Modernists and Mavericks Read online

  Steadily, the visible subject was disappearing from the pictures Pasmore was painting of the view outside. The sky and water were vanishing like mist on the Thames, the bushes turning into masses of dots – like flocks of starlings or swarming bees – and bare branches into networks of lines. ‘I started being influenced by Pointillism, and that’s what those late river pictures are: semi-abstract,’ Pasmore recalled. ‘They were leading up to the abstract art.’

  PRUNELLA CLOUGH Cranes and Men, 1950

  VICTOR PASMORE The Gardens of Hammersmith No. 2, 1949

  The Gardens of Hammersmith No. 2 (1949) was one of the very last paintings of the visible world around him that Pasmore ever made (or, at least, admitted making). He had already in 1948 had a first exhibition of some abstract pictures; he did so again in 1949. It was, in the little world of art, a conversion almost as dramatic as the defection to the Soviet Union of the two spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean two years later, in 1951.

  Chapter four

  SPIRIT IN THE MASS: THE BOROUGH POLYTECHNIC

  Reality is a slippery concept, because it is not separate from us. Reality is in our minds.

  David Hockney, 2016

  The objective truth of what we see is elusive: in one sense we all see the same thing, in another we all perceive it differently, filtered through our emotions and memories. This explains some of the agonies of Coldstream and his followers as they attempted to measure and represent what was really in front of them. One problem, as Hockney has also pointed out, is that the eye is connected to the mind, and so the data passed through the optic nerve to the brain is interpreted in very different ways. Thus there are as many ways of seeing the world as there are people. What we see is coloured by memory, and also by feeling. No doubt Francis Bacon did not see the same way as William Coldstream or Victor Pasmore. All artists of powerful individuality see differently, as do all people of pronounced interests: they notice certain phenomena, particular types of information that fit into their own visual universe.

  In the years following the war, a figure as charismatic as Bacon was at work in an obscure corner of South London. His name was David Bomberg and he taught life classes on two days and two evenings a week at the Borough Polytechnic Institute on Borough Road, near the Elephant and Castle. Bomberg’s classes, according to Frank Auerbach – who began attending them in January 1948 – were ‘highly unpopular’. Yet Auerbach still counted himself ‘lucky to have been a student of Bomberg’s; this was someone worth listening to and a very profound thinker. In the way of young people my standards were to some extent formed by Bomberg.’

  DAVID BOMBERG Self-Portrait, 1931

  Leon Kossoff, who started attending Bomberg’s evening classes at Borough Road a few years later, in 1950 – when he was in his mid-twenties – also found the experience shaped his future:

  Although I had painted most of my life, it was through my contact with Bomberg that I felt I might actually function as a painter. Coming to Bomberg’s class was like coming home.

  The lesson Kossoff learnt from Bomberg was as much spiritual as aesthetic.

  What David did for me, which was more important than any technique he could’ve taught me, was he made me feel like I could do it. I came to him with no belief in myself whatsoever and he treated my work with respect.

  Another student at those sparsely attended classes was Dennis Creffield, who remembers the sense of mission that Bomberg handed on to the young would-be artists who found their way there. He has described how Bomberg ‘placed his hand on me [and] said “You are an artist”’.

  Creffield also commented on how Bomberg passed on a sense of the significance of painting, its moral value and its sheer difficulty:

  He was extraordinary in the way he loved painting, he really thought it was the most important thing in the world. That’s what he gave you: a sense of great privilege as if you were involved in an immensely significant activity. Painting was the most important thing a human being could do. He put it right in the middle of history.

  In this respect, his message was complementary to Bacon’s, though in many ways they were opposites (indeed, Bacon was one of the fellow artists for whose work he had little time; he told Auerbach that he didn’t think the ‘vogue for Francis’ would last for more than five years). However, where Bacon and Bomberg concurred was in thinking that painting required intense effort and was to be measured by only the highest standards. On the other hand, in their different ways, both offered hope that great art could be made not only by old masters and famous artists in Paris, but also here and now, in the hidden corners of London, be they Cromwell Place or the Borough Polytechnic.

  Most of the artists who had come to prominence in the short, heady era of Modernism before the First World War – Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts and Mark Gertler among them – were now running down as creative forces. Only Bomberg – at this point in his late fifties – continued to work at the height of his powers and passed on an electrifying message. And yet, by this time, hardly anyone had heard of him and no one was buying his work anymore. In retrospect, it is hard to comprehend the neglect that Bomberg suffered almost uninterruptedly from early middle age until his death in 1957.

  Immediately before the First World War, he had been recognized as among the most brilliant painters not only in Britain, but also in the whole of Europe. At that moment Bomberg had been almost, but not quite, an abstract artist and one whose work was comparable with the best being done in Italy, Germany or the Netherlands. Bomberg’s The Mud Bath (1914) easily equals works by such European contemporaries as the Italian Futurists Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carrà or the Parisian Robert Delaunay. In 1914, Bomberg made a manifesto-like declaration, of an emphatic Futurist nature: ‘I look upon Nature, while I live in a steel city … Where I use Naturalistic form, I have stripped it of all irrelevant matter.’ His Mud Bath quite literally frightened the proverbial horses; the animals drawing the Number 29 bus down the King’s Road in Chelsea would apparently shy as they saw the painting displayed outside the Chenil Galleries. Bomberg’s one-man exhibition there in 1914 – when he was still only twenty-three – was the greatest triumph of his life.

  But Bomberg emerged from the First World War shaken and changed. He spent some time working for the Zionist Organization in Palestine as an Official Artist, where he found himself again – and one of his most important subjects – in the brilliant light and mountainous terrain of the Mediterranean. Over the coming years, in Spain, he produced some of his finest works in vertiginous spots recalling the ‘high places’ of the Bible: the hill towns of Toledo, Cuenca and Ronda and the Picos de Europa mountains. Bomberg painted there with exultation. Bit by bit, in the reality of these landscapes, he rediscovered the vehement, dynamic structure of his early work. But instead of the smooth finish of his first phase, he now became a master of thick, loose, loaded brushstrokes. In the 1930s, when the fashion was for clean geometric abstraction or Surrealism, Bomberg’s new manner was incomprehensible. Increasingly he was ignored.

  In place of his early emphasis on hard, mechanical modernity – the ‘steel city’ – he now found inner, emotional and spiritual truths in the subjects he depicted. When at work on a landscape – according to his wife, Lilian – Bomberg would study the prospect for a long time after his easel was set up. Hours might pass; then, when he was ready, he would paint, as the critic and historian Richard Cork wrote, with ‘prodigious speed and certitude’. Bomberg was prone to alternations of exultation and depression, sometimes producing little work for years on end, and then completing a series of masterpieces in a spurt of inspiration.

  Late in life, Bomberg summed his thinking up in a gnomic phrase. Form, he believed, was ‘the artist’s consciousness of mass’. But what did he mean by that? As we have seen, Hockney has insisted that human beings do not see geometrically or mechanically, like a camera; we see ‘psychologically’. There is no such thing as an objective view of anything. Bomberg believed that vision was also physiolo
gical, that our comprehension of what we see is derived not just from the information that comes though our eyes, but informed by our experiences as three-dimensional beings moving around in the world. Especially important in this process is our sense of touch. He expressed this in epigrammatic notes: ‘The hand works at high tension and organizes as it simplifies, reducing to barest essentials … Drawing flows from beginning to end with one sustained impulse … The approach is through feeling and touch and less by sight.’

  Bomberg had been struck by a thought expressed by the eighteenth-century philosopher Bishop Berkeley: ‘The sense of Touch and associations of Touch produce on sight the illusions of the third dimension.’ Then, as the Bishop had before him, he made a leap, proposing that by ‘sensing the magnitude & scope of mass & finding the purposeful entities to contain it on a flat surface’, the artist was brought closer to ‘God the Creator’.

  For him, painting and drawing were nothing unless they were expressions of the ‘poetry in mankind in contemplation of nature’. Here was the rock on which Bomberg stood. In the desolate landscape of the mid-twentieth century, he insisted painting was a way – perhaps the only way – to affirm man’s spiritual significance. This, then, was the spirit that lurked in the mass: the human spirit. But to reach it, it was necessary to pare away the inessential. In so doing, the underlying structure, the most crucial element of all, was revealed. Bomberg might have had little time for his contemporaries but he revered the old masters, above all Michelangelo, the titanic inventor – or discoverer – of form. This was a lesson that stayed with Frank Auerbach:

  His idiom was deeply anti-illustrational, in a sense I suppose anti-realistic. He thought, what I suppose is to some extent true, that it is the architecture of the painting that finally determines its quality – as long as it is seized in the most daring possible way. I remember going to Bomberg’s class, and him showing me – as much as to say how can I kick this student who doesn’t understand what’s going on? – Piranesi’s Carceri. At that moment I remember suddenly seeing that there was a real excitement in the wordless and subject-less tension of the structure in space. That did affect me.

  So much did this affect Auerbach that achieving this ‘tension of the structure in space’ remained the goal of his life’s work from that day on. Bomberg did not found a school; he was not, as Auerbach points out, ‘teaching people to paint Bombergs’. Auerbach himself feels he was not really ‘a follower’. Yet Bomberg had taught a profound lesson.

  *

  By the early 1940s Bomberg was reduced to such menial occupations as part-time work at Smith’s Motor Accessories Works in Cricklewood, North London. Between 1939 and 1944 he applied unsuccessfully for over three hundred teaching posts, before eventually finding his foothold in the world of art education at the Borough Polytechnic. One of the reasons why Bomberg fell into such a black hole was the very thing that made him such a remarkable teacher. He combined extraordinary levels of self-belief with total disrespect for established opinion or reputation. ‘He had an impossible temperament,’ Auerbach reflects, ‘in the sense that he managed to muck his own life up by being immensely aggressive and making enemies in every possible direction. But it worked very well for his students.’ Despite the fact that Bomberg, much like Bacon, seldom had ‘a good word to say for anybody else’, he was prepared to take young beginners absolutely seriously:

  I remember when I was at his class, there was a show of Matisse, sculpture and drawings. He said, ‘What do you think of it?’ I answered, realizing that I wasn’t supposed to like anything, ‘Well, actually, I was rather impressed.’ He said, ‘Well, they are rather good, and no worse for being like the drawings done in this class!’ That was the tone. He was capable of coming up behind students and saying, ‘Sickert wouldn’t be capable of this formal, architectural composition you are making.’

  Even in his days as a fiery Modernist, Bomberg’s combative temperament had been active. His mentor as a young man had been the Edwardian master of brilliantly loose brushwork and suave portraiture, John Singer Sargent. Bomberg confided to Auerbach, ‘Sargent used to like me to go round and tell him that his work was like a pavement artist’s’ (although how much Sargent really enjoyed this seems doubtful). But, if he regarded the famous and distinguished with disdain, Bomberg was remarkably open towards the youthful and unknown. Auerbach remembers how Bomberg treated him and his contemporaries as his equals, sharing with them his vision of what art should be:

  I was eighteen or nineteen and he would talk to me about absolutely anything that came into his head as well as about painting. He would talk about the shape of someone’s ear, run down other painters – which you’re not supposed to do – and all the while behind it there were grand ideas about what the process of painting was.

  Bomberg’s account of what an artist should aim for was – like most attempts to explain the objective of visual art in verbal terms – vague in the extreme.

  DAVID BOMBERG Evening in the City of London, 1944

  Bomberg’s Evening in the City of London of 1944 gives a better idea of what he meant. He painted the war-torn city as a shattered network of tensions and energies in which there was little that was immediately identifiable apart from the dome of St Paul’s looming over the scene. The image is packed with feeling and what you might call moral emotion. The colours and forms, even the vehement traces of the brush, transmit the idea that this is a place that has survived an apocalypse. The painting is alight with energy and a sense that this picture matters.

  *

  Like many notable teachers of painting and drawing, Bomberg preferred to instruct visually, by working on another person’s drawing, showing not telling. Auerbach describes his classes as:

  more like ballet teaching. He would demonstrate to you, he would never suggest that something was adequate because you were a student. That was the prime thing. Often you’d end up with a sort of chaos when the class finished, but you’d been given a glimpse of what the great possibilities were. That I think is proper teaching. One slowly gathered from what he was saying, what he was really talking about. It wasn’t lucid, the philosopher A. J. Ayer laying out a theory of art.

  Creffield felt much the same:

  At other art schools the teacher would come up and … make an elegant drawing in the corner, then go off leaving you with this thing ‘how to draw the figure’. Bomberg didn’t do that. He was always very polite, ‘May I?’; then he would always paint with the painting you had made. Often just bring your attention to something, the definition of a head out of your cloudiness. The whole business of draughtsmanship was finding a specific sense of something.

  Kossoff has described the experience of observing Bomberg the teacher at work: ‘Once I watched him draw over a student’s drawing. I saw the flow of form, I saw the likeness to the sitter appear. It seemed an encounter with what was already there.’ This, of course, raises the tricky question of what is in fact actually there – the answer to which depends, to go back to Hockney’s point – on who is looking. Simply mimicking appearances mechanically – what Bomberg described with characteristic disdain as the ‘hand and eye disease’ he believed was taught in other art schools – led not merely to bad art. It was corrupting. The Euston Road School’s emphasis on measurement, to Bomberg, was a case of ‘hand and eye disease’ in its most advanced form.

  Although the classes attended by Auerbach, Kossoff and Creffield took place in an unglamorous corner of South London, under the tutelage of a man whose worldly reputation had long since evaporated, there was a sense among the participants that something momentous was happening. Some of them exhibited together under the name ‘The Borough Group’. But, although there was certainly a resemblance between the work of the various painters involved – vehement brushstrokes, for example – what Bomberg was teaching was not a style so much as an attitude; or rather a connected series of convictions.

  Among these was the belief that painting was an immensely important business – none
more so – but also that it was an extraordinarily difficult one. This mindset, too, was passed on to Bomberg’s students, several of whom went on to lead lives of intense effort, maintained decade after decade. Creffield recalls his teacher’s way of saying goodbye:

  ‘Keep the paint moving!’ That was a real Bombergian farewell. That’s all you can do. The important thing is to drag yourself to the task. The people who survive are the ones who carry on. Bomberg was as much as anything a moralist. It was like being brought up by Ruskin, certainly a nineteenth-century attitude. There was nothing permissive about it, nothing like self-expression: ‘Just do what you feel like, darling!’ I’m grateful for it, but it was a very severe education. He had a huge charge of the gravity of Jewishness and I am not Jewish. I’m an English Catholic.

  *

  Bomberg’s lessons were various – the sheer importance of painting as an activity, its immense difficulty combined with the possibility of achieving something of the highest quality here and now, the potential of loose, thickly brushed paint. His students at the Borough Polytechnic took away different lessons from his classes. All who had much to do with him, however, felt they had encountered an extraordinary personality. When talking about him Auerbach repeats the writer and historian Jacob Bronowski’s remark about William Blake, ‘he was a man without a mask’.