Bryan Robertson and Christopher Le Brun
Interview. Lindos, Rhodes. April 1997 and January 1998.
BR Was there any period or specific moment or consequence of things, issues or events which may perhaps have revised or first formulated your very personal idea of modernity?
CL I resisted the implied imperative of being ‘modern’, because I associated modernity with imaginative freedom. Otherwise it would have been more of a political rather than an aesthetic act or decision. I can certainly be wrong, especially in interpreting myself to myself, but if it’s an aesthetic, or inner demand, it’s a less accessible one. It’s what you are rather than what you intend to be.
BR When or where did you first resist that imposed definition?
CL This would be in the early nineteen seventies, which was a formative time, when I was thinking everything through.. I couldn't explain my temperament and I couldn't find a home for it in any of the orthodox approaches to contemporary art. The art schools, remember, were highly politicised - we were taught art history by a Marxist, and the Maoists with their chinese suits and caps were always prominent in the endless student meetings.
It was intensely political, and curiously, many of the most active at that time now dominate the art establishment. Occasionally this patronage encourages more power than poetry, rather like the French pompier painters of the late 19th century who also covered vast state-sponsored spaces. But then the whole drift of the last decades has been towards sculpture and the occupation of real physical space as opposed to the imaginary space of painting.
BR To what extent has the Wagner commission affected, held up or condensed the flow of your thinking? And how specific or searching were the terms of the commission?
CL The terms were not specific beyond asking for one painting for each opera of The Ring. It had been a long-held ambition for the collector in question to own a sequence of paintings along those lines. He had seen my work in 1982 and thought then that I'd be suitable but didn't approach me until 1992. Although he was very clear about not wishing to pin me down too exactly, there was a real collaboration once the work was underway. He thought that, for instance, I might want to paint only a spear or sword as a symbolic interpretation of Seigfried. But I felt that the operas deserved more than to be treated as a sequence of metaphors. I wanted a type of pictorial complexity to reflect the complexity and the range of the music. So therefore a full-blooded pictorial representation seemed the only way in which to state the layers of feeling, action and meaning in the music. Its also important to recognise that elements of the absurd will always be present in Wagner and are crucial to any representation.
The risk was to arrive without cliché or caricature at the mood and substance. The challenge was in my primary exploratory need to establish ideas at the level of pictorial space first and then move through them into painting. I needed to picture everything to myself before moving into the full realisation of painting with its deeper implications
One of the differences between illustration and painting is the weight of form in painting and how it is described and deployed. There are independent abstract structures of scale, colour, space, light, texture, thickness and thinness,which somehow operate independently from what appears to have been depicted or even intended. I understand, to some extent, what I depict but I feel differently about my decisions in the physical world of colours and materials. I trust them more. As a painter, I give more weight to this intuitive structuring or handling of materials, than to my understanding of any depicted meaning from which I might begin.
The commission, gratefully received as it was, might have deflected my work in some way; but it did enable me to test the implications of what I’d been thinking about for a long time. For example, if you have a motif for a story which is given, then maybe that will lift the burden of searching for a meaning that otherwise might preoccupy one too much. What I’m saying is: for many artists the questions are “what am I doing and why am I doing it?”-which favours semantics rather than aesthetics. So therefore instead of saying “What am I doing and why”; one can turn the question to “how”, which is capable of an answer in artistic or practical terms.
BR I don’t see how the “how” question can be considered without the “what” question. “What” surely precedes “how?”
CL The “what” is to do with “how” to fulfil a commission or to tackle a theme without lapsing into illustration. The advantage of a commission tends to take away the burden of the questions of “why”.
And yes, the commission in many ways did extend me in the sense that I see it as one extreme of my thinking about what painting can be and more specifically, what I can paint. I physically enjoy painting and I like to work both broadly and in detail - in other words I like the act of painting to be prolonged and not too technically complicated. Moving from figuration to tight depiction of a head or a wing - Brunhilde’s winged helmet or Seigfreid in the forest - to something very broad such as The Rhine or the Rainbow Bridge is like moving from the point of the brush to the flat of the brush. In other words, I want modes of drawing and painting within my conception of painting. Some elements were under way before - and have since re-appeared and been developed further. Obviously, they have been somewhat changed by the experience
I had been painting themes which in retrospect seem wagnerian, before the Wagner commission arrived, but given my interest in Jung and archetypal imagery this is unsurprising. This wing motif gave me a key to provide the helmet for Brunhilde, and this was the first painting in the sequence. to be completed, in1993. Originally, I had been looking for an image which would somehow take the paint without any particular over-vividness of meaning to disrupt the painting.
If we consider that I am at heart an abstract or formal painter, the challenge was to see whether I could make an essentially abstract painting even within a complex, figurative mode.In other words, somehow despite the story.
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BR Artists have always been, to an extent, performers, from Altimira through to murals and ceiling decorations; but the pace quickened and the focus shifted when Picasso drew in the air in the dark with coloured lights for Clouzot’s terrific film, Le Mystere Picasso at around the same time, c. 1951, that Pollock made a collage on glass for the camera in Hans Namuth’s documentary. I am nervous of al this because painting, as an enjoyer or art and as an interpreter, is my primary concern, with sculpture, and both are best made in privacy, in solitude, give or take occasional assistance. Now, of course, performance art has emerged as a separate art form, although overtaken or perhaps translated into some kinds of conceptual art. How do you feel about these commissions, which must involve some invasion of privacy, and these various elements of performance? Do the two things interact in any way or do commissions force you too much into a public area or simplification of approach?
CL I think of the studio as private and even the word performance disturbs me. But there is one particular area where I do work publicly and that is when I’m printing. You may have just a week or ten days - that is, with the professional technicians at the press- and this is an instance of working to a strict deadline. Improvisation makes it very exposed. This element is the main characteristic of monotype and also working quickly before the paint dries. The process is rapid and spontaneous, it’s difficult to make changes. Or at least, you must make changes very swiftly indeed, if at all. It’s the closest thing that I can think of to dance, in the sense of the dance of the hand which must have a perfect rightness, an absolute poise. What is done is dependent on mood and intuition - physical intuition.
Intuition is thought of as an imaginative, cerebral thing, but lines and colours are also experienced physically by the body and it responds - in reaching out physically to make a mark in the top right hand corner, the body then feels that the work needs an answering mark elsewhere. It's as if one thing calls up another response, without conscious apprehension.I feel this acutely with colour sensation which can carry you on and on in this resonant field.
So what happens in monotype painting is a kind of performance. Painting on metal, copper or aluminium, is conducive to fast, skidding movements of the brush. These sessions are times of free play or invention. This is not at all like work made in the studio which is a more considered and layered affair and based on the repeated touch, the corrected brushstroke on canvas, and thought through over a considerable time
In the studio a more watchful, considered and critical process goes on. I habitually work alone without assistants. But in the printing studio - and this applies to all printmaking, not only to monotypes - I very much enjoy the collaboration with the printers, who in many cases have become friends. To an extent, they take on one’s imaginative preoccupations and become part of a trusted territory where one can work freely and openly. Now, this is the area that I don't like: the self-consciousness of performance in the usual sense of the word, and in the sense, of course of ‘now just watch this’. I enjoy bravura painting, clearly, but I keep it on a very tight leash, because otherwise it can take over and become merely a manner. It’s a question of timing and this may be after weeks of preparation. I associate it with complete conviction or desperation. Perhaps now you see why I keep it on a tight leash; if it were unconstrained it would become meaningless.
BR Are you bothered by the way in which demarcation lines between the various techniques, let alone the different genres, have become blurred, merged with each other or disappeared, or do you think that this breaking down of barriers, if that’s the way to see it, is a healthy move?
I’m thinking for instance of my irritation years ago when the critics excitedly
praised the way in which Sutherland’s actual brushstrokes or chalk marks from his original designs had been faithfully re-produced on an enlarged scale, on the actual tapestry of Christ in Majesty for Coventry Cathedral. This seemed a vulgar confusion of media. When Dufy made some of the greatest designs of the century for silk materials made by the Blanchini - Ferrier Company in Lyons 1911-1922, proprieties they were quite different to the designs he made for cotton or for linens. I think the propriety in the treatment of different substance should be maintained. Tapestries are woven from wool and the great tapestry designs are formalised, in terms of stitching with threads.
Today, I’m fidgety when I see little paintings by an artist issued in ‘editions’ as prints. They are indeed ‘printed’, but they are essentially reproductions of paintings. Gone is any sense of the bite of chalk on paper that you get in lithography or the variety of printed line and wash that you get in soft ground or etching line and mezzotint. The greatest prints of this century by Bonnard, Vuillard, Villon, Munch and Picasso, don't look like paintings, they have their own graphic qualities.
I’m on slightly uncertain ground here because I do tend these days to accept the more painted or painterly element in some sections of the prints of Johns and Rauchenberg - but here it’s set against the great bravura stuff in the more obviously conventional parts of their prints, i.e. more obviously graphic. How do you feel about all this?
CLB When you mention the breaking-down of barriers, this has become a terrible cliché of contemporary art, and in fact I relish barriers, in that they they are essential to the concentration of form that’s required in a medium of high culture like painting. For example, it’s clear that the historic development we see in Ingres studying David, and Degas then studying Ingres, is made entirely lucid or constructive by the containment of the classical format of painting which they follow. You could say that a ‘barrier’ is in fact an agreed format -which is an absolute prerequisite of language. What is more likely to be broken down in the ‘blurring of boundaries’ is the ability to speak with economy and depth. These dialogues are very particular and are enabled to be carried on over long years by their specificity-They are the rituals of form. By contrast, if you reduce the language, the constructive dialogue is changed from addition to one of simple substitution which hardly qualifies as a culturally significant act.In some ways painting is a language of eternal repetition.
To return to some of your arguments or constraints: when you make a reproduction of a brushstroke in a print, it trivialises the brushstroke because it does something inappropriate: a brushstroke is singular, unique, and vividly of it’s moment. I think of print-making essentially as black and white, which makes it more related to an idea, like drawing. This is the argument of Ingres when he says ‘a line expresses an idea’.
On the issue of brushstrokes in printmaking, after Roy Lichtenstein’s giant reproduction ‘brushstrokes’ there must be a certain amount of embarrassment at seeing such joie-de-vivre repeated but expressed with such tedious care. Something fast and warm is reduced to something cold and analytical. Dry wit and expressive brushstrokes don’t go together but of course that's what Lichtenstein exploits as an ironist.
BR I appreciate the irony, but that did not prevent an absolute chill engulfing me as if from the mortuary, when I explored a large Lichtenstein retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York back in the early eighties. That same dealthly chill, if not from a mortuary drawer then from the displayed contents of a frigidaire also, gets to me occasionally when looking at Warhol whose work I admire as much as I do Lichtenstein.
Warhol dealt with death more directly than Lichtenstein of course; and made it prettier, by using colour like cosmetics, as a kind of maquillage rather than painting, as he embalmed Taylor and Monroe. Some aspects of Lichtenstein are like taxidermy. But I’m pushing our discussion too far away.
I think that a lot of my reservation over the blurring of boundaries between different techniques and genres is probably pretty old fashioned, and you’ve extended things into a more interesting area, for yourself and for your own pursuits as an artist. But although I’ve come to appreciate with some reservations the blurring of what's permissible in the prints of Johns and Rauschenberg and others, I do fear that this business of blurring the categories has also accelerated to enable everything and anything to be presented and accepted as art - as in the Duchampian sense of the urinal as an artwork, or the recent work of conceptual artists.
More interestingly, in the sixties and seventies, there was this new idea of painting becoming sculptural with Dick Smith’s solid sculptural paintings pushing out into 3-D from the walls, followed by Frank Stella’s multi-dimensional wall jobs. This seemed a more legitimate crossover. Conversely, beginning in the sixties, sculpture tried to achieve the fluidity and freedom of painting, with Caro's coloured sculptures snaking across the floor or Phillip King’s Genghis Khan with it's ‘train’ flowing outward along the floor like molten paint. All this had historical precedents in the painter’s sculpture of Rodin, Renoir, Degas. Picasso and Matisse - notably Picasso whose sculptures are very pictorial like 3-D paintings. What bothers me now are quite different and more recent attempts to confuse or dissolve categories.
As a painter who has recently, in 1996, begun to make sculpture which must obviously be considered as painter’s sculpture - all of which seems to be among the most potent sculpture in the century - are you intending to make sculpture that’s self-sufficient in it’s own right, or as an adjunct of your painting - or as a comment on, or an extension of your painting? And your motifs, the wing, the horse, etc, with others, so obsessively felt, considered and deployed, that these sculptures are basically 3-dimensional fetishes, obsessive objects, or are they more open and transitory in the sense of perhaps extending your formal thinking and opening up new possibilities, either of form or treatment?
Inother words, are your sculptures just three-dimensional realisations of motifs in the paintings, or are they more searchingly part of a new dialogue between painting and sculpture in idea and application?
CLB Yes, there are of course formal reasons for my sculpture.Picasso actually said ‘sculpture is the best comment a painter can make on his painting’. . Clearly, I’ve started with the motif of my paintings, and one of the things I'm doing is finding a different way to superimpose consecutive thoughts.
For instance, in the paintings, I habitually cover over images, they are built up from superimposed layers of different images, or different modes, so a painting which might start with a flat circle could then be cancelled out with a head, or a line. I’m not talking of any organic process of modification but a literal burying of things - although this is less extreme in my recent work The act of cancellation implies a rejection: but it certainly increases the excitement and anxiety of making something new.
So the question that occurs to me in the sculpture, is what happens to this process when it comes into three dimensions? I’m looking at how images in sculpture can be changed whilst making them, as they can in painting, but can also be simultaneously present. And of course, I want to consider the question of the front and back of a sculpture and how, by walking around it, you can have many images. I think extending my media to include bronze with its monumental associations has certainly intensified those questions.Any work which is both symbolic and painterly [or, say, has permanent and ephemeral elements] is bound to consider these things.
BR In the late nineteen thirties and forties, continuing into the early fifties, there was a scattered sort of movement in painting centred around Paris, New York, and latterly London, which was loosely neo-romantic in impulse and style. Tchelitchev, the Berman brother, Christain Berard (a wonderful painter, unknown to the English) and a few others represented by a kind of bitter - sweet melancholy, with adolescent youths in twilit fields, horses and pillars, all romantic and touched sometimes with surrealism and homosexual undertones. In England, John Minton, Keith Vaughan, and John Craxton entered the field a little later, with Picasso and Miro a more bracing stimulant for Craxton than Palmer and Sutherland. Neo-romanticism was in the air in music, also. What Rachmaninov did in his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. In giving fulsomely romantic themes sardonic, abrasive or ironic twist and astringency was very similar to what Stravinsky was doing, at the other end of the spectrum, to classical format and treatment - in his violin concerto, for instance, or the Dumbarton Oaks concerto.
Has your approach to imagery, got anything to do with neo-romanticism?
CLB As a young artist beginning to work in the mid-sixties on, I wasn’t really aware of them- not even our own Minton and Craxton, and although Keith Vaughan was on the staff at the Slade I didn’t meet him. I was fascinated at first more by Turner and then by Mark Rothko and Clifford Still. I admired grandeur of subject: the idea of painting - of painting the great permanent subjects of art, like the sea, which I grew up by; or night - huge fantastic subjects, ideas of the sublime, courage, self-sacrifice, these sorts of ideas. No, it was rather de Chirico that attracted me. I read his novel Hebdomeros and his writings on Modern Art - an indefinable renegade,he gave me my first insight into how complex the relationship of an artist to the contemporary world could be. Paul Nash was a continual inspiration, partly because in Hampshire and Sussex I recognised his imagery -the beech woods on the chalk downs,or paintings like Whittenham Clumps,or Landscape of the Vernal Equinox.
Nash was lyrical but he wasn't a neo-romantic.I was attracted to whatever I thought of as a mysterious, or difficult idea, not nature on an intimate scale, let alone anything picturesque. Not the garden, but the forest.
Distance is vital, whether it is the visually deep space that a picture has or whether in the sense of something remote and detached.This ‘far-away-distance’ sometimes has more tangible reality than the everyday. It’s something imagined rather than seen- the distant not the vernacular!
BR I do see of course that your big dark forest paintings are far nearer to the slow-moving, vaporously heavy shapes in, say, Clifford Still; and that the schematic divisions of some of your paintings with two sections, laterally, across the canvas, could be read as linked with a kind of Rothko division, but lateral instead of vertical.
But there are the repeated appearances of horses and riders and one or two other motifs - apart from you r prescribed or subject-dictated motifs in the Wagner and church commissions, and I suppose we must just accept these are romantic emblems. I appreciate that you are steering a course between figurative and abstract painting and wish to create a figurative art which is also practically abstract, but the horses and riders, which have become such familiar apparitions in your work, are both specific and recurrent.
Were you ever affected by The Polish Rider painting by Rembrandt in New York? This seems to me of the essence as a romantic emblem, and to break through to something, to sensation and an attitude, almost like a character in Lermontov, beyond Rembrandt's time and place.
CLB When you talk about horses and riders in my work, it’s important to me, that this is not seen as a real horse. It creates some kind of psychological field, so I think of it as an entrance or a key to the place that I want to enter. It’s as if ‘the horse’ enables the journey more than providing the final subject. The final subject of the painting still requires an object through which it might be expressed. Partly for practical reasons, the brush needs something to grip and model during the thinking-out of such an abstract subject.
BR I can see that ‘vague and amorphous’ subjects, unvisual in themselves as concepts or feelings, require some sort of visual peg, to either detonate or stand in for that sensation or concept. But there’s the danger that the peg may blot out the clothes line, as it were, and only the horse or the horse and rider may be seen, experienced, instead of the enveloping or governing idea/subject. We're on the edge of symbolism.
CLB We’re not on the edge of symbolism, we’re actually somewhere well into it, but I do associate art with risk and unless I risk something I don’t feel that I’m engaged enough. To an extent, figuration frightens me, or at the very least worries me, it’s so potent. But it’s often, not always, an inevitable stage of my work.
BR Which direction is this stage pointing? Or which direction are other steps taking you? Is there a possibility that you are really, instinctively an abstract painter seeking to build up a fresh authority and dimension in your work through a degree of figuration? Or, conversely, are you essentially a figurative painter deploying abstract elements to deepen the game?
This is a real question and not rhetorical because of the knife-edge of near equilibrium which divides your work between abstraction and figuration. And I think probably that this knife-edge is precisely where you want to be, without a decision either way, and we'll see how things develop.
CLB There’s a truth in that knife-edge which is very much of our time, but isn't it generally true of painting always?
BR To what degree is your colour abstract and to what degree is it descriptive or emblematic? How do you approach colour? Does colour find it's own form or do certain shapes and forms demand certain kinds of colour? Do you use colour schematically? What uses of colour are you most drawn to, in earlier forms of art?
I only occasionally work from nature, so that consequently I need a certain artificial scheme of colour which I build up, over time, for myself; and this is, I suppose, a kind of system. I don't mean this in a dry, doctrinaire sense. Its more like an accumulation of memory, sensation - what works. Where I have thought hard about colour, it is in the use of warm and cool mid-tones through contrast to create a sense of lived reality.
I’m talking about the use of greys and whites and how its possible to structure an entire painting in terms of warm and cool tones. For instance, a painting called Passage, or Silver Birch.
I’ve looked hard at paintings to memorize, and to learn passages pf paint which have worked particularly well for me, almost as a musician might study chord structure or aspects of orchestration, filling his mind with remembered passages. I can’t resist that analogy, music has been so important to me.
BR Glowing reds come to my mind, and some brilliant blues - but you seem loosely to favour rather subdued and sparsely used variations on venetian colour, primarily, which so often seems to find favour with English painters, but there also comes to mind an immense amount of modified colour and varied tonalities so that a lot of your painting in retrospect seems often to be silvery or in tones of warm or cool greys, charcoal greys, blacks or near-blacks, and Indian reds and other venetian or charred-like tonalities. Your colour is lived-in, experienced, filtered through experience, time and exposure. Does this seem accurate? And why have you made a number of very big paintings that are also very dark indeed, almost another colour altogether, an unearthly dark, like the forest paintings? They are impressive and have their own beauty, but they can present problems in lighting because artificial light on them tends to deaden and flatten everything and not really to illuminate the subtle variations in low tones. What are the dark paintings about? They're obviously not just forests, if your horses are not just horses?
CLB That’s a lot of questions. Let’s take the last one first. It’s important to realise that the forest paintings were painted in daylight. Imagine a painting made over a long period of time, in hugely shifting conditions of light and times of day. It’s also true that daylight enables you to somehow see into the surface of these paintings. My response to this fluctuation is what I have tried to record in the layering and modulation of the colours. The colour needs seeking out, it’s deliberately toned down, it’s slow, it doesn’t seek your attention.
The first big dark painting was called Tristan before I was commissioned for the Wagner series, the title was not to call up the opera but to establish a sense of brooding or dwelling, a type of plangency in expression. The title came after the painting was complete, the subject depending on colour, texture, mass, weight and scale more than narrative. Aram nemus vult [the grove requires an altar], carries an implicit but obscured narrative. The Briar Wood intentionally evokes in it’s title Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, Tennyson and Burne-Jones. All these paintings are somehow triste, and they just came that way, not through deliberation at the start. They’re excessively dark, perhaps more about time than appearance. Perhaps even about not being able to be seen or revealed. They’re awkward to talk about, because they don’t have motifs, in the sense of figure/ground; each one is a complete, self contained ‘motif’ in its own right, the motif spreading to take up the entire surface of the painting. You might think that these might be, therefore, my most fully abstract paintings because free of motifs; but in fact they directly recall much earlier abstract work made when I was a student at the Slade - single sheets of colour, pale blue, a kind of linen/beige colour, which were really fields of colour where only the paint handling animated the surface. I thought of them as fields to reflect natural light. This paralleled the process painting of Bernard Cohen, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman and others. And the dark paintings are indeed a sort of ‘process painting.’ and dwell on that idea.
BR How about the level or degree of a far more directly descriptive figurative imagery which might be obligatory when you accept from time to time a commission like the recent one for Liverpool Cathedral of The Parables. This is successful and the two big paintings are admired but they make a strong statement in quite a different direction to, say, the forest paintings. How do you feel about this apparent polarity between something open and generalised and something explicit and closed which appear to fluctuate through much of your recent work?
CLB I find in the course of my work that I need both. I think of one as the inside, and the other as the outside. The outside concentrates on materials and painting’s sensual qualities; the inside, I think of rather more to do with drawing: in other words, more imagined things. This is to over simplify, since the two are clearly dependent on eachother. But these are these extremes in my work and I find in some ways that the drama of this opposition helps me to invent. I’m glad we're talking about this question after discussing the forest paintings. I want the narrative paintings to have the same formal authority. And in many ways this is clearly a much more difficult thing to do, since certainly when a young artist the accepted truth was that depicted space was of a secondary order of integrity. What I mean perhaps is a lapse into illustration, and not just figuration; but I do also mean that a hollowed-out space, in which something is depicted, would be seen as weak compared with the continuous and consistently flat surface of an entirely abstract painting.
BR I believe that attitudes about content, subject and narrative relate to a period and are now redundant or forgotten. I don't believe that any of your paintings ever ‘illustrate’the subject, least of all the Church Commission. There has been a half excellent, and half slightly mindless, openness in art, about what might be tackled and how for a decade or so, so that the structures and demarcation lines to which you refer have perhaps been consumed by time and usage.
But over the figuration question, and your freedom to roam around areas of feelings as much as directly portrayed substances, I sometimes feel slightly bothered by the way in which your figures recently seem to be dressed in, or to have come from, in their style or general appearance, a more definite explicit period in history. I enjoy all of this, and I don’t feel critical about it; I merely question the way in which such details of appearance might pin you down, and isolate your interests to a kind of latter-day Gustave Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes sory of nervy vibration. I quite see how young Seigfried had to look broadly like young Seigfried; but there have been muses, referring to some sort of antiquity, and other period signs.
CLB Jean-Christophe Amman called it my ‘synchronicity problem’. As I said before, they way in which I give myself room to move or imagine is to distance myself from the motifs. It sometimes seems to me that the more unreasonable the choice of motif, [although it must possess a type of ‘stoic decorum’] the more I am able to sympathise with its depiction. It has to be utterly remote from my normal visual world - but I'm not talking of conscious choices. The figure of the knight in The Three Riders painting, or Sir Bedivere, is one that I wouldn’t consciously have chosen in this particular time, because it would seem absurd. But I can only honestly describe the freeing effect on my drawing, and self forgetfulness when working. Why was it that I was first attracted to the work of de Chirico aged 16?, I clearly recognised something. If you were to press me further then I suppose I would say that I feel intensely painting’s enigmatic nature It’s not for painting to make the world a less legendary place. I think I forcibly put painting’s metaphysical nature and outright contrariness before you.
BR How did you arrive at your own subjects of painting? And has it been an especially fraught and confusing time for a young artist to establish his own world of subjects, in the teeth of so much against painting itself. How do you feel about the younger, or newer, American painters like Fischl, or Schnabel, or the Germans and Italians as they arrived through the seventies and eighties, all of whom are working figuratively in varying degrees?
CLB Of course it has been a very long process but I think it’s important to remember the atmosphere and the stimulus given to painting at the end of the 1970’s; partly because of it’s embattled position, I felt a real fury over the politicisation of art and the righteous vigour of the anti-romanticism of the period, by which I mean, in the sense of the distortion of art’s purpose, away from the personal, the sensual and the metaphysical and towards the social or useful - the relevant. I think that my strength of feeling was such that I wanted to create the most extravagant demonstration of resistance to all this. I think that my paintings of the early eighties are clear evidence of this, paintings like Amphion and Victory or Pillar, Banner, Fire or the Tate painting, Dream, Think, Speak (which was a quotation from Delacroix. I had been reading the marvellous ‘Journal’].
I feel that this title Dream, Think, Speak, represented for me a manifesto for the behaviour of the artist. The original quotation refers to colour; he says that colour dreams, thinks, speaks. It was important for me that the dream comes first, because I take my pictorial intuitions as given truths, the rest is an elaboration of their consequences.
This strong feeling of mine, at the time something almost, but not quite like rage, should be communicated through images of an unpalatable, or difficult, uningratiating and unfashionable awkwardness without the need to turn the images upside down, like Baselitz, with whom I exhibited paintings several times in this period.
Separately, about others, from this perspective, looking back from the end of the nineties, it seems to me that despite the apparent expressionist content in the works of Baselitz, Lupertz, Richter, in the early eighties their aim was actually programmatic, and their exhibitions were carefully managed. They had this tremendous intellectual prestige characteristic of the appreciation of artists in continental Europe. But the sense of competition among painters and the sudden refound confidence in exploring national traditions had extremely interesting and unexpected results. Exhibitions were often experienced as battles of paintings with each artist trying to outdo his rivals. I remember Markus Lupertz saying to me: “Every ten years, the doors of art history open and then we start running.”And he said, “I shoot you, and you, and you”, pointing his finger at each artist who sat around the table. Lupertz was , shaven headed with one gold earring, [a pirate crossed with a rugby international] - his words were particularly convincing. It was a period,of extremes that had it's excitements and drama, not just through the big sums of money crashing about but in the sense of a tenacious rehabilitation and gleaming of the muscle and sinew of painting not just as it had been but rather more in what it might become. Coming from England, and our rather decent-natured exchanges between isolated and emotionally rather private artists, the idea that to build an empire, as Rubens or Titian, did, with their staff and entourage, the idea of the painter-prince, was possible or even worth striving for, was immensely liberating.
When I went to see Sandro Chia in his New York studio, he was occupying the top [maybe ten] floors of a building in West 23rd Street. He had numerous assistants, some making sculpture, some making prints - one floor of the building was given up to print making - some mixing colour. When I asked him how he coped with so many assistants, he told me: “remember, Titian employed many more than the Venetian harbour authority.” Well, perhaps, but you could see what he meant. Meanwhile, there were two secretaries at least plus an office manager.
I also met the painter Bernd Koberling in Berlin. He was the teacher of Middendorf and Fetting,and the Neue Wilden, artists of my age. When we first met he was sitting at the head of a table surrounded by his students. It was also the first time that I’d seen the atelier system, although this first meeting was in a famous artist’s bar, the Paris bar, where artists had the best tables no matter who was in town.
By the atelier system, I mean the professor was responsible for both teaching and choosing his students; it was a close relationship - the students would regularly spend time in his studio. All three of the middle generation German artists whom I’ve mentioned lived in great style as extravagant dandies, buying their suits by the half dozen from Savile Row. They were disappointed to find an Englishman with no apparent concern for enjoying what they considered his birthright: Slightly stung by this, I was introduced to their English tailor who had not only dressed the German neo-expressionists but also Harold MacMillan and Eric Honneker, the then President of East Germany. Those artists were strong anglophiles. Occasionally, they got it slightly wrong- the evening dress with plus fours? Or Baselitz appearing at a Private View in an immaculate suit, but with matching Edwardian peaked cap?- His full beard and confident looks sat uncomfortably with the primary school uniform.
Of the older generation, not among these names of the period, I increasingly admired what Philip Guston had done and was doing. It was the feeling of speculation in his work and how he managed to sustain a density of thought and feeling with a very open and alert sensitivity to paint and to touch. I’m thinking of the long abstract phase or phases of his work which almost seem to epitomise for me the look of intelligence when deployed through the simplest means of painting. I sensed in Guston even then something important and sustaining for me in the way that he addressed the problems of figurative imagery, how powerful it can be through its absence or in its imminent arrival. You always feel the image is either arriving or has just left, and that's what a painter’s mind is like isn’t it?
BR Guston’s retrospective show that I presented in the early sixties at the Whitechapel was particularly well received by the painters engaged with imagery - at a time when abstract art from the US was still in the ascendant - and his then recent big paintings of still life, or that looked like still life, were keenly appreciated. But later, I grew impatient with the excessive attention paid by his admirers and supporters, to the late phase of hammer and nails and shoes, a kind of rough-hewn, semi primitive and cartoon-like neo-realism. It was turned too much into a cause celebre, and as the paintings came out at a time of protest over Vietnam and other troubles, Watergate and so on, I’ve always felt that a kind of unwanted and unneeded socio-political mantle was thrown over them, which we were all expected to admire. I think Guston, who tacked endlessly all his life, in between abstract and figurative areas of painting and feeling, should be seen and understood as a whole, like Turner.
CLB Yes, I agree, but don't forget that the final paintings by Guston were far beyond any socio-political connotations or significance, dwelling as they do so remorselessly and painfully on his own and his wife’s mortality. He’d continued smoking and drinking after his heart attack, there was a self destructive side to him.
BR I’ve not seen those last paintings; I was thinking more of the Klu Klux Klan series and those heads over walls and pairs of old boots. Guston’s figurative end as a painter makes sense: he began as a figurative artist. Most interestingly, an abstract phase of his work in the fifties exemplifies that crucial 20th Century impasse, the oppositions of Monet and Mondrian.
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