Modernists and Mavericks Read online

  Chapter eighteen

  THE NON-EXISTENCE OF ACTON

  England gave me the freedom to be more myself, I suppose. Portugal was more restrictive. They didn’t want you to be a modern artist there; here I don’t care whether I am or not. I wouldn’t have done these things if I’d stayed in Portugal, not on your life.

  Paula Rego, 2005

  Although there was no such classification at the time, in retrospect, the maverick moderns were one of the most important groups of painters in London in the 1960s. That is, those who borrowed the vocabulary of abstraction but misused it to depict all manner of forbidden things: dreams, stories, feelings, remembered incidents, irony and political anger. Among these were Kitaj, Patrick Caulfield and Howard Hodgkin.

  Every picture may depict a drama or relate a narrative, but in the opinion of Howard Hodgkin it is not a tale the viewer ever needs to comprehend. ‘The picture’, he once explained to the critic Robert Hughes, ‘is instead of what happened. We don’t need to know the story: generally the story’s trivial anyway. The more people want to know the story the less they’ll want to look at the picture.’ The point is for us to respond to the painting in front of us, with the title as a (possibly allusive or elusive) guide.

  ‘What is important,’ Hodgkin insisted, ‘is that what I feel, think and see turns into something. I mean, ideally, it starts off in my head, and ends up a thing.’ His painting Small Japanese Screen (or The Japanese Screen) from 1962–63 is a case in point. Its origins lay in a specific event: an evening when the artist, his wife and some other friends went to dinner with the art dealer and – later – writer Bruce Chatwin. At the time Chatwin lived in a flat ‘behind Hyde Park Corner’. He had been away on a journey in the Sudanese desert and the sitting room with its ‘monochromatic desert-like atmosphere’ contained only two works of art, one being an early seventeenth-century Japanese screen.

  HOWARD HODGKIN Small Japanese Screen, 1962–63

  Years later Chatwin wrote an account of the painting and its origins. He remembered the painter collecting his impressions: ‘Howard shambling round the room, fixing it with the stare I knew so well’. In the final painting, Chatwin felt, the screen was easily identifiable but the other guests had become ‘a pair of gun-turrets’ (he meant the eyes, disembodied like those of some visitor from outer space in a science-fiction film). Chatwin recognized himself as ‘an acid green smear turning away in disgust, away from my guests, away from my possessions … possibly back to the Sahara’.

  Hodgkin, talking many years later still, pointed out that biliously green though it might be, ‘oddly enough it was a very good likeness of Bruce in that period’. His sense of the emotional undertones encoded in the painting, though, was quite different. These began with his feelings for his host:

  I loved Bruce. But he was completely uninterested in my work, totally. In fact, as far as I know, he was totally uninterested in the work of any living artist. I can’t think of one. His taste and knowledge stopped at Gauguin perhaps.

  The sourness, greenness and turning away – Hodgkin speculated – were to do with Chatwin’s unintentionally but hurtfully slighting attitude towards Hodgkin’s painting. ‘He had written some not deliberately unfriendly, but nonetheless patronizing remarks about my work. And that, I think, probably produced some of the sourness that was in that picture – my sourness.’

  Two of the main participants in the creation of this picture – the subject and the artist – thus had rather different understandings of the emotional situation that was its hidden subject. Does it matter? Is it even possible to know? After all, as David Hockney has observed, it is hard indeed to be sure what is going on in a picture, even if you are the one who painted it. This is as true of the art of long ago as it is a picture such as Small Japanese Screen. A ceiling by Tiepolo – an artist Hodgkin much admired – is not entirely about the apotheosis of some unremarkable Venetian aristocrat: it is also about the way the apricot light strikes the side of a cloud, or a Turk in a turban peeps out from behind the entablature.

  Hodgkin felt he came from an anti-visual culture and railed against the ‘tyranny of words’ that he felt reigned in his native land. He informed an audience at the Slade in 1981: ‘To be an artist in Britain is perhaps, even certainly, special, more traumatic and probably more fraught with the absolute certainty of failure than in any other country.’

  *

  Hodgkin was a sensitive, indeed hypersensitive, man easily moved to tears in ordinary conversation, sometimes by subjects that would barely register on most people’s emotional scales. Once he began to describe a still life by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, previously owned by his cousin. ‘It was just a vase with fresh flowers in it. Marvellous painting. It was one of only two still lifes Corot ever painted, now it’s disappeared.’ And as he spoke his eyes filled up, at the thought of that Corot: its simplicity, its directness – and its subsequent vanishing. Here is a clue to the meanings of his pictures. They are about intensely felt, small things: the mood in a room, a party, an erotic memory.

  I go to a place and accumulate things I’ve encountered – juicy human situations, that kind of thing. Then I come back and turn them into pictures, but it’s not as quick a process as painting watercolours on the spot would be.

  Indeed, the gestation of a Hodgkin was often a matter of years, during which time most days were spent not painting but ‘working out’ the picture in his head. The transmutations that the initial sights and feelings underwent could be positively alchemical. Bruce Chatwin’s metamorphosis into an ‘acid green smear’ was at the most straightforwardly figurative end of Hodgkin’s pictorial spectrum. In Mr and Mrs E.J.P. (1969–73) the collector Edward ‘Ted’ Power – the man who introduced himself to Allen Jones with the words ‘Power’s the name’ – was transformed into an enormous, green translucent egg. This stands – according to the curator Paul Moorhouse – for his ‘enveloping conversation’.

  HOWARD HODGKIN R.B.K., 1969–70

  It was no doubt Hodgkin’s sea-anemone-like responsiveness to atmospheres and undercurrents that made him feel lonely and embattled. He told Richard Morphet that the 1950s had been for him ‘a decade of painful isolation’. However, by the evidence of his own paintings, in the 1960s Hodgkin was absolutely in the centre of the London art world.

  His paintings of that decade and the next constitute a sort of gazetteer of artistic London and its inhabitants. Mind you, the cast of characters – and the locations – do not overlap with those of Bacon’s Soho. He did not depict Wheeler’s or the Colony Room, nor the roster of artists who assembled there. But the list of Hodgkin’s pictures of this period would include the names of most of the prominent abstract and Pop artists in the city and many of the other inhabitants of the art world – critics, dealers, collectors, curators – who feature in these pages. In a sort of semi-private code, the subjects are often referred to only by initials – or, perhaps, addresses. Thus Widcombe Crescent (1966) was the name he gave to his second picture of Robyn and Anna Denny, painted in Bath; Durand Gardens – which features in the title of two paintings from the early 1970s – signalled the Stockwell address of Richard and Sally Morphet.

  Hodgkin’s pictures were filled with private messages and, sometimes, visual jokes. When he painted The Tilsons (1965–67), for example, he seemed to hint at the vigorous idiom reminiscent of the children’s toy blocks that the artist Joe Tilson used for his wooden reliefs. His use of street names as titles was also an indication that this was a most unusual, not to say, quixotic type of portraiture: as much a picture of an interior as of the people in it, as much of the social situation as of the interior. More specifically, his pictures are a record of Hodgkin’s memory of how he felt at the time – and all of this transformed by a process he could never quite explain into a personal language of circles, rectangles, dots and stripes.

  His portrait of the American painter R. B. Kitaj, R.B.K. (1969–70) was executed not on a canvas but on a wooden panel with a painted bord
er, like a frame. This was the first indication of a new development in Hodgkin’s pictures, which invariably came to be painted on wood, very often with the frame incorporated into the image. He explained: ‘The more evanescent the emotion I want to convey, the thicker the panel, the heavier the framing.’ In R.B.K. the subject is barely visible, seated in an interior but screened – or imprisoned – by thick green diagonal bars. It is as though Kitaj were sheltering or masked behind a barrier of abstract art.

  *

  R. B. Kitaj, like Hodgkin, was a highly sensitive individual. He too felt that he was isolated and a loner, noting years later ‘without hesitation’ that he did not fit in England and never would ‘in any comfortable way’. He was an elective outsider, despite his time spent studying at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford. His feelings about the word-orientated culture of Britain, however, were the exact opposite of Hodgkin’s. The latter sensed a general indifference and neglect towards those, like himself, who worked in a non-verbal medium. Kitaj, conversely, felt marginalized because he wanted to connect his art with literature and give verbal commentaries on it. Some of his early works, such as The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg (1960), done when he was at the Royal College of Art, actually had texts stuck to their surfaces. In this particular case, the ostensible theme is the execution of the left-wing Jewish thinker and revolutionary in Berlin in 1919. However, this is not a narrative painting of a historical event. Kitaj added layer after layer of association to the image – for example, he identified Luxemburg with his own Jewish grandmother Helene, forced to flee Vienna – though no one would be likely to guess any of these connections without the clues provided by the artist’s notes and his choice of title.

  R. B. Kitaj in the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, 1965

  For Kitaj, as for Hodgkin, titles were all-important. Even so, they don’t necessarily help much. The Ohio Gang (1964) is not about the cronies of President Warren Harding (the usual meaning of the phrase), but Kitaj’s own disparate ‘cast of characters’, including two friends, an actor and a poet. The naked woman pledges herself to one of them with the yellow ribbon, as in the film by John Ford; the maid is borrowed from Manet’s Olympia, and she’s pushing a pram because the artist had just bought one for his second child. The painter admitted this picture didn’t make much rational sense, but nonetheless it’s one of his strongest.

  R. B. KITAJ The Ohio Gang, 1964

  Kitaj’s first exhibition, at Marlborough Fine Art in 1963, was entitled ‘Pictures with Commentary, Pictures without Commentary’. As a preface he quoted the Roman poet Horace’s famous dictum, ut pictura poesis – ‘as it is in painting, so it is in poetry’. In an interview two years later he developed this idea, stating, ‘For me, books are what trees are for the landscape painter’.

  This then was Kitaj’s rebellion. When he was a child, he explained, he had thought that if T. S. Eliot could append notes to The Waste Land, then he could provide notes to his pictures ‘and drive dogmatic formalists nuts into the bargain’. This was a revolt against the consensus formed in the 1950s and 1960s that a painting should be purely visual and that the more it told a story, the weaker it was. In this way Kitaj successfully annoyed everybody. He imagined them complaining, ‘Here’s Kitaj, the literary artist, doing it again! He doesn’t even know yet that a picture is supposed to speak for itself.’ He went on:

  R. B. KITAJ Synchromy with F.B. – General of Hot Desire, 1968–69

  And it won’t just be abstractionists speaking. Francis Bacon talked like that. All through those conversations with Sylvester – it is the most boring thing, Bacon was always on about illustration, and how a picture doesn’t need any literary meaning.

  Yet, in other ways, Kitaj was unexpectedly close to Bacon. Kitaj tends to be grouped with Hockney and his contemporaries at the Royal College, but it was Bacon who had the greatest impact on him, having got under his skin when he was still living in New York, long before he came to Britain. Even then, Kitaj decided that Bacon and Balthus – the French-Polish painter – were his favourite postwar artists. He remembered how ‘Harry Fischer [of Marlborough Fine Art] introduced Bacon to me over lunch at the Reform Club around 1962. We lived in the same district for his last twenty-five years and gossiped in the supermarket and streets.’ Here is another demonstration of what a small social world the painters of London inhabited. Bacon might seem to belong with those who frequented the Colony Room and Wheeler’s, but he was talking to all manner of artists of diverse generations including Kitaj, Hockney and Frank Bowling.

  Kitaj remained a fervent admirer of Bacon, both as a man and a painter, and featured him in a number of pictures, most strikingly a diptych called Synchromy with F.B. – General of Hot Desire (1968–69). Of Bacon himself he said:

  I believe he sought to stun his audience. He was a stunning creature, a kind of mutant, not a human type I’d ever encountered – Gide’s Immoralist arisen in painting. Like the Immoralist, his mode was the gratuitous act, only this time on those relentless canvases, strong stuff for friend and foe.

  Kitaj and Bacon took opposing lines – the former adding a mass of commentary to his works, the latter adamantly refusing to provide any. Much though he revered the older painter, Kitaj did not – surely rightly – consider Bacon a great artist in quite the same category as Picasso, Matisse or Cézanne. Furthermore, Kitaj contended that Bacon’s very refusal to put the meaning of his works into words was, well, a bit old-fashioned:

  He was talking like Roger Fry and Clem Greenberg, and he would have been astonished if you had said that to him, because he was the great immoralist, you know. He was such an iconoclast. But there is this feeling, even among the painters that I love most, that you don’t talk about it – I use the analogy of a Western like Shane. You don't know who the heroes are. You don’t know where they come from. They ride into town. They do their art, and they don’t talk about it. Then they ride away, and you don’t know where they’re going. That’s what art is supposed to be. Cool.

  In the 1980s, Kitaj developed the habit of exhibiting his pictures with ‘prefaces’ – explanatory notes, sometimes placed next to the work on the gallery wall. But these pieces of prose weren’t necessarily enlightening. Kitaj added copious references to poetry, historical events and autobiographical incidents, but the pictures themselves tended to remain enigmatically mysterious.

  This is the case with the Bacon diptych – why is F.B. wearing that homburg hat and utterly uncharacteristic costume? And why is he juxtaposed with a brutally explicit female nude? Kitaj and Bacon were both painters who depicted sexuality – Hot Desire – and squalor. But this sort of body, clearly, was not the variety Bacon himself desired. Another link between the two painters is that they both had roots in Surrealism. At a deeper level, however, they didn’t want or expect their pictures to make sense. ‘I don’t mean to explain the mystery away, or to say what everything in the picture means’, Kitaj confessed, ‘I can’t.’ The paradox is that Bacon’s paintings – which he firmly insisted had no narrative – are often rather easier to decode than Kitaj’s. The more the latter added glosses and notes to his works, the more mystifying they became.

  *

  Another way of defining this individualistic group of maverick Modernists might be to say that they were all in some sense Romantics. Kitaj admitted as much: ‘Romance provides some of my happiest moments: sexual romance, the romance of picture making, the romance of books, the romance of big city streets and political historical romance.’ It was the last that preoccupied Paula Rego, an artist with a multiple cultural identity. After growing up in Lisbon, she attended the Slade, then returned to Portugal with Victor Willing, an older fellow student, whom she married. Though she and Willing kept a pied-à-terre in Camden from the late 1950s, much of her work of the 1960s was done in Portugal and concerned with Iberian themes (it was not until the 1970s that the couple settled permanently in London).

  PAULA REGO Stray Dogs (The Dogs of Barcelona), 1965

  One of
Rego’s most striking pictures from this time, Stray Dogs (The Dogs of Barcelona) (1965), was sparked by a report that the authorities in Barcelona had decided to reduce the number of stray dogs in the city by feeding them poisoned meat. The casual cruelty of this struck Rego as emblematic of the behaviour of the Franco and Salazar dictatorships. But there is far more in the picture, a mixture of collage and painting, revealing the artist’s personal anxieties and feelings. Rego was suffering panic attacks at the time she was at work on it. ‘Fear is something you have all the time’, she has said. ‘Not of other people. I like other people because they make me feel less fearful. But just this, you wake up in the morning and you feel this horrible sinking feeling inside you.’ Fear is an underestimated ingredient in art. It is crucial, for example, in the work of Goya, whom Rego greatly admires.

  In contrast, as the critic Christopher Finch once observed, Patrick Caulfield was a romantic ‘disarmed by his own irony’. If Kitaj rebelled against one art world taboo – the one that forbade paintings to be literary – Caulfield disobeyed another that outlawed anything ‘decorative’. In 1999, he described his intentions when he was setting out as a young painter:

  I thought I’d like to do something decorative, which was a bit of a dirty word in fine art. It wasn’t considered correct. Decoration was something you left to interior decorators. I didn’t want misty, tortuous, tentative Englishness. I just wanted it to be very clear-cut, straightforward – and decorative.

  Caulfield’s art was based on a taste for the half-forgotten and outmoded. He wasn’t interested in painting his immediate surroundings since to do this, he felt, ‘would be extremely boring’.