Warhol, Hockney, Dali and the Surrealists …
The Spectre at the Feast
Said hello to lots of people, who said hello to me … This entry in November 1976 virtually sums up the entire contents of the diaries which Warhol kept for the last ten years of his life. The endless parties and gallery openings drift by in a dream of Manhattan, touched by movie stars and pop celebrities. Mick and Bianca, Jack Nicholson and Jackie O, Madonna and Yoko flare briefly through a prose as soft and depthless as his screen prints of car crashes and electric chairs. As he moves through the New York dusk with his white wig and ashen pallor, Warhol resembles a spectre at the feast, a role in which he seems literally to have cast himself. In June 1968 he had been shot and critically wounded by Valerie Solanas, founder of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, who had played a small part in his film Bike Boy. Semi-conscious, Warhol heard his doctors say that he had died, and from then on considered himself ‘officially back from the dead’.
Sadly, Warhol’s creative imagination failed to join him on the return journey, and the gun-shots in the Factory sounded the effective end of his remarkable career. Was Warhol the last important artist to emerge since the Second World War? The works of his fellow pop-artists, the comic-strip blow-ups of Roy Lichtenstein and the billboard murals of James Rosenquist, seem as dated as half-forgotten advertisements. By contrast, Warhol’s silk-screened soup-cans and celebrities, criminals and race riots are now even more vivid than their original sources, exposing the eerie banality of the world that modern communications have created. The multiple images mimic the mass-produced news photographs that swamp our retinas, and make an unsettling judgment on our notions of fame and success.
What sets Warhol apart is his effortlessly assumed naivety, a wide-eyed innocence that recalls an earlier filmmaker. In many ways Warhol is the Walt Disney of the amphetamine age. In his silk-screen images there is the same childlike retelling of the great fairy-tales of our time, the mythic lives of Elvis and Marilyn, Liz and Jackie. Presented in cartoon form, the replicated frames resemble film strips, their colours hand-painted by a studio of assistants.
Like Disney, he then moved on to wildlife documentary films, Flesh, Trash and Bad, his camera lens observing the mating rituals and reproductive cycles of the canyon-life of Manhattan. And Warhol, of course, was for ever his own greatest creation, a Valium-numbed Mickey Mouse in a white fright-wig. His dead-pan comments on his own work show a teasing astuteness. ‘If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings. There’s nothing behind it … I want to be a machine … Everybody’s plastic. I want to be plastic …’
Inevitably, his dream came true. Why did this brilliant and gifted man – after Warhol, remember, came Schnabel with his wall-loads of broken crockery and the lurid twilight of Gilbert & George – lose his inspiration and devote himself for his last twenty years to commercial portraits and the cocktail party circuit described in his diaries?
As a child Warhol was a keen reader of movie magazines, and all his life remained star-struck by the rich and famous. Together, his paintings and films constitute the ultimate fan-magazine devoted to celebrity. The multiple images of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of these desperate women, while the Day-Glo palette returns them to the innocent world of the child’s colouring book. The same banalization of celebrity seems to have affected Warhol himself, ensnaring him in the reductive process he had once observed in the glitterati around him. He records in July 1983: ‘There was a party at the Statue of Liberty, but I’d already read publicity of me going to it so I felt it was done already.’
So the diaries unroll, recording the endless parties (nine, I counted, in one evening alone) and not a single interesting conversation. He notes the impossible arrogance of Jane Fonda and reflects without envy on the astronomical prices paid to his fellow-artists Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns – he himself was having to get by on $25,000 portraits of bankers and their wives. Neutral to the last, he confirms his Valium addiction and lists the deaths of his friends from Aids, a fear of which may have led to the slight social ostracism he seems to have suffered. People avoid him, fail to invite him to parties, seat him at remote tables. One assumes that his unexpected death in 1987 after gall-bladder surgery would not have unduly surprised him. By then he was almost as celebrated as the stars he so thrillingly admired, his imagination fixed for ever in those carefree days in New York ten years earlier, when ‘it was wall-to-wall everybody rich and famous, and you couldn’t understand how they were all in town because it was August, and then you know it is a great city’.
Escape into the Seraglio
Affable and engaging, his Yorkshire savvy filtered through the warmest shades of California sunshine, David Hockney wears his celebrity more casually than any post-war artist. Neither Warhol, with his eerie, death’s-head stare, nor Dali, too often coming on like a hallucinating speak-your-weight machine, ever achieved the comfortable rapport with his audience that Hockney has been able to take for granted since the 1960s.
Together, Hockney’s life and work sum up exactly what the public today asks of its artists. Cannily, Hockney has saved his real waywardness for his life-style – the gold lamé jacket and dyed blond hair, once so outrageous, and the pool-boys high in the Hollywood Hills – while his paintings have remained wholly acceptable to his Sunday supplement admirers. The playgroup palette reminds them of the kindergarten paintboxes with which they dabbled as toddlers, while the images of Los Angeles offer a romanticized vision of that latter-day Samarkand among the freeways. In many respects, Hockney performs the role today which Alma-Tadema played for his Victorian audience. Both artists have satisfied the public’s need for exotic, far-away lands filled with graceful houris and sybaritic dreams. Both specialized in swimming-pools, but where Alma-Tadema, depicting the seraglios of a wholly mythical east, surrounded his marble grottos with pretty girls, Hockney furnishes the pools of his equally mythical west with a parade of pretty boys.
Anyone who has spent even five minutes in Los Angeles can see that this city of dreadful night is nothing like the sanitized realm invented by Hockney in his paintings of the 1960s. Hockney’s Los Angeles resembles the real terrain of dingbats and painted glue, stretching as far as forever under a tangle of overhead wires, only in the sense that Rick’s Cafe resembles the real Casablanca. Needless to say, Hockney’s vision is all the better for that, and I for one wish that he had stayed with his houris in the Hollywood Hills, painting ever bigger and bigger splashes. But the great period of the swimming-pools had passed with the end of the 1970s, at about the time when the first British visitors arrived en masse and discovered the reality of his imaginary city.
By then Hockney had himself begun to discover reality in the form of photography, a long-standing enthusiasm which seems to have seized the centre stage of his imagination during the 1980s. Hockney on Photography is a lavishly illustrated guide to the series of photo-collages he has made in the last six years. These, he believes, pose a fundamental challenge to the ‘one-eyed’ tradition that has always dominated photography since its birth.
In his interviews with the filmmaker Paul Joyce, Hockney describes his first experiments with the Polaroid camera and the significance for the future of photography of what he calls his ‘joiners’. He ranges widely over the history of western painting, contrasting its single-point perspective with the generalized perspective of eastern art, and discusses his attempts in the photo-collages to enlarge the dimension of time and infuse a greater degree of realism. Hockney speaks with all his customary wit and intelligence, though he is frequently pushed over the top by an immensely subservient interviewer. ‘I wonder whether you are going almost beyond art itself,’ he gushes. ‘Photography is no longer the same after this work of yours …’
‘Picasso and others then took off from Cezanne, and now I’m trying to take off from Picasso in an even more radical way,’ Hockney rejoins. He disdains the ignorant viewpoint of ‘people who think they know about art, or write for the Guardian’.
Suitably chastened, I none the less feel that Hockney’s ambitious claims suffer severely when placed against the actual photo-collages. The overlapping rectangular prints form a mosaic of sharp angles and unintegrated detail that soon irritates the eye. Hockney maintains that the joiners are ‘much closer to the way that we actually look at things’ but the human eye is not faceted, and the only people who see like this are suffering from brain damage. Gazing at these jittery panoramas one sees the world through the eyes of a concussed bumblebee rather than, as Hockney hopes, through the visionary lens of some future Rembrandt of the Rolleiflex. There is no sense of when the separate photographs were taken, and the collages could equally have been shuffled together from cut-up copies of the same snapshot. A masterpiece of still photography such as Cartier-Bresson’s ‘The Informer’, reproduced in the book, showing the revenge of concentration camp inmates, resonates with a richness of meanings that transcends the single image and the moment of time it records.
These resonances are missing from the photo-collages, which work, if at all, only as still lives or landscapes. Hockney himself gives the game away when he admits that his technique would be unsuitable for a serious subject like the tragic image of a napalmed child on a Vietnam highway, also reproduced. I hope Hockney returns to his swimming-pool near Mulholland Drive, shuts his eyes to the city below and once again brings us the candied dreams of his mythic west.
In the Voyeur’s Gaze
This August, 300 yards from our apartment in Juan-les-Pins, the pleasant park of eucalyptus and fir trees between the RN7 and the sea had unexpectedly vanished, along with the old post office and the tabac selling the Marseille edition of the Guardian. In their place was an immense bare-earth site, exposed soil raked by bulldozers, for the moment occupied by an air-conditioned pavilion fit for some latter-day caliph resting en route from Nice Airport to his summer palace in Super-Cannes.
Cautiously entering the pavilion, we found ourselves in a property developer’s showroom, filled with promotional displays and a huge model of the new Côte d’Azur, ‘truly the French California’. An attractive guide took us on a tour of this visionary realm, a multilingual Scheherazade who swiftly spun her 1,001 tales of the world in waiting. Here, at the newly named Antibes-les-Pins, will arise the first ‘intelligent city’ of the Riviera. Outwardly, the pitched roofs supported by dainty classical columns, the pedestrian piazzas and thematic gardens suggest something to calm the fears of our uneasy heir to the throne, but behind the elegant façades everything moves with the speed of an electron.
The 10,000 inhabitants in their high-tech apartments and offices will serve as an ‘ideas laboratory’ for the cities of the future, where ‘technology will be placed at the service of conviviality’. Fibre-optic cables and telemetric networks will transmit data banks and information services to each apartment, along with the most advanced fire, safety and security measures. To cap it all, in case the physical and mental strain of actually living in this electronic paradise proves too much, there will be individual medical tele-surveillance in direct contact with the nearest hospital.
I’ve no doubt that Antibes-les-Pins, to be completed by 1999, will be a comfortable, pleasant and efficient place in which to live and work. Claire, my girl-friend, couldn’t wait to move in. While I dozed on the balcony with Humphrey Carpenter’s Geniuses Together, an enjoyable memoir of the 1920s Paris of Gertrude Stein, Joyce and Hemingway, Claire had discovered a piece of the twenty-first century under my nose.
The next day, as we drove to Marseille to see the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Musée Cantini, police helicopters raced overhead along the high-speed auto-route, while Canadair flying boats water-bombed the blazing hillsides a few miles from the city. The endless marinas and highways of the Côte d’Azur, and the fibre-optic vision of Antibes-les-Pins, reminded me of how technologically obsessed the French have always been. The future, which in Britain has been dead for decades, still thrives in the French imagination and gives its people their strong sense of get up and go. Prince Charles may be doing his best to propel the British into a nostalgic past where, in due course, he will feel more comfortable under an ill-fitting crown, but the French are still living in the future, far more fascinated by high-tech office blocks, electronic gadgets and Minitels than they are by Escoffier and Saint-Laurent.
Walking around the Edward Hopper paintings in the quiet gallery near the Old Port, we had entered yet another uniquely special world, that silent country of marooned American cities under a toneless, depression-era sky, of entropic hotel rooms and offices where all clocks have stopped, where isolated men and women stare out of one nothingness into the larger nothingness beyond. It was ironic to see the French visitors to the exhibition, residents one day, perhaps, of the California of the new Côte d’Azur, enthusing over Hopper’s images of a stranded US. They seemed to show the same appreciation for these pictures of a vanished American past that an earlier generation of Americans had felt for the Impressionist painters and their evocation of the Paris of the belle époque. Presumably, too, they saw Hopper’s close links with Degas and Monet, and recognized that in a sense this American painter was the last of the French impressionists.
Surprisingly, for a painter who seems so completely of his own country, Hopper’s ties to France are strong. To British eyes Hopper’s melancholy bars and hotel rooms sum up the America of the 1930s and 1940s, the antithesis of the folksy and sentimental Saturday Evening Post covers of Norman Rockwell. Hopper depicts that hidden and harder world glimpsed in the original Postman Always Rings Twice, and many of his paintings could be stills from some dark-edged James M. Cain thriller.
Yet Hopper’s imagination was formed across the Atlantic, above all by the three visits to France which he made before the First World War. Born in Nyack, New York State, in 1882, Hopper was a life-long francophile. In the catalogue of the Marseille exhibition Gail Levin, curator of the Hopper collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, points out that Hopper’s passion for all things French extended far beyond painting to take in poetry and the novel, theatre and cinema. During their long marriage he and his American wife, Josephine Nevison Hopper, frequently wrote to each other in French, although they were never to visit France together.
At the New York School of Arts his teachers lectured Hopper enthusiastically on Courbet, Degas, Renoir and Van Gogh, and Hopper later spoke of the ‘Vital importance of the French art of the nineteenth century for American painting’. In 1906, when he arrived on his first visit to France, he was consummating an already intense love affair. After the money-driven tumult of New York he found Paris elegant and unhurried. He particularly liked the way the Parisians seemed to live their entire lives in the street, and spent his time sketching them in the boulevards and cafés.
Among these drawings a figure appeared who would dominate the paintings of Hopper’s maturity – a nude woman standing by an open window, hand to her face in a meditative pose. In spite of Hopper’s strict Baptist upbringing, or perhaps because of it, as Gail Levin comments, Hopper was especially fascinated by the prostitutes who plied their trade in the streets of Paris, and the sight of these women seems to have unlocked the door of his sexual imagination. In his sketches, the prostitutes sit in their cafes, indifferent to the stares of the passers-by, marking out for the first time the voyeuristic space that separates Hopper from the mysterious and impassive women who dominate his paintings.
Nearly forty years later, in ‘Morning in a City’ (1944), we see the same woman by her open window, standing naked by an unmade bed as she stares into the street below. She appears again and again, in ‘Night Windows’ of 1928 and ‘Hotel Room’ of 1931, as if glimpsed from a passing elevated train or through an open hotel-room door. This voyeur’s eye bereft of emotion, in which all action is suspended, all drama subordinated to the endless moment of the stare, seems to be the key to Hopper’s paintings. Even the isolated houses and office buildings that form a large part of his subject matter are depicted as if they too are the object of a voyeur’s gaze.
In 1909 and 1910 Hopper made two further journeys to France. On his return he married Josephine Nevison, and when she asked him why she attracted him he replied: ‘You have curly hair, you know a little French, and you are an orphan.’ Curiously, Josephine Hopper, to whom he remained happily married for the rest of his life, served as his model for almost all the solitary women whom Hopper poses in their tired hotel rooms.
He never again crossed the Atlantic. He and Josephine bought a car and embarked on a series of long drives across the United States, to Colorado, Utah and California. Hopper’s paintings depict an archetypal America of small cities and provincial towns, late-night bars embalmed in the empty night, airless offices and filling stations left behind by the new highway, but seen through an unfailingly European eye. The mysterious railway lines that cross many of his paintings are reminiscent of Chirico’s, and his steam locomotives might pull the carriages that Delvaux left stranded in their sidings, while his strange nudes sleep-walk in the evening streets.
Out of sympathy with the art of his American contemporaries, he protested publicly in 1960 against what he felt was the excessive attention given to the abstract expressionists. In a sense he had bypassed the American art of the twentieth century, and his own roots went back to the Paris he had known before the First World War. Still at work after the deaths of Bonnard, Leger and Matisse, Hopper may arguably be not only the last impressionist, but the last great French painter. Hopper’s ‘New York Movie’ of 1939 might easily have been painted by Degas had the latter lived on into the age of the great picture palaces. In a gloomy side-chapel the usherette stares into the carpeted darkness, lost in her own dreams while a larger dream fills the distant screen. Degas remarked that he painted his women subjects as if he was seeing them through a keyhole, catching them in their most intimate and unselfcon-scious moments. Degas’ women are precursors of Hopper’s, but in painting the depression America of the 1930s Hopper brings his eye to bear on the alienation of the twentieth-century city.
His women expose themselves to a far more public gaze than a keyhole. They stand by their open windows as if no one can see them, as if the anonymity of the modern city renders them invisible to the passengers of a passing train. They expose everything but reveal nothing. In a late-night bar, in the ‘Nighthawks’ of 1942, a couple sit like characters on a theatre stage, but no drama is communicated to the audience. Hopper’s gaze is far removed from that of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. He is uninterested in whatever banal mystery surrounds his solitary men and women, or in whatever pointless business is transacted in their provincial offices.
Leaving this powerful but unsettling exhibition, we set off for the Old Port and a necessary drink at a quayside cafe. Beyond the white picket fence which I had last seen in The French Connection was moored the life-size replica of a square-rigged sailing ship from Polanski’s ill-fated Pirates, a masterpiece of fibre-glass that towers above the fishing-boats in the harbour. Two years ago it was moored at Cannes, as if taking its revenge on the film festival where it came unstuck, but has now moved down the coast to Marseille, and it was ironic to see the natives of the great seaport paying their 30 francs to inspect this cathedral of floating kitsch.
But for once kitsch was reassuring. As the Côte d’Azur of Matisse and Picasso gives way for the last time to the fibre-optic, telemetric California of Antibes-les-Pins, to English language radio stations and the science park of Sophia-Antipolis, Hopper’s marooned hotel rooms appear positively inviting, as his French admirers may have realized. In the context of the future unwrapping itself on our doorsteps Hopper’s voyeurism and undisguised loneliness seem almost like intimacy. Penned in their high-security apartments, constant medical tele-surveillance linking them to the nearest hospital, a generation of even more isolated women will soon stare across their bedrooms. But this time there will be no keyholes through which others can observe them, no half-open doorways or windows on to the watching night.
A Humming-bird for Salvador Dali
Scurrying from continent to continent in his surrealist search for a quarry he never identified, Edward James led his life as if he had forever mislaid his invitation to the Mad Hatter’s tea party. The highest compliment one can pay this spoilt and eccentric man, who must have been one of the most tiresome people imaginable, is to say that no one else so deserved to sit beside Alice and the March Hare at that magical table.
During the dark days of the late 1940s, when I was first discovering surrealism for myself, the name of Edward James began to appear in catalogues and reference books. Who was this mysterious collector, all the more strangely an Englishman, for years the patron of a group of artists regarded as little more than charlatans? A tantalizing clue appeared in Magritte’s ‘Not to Be Reproduced’, a double portrait of the back of James’s head as he stood beside a mirror with Lautréamont’s Song of Maldoror, the black bible of surrealism, and gradually a few facts about James began to emerge. He had been active in surrealist circles in the 1930s, and had financed a ballet season for George Balanchine. Dali described him as ‘my little humming-bird’ and, on the family estate near Chichester, James had furnished a house with Dali’s sofa in the shape of Mae West’s lips, and a stair carpet into which were stitched the bath-time footprints of his wife, the dancer Tilly Losch.
Apart from these details, there was little more to go on, and James himself seemed to vanish until Philip Purser’s Where Is He Now? – The Extraordinary Worlds of Edward James, published in 1978, and now revised and enlarged as Poeted: The Final Quest of Edward James. In his lively detective story, Purser describes how he tracked James down to a remote hillside in Mexico, where he was building a jungle Xanadu among the snakes and parrots. Unhappily for his long-time admirers, James turned out to be a shrill and eccentric old man pottering about in an Old Etonian blazer, who talked and twittered but had nothing interesting to say. Yet this was the man who had opened his purse so generously to the surrealists, and whose judgements had been tested by time, in a way that those of the Saatchis, and the New York bankers at present buying warehouses of Manhattan kitsch, are never likely to be.
Fashions in biography change, as they do in the novel. Ruthless documentation of frailty is now the vogue, a fashion set off in the 1970s by American academic biographers who funded teams of PhD students eager to scan ancient hotel receipts and discover exactly how many whiskey sours Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald drank on a dull afternoon in Atlanta in 1928. Richard Ellmann’s much praised biography of Oscar Wilde took frankness a stage further. Scarcely any sense of Wilde appears in this massive account – he comes across as flawed but vaguely presidential, rather like Goering – but the book is filled with details of sheet stains at the Savoy, Wilde’s symptoms and pus-filled diseases, the exact daily distance he was forced to climb on the prison treadmill and, above all, the money he made, details which fascinate us but may strike future readers as prurient or irrelevant.
Now John Lowe, the former principal of West Dean College – the arts and crafts foundation which James set up before his death in 1984 – has written a full-scale biography in what may be a new mode, of portraits composed by biographers who actively dislike their subjects. He describes himself as a friend of James and ‘a kind of enemy … my feelings towards him varied from amused affection to a black loathing. There were moments when I thought him an evil man.’ But James was always unexpected, and if he was boring, at least he was boring in a new way. Both these biographies are shrewd and entertaining accounts of this monster of egotism, who seems to have made up for an empty childhood by paying the adult world to pretend to be a huge indulgent nursery.
He was born in 1907 to a wealthy Edwardian family which had made its fortune in American mining and railways. His mother was a society beauty and court favourite, and James was long rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Edward VII. In later life James, who loathed his mother (once, when calling for a child to accompany her to church and asked which one, she snapped: ‘Whichever one goes with my blue gown!’) suggested that in fact she was the King’s illegitimate daughter – it’s tempting to speculate on the dynastic possibilities of a surrealist monarch ascending to the English throne, though this may well be about to happen…
At Oxford he was an intimate of Betjeman and Randolph Churchill, hung his rooms with silks and black velvet, and became a poet. Soon after he inherited both his father’s and his uncle’s fortunes, and decided to leave the university and serve as an honorary attaché at Rome. The surrealist impulse was already well developed. In a secret report he astounded the Foreign Office by informing them that Mussolini was laying down the keels of 300 submarines (in fact, three, but someone as rich as James could scarcely be expected to count). By the early 1930s he had established himself as a patron of the avant-garde, underwriting Balanchine’s Ballet 1933 and befriending Dali and Magritte at a time when they needed help. Although a lifelong homosexual, he became infatuated with Tilly Losch, who saw him as little more than a hyper-trophied cash-till. On their honeymoon night, crossing America by train, he tried to enter her cabin and was greeted with ‘Edward, don’t be a fool. Everyone knows you’re homosexual. That’s why I agreed to marry you.’
In most upper-class English families this would have been the recipe for a long and happy union, but all his life James was driven by an intense restlessness. In 1939 he abandoned England and settled in America, staying first with Frieda Lawrence in Taos, and then moving to Los Angeles, drawn by Aldous Huxley and the Vedanta movement. But the Hollywood intellectuals were only interested in him as long as he picked up the bill, and by the late 1940s James was already developing certain Howard Hughes-like symptoms of separation from reality – he moved from one LA hotel to another, obsessed with the cleanliness of the bedlinen, covering every surface in the rooms with layers of tissue paper.
At last, presumably in a final attempt to create some kind of concrete dream for himself, he moved to a remote jungle village in northern Mexico and began to build a strange palace for the birds. This homage to Max Ernst, on which he spent some $10 million, was unfinished at his death, and is already being undermined by a nearby stream.
The Artist at War
Our images of war today come almost entirely from the combat newsreel and photograph, their visual impact bought at a certain cost in reflection and insight. Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’ and Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ scarcely match for sheer horror the Vietnam newsreel of a naked girl, skin stripped from her back, stumbling along a road from a napalmed village, or the first film footage of Belsen and Dachau. Satellite television now brings the realities of the Gulf War not just into our living rooms but deep into our brains, with scarcely known effects on the imagination.
The Falklands and Vietnam newsreels gave us a convincing idea of what it was like to be a soldier, but the TV reports from the Gulf incite our imaginations in a wholly new way, urging us to become a cruise missile. Breathtaking super-technologies confirm every Rambo-like fantasy of battlefield omnipotence. The nose-cameras mounted on the laser-guided smart bombs plunge us through doorways and ventilation shafts, every hit a bull’s eye, stored away for future reference in the viewer’s memory. Before anyone is hurt we are back to General Schwarzkopf, the P. T. Barnum of Desert Storm, jovially commenting on what some lucky Iraqi driver saw in his rear-view mirror as he crossed a bridge disintegrating behind him.
Already one can visualize the combatants in a future war returning from their sorties and fire-fights to scan the evening rushes, and perhaps planning the next day’s tactical strike in terms of its viewer potential. Even now the shoulder-holsters worn by officers of the British Armoured Brigade look suspiciously like a glamour accessory – with its chest-hugging harness, the shoulder-holster has always been the male brassiere, a heavy-duty 375 Magnum holster the equivalent of a loaded 44 D cup. If the war gets rougher, the shoulder-holsters will presumably jut more aggressively, like the corsetry of barmaids in a tough roadhouse…
Can the old-fashioned war artist with brushes and paint-box ever hope to match this electronic video-game? The artists of the Second World War found themselves competing with the newsreel and photograph, but these were recorded for the most part by men and women in the field of battle, who shared the danger and panic, and had no time to construct a reflective frame around their camera lenses.
Looking through the huge collection of paintings and drawings that make up Images of War, produced by some 200 artists from twelve countries, one has a sense that a process is taking place far closer to dreaming than direct reportage – an oblique and restorative working through of experience, of repair and renewal, a coming to terms with violent action and its aftermath. Together they form a powerful and moving record, not only of World War II, but of the effects of battle on the artists who were present. Many of the paintings were commissioned by governments or armed forces, but others, like the poems and drawings found on the body of a Japanese officer, were the responses of individuals who probably never expected to share them. It would be tempting to say that national characteristics emerge intact – the British artists do show the nuggety courage of the ordinary tommy and civilian enduring the blitz, while the American artists have a graphic sweep and scale that reflect the determination and emotional needs of a great military power flexing its strength for the first time.
But the German artists seem unremarkably muted, with none of the visual and ideological fervour of Waffen SS recruitment posters, though it is hard to tell how far this is governed by the process of selection. Without exception, the Russian front is pictured as a hell of cold and desolation. Franz Eichhorst’s Soldiers shows ill-clad Wehrmacht troopers huddling in blankets in a frozen ditch, and it is no surprise that the painting was never exhibited.
The Russian paintings are the most impressive of all, and for once the conventions of state-sanctioned social realism – tractor art, at its crudest – come together to evoke the overwhelming national crisis that summoned the will of the peasants, soldiers and factory workers who saw their country turned into a sea of fire and death. The Homeric scale of their stand against German barbarism comes through these paintings more strongly than in any others in Images of War, and suggests that the notion of heroism had already died in the west.
But what separates these paintings and drawings is not the nationality of the artists so much as the theatre of war. The images of air combat, sadly, rarely rise above the level of Airfix art, while those of the sea war, such as several vast panoramas of the Dunkirk evacuation, tend to stay within the conventions of the wartime Illustrated London News, compelling though those sepia vistas of great battles often were. The most moving paintings are those of the land war, expressed in a series of often small but telling images – the deadening boredom of railway stations where the ordinary soldier or sailor spent so much of the war; the eerie golden emptiness of an Italian cornfield through which an allied tank moves like a sinister harvester, as if death has lost its way; the shrinking of the infantryman’s world to the ground under his feet, the ever-present cold and his mug of tea.
Wholly absent from this selection is any sense of triumphalism. A reader knowing nothing of the Second World War would find it hard to decide who had won the war and who had lost. None the less, endurance and pride shine through, as they do in what is, for me, the most stirring image in the book, painted in 1985, of a group of elderly Russian ladies, medals heavy on their ample bosoms, posing at a reunion before a mural painted of them forty years earlier when they were Red Army pilots. The distance crossed between the young women and the old, between the clear-cheeked, eager youngsters and their wise and determined older selves, is the distance covered by the paintings in this remarkable book.
The Culture of the Comic Strip
Invisible literatures proliferate around us today – faxes and electronic mail, press releases and office memoranda, obscure genre fictions wrapped in metallized jackets that we scarcely notice on our way to the duty-free shop. One day in the near future, when the last corporate headquarters has been torn down and we all earn our livings at the domestic terminal, anthologies of twentieth-century inter-office memos may be as treasured as the correspondence of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot.
If this seems unlikely, it may be worth noting that the originals of 10 cent comic books published in the 1930s are now worth thousands of pounds, far exceeding in value the first editions of most literary writers of the period. The separation between high and popular culture is now virtually complete, probably to the former’s loss. None of the artists in either of these encyclopaedias would ever have won the Turner Prize, but the influence of the comic strip on film, advertising and the iconography of everyday life has been vastly greater than that of any Arts Council favourite collecting his cheque from the Prince of Wales. In the past fifty years only Dali, Magritte and Warhol have matched the influence of the anonymous artists who inked their splash-panels in the King Features Syndicate ‘bull-pen’, creating the images of a popular culture that range from the Prince Valiant suit in which Elvis Presley romanced the Las Vegas matrons to the Superman clones endorsing a car battery or lavatory cleaner.
Yet, for a form still rarely admitted to polite society, the comic strip had surprisingly classy beginnings. The Comic Magazine, first published, appropriately, on 1 April 1796, contained a Hogarth print in every monthly issue, which together formed the series ‘Industry and Idleness’ and could be regarded as an early form of comic strip. During the nineteenth century, particularly in Britain and the United States, a host of caricature magazines and comic sheets were published, though the first recurring character in his own comic strip only appeared in 1895.
The circulation wars between the American press barons, and advances in the technology of colour printing, led William Randolph Hearst to introduce the first comic strip supplements to his Sunday papers. Humour was still the dominant subject on both sides of the Atlantic, and a huge range of scatty and eccentric characters began to form the folk culture of the twentieth century, from Little Orphan Annie to Popeye and Mutt and Jeff. Together they created a genuinely weird and baroque world that occasionally, as in Little Nemo in Slumberland, produced a dreamlike masterpiece that transcends the limits of the popular medium and has rarely been matched since.
By the 1930s, perhaps in response to the Depression, crime and detective strips were well established, led by Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, and in America the comic book was now openly aimed at an adult readership. In Britain, which lacked the necessary social and geographical mobility, the comic strip was virtually monopolized by children’s humour, of a peculiarly warped and introverted kind, from which I’m glad to have been saved – though as a boy in Shanghai I had my own problems trying to find the exotic world of Terry and the Pirates, an oriental farrago of inscrutable mandarins, dragon ladies and sinister pagodas, among the department stores and art deco cinemas of the real city in which the strip was set.
Unquestionably, the biggest influence on the evolution of the comic strip, and on popular culture generally, was science fiction. Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon embarked on still credible interplanetary adventures, but soon gave way to an army of superheroes, led by Superman and Batman, who stayed home on Earth, battling crime, international terrorism and the Nazi menace. Both had everyday selves with whom the reader could identify, those of newspaper reporter and thoughtful playboy. The superheroes who followed them, Captain Marvel and Captain America, moved beyond the constraints of time and space in their defence of the nation at war. By the 1960s, America’s immense self-confidence and the overheating imagination of the Marvel Comics artists gave birth to a race of god-like figures who existed on the astral plane alone. Among these were the Incredible Hulk, the Amazing Spiderman and, strangest of all, the Silver Surfer, an emissary from the stars sent to warn the people of Earth of their impending doom, a noble and tragic figure who became trapped within our atmosphere. Given to flights of agonized and poetic moralizing, he was one of the few to break the rule that the more advanced the super-science surrounding the hero, the less intelligent and articulate he becomes.
None of these comic strips, I have to admit, has ever held much charm for me, at least since childhood, and the depth psychology of the entire comic book universe I happily leave to others. But it’s impossible to deny the immense visual energy of the comic book artists, with their zooming angles of attack, sudden close-ups and crane-shots. Many of the greatest strips, from Batman to the Fantastic Four, are cinematic tours de force that have strongly influenced contemporary film. The Star Wars series, Sylvester Stallone’s entire career, and recent movies such as Die Hard and Total Recall are little more than imitation comic strips, patterned on the same compensation fantasies and paranoid view of the world. The success of Arnold Schwarzenegger makes sense if one accepts that his grotesque physique and hesitant approach to speech and thought exactly mimic the steroidal musculature and bearing of the comic-book superhero.
It is even more depressing to reflect that American comics are read by virtually the entire US population well into adult life, and have probably been the dominant force in shaping the American imagination, a sobering thought for any British novelist hoping to sell his introverted crochet-work to an American audience. For good or bad, one can see the comic book’s influence not only on film but on the present-day American novel, with its constant foregrounding of action, avoidance of the passive tense and dislike of explanatory matter, its narrative equivalent of a visual climax every four frames, and dialogue that would be more comfortable in capital letters inside a balloon. Tom Wolfe’s journalism and fiction show the process already well developed. Like it or not, the contour lines of our culture have long since side-stepped Bloomsbury and the Left Bank and run back to those anonymous offices in Manhattan and Los Angeles where an exclamation mark is an understatement.
A Still Life
Sir John Pope-Hennessy, sometime director of the V & A and the British Museum, is the last of the arts grandees, a rare and now endangered species that will become extinct at his death. Their triumph in the age of the common man is one of its minor and more intriguing mysteries. Along with Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark, Anthony Blunt and, arguably, Diana Vreeland of Vogue, Sir John has helped to shape the way we respond to the visual arts. If, as is often claimed, our great museums and galleries are the cathedrals of a new secular religion, then Sir John has been one of its greatest pontiffs, presiding over its highest altars with a fastidiousness so rarefied as to be ionospheric. ‘Works of art have always seemed to me to have a supernatural power,’ he writes in this autobiography, and one feels that between Sir John and eternity there now lies nothing but the radiant ether of his exquisite sensibility.
Needless to say, the grotesque over-valuation of the visual arts which Sir John has helped to achieve has been translated into the commodity beloved of all religions in their decline. If the Mona Lisa, entombed in her glass-fronted bunker at the Louvre, were ever to come to market, every brush stroke would probably be worth a million dollars, an estimate implicitly underwritten by Sir John and his fellow grandees.
But a sea-change seems under way, and the great temples of the visual arts are under siege from a new generation of curators, many of them showmen and theme-parkers of a type repellent to Sir John, but who may bring the top-heavy edifice of the fine arts a great deal closer to the ground. Shortly before he left the V & A to become director of the British Museum, Sir John was visited by the secretary of his successor, Dr Roy Strong. She announced that his office would be redecorated by a firm named Supertheatricals Ltd. When asked why this was necessary, she replied: ‘Because Dr Strong will be receiving members of the aristocracy.’ Sir John comments: ‘This was the beginning of a thirteen-year regime that reduced the museum and its staff to a level from which it will not recover for many years.’ Later he is even more scathing about Roy Strong’s successor, ‘a capable librarian named Mrs Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, who embarked on policies of a brainless vulgarity …’
However, the gallery arrangement of which he is most proud, the impressionist collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, with its vast open-plan display of scores of paintings, seems to me to be an example of the airport concourse approach to exhibitions, closer in spirit to the Motor Show than to the scholarly isolation he so values.
To be fair to Roy Strong, he was merely paying Sir John the compliment of trying to imitate him. The opening chapters of this autobiography, unrolling the purple carpet of Sir John’s distinguished ancestry, are a parade of establishment figures who served in the highest echelons of the British army and the Colonial Office – governors, generals, governor-generals, and enough tided ladies to outstare Debrett. As for Supertheatricals Ltd, the name might well describe the endless galleries of renaissance art with which Sir John had begun to redecorate the office of his mind from the earliest age. A major-general’s son, he was sent to Downside at the age of nine, his aesthetic sensibilities already well developed. Of his fellow boys and playground adventures he tells us nothing, and recalls only ‘a passable library’, the Medici prints in the corridors, and his reading of Tacitus, Ovid and Juvenal.
His adolescence, like his life as a whole, is experienced exclusively in terms of the works of art he travels endlessly to admire. Human relationships appear to have been erased from his life long before he went up to Oxford. Physical passion, the realm of the senses, the discovery of sex, seem never to have troubled him. He describes himself as ‘a lifelong celibate’, and seems to have passed his entire Oxford years in the Ashmolean museum. He sets off on his first visit to Italy, which is a procession of frescoes, predellas and altarpieces. We learn nothing of Italian food, women, landscape or even its architecture, of any quickening of the blood and awareness of the charged pleasures of life.
This avoidance of feeling has left an empty heart in this autobiography and, one guesses, in its author’s life. Time and again he introduces us to remarkable and extraordinary people, and then tells us nothing about them. He frequently visits Bernard Berenson, then at the height of his fame, but draws no portrait of BB and fails to comment on his dubious dealings with Duveen. In the entire biography, spanning some eighty years, he never once meets a living twentieth-century painter, though he admires Picasso, Matisse and, surprisingly, the Pop Artists.
In 1938 he joined the V & A, whose walls closed around him for thirty-five years. The Second World War passes in half a dozen pages, and he remembers little more than the ‘fetid smell’ of people sleeping in Holland Park tube station during the blitz. He served in RAF intelligence, and once, bizarrely, found himself inspecting sentries in St James’s Park, of which he remarks: ‘I had never met ordinary people before.’ To his amazement, he finds them ‘congenial and interesting’.
But ordinary people never played much part in Sir John’s life. He has now retired to Florence, where he poses in his apartment wearing a dark, pin-striped suit and tic, the curator of a very rare private collection, himself. As for the outside world, at which he stares in such steely fashion, he refers in the first paragraph of his book to ‘the sweaty tourists’ on the Ponte Vecchio (the next time I dare to set off for the Uffizi I will remember to shower twice and keep a wary eye open for a pair of hypersensitive nostrils), though it is the taxes of those over-charged tourists which have paid Sir John’s salary all these years. But for Sir John, Sir Kenneth, (Sir) Anthony and, even, Sir Roy, the Ponte Vecchio would be far less crowded than it is.
It seems a curious paradox that a man so bereft of human experience, who has never by his own admission enjoyed a physically intimate relationship, who has never seen a child born or, one assumes, a woman naked (shades of Ruskin) should be considered an authority on those masterpieces of western art that celebrate the most impassioned and most mysterious of human experiences.
How does he assess, one is curious to know, Titian’s luscious and ambiguous Venus of Urbino, which hangs only a few hundred yards from his apartment, let alone the legion of annunciations, nativities and agonies in the garden that he has spent his life observing? More interestingly, what vacuum of the human spirit have Sir John and fellow grandees been able to fill so deftly as the impresarios of the British Museum, the Louvre and the Metropolitan, with their dreaming pharaohs, crucifixions and resurrections, the ultimate in supertheatricals waiting for a second de Mille?
The Last Real Innocents
Few of these children smile. Some are wounded, and many are clearly starving, holding out their hands to the camera or raising an empty bowl to a passer-by. They wander around the debris of war, and sit astride a tank turret or the fuselage of a downed bomber as if these were the commonplace furniture of everyday life. Even those playing their games in peacetime seem wary of the sky over their heads, as if watching for a flight of approaching enemy aircraft. Nevertheless, they are clearly children, in the sense that most are small and under ten years old, but they have the look of crushed adults, with eyes far sharper than any one can see today in a suburban playground or shopping mall. Above all, they seem aware that they exist outside time, and have only a confused and not-to-be-remembered past and a future on which they can never rely.
In Children of War, Children of Peace, Robert Capa’s extraordinary images, selected from the 70,000 negatives he left behind at his death in 1954, remind us of how far the world has moved away from the Europe and Asia he began to photograph nearly sixty years ago. Television has glamorized war for us, whether the movie-drenched jungle palette of the Vietnam newsreel or the sinister black-and-white film relayed to our living rooms from the nose-cone cameras of Desert Storm’s smart bombs, which almost incite the television viewer to become a cruise missile.
Meanwhile, the consumer society has turned our cities into extended video arcades, with competing levels of unreality laid down like the strata of an electrographic Troy. Turning the pages of this moving book, one is virtually looking at the last generation of real children, standing silently like witnesses to the last real world. Today’s children, across a large part of the planet, are dressed in trainers and Day-Glo track suits, and they have voices and a body language to match or mimic their television culture heroes. A bored and indulgent adult world has foisted on to its offspring the image of a kind of dandified super-infant, adept at computerspeak by the age of four, tuned in to the latest consumer fads and canny in its reading of its parents’ psychology.
By contrast, Capa’s children, photographed in the China and Spain of the 1930s and in Europe during the 1940s, seem to show no understanding at all of the world around them. They gaze in an undemonstrative way at passing parades, stare up at approaching bombers or trudge with their small suitcases along the refugee road to the nearest frontier, unaware of the significance of the events that have shattered their lives. So powerful are Capa’s images of war that they shape one’s perception of even the most innocent settings. Only Pablo Picasso, photographed in 1948 on the French Riviera at Golfe-Juan as he romps with his baby son, projects an uninhibited joy in the young life between his hands. For the most part, though, Capa tended to photograph peace as if it were another kind of war, and managed to make Europe, and certainly Britain, resemble the third world. As they play their games in the streets of post-war Europe, Capa’s children seem to wait for the sound of tanks or the footsteps of men with guns. Only the few pictures taken in the United States are set in a country that has not known war within its borders this century – though Hemingway’s Idaho, where he is photographed with his son Gregory, surrounded by guns, perhaps qualifies as a kind of honorary war zone.
Given the ever-present background of stress and upheaval, culminating in the photograph of a French Army halftrack taken a few hours before Capa himself was killed by a land mine in Vietnam, it may seem surprising that none of the children show any fear. But children, as long as they are with their parents or adults they trust, can feel touched by war even during the most violent and terrifying times. Bearing in mind the tragic events Robert Capa’s subjects must have witnessed, and the probability that most would grow up to become adults, one can be grateful for even this small measure of innocence preserved.
The Coming of the Unconscious
The images of surrealism are the iconography of inner space. Popularly regarded as a lurid manifestation of fantastic art concerned with states of dream and hallucination, surrealism is the first movement, in the words of Odilon Redon, to place ‘the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible’. This calculated submission of the impulses and fantasies of our inner lives to the rigours of time and space, to the formal inquisition of the sciences, psychoanalysis pre-eminent among them, produces a heightened or alternate reality beyond that familiar to our sight or senses. What uniquely characterizes this fusion of the outer world of reality and the inner world of the psyche (which I have termed ‘inner space’) is its redemptive and therapeutic power. To move through these landscapes is a journey of return to one’s innermost being.
The pervasiveness of surrealism is proof enough of its success. The landscapes of the soul, the juxtaposition of the strange and familiar, and all the techniques of violent impact have become part of the stock-in-trade of publicity and the cinema, not to mention science fiction. If anything, surrealism has been hoist with the petard of its own undisputed mastery of self-advertisement. The real achievements of Ernst, Tanguy and Magritte have only just begun to emerge through the mêlée of megaphones and manifestos. Even in the case of a single painter, such as Salvador Dali, the exhibitionistic antics which the press have always regarded as ‘news’ have consistently obscured the far more important implications of his work.
These contradictory elements reflect the dual origins of surrealism – on the one hand in Dada, a post-World War I movement not merely against war and society, but against art and literature as well, out to perpetrate any enormity that would attract attention to its mission – the total destruction of so-called ‘civilized’ values. The rise of Hitler, a madman beyond the wildest dreams even of the Dadaists, shut them up for good, although the influence of Dada can still be seen in ‘happenings’, in the obscene tableau-sculptures of Keinholz and in the critical dictats of Andre Breton, the pope of surrealism, that ‘surrealism is pure psychic automatism.’ Far from it.
The other, and far older, source of surrealism is in the symbolists and expressionists of the nineteenth century, and in those whom Marcel Jean calls ‘sages of dual civilization’ – Sade, Lautréamont, Jarry and Apollinaire, synthesist poets well aware of the role of the sciences. Sade’s erotic fantasies were matched by an acute scientific interest in the psychology and physiology of the human being. Lautréamont’s Song of Maldoror, almost the basic dream-text of surrealism, uses scientific images: ‘beautiful as the fleshy wattle, conical in shape, furrowed by deep transverse lines, which rises up at the base of the turkey’s upper beak – beautiful as the chance meeting on an operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella’. Apollinaire’s erotic-scientific poetry is full of aircraft and the symbols of industrial society, while Jarry, in ‘The Passion considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race’, unites science, sport and Christianity in the happiest vein of anti-clerical humour.
This preoccupation with the analytic function of the sciences as a means of codifying the inner experience of the senses is seen in the use surrealism made of discoveries in optics and photography – for example, in the physiologist E. J. Marey’s Chronograms, multiple-exposure photographs in which the dimension of time is perceptible, the moving figure of a man represented as a series of dune-like lumps. Its interest in oceanic art, in the concealed dimensions hinted at by Rorschach tests, culminated in its discovery of psychoanalysis. This, with its emphasis on the irrational and perverse, on the significance of apparently random associations, its concept of the unconscious, was a complete mythology of the psyche which could be used for the exploration of the inner reality of our lives.
Something of the ferment of ideas that existed by 1924, when André Breton issued the First Surrealist Manifesto, can be seen from both these histories. What seems extraordinary is the sheer volume of activity, the endless stream of experimental magazines, pamphlets, exhibitions and congresses, films and absurd frolics, as well as a substantial body of paintings and sculpture, all produced by a comparatively small group (far smaller, for example, than the number of writers in science fiction here and in the USA).
Equally, the movement is noted for the remarkable beauty of its women – Georgette Magritte, demure sphinx with the eyes of a tamed Mona Lisa; the peerless Meret Oppenheim, designer of the fur-lined cup and saucer; the mystic Leonora Carrington, painter of infinitely frail fantasies; and presiding above them all the madonna of Port Lligat, Gala Dali, ex-wife of the poet Paul Eluard, who described her before his death as the one ‘with the look that pierces walls’. One could write a book, let alone a review, about these extraordinary creatures – nymphs of another planet, in your orisons be all my dreams remembered.
In so far as they have a direct bearing on the speculative fiction of the immediate future, the key surrealist paintings seem to me to be the following.
An undefined anxiety has begun to spread across the deserted square. The symmetry and regularity of the arcades conceal an intense inner violence; this is the face of catatonic withdrawal. The space within this painting, like the intervals within the arcades, contains an oppressive negative time. The smooth, egg-shaped heads of the mannequins lack all features and organs of sense, but instead are marked with cryptic signs. These mannequins are human beings from whom all time has been eroded, and reduced to the essence of their own geometries.
A large cauldron with legs, sprouting a pipe that ends in a bull’s head. A decapitated woman gestures towards it, but the elephant is gazing at the sky. High in the clouds, fishes are floating. Ernst’s wise machine, hot cauldron of time and myth, is the benign deity of inner space.
A rocky path leads among dusty olive trees. Suddenly a strange structure blocks our way. At first glance it seems to be some kind of pavilion. A white lattice hangs like a curtain over the dark façade, and two elongated chess-men stand to one side. Then we see that this is in no sense a pavilion where we may rest. This terrifying structure is a neurological totem, its rounded forms are a fragment of our nervous systems, perhaps an insoluble code that contains the operating formulae for our own passage through time and space. The annunciation is that of a unique event, the first externalization of a neural interval.
The empty beach with its fused sand is a symbol of utter psychic alienation. Clock time here is no longer valid, the watches have begun to melt and drip. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These are the residues of a remembered moment of time. The most remarkable elements are the two rectilinear objects, formalizations of sections of the beach and sea. The displacement of these two images through time, and their marriage with our own four-dimensional continuum, has warped them into the rigid and unyielding structures of our own consciousness. Likewise, the rectilinear structures of our own conscious reality are warped elements from some placid and harmonious future.
By crushing gouache between sheets of paper, Dominguez produced evocative landscapes of porous rocks, drowned seas and corals. These coded terrains are models of the organic landscapes enshrined in our central nervous systems. Their closest equivalents in the outer world of reality are those to which we most respond – igneous rocks, dunes, drained deltas. Only these landscapes contain the psychological dimensions of nostalgia, memory and the emotions.
This spinal landscape, with its frenzied rocks towering into the air above the silent swamp, has attained an organic life more real than that of the solitary nymph sitting in the foreground. These rocks have the luminosity of organs freshly exposed to the light. The real landscapes of our world are seen for what they are – the palaces of flesh and bone that are the living façades enclosing our own subliminal consciousness.
The sensational elements in these paintings reflect their use of the unfamiliar, their revelation of unexpected associations. If anything, surrealist painting has one dominant characteristic: a glassy isolation, as if all the objects in its landscapes had been drained of their emotional associations, the accretions of sentiment and common usage. What they demonstrate is that the most commonplace elements of reality – for example, the rooms we occupy, the landscapes around us, the musculatures of our own bodies, the postures we assume – may have very different meanings by the time they reach the central nervous system. Surrealism is the first systematic investigation of the most unsuspected aspects of our lives – the meaning, for example, of certain kinds of horizontal perspective, of curvilinear or soft forms as opposed to rectilinear ones, of the conjunction of two apparently unrelated postures.
The techniques of surrealism have a particular relevance at this moment, when the fictional elements in the world around us are multiplying to the point where it is almost impossible to distinguish between the ‘real’ and the ‘false’ – the terms no longer have any meaning. The faces of public figures are projected at us as if out of some endless global pantomime, and have the conviction of giant advertisement hoardings. The task of the arts seems more and more to be that of isolating the few elements of reality from this melange of fictions, not some metaphorical ‘reality’, but simply the basic elements of cognition and posture that are the jigs and props of our consciousness.
Surrealism offers an ideal tool for exploring these objectives. As Dali has remarked, after Freud’s explorations within the psyche it is now the outer world which will have to be eroticized and quantified. Surrealism offers a neutral zone or clearing house where the confused currencies of both the inner and outer worlds can be standardized against each other.
At the same time we should not forget the elements of magic and surprise that wait for us in this realm. In the words of André Breton: ‘The confidences of madmen: I would spend my life in provoking them. They are people of scrupulous honesty, whose innocence is only equalled by mine. Columbus had to sail with madmen to discover America.’
The Touchstone City
For two decades, from 1920 to 1940, Paris and surrealism conducted a passionate affair, broken off when the more fickle of the partners fled to the United States during the Second World War, only to find the door slammed in its face when it returned with the GIs in 1945. As George Melly remarks in his introduction to this enchanting book, it is surprising that an artistic movement so avowedly international in its aims should have identified itself so closely with a single city. Dada, the rumbustious godfather at the movement’s birth, had first appeared during the Great War in, of all places, Zurich. Delvaux and Magritte rarely strayed from Brussels, and Dali, when not at Port Lligat, painted in hotel rooms on both sides of the Atlantic. Most of Max Ernst’s masterpieces, those calcinated landscapes like ‘Europe after the Rain’ that are pre-visions of the third world war, were painted in the Arizona desert they so closely resemble.
None the less, Paris was the great forcing house of surrealism and its theoretical centre, in part because André Breton, surrealism’s ‘Pope’ and one-man think-tank, chose to live there. When Breton left Paris for America, at the outbreak of the Second World War, surrealism died, and never really managed to resuscitate itself. Had Breton remained in Paris, perhaps to work for the resistance, surrealism might have fought off the post-war challenge to its authority posed by Sartre and the existentialists. After the war the movement lost its bearings, though the consumer society of the past forty years, and the creation of a TV monoculture dissolving the last barriers between fantasy and reality, is a surrealist domain in its purest form.
George Melly has long been identified with the English wing of surrealism, first as E. L. T. Mesens’s assistant at the London Gallery, which specialized in surrealist art, and then as one of surrealism’s most intelligent collectors and fuglemen. Recalling his first visit to Paris in 1946 – he had hoped to meet the surrealists, but nearly had his wallet stolen by two prostitutes whose bed he shared – he had the happy notion of revisiting the city and collaborating with a sympathetic photographer on a book about the countless Parisian locales forever associated with the surrealists. The result is the tastiest little feast of wit and pleasure. Michael Wood’s photographs brilliantly complement Melly’s urbane commentary, and without any expressionist or surrealist camera-work illustrate just what inspired the surrealists’ infatuation with Paris. Through his self-effacing camera lens this touchstone city of charm and elegance becomes increasingly eerie, filled with strange passageways and arcades like sets from a remake of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. A forest of curious monuments and obelisks rises into the air, there are restless stone lions that seem to have strayed from a Magritte canvas, and art nouveau Metro stations whose metal railings and canopies seem to be evolving into vegetal forms. Above all, as Melly points out, Paris is filled with a profusion of statuary, resembling the pumice-like figures of a population fossilized by the lava of a nearby Vesuvius.
Melly identifies Paris as feminine, London as strongly, even oafishly, masculine. He wonders why surrealism never took root in England, and cites our Protestantism, our intolerance of ideas and, perhaps most important of all, the absence of café life. Certainly, surrealism failed to take root in New York for the same reason, and only Warhol, with his endless round of parties, found a substitute for the Parisian café.
As soon as Melly’s feet touch the Paris pavements his spirits rise, and he makes an entertaining and amiable guide, retracing the path of his first visit to André Breton in 1952. Breton spoke no English, and Melly struggled with his modest French, but afterwards he had the strong sense that both had talked in English. The best compliment I can pay to this romantic and seductive book is to say that for an hour or two, turning its pages of calm and mysterious photographs, I was quite convinced I had been reading in French.
The Innocent as Paranoid
The art of Salvador Dali is a metaphor that embraces the twentieth century. Within his genius the marriage of reason and nightmare is celebrated across an altar smeared with excrement, in an order of service read from a textbook of psychopathology. Dali’s paintings constitute a body of prophecy about ourselves unequalled in accuracy since Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Voyeurism, self-disgust, biomorphic horror, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings – these diseases of the psyche which Dali rightly diagnosed have now culminated in the most sinister casualty of the century: the death of affect.
This demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures – in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game; and in our ever-greater powers of abstraction – what our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.
Dali’s paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis that produced this glaucous paradise, but document the uneasy pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the twentieth century – sex and paranoia – preside over his life, as over ours. With Max Ernst and William Burroughs he forms a trinity of the only living men of genius. However, where Ernst and Burroughs transmit their reports at midnight from the dark causeways of our spinal columns, Dali has chosen to face all the chimeras of his mind in the full glare of noon. Again, unlike Ernst and Burroughs, whose reclusive personalities merge into the penumbra around them, Dali’s identity remains entirely his own. Don Quixote in a silk lounge suit, he rides eccentrically across a viscous and overlit desert, protected by nothing more than his furious moustaches.
For most people, it goes without saying, Dali is far too much his own man. Although the pampered darling of jet-set aristocracy, many of whom, like Edward James and the Vicomte de Noailles, have done their intelligent best by him, forking out large amounts of cash when he most needed it, the general response to Dali is negative – thanks, first, to the international press, which has always encouraged his exhibitionist antics, and second, to the puritanical intelligentsia of Northern Europe and America, for whom Dali’s subject matter, like the excrement he painted in The Lugubrious Game’, reminds them far too much of all the psychic capitulations of their childhoods.
Admittedly Dali’s chosen persona – part comic-opera barber, part mad muezzin on his phallic tower crying out a hymn of undigested gobbets of psychoanalysis and self-confession (just the kind of thing to upset those bowler-hatted library customs clerks), part genius with all its even greater embarrassments – is not one that can be fitted into any handy category. Most people, even intelligent ones, are not notably inventive, and the effort of devising a wholly new category, and one at that to be occupied by only one tenant, demoralizes them even before they have started.
At the same time it seems to me that the consistent failure to grasp the importance of Dali’s work has a significance that extends far beyond any feelings of distaste for his personal style, and in many respects resembles the failure of literary critics to come to terms with science fiction. Already one can see that science fiction, far from being an unimportant minor offshoot, in fact represents one of the main literary traditions of the twentieth century, and certainly its oldest – a tradition of imaginative response to science and technology that runs in an intact line through Wells, Aldous Huxley, the writers of modern American science fiction, and such present-day innovators as William Burroughs and Paolozzi. One of the conventions of the past thirty years has been that the so-called Modern Movement – i.e., the literary tradition running from Baudelaire and Rimbaud through Joyce and Eliot to Hemingway and Camus, to name a few landmarks – is the principal literary tradition of the twentieth century. The dominant characteristic of this movement is its sense of individual isolation, its mood of introspection and alienation, a state of mind always assumed to be the hallmark of the twentieth-century consciousness.
Far from it. On the contrary, it seems to me that the Modern Movement belongs to the nineteenth century, a reaction against the monolithic philistine character of Victorianism, against the tyranny of the paterfamilias, secure in his financial and sexual authority, and against the massive constraints of bourgeois society. In no way does the Modern Movement have any bearing on the facts of the twentieth century, the first flight of the Wright brothers, the invention of the Pill, the social and sexual philosophy of the ejector seat. Apart from its marked retrospective bias, its obsession with the subjective nature of experience, its real subject matter is the rationalization of guilt and estrangement. Its elements are introspection, pessimism and sophistication. Yet if anything befits the twentieth century it is optimism, the iconography of mass-merchandizing, and naivety.
This long-standing hostility to science fiction, and the inability to realize that the future provides a better key to the present than does the past, is reflected in a similar attitude to surrealism as a whole. Recently, as part of a general rejection and loss of interest in the past, both science fiction and surrealism have enjoyed a sudden vogue, but Dali still remains excluded. He is popular as ever only with the rich – who presumably feel no puritan restraints about exploring the possibilities of their lives – and a few wayward spirits like myself.
Dali’s background was conventional. Born in 1904, the second son of a well-to-do lawyer, he had a permissive childhood, which allowed him a number of quasi-incestuous involvements with governesses, art masters, old beggar women and the like. At art school he developed his precociously brilliant personality, and discovered psychoanalysis. By this time, the late 1920s, surrealism was already a mature art. Chirico, Duchamp and Max Ernst were its elder statesmen. Dali, however, was the first to accept completely the logic of the Freudian age, to describe the extraordinary world of the twentieth-century psyche in terms of the commonplace vocabulary of everyday life – telephones, wristwatches, fried eggs, cupboards, beaches. What distinguishes Dali’s work, above everything else, is the hallucinatory naturalism of his renaissance style. For the most part the landscapes of Ernst, Tanguy or Magritte describe impossible or symbolic worlds – the events within them have ‘occurred’, but in a metaphoric sense. The events in Dali’s paintings are not far from our ordinary reality.
This reflects Dali’s total involvement in Freud’s view of the unconscious as a narrative stage. Elements from the margins of one’s mind – the gestures of minor domestic traffic, movements through doors, a glance across a balcony – become transformed into the materials of an eerie and overlit drama. The Oedipal conflicts we have carried with us from childhood fuse with the polymorphic landscapes of the present to create a strange and ambiguous future. The contours of a woman’s back, the significance of certain rectilinear forms, marry with our memories and desires. The roles of everything are switched. Christopher Columbus comes ashore having just discovered a young woman’s buttocks. A childhood governess still dominates the foreshore of one’s life, windows let into her body as in the walls of one’s nursery. Later, in the mature Dali, nuclear and fragmentary forms transcribe the postures of the Virgin, tachist explosions illuminate the cosmogony of the H-bomb, the images of atomic physics are recruited to represent a pietist icon of a Renaissance madonna.
Given the extraordinary familiarity of Dali’s paintings, it is surprising that so few people seem ever to have looked at them. If they remember them at all, it is in some kind of vague and uncomfortable way, which indicates that it is not only Oedipal and other symbols that frighten us, but any dislocation of our commonplace notions about reality. The latent significance of curvilinear as opposed to rectilinear forms, of soft as opposed to hard geometries, are topics that disturb us as much as any memory of a paternal ogre. Applying Freud’s principle, we can see that reason safely rationalizes reality for us. Dali pulls the fuses out of this comfortable system. In addition, Dali’s technique of photographic realism and the particular cinematic style he adopted involve the spectator too closely for his own comfort. Where Ernst, Magritte and Tan-guy relied very much on a traditional narrative space, presenting the subject matter frontally and with a generalized time structure, Dali represents the events of his paintings as if each was a single frame from a movie.
Although he is now famous for his paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s, such as ‘The Persistence of Memory’, at the time Dali was close to penury. Picasso, Braque and Matisse held a monopoly of the critics’ attention; the great battle being fought then, older than any Uccello painted, was between a philistine public and the cubist painters. Faced with this position, Dali, assisted by his ruthless and ambitious wife Gala, set out to use that other developing popular art of the twentieth century – publicity, then shunned by intellectuals and the preserve of newspapers, advertising agencies and film companies. Dali’s originality lay in the way he used the techniques of publicity for private purposes, to propound his own extremely private and conceptual ideas. Here he anticipated Warhol and a hundred other contemporary imitators.
Applying himself to a thousand and one stunts, he soon achieved the success he needed. At the start of World War II he moved to America, and his autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dali was written in the New England home of one of his first American patrons. Here Dali reveals his mastery as a writer, and invents a completely new alphabet, vocabulary and grammar of ideas, rich in psychoanalytic allusions but freighted also with an immense weight of reference to geology, aesthetic theory, metaphysics, metabiology, Christian iconography, haute couture, mathematics, film criticism, heraldry, politics – melded together into a unique alloy. This new language, which few people seem willing to read, just as they refuse to look at his paintings, allowed him to enlarge verbally on his visual subject matter, and was formalized above all in his so-called paranoic-critical method, i.e., the systematic and rational interpretation of hallucinatory phenomena.
Some idea of the richness and seriousness of this language can be seen in the titles of Dali’s paintings:
‘Gala and the Angelus of Millet immediately preceding the arrival of the conic anamorphosis’
‘Suburbs of the Paranoic-Critical town: Afternoon on the outskirts of European history’
‘The flesh of the décolleté of my wife, clothed, outstripping light at full speed’
‘Velazquez painting the Infanta Margarita with the lights and shadows of his own glory’
‘The Chromosome of a highly coloured fish’s eye starting the harmonious disintegration of the Persistence of Memory’
Although comic masterpieces at first sight, each of these tides, like dozens of others, exactly describes the subject matter of the painting. More than that, each illuminates its painting. To describe the landscapes of the twentieth century, Dali uses its own techniques – its deliberate neuroticism, self-indulgence, its love of the glossy, lurid and bizarre. Behind these, however, is an eye as sharp as a surgeon’s. Dali’s work demonstrates that surrealism, far from being a gratuitous dislocation of one’s perceptual processes, in fact represents the only reasonable technique for dealing with the subject matter of the century.
1 The classic Freudian phase. The trauma of birth, as in ‘The Persistence of Memory’, the irreconcilable melancholy of the exposed embryo. This world of fused beaches and overheated light is that perceived by the isolated child. The nervous surfaces are wounds on the cerebral cortex. The people who populate it, the Oedipal figures and marooned lovers, are those perceived through the glass of early childhood and adolescence. The obsessions are: excrement, the flaccid penis, anxiety, the timeless place, the threatening posture, the hallucinatory over-reality of tables and furniture, the geometry of rooms and stairways.
2 The metamorphic phase. A polyperverse period, a free-for-all of image and identity. From this period, during the late 1930s, come Dali’s obsessions with Hider (the milky breasts of the Führer compressed by his leather belt) and Lenin’s buttocks, elongated like an immense sexual salami. Here, too, are most of the nightmare paintings, such as ‘The Horrors of War’, which anticipates not only Hiroshima and the death camps, but the metamorphic horrors of heart surgery and organ transplants, the interchangeability and dissolving identities of our own organs.
3 The Renaissance phase. Dali’s penchant for a wiped academic style, Leonardoesque skies and grottoes, comes through strongly during the 1940s and 1950s in paintings such as his ‘Hypercubic Christ’. These images of madonnas and martyred Christs, quantified by a formal geometry, represent a pagan phase in Dali’s art.
4 The Cosmogonic-religious phase. In the fifties Dali embarked on a series of explicitly religious paintings (most of them apparently on secular topics), such as those using the central figure of Christopher Columbus. Here the iconography of nuclear physics is used to invest his religious heroes with the unseen powers of the universe.
5 The phase of Analytic Geometry. The masterworks of this period, among the greatest in Dali’s art, are the famous ‘Young Virgin auto-sodomized by her own chastity’, and ‘Goddess leaning on her elbow’. Here the quantification of time and space is applied to the mysterious geometry of our own morphology and musculature.
6 Nuclear phase. Dali’s marriage with the age of physics. Many of his most serene paintings, such as ‘Raphaelesque Head Exploding’, date from this recent period.
Notwithstanding the immense richness and vitality of this work, Dali still invites little more than hostility and derision. All too clearly one can see that polyperverse and polymorphic elements, acceptable within, say, automobile styling, are not acceptable when they explicitly refer to the basic props and perspectives of our consciousness.
At the same time, other factors explain this hostility, above all the notion of the naive. Too often, when we think of the naive, we shed a sentimental tear for the Douanier Rousseau or the Facteur Cheval (the eccentric country postman who built with his own hands a dream palace in pebbles and cement that rivals Ankor). Both these men, naives of genius, for the most part lonely, ignored and derided during their lifetimes, fit conveniently into our idea of the naive – amiable simpletons with egg on their ties. We can reassure ourselves that Jarry, Apollinaire and Picasso laughed at Rousseau, and admit that we too might laugh faced with so odd a departure from the accepted norm.
What we fail to realize is that science fiction, like surrealism, provides just this departure, and is an example of an art of the naive in mid-twentieth-century terms. None of us have egg on our ties (more likely crepe suzette, given Playboy prices), nor are we particularly amiable, but like Dali we may well be simpletons. I regard Dali, like Wells and the writers of modern science fiction, as true naives, i.e. those taking imagination and reality at their face value, never at all sure, or for that matter concerned, which is which. In the same category I place many other notable originators, such as William Burroughs – certainly a naive, with his weird delusions, possibly correct, that Time magazine is out to subvert our minds and language – and Andy Warhol, a faun-like naive of the media landscape, using the basic techniques of twentieth-century mass communications, cinema and colour reproduction processes, for his own innocent and child-like amusement.
Dali is a good example of the sophisticated naive, with an immense vocabulary of ideas and imagery, taking the ‘facts’ of psychoanalysis at their face value and applying them like a Sunday painter to the materials of twentieth-century life – our psychopathology, our switchboards of emotion and orgasm. Rousseau’s enchanted botanical forests have been replaced by flyovers and production lines, but Dali’s paintings still remain a valid image of the interior landscape of our minds.
That other naive, Henri Rousseau, a minor customs official, died alone and in poverty in 1910. His friends who had laughed at him then realized his true worth. Two years later he was reburied in a decent grave. The great sculptor, Brancusi, became a simple engraver and inscribed on the tomb an epitaph written by Apollinaire: ‘Dear Rousseau, can you hear us? … let our luggage pass through the doors of heaven without paying duty …’ Let us hope that on Dali’s death a suitable epitaph is written to celebrate this unique and undervalued genius, who has counted for the first time the multiplication tables of obsession, psychopathology and possibility.
Archetypes of the Dream
Alone among the great surrealists, Salvador Dali has remained faithful to their historic mission, now almost impossible to fulfil, of shocking the bourgeoisie. Sooner or later, respectability embraced Max Ernst, Tanguy and Magritte. The pioneers of Dada and psychic revolution, who so detested commerce, academia and the cash nexus, died laden with honours and prestige, their paintings traded for millions, their pedestals secure in the critical pantheon. Dali alone remains beyond the pale, still greeted with a shudder by the bureaucracy of the art world. Yet, if surrealism is the greatest imaginative venture of the twentieth century, its course has in large part been set by Dali.
For over fifty years, Dali has incarnated the spirit of surrealism. His luminous beaches with their fused sand, his melting watches, marooned lovers and exploding madonnas have become the popular archetypes of the dream and unconscious, images so familiar from film and stage design, paperback jackets and department store windows that it is easy to forget their source in this single extraordinary mind. None the less, Dali’s critical reputation remains that of a purveyor of sensational and lurid kitsch. As Meryle Secrest points out in her well-researched biography, this is almost wholly due to his exhibitionist antics and hunger for material rewards (summed up in André Breton’s cruel anagram, ‘Avida Dollars’) and to his marked flair for the wrong kinds of publicity, with which he seems to have deliberately subverted his own seriousness.
The key to the Dali riddle, the author believes, lies in the painter’s earliest childhood. Some nine months before Dali’s birth his parents had been devastated by the death of their first son, Salvador. With Dali’s arrival they were convinced that their lost son had been reborn, christened him Salvador and lavished on him the most tolerant affection. The young Dali found himself saddled with this double burden – of never being wholly convinced that he existed in his own right, while being encouraged by his doting parents in every precocity. Given this combustible mix, success was guaranteed. ‘At the age of six I wanted to be a cook,’ Dali has said. ‘At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing ever since.’
Meryle Secrest charts the rise to celebrity of this remarkable and in many ways monstrous personality, at once brilliant and egocentric, witty, callous and engaging, and his domination of international surrealism. For all his pranks, Dali became utterly serious in front of his easel. He was prepared to accept the logic of psychoanalysis and brave enough to enter areas where many of the surrealists became squeamish: castration, voyeurism, onanism and coprophilia. This complete frankness and readiness to exploit himself mark Dali out as a true modern. His surrealist masterpieces of the 1930s, with their eerie light that is more electric than solar, seem like elegant but sinister newsreels filmed inside our heads.
His greatest support, as Meryle Secrest shows, was his wife Gala, his lifelong model and muse, whom almost everyone appears to have detested, this mysterious Russian with ‘the look that pierces walls’ (or bank vaults, as George Melly commented). After Gala’s death in 1982 Dali lapsed into extreme melancholy and was seriously injured in a mysterious fire, but has now recovered.
Fools and Innocents
Part holy fool and part unholy innocent, Stanley Spencer led his life as if every passing second was literally the first moment of existence, to be greeted with open-mouthed wonder, unstinted praise for the Creator, and a sharp eye to every visionary chance. Like a street urchin scampering after a visiting parade, Spencer saw everything from knee height, astounded by the crowds and the brass band but only too eager for a glimpse up the carnival queen’s skirts.
Reading this rich and authoritative biography, one is repeatedly struck by Spencer’s good fortune in living and working at the time he did. Today he would be an intimate of Wogan and Paloma Picasso, be painting murals for the Playboy mansion and co-hosting a New York chat-show with Quentin Crisp, while an army of lawyers exploited the merchandizing rights to his latest Resurrection or Crucifixion. Few artists can have been so confined, and so liberated, by the constraints of that innocent world before the coming of the mass media.
Small Thames-side towns have a special magic, each an island waiting for its Prospero. Cookham, where Spencer was born in 1891, is more self-contained than most, enclosed by water meadows that often flood in winter, isolating the town in a way that must have forced the young Stanley to peer doubly hard at the precious ground under his feet. In the later years of his fame, Spencer affected an eccentric and almost bumpkin manner, trundling his easel and paints around Cookham in a dilapidated pram. In fact, he was born into a respectable and high-minded Victorian family, the ninth child of Annie Spencer, a former soprano, and her husband William, a master-builder turned church organist and amateur astronomer. The family were inveterate talkers, a trait Spencer displayed all his life, exhausting his wives, friends and patrons with monologues that lasted half the night. But his Cookham childhood, with its Bible-reading, love of Ruskin and abhorrence of idleness, its fierce discussions of politics, poetry and philosophy, must have generated a pressure-cooker atmosphere where the smallest talent was stretched and encouraged – a regime fairly typical then but vanished today except, perhaps, in Japan; one looks forward to a comparable flowering of philosophers, artists and statesmen from the Tokyo–Osaka mega-conurbation, though youngsters there show a disappointing tendency to commit suicide, a possible Japanese design flaw…
Eager to become an artist from his early teens, Spencer entered the Slade, where his remarkable draughtsmanship soon revealed itself. His prize-winning Nativity, painted while a 21-year-old student, virtually set out the entire prospectus of his imagination and life’s work. Here we find the familiar Pre-Raphaelite panorama of tranquil village lanes, curiously warped as if by a defective fish-eye lens. The isolated embracing couples, and the biblical myth domesticated by the garden railings and placid harvest field, are charged with a barely concealed sexuality that expresses itself in the clumsy gestures and askew glances soon to become Spencer’s most distinctive trademark.
Spencer’s childhood in Cookham so shaped his life that his biographers have searched every surviving record for a crucial early experience. Spencer was a tireless writer, maintaining an immense correspondence with himself, composing long essays in his notebooks, eventually adding up to millions of words, stored in trunks through which he would rummage, re-reading and annotating.
As an example of Cookham’s magical hold over the small boy, Kenneth Pople cites Spencer’s description of himself listening to the maid alone in her attic bedroom, talking to an invisible person. In fact, she was talking to her counterpart on the other side of the party wall, but Spencer was convinced that ‘a sort of angel’ had kept her company. On another occasion, when one of his older brothers caught pneumonia, the womenfolk sitting around the bed despatched the young Stanley with a message that the crisis had come, duly reported by Spencer as ‘Christ has come.’ For Spencer, Cookham was a paradise in which all the world’s ills could be cured. By placing his great religious tableaux among its calm lanes and thatched houses he was in no way trying to follow the long tradition of setting the Crucifixion on a Tuscan hillside or the Annunciation in a lavish Florentine villa, and satisfying the spectator’s sense of dignity and occasion against a familiar backdrop. Spencer’s intention, in his ‘Betrayal’ and ‘Crucifixion’, was to enlist Cookham in an attempt to assuage the pain of these terrible events. Spencer’s entire life’s work as a painter was a single-minded quest to redeem the world through this Thames-side town.
Few people can have had higher expectations of sex than Spencer, and few can have been so led astray by their obsessions. Dogmatically strait-laced about the sanctity of marriage, he was still a virgin when he met Hilda Carline, a fellow painter and Christian Scientist who was the second inspiration of his life. His first sexual experience with her probably prompted his greatest painting, the ‘Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard’. Spencer and Hilda appear several times in this huge canvas, along with their many friends and relatives, reborn into the wonder of Cookham not from the dead but from the previous moment of existence.
It is ironic that the scene of his most famous triumph should soon have become the cockpit of personal disaster – Spencer’s unhappy relationship with Patricia Preece, who lived with her lesbian companion, Dorothy Hepworth, in a nearby cottage. The two women, both struggling artists, clearly saw Spencer as a rabbit waiting to be snared and skinned. Patricia confided to a friend that ‘she would have to marry that dirty little Stanley Spencer.’ They were married soon after his divorce from Hilda. For the honeymoon Patricia and Dorothy left for Cornwall together, sharing a room while Spencer was told to follow them later. Considerate to a fault, they even invited Hilda to join them. On their return to Cookham, Spencer was expelled for ever from the marital home. All this he accepted without complaint. Hilda remained the love of his life, and he was with her during her final illness. After her death he continued to write letters to her until the end of his own life ten years later. The suggestion sometimes made that this was a means of sexually exciting himself in no way diminishes his devotion to her.
Desperate Humours
In many ways Ronald Searle’s world reminds me of Max Wall – his twitchy clubmen and crazed headmistresses reveal the same ferocious impotence, and a desperate humour that has nothing to do with comedy. This is tragedy that has opened the wrong door and found itself on a burlesque stage with a few baffling props – a samurai sword, a schoolgirl’s gymslip and a bottle of Lemon Hart rum. Out of these materials Searle has created a unique graphic universe, intensely English – though he might dislike anyone saying so – but enormously deepened by his years as a Japanese prisoner, and by a certain single-mindedness and detachment of character at which this biography can only hint.
I remember coming across his prison-camp drawings within a few months of leaving my own camp, and thinking how exactly he had caught the squalor of camp life (rather like Gatwick airport during a peak-travel baggage strike), and the peculiar impassivity of the Japanese soldiers, for whom their prisoners had already ceased to exist, so that cruelty and violence meant no more than a few practice flourishes of the kendo sword. Superficially, Searle’s touch lightened when he launched his post-war career as a humorous cartoonist and illustrator, but even then, in the barbed wire profiles of Russian militia-men and New York cops, and especially in St Trinian’s – Holloway on speed -one still senses somewhere in the background the perimeter wall of Changi Jail.
Inevitably, biographies of the living are partial portraits – most of the principal figures in this one are still alive, including both wives, and many of his fellow artists and commissioning editors – but Searle’s Cambridge childhood seems to have been uneventful, though the university town’s curious mix of the preposterous and the banal, the grandiose assumptions forever held down by the low fenland skies, may have given the future moralist and humorist a useful start.
He was born in 1920, the son of a former World War I infantry sergeant and a remarkably beautiful mother, and by his mid-teens had already shown a well-developed will. After leaving school at fifteen, when the family were unable to afford any further education, he became a solicitor’s clerk, financing his evening art-school classes out of his own earnings. His confident and strongly drawn cartoons soon began to appear in the Cambridge Daily News, and in 1938 he won a full-time scholarship to a local art school. He contributed to Granta and held two exhibitions of his work. But for the war, the young Ronald Searle might have launched himself on a conventional English career, in due course becoming editor of Punch and a pillar of Fleet Street and the Garrick.
Then, in April 1939, a few months before the outbreak of war, Searle enlisted in the Territorial Army, for reasons which Russell Davies never fully explores. He was mobilized into the Royal Engineers and stationed, first in Norfolk, and then in Kirkcudbright in Scotland, where the girls of a progressive Edinburgh academy, St Trinnean’s, had been evacuated. Transformed by Searle’s imagination, the school became St Trinian’s and his most famous creation, from which in later years he tried to escape, with mixed success. Before setting off overseas in his troopship, Sapper Searle posted the original St Trinian’s cartoon to the assistant editor of Lilliput, Kaye Webb, not realizing that he was writing to his future wife.
He first saw the published cartoon on the streets of Singapore during the Japanese artillery bombardment. Searle’s harrowing drawings made during his captivity, at Changi Jail and the Selarang Barracks, and then on the Siam-Burma Railway, constitute one of the greatest graphic records of the Second World War. Searle endured repeated beatings, starvation and malaria, and the deaths of his friends, all the while sketching on pages torn from books, and bartering, in Russell Davies’s quaint term, ‘orgiastic’ drawings with the Japanese guards in return for precious supplies of paper.
After liberation there was a banquet in Singapore laid on by Mount-batten and his press attaché Tom Driberg. The next year, at the Labour Party conference, the latter shared a bedroom with Searle, and after urinating in the wash-basin asked: ‘Ronnie, are you a masochist?’ But Searle had coped with far greater terrors, and the publication of his wartime drawings soon made him a celebrity. The St Trinian’s series followed, a nightmare preview of women’s lib, and eerily prophetic in other ways – ‘Fair play, St Trinian’s, use a clean needle,’ a teacher admonishes two girls nobbling a rival before an inter-school track event.
Whether suffocated by Punch, or needing to break away from the little England of the pre-Beatles sixties, Searle suddenly packed his bags and left for Paris in 1961, leaving behind his wife and children. It seems a pity that he missed London in the sixties, which were tailor-made for his caustic line. In the last thirty years he has rarely returned to England and, after a happy second marriage, now lives in Provence. By dropping Punch in favour of Holiday and the New Yorker he widened his subject matter and was able to show his mastery of colour, creating some of the most striking covers in the history of those magazines. His humour is as strong and quirky as ever, but the horizon lines in his drawings get ever deeper – the deepest since Dali’s – and the shadows reaching towards the feet of his harassed tourists and executives seem to have their sources far beyond the margins of the page.