Painting: Britannia’s New Wave

Though Britain has had more than its share of internationally renowned sculptors in recent years, first-class English painters have been few and far between. Of those who have come forward, nearly all, like Graham Sutherland, Ben Nicholson and Francis Bacon, are loners who have attracted few, if any, significant imitators. One reason for the dearth of painters has been the traditional conservatism of British critics and collectors. Even after 49 years as a pillar of the Royal Academy, the great Joseph Turner was so fearful of critical scorn that he never risked exhibiting his last, prophetically impressionist, paintings. “For years, the English art scene drove me mad with tedium,” says Bryan Robertson, director of London’s prestigious, avant-garde Whitechapel Gallery. “Nobody cared. It was a real problem just finding people who were worth a show.”

Now, at last, the fog of traditionalism has begun to lift over London, and the artistic void has been filled by a platoon of young painters whose cool, bold work, while clearly influenced by U.S. pop art, is rooted in a distinctively English idiom that may well help Britannia rule a new wave. At the 1963 Paris Biennale, where French art bored even the French for a change, two of the young Londoners, Allen Jones and David Hockney, took the top prizes for painting and graphics from among 500 international entrants. Predicts Robertson: “The next great concentration of painters—after New York—will be in this country.”

The Londoners are sure, meticulous professionals who paint as if every brush stroke were their last. They are totally uninterested in the haunting, elusive landscape that for centuries has been the obsession of English painters. Rather, it is the minor and least honored theme of English art, literary painting, that has primed their vision. The time may be ripe for them. Among collectors and critics, weary of the inward-turned, paint-for-paint’s-sake language of abstract expressionists, almost any lively new departure stirs serious interest.

London’s young lions have produced no obvious leader. Nor do they form any cohesive movement. As one of them puts it, “We’ve never been a group sitting around a round table reading manifestoes to each other.” Resisting each other’s styles, as well as the collective palsmanship of their predecessors, they are a selectively chummy lot, like the old Tenth Street gang that was ennobled and enriched as the New York School. Of a score or more of acknowledged London comers, an artist’s dozen have aroused international interest and will be shown in the U.S. this season. Among the best (see color pages):

∙ DEREK BOSHIER, 27, invents jazzily colored bewilderments that he calls “geo-art.” Portsmouth-born Boshier was baffled by math in school, but found in art a personal arithmetic. His colors are rainbow, his brushwork invisible, his imagery a camouflage that creates the illusion of depth while flatly defying the painting’s artificial edge. A modest but highly confident chap, Boshier says: “All the images I use have very much to do with presentation, the idea of projection—rather like the phrase ’20th Century-Fox presents’ in the movies. These images come from a social condition or setup, notably in advertising—the blown-up image, the ‘larger-than-life’ kind of production.”

∙ BRETT WHITELEY, 25, is a Sydney publisher’s son and rambunctiously Australian, the kind who ties his own kangaroo down. He was enraptured by Piero della Francesca while on a scholarship in Italy in 1960, and has insisted ever since that paintings should have shallow, stagelike space, like Piero’s. Says he: “I like to be stopped cold not more than two inches inside the picture plane. Even with Jackson Pollock, you go on forever and get lost.” His own preference is for abstract figural arrangements with the “thumping, alive sense of skin on skin.” After painting 25 variations of his wife in the bath, he embarked on a detached but erotic series of paintings that explored the life and strangled loves of John Christie, the meek little Londoner whose hobby was murdering whores. Why Christie? “Most people,” says Whiteley, “can escape from the essential meaninglessness of life just with a few beers or a game of darts. Christie could only do it by taking human life.”

∙ ALLEN JONES, 27, has moved away from pop art toward ambiguous blocks of hard-edge color. He exemplifies the young Londoners’ qualities of depthless space, cool expertise, matte brilliance of color. He too indulges in controlled erotica when not painting buses, aircraft, and parachutists, all blurred images of speed. A Southampton engineer’s son, Jones admires a curious lot of ancestors from Delaunay to Miró. Intrigued by the notion of creativity as the interaction between the male and female within each person, he often paints androgynous figures such as Hermaphrodite.

∙ PETER BLAKE, 32, insists that painting should be pleasing to non-cognoscenti. To Blake’s delight, his The Da Vinci Brothers was bought by a professional soccer player. “What I’m doing becomes a folk art,” he says. For ten years, since he first enrolled at the Royal College of Art, he has filled his paintings with medals, badges, fancy lettering, pinups, comic strips (he incorporated one in a 1957 painting), athletes,, pop singers from Elvis to the Beatles. Unlike U.S. pop artists, whom he believes (incorrectly) to be harsh satirists, Blake packs his pictures with instant memorabilia as lovingly as a Victorian might press flowers in his family Bible. Married to a California beauty, he has been chosen to teach mural painting at the Royal College, where, he says, avant-garde students “already think of me as trad.”

∙ R. B. KITAJ, 32 (he never uses his given names, Ronald Brooks), is a Yank, actually. Cleveland-born, Kitaj (rhymes with knee-high) is a brusque, opinionated intellectual who acknowledges the influence of the surrealists, and has “always been devoted to De Kooning, Clyfford Still and Pollock.” Unlike them, he believes that painting should have subject matter. “The picture always takes over,” says Kitaj, “but you can’t help being moved by the great cultural issues peripheral to the picture.” He carefully divides his time between reading and painting, produces barely ten canvases a year. In his earlier work the periphery threatened to take over completely, with minute, wordy inscriptions fussily paramount. Now he lets the paint, flat, matte and massy, do the job. His wife refused $7,500 for his Junta.

∙ DAVID HOCKNEY, 27, looks as improbable as a figure in one of his own paintings. His fastback hair is peroxide blond, his eyes peep owlishly through black spectacles, and occasionally he sports a gold-lamé dinner jacket. Yorkshire-born Hockney’s first one-man show in Manhattan was a sellout when it opened last week. His painting, a poetic blend of childish innocence and sophisticated whimsicality, is often dominated by an edgy displacement of figures in space. His bite is sharp in 16 etchings for The Rake’s Progress, a series on his adventures in Manhattan, inspired by Hogarth’s classic. California Art Collector, explains Hockney, combines quaintness and caricature. Asked about the tiny efflorescence of white behind a support at the right of the work, Hockney replied: “Californians are very proud of their Clyfford Stills. That’s a little Still.”

∙ PETER PHILLIPS, 25, is an industrious craftsman who rejects pop art’s emphasis on the painted object, regards his own work as “a bit traditional. Subject matter is not the most important thing,” he says. “Like building a computer, you don’t want anything that’s not supposed to be there.” Son of a Birmingham carpenter, Phillips fell into art school because he was too “cowardly” to work at a trade. At the Royal College of Art, he rebelled against painting “flowers and nude ladies” and turned out “huge paintings that looked a bit like 100th-rate De Koonings.” Then he headed toward his present style, elaborating a sort of heraldry of modern times. His Gravy for the Navy, decked out with greyish triangles of prismatic glass, features images of U.S. pinups. Says Phillips: “American imagery hits you more readily; it’s a little more startling.”

He will have ample opportunity to savor it at firsthand. Phillips has won a 21-month Harkness Foundation fellowship that will enable him to paint and study in New York. He is convinced that the British painters will enjoy a long renaissance. Says he: “There’ll be a lot of good people coming after us, and the older generation have started thinking again. For once, all the good artists are pulling their weight in England these days.”