them plainly. Lines go up his pictures like thermometers rising. Roads bolt upwards to the horizon as though making for a very distant burrow.

The landscape is empty because the traffic never stops. The pitiless, remorseless, nose-to-tail traffic; the mobile junkyard of half-human lorries which, snorting their own fumes and grimacing with effort, breast the hills to transport graffiti across intersections and over viaducts until the world is deaf and dumb and all the countryside shaken to bits.

Burra English Country Scene I — English Country Scene I, c.1970

These machines can turn on each other, earthmovers bite bits out of one another with metal jaws, dog eat dog, and only the half-crazed Bank-Holiday pillion-rider, hair flying, cutting through the traffic, can be seen to be almost entirely human. […]

burra_pickingquarrel — Picking a Quarrel, 1968

No one would venture willingly off the road into the unholy places where he sometimes shows an isolated figure. A faceless figure, darkened by a trick of the light under leafless trees, is digging a grave or working an allotment.

I cannot see their faces. . .
the knobs of their ankles
catch the moonlight as they pass the stile
and cross the moor among skeletons of bog oak
following the track from the gallows back to the town
– Louis MacNeice.

Burra allotments — The Allotments, 1962-3

The only traffic on a forlorn path through a graveyard of boulders (in Connemara) is a figure, the same figure like Death, hooded by an army blanket, repeated three times as though at different stages on its journey. None of the three will ever catch its other selves up, separated by the landscape and by time, its furthest self already distant, moving as surely towards the horizon as the reddleman on the heath. How effortlessly the landscape outlives the traveller! The heart has rotted out of the trees, out of the figures and out of the views themselves.

Views across chalk Downs to factory chimneys in Sussex; the Weald seen from above, bulging like the bottom of a boy scout on a bicycle; the cloisonne pattern of Cornish fields broken off by the sea; Dartmoor ready to murder lost hikers; the Lake District with its knees up under the wet viridian blanket; an industrial town itching the lap of a valley; the scarred high places of Yorkshire and Northumberland; hills in Snowdonia like the stockinged heads of criminals; the Wye Valley in a vast gesture parodying Wordsworth and the Sublime. Everywhere there are the giant teeth of broken viaducts, dizzy quarries, white cauliflowers of smoke. Who will give you sixpence for a cup of tea, a cup of comfort, in such a landscape, where the insane traffic throws grit in the face of the receding hitch-hiker and all the meadow plants are poisonous?

No one has made a more convincing case than Burra against finer feelings in landscape. Even the traffic must have seemed to him to have an energy which he lacked. He watched the countryside as though craving extremes, and painted it as though something terrible were about to happen. Depicting people or depicting landscape, he was a kind of voyeur. About mountains and valleys he made sharp, exaggerated comment. He put round malicious rumours about places so that we see them in a new way. But an imaginative truth always stands for a real truth, and if he played up the awesome, the flawed and threatening, we can see the accuracy of it sticking up through the pelt of fields and moors whenever we look.

Asked about the meaning of his landscape paintings, he gave a version of the reply which I suspect he often used. He simply said: ‘Call in a psychiatrist.’ With his air of subversion he made isolation a virtue. In some ways we are over-civilized. We are surrounded by, and constantly react to, art that insulates us against real feeling. That includes an easy view of landscape. In its place, Burra shows us a distraught countryside, never limited by its usual benign appearance, in the hope that we may be unsettled enough to have some feelings of our own.

When he was young he was sent by his mother to London to have his spleen attended to. Instead of going to the doctor he thought of a slightly different kind of operation – more spirited, less useful – and had himself tattooed. His attitude to landscape was very like that. He saw and painted the related but utterly unobvious; and only artists and children have the imagination and courage to do that.

I also came across an article by Adrian Hamilton in The Independent which contained this observation on the late landscapes:

In later life, Burra turned more and more to landscapes. To some, these are the most beautiful – and most serene – works of his career as he turns away from man to nature. They are certainly majestic, done back in Burra’s Rye home after regular tours around the country, when he was driven by his sister. But they are also bleak in mood, as the vanishing point so beloved by the artist leads the eye through virtually treeless landscapes into infinity. Whenever man appears it is as a despoiler of the land, as in Picking a Quarrel of 1968, or as pale ghosts in Sugar Beet, East Anglia of 1973 or cowled black spirits in Black Mountain, from 1968. Burra has a particular hatred of Esso and Shell, whose emblems appear in his most aggressive works.

Billy Chappell recalled car trips with Burra and his sister Anne:

It fascinated me to watch Edward when the car halted by some especially splendid spread of hills, moorland, and deep valleys. He sat very still and his face appeared impassive. He might, I thought, have been staring at a blank wall, until I saw the intensity of his gaze.

Burra Cornish landscape with tin mines — Cornish Landscape With Figures and Tin Mine, 1975

One painting which was in the Chichester exhibition, but not included at Nottingham is Cornish Landscape With Figures and Tin Mine. This landscape is inspired by the ruined mine workings in Western Cornwall. The two tattooed figures were based on photographs in a French book called Les Tatouages du Milieu by Jacques Delarue and Robert Giraud. Burra himself had a tattoo done in 1928 of an oriental head with a knife through it. The man in a striped coat who appears twice was seen by Burra in a pub in Penzance, while the doleful figure eating a Cornish pasty with crippled hands is a self-portrait.

English-Country-Scene II — An English Country Scene II, 1970

Another painting not on show at Nottingham is this watercolour, based on the landscape near Buxton (it looks like it could be the Cat and Fiddle road between Macclesfield and Buxton). Burra visited the area with his sister Anne in July 1969. He was unafraid of showing man’s impact on the natural landscape, and records the traffic-clogged roads snaking around the hills, giving the lorries and vehicles animalistic characteristics.

Edward Burra: an utterly unique vision

Back in January I wrote an appreciation of the work of Edward Burra, inspired partly by Andrew Graham-Dixon’s excellent film on the artist broadcast in the autumn and partly by regret at not being able to get to the first major retrospective of Burra’s work for 25 years at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.

However, last weekend as luck would have it, I had to travel to Derbyshire and so took the opportunity to catch the exhibition, now on tour, at the Djanogly Art Gallery on the Nottingham University campus. Burra is an artist whose work I have loved since I first encountered his paintings of Harlem night life. This extensive exhibition does him proud, with representative work from all stages of his career, including the less well-known British landscapes of the post-war decades. It was a joy to come face to face with works such as The Straw Man from 1963 which, though remarkable in reproduction, is truly electrifying in the flesh. The late landscapes are a revelation, too – including paintings such as English Countryside, 1965–7 (above).

Burra was a white Englishman, the son of a rich lawyer who never needed to earn his living. Born in 1905, he had a dull, comfortable upbringing in the ‘quintessentially English’ town of Rye. There he had led a particularly closeted life, being crippled by a rare form of acute rheumatoid arthritis from an early age, as well as suffering from pernicious anemia. The combination of fatigue and muscular pain made it too difficult for him to stand for any length of time and explains why virtually all of his paintings are watercolours. But what extraordinary watercolours! In 1969 the critic Pierre Rouve observed of Burra’s work: ‘The power of his larger compositions is unique and uniquely disconcerting in the eyes of those convinced that watercolours can only water down all colours. To ask them to convey emotional intensity and cerebral strength would seem absurd… And yet this miracle occurs time and time again in Burra’s work’.

For his entire life Burra’s home was the handsome and substantial family mansion set in rolling Sussex countryside, attended by eight servants and with eleven acres of garden perched on a hill overlooking Rye. Cabbages, Springfield, Rye painted around 1937 (below) depicts the view from the Burra family house.

The opening section of the exhibition, ‘High Art, Low Culture’, concentrates on the paintings of street life in New York, Paris and the south of France with which his name is most commonly associated. Reading about his upbringing in the book published to accompany the exhibition – Edward Burra by Simon Martin – makes these vibrant paintings seem even more remarkable. As Jane Stevenson writes in one of the essays:

Burra was born into what surely must have been one of the most secure milieux ever to exist: the English upper middle class before the First World War. His father … was the descendent of three generations of successful bankers. … The infant Edward was automatically entered for Eton; the family outlook was profoundly right-wing and class-conscious. His grandmother, whom he loved, was a member of the anti-socialist British Empire Union.

Yet this young artist, raised in an exclusive rural setting, produced paintings in the 1920s and 1930s that revelled in the vitality of modern city life – paintings that are now some of the most memorable images of the Jazz Age. Burra was fascinated by low-life, loved jazz and films, and, on his travels, frequented nightclubs and bars in New York, Paris and Marseilles in the early 1930s – from where he drew the inspiration for his paintings in that period. His affectionate and celebratory depictions of black street culture in Harlem in the 1930s, and the nightlife of Boston in the early 1950s, led him to be described by his friend the American poet Conrad Aiken as the ‘best painter of the American Scene’.

Two early paintings in the exhibition show Burra’s characteristic style already fully developed by the early 1920s. Hop Pickers Who’ve Lost Their Mothers 1924 (above) and Market Day, 1926 (below) were painted when Burra was just 19 and 21 years old respectively. The caption to the former work offers no explanation as to its strange title but its subject matter would probably have been familiar to Burra: each September whole families would go from the East End of London down to Kent to live in hoppers’ huts for most of September (Orwell observed the conditions they worked under in one of his essays). What is interesting is that Burra portrays this group of hop-pickers as being from diverse ethnic backgrounds. The art historian Andrew Causey wrote of Burra’s works demonstrating a ‘Whimanesque brotherhood of races and types’.

Burra was a student at the Chelsea School of Art and Royal College of Art between 1921 and 1925, so Market Day is one of the first works painted after completing his studies. This busy scene presents a multicultural view of a Mediterranean port – but the inspiration must have been drawn from films and novels since it was not until September 1927 that Burra made the first of several trips to the south of France, visiting the ports of Cassis, Marseilles and Toulon.

Market Day is full of detail, with two black sailors on shore leave carrying their ditty bags and being accosted by hip-jutting prostitutes. Simon Martin writes

It is hard to believe that such works were executed in watercolour, for Burra’s handling of the medium was so tight and the intensity of colour more akin to temura painting than the fluidity normally associated with watercolour.

Marriage à la Mode (1928–29) was loosely based on William Hogarth’s formal Baroque marriage portrait The Wedding of Stephen Beckingham and Mary Cox (1729). Burra’s modern take on the subject is full of humorous details and visual double-entendres. For example, the putti holding a cornucopia of flowers in Hogarth’s painting are replaced by wingless flying children who water the bride and groom’s floral headpieces with an atomiser and a watering can.

Marriage-a-la-mode-1928-2-011 — Edward Burra: Marriage-a-la-mode, 1928

Another early work inspired by a metropolitan setting is, unusually, an oil painting. In The Snack Bar (1930) a woman whose thoughts are elsewhere is frozen in the act of placing a sandwich between her brightly painted lips, while the man behind the counter suggestively slices an enlarged salami while glancing in her direction.

The scene is set in the Continental Snack Bar in Shaftesbury Avenue in London, and the woman is probably a prostitute. According to Burra’s friend Clover de Pertinez, ‘Soho tarts were mostly French around 1930 and dressed and made up just like that’. There is a suggestion of sexual violence as the barman slices a ham, his eyes on her rather than on the task in hand, but she is clearly off duty, caught in a moment of reflection and far from eroticised.

In Three Sailors at the Bar (1930), the trompe l’oeil painted frame suggests that this bar scene is a reflection in a mirror. The perspective of the tiled floor in the bar falls away vertiginously and the table in the foreground appears to be floating. Two of the sailors have their backs to the viewer, giving the picture a voyeuristic feel that relates to the visual strategies of early cinema.

The cinema remained a great love and source of inspiration throughout Burra’s life. As Graham-Dixon pointed out in his TV documentary, Burra’s sense of composition – with extreme close-ups, plunging, vertiginous perspectives, close cropping and heavily made-up faces with exaggerated expressions – was derived from the old silent movies. Burra’s biographer, Jane Stevenson, suggests that rather like the novelist Christopher Isherwood, Burra was a ‘camera’ – a spectator with an extraordinary memory for vivid detail.

Burra’s paintings of Harlem fall into two groups – street scenes and scenes of night-time entertainment. Harlem (1934) depicts the area’s daytime street life. Several men and women are shown in front of a row of brownstone tenements, with New York’s elevated railway visible in the background. On the street people linger at their doorsteps to smoke, talk and read newspapers.Burra painted his Harlem scenes after returning from New York, but he remembered details such as clothing and window signs with great clarity.

Burra visited New York, staying with the photographer Olivia Wyndham and her partner the black actress Edna Thomas on Seventh Avenue in Harlem from October to December 1933, and again in January 1934. He wrote enthusiastic letters to friends about the exuberant jazz clubs he visited at night, while his images of Harlem street life during the day capture a quieter sense of nonchalance and friendly community. Burra wrote to his friend Barbara Ker-Seymer:

New York would drive you into a fit. Harlem is like Walham green gone crazy we do a little shopping on 116th St every morning there are about 10 Woolworths of all sorts also 40 cinemas & Apollo burlesk featuring Paris in Harlem which I am plotting to go to It must be seen to be believed…The food is delish 40000000 tons of hot dogs and hamburgers must be consumed in N.Y. daily.[sic]

In the next section, ‘The Danse Macabre’, the exhibition explores Burra’s fascination with the macabre and supernatural. He enjoyed watching horror movies and reading science-fiction novels by cult authors such as HP Lovecraft, and admired the ghoulish work of artists such as Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch. In the 1930s Burra visited Spain and witnessed the Spanish Civil War first-hand, an experience which informed the violence of some of his paintings – for example, Beelzebub (c.1937–38).

In Spain in 1935, Burra had witnessed a church being burned down in the months before the Spanish Civil War. In this enormous watercolour (very powerful when seen in the gallery), a marauding throng with bloody weapons clashes violently in the ruins of a church. The devilish monster that goads them on is Beelzebub (literally ‘Lord of the Flies’), one of the seven princes of Hell. The elongated figures influenced by Mannerist and Baroque art serve to heighten the drama of the scene.

This section also includes some works painted during the Second World War. Burra did not address the conflict directly; instead, he painted images of soldier’s backs and ghoulish monsters to represent the terror of war. A remarkable painting when encountered in the flesh is Blue Baby, Blitz over Britain (1941) in which the German air attack is represented as a monstrous blue bird-woman dominating the skies as figures cower or run for shelter.

In September 1940 the Battle of Britain raged in the skies above Burra’s home in Rye. He wrote to Paul Nash:

Oh theres bombs here messershmidts there and I dont know what all!! The other evening I observed a parachute descending gracefully down. The whole place is an armed camp with crashing tanks roaring up & down the rd – so if anything’s a military objective all they have to do is throw a bomb & hit one of the Irish Fusileers [sic].

Two more fine wartime paintings on show are Ropes and Lorries (1942-43) and Soldiers’ Backs (1942–3).

During the Second World War large numbers of troops were stationed at Rye. Burra told Paul Nash of how: ‘Ive [sic] got some very turgid work, delightful sketches of the troops’. Soldiers’ Backs, an image of soldiers climbing into the back of a lorry, dehumanizes the soldiers, who are seen from behind as they clamber into an army lorry. Their buttocks, shoulders and calves are emphasized, almost like medieval armour. Another small wartime painting is Seaman Ashore, Greenock, 1944 (below).

The exhibition features a group of landscapes that Burra painted in the 1930s and 1940s. These include Landscape with Red Wheels (1937-9), Blasted Oak (1942), Landscape near Rye (c.1943–45), The Harbour, Hastings (1947), Cabbages, Springfield, Rye (c.1937) and The Cabbage Harvest (c.1943–45).

The Harbour, Hastings 1947 — The Harbour, Hastings, 1947

Cabbages, Springfield, Rye is a composition structured by ranks of trees, with the foreground depicting the cabbage patch in the family garden at Springfield. Cabbage Harvest is a darker, wilder image with human figures stacking sacks of cabbages under a lowering sky. Most of the cabbages are harvested, the colours are autumnal and there’s a sense of impending storm.

In another room are paintings made in the post-war period, including tow of the most striking that Burra created. Silver Dollar Bar (c.1953) was inspired by a visit to the eponymous bar in Boston – a locale he had painted before in Izzy Ort’s (1937). Silver Dollar Bar was painted after another visit to the bar by Burra while he was staying with the American poet Conrad Aiken. According to Aiken’s wife Mary, Burra painted the scene from memory after he had returned home to England:

Oddly, though typical, Ed didn’t do the Silver Dollar Bar etc paintings until after he returned to England. What a memory – photographic – they couldn’t have been more ‘like’! Especially of the essence, which only Burra could do. We’re lucky they exist since the bars themselves are gone forever. I shall always miss them, and thus be more than grateful for the paintings, a lost juicy slice of life as it will never be lived again.

Reviewing the exhibition in The Observer when it was on at Pallant House, Rachel Cooke suggested that to understand Burra a good place to start is with later painting, The Straw Man (1963). It’s a wonderful, dynamic composition, all intersecting diagonals, given a wall to itself at Nottingham. Reproductions simply can’t compare to the experience of seeing the large original up close: it grabs you by the throat. This is what Rachel Cooke had to say about it:

The Straw Man is purest essence of Burra: mysterious, antic, wild. Five flat-capped men – or is it six? – appear at first to be dancing, their calves bulging and stockinged, as if they had come from the ballet. Then you understand: these high steps are not celebratory. They are kicking some kind of mannequin. In the right-hand corner of the painting (right-hand corners are important with Burra; the novelist Anthony Powell recalled that this was where the artist began a painting, sweeping diagonally leftwards), a mother pushes a small boy away from the scene, her gesture confirmation, if it were needed, that this is a tale of violence, not joy.

This remarkable watercolour relates to a painting by Francisco de Goya called The Straw Manikin (1791–2) in which four women toss a masked straw figure into the air with a blanket. However, the dark menace of Burra’s large watercolour (created with two sheets of paper) is far removed from the Goya. Burra has re-imagined Goya’s decorative scene in an urban wasteland where a group of flat-capped working-class men violently kick a straw dummy on an urban wasteland. Though the violence of the scene is metaphorical, the air of brooding menace is emphasised by details such as the train hurtling past on the bridge, and the indifferent figures standing alongside.

Goya-TheStrawManikin — Francisco de Goya: TheStraw Manikin, 1791

In another room are displayed examples of Burra’s late landscapes. In the last decade of his life Edward Burra travelled around the British Isles with his sister Anne to places such as Yorkshire, Dartmoor, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. On his return to his studio he would make preliminary drawings on sketchpads using pencil, crayons and felt-tip pens before commencing his enormous landscape watercolours. The majestic scale of these late landscapes gives them an epic quality that is remarkable given his frail physical state at the end of his life.

Of the late landscapes, my outright favourites are Near Whitby, Yorkshire and Valley and River, Northumberland (in the Tate collection), both painted in 1972. Neither are in the current exhibition, but there are several more fine examples of this strand in Burra’s work, most notably English Countryside (1965–7, top) and Connemara (1962-63), a superb, wild and rocky landscape that is in the Devonshire Collection at Chatsworth House.

English Countryside is typical of many of these later landscapes in that, although there is little evidence of human beings in these scenes, Burra did not shy away from showing man’s impact on the landscape – depicting electricity pylons, tunnels, motorways and heavy goods vehicles.

Often, these are not pure landscape views in the traditional sense, being imbued with a sense of supernatural activity. The most startling example of this tendency here being Black Mountain, painted in 1968.

Against a distant view of the dark hulking mass of the mountain, Burra depicts a modern-day tractor and its driver tractor with blue cans of Shell diesel in the foreground. But they are surrounded by mysterious, medieval-looking hooded figures, perhaps cowled monks, one of whom appears to be radiating from his eyes red bolts of electricity. ‘Visitors from the past, perhaps usually invisible to the living’, suggests Andrew Lambirth in the exhibition catalogue.

While Burra was alive, his late landscapes were seen by many art critics as something of a distraction from the main body of his work. This began to change after his death in 1976, and by the time of the 1985 retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, Andrew Causey was writing in a catalogue essay that ‘these late landscapes are one of the most important and undervalued aspects of his work’.

These landscapes are not conventional, picturesque views and there is sometimes a sinister edge to them, with dark brooding colours or unlikely choice of subject matter, such as a menacing petrol tanker or bulldozer. Burra’s late landscapes seem to reflect a return to his roots, but also a concern with the despoilation of the English countryside taking place around him. There are powerful paintings in which diggers, lorries and tractors appear as monsters ripping hungrily through the landscape. Commenting on the late landscapes, Jane Stevenson writes:

In the 1950s, he turned away from the human form to concentrate on landscapes of luminous serenity and weirdly powerful flower pieces. In the 1960s and 70s, he was one of the first artists to protest about the ravaging of the English countryside that went along with the creation of the new motorways, to perceive the real costs of you’ve-never-had-it-so-good. His interest in ecology as well as in the built landscape can be charted in letters and paintings from the end of the war onwards. He produced, for instance, a series of pictures in which the vast diggers and dumpers of the construction industry have morphed into carnivorous dinosaurs, snapping at each other and at the landscape with hostility and greed.

Writing in The Observer, Rachel Cooke concluded:

It is his landscapes, though, that for me are the best paintings in this show: transcendent and wonderfully modern – you see Hockney here, and Michael Andrews – even as he nods to the masters. In his last years, Burra toured Britain, chauffeured by his sister, Anne. He went to wild places – to Cornwall, the Peak District, the Yorkshire Moors – and he gawped and gawped. “It fascinated me to watch Edward when the car halted,” said his friend, Billy Chappell. “He might, I thought, have been staring at a blank wall, until I saw the intensity of his gaze.” Only when he got back home did he settle to work, reproducing the heather and the screes, but with curious dashes of his own: a road as blue as a river, a field as brightly coloured as an orange. And often, too, an invader or three: a crawling lorry, a demonic motorbike, a rapacious tractor, even an aeroplane, tiny in the sky, but indelibly black. Black Mountain (1968), English Countryside (1965-7) and An English Scene No 2 (1970) are unforgettable paintings: giant postcards from a man who could not ignore what was happening to England, even if it is sometimes hard to tell if her changing landscape was more a source of regret or delight. Oh, you must see this show. It is fascinating and beautiful – and we will not, perhaps, see its like again: the majority of these works are in private collections. Feast your eyes while you can.

Another section of the exhibition surveys the work that Burra did for the stage. Burra’s love of theatrical spectacle was exuberantly expressed in his depictions of music halls, and of actors and movie stars such as Mae West. He was also one of the greatest British designers for the stage in the twentieth century; he designed striking décor and costumes for several notable ballets and operas, as well as a set for the 1948 film A Piece of Cake. Not only were Burra’s costume designs concerned with an understanding of fabric and movement, they also conveyed the personality of the individual character and had much in common with the people that appear in his watercolours of bars and street scenes. With his interest in depicting ordinary people in the streets, Burra was the perfect choice to design sets and costumes for Robert Helpmann’s wartime ballet The Miracle in the Gorbals.

Front cloth: Don Quixote — Front cloth for Don Quixote, 1950

Burra’s front cloth for an operatic version of Don Quixote in 1950 was, I thought the most striking. It depicts Quixote on his donkey heading out into the Spanish plains, with Sancho Panza behind. The Sadlers Wells choreographer Ninette de Valois recalled:

There stands out clearly a special memory: the magic front-cloth for Don Quixote. Rarely does there appear such force and spiritual strength in a stage set painting. Every line conveying purpose with a defiance that is highlighted; a fate framed in ennobling colours – whatever the outcome. We do not get such cloths today in the theatre.

The exhibition concludes with a display of Edward Burra’s paintbox and paints, alongside colour tests on opened envelopes and a shopping list.

It looks increasingly likely that Edward Burra will be accepted as one of the greatest British artists of the 2oth century. He is a unique figure, impossible to categorise, who charted his own highly individual course, never aligning himself with any particular movement or group. In the exhibition catalogue, Simon Martin gives this overall assessment of his significance:

With [his] baroque exuberance Burra does not neatly fit into the restrained and cerebral modernism of his contemporaries such as Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, John Piper or Graham Sutherland. He was not interested in good taste. If anything he embraced ‘bad’ taste: garish nightclub performers, sailors in search of a pick-up, tarts in a snack bar or dancing skeletons. He was unafraid of expressing a gay sensibility at a time when such personal honesty and an overtly camp aesthetic were by no means widely acceptable. Decades before the contemporary artist Grayson Perry was exploring transvestism in his art, Burra was depicting men in drag and in his hilarious letters to friends adopting the alter egos of ‘Lady Ex Bureaux’, ‘Tottie’, ‘Gladys Dilly’, ‘Marguerite’ and ‘Madame Mata-Hari’. He was not interested in what other people thought of him, but he was interested in people, in their foibles and eccentricities, but also in mankind’s dark side – to which he gave powerful expression during the Spanish Civil War and Second World War. His fascination with the macabre led to the creation of uncanny images of unsettling power that are as disquieting as his other images are humorous.

Acknowledging his importance internationally, Burra’s work was rightly included in the major survey of the art of the Harlem Renaissance, Rhapsodies in Black, and in time his paintings inspired by the Spanish Civil War will be viewed as an important contribution to the visual legacy of that conflict. Likewise, his ballet and opera designs will be celebrated as some of the most significant artistic contributions to modern set and costume design, while his late landscapes, scarred with motorways, pylons and construction, will come to be seen as a powerful and un-idealised record of man’s environmental impact on the great British landscape. […] Edward Burra deserves to be considered as one of the greatest British artists of the twentieth century: utterly unique, and to be celebrated for his extraordinary individuality.

Burra hated all the talk around pictures and once, in a TV interview, got annoyed at the question, ‘So what does it all mean then?’ With a twinkle in his eye, Burra responded, ‘Nothing’. He died in 1976 at the age of 72 having lived far longer than anyone could possibly have predicted, and leaving a far greater legacy than he was given credit for at the time.

David Hockney: My Yorkshire

Anyone who has browsed the most-read posts on this blog will know that I am a fan of David Hockney’s recent Yorkshire paintings, as seen in the exhibitions at Salt’s Mill last year and, currently, the Royal Academy. But I have to admit I was a tad disappointed with David Hockney: My Yorkshire Conversations with Marco Livingstone that I have just read, courtesy of the embattled Wirral library service.

The book consists of conversations between Hockney and Marco Livingstone who has written extensively on Hockney and co-curated the current Royal Academy exhibition, A Bigger Picture. It’s a lovely book to look at – produced in A4 landscape format with reproductions of many of the paintings from the RA exhibition on good quality paper, with several of the larger paintings printed across double A4 fold-out spreads.

Where the book disappoints, for me, is in the text. Livingstone has chosen to transcribe verbatim several conversations he had with Hockney during the period when he was engaged in his painterly exploration of the Yorkshire Wolds, producing the huge paintings of trees and rolling landscapes through the seasons that culminated in the RA exhibition. Unfortunately, these conversations are not, for the most part, particularly revealing. Hockney is often rather opaque and contradictory when expressing his well-known views on, for example photography and art; and Livingstone’s prompts often fail to push Hockney to clarify his meaning. All in all, these conversations are nowhere near as revealing or interesting as those that form the basis of Martin Gayford’s excellent A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney.

The issue of Hockney’s attitude to photography keeps recurring in his discussions with Livingstone, particularly with reference to the controversial argument he articulated in The Secret Knowledge, that advances in realism and the accuracy of representation in art since the Renaissance were primarily the result of optical aids such as the camera obscura, camera lucida, and curved mirrors, rather than being primarily due to greater artistic skill. What can be confusing is that, on the one hand Hockney insists on the importance of photographic technology, whilst at the same time speaking of photography being finished and presenting a flat and restricted view of the world. In this respect he often talks of his return to landscape painting in Yorkshire in the late 1990s, first in watercolours and then in oil paintings, as his ‘photographic detox’; yet, at the same time the recent period of work in Yorkshire has also seen a return to photography with his experiments with nine-camera arrays.

Hockney does, indeed, admit to being contradictory:

Well, I go hot and cold about things. I’m interested in images. I’m interested in how images were made in the past. .. If you’re interested in images, you’re interested in the photograph as well; it’s an image. So I’ve always been interested in photography, but I’ve always thought it was not that good a way to make pictures. I see now it’s because the camera isn’t used right, and all my criticism has always been this: it was always the same, ‘Well, use the camera another way’.

Livingstone begins, though, by taking Hockney back to the time when he first became aware of the Wolds:

I would have been 14, I think. 1952. In the summers of 1952 and 1953, when I was at Bradford Grammar School, I worked on a farm between Wetwang and Huggate, stooking corn, as a schoolboy. I had a bicycle, of course that was the only way you could get around here, and I cycled around, all over…

There were no paintings of the Wolds then: working ‘long, long days’, from 7 in the morning to 7:30 at night; ‘but I was aware that I was in a lovely space. Those fields are still there. You get wonderful views. I do react to space, I am very aware of that.’ Later, in the 1980s, his brother went to live in Flamborough, and later still his sister moved to Bridlington, followed by his mother. When his mother was in her nineties Hockney visited her regularly in Bridlington, and began exploring the Wolds. Then, in 1996, when Jonathan Silver, his great friend and developer of Salt’s Mill in Saltaire, was dying of cancer, Hockney for the first time stayed over in Yorkshire for six months or more and began painting the Wolds. He was driving every day from Bridlington to Wetherby to see Jonathan, and every day he was travelling up and down Garrowby Hill. He made some drawings, and after Jonathan died, back in Los Angeles, he did the wonderful Garrowby Hill painting.

After Hockney returned to settle in Yorkshire, the first paintings he did were watercolours. He speaks of the discipline of working with watercolours:

Watercolour has to discipline you in the sense that there are certain methods. For instance, you have to paint from light to dark in watercolour. In oil painting you can do what you want. I liked the disciple of it; the discipline is making you do things.

Soon, though, he was painting in oils and excited about the possibilities of painting compared to photography. He became deeply aware that we ‘see with memory’:

None of us see the same thing. No matter what we are looking at. When I am looking at anything now, it’s now. Memory is also now. When I am looking at you, I have memories of you before. Someone who has never seen you before doesn’t, so they see something different. That’s what I’m saying. That’s true of everything. The landscape, where you are. I became rather fascinated with this, especially when you are watching seasons change; the same trees change. Because you have the memory of last winter, but you are seeing more this winter. ‘I didn’t notice that last winter’. The first winter, I didn’t notice how all the branches were reaching for the light, especially in December, that’s when they stand up the straightest. You don’t notice that until you’ve been around a while or looked at them. This was also linking it with memory.

Three Trees near Thixendale, Winter 2007

Hockney tells Livingstone how he went about painting the trees near Thixendale (a sequence of three observed at each season). The paintings were based on observation, rather than photographs:

We took some photographs, but they were all flat to me, and I am painting spatial feelings. With those trees, the first time I decided it was a subject was August 2006. I thought I’d do them in August, because they looked so majestic to me. I realized they were about 200 years old each. There were a lot of things about them. … Once you spend the winters here, you realize that every tree is different. Every single one. The branches, the forces in it, they are marvellously different. […]

They are like faces , they are. Especially in the winter. They are not skeletons, either. They are very, very living; a skeleton isn’t. So you come to see that a tree, after all, is the largest plant form we know. It’s also a kind of physical manifestation of the life force, and we can see and feel that. … Van Gogh was thrilled by that, the infinity of nature, the never-ending variety.

William Carlos Williams was on the same wavelength:

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
– ‘Winter Trees‘

Three Trees near Thixendale, Summer 2007

The Thixendale Trees – all four paintings – were done entirely in the studio. Hockney says, ‘I wanted to use memory, you see. I had done a lot of hard looking. I was beginning to get a vocabulary’. And the paintings got bigger:

What was thrilling was painting from nature on what were quite big canvases – but remember there were six. It’s unusual to paint on that scale direct from nature.

Later, of course, they got bigger still.

In the second of the two conversations which make up the book, Hockney talks at length about the ideas that lay behind the films he has created using an array of nine video cameras attached to a moving vehicle. The films form part of the RA exhibition and create the sensation of being in nature and travelling through it.

When I went back to the camera, I didn’t go back to using it like Vermeer, like everybody else does, but I’ve used it as a collage. That’s why I went back to photography. My critique is more that it doesn’t showyou enough, and that’s why I was bored with it. So I took it up again to demonstrate that if you use a camera a different way, you can open it up. … A single camera isn’t very good at showing a landscape. But nine cameras are.

Hockney "drawing" with images from nine cameras — Hockney 'drawing' with images from nine cameras

Towards the end of their conversation, Hockney and Livingstone discuss the new computer technologies that the artist has been using in the last few years – iPhone, iPad and printing directly from drawings created on the computer using Photoshop. Some of these Photoshop images are reproduced in the book, and, personally, I think they are dreadful. Onto a background painted by Hockney on the iPad are superimposed what look like superior clip art images of trees. Nevertheless, Hockney is enthusiastic about the advantages of using a computer for both speed and precision. He can magnify a small area of the painting temporarily so that he can work on it in detail.

For Hockney, the iPad has taken over as his sketchbook ‘totally’:

Why go back to a sketchbook? This is terrific. … The iPad is affecting the way I’m painting, because I’m drawing bolder and bolder on it. My mark-making is becoming bolder and bolder.

For me, the best of the iPad images reproduced in the book is this one, Untitled 12 August 2010:

In one exchange, Marco Livingstone suggests what Hockney’s recent flurry of work might signify:

With all these investigations into forms of picture-making using new technology, you have also managed during the past two years to continue using the very old technology to which you have always been devoted, that of oil painting. Most of these pictures, including an immense painting on 15 canvases of felled logs, Winter Timber 2009, and a series of hawthorn blossom canvases, were made in the large warehouse studio rather than from the motif. You call that sudden period of manic flowering in the spring ‘action week’, all the more exciting for its brevity and for your knowledge that a single downpour will bring down most of that delicate blossom. Is that feeling of the brevity of life – and the cycle of birth, death and renewal – particularly poignant to you as you get older? Is it an urgent desire to embrace the vitality of life that you wish to communicate in these pictures?

To which Hockney responds:

Yes, there is a desire to embrace the vitality of life and yes, it becomes more poignant as I get older. It does for everybody, doesn’t it? When people are in their twenties, they think they’re immortal, don’t they? When I was 23, after a year at the Royal College of Art, I received a letter from the National Insurance saying that unless I put more stamps on, ‘This could mean four and sixpence less in the pension’. The old-age pension. Well, I was 23: ‘Fuck your fucking pension! … And I thought, Fuck off. I didn’t care. I mean, four and sixpence less, this is in 45 years’ time! What are they going on about?’ Well, you think you’re immortal when you’re 23. You think you’ll never be 63, and I certainly wouldn’t have worried about four and sixpence less. […]

Well, you ponder your own mortality. But when I signed the lease for this huge studio two years ago, the moment I’d signed it I felt 20 years younger. I’d taken it on for five years, renewable to ten. I started planning, and I’m going to tell you, it gives you a lot of energy. I’d recommend it to anybody. I wouldn’t recommend retirement. Retirement isn’t a thing you even think about as an artist, anyway. Anybody who is spending their life doing what they like, any creative artist, continues till they fall over.

I’ll raise a glass to that!

Footnote:

A friend borrowed this book from Wallasey library which, according to the borrowing slip, is managed by Wirral Council’s Department of Regeneration. Seems something very much of our times about that – books and reading seen only in terms of economic development. I’m sure Hockney would snort.

Mondrian//Nicholson: In Parallel

It was a study in contrasts as I made my way across the courtyard of Somerset House where London Fashion Week was being hosted, and fashion models in glitzy outfits and extraordinary hats posed for photographers with big cameras. I was headed for Mondrian//Nicholson: In Parallel, a small but brilliant exhibition at the Courtauld, in which the relationship between the two artists is recounted through just 18 works, from the moment when Nicholson visited Mondrian’s studio in Paris early in 1934 to the time when the two went their separate geographical ways some seven years later. Continue reading “Mondrian//Nicholson: In Parallel” →

Lucian Freud Portraits: Painted Life

The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone
– Bob Dylan

It was to be his last painting. As always, in his inimitable style, after a cursory charcoal sketch he went straight to paint, working from the centre of the canvas outwards. It was a double portrait, another of the many that he had painted of his assistant David Dawson and his whippet Eli. By the early summer he had finished the man and was working on the dog. He continued to work on the dog until he was too frail to carry on. When he died in July the canvas was still on his easel, unfinished.

Portrait of the Hound (unfinished), 2011

The encounter with ‘Portrait of the Hound’, the last painting in Lucian Freud: Portraits, the major retrospective of the artist’s life’s work as a portraitist, is an emotional moment. To see those final brushstrokes giving form to the dog before they fade out to white was, for me, an intensely moving experience.

Before he died at the age of 88 last summer, Lucian Freud was working closely with the National Portrait Gallery planning the shape of this exhibition that comprises 130 paintings, drawings and etchings, and was not intended to be a memorial. Still, that is what it has become. It’s beautifully presented in pristine, spacious rooms with no caption clutter (everyone receives a little handbook with all the info – other galleries please note).

Two days before seeing the exhibition we had watched Randall Wright’s superb documentary Lucian Freud: Painted Life on BBC 2 that included the only video ever made of Freud painting – which just happened to be that final day at work on ‘Portrait of the Hound’. The sequence provided an extraordinary insight into the physicality of his technique: the intense concentration, the muttering and the scraping of paint hardening on the palette, flinging away gobs of the stuff to splatter on the wall that looked as if Pollock had passed by.

The film went on to explore Freud’s remarkable life and work through frank recollections by friends and family members of a man who lived by his own rule and kept his private life as mysterious as possible, and who was totally uninterested in what others might feel about his behaviour or remarks.

All my patience has gone into my work, leaving none for my life.

There was ‘a disturbing intensity’ in the man and his work – and it was present right from the start. Arriving in England with his parents, refugees from Berlin fleeing Nazi persecution, Lucian and his brothers were sent to Dartington Hall, the liberal boarding school in Devon, where he found nothing to interest him in the classroom. Instead he single-mindedly pursued his intense love of art and of animals, especially horses, spending his whole time painting, looking after horses, and sleeping with them in the stables. Later moved to the more disciplined Bryanston, he made little academic progress, and was eventually expelled.

Lucian loved the horses – as was evinced by a startling anecdote recounted in the film by the man who became Freud’s dealer from the 1980s, William Acquavella. After agreeing that Acquavella would represent his interests worldwide, Freud asked just one thing of the dealer: ‘I have a gambling debt: would you take care of it for me?’ Acquavella says ‘sure, no problem’. So he met with the bookie and said he’d like tp pay off the debt’. The bookie says, ‘that’s wonderful, Bill; it’s £2.7 million’.

Randall Wright’s film profiled a complex man who dedicated his life to his art and who always sought to transmute paint into a vibrant living representation of humanity. As Laura Cummings expresses it in her review of the exhibition, ‘the naked animal, unidealised and depicted with extreme concentration on physical essence: that long ago came to look like Freud’s grand contribution to 20th-century painting’. Or, as Freud himself pithily put it:

I am inclined to think of ‘humans’…if they’re dressed, as animals dressed up.

The paintings here demonstrate the unrelenting observational intensity of his work. The exhibition spans seven decades
and is arranged broadly chronologically, beginning with his early explorations of the portrait. Freud was almost totally preoccupied with the human face and figure. Family, friends and lovers were his subjects, but sitters were also drawn from all walks of life – from the aristocracy to the criminal underworld – though he rarely took on commissions. He also produced, as the decades passed, a succession of self-portraits that rival those of Rembrandt for the intensity and honesty of their gaze.

‘Man With A Feather’ is the earliest self-portrait in the exhibition. In this surreal painting, Freud depicts himself
holding a feather. On the ground behind him there are several mysterious shapes, and in the background we see shadowy figures of a beaked bird and a man wearing a hat. Freud did not reveal what they represented.

In contrast, ‘Self-Portrait, Reflection’, the most recent self portrait in the exhibition, is a quiet, reflective painting of the artist as an old man. Freud wears a jacket, but no shirt. He clutches at his scarf as though it is a noose around his neck. What is remarkable is the way he has depicted his head using impasto, building up the layers of pigment until he seems to disappear into the paint-encrusted wall behind him.

In ‘Girl with a White Dog’,1950-1, Kitty sits on a bare mattress, pressed up against the wall with a grey blanket for a backdrop. Her exposed breast is echoed in the form of the English bull terrier’s muzzle in her lap. The couple separated not long after the painting was completed.

In the next room are two portraits of Freud’s second wife, Caroline Blackwood, which offer a profound study in psychological contrast. ‘Girl in Bed’ was painted after they eloped to Paris and were living at the Hôtel la Louisiane. Loving and gentle, it conveys Blackwood’s wide-eyed innocence, in stark contrast with the haunting, oppressive composition of his double portrait ‘Hotel Bedroom’, painted just two years later. The artist and his wife are in the same room but they appear to be entirely separate from each other.

‘Hotel Bedroom’ was the last painting Freud made sitting down at the easel. In the mid-1950s his style began to change: he began to move towards a more vigorous approach, influenced by his decision to begin painting standing up and to use coarse, hog’s hair brushes.

When I stood up I never sat down again’ ‘When I stood up I never sat down again.

One portrait representative of the shift in Freud’s style – as well as Freud’s ability to probe beneath the skin to reveal the interior being – is the portrait of George Dyer, Francis Bacon’s lover, made in 1965. Dyer looks down, a troubled expression on his face. While Bacon’s paintings depicted him as a turbulent character, Freud shows him to be a more vulnerable man. He paints his harelip and his broken nose. The redness of his exposed chest is made more intense by the blueness of his shirt. Dyer committed suicide in 1971.

I was struck, too, by ‘A Man and his Daughter’, a painting of a man with livid scars on his face, but also a tender depiction of the close relationship between a father and daughter. They are painted as though they are one body, the girl with a long golden plait tied with a pure white bow, and her unblemished skin contrasting with that of her father. The man lived in a flat beneath Freud in the run-down part of Paddington where he had lived since the 1940s.

A little further on is a self-portrait that it also a wonderful portrait of a plant (Freud did those, occasionally, too, sometimes as a feature of the room in which a human portrait was painted, sometimes glimpsed through a window). A spider plant dominates the foreground in ‘Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (Self-portrait)’. Behind it, a mirror reflects the painter, his hand cupping his ear. Naked, he appears to be an extension of the leaf.

Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (Self-Portrait), 1968

In the 1960s and 1970s, Freud continued to explore complex compositions like this, at the same time drawing back from the head to reveal the whole body, sometimes, as in the 1970 portrait of Harry Diamond, placed in the context of the artist’s studio and living space. Seen from a high viewpoint, light falls over the sitter making him look uncomfortable, as though he is unwillingly exposed to our scrutiny. He seems out of place, seated and fully dressed, with a bath and basin behind him, evidence that Freud was living and working in the same space. Freud had been a friend of Harry Diamond, a photographer and Soho habitué, since the 1950s. This is one of three portraits he made of him. Diamond found the experience of sitting for Freud diminishing, saying: ‘If someone is interested in getting your essence down on canvas, they are also drawing your essence out of you …’. Although Freud said, of his portraits in general:

I work from people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know.

Paddington Interior, Harry Diamond, 1970

It’s in this period that Freud’s brushstrokes become increasingly forceful, and the volume of paint on the canvas increases, so that it seems to almost shape the contours of skin or hair . In the portrait of the artist Frank Auerbach, his powerful forehead dominates the canvas. The two men had been friends since the mid-1950s, were great admirers of each other’s work and saw each other frequently. It was at the time he made this portrait that Freud began to use Cremnitz white, a dry lead-based pigment with a stiff consistency that goes some way to replicating the texture of flesh (later, as the EU was about to impose a ban, Freud bought up nearly all the UK’s stock). Auerbach once said of Freud’s work, ‘the subject is raw, not cooked to be more digestible as art …’, which sums it up pretty well.

The TV documentary explored Freud’s relationship with his mother, one that was fraught with tension and difficulties. Yet the portraits that Freud painted of his mother, Lucie, in the 1970s are among his most tender. They form a series that are in the long tradition of artists’ portraits of their mothers from Rembrandt to Van Gogh and on to Hockney. They are intensely moving paintings and a sensitive study of old age.

The Painter's Mother, 1972 — The Painter’s Mother, 1972

The Painter's Mother Reading, 1975 — The Painter’s Mother Reading, 1975

Following the death of her husband Ernst in 1970, Lucie’s grief brought on a deep depression and her previously overpowering interest in Lucian diminished. Freud now found it was possible for her to sit for him. Over a period of seven years, by painting her, Freud was able, as Hockney put in the TV film, to be with his mother without actually saying anything.

The Painter's Mother Resting, 1976 — The Painter’s Mother Resting, 1976

The only time he did not paint her alone was in ‘Large Interior, W9’, a double portrait in which two women appear oblivious to each other’s presence (they were painted separately and never met during sittings). They are opposites: youth and age; clothed and naked. The nude – Freud’s lover Jacquetta Eliot – is strangely enlarged in relation to the small bed and to the shrunken, oblivious figure of his mother, painted with affection and dignity. With the pestle and mortar underneath her chair, this is a strange and unsettling painting.

In 1977, Freud moved to a more spacious studio in west London, where he installed a skylight to provide stronger light. Enjoying the freedom to paint on a larger scale, he made three ambitious works, opening out the composition to reveal the surroundings in which the subjects sit and the cityscape beyond the room. ‘Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau)’ was the most complex composition Freud had attempted. He gathered together people who were close to him to create a
group portrait based on Jean-Antoine Watteau’s, ‘Pierrot Contente’ (1712).

Large Interior W11 (after Watteau), 1983

Freud said that this painting was ambitious, ‘because it is large, and because I had to gather family’. The family here consists of his daughter Bella, his lover Celia Paul, his ex-lover Suzy Boyt, and her son Kai – the only one of her five children who was not Freud’s – cast as the modern Pierrot. ‘He’s the subject, not Suzy, not Bella, certainly not Celia’, said Freud. ‘I’m the connection. The link is me’.

‘Two Irishmen in W11’ combines a portrait of a father and son with two small, unfinished self-portraits against the studio wall, and a portrait of west London seen through the window.

Celia Paul, who was Lucian Freud’s pupil, mistress, and model during the 1980s, appears in several paintings in the exhibition. In ‘Painter and Model’ from 1986-7, she is the artist – as in real life, but without a canvas and easel. It’s an allegory of painting with the traditional roles reversed. In the act of painting a male nude, the female artist’s naked foot suggestively squeezes a tube of paint.

In 1990, Freud met the Australian performance artist, Leigh Bowery and invited him to sit. Bowery chose to sit for Freud naked, without the trappings of the outrageous costumes and body piercings for which he was known. Freud said of Bowery, ‘he was a remarkable model because he was so intelligent, instinctive and inventive, also amazingly perverse and abandoned’. Despite his size, Leigh Bowery was delicate and supple. Freud had always shunned working with professional models, but as a performer, Bowery was able to invent and sustain demanding poses.

‘And the Bridegroom’ (the title taken from the poem ‘Epithalamium’ by A.E. Housman) is a relaxed and moving portrait of Bowery with his wife, Nicola. For four years Bowery was Freud’s most consistent model and the two men developed a close relationship. Unknown to the artist, Bowery was gravely ill with AIDS.

It was Leigh Bowery who introduced Freud to Sue Tilley, a clubbing friend known as ‘Big Sue’. Painting her was a continuation of Freud’s fascination with ﬂesh, although he talked about not wanting to over indulge his ‘predilection towards people of unusual or strange proportions’. ‘Benefits supervisor’ came to be one of Freud’s best known paintings (and, at $33.6 million the most expensive). As the exhibition guide puts it:

Sue Tilley lies languidly on the sofa in a bohemian artist’s studio, far removed from her day job as a civil servant working for the Department of Social Security. Freud was initially fascinated by her size, however as time passed her proportions became more ordinary to him. Freud’s portraits of Tilley are a celebration of flesh and as feminine as Manet’s Olympia or the Rokeby Venus by Velázquez, although far less idealised.

Freud used hotel linen as rags to clean his brushes and palette knives, and thepiles of rags appear in several paintings. They came to suggest the landscape of the studio, and provided a compositional device. In ‘Standing by the Rags’ we can almost feel the weight of the woman’s body against the tangled pile of rags. Her over-sized feet root her to the ground. Beneath the mounds of soft linen, a makeshift structure supports the pose.

Standing By the Rags', 1988-89 — Standing By the Rags’, 1988-89

The last rooms of the exhibition review the last twenty years of Freud’s life and include paintings of his assistant, David Dawson, members of his family and a series of intensely observed heads and figure paintings, some seen here for the
first time. Freud in his eighties was as energetic as ever and painted every day, making rigorous demands on his sitters. David Hockney calculated that this portrait took 130 hours to complete. Early each morning he would walk from his house in Kensington to Freud’s studio in Holland Park, where he would sit until about midday. While Freud paused to mix paints the two men would talk: their subjects ranged from painting to gossip about mutual friends and acquaintances. When Hockney asked his friend to return the favour, and pose for a portrait, Freud sat for two and a half hours.

In many of his human portraits, Freud included a dog, often one of his beloved whippets, painted in the same style as his paints his human models, and afforded the same importance in the composition. My favourite example is Double Portrait of 1985 (not in this exhibition). I love way that human and animal limbs entwine and echo each other.

Freud’s constant model and companion in his final years was the painter, David Dawson, his assistant since 1990. Freud’s recurrent theme of the complicity between the human and the animal is evident in the paintings of Dawson with the whippets, Pluto and Eli (see Lucian Freud: Dogged Portraitist). If any painting reveals the playfulness in Freud’s work, it is ‘Sunny Morning – Eight Legs’, a portrait of David Dawson and Freud’s whippet Pluto. Dawson lies with his arm wrapped affectionately round the dog. Human and animal are intertwined. It was as he was working on the painting that Freud realised there was something missing from the composition. He decided to incorporate a mirror image of Dawson’s
legs coming out from underneath the bed.

Dawson is an excellent photographer, too, and there is a small display of some of his images of the artist at work.

Lucian Freud Working at Night by David Dawson

For the last four years of his life Freud worked on ‘Portrait of the Hound’, an affectionate double portrait of Dawson and Eli that forms the moving conclusion to this exhibition. Dog and man are painted as equals; their bodies share the same rhythms. Unfinished at the artist’s death, the last brush strokes he made created Eli’s ear, alert and listening.

Freud's last painting, with Eli by David Dawson — Freud’s last painting, with Eli by David Dawson

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture

We had bought our tickets weeks ago: a good move, since David Hockney’s show, A Bigger Picture, at the Royal Academy is now sold out for its entire run.

And show it is: this realisation hit me when I entered the gallery devoted to the arrival of spring. This huge room brings to mind Hockney’s long involvement with theatrical spectacle, designing sets for the opera. Stand at the centre of this overwhelming display and you are surrounded by 51 large prints, a series entitled The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 that records the transition from winter through to late spring on one small road. The prints originate from drawings made on an iPad, an instrument that didn’t exist when he accepted the Royal Academy’s invitation in 2007 to mount an exhibition. Dominating all, on the end wall, is a massive 32-canvas painting that represents the theme’s vibrant crescendo – The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty-eleven). This is a theatrical experience, a stage set with the viewer at the centre of the drama.

Hockney 1 — Viewers take in ‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011’

This is an astonishing painting, with vibrant colours and disembodied, Rousseauesque leaves and tendrils that seem to float among the vivid orange and purple vertical slashes of the tree trunks. On the woodland floor, spring flowers and green ferns form a William Morris tapestry. It represents the acme of Hockney’s intent to share his rediscovery of the English landscape, and to assert the importance of careful observation of the small but significant changes that unfold daily in the natural world around us.

Hockney poses before Arrival of Spring in Woldgate — Hockney with ‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, 2011’

This exhibition reveals Hockney as a showman. He was invited to stage this exhibition in the autumn of 2007, immediately after the Royal Academy display of his huge painting, Bigger Trees near Warter, and he has spent the last four years not just painting furiously, but also playing a central role in planning the layout of the whole show, room by room, as if the RA were his own giant stage set (which it is, for the time being). It’s a show in that you sense Hockney actively wants to communicate his feelings about art and representation, nature and looking, as well as putting on a great two hours or so of entertainment – a great quantity of paintings to look at, new technologies to marvel, a stunning high definition film show, and even a bit of ballet dancing with lots of jokey allusions.

In the first room you enter you encounter four immense oil paintings of trees near the Yorkshire Wold village of Thixendale, about 20 miles west of Bridlington where Hockney now lives and has his studio. This is the countryside where, like his agricultural labourer grandfather before him, Hockney had worked on a farm as a teenager, and where he now sketches incessantly.

Three trees near Thixendale, Spring 2008 — Three Trees near Thixendale: Summer, Spring, Winter 2007

The series illustrates a view of three trees painted from precisely the same spot during the winter and summer of 2007, and the spring and autumn of 2008.

There is absolutely constant change. Superficially, Bridlington and the country around haven’t altered much in fifty years. But when you are here, you can see how it varies continuously. The light will be different; the ground changes colour.
-David Hockney

Hockney paints each scene in vivid colours: spring dominated by the season’s abundant greens and yellows, while the winter version has the three bare trees silhouetted against a deep belt of blue with parallel bands of orange and green in the foreground.

Here the tree is introduced as a key motif of Hockney’s recent work, seeming to embody, as the RA’s guide puts it, ‘a vital life force, whether in full leaf in summer or as a bare structure in winter’. And there is Hockney’s other great theme in this recent work – nature’s transience. The Thaxendale series, along with others in the show, are all about nature’s cycles and the passage of time – the same process that engrossed Claude Monet when he devoted his later years to painting water lilies in his garden at Giverny over and over again.

I have painted these water lilies a great deal, modifying my viewpoint each time … The effect varies constantly, not only from one season to the next, but from one minute to the next … So many factors, undetectable to the uninitiated eye, transform the colouring and distort the planes of the water.
– Claude Monet

There have been some highly critical reviews of this exhibition, such as those by Andrew Graham-Dixon and Alastair Sook, and these have usually commented on the startling contrast between what Hockney is now doing and the work he created in Britain and America in his younger days. The next room, ‘Earlier Landscapes’, sets out to illustrate the extent to which landscape has always been present in Hockney’s work. Here is a selection of paintings spanning the years from 1956 (Fields, Eccleshill’ and ‘Bolton Junction’) to 1998 (the gigantic and glowing ‘A Bigger Grand Canyon’) by way of the humorous ‘Flight Into Italy – Swiss Landscape’ of 1962 and ‘Nichols Canyon’ from 1980.

Hockney, Fields, Eccleshill , 1956 — Fields, Eccleshill,1956

The first two paintings were made when Hockney was a teenager studying at the Bradford School of Art. With their subdued colours and dull light they offer a marked contrast to the recent work.

David Hockney- Flight into Italy-Swiss Landscape — Flight into Italy-Swiss Landscape, 1962

‘Flight Into Italy – Swiss Landscape’ is Hockney’s at his most flippant, remembering when he went with some friends to Italy to look at paintings and architecture in a small van. Hockney was stuck in the back of the van (with the red coat, presumably), and so couldn’t see the mountains as they went through Switzerland. He painted them later from a geology textbook.

Hockney, Nichols Canyon, 1980 — Nichols Canyon, 1980

In ‘Nichols Canyon’ Hockney attempts to find a solution to the problem of portraying movement and the passage of time on the static two-dimensional surface of a canvas. In the painting he depicts how he saw – both in actuality and in the layers of memory built up through repeated journeys – the places he travelled through every day by car to his home at the head of Nichols Canyon. Hockney does not depict in any naturalistic way the canyon’s environmental features, nor does he illustrate the view from his home. Instead, he takes viewers on a journey through Nichols Canyon itself, visually recreating his daily drive from his home at the top of the canyon to his studio in Santa Monica Boulevard below it.

From this room, we ease into the Yorkshire landscapes beginning with the first ones that he completed between 1997 and 1999 after he had returned to Yorkshire to be near his close friend Jonathan Silver, who was terminally ill. Here are the by now familiar images ‘Road Through Sledmere’ (1997), ‘Double East Yorkshire’ (1998) and the magnificent ‘Garrowby Hill’ (1998), with its echoes of the California landscapes with its vivid colours and expressiveness of viewing the landscape from a moving car.

These first Yorkshire paintings were all painted in the studio from memory. By contrast, those in next room were all painted directly from observation in 2004 – 2005. Two of the walls are crammed with arrays of small or medium-sized paintings, some oils and some watercolours. One painting, ‘Wheat Field Off Woldgate’, shares an affinity with Van Gogh’s
‘Wheat Field, June 1888’. The point of view of each artist is similar: Vincent walked into the field to paint; Hockney, too, has set up his easel at the edge of the field, immersing us in the grasses and the wheat that stretches off into the distance where electricity pylons march. For Hockney, Van Gogh is simply a great draughtsman, his work manifesting the two qualities that Hockney values most and considers wholly entwined: rigorous observation and mastery of drawing.

There are more hints of Van Gogh later on in the exhibition, in paintings of hawthorn blossom and in the purple whorls of ‘Winter Timber’. The last room of the exhibition, which consists of a lavish display of 16 of Hockney’s sketchbooks and iPads, should not be overlooked. It reveals, as do Van Gogh’s drawings, how ‘everything begins with the sketchbooks’, in Hockney’s words, and how a supreme draughtsman can reveal the likeness of a man’s face in a few deft lines. As Brian Sewell put it in his otherwise scathing review of this exhibition, Hockney is ‘one of the best draughtsmen of the 20th century, wonderfully skilful, observant, subtle, sympathetic, spare, every touch of pencil, pen or crayon essential to the evocation of the subject’.

Another fine painting in this group is ‘Woldgate Tree’, a portrait of a solitary tree in early spring, just about to burst into bud. The tree is defined in just a few very fast brushstrokes, three slashes of yellow.

Every tree is different. Every single one. The branches, the forces in it; they are marvellously different. You are thrilled. This is the infinity of nature.
– Hockney

In these oils and watercolours, Hockney does indeed capture the infinity of nature: trees and puddles, clouds reflected in puddles, a series of poems in blues and greys.

Then another room that demonstrates Hockney’s fascination with examining the same place at different times of the day and the year. This is ‘the tunnel’, a farm track near Kilham in the East Riding. In summer the dense growth of trees completely encloses the track, as shown in ‘Early July Tunnel, 2006’. Here is the same scene at two other seasons:

Woldgate Woods is another series of seven large paintings (each consisting of six canvases all made from the same viewpoint) that reflects Hockney’s admiration for Monet’s Water Lilies. Again there is close attention to to changing light and seasonal conditions (compare to the two versions below, painted a couple of weeks apart and at different times of day; another version, dated 7 & 8 November 2006, is suffused with a misty light, while ’26, 27 & 30 July 2006′ is a study in green – leaves in many shades, dappled light falling on a far glade). The height of the trees, the sense of space and the dazzling late autumn colours all heighten the intensity of being in nature. Hockney sets out to persuade us to open our eyes to our surroundings: ‘It doesn’t have to be Woldgate – your own garden will change as much’.

Hockney, Woldgate Woods, 21, 23 & 29 November 2006 — Woldgate Woods, 21, 23 & 29 November 2006

The next room is devoted entirely to paintings of hawthorn blossom. It is the strangest sight, and I wasn’t entirely sure about it (though amidst all the critical reviews that this exhibition has received, it was this room that critics tended to like the most). For the last three years, Hockney has prepared for what he calls ‘action week’, three or four days in late May or early June when the hawthorn blossom makes its fleeting appearance. Rising at dawn, Hockney has depicted the wild exuberance of the hawthorn in the early morning light. He says that this moment is ‘as if a thick white cream had been poured over everything’. I found Hockney’s preparatory charcoal drawings preferable.

Hockney, May Blossom on the Roman Road, 2009 — May Blossom on the Roman Road, 2009

Writing in The Guardian, Adrian Searle spoke of these landscapes having ‘an almost surreal and visionary delight’, culminating in

a painting so over the top – ‘May Blossom on the Roman Road’, from 2009 – that it looks as though giant caterpillars were climbing all over a kind of mad topiary, beneath a roaring Van Goghish sky. I wish more works could be as crazy as this: Hockney captures and amplifies something of the astonishment of hawthorns in bloom. I kept thinking of dying Dennis Potter describing in that 1994 interview with Melvyn Bragg how “nowness” had become so vivid: “Instead of saying, ‘Oh, that’s nice blossom’ … I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom.

It is a very weird painting.

Hockney, Winter Timber, 2009 — Winter Timber, 2009

On we go to a room entitled ‘Trees and Totems’, comprising a group of paintings of trees and cut timber in winter. Here, Hockney juxtaposes the freshly-cut logs against the verticality of the purple ‘totem’ suggested by a hewn trunk and the myriad blue trees that remain upstanding, protectively surrounding the dead wood. It is highly expressionistic, with vivid patterning (the tractor tracks on the purple trail in the foreground, the leaves and bracken alongside the logs seeming to evoke a William Morris design, and the marks on the bark of the violet stump). Your eye is drawn along the line of the logs and the curve of the pink track on the left towards the Van Gogh whorl in the distant trees. This is Alastair Sook in The Telegraph:

Another series, Winter Timber and Totems, introduces a touch of foreboding and forlorn melancholy. We are in the woods. Using an extreme Fauvist palette, Hockney paints tree stumps and felled logs. The culmination of the sequence is the 15-canvas oil painting ‘Winter Timber ‘ (2009). An imposing magenta stump dominates the foreground. Next to it, piles of orange logs stripped of their bark lie beside a road that leads off into the distance. The track is flanked by slender blue trees, some of which start to bend and curl into a disconcerting vortex as they approach the horizon. Thanks to the preternatural colours, the scene feels uncanny, suffused with the intensity of a vision. It doesn’t take long to read the stump and logs as reminders of mortality, or to understand that Hockney has transformed a humdrum wintry scene into a gateway to the afterlife. … Paintings such as ‘Winter Timber’ go beyond mere topographical record, and remind us of the power of Hockney in his prime.

After the ‘Arrival of Spring’ gallery, there are two decidedly unimpressive rooms. One consists of paintings inspired by Claude Lorrain’s ‘The Sermon on the Mount’ (1656) which Hockney encountered in New York in 2009. Having acquired a digital copy of the painting, he digitally ‘cleaned’ the surface which had darkened due to exposure to fire two centuries ago. Brian Sewell was scathing about Hockney’s resultant studies in his exhibition review. They didn’t appeal to me.

A final gallery of paintings gathers some of Hockney’s most recent work. The room is dominated by very large prints of iPad paintings of the Yosemite Valley in California. All that can be said about these is that blowing them up to this size exposes the limitations of iPad works which have charm and delicacy at their original size. However, the three recent oil paintings of Woldgate in this final gallery, with their close focus on the wild flowers and grasses growing beneath trees and the delicate flowers of Queen Anne’s Lace are a delight.

Queen Anne’s Lace (or Cow Parsley as it’s generally known up north) is so ubiquitous along English roadsides and hedgerows that it tends to fade into invisibility. But Hockney has latched onto it in these recent paintings – and in the 18-screen high definition films that he has developed as another means of depicting the landscape which are shown in the penultimate room of the exhibition.

Woldgate Woods, 11.30 am 7 November, 2010

Woldgate Woods, 9.30 am 26 November, 2010

In the past, Hockney has criticised photography, saying that it is ‘all right, if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralysed Cyclops’. What these films (stunning in the high-definition clarity and in their widescreen opening to peripheral vision) are about is his attempt to overcome the discrepancy between how we see the three-dimensional world in space, volume and time, and how to translate that vision into a two-dimensional representation. He tried this before with his photo collages in the 1980s ( a few of which are on display here in the ‘Earlier Landscapes’ room).

In 2007, Hockney began experimenting with a set of nine synchronised, high-definition, video cameras attached to a rig on his Jeep. Hockney and his assistants drive slowly along the road to ‘The Tunnel’, for instance, filming first one side of the road, and then the other side, before joining them together. ‘A single camera isn’t very good at showing landscape,’ he claims, ‘but the nine cameras are’.

We see space through time. When you’re seeing the nine-camera videos of Woldgate, it’s a different time in the top right-hand corner from what it is in the left-top corner. Just as it is in real life for you.
– Hockney

The films run for about 20 minutes or so, and are both beautiful and hypnotic. This is not simply a widescreen movie: by aiming each of the nine cameras in a slightly different direction, Hockney’s team have got close to how we experience walking through a landscape with our own eyes.

As a finale, there are scenes filmed in Hockney’s Bridlington warehouse studio with a pianist and ballet dancers, nods to Degas, Matisse and maybe Van Gogh (yellow chairs) and, at the end Hockney raising a red mug. At one point we see a poster with the message, ‘DEATH waits for you when you do not smoke’ (incontrovertible for sure, and an expression of the combative position on smoking that Hockney has repeatedly taken).

This is an enormous exhibition, filling ten rooms, including the vast Gallery III devoted to ‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, in 2011’. It comprises vast oil paintings, the 52 works in ‘The Arrival of Spring’ (51 of which are iPad drawings: the 52nd is a 15 metre oil painting), a wall of 18 screens showing footage from 18 cameras, a wall of watercolours, a room filled with sketchbooks (each displayed with a monitor above it, on which the pages open in a slideshow), another displaying 12 ft high iPad drawings of Yosemite, a scattering of charcoal drawings and a number of earlier landscapes. It has been hugely popular with the public, yet almost all the reviews by art critics were hostile to a greater or lesser extent.

It is undoubtedly true that, having decided to fill the Royal Academy with work completed almost entirely in the last six years, Hockney has run the risk of quantity exceeding quality. There certainly could have been some pruning. I could have done without the Yosemite iPads and the Lorrain homage. But it is the sheer quantity of images (sometimes stacked two or three deep on the walls) that succeeds in immersing the viewer in the exuberance and ever-changing character of the natural landscape. It is this, I think, that makes the show so popular. Hockney knows how to convey – in oils, watercolours or scratches and smears on an iPad screen – a misty November morning, the sharp sunlight of an early May morning, or bars of autumn sunlight slanting through the trees in Woldgate Wood. He leads us to see the things that we stop seeing because they are so familiar – roadside nettles, Queen Anne’s lace, dock leaves and wild flowers, the fantastical shapes of hawthorn blossom, and trees in their endlessly varied structure and foliage.

He experiments endlessly with new technologies, but not for its own sake. The 18-screen films, like the very large scale of his new paintings, is about trying to capture the experience of seeing in three dimensions, making us crane our necks, walk about, glance all over the place. These works – indeed the whole exhibition – envelop the viewer, as if the landscape isn’t simply out there, like a flat surface or a window, but all around us.

As for the iPad drawings – the speed with which Hockney can create them has allowed him to capture changing light effects through the day or the seasons. And that is the real theme of this exhibition – the representation of time itself, moving through the day, moving through the year, moving from shadow into bright sunlight.

Two paintings, one near-forgotten Liverpool artist

Walking back from a hospital appointment this morning, I called in at the University’s Victoria Gallery to take another look at two of my favourite paintings currently out of storage and on display. One is Lucian Freud’s portrait of Harry Diamond, Paddington Interior, painted in 1970, and the other, facing it on the adjacent wall, is Morning Interior by Dick Young, painted in 1957.

It’s fitting, I think, that these two paintings should be displayed within sight of each other: they are both fine, expressive works that have skilfully manipulated perspective to represent the context and the inner state of mind of the sitter. One is by an artist who is recognised as perhaps the most important and influential artist of his generation; the other is by a Liverpool painter whose work is now largely forgotten.

Lucian Freud’s Paddington Interior, Harry Diamond (1970), is the most important 20th century painting in the University collection. Purchased in 1970 for £1,800, it has been extensively loaned around the world – I wonder if it will travel to the National Portrait Gallery for the big exhibition of Freud portraits, opening next month? Freud has played tricks with perspective here, foreshortening the view to squeeze the room furnishings into the top corners of the canvas and place the sitter dead centre. It’s a portrait that sizzles with tension; everything about Diamond’s awkward posture – his clenched fists, and the sense that he is about to leap to his feet and storm out of the room – suggesting something strained in the relationship between sitter and artist.

Freud later recalled that Diamond was aggrieved at his earlier 1951 portrait of the photographer that’s in the Walker Art Gallery (the one with the cactus): ‘He said I made his legs too short. The whole thing was that his legs were too short. He was aggressive as he had a bad time being brought up in the East End and being persecuted’.

Richard Young deserves a major retrospective. He was born in Walton, Liverpool in 1921, the the youngest son of Henry (an electrician) and Nelly Young. The family moved to London and then Newcastle where Richard became an apprentice ship’s electrician. By 1945, Young had started painting, and attended classes and weekend schools with occasional distinguished visiting tutors. When his father died in 1953, Richard returned with his mother to Walton, and soon became an established figure on the Liverpool arts scene, known to everyone as Dick. By the late 1950s he was gaining recognition, with his first exhibition at the Liverpool Academy in 1955, followed two years later by having Morning Interior selected for the first John Moores exhibition.

Morning Interior is a portrait of the artist as a young man in a striped dressing gown enjoying a contemplative fag after Sunday breakfast, with his mother, Nelly, lying on the sofa, and a young woman reading the papers behind him.

The Victoria Gallery caption reads:

Young’s paintings are generally centred around the home, whether interiors or views from windows. This work is at base level a self-portrait, the artist shown relaxing with a cigarette, wearing a stripey dressing gown. To the left is a detailed still-life of a breakfast table. In the background are further figures, one seated reading a paper, the other lying on a sofa. Young has manipulated the viewing point of the picture, skilfully joining together various elements of the room to create a complete image.

You can read more about Dick Young, and see galleries of his paintings, on my blog, Dick Young: Legendary Liverpool denizen and artist.

That's How The Light Gets In

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Tag: painting

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Links

David Hockney: My Yorkshire

Mondrian//Nicholson: In Parallel

Lucian Freud Portraits: Painted Life

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David Hockney: A Bigger Picture

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Two paintings, one near-forgotten Liverpool artist

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