And yet the man I married was dazzling. The characteristics that made Robert challenging to live with also made him compelling company. His powerful, competitive spirit extended far beyond the tennis court, and he was as happy engaging in debates about the ethics of blood sports as he was playing a game of chess. He would argue for the sheer jousting joy of it, his facility with language and confidence of manner more than occasionally compensating for the slightly dodgy facts he built his cases on. I revelled in his energetic company and wallowed in his sweet smell, the texture of his skin, his elegant hands and his open smile. He was generous with his time and his money, supporting the local community and lending his expertise to good causes further afield. He was culturally inquisitive, a great reader – insomnia supported his prodigious thirst for books – and let’s be straight here, he was pretty damned sexy. This man completed me: his strength complemented my femininity and his intellect my practicality. I loved him deeply.
We baby boomers were the in-betweener generation. Germaine Greer had published The Female Eunuch in 1970 and Margaret Thatcher was now prime minister. Women were told that everything was possible, but the odds were still stacked against us. The times were a-changin’ – but oh so slowly.
Having questioned Lindy about her willingness to ‘love and obey’ in her wedding vows, I thought nothing of changing my surname from Branson to Devereux, unaware of the impact that it might have on my sense of identity. Robert and I then fell into the trap of playing out the roles that husbands and wives subconsciously play, without ever discussing the effects that getting married would have on our relationship.
This uncomfortable role-playing, combined with the possibility of waking the honeymoon monster, squeezed much of the fun from our relationship. From the first day of our married life, I failed to acknowledge that I was hurting. Distant memories of being bullied as a ten-year-old bubbled up. I hadn’t known how to confront my tormentors then, and I didn’t know how to confront my husband now. I’m sure Robert was unaware of the effect his dictatorial style was having on me and I kept on smiling as if it was water off a duck’s back, which must have infuriated him even more.
Robert didn’t mean to stop being my friend, but he did so at a stroke on our wedding night. We were falling into the same pattern of behaviour as his mother and father, and I found myself occasionally catching someone’s eye and winking if Robert’s manner became particularly arrogant. Given the opportunity, his mother and I would sneak off for a smoke and do the Guardian crossword together. Smoking was my self-destructive self-preservation, my pathetic ‘fuck you – I’m not going to be controlled by you’ self-defence.
When you’re newly married, you can’t admit that you’re unhappy to anyone – not even yourself. I was convinced that these were just teething troubles and that once we got into a rhythm we would find a way of communicating as equals, the oppression would lift and we would fly once more. However, the reality was that our patterns of behaviour became entrenched as we dug ourselves deeper into the mud.
Everything I did became an unconscious attempt to please Robert. He hated illness, dismissing it as a sign of weakness, so I became defiantly stoic. And he introduced the term ‘MUT’ or ‘maximum usage of time’, which to this day occasionally pops into my mind. Reader, you must be shrieking, ‘Why did you allow this man to dominate you so?’ The answer is that, back then, Robert was 90 per cent wonderful. My parents had always taught us to look on the positive side; holding one’s own was never in their parenting manual. On the contrary, girls of my generation were taught that we were there to boost men’s confidence, to make them feel and look good. Robert had commented that he thought the Branson family were dysfunctional because we never yelled at each other. Whatever your point of view, it seemed that we were programmed for different styles of married life and were ill-equipped to reconcile them.
Details, details, details. Despite all this, our lives were about to enter a fantastical period. Although the time was defined by work, the line between work and play was so faint that it sometimes felt impossible to tell them apart.
The draw of west London was strong, and soon after getting married we moved into a garden flat at 98 Oxford Gardens in Ladbroke Grove. The forty-foot-long sitting room was bookended with floor-to-ceiling windows and the ceiling was decorated with elaborate cornicing, beautifully set off by a marble fireplace. Off to the back was a narrow galley kitchen and downstairs, testament to the fact that the idea of children had not yet crossed our minds, there was one spacious bedroom and a bathroom.
It was the summer of 1984. Live Aid, Bob Geldof’s visionary endeavour to raise funds for relief of the Ethiopian famine, harnessed all that was good in the music industry, ending with the thrilling performance of Freddie Mercury. ‘We are the champions,’ he sang, and indeed, everyone under thirty felt at that moment as if they were the champions of the world.
Word of a mysterious fatal disease that had affected mostly gay men from the East and West Coasts was filtering through from New York. My neighbour Tony Moore, a gentle artist, rang the doorbell to ask if I wanted to buy some of his prints.
‘My God, you look ill – are you OK?’ I asked without thinking, horrified at the sight of my statuesque friend, now reduced to skeletal proportions.
‘It’s nothing,’ he sighed, giving me a resigned smile. I found out a few days later that when he became gravely ill, the ambulance crew had refused to pick him up.
The extent of the prejudice surrounding AIDS became apparent over the following years. Thankfully, most of this ignorance has now been eradicated. In the London I inhabited in the 1980s, we brushed up against the disease rather than being overwhelmed by it. However, I remember answering the door to a man canvassing for support to prevent an AIDS hospice called The Lighthouse from opening in our area. He tried to convince me that having such a building nearby would affect house prices, but how wrong he was.
One weekend Richard came down to Tanyards, looking very pleased with himself.
‘Ok everyone, guess what new venture I’ve just started?’ he gleefully asked at dinner. ‘Let’s do twenty questions.’ He smiled, confident that we wouldn’t come up with the right answer.
‘Animal, mineral or vegetable?’ I asked.
‘Well, I suppose it’s mineral,’ he said.
We started guessing. ‘T-shirts? Taxis? Hotels? Schools?’
‘No, no, no, no,’ he replied. He loved this game.
‘Ok, you win,’ we said, when the twenty questions were up.
‘Well, we’ve done lots of studies about the condom business,’ he said, enjoying our incredulous looks, ‘ and Durex has such a stuffy image. People are embarrassed to even say the name, let alone buy them – plus, they have a virtual monopoly and charge too much.’ We caught each other’s eyes, enjoying his enthusiasm. ‘AIDS will be a thing of the past if everyone is happy to use condoms, so we’ve started Mates, a new condom company to undercut Durex and make condoms seem more, well, sexy.’
We all laughed as the simple brilliance of his plan sank in, and then Mum stepped in, cutting her son down a peg or two. ‘Oh, Richard,’ she sighed, ‘When are you going to do something worthwhile with your life?’
The smile dropped from his face and he pleaded quietly, ‘I’m trying, Mummy. I’m trying.’
Robert had started a film arm of Virgin called Virgin Vision. Their ambitious team included Stephen Navin, who was to so enrich my life. Their first project was Electric Dreams, a modern-day version of Cyrano de Bergerac, in which the love triangle was between a girl, a boy and a computer. Steve Barron was directing his feature debut and Giorgio Moroder produced its pulsating soundtrack; the theme song by the Human League has since become a classic.
Flying to join Robert, who’d been working on the film in LA, I experienced my first taste of film industry lunacy. MGM, the studio which had picked up the film, sent a stretch limo to collect me up from the airport and put us up in a suite at the Sunset Marquis hotel. The two days before the premiere were insane; we couldn’t open the door to our room because of all the job offers and invitations that were jammed under it. ‘We could get used to this lifestyle,’ Robert and I thought as we lay in the March sun, sharing a chilled bottle of Californian sauvignon blanc and observing the shenanigans of an ageing rock star and his groupies by the pool.
MGM had enormous hopes for Electric Dreams, with the film set to open in over 1,200 cinemas nationwide. Robert and I met Ileen Maisel, the executive in charge of the film, for lunch in The Ivy to raise a glass to the film’s success during its premiere on the East Coast. We waited for the time when the viewing figures from the early screenings were collated. Eileen went to call her New York office from the restaurant phone, before all too quickly returning to our table, her eyes averted.
‘I’m afraid the film has to be pulled,’ she said. ‘Not enough people went to the screenings to gather decent word-of-mouth. I’m so sorry.’ And with that she walked out of the restaurant, leaving us to pick up the bill.
I swear the receptionist at the Sunset Marquis was reluctant to look us in the eye when we returned to the hotel. There were no notes pushed under our door and not one message on the answerphone. We had gone from gods of the universe to untouchables in one afternoon. Feeling rejected by Los Angeles itself, we hired a car and drove to Santa Barbara for the weekend, where to add insult to injury, it rained.
The film industry is as compelling as it is ruthless, and Virgin and Robert were seduced by its allure twice more. The first time was to finance a screen version of Orwell’s 1984; the director Michael Radford and producer Simon Perry, who in their eagerness to complete the film quickly, exceeded their budget with such abandon that Robert lost much of his hair. He attempted to persuade them to commission Eurythmics to write the soundtrack, knowing that they would do a stunning job while hoping to recoup some of the film’s overspend through a record deal.
Talking to Annie Lennox about the project recently, I realise how appalled and let down they were by the experience. She and Dave Stewart were given three weeks to complete the soundtrack and worked around the clock to produce an extraordinary album; they delivered it at the eleventh hour, only to hear nothing back. Unbeknownst to them, the project had been hit by drama and they found themselves caught up in a battle between the vision of the director and the needs of the producers. When the film won the award for Best Film at the Evening Standard British Film Awards later that year, Mike Radford shattered us all by angrily denouncing Eurythmics and Virgin Vision in his acceptance speech. Knowing how much Robert had put into the film and lost in the process, it was devastating to hear Radford tearing into Virgin Vision in front of the entire British film industry. Trying to hide my distress, I turned to Rupert Everett, who was sitting to my right. In an attempt to console me he could only say, ‘Well, darling, at least you won!’ I suppose he had a point.
Virgin’s last foray into film was financing Absolute Beginners, directed by Julien Temple and produced by Stephen Woolley and Nik Powell, our old neighbour and Richard’s erstwhile partner. It was a decision that sadly sealed the fate of Virgin’s involvement in the film business forever.
***
At that time I could just about justify going to New York for the odd ‘business trip’ by selling a few vintage posters. After my month tramping the city’s streets as a teenager, I still thought of it as my town and felt at home in the crime-ridden, chaotic city. In 1984, I found myself on the only Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 on the way to Newark with Yu-Chee Chong, an art dealer who specialised in historic images of Singapore and had a knockout sense of style and a devilish sense of humour. Night had fallen and the captain invited us into the cockpit, where we looked down at the network of red and orange glowing ribbons, as commuters returned to the suburbs from Manhattan, energy surging along every highway.
Then the captain radioed the control tower. ‘Virgin 001, Virgin 001, are you receiving me? Over.’
The airline was still new enough for the air traffic controller to quip, ‘Virgin? How can you prove it? Over.’ The captain rolled his eyes as he banked the mighty plane to line up with the runway.
Once we were through customs, we wove our way through traffic into the centre of town to the Upper East Side, where we were staying in a grand apartment that belonged to a colleague of Yu-Chee’s. We had all of Manhattan before us, but what to do? Yu-Chee suggested we visited her friend, Evelyn Samuels, who was studying history of art at the Warburg Institute. The daughter of John S. Samuels III, a coal magnate from Galveston in Texas, Evelyn had just married a Brit named Nick Welch, and adventure was in the air.
We headed downtown to the Samuels’ loft on Prince Street in SoHo, took the elevator to the top floor and entered a cavernous room with exposed brick walls and a Harley Davidson artfully positioned as a centrepiece. John S. Samuels III was entertaining a few elegantly dressed friends. We quaffed a glass or two of champagne, pretending that we did this every day of our lives, before Evelyn suggested that we leave the oldies and walk around the corner to the newly opened Palladium club, the successor to Studio 54.
Our plan had one fatal flaw: the Amazonian bouncer, a Grace Jones-lookalike in a spray-on latex catsuit, took one look at Evelyn in her Laura Ashley floral print dress, Yu-Chee in her Chanel suit and me in my baggy Annie Hall trousers, and sent us to the back of the queue. A crowd was gathering, and Big Grace was clearly relishing her power. But then something remarkable happened: a white limo swept up, the crowd parted like the Red Sea and Andy Warhol got out, dressed in a white suit. To our embarrassment, Evelyn started shouting. ‘Andy, Andy – over here!’
Andy looked over in our direction and beckoned to us. ‘Over here, girls,’ he drawled, and we cocked our heads and smiled at the open-mouthed bouncer as we followed Warhol into his inner sanctum at the back of the club. It transpired that he had not only been a guest at Evelyn’s wedding but had given her a screenprint of a dollar sign as a present. A postscript to this story is that Evelyn went on to become Professor Evelyn Welch, a renowned expert on the Italian Renaissance and mother of Florence Welch, lead singer in the band Florence and the Machine.
The following night I met up with Fiona Whitney, who had come from LA to join us. We ventured back to SoHo, this time to a loft on Spring Street that belonged to the Jaffe family. Lee Jaffe took us to an unconverted industrial floor to meet his flatmate Shenge Ka Pharaoh and a strange evening followed. Fiona and Lee connected over quantities of cocaine, while Shenge and I chatted and danced around. He never sat still and clutched a paintbrush that he’d continually dip into pots of paint before painting on every surface he could find, leaving wild heads with spiky Afro hair on hubcaps and strange toy cars and big cat-like faces on discarded objects in the abandoned loft. I bent down and snorted a line or two of coke; the evening confirmed my prejudice against coke, the ensuing conversations being frustratingly disconnected. However, hanging out with Shenge – who many say was the energy and brains behind Jean-Michel Basquiat – was a real privilege.
Back in London I began to curate – not that I would have used the term back then – exhibitions, first with Kate Flannery and then with Louise Hallett. We hit on the simple formula of showing an overview of artists from the twentieth century, decade by decade, and then focusing on six contemporary artists.
One hundred or so works were hung, from floor to ceiling, in the flat at Oxford Gardens. Looking back at our old catalogues now, I’m amazed at the range and quality of the shows. The works were loaned on consignment by the London galleries I’d once framed pictures for and who now generously opened up their storerooms to us. We had paintings by Howard Hodgkin, David Hockney, Patrick Procktor, Victor Pasmore, Henry Moore, Christopher Wood, Augustus John, Bridget Riley – an astonishing list of modern British masters. Between us we knew plenty of first-time collectors who wouldn’t dream of walking into an intimidating West End gallery but were happy to come to our private views, with their drinks, nibbles and log fires.
We’d zip on a dress, slip into a pair of stilettos and, armed with a bottle of champagne, a blue duplicate book and a sheet of red dots, we’d sell paintings by the dozen. Our shows became so successful that galleries became reluctant to loan works to us as we were depleting their inventory, leaving us with no option but to take the plunge and open our own galleries.
I called Mum, proud to tell her that I had my eye on a space on Blenheim Crescent, just off Portobello Road. ‘Portobello Road?’ she said, sounding rather disappointed. ‘Oh Nessie, why aren’t you opening on Cork Street?’
Regardless of Mum’s disdain, I opened The Vanessa Devereux Gallery in 1986, a 200-square-foot shoe-box of a space next door to the Travel Book Shop, the very shop that Julia Roberts would stumble into a decade later.
How I loved my morning walk from Oxford Gardens down the Portobello Road, nodding to stallholders as they arranged their fruit and vegetables and saluting to shopkeepers as they raised their protective window grills. Reggae would be pulsating from basement flats, while rich smells of coffee and freshly baked bread wafted from the Moroccan cafes and the pungent aromas of hams and cheeses tempted me into Garcia’s, the Spanish supermarket. The air rang with traders warming their voices up before singing out their bargains. As I neared Blenheim Crescent, the Salvation Army would be opening its doors to welcome in rough sleepers to take their breakfast and their morning pledge, while publicans arranged tables on pavements nearby to tempt them back to the devil.
Soon after opening the gallery, Dominique Taylor, Richard’s former PA who had recently separated from Roger Taylor, the drummer in Queen, came to work for me. Dom relished doing all the admin I loathed. She was my saviour. Over the five years of the gallery’s existence we were joined by a succession of three young directors, Sarah Howgate, Thomas Dane and Rose Lord, all of whom had different skills and confirmed my belief that you’re only as good as the people you work with – they all went on to have meteoric careers in the art world.
The space was small but our rent was low, so we could afford to take risks, and nobody was dictating who or what we should show. Much of what I did in the gallery was instinctive: we would go to degree shows and other galleries, both commercial and public, and we talked to art-school tutors, collectors and artists, asking them who they rated.
We didn’t take on a single artist who came to us without a recommendation. However, I always wanted artists to feel we were on their side, so I made sure I answered each request with a considered response – a decision I cursed when we became more successful and the requests mounted. However, this courtesy has paid off over the years, as time and again I’ve been approached by artists thanking me for encouraging them early in their careers.
There was one damaged soul who became incandescent with rage when we turned down his request for an exhibition. Dominique and I were out one morning and Sarah Howgate was on her own when he entered the gallery and starting screaming obscenities at her. Sarah did her best to calm him down but, instead of leaving through the door, he turned and ran at the shop window, hurling himself through the thick plate glass. Sarah called me half an hour later to tell me what had happened next. She was finding it hard to see the funny side of the story.
The artist had staggered back inside and then whipped off all his clothes before running upstairs and clambering onto the roof. There he stood, bloody and naked, shouting abuse and drawing a large crowd on the pavement below. The police were called and managed to wrestle him back into the gallery, before covering him with a grey packing blanket and bundling him into a waiting squad car. ‘All in a day’s work,’ I explained to poor, traumatised Sarah.
It’s hard now to imagine how provincial the London art scene was in the mid-1980s, a time when most people’s idea of good art didn’t extend beyond traditional sporting prints or Victorian watercolours. Showing contemporary artists, and especially those from abroad, was considered rather racy. I relished pushing the boundaries of good taste, and leapt at the opportunity to show artists from other cultures.
When the American writer Andrew Solomon introduced me to a group of unofficial Soviet artists, I couldn’t resist the challenge of becoming the first UK gallery to show their work. Rather than struggle with complications around shipping and customs, we invited Sven Gundlach and Irina Nakhova to come to London and produce their work here. The freedom offered by the city was there to test their self-control, and to add to our woes, Sven’s wild Soviet sexual allure certainly didn’t help them keep their eye on the job at hand. While researching this book, I emailed Andrew to ask him if he knew what had happened to Sven and Irina. He hadn’t heard from them for years, and thought Sven had given up as an artist. I looked up Irina and it was rather gratifying to see that she had been selected to represent Russia at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
We also exhibited works by Lee Jaffe, whom I’d dismissed as too cool for school when we were in his New York loft. He’d painted a series of stunning studies of blind blues musicians on rough handmade paper. He had gone from New York to Jamaica, where he’d played harmonica with Bob Marley, the only white man to have ever played with the Wailers. OK, Lee, I admit it: you’re pretty cool after all!
My gallery director Thomas Dane championed the Spanish sculptor Pep Duran Esteva, who worked in an old Barcelona shoe factory. We showed artists as diverse as Sonia Boyce, whose work investigated the theme of being a woman of colour, and Bridget McCrum, an elderly sculptor from Devon who carved birds from monumental blocks of stone and made them soar.
During our opening month, we held exhibitions by four emerging artists: Sunil Patel, Margaret Hunter, Emma McClure and Pete Nevin. Pete mentioned that he thought the girl who was working in the studio next door to him had ‘something about her’, so I decided to pay her a visit.
Just entering Tracey’s studio was an experience in itself. Streams of tracing paper toilet roll were hanging from the ceiling to the floor and I had to weave my way through them to get to the back of the room, where Tracey was sitting cross-legged on a cushion, drawing. Each strand of paper had been covered in delicate pencil drawings of naked bodies or animals. We chatted for an hour or two, her tentative confidence slowly emerging through her crooked but electrifying smile. I knew then that she possessed some intangible quality, and I kick myself now that I didn’t recognise her potential and invite her to join my stable of artists. I did, however, help to get her career going by writing a letter of guarantee so she could rent her first flat, and also by introducing her to the collector Stuart Evans, whom I took to her studio later that week. I’d convinced Stuart to stop buying art by dead modern British artists and have the courage to collect young emerging ones and he embraced the challenge with enthusiasm, buying an oil painting. It was Tracey Emin’s first sale.
Witnessing the impact that a sale can have on an artist was one of the most rewarding aspects of running a gallery. As soon as the collector had committed to a work, I would call the artist with the good news, which meant, more often than not, that they could cover next month’s rent. When you buy a work, you’re playing a role in the creative process by both enabling an artist and encouraging them to continue.
In those days I’d spend hours in freezing studios as we selected works for shows, regretting that I hadn’t remembered to wear gloves and thick-soled shoes. Trust between artist and dealer is paramount as you discuss which pieces to hang and which ones to set aside and possibly rework. This process takes time, and lifelong friendships can be formed in the process. I felt as if I was taking a little of the artist’s soul away with me as I carried their works to my van.
In 1987 I found myself sitting at dinner next to a quietly spoken, modest man called Robert Loder, whom I could tell also took pleasure in the absurdity of life. Before long we realised we shared an interest in art and he told me that he’d just donated his collection of prints to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In 1959 he’d spent a year in Johannesburg, working with Trevor Huddleston, the celebrated bishop who was involved in the fight against South African Apartheid. He had developed an interest in African art and formed the African Arts Trust. Later on, he and the sculptor Anthony Caro set up the Triangle Workshop, bringing artists from different countries together to explore new ideas.
‘Blimey,’ I thought, ‘this man knows his onions.’
‘Which do you think is more interesting, welded sculpture or moulded sculpture?’ he asked. I should have confessed that I hadn’t a clue but instead launched into some spurious answer, gesticulating wildly with my hands and catching the tip of my nose with my little fingernail in the process. As I dabbed at the bleeding wound with my napkin, Robert smiled but not wanting to humiliate me said nothing, and I adored him from that moment on. We became firm friends, and when I later asked him if he would be director of my gallery, he said yes.
Robert and I would visit exhibitions together at least once a week, and I came to be profoundly influenced by his enthusiasm for the role that artists play in our lives. He recognised that visionaries are often outsiders and forgave their eccentricities, supporting them by offering spaces in which they could experiment, as well as with the occasional purchase. He not only encouraged disheartened artists to continue, helping them articulate their vision, but also connected them to collectors and galleries. It was thanks to him that I showed Fred Pollock, Beezy Bailey and Louis Maqhubela, all of whom are still respected artists.
Early on in our friendship, I confided in Robert that I had a phobia of some social interactions. One example was that I tended to freeze when asking the girls behind the front desk at Sotheby’s and Christies for directions because they had an uncanny knack of making me feel unworthy. He smiled at me and said, ‘I was taught a rule of thumb when I was your age and it hasn’t failed me yet.’
‘Tell me,’ I laughed, expecting him to crack some joke, but in fact he gave me an astonishingly simple tip, which still helps me almost daily.
‘Almost inevitably,’ he said, ‘people are the size they make you feel. If they make you feel funny, they usually have a good sense of humour themselves. If they make you feel boring, they’re inevitably mind-numbingly dull. And if they make you feel smart, they’re usually pretty clever.
Anyway, those posh auction house girls aren’t interested in adding “MBA” to their names – they’re just after their MRS.’
Robert had become acquainted with an extraordinary group of intellectuals who were trying to undermine the hideous South African regime from within. These included the Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer, her husband, the art dealer Reinhold Cassirer and their neighbours, Sydney and Felicia Kentridge. Sydney was a respected barrister who made his name representing the family of Steve Biko at the inquest following Biko’s death in police custody. When Reinhold asked Robert if he could recommend a London gallery who would hold an exhibition for Sidney’s son William, Robert suggested the Vanessa Devereux Gallery.
Born in 1955, William Kentridge studied politics and African studies at university and went on to study art at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, after which he studied at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq, a school in Paris that specialises in miming, movement, and physical theatre. Three years later, after two low-key shows at the Market Gallery in Johannesburg, this quietly spoken man walked into my tiny space wearing what I now know to be his uniform of black trousers and a white shirt and carrying a huge roll of drawings under his arm. He unfurled the roll and showed me his mesmerising charcoals.
‘This one, The Kiss, is a metaphor for the relationship between F. W. de Klerk and President Pinochet of Chile,’ he explained. ‘And that’s a self-portrait of me, as I fall from the picture in despair.’
I looked on in silence.
‘And this image of a suburban swimming pool filled with the detritus of consumerism is pretty self-explanatory. Johannesburg is a strange place to be right now,’ he went on. ‘Every year we fortify our houses against the masses, with incremental precision – our walls a little higher here, some extra razor-wire there. Creeping fear is so insidious.’
His drawings were tough, lyrical and stunning, and I was desperate to show them. We had one small hurdle to overcome – the embargo on South African sports, goods and culture. I knew that this work was important and needed an international audience, so William and I decided to simply go ahead and have the exhibition – to hell with any backlash.
Working on the Marrakech Biennale twenty years later, I was confronted with a similar dilemma when I had to decide whether or not to show an Israeli-born artist after there had been some negative coverage in the Arab press around her inclusion. I referred then to the South African cultural embargo, an initiative that had proved that denying a country a cultural voice has no bearing on its political outcome – in fact, the opposite is true. Unless it is state-sponsored, art from even the most extreme regime should never be censored.
Over the next five years we held three exhibitions of work by William Kentridge. I went to visit him in South Africa and saw his technique for making stop-motion animated films first-hand. Robert and I spent a happy week in Italy with his family, helping with the harvest at the local vineyard. I learned about the role the arts play in politics and their importance in defining a nation’s identity and introducing humour at the darkest moments. I also learned how art can better create impact through raising questions rather than preaching didactic messages.
In mid-1980s London, galleries tended to show established artists and were clustered in Mayfair, on or around Cork Street. The Young British Artists were just leaving art school and the East End hadn’t yet become a gallery district. The Lisson Gallery was one of the few other galleries that dared to show young experimental artists. We wanted to celebrate young talent and give it a voice. We were perfectly positioned to do this in Portobello: it was not only inexpensive but it also had a somewhat anarchic atmosphere. To us, anything seemed possible.
Meanwhile, other interesting spaces were opening up in Portobello: Kitty and Joshua Bowler opened Crucial Gallery, Catherine Turner and Chris Kewbank at the Special Photographers Company, Anatol Orient’s pioneering ceramics gallery and Prue O’Day’s gallery, Anderson O’Day.
Understanding the power of a street gathering with performance art, live music and free wine, Anatol, Prue and I called a meeting with the other arts-interested people in the Portobello area, with a view to launching a festival. The idea of inviting all the galleries, bars and restaurants in the area to take part in a celebration of the arts was a popular one.
We launched the Portobello Arts Festival on a balmy April evening, opening with our first Kentridge exhibition. The response from the public was overwhelming. Halfway through the evening, I left Reinhold to deal with the crowds desperate to buy the works, and wandered out onto the street. As I walked down the busy road past countless animated faces, for a fleeting moment I felt as if I was at the centre of the universe.
***
London, July 2017
Beezy Bailey called me last month to tell me that Robert Loder had advanced colon cancer. I went to visit him that afternoon and we sat in his homely conservatory, surrounded by books, photographs and paintings.
‘What a rich and varied life the art world has offered us, Robert,’ I said, after a few minutes of contemplative silence.
‘Yes, it has rather,’ he said, his eyes lighting up.
‘You have no idea how grateful I am for all your help in the early days of my gallery,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t have done it without you.’
‘Here, I’ve got something for you,’ he said, cocking his head while writing something in a copy of his book Making Art in Africa.
I looked him in the eye as he handed me the book. ‘Ah, Robert,’ I said, ‘you’re still as beautiful as ever.’ He smiled and we walked to the door. When he had closed the door, I sat on his front step and opened the book.
‘For Vanessa,’ he had written. ‘We had a good time on the journey.’
Yes, I agreed, thinking over the cast of characters from my world back then. We certainly did.