Charles Saumarez Smith. Christopher Le Brun
Introduction to the monograph Christopher Le Brun Booth-Clibborn Editions 2001
The first time I saw Le Brun’s paintings was at the private view of his exhibition held in 1982 at Nigel Greenwood’s gallery in Sloane gardens. The room was packed. Lawrence Gowing, who had been familiar with Le Brun’s work from the Slade, hissed in my ear that he regarded the new work as straight, good painting and that in this exhibition Christopher had found his form. The paintings were grand, historical, and instantly identifiable. They were legible to someone who had been trained in the history of art as having elements of Turner in his view of raw landscape treated highly emotively; and his interest in late nineteenth-century symbolism was equally evident.
I look back on it now as having been a period of obvious change in the arts, as in politics, although the connections were not evident at the time. The change involved the rediscovery of lost artistic forms, sometimes with the knowingness which was characteristic of this period of postmodernism. Sometimes there was simply a sense that art must join up with history and that it was once again legitimate - indeed, essential - that artists should re-explore, perhaps re-invent, the idea of grand literary narrative.
Le Brun, in one of his gestures of recognition that we might share common intellectual interests, suggested to Richard Shone, the assistant editor of the Burlington Magazine, that I should review the exhibition. Shone made it quite clear that he regarded the suggestion as improper and that he himself would be doing so. The opportunity was lost. But the episode was instructive. It shows that, from early on in his career as a painter, Le Brun wanted to be judged by someone with an interest and training in the history of art and not by the standard critical tenets of the contemporary avant-garde. He has always had a seriousness and sense of purpose about his work.
His 1982 exhibition at Nigel Greenwood established Le Brun as one of the most highly regarded British representatives of a new generation of painters. The Tate Gallery bought his painting Dream, Think, Speak (1982). Charles Saatchi, whose acquisitions throughout the past two decades have been a consistent barometer of fashionable opinion, bought Xanthus (1981) and was disappointed not to be able to buy more. Norman Rosenthal arrived for an appointment to see the exhibition late, kept the taxi running, and arranged for examples of the work to go to Berlin for the exhibition Zeitgeist, which was shown later in the same year at the Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin, perhaps the definitive show of the period.
After the 1970s, when the British art worlds may be viewed in retrospect as enfeebled, dominated by late modernist abstraction, preoccupied by versions of minimalism, and with only occasional sporadic displays of interest in figuration, the early 1980s had a sense of energy, of painting coming back to the centre of the agenda for art, with a new vitality flowing back into pictorialism. Thus in the early 1980s Le Brun became the major British exponent of an international movement in painting, which enabled European artists to escape from the domination of the New York school of post-war abstraction and to recover a sense of national - and sometimes even nationalist - traditions in art. His work during this period was allied with those German artists whose work Nicholas Serota had brought to Britain at the Whitechapel Art Gallery during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Marcus Lüpertz, George Baselitz and Anselm Keifer. As a group, these artists all shared a sense of commitment to painting; the belief that a powerful visual and sometimes intellectual sensibility in pigment should be at the centre of their artistic practice. And they were not afraid of history. In fact, they recognised that history could provide the big underlying themes for art.
This movement was first shown in Britain at the exhibition A New Spirit in Painting, held at the Royal Academy in spring 1981, which celebrated the rediscovery of the power of painting. Artists, including painters such as Frank Auerbach and even to an extent Lucian Freud, who had been working away in comparative isolation, were suddenly properly recognised. The School of London was invented, which, like all such historical groupings, was only half a reality, the other half being a convenient post hoc invention. Peter Fuller began to publish a series of texts, beginning with Beyond the Crisis in Art published in 1980 and culminating in the first issue of Modern Painters in 1988, which celebrated a new interest in visual narrative and tried to open up artistic practice beyond the small-scale citadels of modernist practice in the metropolis.
In the summer of 1982, Le Brun’s work was included in the exhibition Mythe/Drame/Tragédie held at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Saint-Etienne, in which his paintings, Mars in the Air (1981) and Mazeppa (1981), were shown alongside the work of Baselitz, Keifer, Lüpertz and Penck. In 1983, he exhibited for the first time in America and was invited by Bryan Robertson to paint the safety curtain at Covent Garden. In 1984, he was invited to provide the designs for a production of George Balanchine's Ballet Imperial, also at Covent Garden, and with the producer, John Cox, he travelled to Munich where his designs were accepted by Wolfgang Cevallisch for a production of Richard Strauss’s Daphne. His paintings were acquired by international collectors, including Frederik Roos in Sweden and Thomas Amman in Switzerland, as well as by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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But the art market is fickle. Dealers tend to prefer artists who stay still and go on painting in the same way over and over again, so that they can easily be categorised, while critics prefer to move forwards in the discovery of new styles and new work. By the mid-1980s, Le Brun had become widely known for his big, ambitious, semi-abstract painting. How was he to move forwards?
I think that what happened is that he began to test out the risk inherent in recognisable subject matter which had a strong symbolic and emblematic content. He wanted to push beyond the landscape sublime and penetrate into the territory that lay beyond, where the forms of landscape were not abstract, but real. He acknowledged the fact that, in the work of his German contemporaries, art had a strong historical and political content, particularly in work by those artists including Baselitz, Lüpertz and Penck, who had come from east Germany to settle in the west and who wanted to recover a sense of myth and meaning in art, by going back to subject matter which had been forbidden in the post-war period.
If I think back on the progress of his work, I am inclined to see a break in his development at the time of his painting of the drummer boy, Portrait of L as a Young Man (1984-5), now in the collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. It was a painting of his oldest son, Luke, made shortly after he was born. It was not in any way a straightforward portrait, but rather an attempt to depict the emotions he felt as a father for his son (and himself as a son for his own father), based on traditional archetypes which occur in childrens’ stories and in myth. This approach towards the literary in painting and in the idea of symbolic narrative has been taboo, except perhaps in the work of Paula Rego, whose work has been validated by feminism. But Le Brun’s work deliberately set out to explore themes and archetypes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, through an appreciation of the work of, amongst others, Von Marees, Bocklin, De Chirico, Puvis de Chavannes, and above all, of Delacroix, whom he regarded as the great master of a profound, painterly tradition. He was inspired by the adventure of an art which spoke not just to the intellect or to itself alone, which was not preoccupied just with aesthetics and which did not appeal only to a small-scale, narcissistic and metropolitan avant-garde, but which attempted to reach out to the soul of the spectator.
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In 1987 Le Brun went to live for a year with his family in Berlin on a D.A.A.D. scholarship and his style deepened in its intensity by its contact with the forests of the north. The paintings which he exhibited at the daadgalerie in Berlin in spring 1988 consisted of single emblematic trees against a deep white background, hovering halfway between the form and content. He never quite loses the form of the tree, but the level of its expression did not extend much beyond a thin trunk, sometimes infinitely extendable, with the white background giving a suggestion of numinous space beyond. These were powerful paintings revealing a mastery of abstract space, while at the same time exploring the emblematic suggestiveness of the sky and trees in ways which had echoes of Caspar David Friedrich.
In spring 1987 we travelled together through east Germany and down into Czechoslovakia two years before the velvet revolution. He remembers us passing the endless barracks outside east Berlin, where the Russian tanks stood ready to roll into the west. I remember particularly visiting Dresden, where there was a big granite inscription recording how the city had been destroyed by the enemy action of ‘the Barbarians of the West’. In Trebon, a dusty town in southern Bohemia with not much to recommend it beyond the town brewery, we talked about painting, according to a notebook I kept at the time, about ‘Delacroix, Titian, the need to take risks, especially the risk of being trivial, the Tate bricks, of modernism, the possibility of conversing with the past, like those composers such as Schoenberg, who had taken up late romantic music and pressed on.’ I associate Christopher’s paintings with this period of our lives. The atmosphere of Bohemia, the lost currents of central European history, the sense of ravishment by the present - these are part of the content of his painting.
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In the late 1980s , Le Brun was still riding high, represented by Nigel Greenwood in London, by Sperone Westwater in New York, Rudolf Zwirner in Cologne and selling well internationally. But, ineluctably, the art world had moved away from painting towards regarding sculpture as the central art form, towards public art and performance art. There was perhaps a generational aspect to what happened. Many curators and critics who had entered the art world late in the 1960s and early 1970s responded more readily to an art whose content engaged issues of politics and gender. Many of them were influenced by the teaching of art history and general studies in art schools whereby analysis of film, media and advertising increasingly replaced the traditional history of art and the teaching of drawing. A new generation of artists and curators emerged, many of them associated with Michael Craig Martin's department at Goldsmith’s College. They took their stance against the big, virile, rather macho paintings of the early 1980s and were more impressed by Dada than by narrative painting. Briefly, during the mid-1980s, there had been a recognition of the benefits of pluralism in art practice; but pluralism does not suit the knowingness of the contemporary art scene, which is constantly on the hunt for new work, new names, and the invention of new reputations. The contemporary art business does not have the patience to watch over the development of an individual’s progress, particularly if there is an element of unpredictability to it. So, almost inevitably, mid-career artists enter a phase, when, however well-established they may appear, critics and curators and dealers and collectors are on the hunt for novelty.
In some ways, not being in the mainstream of artistic fashion has been liberating to Le Brun as an artist. In 1992 he joined Marlborough Fine Art, whose stable included major artists such as Francis Bacon,Victor Pasmore,Frank Auerbach, R.B.Kitaj and Paula Rego. With the gallery’s strong support he has gone on working away in his studios, for much of the 1990s in a garden studio built by the artist Albert Houthuesen two doors away from his house in Love Walk in Camberwell, sometimes in the studio he converted at Muchelney Ham with its views of the flooded Somerset levels, and more recently on two floors of a warehouse in Camberwell which he shares with the Hope (Sufferance) Press, where his studio full of books and prints looks out over the dramatic skyscape and railway yards of south London. Like his art, his studio has an atmosphere of sternly eremitic intellectualism.
He has continued to develop as an artist, moving always between paintings with resonant pictorial content and others with a free use of abstraction, always experimenting with the relationship between form and content and developing the repertoire of symbolic motifs with which his work is especially associated.
From the mid-1980s, one of the ways he has developed as an artist is through working with new media. This goes back to an invitation from the American printmaker, Garner Tullis, to work with him at his print studio near the waterfront in Santa Barbara, California. The monoprints which emerged from this period were not only different in style from his other work, freer, lighter, less sombre, but they also conspicuously influenced his paintings, which, in the exhibition of his work held at Nigel Greenwood’s gallery in New Burlington Street in autumn 1989, were looser, less preoccupied by imagery and sometimes demonstrating a more Matisse-like, hot abstraction. These paintings are suggestive of his passionate interest in early twentieth century music, the work of Schoenberg, Debussy and Scriabin, in the ways in which he uses abstract calligraphy and shape to create mood and atmosphere:
During the 1990s, he has developed an extraordinary mastery in the medium of print-making, and his work has included woodcuts, etching and lithography. His work in this field was first evident in Fifty Etchings published in 1990. His work has been shown in the small gallery alongside the print room of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, where it was able to appeal to the fastidious eye of the print connoisseur, who values the work of someone who has achieved such skill in the techniques of print-making; and in the study gallery by the entrance to the Courtauld Institute where he was encouraged to exhibit his prints alongside works he had himself selected from the collection of the Courtauld Institute Gallery.
In 1990 he became a trustee of the Tate gallery, to which he gave a great deal of time and commitment, slightly paradoxically since the Tate Gallery in the 1990s was so much associated with the narrowing of the range of official art to those artists associated with the Turner prize, not necessarily the work of painters. Le Brun has been succesful as a Trustee, being highly intelligent, well read and with a particular commitment to the importance of displaying paintings. He is not only conscious of the extent to which artists learn from art, but is also unusual in that he very much values the work of curators in museums and galleries, who have a deep specialist knowledge of the art of the past.
This belief in working in the mainstream, rather than on the periphery, of art practice has conspicuously set him apart from the normative expectations of the behaviour of twentieth-century artists. But do artists necessarily have to be preoccupied with the avant-garde? It has always struck me as perfectly legitimate, in spite of it being contrary to the movement of contemporary art, that he has been willing to explore the highly charged themes of the imagination. He has invariably worked not with a simple reconstructive intent, but by exploring imagery which has been neglected in the twentieth century. Le Brun often consciously dares the contemporary art world to do exactly what it does, which is to dismiss his paintings as historicist. There is a strong element of him deliberately wanting to challenge facile judgement and that he wants to traverse this territory on his own, to explore the resonances of particular images and symbols even if, as they frequently are, they are uncomfortable.
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In the last five years Le Brun has been working in sculpture. These works demonstrate his interest in renewing himself through working with new media, as well as his desire to use motifs which provide a deliberate frisson, as in Twilight (Winged Helmet) (1996), which I first saw at Gallery Fortlaan in Ghent and which in any context would be faintly shocking. More recently, the huge bronze Union (horse with 2 discs) shows that his commitment to sculpture may be as fruitful as his relationship with printmaking has been, being seen increasingly as a natural development of his work.
At the same time he continues on his journey developing images which are resonant both of history and abstraction. His exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art in spring 1998 did not in the end include the work Planet (1992-7), a huge, white sphere travelling through the night. Instead, it was dominated by the picture Three Riders (1995-7), in which the three horsemen, whose role or purpose remains unexplained, appear distantly through layers of paint. These were big works of adventurous, masterly painting.
Three works from the last five years suggest the antithetical aspect of his moves between abstraction and figuration. At Antony House on a peninsular on the other side of the straights from Plymouth, Richard Carew-Pole has been assembling a collection of works of art which demonstrate a singular independence of judgement. Outside is an eighteenth-century garden with a water sculpture by William Pye. Inside are portraits of Carew-Pole ancestors, including works by Reynolds and Raeburn. In the drawing room is a painting called Oh! Death will find me, (1996) commissioned from LeBrun. It is based on a memory from Richard Carew-Pole's youth. Unusually for a work of contemporary art in a country house, it holds its own as a piece of pure painting, drawing the force of its imagery from virtuosity of technique and from a knowledge, which has grown more skilful over time, of the ways in which art can move the spectator through the manipulation of appropriate subject matter, as well as paint.
In 1998, he was commissioned by the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery to undertake a portrait of George Steiner. I had lunch with him in December 1999 in order to see the nearly complete portrait. He was interested in my response to it, as it was the first time that he had agreed to undertake a portrait commission. Le Brun greatly admires and admits the influence on him of George Steiner as the author of Language and Silence, Babel, Extraterritorial and Real Presences, which have made the case for high culture. He had great pleasure in their meeting. But the process of sittings for a portrait are never straightforward. The anxieties of the relationship have created a powerful, but slightly troubled painting of a European intellectual, ferocious in his concentration, but slightly off-centre, with a dark and resonant background which was, in fact, another more abstract painting entitled Fleet, which happened to be in the studio. It is a painting that sits - rightly - rather uncomfortably in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery.
Fleet was recently exhibited alone in a fashionable gallery space, Fig_1, off Dean Street in Soho. It is a large picture, much more abstract than most of Le Brun’s recent work, dense and heavily gestural, like the waters of Lethe. One senses him returning to themes and ideas which preoccupied him earlier in his career, the dark, shifting presences of the early 1980s, in which paint is used calligraphically. It sets up a challenge not only to Monet - as if Monet had been crossed with Courbet -, but also to the big pictures which have become de rigeur in the international art museum. It is in those works in which his symbolism works subliminally that the quality of his imagination can be seen at its most powerful.
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It is clearly too early to reach any definitive judgement of Le Brun’s work as an artist. Viewed from the perspective of a new century, there is inevitably a danger that he will be regarded as someone whose period of major international significance was during the 1980s. There is always a possibility that art has moved away from painting forever, in the way that people are always predicting the death of the book, or the symphony. But I am not convinced that the understanding of art is necessarily progressive. Nor is he.
I believe that, as time goes by, writers and historians and critics are likely to give credence to the journey that he has travelled in the development of a complex and important oeuvre which can stand on its own as a major contribution to late twentieth-century British painting. He cites as a precedent the work of William Walton (it is typical of him that the analogy should be musical). Walton’s work was frequently dismissed by his contemporaries as too lyrical and, as such, to lack difficulty or depth. Now it is looked upon as work of great intensity and unforgettable form.
Viewed from the perspective of the end of the millennium, there are few artists besides Le Brun who have explored symbolic imagery with such consistency. There is always a desire on the part of historians to fit the work of artists into particular eras without necessarily recognising the complexities of their development, except possibly at the end of their career. Also, conventional systems of critical and art historical classifications can suddenly change, so that work which in one decade appears eccentric can in the next decade take centre stage. The judgement of history, as Le Brun understands better than most, is an unpredictable process.
