The Jackdaw

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  • Editorial – July 2016

    Der Clapham Strassenbahn

    When very young, and when not train spotting, I was a keen bus spotter. It was an ideal apprenticeship for a fledgeling art historian. It involved identifying, sometimes at a considerable distance (through rain), the beautifully crafted, hand-built models, of which there were many different marques and specifications. Every town corporation in the county had its own company, each with its distinctive colour combinations and decorative embellishments. All of these buses were built in England: for example, Crossley’s, whose factory was only a few streets from our house in east Manchester, built a splendid three-axle trolleybus for the Denton run up Hyde Road. By the age of ten I could have told you where I was – Rawtenstall, Stalybridge, Bolton, Ramsbottom – by their buses. My two favourites were Crosville’s single-decker Bristols and Lancashire United’s Foden double-deckers (ex-Sandbach) with their Art Deco frills. Identification could often be established by sound alone. The Bristol whined through its gears and even bouncing downhill roared alarmingly as though it was straining in bottom. The Foden’s engine turned over with a reassuring metallic tick, not unlike a loud blackcap.

    In 1970 I visited Holland for the first time arriving at Rotterdam railway station via a local stopping train through polder landscape from The Hook – the diesel was bright yellow and blue with a blunt bull nose, quite unlike the flat-faced, toilet-green electrics on our local line (built at Wolverton Works). Everywhere were whiffs of Art Nouveau. Tendrils, ogives and curlicues cut no ice in Manchester; we liked bricks, circumcised chimneys and oblong windows. The art of Mondrian, Vantongerloo, van Doesburg and van der Leck here made thrilling, perfect sense. Colours were primary, graphics Symbolist, planning rational – here Modernism was alive. Lancs looked nothing like this. Thus, we got Lowry and they produced Rietveld: Oldham Road Dwellings versus the Schroder House… I still love both.

    These geriatric musings were prompted by a news report from Birmingham. A councillor was expressing delight with the city’s new trams. “They give a real European feel to Birmingham,” she trilled in that comical voice they have – a royal European foil. “We look as though we’re royally part of Europe now.” Indeed indeed, Brum’s trams were designed and built (like Edinburgh’s) outside San Sebastian. From Eindhoven to Berlin, Toulouse and Bratislava Brum’s trams now await at every Ryanair outpost.

    Manchester also has an expanding tram network. Nippy and frequent they’re criminally dear but, like Brum’s, our trams are ever so European … they are even owned by the French company that runs the Paris Metro. And if on your travels you happen to visit Cologne, Croydon or Blackpool (which until 2012 had unique double-decker trams with streamlining and two-way seats) you’ll see Manchester’s trams there as well, because they’re built by the same lot in Germany and southern Spain.

    Two days after this issue goes to press the referendum takes place. My grouse with the EU is that it’s meddling regulations have contributed significantly to making everything and everywhere look the same. By insinuating uniformity it has replaced difference with committee-induced sterility. But why must Birmingham or Blackpool have to look like Budapest? And what sly brainwashing has been sneaked through to convince municipal jobsworths that such pan-European overlaps are in any way desirable? You might as well walk around Europe now with eyes closed because you know that flats and offices, clinics and swimming pools, buses and trams, cars and vans will look just like home, because they are the same, and all dictated from Brussels (whose own trams, incidentally, also mimic Manchester’s because they derive from the same production line near Dresden). The homogenising of appearances resulting in the visual poverty of surroundings, courtesy of the EU, is the most grievous cultural loss of my lifetime. Before we joined the EU, streets across our continent were a free museum and immeasurably more stimulating to experience than they are now. It is precisely because anything but variety is unendurable that I loathe the EU.

    David Lee
    The Jackdaw Jul/Aug 2017

  • Alexander Adams: Canon Fodder – November 2017

    Alexander Adams investigates the status of the canon in art under Post-Modernism and the dangers of undervaluing it

    The canon of great art has never been the target of greater ire than it is today, but many leftist critics and their traditionalist opponents misunderstand the canon. The truth is unsettling for both groups. This essay seeks to clarify the nature of the canon at a time when it is an especially contentious subject.

    Great Deeds Against the Dead

    Last year art-history A-level was scrapped due to low take-up, then, after a campaign to reverse the decision, it was reinstated. This allowed New Criticism a foothold in school art-history teaching. When the new curriculum was developed, there was a downgrading of the master artists of Europe. Sarah Phillips, designer of new art-history syllabus, said “It is a global specification. Students won’t just study the work of dead white men. They will have the opportunity to study Islamic architecture and work by men and women of all colours and creeds.” Perhaps students will be tested on artist skin colour in exams.

    “Art history is the study of power, politics, identity and humanity; it makes perfect sense to keep the exam,” said Jeremy Deller. One doesn’t envy students wanting to learn about painting only to be dragooned into political-education courses and harangued on the purported crimes of their forefathers, who were more likely to have been agricultural labourers toiling in fields than redcoats bayonetting babies in India. Perhaps A-level art history would have better remained decently defunct.  

    Leftist critics characterise the canon as a white male Christian club. That view excludes ancient pre-Christians, undisclosed atheists/agnostics and recent additions to the canon but – those exceptions aside – white Christian men were ones making large-scale oil paintings and stone carvings up until recent centuries so Western European art is necessarily their art. Critics confuse corollary with cause. The canon has never been based on the identity of artists. Indeed, it is heedless of artist identity. Art in the canon is judged on intrinsic and extrinsic qualities without regard to maker. Numerous anonymous ancient and medieval art works are canonical.

    Incidentally, dismissing art because of the maker’s masculinity discards contributions of countless female models, patrons and collectors, not to mention wives, sisters and daughters who worked in studios and even painted parts of pictures. These women believed in and helped to make these paintings; if they could see activists agitating to have these paintings removed from sight they would likely be appalled and baffled at careless condemnation of art they loved.  

    The Exquisitely Efficient Machine

    The canon is both the group of generally accepted masterworks (and, by inference, their makers) and the principles underlying that selection. Art historians, artists and knowledgeable enthusiasts have approximate lists of great essential art though details vary. There are major and minor figures in the canon and canons for specific countries and mediums.

    The canon is a distillation of informed judgement over the course of centuries. It is an exercise in both discrimination and tolerance as one accepts the whole without agreeing with every part. Crucially, personal taste is irrelevant. You may not care for Rubens but he is important, influential and innovatory; he cannot be removed by you. The canon provides broad consensus while at the same time compelling no one to praise falsely. The canon cannot be imposed from above by either scholars or social activists. The canon endures despite fashion and politics but the contents of the canon are provisional.

    Dissent regarding the stature of an artist does not damage the canon; on the contrary, it strengthens it by forcing supporters of an artist to examine and refute (or accept) criticism. This process of continual testing winnows substandard art from the canon and proves the fitness of that which remains. It is an exquisitely efficient (though slow) machine for refining our understanding of art. The canon, far from being a machine of oppression and exclusion, is a meritorious mechanism for selecting the most important art on fairly universal principles for the education and pleasure of everyone. The canon has no racial, gender, sexual or personal prejudice. It is regional but not nationalistic. It accepts the professional and amateur, the sacred and profane.

    What is this “Canon”?

    There is no authoritative list of canonical works. The canon, by definition, cannot have a single fixed form. If you want to produce a list of canonical works take all narratives on art history, starting with Pliny going through Vasari and ending today, add respected monographs covering individual art movements and books of masterpieces of art. Add up all mentions or illustrations of individual art works then remove the least frequently cited third of that list, remove all works made in the last 40 years, remove anything made by a living artist. What remains is the canon.

    The weaknesses of this definition are that it gives greatest statistical weight to recent views, to published (rather than privately expressed) opinions and to works of which we have photographic images. Frequency of citations proves nothing and does not qualitatively measure works. Popularity proves nothing except itself.

    The canon is not democratic nor is it just. It rewards audacity. The cuckoo which ejects the host’s chick from the nest will survive and prosper, so too the brilliant adopter can displace a talented but flawed inventor. Justice has never informed the canon nor can it. The canon is a hierarchy of competence which reflects societal appetite for exceptional achievement and it does not arbitrate historical priority or factual (or emotional) justice.

    Canon Criteria

    The presence of a single work (or body of works) produced by a now-deceased artist in the Western fine-art canon is due to it having at least one of three attributes still considered to apply today: (a) importance or influence, (b) originality or innovation, and (c) outstanding quality within an aesthetic field; with two minor attributes valued: (d) timeliness, and (e) lineage. To be a minor figure an artist needs only one of the minor attributes.

    Attributes (b), (d) and (e) need further comment. Originality need not be actual invention but being the outstanding exponent or populariser of a new material, style or subject. For example, no modern historian now assigns the invention of oil painting to the Van Eyck brothers but they were the first artists to bring the technique to perfection in panel painting and were historically credited as originators. Priority on its own is not enough.

    Timeliness is zeitgeist – encapsulating a particular culture during an era. Lynn Chadwick is a minor canonical figure. His metal sculpture of the 1950s embodies the spirit of an age (post-War figurative sculpture) while it is not strong enough to make Chadwick a major artist. Lineage is an attribute of the canon’s traditional didactic purpose. Perugino, a figure on the periphery of the canon, would probably have sunk from our view if he had not taught Raphael.

    Man Proposes, the Canon Disposes

    There is something unusual about the way the fine-art canon operates, which may not have been remarked on before. Every artist who is – or has been – in the canon rises once and remains or sinks but he/she never rises for a second time. I cannot think of an example where an artist we regard as canonical has ever dropped out of the canon and later returned to the canon as significant as he/she was before. This is not a matter of fluctuating popularity but one of absolute neglect – a time when an artist was no longer taught or mentioned in general texts, only for that artist to be resurrected. It seems that once history has downgraded an artist gravely, it is a permanent change. I have never read this observation elsewhere.

    During his lifetime Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-79) was considered a genius comparable to Raphael. His paintings displayed great skill; his life drawings are excellent. His place in history seemed assured yet Mengs disappeared from the canon quickly and is hardly more than a footnote in art histories. Viewers found Mengs’s good qualities in other artists and nothing great or original to distinguish his art. Technical brilliance is no meal ticket to Parnassus.

    Consider the case of Bernard Buffet (1928-99). In France, Buffet was the most lauded painter to mature in immediate post-War period. He was very successful in Japan, where a Buffet museum was founded. For several decades Buffet was hugely famous, fabulously rich and perhaps the worst ever painter to be considered great. His work is as crude, ugly, bombastic, modish and shallow as anything that has been shown on museum walls. Despite prizes and critical acclaim, by the time of his death Buffet was utterly forgotten; more than half of younger readers will never have heard his name let alone seen a Buffet painting in person.

    The canon makes short work of poseurs such as Buffet and the technically gifted but banal such as Mengs. So, if you despair of the artists of today who are promoted as living links to the canon, fear not.

    Modernism and the Canon

    Traditionalists beware: the canon is not a sword of truth which makes aesthetic distinctions and slays the dragon of Modernist art. There is no objective aesthetic standard which applies to all art in the canon. Even if we set aside Modernism, in aesthetic terms the canon ranges from the schematic (Byzantine), symbolic (Neolithic), semi-abstract (Cycladic) and decorative/abstract (Celtic manuscripts) to the naïve (Fontainebleau school), idealistic (Michelangelo) and realistic (Caravaggio). Modernist art cannot be excluded from the canon; it has already entered it. The only aesthetic criterion is excellence within a defined field.

    Those who state “Raphael is part of the canon; in aesthetic terms, Pollock cannot be compared to Raphael; therefore Pollock cannot be part of the canon” are in error. Consider the rules of the canon. Raphael and Pollock are comparable in that they are both great exponents of their schools; their art is artistically influential, culturally important, original and typical of their period and place. In strictly canonical terms, Raphael is closer to Pollock than to Raphael’s own assistant Gianfrancesco Penni. Reverse engineering of what the canon is in order to exclude art one does not like is dishonest. Consider: the canon exists as a collective enterprise regardless of personal taste. One can dislike Pollock; one can argue against his art; one cannot exclude Pollock from the canon ex cathedra. One can propose and advocate for additions or subtractions regarding the canon but propositions will be decided upon collectively over a lengthy historical period.

    Bear in mind that the canon is not necessarily the best art ever produced. It is a collection of the best art that is commonly known and which it is vital (or useful) to be known by artists, scholars, art lovers and those more broadly interested in visual culture. The fact that you might have the world’s most beautiful painting hidden in your attic does not invalidate the canon because the canon is a collective body of knowledge which is comparative, commonly understood, widely accessible and not entirely based on aesthetic worth. There are plenty of beautiful works which are not canonical and plenty of canonical works which are not beautiful. If an ugly work of art meets the criteria for inclusion then it can be included. I would propose Asger Jorn’s more shocking “disfigurations” – defacements of junkshop pictures – as examples of ugly art which has already entered the canon.

    Counter-intuitive as it seems, it is a fact that no aesthetic criteria will fit the canon. Therefore, though aesthetic criteria are crucial to our judgement of art, aesthetic rules cannot generate a canon. Consider the cases of Mengs and thousands of gifted academicians whose art is tediously accurate and which will never supplant the wonky anatomies of Delacroix and Goya. In the article “New Order”, I suggested that viewers, curators and museum directors should continue the traditional approach of selecting and judging work on the bases of primarily aesthetic quality and secondarily historical value. This is not in conflict with the canon. Art appreciation is a personal matter which we practise every day; the canon is a collective endeavour which no individual (or single national or professional body) can arbitrate.

    Masterpieces and Blind Spots

    Due to the way art is discussed, there is a tendency to highlight masterpieces. They provide common reference points. The human memory has a limited capacity and books have limited pages, so (for the non-specialist) Cimabue’s Crucifixion serves to stand for his whole output. However, the canon can select works which are atypical. Meret Oppenheim’s Fur Teacup (1936) is an iconic work of Surrealism and is celebrated as such. It far surpasses the quality of all her other work. (Trust me, I’ve slogged through the monographs.) In that respect Fur Teacup is actually atypical of Oppenheim’s art, being so much better than her other work. The canon being efficient as it is, has pared down her entire output to the only good thing she made. Likewise, Richard Oelze’s masterpiece Expectation (1935-6) is the only work of his that is worth giving time to. The canon recognises masterpieces by journeyman artists.

    Consider the converse. The canon also admits bodies of works when no masterpiece exists. Paul Klee is an established figure in the canon, but there is no single painting, or even handful of paintings, which sums up Klee’s achievements. In Klee’s case any typical painting serves as an introduction to the diffuse body of works.

    The canon does have weaknesses, mainly due to its didactic presentation of progress. There are marginal cases of artists who do not fit easily into eras or schools. The canon tends to overlook remarkable outsiders. Balthus springs to mind. I would say Balthus deserves to be in a canon of 20th-century painting on merit but he could justifiably be left out as being “unnecessary” to explain any era or movement. William Blake and Stanley Spencer are only relevant to the story of British art and can be completely omitted from an overview of Western art of their times.

    Another weakness of the canon is it has historically undervalued secular subjects, such as the still-life, landscape and marine. Grand subjects often overwhelm intimate reflection. A final series of weaknesses concerns the hierarchy of mediums. Since the rise of the reproduction print and photographic illustration, sculpture has been forced to the margins while painting has taken centre stage. Likewise, while separate canons for printmaking, watercolour and drawing have developed, they are generally viewed as subsidiary to painting and find only marginal places in histories of art.

    Post-Modernists and the Canon

    Post-Modernists loathe the canon for its specific qualities and its existence. The canon accretes slowly and selectively; it cannot be changed for political reasons and it cannot be legislated upon. The fact it does offer recognition for women/minority artists makes the canon even more hateful to Identarians. It is too slow and selective to comply with social-justice-activist demands that women/minorities be elevated en masse immediately and accepted universally. The canon compels no one to like or respect art. The canon rewards accomplishment not identity and – in Identarian eyes – effectively “bribes” women/minority artists by offering recognition to any artist who accepts the status quo and who makes art worthy of the canon. Identarian opposition to the status quo precludes participation in a canon which rewards application, patience, excellence and individuality; Identarians prioritise conformity, victimhood, impatience, birth rights and the right to demand instant change and exercise totalitarian control. The very existence of the canon is repugnant to Identarians, who feel it impedes social justice.

    There is no need to force women into the canon because the canon absorbs great art regardless. One cannot write of 20th- century portraiture or the legacy of Symbolism without mentioning Frida Kahlo, likewise with abstract sculpture and Barbara Hepworth. There are many other examples. Berlinde de Bruyckere is the most original and powerful sculptor of the figure since Giacometti and it would be surprising if her art did not find its way into the canon. Much to our editor’s dismay and disagreement, I suspect Jean-Michel Basquiat is also canon-bound. Traditionalists dislike the speed with which art accretes to the canon and it offends them to see non-traditional schools appended to the Golden Age of (insert preferred artist/school/era here). Traditionalists should propose recent makers of great art and await history’s verdict. The canon may discard all recent art and record a fallow period, as it has done for whole countries and eras.

    Post-Modernists too reject accretion to the canon. For them the accretion is too slow. They have two views on the canon – that it must be abolished or rewritten. Neither of these authoritarian tendencies can be achieved in a permanent form. Abolition is impossible because people have a natural tendency to form groups, celebrate exceptional excellence and class things in terms of quality and thereby reach group consensus. Rewriting is impossible because no one group can dictate the canon and – as we have seen with political appointees such as Socialist Realist and National Socialist artists – the canon rejects bad art.

    Post-Modernists hate the canon partly because they do not believe in group consensus. They do not believe that art progresses or that a narrative (other than a socio-economic one) can be drawn from art history. Post-Modernists contend that the idea that multiple groups and individuals over eras can reach agreement is an illusion which conceals collusion, oppression and exclusion.   

    So, if abolition and rewriting are impossible, why now write an article addressing Post-Modernist attitudes towards the canon?

    Firstly, art history students are suffering because they are not being taught the canon in a thorough way, thus limiting their understanding. Even to oppose the canon you must at least know it. Secondly, we all suffer when political activists manipulate education and curation of art. Thirdly, elevation to the canon is a prize to be striven for and fame has inspired plenty of artists to perform to their best. Fourthly, symbolic changes, even ineffectual ones against weak opponents – and there are no weaker opponents than the dead – encourage further encroachment in other areas of life.

    Lastly, if traditionalists and moderates wish to oppose Post-Modernism effectively they should examine what the canon really is before they invoke it. If you support the canon you must acknowledge it in its totality, even with schools and artists you dislike, and you must accept it will accrete new art. As I have previously written, traditionalists who battle both Post-Modernism and Modernism will drive away Modernists and moderates, who are their natural allies in opposing Post-Modernism. Traditionalists, Modernists and moderates today all have common cause against Post-Modernist authoritarianism, quota programming and identity politics. They have differing tastes but their principles largely overlap.

    In the past many Marxists agitated against the canon whilst covertly enjoying its art. They understood that dissidents savour the moral superiority of principled protest while enjoying the fruits of a system they ostensibly oppose. What is different now is that New Left agitators are in positions of power unopposed by conservatives or connoisseurs within institutions or the political class. They can alter curricula, defund research, publish propaganda as art theory and take down pictures in museums; they are in a position to actually suppress and – in the case of historic statues – destroy.

    The canon is nothing less than a manifestation of our civilisation. To learn from and contribute to the canon (as writers, makers and art lovers) is to contribute to civilisation and is to affirm our belief in collective wisdom, consensus and progress, regardless of our personal taste in art.

    Alexander Adams
    The Jackdaw Nov/Dec 2017

  • Alexander Adams: New Order – September 2017

    Alexander Adams seeks to explain how identity politics, Feminism and New Criticism underpin the ideology of a generation of curators, and concludes by discussing the probable direction of the Tate under Dr Balshaw

    An Allegory

    Once upon a time there was a society which made objects that had meaning and that people enjoyed looking at. The society put these objects in museums so that more people could enjoy them. Then an elite of that society decided that the objects did not matter so much but the skin colour and reproductive organs of the object-makers mattered a lot. Displaying objects made by people of certain skin colours or possessing certain reproductive organs pleased other people and made them feel virtuous. The elite counted the numbers of museum objects made by people of certain skin colours or possessing certain reproductive organs. These statistics measured how virtuous the society was compared to other societies. More and more people were encouraged to visit the objects to display their virtue or to acquire virtue. The elite wanted all the people to visit the objects even though some people preferred to do other things. When the elite persuaded people of certain skin colours or possessing only small amounts of money to visit the objects, the elite said it made society better when actually all it did was make the elite feel less guilty. It was known that most people liked meaningful or beautiful objects but it was decided by the elite that the virtuous statistics were more important. The elite decided that people’s unhappiness about the elite using people’s money to buy for museum objects that were neither meaningful nor beautiful was caused by people not being virtuous enough. Some people thought the idea of virtuous statistics was silly but most of them did not say that because it would have been rude.

    Murder Machines

    This year a sculpture by Sam Durant entitled Scaffold was erected in a sculpture park managed by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. The wooden sculpture juxtaposed elements of playground-activity structures and gallows. One minor aspect of Scaffold referred to the hanging of Dakota Native Americans in 1862 as part of struggles between the Dakota Nation and the American government. That reference had been missed until it was pointed out, at which time a campaign to remove the sculpture was begun by the Dakota. “This is a murder machine that killed our people because we were hungry,” said a member of the Dakota Nation, equating Scaffold with an actual gallows that hanged members of the Dakota. In May the museum destroyed Scaffold and the artist renounced his work.

    This year there was a protest by some black artists against the display at the Whitney Biennial of a painting of murdered black activist Emmett Till. Black activists lobbied to have the painting by Dana Schutz, a white artist, removed as offensive and hurtful. “The subject matter is not Schutz’s,” said one protestor, claiming ownership and authority over the representation of a historical event.  

    In these two cases, activists claimed ownership over aspects of history in order to suppress art works. In one case it resulted in the destruction of art. Pressure groups have noticed the weakness of curators, administrators and politicians and their unwillingness to protect art from censorship. Sympathetic towards notions of social justice, administrators sometimes submit to emotional blackmail by groups which demand censorship.  

    Delacroix did not have to be Greek to paint Massacre at Chios; Sargent did not have to be either British or a combatant to paint Gassed; Callot did not seek approval of relatives of hanged men before publishing prints. These are iconic touchstones for appreciating events in world history, yet according to supporters of identity politics such art should not be made now. Groups should own their histories, curb free speech and suppress or destroy art deemed offensive. There was a time, not so long ago, when we derided Soviet agronomists’ dismissal of Mendelian genetics as “bourgeois” and Nazi ministers damning branches of science as “Jewish”, yet today art can be “too white and male”.

    Identarianism

    Identarianism (or identity politics) is a political belief system which has had huge influence over politics in Western countries for the last three decades. It sprang from New Left principles developed in the wake of failed attempts at revolution in 1968 and revelation of the atrocities and failures of Communism. It seeks to advance social justice and enforce relative equality through incremental advances in social capital of supposedly disadvantaged subsets such as women, ethnic and sexual minorities and so forth. There is commensurately punitive retraction of rights from supposedly advantaged groups such as men, white people and so forth.

    Identarianism is essentially a political manifestation of Post-Modernism which acts by harnessing factional interests. In the same way Marxism co-opted movements of emancipation, workers’ rights, anti-clericism, anti-colonialism and so on, Identarianism gathers factional interests under the umbrella of Post-Modernist relativism by promising social justice.

    Here are some tenets of Identarianism:

    Every person has involuntary affiliations from birth (ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, physical ability, family religion, etc.) and shares a common identity with other members of his or her subsets. These identity subsets are not generally mutable. (Mutability of gender and sexual orientation are controversial issues within Identarianism.) Subset identities necessarily form a strong part in determining one’s outlook. People do not have universal qualities (as in the Enlightenment model of universal rights) but have compound qualities derived from their subset identities. Equality is therefore relative not universal.

    1. Every person has involuntary affiliations from birth (ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, physical ability, family religion, etc.) and shares a common identity with other members of his or her subsets. These identity subsets are not generally mutable. (Mutability of gender and sexual orientation are controversial issues within Identarianism.) Subset identities necessarily form a strong part in determining one’s outlook. People do not have universal qualities (as in the Enlightenment model of universal rights) but have compound qualities derived from their subset identities. Equality is therefore relative not universal.
    2. Subsets are subject to pervasive networks of personal, institutional and social prejudice, discrimination and disadvantage. This oppression is collective and endemic.
    3. Social, legal, political and financial power – and its converse – is heritable.
    4. Privilege and guilt is collective and heritable.
    5. Subset members have a right to demand redress or reparations for collective discrimination and oppression by oppressing subset(s).
    6. Subset members can work together to promote the fulfilment of their potential (called “equity”; see below) and to reduce power/privilege of other subsets. Subsets can work together to form tactical alliances in order to achieve social and legal change. Dialogue is power negotiation between inherently unequal subsets; compromise is acceptance of oppression.
    7. Identities are formed of multiple subsets and these overlapping definitions are described as examples of intersectionality.
    8. Some subsets experience more discrimination (or privilege) than others. This is (relatively) quantifiable. An individual’s position is determined by his or her specific intersectionality.
    9. Culture and language are sources of power/oppression and should be used to enact social justice. Social justice is either a) the relative equalisation of power/privilege of subsets or b) realisation of potential in unequal ways (see below).
    10. One cannot understand or judge members of another subset. A subset culture is unique and the experience of its members is unfathomable. Only members of a subset have the right to speak about the experience of members of that subset.
    11. It is injurious for a person to use or appropriate culture, history or language of another’s subset.
    12. One best understands – and is understood by – members of one’s own subsets. Each subset has a shared culture. It is not expected or encouraged for a person to form voluntary personal affiliations across subset boundaries except for purposes of temporary political action. Strong affiliation for another’s subset is akin to appropriation.
    13. Exercise of imagination, empathy and fantasy are opportunities for potential (even unconscious) prejudice, misapprehension and distortion to occur and should therefore be avoided.
    14. Any of the rules above can be broken to promote a subset, prove the truth of identity politics or to otherwise further the cause of Identarianism.

    An example of rule 14 modifying rule 11 is that it would be fair for a black person to appropriate white Western culture because the black man is relatively disadvantaged. If a white man appropriates black culture this is an act of oppression. If a black man claims he is interested only in black art this is expected (rule 12). If a white man claims he is only interested in art by white men this is narrow-minded bigotry.

    Never fast enough, never far enough

    Identarianism is not a fuzzy warm principle of being nice to people and treating others equally – quite the contrary. It demands people be treated unequally. It divides people into subsets, classifies individuals’ worth minutely with matrices of privilege and social status, undercuts individuals’ autonomy and discourages (even curtails) individuals’ forming personal taste. It is incompatible with humanistic Enlightenment values. It accommodates factional interests and dehumanises opponents. It seeks to suppress free speech and free thought. Identarianism is dictatorial and dehumanising to its core; as an ideology it is riven by contradiction, hypocrisy and double-think. Identarianism is part nihilistic revolutionary movement, part narcissistic cult of selfhood, part religion of moral fury. It nurtures a culture of self-hatred, guilt and contempt for Western civilisation even – especially – among middle-class white people.

    Look at the groups removing “politically objectionable” statues. Look at university-student mobs which shout down or assault public speakers. Look at student bodies which demand “safe spaces” and ban discussion as “hate speech”. This is Identarianism in its purest form, where it expresses the mentality and emotional tenor of even those who consider themselves moderates. Most activists do not fully understand the origins, tenets and implications of their ideology. No matter. Consider the Cultural Revolution, when commissars harnessed the anger of young idealists to instigate an orgy of righteous cultural destruction. Identarianism is not simply another way of viewing society, which can co-exist with other outlooks; it is an entity which has evolved to suppress opposition and destroy cultural expression.

    Identarians do not have much time for old art because a) its artists and subjects do not reflect the demographic profile of today’s society; b) it rarely has a clear “socially progressive” message; and c) it resists co-option to Identarian aims. Beyond justifying the general Marxist declaration that spousal portraits and paintings of livestock and land constitute evidence of the capital classes recording possession of chattels, old art cannot be used to further social justice. This is, to be fair, an accurate assessment in purely political terms if one has didactic aims and no aesthetic, cultural or historical curiosity. If I were a curator in the Identarian movement, I would be consigning old art to the vaults and lobbying for deaccession rights.

    To Identarians, when change seems so gradual and the historic burden so outrageous, implementation of affirmative action (including – unstated – quotas) seems not only desirable but necessary and those who will be disadvantaged by quotas are unavoidable collateral damage. Individuals who advocate caution are revanchists. For a firebrand who believes he or she is on the right side of history, change cannot come fast enough or go far enough.

    New Criticism and Post-Modernism

    To understand why Identarianism has such purchase inside the art world one needs to understand New Criticism.

    New Criticism in art history is an outgrowth of Marxist analysis of culture. It produces socio-economic critiques of art production/reception and is driven by theory in the fields of women’s/black/queer/post-colonialist studies. New Criticism is leftist, more theoretical than historical and underpinned by French post-structuralist philosophy. New Criticism is at the core of most art-history university education, existing uneasily alongside traditional art history. A common strand in New Criticism is distrust of aesthetics, formalist analysis of art and anything that could be construed as connoisseurship. New Criticism, Post-Modernism and identity politics began in the late 1960s and developed in parallel and in symbiosis.   

    New Criticism is predicated upon the fracturing of the consensus in Western values. Post-Modernism states that an infinite variety of perspectives and interpretations means consensus is both impossible and irrelevant. (“All values are relative” is an unqualified assertion of an unconditional truth which negates itself, but never mind.) Where all values are relative there can be no society-wide standards for appreciation and evaluation of art; hence the development of multiple strands within New Criticism, each with different concerns, languages and value systems. Whereas Modernist art was judged carefully in terms of its visual content, Post-Modernist art exists in a zone free of all formalist analysis; its appearance is not only inscrutable and illegible but actually arbitrary and meaningless in visual terms.

    Nowadays many art critics, curators and theoreticians do not enjoy art; they do not like looking at art or discussing how it operates visually; New Criticism says that this is unimportant as only contextual power structures around art production and reception matter. This ideology breeds theoreticians with a positive disdain towards the visual qualities of art.  New Criticism and Identarianism are tools for identification of power structures and are antipathetic towards aesthetic appreciation, ambiguity, personal reflection, dissent, individualism and even pleasure. Pleasure in appreciation of form and technique, interest in creative decisions, appreciation of beauty, wonder at the experience of being transported into a different world or era, delight in discovery, joy through empathetic engagement – all these are alien to New Criticism and Identarianism.  

    What art is

    While New Criticism can provide insights into aspects of art production/reception, it never comes close to describing (let alone explaining) our responses to art as a whole or delineating why we respond more strongly to certain objects rather than to other similar objects. Syncretic criticism on a grounding of formalist analysis, traditional art history, aesthetics, iconography and literary and scientific knowledge – directed by self-scrutiny – is a more valuable approach to art criticism. To advocates of New Criticism that sounds suspiciously like bourgeois connoisseurship – perhaps it is.

    I have previously given  the definition of fine art as follows: a non-utile physical object appreciated primarily for its appearance which can function on an aesthetic and emotionally engaging level when shorn of all original cultural context (e.g. cave painting, Cycladic art, African tribal objects viewed as art rather than religious devices, etc.). (Technically, that means Conceptual art is not art, but that’s another subject.) Although mythology, allegory, literary sources and biographical information can inform readings, they are never central or even primary. It does not matter how sophisticated an argument is put forward in a work of visual art (a medium which by its nature is unsuited to conveying complex intellectual ideas), if a work of art is not appreciated on either a human/emotional level or aesthetic basis it will sink from view. Museum basements are full of prize-winning allegories which are unendurably tedious even for cultured visitors. Syncretic criticism can ably discuss and explain why certain works of art succeed or fail; New Criticism cannot, though – to be fair – its proponents do not believe art can succeed or fail.

    Modernists and traditionalists should make common cause against Identarianism. While Modernists and traditionalists disagree about aesthetics, both groups care passionately about the appearance of art. Identarians do not. They do not believe that aesthetics exist. New Criticism (which subordinates art’s visual character to political readings), Feminism (which seeks redress for perceived historical injustice) and Identarianism (which states that culture is a tool to be used to combat privilege) bolster curators who believe that art which cannot be turned to political purposes should be dismissed, subordinated or suppressed.

    Women’s art

    Due to multiple causes, in terms of proportion, women artists working in major art fields were in a minority until the late 20th Century. The lack of women in the Western canon is complex and relates to at least four social factors which led to one significant consequence:

    1.   Social pressure strongly discouraged women of upper and middle classes from pursuing manual crafts for income.
    2.   Women had difficulty in studying art because of restrictions on entering academies, apprenticeships and gaining access to male life models, which led to few women gaining high-level skills, experience and qualifications.
    3.   Women were often barred from joining guilds and societies and were therefore impeded from engaging in professional commissions and making their livelihoods.
    4.   Childcare and domestic duties often restricted the amount of time women had to make art.

    Consequently, women artists rarely practised large-scale history/religious oil painting and stone carving – genres and mediums that were central to art historical canons. Instead women artists often practised the “minor” arts of drawing, watercolour painting, pastel painting, crafts and folk art. These fields have traditionally been classed subsidiary to oil painting and stone carving – much to the chagrin of practitioners both male and female. Therefore there were relatively few women artists working at a professional level before the late 19th Century and thus there is little historical art by women in museums.

    Here is the sleight of hand which justifies affirmative action: “Look at the statistics of how little art by women is included in art-museum collections. This demonstrates there is an implicit masculine bias in judging what is suitable for art canons and proves there is a campaign of exclusion and suppression which continues to this day.” Historically there were specific restrictions on women entering the fine arts. However, today cohorts of fine-art graduates are often female dominated. Many administrators, curators, tutors and scholars are women. In my experience, lower and middle ranks of arts administration are hugely dominated by women, who are rapidly rising to top positions. Of the journals I write for, half have female editors; every single editorial assistant is female. The staffs of publishing house press departments are almost all female. Roughly 90% of the museum press officers I have liaised with are female. I would love to meet a caste of oppressive bearded patriarchs in the arts so I could gaze upon them in wonder and curiosity. I could shake their hands and wish them farewell.

    A statistical imbalance from a broad swathe of history is used to justify affirmative action applied to the current art scene where no exclusion exists. The just campaign for equal rights has been won; the new cause is for preferential rights. To the assertion that women/minorities faced worse discrimination in the past and that quota programming is a small price to pay, one can say two things: firstly, the price is heavy enough for individuals who have to bear the burden of this “historic redress” and, secondly, discrimination in the past was wrong and it is wrong today.

    Equity not equality

    Equity is different from equality. Equality means parity and neutrality. Equity means reward determined by input or worth, not necessarily equal. Equality is problematic for Identarians and Post-Modernists because it produces inconvenient results. Despite decades of equal opportunity, certain demographic groups tend to choose particular academic subjects less often and – as groups – perform on average better or poorly within their population cohorts. So, faced with this situation, Identarians have reversed the target. No longer is it equality of opportunity which is important, it is equality of outcome. This is equity, in Post-Modernist terms.

    Since oppressed individuals struggle against society, academia and privilege, they should be given preferential treatment to compensate for their disadvantages. The individual is valued as a victim, to be patronised and promoted regardless of his/her unique circumstances and actions. He/she is merely a figurehead, role model or token. The humanistic values of equality of worth, dignity and rights as ideals are nullified by a capricious and inscrutable system which not only denies equality as a target but even as a possibility.

    In employment this leads to affirmative action, in academia to equity recruitment, in culture to quota programming.         

    Quotas v. art

    Many Feminists (including Dr Balshaw) suggest that active steps must be taken to increase the public presence of female artists. Here are five flaws to collecting and exhibiting art on the basis of statistics:

    Firstly, targets diminish art. They reduce every artist (indeed every person) to a representative of subsets categorised by gender, race, etc. Artists become featureless interchangeable tokens in abstract calculations. It neglects the subject, quality and intellectual content of art and makes labels more important than art. It views artists as more important than art.

    Secondly, targets patronise artists. The reputations of Barbara Hepworth, Gwen John, Frida Kahlo and many other women have risen as high in their fields as those of male counterparts. Their art has become recognised without quota programming, on its intrinsic merit as art. Fairly or unfairly, quota programming will cast a shadow over the new generation of female artists who will benefit from it.

    Thirdly, targets patronise viewers. A generation of viewers will be subject to second-rate art promoted through a quota system. It will teach the lesson: what you do is less important that who you are. Inspiring examples of women (and men) attaining success through hard work, skill and invention will be replaced by the example of passive mediocre individuals who were selected because their skin colour or reproductive organs fulfilled a quota. A more dispiriting message is hard to imagine.

    Fourthly, targets are unworkable. Should half of all the art we view be produced by women? How would that be calculated: by number of artists or artworks? What about unattributed works? Will living artists have to register data or will a committee verify data to prevent artists wrongly self-identifying in order to gain advantage? Who will arbitrate these matters?

    Fifthly, targets are meaningless. In what way is a museum which displays 50/50 male and female artists a good museum? Viewers who are engaged by art not artists would be content with museums completely filled with women’s art if that art were the best art available. An obsession with statistics is the only fixed point in Identarian arts policy because all other issues – what is art, how can one judge art, what is art for – are all rendered unanswerable (or null) by Post-Modernism.

    Predictions

    From the statements of Dr Balshaw, her track-record at the Whitworth Art Gallery and Tate’s recent policies, we can guess that her tenure will be marked by three aims: a) a drive to increase levels of attendance; b) attempting to alter visitor demographics; and c) altering the demographics of artists represented. Here are some predictions:

    1. Collection and exhibition of art will be increasingly driven by the imperative to promote female/minority artists regardless of aesthetic or formal qualities of their art. There will be a drive to pack the collection with art by women/minorities in an attempt to reach arbitrary statistical targets. The contemporary collection will become a massive ever-inflating multi-million-pound experiment in social engineering grounded on untested principles, driven by ideology and set to utilitarian goals: to demonstrate virtue and make visitors virtuous.
    2. As in all politically driven economies which prioritise production and performance targets (centralised national economies, educational and health-care systems, etc.), there will be an increasing tendency to distort, partially report and fabricate figures to suggest increased attendance and greater consumption of art by minorities and the poor. Targets will be altered and definitions manipulated to compensate for poor results.
    3. There will be an increase in the practice of piggybacking shows of lesser known female/minority artists by attaching them to shows of more popular artists, regardless of whether the linkage is artistically/aesthetically appropriate. Attendees of Tate Liverpool’s exhibition of Leonora Carrington will remember a neighbouring room devoted to Cathy Wilkes. Both exhibitions were on the same ticket. Many visitors – seeing a room filled with contemporary art unrelated to Carrington – did not even enter the Wilkes room. However, Tate reports attendance of the Wilkes and Carrington shows as equal.
    4. Space devoted to historical (pre-Modern art) in Tate Britain will be steadily reduced. Presentations of historical art will increasingly disregard art-historical standards. Curatorial staff and financial resources will be redirected towards contemporary art. Departing staff who handled pre-Modern art will not be automatically replaced.
    5. Interpretative texts will reduce discussion of stylistic aspects and will highlight social dimensions of art. In an attempt to make texts as accessible as possible, they will be simplified to a degree that errors will become frequent, undetected by staff who will be under-informed about art history.

    The Fate of the Tate

    The Tate has numerous problems. It has multiple subjects to cover (British, contemporary and world art). It does too many things (maintaining and expanding a collection, hosting exhibitions, running a website, maintaining four venues and organising education/outreach programmes, publishing, conservation, research, hospitality, retail, fundraising, membership services, publicity and so on). It has too many staff. It has too much art. It must continually increase income. It must continually increase attendance. The Tate’s fundamental problem is that it does not know why it exists; this will only get worse over Dr Balshaw’s era, with its promised blend of identity politics, populism, community events, pop culture and an influx of school parties, not to mention a massive acquisition drive.

    When the existence of museums depends on popular consent and museum funding depends on reaching a mass audience, curators tend to make art as approachable as possible. Yet the more art is presented as just another piece of everyday life, the more averagely informed people wonder what the purpose of an art museum is. Making art more popular by adapting it to ape pop culture (or by co-opting pop culture as art) increases engagement but decreases respect towards art. Pop culture in museums cannot help but be a feeble denatured mimicry of the pop culture that fills the rest of the world.  

    People are not helpless dolts. Many of them yearn to have new experiences, to learn, to overcome obstacles. Rather than saying “fine art means whatever you want and it’s just ordinary life”, tell them “fine art is complicated and dense but if you invest time and thought you will get unique rich experiences and insights into the world and human nature”. If you were told (the lie) that fine art is just ordinary life, why would you bother with art?  

    In a Post-Modern multi-cultural age, cultural institutions lose morale and direction because they have no moral or intellectual underpinning. If museum staff do not believe fine art has intrinsic value as art (not just as a demographic signifier) then they cannot explain art. If even experts cannot explain why art is important, they (and their museums) deserve to go. Dr Balshaw, who studied English and critical theory not art history, is an arts-venue manager who has demonstrated little knowledge of art history and is thus in the worst possible position to put forward an intellectual and moral case for high art.

    Instead of experiencing fascination slowly develop in a quiet gallery, today’s teenager is inside a cultural mall facing a Sam Taylor Wood video installation in a noisy, overcrowded room. “Seen better on YouTube,” he says and wanders off – and who would disagree? Frankly, I’d rather be watching YouTube too. Arts-venue managers (as opposed to art historians, who used to run museums) are terrified of silent static art, of allowing visitors to choose to engage or walk away, and – like an anxious mother – chop art into tiny morsels without context or jangle bright geegaws such as interactive experiences to capture attention. But that is exactly what everyone experiences elsewhere all the time. Why go to a museum to bow your head over a museum-specific mobile-phone app when you could do that sitting at home?

    But surely those morsels entice visitors to learn more. Oh? Where? In a chaotic museum which cannot properly display that art, label it informatively or explain why it is important? Showing films, staging concerts, hosting performances, holding lectures, providing educational activities – all of these are done better, cheaper and smarter by cinemas, private galleries, concert halls and schools with facilities adapted to those purposes and staffed by professionals who are experts. The only thing an art museum does better than any other venue is displaying painting and sculpture. It could almost have been designed for that purpose.

    The Tate is so intent on being second-rate in as many areas as possible it neglects its core mission. A museum such as the Tate should conserve, present and explain art objects of the highest aesthetic quality and historical worth. Clarity, focus and excellence – and the respect that would generate – will secure the future for a slimmed Tate. But the circus must go. Exhibiting and collecting a cross-section of the entirety of the world’s high and pop culture in its myriad manifestations in a museum barely capable of presenting its limited collection of British and Western Modernist art up to 1970 is not only impossible, it is insanity.

    Accept that not everyone will be interested in fine art, as not everyone is interested in classical music, historical monuments and public gardens. So be it. High art has always been a minority interest. Is high art elitist? No. It returns as much as one is willing to put in, like all areas of the arts which require effort before providing rewards of lasting value. The drive to make high art a mass viewing activity is motivated by curatorial self-interest, cultural insecurity and financial necessity. It is not viable. If a museum has (due to poor decision-making) an unmanageably vast collection and an enormous number of staff and consequently locks itself into an unsustainable counter-productive cycle of performance targets to attain ever-greater income simply to survive then it deserves to fail.

    I have no personal animosity towards Dr Balshaw. Certainly, anyone who has run a large arts venue financially successfully has admirable abilities. However, anyone whose approach to leadership is essentially managerial, whose principles are informed by identity politics and Post-Modernism, who has no apparent belief in the functions and value of high art (distinct from pop culture) and who cannot identify or defend the core mission of a national art collection will only make worse the situation at an already unwieldy, organisation. Instead of being the Tate’s most suitable fundraising director, Dr Balshaw may, sadly, be the Tate’s least suitable director.

    Alexander Adams
    The Jackdaw Sept/Oct 2017

  • Alexander Adams: Why are artists poor?

    Imagine the most absurd and outrageous provocations about art that you can. For example: there is no such thing as a pure work of art; artists are unusually ill-informed; there is no market reward for good art; government subsidies make artists poor. Both defensive supporters of state funding and critical traditionalists will be muttering that art should not be viewed as an economic product or an investment. Both sides believe that art and money should be separated; the influence of money in the art market is deleterious to the production/appreciation of art. Yet how many of these assumptions are accurate and where is the economic evidence to back up these views?

    Artist and social economist, Professor Hans Abbing has looked at the fine arts (encompassing dance, classical – not pop – music, opera and theatre but primarily concentrating on the visual fine arts) and sees an economy that does not function like any other. In Why Are Artists Poor? Abbing seeks to understand how this singular market operates, drawing on academic research and statistics and demonstrating through anecdotal examples. Some of Abbing’s findings make profoundly uncomfortable reading for people who accept many common assumptions about the arts. Here are Abbing’s main findings:

     

    Art is used as a social marker

     

    Abbing states that class largely determines one’s attitude to high and low art. “As long as there is social stratification and as long as art products are used to mark a person’s position on the social ladder, an asymmetric judgment of art products will exist. People higher on the ladder look down on the art of people lower than them, while the latter do not look down on, but look up to the art of the former.” Those ascending the social ladder will wish to consume high art while those descending will cling to high art despite straitened circumstances. This explains why a carpet tycoon in China buys an Andy Warhol as a symbol of his improved social status and great wealth, while an unemployed professor will still love Mondrian and Mahler even if deprived of his former position.

    The fine/high arts are largely consumed and produced by the middle and upper classes. One could also view it another way: art of amateur and unqualified makers (produced by a constituency with a greater proportion of lower-class producers) is categorised as low, hobby or folk art not as high art. There seems a consensus that less-educated people believe that high-brow art is “not for them”; in other words, it is made for the middle and upper classes. It may also be that they feel alienated by contemporary art. We can all think of individual exceptions but data about exhibition attendance bears out Abbing’s thesis.

    Abbing admits in an appendix that attitudes towards the high/low divide are changing and that this lower-class deference and upper-class disdain has altered over recent years.

     

    The art economy is self-deceiving

     

    The sensitivity, self-deceit and hypocrisy about the connection between aesthetic appreciation and financial value are distinctive to the arts. This comes from the peculiarities of the special economy of high-status luxuries and the quasi-sacred status of items which are also commodities. We love and value art because it seems to stand apart from monetary considerations; the more we love particular examples of art, the more valuable they become as commodities. Knowledge of the value of items makes us uneasy and suspicious of their quality as art. Yet we do not find the enormous value of rare gemstones impairs our aesthetic appreciation of them. A fan of gems would not decide to boycott a display of gemstones because they were too famous and valuable, yet art lovers often are swayed by such considerations. In the art economy so much is paradoxical.

    Abbing notes that denial of economic value (or sabotaging of marketability) is used to maintain/emphasise material’s high-art status, in contrast to low art, which is popular and commercial in nature. Self-abnegating behaviour can drive up the monetary value of an artist’s products. It is not necessarily (or even primarily) a deliberate economic strategy, though it could be used that way; it is most likely the result of scarcity pricing and the market’s craving for iconic “authenticity”. Greater non-marketability > increased perceived authenticity > elevated status > increased demand > increased price.

     

    Winners take all

     

    The rewards of the arts are not proportionately distributed. If famous Anish Kapoor has 10 exhibitions, less famous Julian Schnabel does not get to 9 exhibitions (equivalent to 90% of Kapoor’s recognition). Schnabel gets maybe 2 exhibitions even though his name recognition is perhaps 90% of Kapoor’s. There is a limit to the number of exhibition slots available. Likewise, magazines and newspapers have a limited capacity to review exhibitions and averagely educated members of the public may recognise the names of only 10 living artists. The difference in recognition between being 9 and 10 on that list is small; the difference between being number 10 and 11 on that list may be huge. Similarly, a graph of all living artists’ income per annum would be flat at zero and near-zero for almost the entire X axis showing the low income of the majority, grow slightly for the small number who make a living income and then reach a sheer wall for the tiny number of super-rich artists. This is a form of winner-take-all situation.

    Negative as they may seem, winner-takes-all conditions provide opportunity for great fame and income in contrast to the poverty of most practitioners, which in turn adds to the excitement and appeal of being an artist. Artists, especially professional ones, are risk-takers. If unionisation or an income-equalising scheme were proposed, neutral risk calculation suggests a way to equalise income disparity should be in most artists’ best interests. However, human instinct being what it is, most artists would conclude that they are talented and lucky enough to benefit from a win-big economy rather than a share-small one. It is the calculation of every person who ever laid a wager.    

     

    Artists are ill-informed gamblers

     

    Abbing posits “more than other professionals, the average artist is inclined to overestimate his or her skills” and “the average artist is less well informed [about his profession] than other professionals”. Considering the way adolescents form an attachment to art (due to emotional rather than pragmatic considerations without even the vaguest of overviews of the career prospects available to artists), it is hardly surprising that future artists are often ignorant of the factors that will determine their likely income and success. In a time when most of the standard aesthetic/skill measurements are no longer indicators of potential success, how can any art student assess his career prospects? In such circumstances, the decision to enter the profession cannot be anything other than a hopeful gamble made by people who consider themselves unfit for “normal” jobs (even though numerous artists actually have second jobs which they perform competently). Artists cleave to a life in the arts not despite the poverty but partly because of poverty which acts as a badge of authenticity and a demonstration of unwillingness to compromise. The lack of reward in a perverse way validates a financially unsuccessful career: it shows how selfless and dedicated an artist has been, when in reality it might just indicate that this artist is no good. Entrants to art schools are also ill-informed about the many hidden, informal and unspoken barriers that exist in the art world, with its web of gatekeepers, conventions, rules and social contacts.  

    I would add that artists think they are more in control of their careers than they actually are. Changing taste, external market conditions and luck are all beyond an individual’s control.

     

    Subsidies create poverty

     

    A large number of artists earn nothing at all from their art; in fact a significant number incur overall debts to pay for material costs while failing to sell art (admittedly, some may not be offering art for sale). Artists are much more impoverished today than in previous eras because many function in a market detached from selling. In terms of income from gifts/subsidies (private and public) compared to income from the market, artists rely on the former to a degree unparalleled in any other profession with the exception of the clergy – another example of low-earning professionals being subsidised for the public good. Thus the exceptionality of the art economy is again apparent.  

    The arts is a paradoxical economy because for a long period (at least since 1945) the majority of artists have had low incomes from art; according to economic theory this commonly known information should cause a contraction in the number of people entering the profession, which would lead the overall consumption of art being spread between a smaller number of producers, thereby raising the average income. Yet, clearly, this has never happened. In fact, the reverse: there are evermore art graduates at a time when incomes from art are at an all-time low. Apparently, the social cachet, personal satisfaction and tiny possibility of great wealth outweigh the statistics.  

    Due to the general esteem in which the high arts are held, it is deemed socially beneficial to subsidise art and artists, partly in order to alleviate poverty. This is a contributory factor in establishing and maintaining a web of government support, patronage and material advantage afforded the arts.

    Abbing writes: “The total amount of financial assistance for artists has no effect on artists’ incomes. […] Irrespective of developments in spending, donations, subsidies and social benefits, the incomes of artists have remained relatively low throughout the West for more than a century now, and most pronouncedly since the Second World War. If there is a trend in the second half of the twentieth century, it is a downward one. […] In countries like the Netherlands where there is extensive subsidisation of the arts, the artist’s average income is the same or lower than of artists in countries like the US and England, where subsidisation levels are lower.”

    This conclusion contradicts most received wisdom. “If the sole aim is to reduce poverty in the arts then the best policy is to reduce overall subsidisation of the arts”. That sets aside the issue of the social benefits of subsidisation. The bare figures suggest that if the purpose of government art subsidies is to benefit artists financially, it is not working.   

     

    The state encourages the oversupply of artists

     

    The Dutch BKR plan bought art for local government bodies directly from artists as a form of subsidy; it operated between 1949 and 1987. Spending on the plan escalated to unsustainable levels as the number of participating artists grew. When the plan was cancelled, there was a reduction in the number of students applying for fine-art courses, an increase in the number of artists leaving the profession and a cooling effect on the general increase in the number of artists joining the profession.

    The past restrictions of academic and guild membership – which restricted the number of producers and set certain standards and conditions and kept prices relatively high – no longer apply. Educational artistic qualification in terms of BA and MA degrees is abundant and easily obtained. Government policy is to encourage the provision of ever-wider art education.

    The public subsidisation of the arts – insofar as it reaches artists directly – encourages people to join the art profession and contributes to commercially unsuccessful artists staying in their careers, which artificially sustains a high number of producers and perpetuates the impoverishment of artists in general. Income from the state allows artists to cut back on their second jobs to devote more time to artistic production. Although society as a whole considers sponsorship (direct and indirect) of artists a social benefit, it may actually be harming artists by swelling the production of art there is no market for. Increased state funding increases the number of artists and art production.

     

    Art funding goes to the middle class

     

    The common goal of expanding the reach of the arts to groups which under-consume them is not efficiently met through public subsidy (such as support for artists, venues, ticket discounts, tax relief, etc.). Subsidies tend to disproportionately reach the middle-class white producers and consumers who are already engaged by the arts, thus sustaining the status quo rather than bringing in consumers from other demographic groups. Government arts policy may be explicitly oriented towards social outreach but its effects channel money into the arts consumed by policy administrators and their milieu.

     

    The state has artistic preferences

     

    The patronage system of local and central government and public arts bodies replaced the patronage of monarchy, nobility and church; nowadays the arts serve their state patrons in an indirect manner. When a king won a battle he would commission depictions to commemorate his triumph and impress visiting ambassadors; the British Council does not commission propagandist art but it does select art that conforms to certain expectations, which it uses in a form of soft power in its cultural diplomacy. This art indirectly says “Britain is a liberal, tolerant, multi-cultural nation exploding with technical and artistic innovation (and is a great holiday destination and good place to trade with)”. The art is made independently but is often chosen because it conforms to – or at least, does not contradict – the establishment consensus. State-supported art is national and political marketing, directly both domestically and internationally. We could imagine the Arts Council funding a theatre production excoriating white patriarchal hegemony but it would be unthinkable that a White Supremacist play would be subsidised even though the latter might be more artistically provocative, more politically challenging and more in need of financial support. In the arts, “diversity” never means true diversity.

    Without state sponsorship fully staged ballet and opera with live orchestras would likely become extinct, but a reduction in grants which caused the closure of Turner Contemporary, The Baltic and some other venues, would result in Wolfgang Tillmans and Gillian Wearing exhibiting slightly less often. In some areas subsidies keep an entire art form financially viable, in others they promote art which is already self-sustaining or already saturating the market.

    As David Lee has suggested, the Arts Council in itself is not the problem; the problem is the narrowness of the art it perceives as worthy of subsidy and – even within the State Art range – the disproportionate favouritism shown to a handful of practitioners already well supported by commercial galleries and foreign state sponsorship.

     

    The amateur-professional divide

     

    There is an important deficiency in Abbing’s analysis, which he admits. What is the status of the amateur-art economy? All manner of visual art material is made, consumed and circulated – and in quantities that far outweigh the traded art in the professional art world – which does not obey the economic rules that apply to professional art. That art is children’s art, hobby and recreational art, copying, private sketching, artefacts from art therapy and other types of art which generally go unexamined through professional channels. Talented amateurs often produce work as good as – or better than – their professional counterparts and are often more risk-averse, financially savvy and better informed than others who have whole-heartedly committed to making art.

    Abbing makes a distinction between the fine arts and applied arts, noting that the income imbalances, reward range and oversupply of makers in proportion to consumers in the applied-art field is much closer to a normal economy than the singular fine-art economy, an intelligent distinction. Abbing states “in practice the distinction [between amateur and professional] is socially constructed”. Perhaps the emphasis could be not upon the status of the producer but the status of the economic activity.

    Abbing’s approach does not deal with art that is produced for (relatively) private consumption and which has negligible monetary value. Is this amateur art also part of the same economy as art produced professionally or semi-professionally? Just because material has no measurable financial value, does not mean it has no economic worth; economics embraces non-monetary transactions, as Abbing notes. Amateur art fulfils some of the criteria of (professional) fine art yet also does not fulfil other criteria. Amateur producers are often not professionally trained/qualified, tend to avoid risk, produce erratically, do not seek/receive income for producing, do not need the approval of venues/collectors, do not interact with the public, are ineligible for subsidies, prizes and public gifts, etc. Yet, in purely material terms, amateur producers can produce items identical to those made by professionals, albeit lacking the cachet and monetary value. Abbing suggests that low, amateur and poorly regarded fine art actually has greater aesthetic qualities than high – or what our editor would call “state” – art. High-art producers are marked by their disregard for – or spurning of – aesthetic qualities, whereas low-art producers strive to create beautiful or attractive art involving the use of craft skills.

    The most obvious answer to this conundrum is that the art economy is a spectrum rather than distinct field, with amateur art falling between fine and applied arts (with artists periodically moving between amateur and professional statuses). This raises the difficulty of definition and whether or not Abbing’s fine-art economic criteria apply in a binary fashion or in variable degrees. Abbing’s thesis is that the fine-art economy is distinctly different because of a) the extreme degree of inequality, barriers to entry, the consumption and production, etc. in that field and b) the unique paradigms that apply to that field and not to others. In various ways, amateur art seems to contradict both distinctions of Abbing’s posited economic model.  

     

    Conclusions

     

    Abbing seeks to overturn many of our assumptions about the relationship between money and art. This book raises two questions: 1. How true/accurate are Abbing’s conclusions (some of which he admits are in need of further data)? 2. Would interested parties be willing to accept his conclusions? The findings go against many of our common cultural assumptions, vested interests and current socio-economic structures. It is quite possible that Abbing is right on many points – and logic, evidence and intuition suggest that most of the economic observations are correct – but that we simply refuse to accept them or act upon them.

    Do not think that Abbing is pushing a political agenda in favour of free-market capitalism or abandonment of artistic subsidy. Abbing admits that there are many legitimate reasons why the arts are subsidised but he suggests that the many common justifications for art subsidies are spurious. The true reasons for art subsidies are rather too self-interested and elitist to be made plain.

    Why Are Artists Poor? should be required reading for everyone in arts administration and planning, and it is recommended reading for any serious-minded person thinking of becoming an artist.

    Alexander Adams
    The Jackdaw Jul/Aug 2017

  • Dick French: On The Town – November 2017

    It used to be said that a night out with John Bellany would take three years off your life. I’ll find out one day. We were both great friends of Cyril Reason, who was one of our tutors at the RCA, and although Cyril was less extreme than Bellany he was a thirsty man. I’ll never forget one night in The Yorker, a tall thin pub on Piccadilly (no longer there) around ’67 or ’68. Cyril improvised a game of ten-pin bowling in the upstairs bar. Bottles for skittles and heavy, round glass ashtrays rolled on edge. What fun we had before being turfed out. And talking of turf, Bellany and Cyril once wangled their way into the Royal Enclosure at Longchamps (they liked the gee-gees). They were happily guzzling away at the free champagne when they felt themselves hoisted into the air by heavies and dumped over the fence with the proles. Like many artists of the past century (Mondrian and Kandinsky for instance) Cyril had some interest in the occult and theosophy and although only fifteen years older than me he had actually met Madame Blavatsky.

    There’s a show of John’s paintings at Fortnum and Mason’s, almost next door to where The Yorker used to be. His paintings are scattered around the store but there’s a helpful catalogue so you can locate them. They are mostly later paintings from the ’80s onwards, although there’s Scottish Fish Gutter and Lost Soul from around ’65. I don’t like the later stuff as much as his earlier work, some of which was extremely good. I first saw it up in the mural room at the RCA where he used to work. A lot of the other students didn’t know what to make of him as they were all being ‘Popsy’ and minimal. In contrast his work was darkly brooding and bloody, strong meat, if a little too Celtic and rootsy for me. There was another Scotsman working close to Bellany who did enormous paintings of women being raped and throttled in public lavatories. I wonder what came of him. Bellany’s later works became formulaic; too many maidens will almond eyes, pointy chins, and thin shoulderless bodies … although there is a good painting of a fishing boat in the shop window called Intrepid.

    In the late ’60s if you were doing anything a bit out of the mainstream people would come up and say: “Hmm. Very interesting but of course completely invalid.” By ‘validity’ I think they meant conformity to the rules of art as laid down by Clement Greenberg in the ’40s and ’50s… “Integrity of the picture plane”, avoidance of depth or illusion, and regarding the painting as an object…

    Talking of which I don’t suppose you can get more ‘valid’ than Jasper Johns who is having a big show across the road from Bellany at the RA. He is said to be “interrogating the relationship between language and art”. An artist who has made ingenious use of his inadequacies – he can’t draw and has no sense of colour – grey is the predominant shade in this exhibition. Not that they aren’t decorative and sometimes even elegant, in particular the ones with dangling strings, the ‘Catenary’ series. You can’t go wrong with a catenary.

    He started off doing targets, moved on to flags, numbers, letters and bronze beer cans painted to look like the real thing. That last idea was taken up later by many other artists – didn’t someone recently do bronze bin bags? Then there were a few cast body parts followed by decades of cross-hatching. The pattern had all the qualities that interested him, namely “literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness and the possibility of complete lack of meaning”. Say no more.

    In the ’70s he met Samuel Beckett and they were supposed to have collaborated on a manuscript called ‘Foirades’ or ‘Fizzles’. The etchings accompanying the text don’t seem to have much to do with it except that they were grey and that was Beckett’s favourite colour. ‘Foirade’ is French for a silent fart but you won’t learn that from the wall charts. Another thing you won’t learn there is that Beckett disliked Johns and so no further collaborations were planned. It’s unlikely that they were collaborations anyway as the etchings were much the same stuff Johns had been doing for years. ‘Foirades’ was on sale for $6,000 in 1976.

    It’s astonishing to consider the intellectual vacuity of the New York art scene which persists to this day. At the White Cube gallery in Mason’s Yard you can see a show called ‘From the Vapour of Gasoline’ (one of Basquiat’s profundities). The show is supposed to “chronicle the dramatic ideological shift and deconstruct a national self-image opening up the space between the authorial narratives of the US and the darker histories they concealed”. Christopher Wool – he of the stencilled messages – features largely. His works are extremely expensive, but then the world is full of rich idiots seeking a safe place to stash their cash. I couldn’t bet on it being safe for much longer because ‘The king is in the altogether’ and Damien seems to have burst. But I’m not one to gloat.

    At the National Gallery an excellent exhibition, ‘Reflections, Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites’, argues that as students Holman Hunt, Rossetti and Millais became fascinated by Van Eyck’s painting of the Arnolfini wedding which hung in the west wing of the National Gallery. In those days the RA schools were in the east wing. It’s a convincing argument that this led to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who were fed up with the influence of Reynolds and the brown academic tradition of the time. They wanted brilliant colour and a more meticulous approach, Reynolds being characterised by his nickname “Sir Sloshua”. They started to paint on white grounds for sharpness and zing.

    They were also fascinated by the convex mirror on the wall behind the Arnolfinis and many of them made use of the same device in their own work. It seems likely that Velasquez was aware of this portrait as it once belonged to the Spanish court, but I suspect it’s stretching it a bit to suggest it led to his use of the mirror in Las Meninas. One of the great surprises of this show is a partial copy of Las Meninas by John Phillip from 1862. It’s extremely well painted, especially the maids’ dresses, but surely it represents an approach the Pre-Raffs were trying to escape.

    Also at the National is a show of pastels by Degas, ‘Drawn in Colour’. Well worth seeing, especially the women bathing. There are three of these, quite large for pastels. In one a woman bends over in a shallow blue tub, the blue of the tub reflected on her flank, and all against a red background. The pastel is laid on in broad parallel streaks in several built-up layers.

    There are dancers, horsemen and café scenes mostly from the Burrell in Glasgow. Next door to Degas is a gallery devoted to small landscapes painted mostly on the spot. Outstanding is Sunset in the Auvergne by Theodore Rousseau showing a distant view of the Puy de Dôme. It’s only about nine inches by seven. Don’t miss it.

    In the central hall you can see a show of paintings by Luca Giordano or Fa Presto as he was popularly known – the fast one. These are preparatory paintings for his decoration of the Galeria and Library of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence. The whole project took him only a year, 1682-83. I was particularly taken by the Allegory of Temperance. Maybe his tongue was in his cheek. There’s a very large Giordano further on in the National. It’s Perseus turning enemies to stone, very dramatic and well worth looking at. I suppose you could call Giordano a very late mannerist.

    At the Tate in ’64 they had a retrospective of Marcel Duchamp. Everyone took it very seriously, including me. I spent a long time pondering the significance of The Large Glass which I think was a replica made by Richard Hamilton. I thought it must be the repository of some arcane wisdom – serious and precocious that was me. A long time afterwards I realised that it was a joke, a very good joke which continues to amuse people to this day. Not many jokes can be funny for a hundred years. You’ve got to hand it to him. How about this … “The Bride fundamentally is a petrol can of love (or power-timidity). This timid potency, distributed to the motor with weak cylinders in contact with the sparks of his constant life (magneto desire) explodes and expands to the virgin who has arrived at the end of her desire.”

    I almost forgot, it includes a “gravity regulator”.

    Following a disappointing visit to The Chequers, the wonderful Spanish barmaid having moved on, I crossed over to the RA to see the Duchamp/Dali exhibition. Duchamp was quite a good cubist. He added some dynamism whereas Dali’s attempts at the same style were dreary, but it wasn’t long before the Spaniard developed his trademark illusionistic technique which curator Dawn Ades considers exquisite. I would call it “hobbyist”.

    All the familiar stuff is here, the bottle rack, stool/bicycle wheel, and that bloody urinal. What tedium. How can anybody still be interested in this crap a hundred years on? But they are.

    In one room there are a series of short films. I was hoping to see more of Gala and her charms but it wasn’t to be. One film shows an enormous banquet with Dali and Gala at the head of the table. I think it’s based on the feast scene in Bunuel’s great film Viridiana. It’s a theme that crops up again in the centrefold of the Rolling Stones album Beggars’ Banquet. Curiously, Bob Hope is among the guests. He takes the lid off a large serving dish and two frogs hop out. He does that Bob Hope face as they leap down the table.

    The traffic was so bad it took me an hour to get down to the press view of Outsiders at the Saatchi Gallery. I got there with only half an hour to spare. Imagine my surprise to find that when I signed the book mine was the only name in it. I wouldn’t normally have bothered but the ticket showed a nice girl’s bottom. Outsider art usually refers to the work of eccentrics or the mentally ill but the stuff on display was “general issue” by those just released from art school, all of which had been  knocked out very recently to fill the space available.

    To Whitehall for my morning draught in the Cock and Bottle. That monument with the dangling coats and hats is truly revolting, and the clay modeller’s conceit of leaving the pellets proud of the trousers makes Montgomery look as though he’s got dysentery. How refreshing for a while to gaze on the Burghers of Calais as I stroll along the river towards the Tate.

    Entering the Duveen Galleries I saw that the Queen of One-Trick Ponies is back in town. Her absence has not done much to furnish the space between her ears. I felt a great surge of pity for the poor woman as I surveyed the ranks of castings displayed along the floor (they are supposed to be the casts of the space underneath chairs).

    On to Haydon’s Punch and Judy where I can happily spend ten or fifteen minutes. And then a wander promiscuously through various galleries. I was in the mood for Samuel Palmer and after a few minutes with him I stepped through the arch to the unexpected pleasure of the work of Ray Harryhausen and some of the artists who inspired him such as John Martin and Gandy. Harryhausen was the maker of vintage Horror films such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Jason and the Argonauts. He specialised in stop-motion animation and many of the models he made to work from are on display. A single scene could take four months to produce. He bought Gandy’s extraordinary painting Jupiter Pluvius but the Martins were beyond his pocket. Displayed are many of his drawings related to his film scenes. They are certainly better than Dali’s drawings.

    Wandering again I found a beautiful Pastoral by Cayley Robinson (above). I remember it being in an antechamber when the National was showing Acts of Mercy about ten years ago. Tonally, it’s remarkable, the simplified shoreline reminiscent of Munch. The fleece of the sheep is picked out by the golden moonlight which slices vertically across the lake. This is the sort of picture that would be extremely popular as a poster, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Apart from that Scotch bloke I don’t think we have any popular art. And so on to the scandalous Duchess of Argyll, a woman I’ve always admired. Gerald Brockhurst’s portrait of her is rather good although he hasn’t quite managed to suggest her lascivious nature. Goya would have managed it somehow. Apparently the famous “headless man” was Douglas Fairbanks junior. As the picture was probably a commissioned piece it wouldn’t have been appropriate to be too revealing of her predilections.

    News from the grotto. The Sage has been giving much thought to the North Korean situation. He thinks that North Korea is China’s  opening move.

    Dick French
    The Jackdaw Nov/Dec 2017

  • Dick French: On The Town – September 2017

    I’ve just been to see an exhibition by an artist whose name for the moment escapes me. He is having an exhibition of his furniture-friendly Pop-Art style abstractions. They’re copies of book covers – title above, abstraction below. A few years ago there was someone, perhaps it was the same bloke, doing large pictures of penguin book covers. Scrape that barrel.

    The only unusual aspect is that the hard-edge compositional passages are superimposed on sloppy bits that he lets dribble at the lower edge. It’s a formula he could pursue for the rest of his life.

    Some would say “’Twas ever thus!” And thus ’twas, I suppose. But the art world has never been such a joke as it is at present. And it behoves us all to treat it accordingly. You can go along and have a laugh at White Cube Gallery in Mason’s Yard.

    “Sir!”, as Dr Johnson didn’t say, “The man who is tired of the 24 bus route is tired of life. From the bosky glades of Hampstead Heath it glides gently through Camden Town and down to the West End. At the bottom of Gower Street you can turn left for the British Museum or right to Bradley’s Spanish Bar and Soho. Further on past the guitar shops of Denmark Street, now destined for demolition by the megalomaniac town and railway planners. The 12 Bar Club is already closed down and before that went the wonderful Black Gardenia at the top of Dean Street – all victims of Crossrail. Stay on to Leicester Square and turn left for the Salisbury or a bit further for Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. Thence to Whitehall where I often alight at the Cock and Bottle for a morning draught. Thus refreshed I might continue on foot along Millbank to the Tate Gallery.

    The other night I deviated from my usual habits and took a bus up to Islington to see the new exhibition by George Rowlett, who has been painting in Italy for a while, taking in the temples at Paestum along with a few land and seacapes. While waiting for Mrs Cravat in the Island Queen I noticed a tall earthenware jar by the window. Its neck was decorated with fairy lights. It reminded me of Samuel Beckett’s great novel The Unnameable, and although some call it The Unreadable I have always found it most absorbing. In it a creature lives in a jar by a restaurant, just a stump with its head poking out. There’s some sawdust in the bottom and from time to time it gets mucked out and spread on the roses. At Christmas they string fairy lights around the neck of the jar and place a tarpaulin over its head if it snows. As the menu dangles from the neck, to read it people must lean down towards the creature’s head.

    Edward Burra was a great fan of Beckett and he thought it would be rather nice to live in a jar with just his eyes poking out. He did a number of pictures on this theme. Being so disabled it was a bit like describing his own condition, although he always managed to get around.

    An interesting feature of George Rowlett’s paintings is that they often contain fragments of the scene which inspired them. Flies, gnats, twigs, and in one of his recent pieces what looks like the tailfin of a sardine is poking out of a rape field. It’s a bit like Goya writing “Yo Lo Vi”. I saw this. I was there. Perhaps it’s just another way of trapping the moment. I always wonder about the insects etc. which must have been stuck in Van Gogh’s paintings. He always complained about them. Someone must have picked them out.

    Rowlett’s painting of the Temple of Neptune at Paestum is a dynamic piece (see illustration). A gigantic dark-haired figure seems to be bursting through the front columns (this is more noticeable in the reproduction than in the actual painting). Such things happen when  improvising so loosely and do not detract from the grandeur of the painting. My favourite piece in the show is, oddly, not included in the catalogue: Rape Field near Ripple, grey sky in May. Over a sumptuously slathered on butter and lemon rape field, a wide violet band containing flecks of viridian streaks along under a lowering sky. In the background of Lady’s Smock Lupin and Poppy Heads he seems to have slathered on a totally new colour. Pinky violet, peachy cream. Farrow and Ball would go crazy. Keep it a secret George!

    To Chichester with Dirty Harry to see the John Minton show at Pallant House. The air at Chichester is really most refreshing. You feel so close to the sea. The train takes ages and by the time we arrived my throat was as dry as a nun’s gusset. Fortunately just over the level crossing is an excellent pub. On the way back to the station the barman let us watch a stage of the Tour de France on an enormous screen.

    At Pallant House as well as the Minton show there is a small gallery of William Coldstream’s paintings. I never realised before how bad he was. The effort he puts in! All those measurements, angles and so forth to achieve such meagre results is astonishing. A kind of constipated sobriety in sharp contrast to Minton’s neo-romantic exuberance. Francis Bacon was always rather dismissive of Minton’s obsession with fellating sailors and body builders: “Why can’t he take it up the bum like everyone else so he can really enjoy it?”

    Poor old Minton, a star in the ’40s he rapidly became vieux chapeau as the neo-romantics were swamped by hard-core American influences. His early drawings and paintings were haunting and mysterious, rather like improvised Samuel Palmers. They had an intensity which is hard to sustain for more than a few years. I can think of a number of artists who have had the same problem of youthful ingenuity followed by floundering attempts to come to terms with Modernismo. And the pressure to do so is enormous.

    Minton resorted to curious stylistic habits; for instance, portraying heads as horizontal rugby balls with sharp ends – the bigger they got the worse they became.

    He did however retain the ability to paint in a straightforward manner and after his early romantic pieces his portraits are some of his best work.

    Minton was renowned for his massive mood swings and was often described as mercurial. He was a great friend and admirer of an artistic duo called ‘the two Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde, who wore kilts for God’s sake. They took advantage of his wealth and generosity but looked down on him as a ‘mere’ illustrator. They were much admired in their day but are now almost forgotten. Bacon and Freud are the only artists of this period to survive the American invasion.

    Minton became so sozzled that he gave up his teaching post at the Royal College. It must be the first and only time an art school teacher has done that.

    Pictures I thought worth looking at were The Desolate Stage of 1939, The Road to Valencia of 1949 and English Landscape of 43. There’s an amusing section called ‘Exotic Fruits’ of half-naked black men picking bananas.

    News from the Grotto… The sage is confined to headquarters for the duration of the Appleby Horse Fair. Pikeys arrive from far and wide seeking ‘business opportunities’; some in the manner of Augustus John, and others with lorries towing large chrome-plated caravans. It’s best to be at home.

    Dick French
    The Jackdaw Sep/Oct 2017

  • Dick French: On The Town – July 2017

    I heard on the wireless that Cornelia Fluff has just been appointed ‘Official Sculptor’ for the General Election. What can this mean? She’s obviously a bit of a Leftie so maybe she could run up a big bronze statue of Compo on his bicycle for Islington Green.

    Mr Serota has left the Billabong and moved uptown to a new job where he’s in charge of absolutely everything. Talk about ‘Once a Jolly Swagman’. I’ve always thought of him as Moriarty ‘The Napoleon of Art Crime’:

    “He sits motionless at the centre of his web, but that web has many radiations and he knows well every quiver of each of these. He does little himself, he only plans, but his agents are numerous and splendidly organised.” (Conan Doyle)

    Talking to Long John in The Salisbury I noticed two tickets sticking out of his shirt pocket. I enquired about them and he proudly handed them over the bar. A pair of tickets for Lord’s at £85 each. He’d just been to Locks of St James’s and spent £300 on a Panama hat. He takes his cricket seriously does Long John. When I was at school I got hit on the head by a cricket ball and have no time for it. And time is what you need for cricket.

    The chap next to me started talking about cricket and then football, but when he realised I had no interest in either he suggested we talk about golf. I think he’d been on a course. I warmed to him because he seemed rather lonely. He was wearing a syrup – not bad, quite well fitted, what used to be known as a ‘Beatle Wig’. I managed to get away and strolled down to the National Gallery. On the way I had an altercation with a street performer who was blocking the path along the south wall with a semi-circle of onlookers. I hate street theatre. You can still hear the buggers as you climb the staircase inside the gallery.

    Chrysophilus has been given his own room to display his latest efforts. He’s done a large tapestry, or rather a factory has run it up for him, based on a series of watercolours which are also on display. Enlarging such exiguous material is of course disastrous. As well as the tapestry the gallery is decked out from floor to ceiling with grisaille hangings of dusky maidens doing the hokey cokey. He didn’t even do these himself. The whole business is unspeakable so I won’t, except to observe that forty-odd years ago it would have been considered rather “girly”. Oops!

    Going past Fortnums I always get a cheery wave from the Irish millionaire who holds the door open. I was on my way to White Cube in Mason’s Yard which is conveniently just behind The Chequers on Duke Street – a pub worth visiting if only for the splendid Spanish barmaids. The WC is showing the work of Wayne Thiebaud, an artist I’ve admired since the ’60s when he was associated with Pop Art. Thiebaud is mostly a still life painter. One of the many things that distinguished him from the Pop artists was his delight in the sensual properties of paint. His cakes and pies look delicious and cakes, pies and ice creams are his favourite theme. His palette is that of the cake shop and ice cream parlour. Later on he managed to translate this into landscapes, oddly enough both rural and urban.

    Sometimes Thiebaud paints people and they’re dreadful.

    Clown Cones (see illustration), a reproduction of which I’d seen in the paper, I imagined as much bigger, but in fact it’s a modest work. I’d like to have seen it much bigger. It would have been outrageous. Cherry Pie of 2016 is delightful, as is Burger To Go of ’99. Quite why I like them so much is difficult to say. Maybe I’m pathetically grateful for finding visual pleasure in a modern painting. He slips thick streaks of lemon yellow into paintings of motorways in a convincing manner. A visionary of sorts. If I was rich I would buy Thiebaud’s pictures and hang them alongside George Rowlett’s, especially those luscious Alpine scenes where he also uses ice cream colours in a surprising way. [See page 46 for the latest Rowlett exhibition. Ed]

    The pictures here are fairly recent and are not quite as juicy as the ones I remember from the ’60s. I think it’s because most of them are done in acrylic rather than the oil of earlier times. But at 95 he is still producing great work. “Mr Thiebaud, you are to be congratulated”, as Elwood P Dowd would have remarked.

     

    To the Royal Academy Summer Show, this year presided over by the winsome Eileen Cooper, who can neither draw nor paint. But, as it says here, “She brings her experience and knowledge of diverse practices to the Summer Exhibition”.

    All the usual suspects are here, including of course ‘Paper & Glue’, the creative bachelors with yet another of their would-be photo combines. Don’t they ever get fed up with themselves? Year after year the same old flashy muck.

    There’s a painting worth looking at by Anthony Eyton of an Indian festival in Varanasi.

    Cornelia Parker is still flattening teapots. Habits acquired in art school are hard to relinquish.

    Prices are unbelievable. Gormless has done a woodcut in an edition of 5 at £30,250 each. That should keep him in vegetables for a while. And Macfisheries shows a linocut in an edition of 50 at £2,800. Fluff pops up yet again with a “polymer photogravure etching on Tiepolo Bianco paper” if you please. Edition of 15 at £3,025 a pop.

    There’s a neon sign by Biffa Bacon’s mother in an edition of 3 at £84,000 each. So rush along all you bargain hunters, why don’t you.

    An etching Girls Girls Girls by Cathy Pilkington, newly appointed Royal Academy Professor of Sculpture no less, is certainly a step up from her hideous sculptures which are curiously but understandably not on display.

    There’s even Julian Schnabel – remember him? – with a rather modestly sized load of smashed plates painted green. Nearby is a truly revolting intestinal jumble in bloody reds and pinks. It was so obscene I almost liked it. Then I realised it was by Hamish Kipper, but I don’t suppose he made it himself.

    With a few exceptions all this work seems to be a constipated extension of what they were doing at art school. There are no surprises. At college in the ’60s there was a chap who wrote in his thesis that by 1970 all innovations would had been achieved and that the future would be given over to what he called ‘conservative abstraction’. A percipient fellow, his prediction has come to pass.

    News from the grotto. The Sage writes from the wild country to tell me that the public lavatories in his local market town have been converted into an art gallery. There are lots of pictures of sheep in the snow – L’Escuela des Moutons Congeladas. On the wall some local wag has written “SID HEPPLETHWAITE HAS A BIG ONE”.

    Dick French
    The Jackdaw Jul/Aug 2017

  • Dick French: On The Town – May 2017

    Mr Wu was on the wireless last night. A very long programme on the World Service, but still I learned very little about him. He speaks as one heavily sedated. Talk about insclutable. He dwells in a large bunker under Berlin with 6,000 three-legged stools and some lifejackets. There was no mention of the poison beans, maybe he’s sold them all. The trailer described him as “one of the world’s most powerful artists”. It is puzzling how an aesthetic black hole can achieve such eminence. His career is enough to make even the most sceptical of us start subscribing to conspiracy theories. He’s one of these artistic accumulators who head things up. There’s a lot of them about. One thinks of MacFisheries, the bloke at the RA who makes animals out of coathangers and map pins. I suppose you could call it a modular approach which prevents you from making a mess… Now what can I heap up next?

    In the 19th century it took a long time for the French to latch on to the importance of Baudelaire. The Parnassian ideal was ascendant and accordingly it was possible to compose what was considered the highest poetry about almost nothing. Plus ça change.

    Art establishments have a primordial and instinctive terror of change. When Baudelaire wrote about “une oasis d’horreur dans un desert d’ennui” he could have been describing Mr Wu and the Art World.

    To the National Gallery for the exhibition of Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo. Sebastiano was from Cesenatico, most famous nowadays for being the birthplace and training ground of ‘Il Pirata’, Marco Pantani, still adored by the tifosi even though almost his entire career was fuelled by coke and EPO. Contrast this with Lance Armstrong who is considered a disgrace.

    An impressive show, although two of the most interesting pieces are already in the National Gallery. One of them, The Raising of Lazarus, is among the earliest purchases of the NG. Something I’d never noticed in this painting is that a group of women close to the raising itself are holding their noses. This I learned from the wall chart, but closer inspection shows this to be untrue. They are raising their veils across the lower parts of their faces to avoid contagion. The plague, both bubonic and pneumonic, had been raging on and off for many years when this painting was being worked on and such a gesture was commonplace. Besides, after three days underground Lazarus must have been a tad smelly.

    Sebastiano composes on the diagonal and the triangle. A striking example of his triangular approach is The Judgment of Solomon. The darkening of the central figure’s head is extremely dramatic but this could be due to deterioration. In some of his paintings he lets the sfumato disintegrate the forms rather in the manner of Beccafumi. The black starts to creep in, especially in a painting of the Virgin and Child in which the infant resembles Charlie Drake. The Virgin’s head is also unsatisfactory – too much face.

    In The Visitation the foetal St John the Baptist is said to be leaping for joy in his mother’s womb during her encounter with the Virgin Mary. A difficult subject to depict. One can almost hear Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling drawling “Well I think the word difficult is awfully well chosen”.

    There are some wonderful drawings and letters in this show. Michelangelo often worked on both sides of the paper which was expensive in those days. I think he was probably a bit of a skinflint. It’s interesting that Michelangelo drew mostly with the hand when nowadays we are encouraged to draw mostly with the arm.

    Many of these paintings have dramatic bits of landscape in the background in the red-tinged sky. I couldn’t take to The Lamentation. I think it’s the expression on the Virgin’s face. Those upturned eyes and the horizontal body seem insufficiently scourged with its immaculate underpants. Still I suppose this is no place for realism.

    “People don’t buy pictures because they admire them, they buy them because others covet them.” Advice given to Constable, but I can’t remember by whom. An Andy Warhol painting of Chairman Mao has just sold in Hong Kong for $1l million. How long can this crap persist? Warhol was once described as “an ambulant black hole”. And now we’ve got another one in Mr Wu.

    To the Mall to see the painter/stainers exhibition. At the opening I met no less than the Chief Stain himself. He seemed a nice chap. Sporting his enormous bling on a chain round his neck he looked a bit like a sommelier. For once the 1st prize was worth looking at. A large, elaborate, patched-together drawing by Chris Green. Bernadette Tinko showed a small picture of a filthy brown sink, which I rather liked, while opposite Alex Rooney showed a similarly sized clean white sink. I wonder if they know each other. Cherry Pickles shows another rear view mirror piece, A487, and Peter Archer’s Cliff Edge is sensitive.

    The Scrapyard Queen shows another of her car wrecks; as always very well done but I’m always hoping she’ll ring a few changes – naked men draped over the bonnet sipping from golden cans perhaps. But I don’t think she takes me seriously.

    My friend The Sage writes from his grotto in the Yorkshire Dales sending me a copy of the Royal Academy Spring Magazine. I can’t imagine how he gets hold of such things. (Age Concern apparently.) He’s very cross about this woman who’s been appointed Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy. She’s called Cathie Pilkington and makes the most atrocious plaster dolls which are supposed to be based on the Little Dancer by Degas. As always in this kind of work the exegesis is of more importance than the thing you have to look at. And there can be few things more unpleasant than what she makes. That such an incompetent can be put in charge of students astonishes me. But it shouldn’t really. After all they have Huge Mary in charge of painting. The Sage described them as “sugar sculptures for cake decorations”. She also intends to “dress, drape, protect or obscure with soft coverings” the RA’s collection of historic casts. She means to display her dolls in a way that will make them seem “tiny but vibrant” against lush velvet curtains. Does that mean she’s going to paint them black?

    To the John Soanes, always one of my favourite places. Unfortunately it was infested by a load of plaster body castings by Marc Quinn. “The museum is an unfinished total artwork. We’re continuing the process.” Oh yeah?

    Even though these things are body casts he’s managed to get them out of proportion. The separate upper and lower parts don’t fit together properly. Someone should grab him by the beard (I imagine he’s got one) and point out shoulder to nipple, nipple to navel, naval to the foothills of the fanny – same distance. Variations do occur of course but with the rather perfect specimen he has grabbed from behind this rule would hold. If her bum was a drug it would be Class A. Her tits too, petite.

    “I think that great art is time travel. Emotional time travel.” What on earth can he mean by this? “Quinn’s works invite us to reflect on the nature and meaning of time”. I should be used to such gnomic utterances by now but I can still be surprised and puzzled.

    And here’s my version of the grab from behind…

    Dick French
    The Jackdaw May/Jun 2017

  • Dick French: On The Town – March 2017

    Now my wedge is worn down to a nubbin so I’m trying to scratch a few dibs out of this art world. I’d done a few beauty panels and I’m punting them round town when I meet this dame in Covent Garden. I’ve known her a year or so and now she’s working the spigot in this bar on Long Acre. Now this is a classy trap, inhabited by the better class of West End rum pots. This Judy is Class A and she dresses in a manner that suggests she’s not afraid of catching cold. I like the way she always lets her bra strap hang down. She’s from that Hungary, where I hear you can commit all manner of depravity in the street without attracting attention. This must be dispiriting for them as likes an audience. I had a nightmare once when I had that Joan Collins over a bar stool of a Friday night in the French and nobody was taking any notice. During the season she’s always glued to the rugby on the tele so I enquire into this situation and she says to me like this: ‘It’s not the rugby Dick, it’s the men.’ And then she pulls me close and whispers in my shell-like, and I reply to her like this: (but this confidential riposte comes out a bit louder than intended, causing no small amusement and then some among the rum pots.)

    ‘A week off work to recover? I don’t believe it. The team maybe!’

    By and by comes Oat Willie. Now this is a curious character and carries a little sack of oats over his left shoulder at hip height. He alternates fistfuls of beer on the right with fistfuls of oats on the left. He’s fond of talking about his practice so much that many of the rum pots consider him to be no great asset to the community and give him the back of their necks. He’s fond of the bogey weed and I personally consider him to be higher than a cat’s back, which is no great commendation. By and by he shuffles off down the bar to gaze at Zoë, for such is the pancake’s name. He even offers her a dip in his little sack but she declines, it being a bit sweaty after a couple of pints. He associates with such low-lifes as John the Stud and Dave the Reptile who really have no business in a high class art blat.

    Dirty Harry sends me a free hack ticket to that Royal Academy to have a glaum at this show of Russian Revolutionary art. So I’m sitting on the No 14 bus admiring the great relief along the front of the Gaumont cinema in Shaftesbury Avenue. It takes you from medieval times to the Charleston and apart from the Parthenon it’s one of the greatest friezes I’ve ever seen. A traffic jam is not always such a bad thing.

    At the Academy they’ve draped the balustrades in red swags and put in a beautiful new crimson stair carpet at the entrances so it’s a bit disappointing when you get inside. It’s not that the pictures are particularly bad, although few of them appeal to me, but most share that “cellar-stored” look common to many early 20th century paintings; cracked, yellowed and dingy. A few things I liked. A painting by Isaak Brodsky which reminded me a bit of George Bellows’s shock worker, a figure stripped to the waist standing on a crane jib. Like Bellows but without the enjoyment in the paint, which is a characteristic of most of these artists. None of them relished the medium. Maybe they couldn’t afford to.

    Israel Lizak is an exception with his painting Walk. It reminded me a bit of Gorky and is an abstraction of an elegant woman in a hat from ’28. And then there’s Vladimir Tatlin who you could say has pride of place with his large model of The Worker’s Flying Bicycle. It never flew but it’s a great idea. And there’s rather a beautiful small photo of the profile of poet Anna Akhmatova by Moisei Nappelbaum (see illustration). She was denounced by the Bolsheviks as ‘half-harlot half -nun’. “Her tormented mouth through which 100,000,000 people scream.” There’s a woman down our street like that.

    On the way out a woman who was clearly upset was saying how sad it had all made her feel. And I had to agree. Apart from all the ghastly goings-on I can’t stand pictures of peasants.

    Up the Burlington Arcade the Fountain Pen Shop has closed down. Some of them cost many hundreds of pounds but were rather beautiful. On Berwick Street the blood oranges have just arrived and the daffodils have come out in the French pub.

    Sent on a mission on your behalf I failed miserably. It had been suggested I look at the David Hockney retrospective, an unpleasant job but someone’s got to do it. The queue was such, hundreds of them, that I lost all enthusiasm. Even after buying a ticket – twenty quid! – you have to wait around for an hour before they let you in.

    I decided to look at the Paul Nash show instead. A wise decision. The first room is called Dreaming Trees. They look like etchings but are mostly pen and ink. The catalogue describes them as ‘Symbolist’, but I disagree. Trees, hills, landscapes and a few ghostly figures which take time to emerge. They convey a sense of mystery which is not transcendent but embedded in the nature of all things themselves. There’s no need to look for anything else, ‘things’ are sufficient for those with eyes to see. Then came the war and a remarkable transformation. He started to work in oil and to make the pictures for which he is most famous.

    “There are men who want the war to last forever. Feeble and inarticulate may be my message. But it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls” 1917

    Starburst shell over the Ypres Salient at night … blacks and various shades of viridian, the light from the starburst picking out the troops helmets as they go slightly downhill on the duckboards. In the same room are The Menin Road and We Are Making a New World, the paintings for which he is most acclaimed.

    After the war he turned again to landscapes with rather mysterious qualities but without the intensity of his pre-war work. In the ’20s he went to live in Rye and got to know the 20-year-old Edward Burra – Nash was 35. Burra disliked Nash’s wife Margaret, who was much involved in folk music and morris dancing.

    “Such fun. We do Widdy Come Toddy, Parson’s Fuddle and Fuck a Chickabiddy and Flummox a Bubby Nit in the Navel. And also Maiden Heads Bung-Ho.” (Burra’s letters)

    Nash himself was quietly appalled by how his wife carried on. Burra considered that Nash couldn’t draw but although his figures were rather weak it didn’t really matter in his best work. Then in the ’30s he became committed to the idea of International Modernism which is strange considering how idiosyncratic his work had been. He liked the idea of a life force within inanimate objects and put together arrangements which nowadays look like very ordinary art school exercises. Later on in the ’30s he got involved with the Surrealists.

    There’s an interesting film of him during the Second World War working in the scrapyard of German bombers at Cowley in Oxford, the drawings and photographs of which led to his famous picture Totes Meer of 1940. The chalkiness of a lot of his pictures, which I’ve always considered one of his drawback, didn’t really bother me, until the very late things of wheeling sunflowers which are supposed to be symbolic of death. He died in 1946.

    Dick French
    The Jackdaw Mar/April 2017

  • Dick French: On The Town – January 2017

    “For we know it’s right, it’s in black and white, and it’s written down in his diary.”

    The immortal words of Benny Hill came to mind as I purchased the complete set of Samuel Pepys’s diaries for fifty quid. This pleased me exceedingly as such a set can usually cost – the venality of bookmongers being so great – well over a hundred. In an old box outside the same shop I discovered a full set of Reginald Perrin videos for just £2. “I didn’t get where I am today without rummaging around in old boxes.”

    Up very betimes and to my workroom and then by omnibus to the alehouse in St Martin’s Lane for my morning draught. By and by comes Mrs Cravat and Calamity Jane. The daughter, a comely wench who weareth the lipsticke, is a rug muncher withal, so dalliance is ill-advised. She runs an alehouse on Warren Street clept The Smugglers and is needed become so tattooed that she resembles a very privateer herself. They provide there a cocke-tail called The Black Spot of rum coffee, sassafrass and jaggery – a vicious little nip. They dined upon neat’s tongue and an udder which did please them exceedingly. But I demurred as my appetite is grown delicate betimes and doth not revive until the evening.

    Returning to my workroom I continue my series of diverse, lewd, impious and obscene drawings, representing men and women in the act of carnal copulation.

    I pondered awhile on that cunning jade Miss Prickens, whose proclivities are the talk of both Whitehall and Covent Garden. She hath abilities beyond those of most women and is said to perform The Whirligig. I decided to send her a message by my boy, e’en though I knew she would be busy.

    To Hampstead to purchase art materials. Whatever happened to Bird and Davis of Kentish Towne? I went there one morning and they had disappeared. The art shop in Hampstead provides carrier bags bearing the legend “Let’s fill this town with artists!” What a horrible thought.

    Just downhill from the art shoppe is an alehouse, The Flask. I was enjoying a morning livener of winter warmer when I noticed that a new beauty salon had opened across the way. It advertised “wart and verruca removal”. I had no idea the good folk of Hampstead suffered such low afflictions. So much for the Chalybeate spring waters… obviously not all they’re cracked up to be. And so I begin to learn modern expressions.

    Down river to Bankside, there to attend an exhibition of curious art pictures in a converted power station. They are by an American fellow, Robert Rauschenberg. To enter this show one must part with £15. I could hire an able bodied seaman at 21 shillings a month for well over a year for this exorbitant sum. A socialite with a finger in many a pie, and a bugger withal, Rauschenberg could not fail, nor did he. The paintings are a congeries of sundry miscellaneous rubbidge, two of which, Charlene and Gold Standard, I liked exceedingly. That latter incorporates a small dog of the sort to be found on record labels. Yellow overall; and projecting some distance from the wall and across the floor. Charlene is mostly a red piece with a segmented circle in the top right hand corner. Both works look much better in photographs, the cheap paint having deteriorated unpleasantly.

    In another room a collection of drawings with not a line in sight. Instead they are transferred from newspaper cuttings with the aid of lighter fluid. They are said ‘to deal with’ Dante’s Inferno. This technique has for decades been used by schoolchildren and I remember it being much discouraged as lazy.

    A most amusing piece is a large shallow tank filled with streaming and occasionally erupting sloppy clay. It reminded me of the snood of porridge looked after lovingly by Adam Lambsbreath in Cold Comfort Farm. “Nat nay nivver say that Robert Poste’s child and to think that I cowdled thee as a mommet.”

    A number of ballet performances are displayed on televisions. The dancers are trolloping about with umbrellas stuck to their backs. I found them unbearably ‘artistic’ and whimsical.

    He did some amusing things with corrugated cardboard but over a long career there was very little development. He finished as he started, a respected member of the institutional avant-garde, and he never drew a line.

    I forgot to mention that on my way to the show I was looking forward exceedingly to the “iconic upwardly soaring escalators” about which I had read so much, and I was not disappointed. Up they soar and down they swoop, although swoop is a misnomer as progress is effective but stately. On my final descent I lighted on the basement, a cavernous space of great cacophony and flashing lights. By and by I realised I was in the midst of a prodigious thunderstorm, but without the wetness thereof and it did please me to wander about up and down.

    Back over the bridge and up to St Paul’s to catch an omnibus, but the traffic so bad that I light on Ludgate Hill and proceed on foot to St Martin’s Lane. Pausing by and by at an ale house in Bull Alley to meet Mrs Bagwell where I had great enjoyment. “Apres avant toccado les mamelles que erant ouvert como siempre, she made shift to fudle mi cosa, but I demurred, it being too publique. ‘Some other time Mrs Bagwell. I am after all in charge of the Royal Navy’. ‘Oh rum bum and concertina!’, she cackled as she flounced off to the company of a bunch of knaves in the next room.

    On betimes to The Salisbury where talk was of that impertinent prating coxcomb Widow Twankey. I would happily see him in the ducking stool were it not that he would probably enjoy it. It would make a good television programme withal, introduced by that tedious pricke Melvyn Barg. Picture the scene. On the banks of the Thames, strapped in with the chair raised to its highest extent, his still dry party frock is caught in a gust of wind and, flying up, reveals a pair of crisp Y fronts. Perry, his secret revealed, is mortified and begs to be released, but it is too late, the beam is already descending.

    Bob Rhodes, artist, friend and dandy has just written to say he is dying of brain cancer and has three months. An unusual man, the like of whom I’ve never met before or since, his sartorial ideal was the striding figure on the Johnny Walker label to which end he always wore tight white trousers and a red crushed velvet long jacket and a neckstock. I was always jealous of his buggers’ grips as I’ve never been able to grow them. I’ve written before here about The School of Pubism which flourished at Sheffield Art School in the mid-’60s. Bob Rhodes was King of the Pubists. The things he could do with chammy leather, kapok and a bit of gloss paint would make your eyes pop out. It was like a desecration of Pop Art. The greatest compliment in those times was for an observer to say “Ooh that’s really sick!” Later on he turned to sculpture and then a series of constructions based on Art Deco cinemas. Some of these were painted Day-Glo pink on the back so that on a white wall they seemed to be hovering in a halo. After moving to Ironbridge in Shropshire he turned his attention to Coalbrookdale. He was keen on the idea that the power station at the end of the gorge created a micro-climate. Whatever its theme his work was always meticulously well made. A later theme was of ruined holiday resorts evoking scenes from J G Ballard.

    A curious thing about Coalbrookdale is that the people who live there have mining rights to their gardens. Bob was rather proud of this, but as far as I knew he never took advantage. He never married but I remember a series of unusual and sometimes spectacular girlfriends, one of whom he kept in a hut in the garden.

    Bob was a champion gurner though he never used a horse’s collar. He always cracked up the opposition by dribbling. I’ll never forget his 21st birthday party when he drank 21 whiskys and ended up in the model’s dais with just his foot poking out. A conscientious tutor, Dave Smith, noticed the problem and took him to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. He was back in the pub by 8.30.

    Bob was also an intrepid potholer. I remember once, deep under Stoney Middleton, dragging him out of a sump on the end of a piece of clothes line. (A sump is when the roof dips down under the water and you go through it hoping to find air on the other side.) Having a carbide lamp on the front of his helmet, he was the best equipped. We were all so ill-kitted it’s a wonder any of us survived.

    Dick French
    The Jackdaw, Jan/Feb 2017