This is a reworked article from 1998 which was dropped from publication at the time due to a dispute concerning photographic reproduction rights.
The
small oeuvre of intensely considered realist pictures left to the world by
Michael Andrews, who died of cancer in his mid-sixties in 1995, has a poetry
and integrity uniquely its own. His are
deeply intelligent works, rooted in an understanding of the complexity of
pictorial language, informed by photography but allied to observation. True, they can appear dutifully conservative
at times, but in a way that just adds to their quirkiness. As Frank Auerbach once put it, "Mike
does these things that at first look like old railway travel posters, but when
you really look at them they are just truly beautiful pictures." With Lucian Freud, Auerbach was a
fanatically loyal champion of this quintessential artist’s artist. Although Andrews enjoyed the patronage of
certain well-placed figures within the British establishment, his reputation
remains pretty limited even within Britain, and virtually non-existent overseas
(although one important work, All Night Long, is in the collection of the
National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia). The combination of a small output, quiet
life, uncontroversial subject matter and unostentatious painterly touch justify
comparisons with Vermeer, whose reputation had to wait two centuries to be
retrieved from oblivion. Luckily,
Andrews may not have to wait that long.
A retrospective is promised by Tate Britain in a couple of years, and in
the meantime, his work can be seen, this Fall of 2000, at the Yale Center for
British Art, in the exhibition “The School of London and Their Friends: The
Collection of Elaine and Melvin Merians”.
A
belated memorial show held at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in the spring of 1998
brought together the three Thames pictures which turned out to be his
last. The series marked his return to
London after many years seclusion in East Anglia. One doesn't need to know they are last paintings (only two were
finished) to sense their urgency of resolve. The expressive and spontaneous treatment of surface was
unparalleled in his career. Not
coincidentally, Mr Taylor's Mayfair premises, in Bruton Place, once housed the
Beaux-Arts Gallery where, in the 1950s, the redoubtable Helen Lessore
championed British realism, exhibiting Bacon, Auerbach, Kossoff, the Kitchen
Sink painters, and - for his first two shows - Michael Andrews. It was a resonant space in which to see his
last works, especially as these deal with the river as repository of memories
and symbol of the flow of time.
Much
as Andrews deserves greater recognition, one could argue, in a bizarre kind of
way, that a quiet exit from art historical consciousness would have fitted
Andrews's artistic character. A devotee
of Zen Bhuddism, he actually made negation of ego one of his themes. In his haunting ethereal landscape paintings
of the 1970s - the Lights series - he adopted the hot air balloon as a metaphor
of selfhood. He had been chewing over
the concept of "the skin-encapsulated ego" described in the writings
of R.D.Laing when he was struck by a newspaper photo of a balloon which gave
him his cue. He once confided to the
writer Lawrence Gowing "I love the sense of homelessness and rootlessness. I'd like to die in a ditch." He was, as it happens, buried in an unmarked
grave, although at a well attendend funeral on the estate of his patron
Baroness Willoughby de Eresby, on land where he was fond of deer-stalking.
Andrews
was born in 1928 in Norwich where his strict Methodist family all worked for
the Norwich Union insurance company. At
the Slade in the 1950s he was the star pupil of William Coldstream, a realist
as torturously self-doubting as he was fanatically empirical. In his own formative years at the Slade, a
generation earlier, Coldstream had been torn between the rigorous observational
realism advocated by Tonks and the temptations of Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, a
dichotomy he passed on, in a way, to Andrews and - to a lesser extent - his
other protégé Euan Uglow. In Andrews
case the struggle was between the austerity of the Euston Road style,
epitomised by Coldstream, and a new conception of the figure, in tune with the
modish existentialism, presented by Giacometti and Bacon, although to be fair
Coldstream enthused more about Giacometti among his charges than about
himself.
Extistentialism
won the day in the paintings which catapulted the young Michael Andrews to
national attention in the Slade Diploma Examination (degree) show of 1952. "A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over" depicts
a middle-aged, middle-class gent about to land, painfully, on the pavement, his
besuited body twisted awkwardly between gravity and equilibrium, his expression
also equally torn between perplexity, hopelessness and a frantic attempt at
composure - he's literally saving face.
Much of the energy in this and other youthful works comes from its
forceful awkwardness. Indeed, David
Sylvester, an early champion of Andrews, identified awkwarness as his key
trait. Partly, Sylvester argued, this had to do with his Englishness (think of
the figures in Turner or Constable) but it also relates to "the
awkwardness of almost every modern painter who has not been content to solve
his problems by simplifying them...The modern artist who aims at the inclusiveness
of traditional European art runs up against the difficulty of recovering that
inclusiveness without embracing what have become the clichés of the tradition,
and the awkwardness arises from trying to have one without the other." Andrews' awkwardness also had to do with the
prevailing philosophical mood, however, and his temperament.
Meanwhile,
the legacy of Coldstream's example, if not advocacy, of observation would
resurface periodically in Andrews' oeuvre.
A decade later he embarked on a large group portrait of his family in
his parents' Norfolk garden which attempted to remain strictly within the
boundaries of perceptual analysis. His
immediately preceding paintings had actually used the same garden, with its
distinctive porch and pergola, as the backdrop of freely imagined bacchanals
strangely redolent of Puvis de Chavannes.
These featured his London friends, sunbathing or making out, in
mannerist, distorted poses. In contrast,
the family portrait, which absorbed intense mental energies, is sober and conservative,
filial to his religiously puritan parents and aesthetically puritan master, but
even so, a tension can be sensed between the competing philosophies - put
crudely, existentialism and empiricism.
The resulting style, as Peter Fuller described it, was of "clipped
angst and trim unease".
Still,
there was more carousing to come. The
1960s were dominated by an ongoing series which explored the party theme. In violation of Methodist taboos Andrews
threw himself into the drinking frenzy of Soho, keeping a sober eye,
nonetheless, on the revellers at Dean Street's Colony Room - Freud, Bacon, and
a cast of hangers on, many of whom were also portrayed by Freud and Bacon -
which Andrews immortalised in his famous group portrait of 1962. In another picture of the same year, The
Deer Park, Norman Mailer's evocation of orgies in the novel of that title fuses
with the format of a Velasquez painting in the National Gallery, the Boar Hunt,
as well as scenes from Fellini movies, in an extraordinary depiction of forced
gaiety and social posturing. Bang in
the centre of his image, isolated from the social throng by a billowy white
couch, is a portrait of the poet Rimbaud, faithful in style to its photographic
source. Elsewhere, an abstracted (in
both senses) Marilyn Monroe is dancing.
As much as a reinvention of figure painting and an exploration of the
mood of the times, this image by Andrews belongs to the Pop canon. Indeed its collision of high culture, the
vernacular, personal allusions and painterly physionomic distortion directly
relates to a younger artist whose example obsessed him, namely R.B. Kitaj
(pages of his notebooks are filled with comments about the controversial
newcomer). This puts paid to the whingeing
by self-proclaimed historical purists against the inclusion of both Andrews and
Kitaj under the rubric "School of London".
If
anything, the connection between Andrews and Kitaj is stylistically safer than
that between Andrews and his close friends and admirers, Freud and
Auerbach. The act of painting The Deer
Park was a new experience for him in that, working on board (instead of canvas)
and under intense time pressure (six weeks), he escaped the "hard
won" look which had characterised his work so far. He suddenly realised that the blotchiness
that comes from constant revision and the texture built up by pentimenti
constituted a kind of "special pleading". As Lawrence Gowing put it, "He did not want painting to look
like hard work any more; it was decadent to boast of the effort; the loaded
pigment had come to seem like surplus fat." The move later on to acrylic, and the incorporation of
silkscreens, stencils and airbrush, betoken deep disatisfaction, in his own
work, with precisely those tropes of angst and effort that eat away at the credibility
of certain of his School of London allies.
One
way that Andrews freed himself from the tyranny of observation was in his
increasingly central use of photographs as source material, although images
encountered in the press had rivalled observation from life and free
imagination from the outset. History
must judge Andrews by the beauty and poignancy of his images, not by his degree
of perceptual observation, which is the means not the end of effectiveness, but
it is reasonable to be aware of his varying dependendence on photography as
this signals very different kinds of picture making. It doesn't seem that he ever took to the photograph as a Dadaist
stance against painting. Even his most
extreme incorporation of found photographic material, The Lord Mayor's
Reception in Norwich Castle Keep on the eve of the installation of the first
Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, 1966-69, with its mass of
dinner-suited guests and its satirical edge, seems genuinely to be about a new
kind of history painting rather than a critique of painting per se. Sometimes, in the tradition of Degas and
Sickert, the photo is a way of invigorating his art by acknowledging another
layer of visual language, revealing the unexpected quirks inherent in the art
of depiction. Andrews himself talked
about "articulate illusions".
This level of pictorial inquiry comes across in his masterful and
intriguing figure composition, Melanie and Me Swimming, 1978-79 (Tate
Gallery). Othertimes, though, the
photograph is more of a shortcut to an easy-to-assimilate realism. And yet, one would be loathe to write-off
such images for this reason. His Lights
series reveal him at his most exquisite, eerie and ethereal, and yet also -
technically - at his most unmediated in his use of the photograph.
This
series deals metaphorically, as mentioned already, with the spiritual theme at
the heart of Andrews outlook: the abnegation of ego. He believed that, in the very act of making images on the
subject, he could effect his own enlightenment. To this end, the impersonal - selfless - quality of the snapshot
represented per se a kind of ego-loss, letting go of an attachment to the
fiction of the artist's unique touch.
The series, almost like programme music, followed a quasi-narrative
sequence. The balloon, a metaphor of
selfhood, at times puffed up, at others floating by magesterially, is seen
crossing a noctornal Thames, then casting its shadow over a beach, and finally
disappearing from the picture but presumably the vantage point still for aerial
views of seaside scenes - a spa or a pier - suffused with an oceanic sense of
release. But even before the series
came to its conclusion, he realised that, from a Buddhist perspective, it
hadn't worked precisely because it implied a seperation of goal and
journey. As Alan Watts put it in his
1957 cult classic, "The Way of Zen", (a book Andrews read and was
influenced by), "...the practice of Zen is not the true practice so long
as it has an end in view, and when it has no view in end it is awakening - the
aimless, self-sufficient life of the 'eternal now'". By a neat coincidence in intellectual
history, by the way, after Andrews, inspired by Laing, painted images inspired
by the notion of the "skin-encapsulated ego", the French
psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu devoted a paper to Francis Bacon exploring this
"painter of rents in the skin ego".
In his strivings to avoid the pitfalls of expressionism it could be argued that Andrews veered too far in the opposite direction, towards illustration. The smooth, glassy opaqueness of the Lights series expunged the last elements of his earlier, defining characteristic of awkwardness. Perhaps Andrews had come to view "awkwardness" as a trope, like the har