Jan Cox on Part 3 of British Masters

“One man” art

The final episode of Dr. James Fox’s “triptych”, though less offensive than the first

two, again mixed factual inaccuracy, lack of context and astounding artistic value

judgements.

As always, no thought was possible without opposites, so we have “gentleman”

Graham Sutherland in Pembrokeshire, and “bohemian” Francis Bacon in Soho,

which was inhabited by “criminals, chancers and ne’er-do-wells”, and not, of course,

by imaginative, talented people from a broad variety of backgrounds, nationalities

and sexualities.

The piece on Sutherland includes a shot of him walking through the reed beds of the

Var valley in France, in a section discussing the “wild landscape of Wales”. However,

it is on the subject of the Crucifixion that Fox shows his greatest weakness – his

inability to make connections between artists and artworks. I lost count of the

number of times in the series he positioned every artist in an isolated bubble by

speaking of “one man”.

Matthaus who?

So the “contorted hands [...] gasping rib cage [...] stretched limbs” of Sutherland’s

great Crucifixion (fig. 1; 1946) were apparently based on Sutherland tying himself to

a home-made crucifix and employing a mirror, and had nothing at all to do with

Matthaus Grünewald’s Crucifixion from the Isenheim Altarpiece (fig. 2; c. 1515), and

this despite Grünewald being Sutherland’s “favourite painter” (Hammer 2005).

Similarly, no mention from Fox that the centrepiece of Bacon’s triptych Three Studies

for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (fig. 3; 1944) was also based on a work by

Grünewald, the Mocking of Christ (fig. 4; 1504-5), or even that Bacon’s left-hand

panel (fig. 5) came from a photograph published in a book of 1920 entitled

Phenomena of Materialisation (fig. 6).

Instead, Fox thought that Three Studies was “badly-painted” and “clichéd”; I could

perhaps try to argue that the appearance of the central panel’s image every half a

millennia or so might struggle to deserve the epithet “clichéd”. No mention of the

artistic closeness of Bacon and Sutherland in the 1940s: Sutherland’s Crucifixion has

a number of features, such as the rail at the base and the use of zinc white, that

immediately remind us of Bacon’s work at this time. It is difficult to tell whether Fox

thinks the average TV viewer is unable to cope with the concept of more than one

painter at a time, or whether he wishes his “innocent” British artists to remain

uncorrupted by nasty foreign influences.

According to Fox, Three Studies was art that shocked rather than moved, and so

wasn’t a patch on Bacon’s “finest achievement”, his Triptych – August 1972, which

dealt with the death of his lover George Dyer. I would argue that this work isn’t even

as good as Bacon’s Triptych – in Memory of George Dyer (1971) – which Matthew

Gale describes as “the most fraught and complex” of the memorial paintings – let

alone Bacon’s “finest achievement”. It is these bizarre value judgements that make

Fox such an unreliable guide. Fox also says in respect of the Crucifixion pictures that

“Bacon, like Sutherland before him, turned to the most evocative subject in Christian

art”. This should read “like Sutherland after him”. Although both discussed the

subject of the Crucifixion in 1944, before his own work of that year, and Sutherland’s

later production (1946), Bacon had produced a Crucifixion in 1933 at the time when

Picasso’s Crucifixion drawings appeared in the French magazine Minotaure.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

Arithmetic is clearly not Fox’s strong suit either. David Hockney was “born in

Bradford in 1937” and won a scholarship “in 1959 at the age of 20”. Help needed

from a Cambridge mathematician, I suggest.

Keith Vaughan: sex and suicide

Finally, let us look at the art of poor “tragic” Keith Vaughan. Adjectives are not Dr

Fox’s strong point – remember “luckless” Alfred Wallis last year? Vaughan produced

marvellous artworks for some four decades, lived well, owned a town house and a

cottage in the country, held a huge and highly-successful retrospective in 1962, and

achieved a CBE in 1965. Those who knew him found him great company. Tragic he

was not.

I was concerned that Fox might take a prurient line regarding Vaughan’s sex life – a

trailer suggested an investigation into masturbation – but he ignored it (already done

that with Bacon?), and instead went for Vaughan’s suicide note, which William Boyd

discussed so much more eloquently in 2003 (Guardian, 8 March).

To ignore Vaughan’s sex life would be as misleading as to discuss it at the expense

of his art. Vaughan’s two great passions were sex and art, in that order. He said: “75%

of my waking time is preoccupied with thoughts ideas or sensations connected with

sexual pleasure”. The important thing to get across is that Vaughan’s sex drive could

be sublimated into an artistic one. This is in no way unusual. For example, Robert

Silberman of the University of Minnesota wrote in 2001: “For Picasso, forever

equating making art and making love, sex was a fundamental obsession in his life

and art”.

So it is particularly strange that Fox should consider Vaughan’s “most telling work” to

be his Ninth Assembly of Figures (1976), painted when Vaughan was already dying

of cancer and his sex drive had been severely diminished by medical treatment.

Fox’s agenda, “the tragic story of one man”, was that Vaughan had been “defeated”

and that this led to his suicide. To this end Fox used quotes from 1964 (“toffee

wrappers” and “stranded dinosaurs”) to illustrate Vaughan’s despair in 1976-77, and

talked of his “failing health” and his “increasingly marginal place in the art world”. But

Vaughan’s suicide was completely unconnected to his painting, as Fox wrongly

implies. Fox introduced the merest glimmer of context when he mentioned the “rich

tradition of European painting” but, just as hopes were raised, he returned

immediately to banalities. He committed an act of plagiarism by discussing

Vaughan’s work while showing a male model posing in a life class, exactly as John

Bulmer did in his 1984 documentary.

If Fox had known anything of Vaughan, it would have been that Vaughan was a born

pessimist who saw others, less intelligent and less talented than himself, leading

apparently “happier” lives. Vaughan was a great believer in euthanasia: “Eternal

Rest Hostels for those who felt they’d had enough”, as he put it in 1961. “There

should be as much rejoicing over an elderly suicide as there is over a new born birth

– (good old So-and-so, I hear he’s made room)”. Vaughan had always intended to

commit suicide if circumstances were “favourable”, hence his most moving words: “I

am ready for death though I fear it”.

Alan Ross, who knew Vaughan well, even doubted that the term suicide was

applicable: “If one can really call it [suicide]. He was merely hastening a process

which was already very far gone”. Ross believed that Vaughan would have

continued painting for several more decades if his health had allowed. Vaughan had

terminal cancer, not “failing health”. His sex drive, which dominated his life, had gone.

He was in pain and his quality of life was poor. He wasn’t “defeated”, he was dying!

He knew he had reached the end of the line and he acted accordingly.

Useful Fox

Now that these programmes are over, I feel like someone who has undergone three

sessions of root canal surgery. Unpleasant, painful, but thankfully over. I intend to

derive good from bad and in my teaching use the series as a paradigm of how NOT

to present art history to an audience at any level.

Twentieth-century British painting is a resilient creature and has never been more

popular – it is of too high a quality to be damaged by Fox’s execrable commentaries.

I wrote these comments before I saw a similarly-argued piece by Richard Warren.

(See http://richardawarren.wordpress.com/ )

However, he encouraged me to find a Vaughan quote that sums up Fox perfectly:

“He did not need to understand because he has the power to delude”.