Anthony Green

There is no surviving correspondence between Anthony Green and Ruth Borchard. Ruth bought his self-portrait at the 'Young Contemporaries' exhibition (an annual public show of students' work initiated in 1949 by Carel Weight (q.v.)) in London in 1960. The selection committee that year included the painters Josef Herman, Jack Smith and Keith Vaughan (q.v.), the art critic Lawrence Alloway and the gallery director, Dr Roland of Roland, Browse & Delbanco. The painting is unsigned but dated on the board in bright red - '9-60.' Green was just twenty-one when he painted it, and had recently graduated from the Slade. He had first attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1956, and had exhibited for the first time that year with 'Young Contemporaries'.

In a 1978 'Artist's Statement', Green examined his early artistic development. His September 1960 self-portrait was painted at a crucial turning point in his life, just after graduation, shortly before his marriage to Mary Cozens-Walker (1938-2020), a student on the painting course at the Slade, at a time when he was vigorously searching for an authentic identity as a painter:

From early childhood (as an only child) my favourite pastime was painting and drawing. My first artistic discovery was copying Mickey Mouse with a pencil - I was seven years old. Walt Disney characters continually delighted me [...] From the age of twelve I increasingly painted my own ideas. [At the Slade] I had a traditional art education – life drawing, life painting and the study of anatomy, perspective and the history of art.

During these formative years my principal heroes were Van Gogh and Soutine and the European Expressionists. Later I fell in love with the Flemish primitives (Van Eyck, van der Weyden).

My youthful visits to the Louvre [Green was born in London in 1939 to a French mother and an English father] introduced me to the great French painters of the 19th Century [...] Although I am a very English artist much of my motivation and strength has come from French painterly tradition (for example – very positive statements and an artistic professionalism).

From 1954 to 1961 I painted approximately 400 pictures, most of   

which were bad; over the years I have destroyed 90% of them –  

keeping only the odd key works. I consider this prolific period in

my work most important – I taught myself how not to paint.

Like the juggler or the acrobat the artist only improves with the

constant and unremitting practice of his craft.

In 1960/1 I lived and worked in France and made the crucial

breakthrough which leads uninterruptedly to the current work.

Towards the end of my student days I had increasingly become

dissatisfied with my subject matter and reasons for painting. I found

myself asking the question 'What am I really concerned with at this

particular moment?'

In my second year at the Slade I had fallen passionately in love with

a beautiful girl, to whom I was returning from France in a few

months to marry. This fact gave me the motivation and subject

matter I needed – my family and its continuing story.

In 2018, Green told the author: 'I came from a home where life was a bit difficult because my parents were divorcing, so that art was something of a refuge, and I just kept on going. I had the immense good fortune that I met an art master when I was at Highgate School who suggested politely that I stopped doing Donald Duck: Kyffin Williams [q.v.] taught me how to use oil paint, he taught me how to lay out the colours in my palette. I remember as a schoolboy seeing Kyffin's still-life of a pheasant on a stool, painted with a palette knife; it wasn't a dirty word then, a palette knife, artists in Paris were using them and, in this country, the younger generation of painters such as Peter Coker [q.v.].' It was Kyffin Williams who suggested that Green apply to the Slade School of Fine Art, then part of University College, London.

To those acquainted with Green's renowned post-1970 paintings - elaborately detailed, vividly coloured, meticulously focussed, perspectively askew montages of scenes predominantly from Green's family life and, latterly, freestanding, sculpted structures of an often quite astonishingly baroque inventiveness (in 1992, Green started creating paintings in three dimensions as well as continuing to make two-dimensional pictures) – this self-portrait may hardly seem to be by him at all. However, it was painted during a peculiarly explorative time for the artist, when the rhythms of Soutine and Van Gogh insistently motivated him.

It is very much a self-interrogating picture. The brilliant, bare light bulb thrusting towards the top centre, with its swirling Van Goghian 'aura', may even bring to mind an image of a light bulb in an interrogation cell. The fierce look of alarm on his face is communicated partly through the two huge, bespectacled eyes, the right one enhanced in perspective. Yet the overall effect has an element of quite comic disquiet. This may be the look of a young man existentially self-dramatising his uncertain predicament before the black abyss of the canvas to his left, yet it surely contains an element of feigned truculence. Green's neat appearance (thick yet tidy hair, trimmed beard, sober tie, shirt and jacket) reminds us that art students (and recent graduates) were then accustomed to appearing as orderly on the surface as any sharp-suited businessman (a photograph of him as a dapper young man standing in a north London square, shows him impeccably attired in black trousers and waistcoat, white shirt, bow tie and stylish spectacles).

At the Slade – where his main tutor was the painter and art critic Andrew Forge (q.v.) (although he recalls that he was once given an inspirational personal tutorial by L.S. Lowry, who was a visiting teacher) – Green drew in the liferoom in the measured manner of his professor Sir William Coldstream. To the horror of his tutors, he soon found himself gravitating towards what he has called 'Dulux-finished Soutines'. His self-portrait endows a muddy Euston Road palette with edgy, expressionist (even Bombergian) overtones. He says, 'I arrived at the Slade in 1956 thinking van Gogh was God!'

In 2018 Green described to me how 'we turned up at the Slade in the autumn term of 1956 and I sat down in what I didn't realise was called the Reading Room (with all the books) and a chap came up and asked, 'is this chair free?' and I said yes, and it turned out to be Ben Levene [q.v.], who went on to become my best friend. (Ben was a born painter. He started at school, got a lucky break, went to an evening class that Carel Weight was running and got a scholarship to the Slade.) Literally a minute later a tall, lanky chap with a Birmingham accent came in and said is the other chair free, and we all said yes, and it was Peter Freeth [q.v.]. The funny thing was not only were we very close friends but we all ended up as Royal Academicians. It's extraordinary, this whole coterie of RAs (including the painter Len McComb [1930-2018] who was on a two or three year course, and trying desperately to what I call 'exorcise' Cézanne; and Tess Jaray [b.1937] was there – she's also ended up as an RA, and another chap who used to draw with charcoal and was on the fringes of Bomberg – though he never saw himself as that – Terry Setch [b.1937]) who wouldn't be seen dead in the RA when we were students – it's a kind of retrograde step. Extraordinary the numbers of artists who went on to have careers, who endured.'

In 1974, Green painted Good Morning, Mr Levene, showing the latter figure, fashionably hirsute and dressed in collarless shirt and flared trousers, pausing on his ascent up the staircase in a London mansion block – to the top floor flat where Anthony Green is seen, awaiting his visitor, behind the frosted glass of his front door. Green has written:

Gustave Courbet painted Bonjour Monsieur Courbet in 1854. 120 years later inspired by his revolutionary example, Good Morning, Mr Levene celebrates my artist friend, Ben Levene RA, who died in 2010. The stairwell really was very green.

From 1958 to 1961 the painter Kenneth Brazier (q.v.) studied at the Slade. Speaking to the author, both Green and Ben Levene recalled Brazier as being an exceptionally talented student (Levene stating that it was with Lucian Freud's help he had gained entry to the college). Among his fellow students at the Slade, Green singled out (in a 2017 conversation with the author) Brazier and Tim Behrens (1937-2017) as the most promising young painters at the time: 'Ken Brazier was a British Soutine – so wild, you couldn't pin him down. Behrens was another wild artist – as a young artist very good and promising like Brazier. Behrens's later works, made after much personal tragedy in his life, I found a great disappointment.'

Green had attended the Slade at the same time as a fellow student, Mario Dubksy (q.v.). Speaking to the author in early 2019, Green recalled that the then often combative, precociously assured figure of Dubsky 'introduced us all to the German Expressionists, and to Klimt and Schiele' (the great Viennese artists from the city Dubsky's parents had fled from as refugees to London in 1938; Dubsky was born in May 1939). Green says that Dubsky (who had said that he himself then 'wholeheartedly subscribed to the Bombergian approach' of 'drawing from life with charcoal, of using thick cheap paint, and of being almost solely concerned with form, mass and structure') dominated the student body at the Slade, along with Dorothy Mead (q.v.) – who had arrived at the Slade (in Dubsky's words) 'as a mature student and practised disciple of Bomberg's – then an entirely unknown, uncelebrated and isolated figure' –  and Dennis Creffield, (q.v.) who had arrived at the Slade aged twenty-six, having earlier attended David Bomberg's painting classes at the Borough Polytechnic (from 1948-51), where he said, Bomberg helped him realise 'that one lives in a world of imagination'.

Speaking in 2019, Green concurred with Dubksy's statement that Bomberg in the late 1950s was an 'unknown, uncelebrated and isolated figure'; he says, 'no one knew then he was very good. William Coldstream let in Bomberg's supporters to the Slade – Mead, Dubsky and Creffield, and Auerbach taught there too. But to admire Bomberg then was in those days widely considered an affectation, if not an affliction! I found at the Slade then everyone was hammering away 'Bomberg, Bomberg, Bomberg' – and using a considerable use of yellow ochre paint! I found it wasn't for me; I found myself paddling against a strong current.' But the influence of Bomberg (who had died in May 1957) –  via the enthusiastic teaching as well as undergraduate presence of his erstwhile students – was to some degree irresistible to young, open-minded art students such as Green.

He says Dorothy Mead 'was a mature student whom we inexperienced young students looked up to. She was an impressive person, one helluva professional as an artist, very friendly with no side to her at all though of course she came with an agenda as a one-time pupil of Bomberg. However when she left the Slade, as a star amongst those of Bomberg's tendency, no art dealers took her up; she was fiercely independent but would have liked a dealer's support and stipend. She herself produced amazing pictures with her own very attractive interpretation of Bomberg, imbuing her pictures with a silvery hue that exuded light. In my second year at the Slade, by contrast, I was just a bloke, who under the Bombergian influence, produced muddy-coloured paintings with shovelfuls of ochre! Her standing as a fine and original painter has been vindicated now – alas long after her death, the critics have re-programmed their assessment of her.'

In 1958, during his time at the Slade, Green had painted a highly mannered, expressionistic self-portrait Je t'adore, in which the strikingly attenuated figure of the artist – his neck and upper torso (in a greyish, collarless top) revealed, Bernard Buffet-like, as gaunt to the point of emaciation – appears with pained mien against a brutally crimson backdrop with three dead, blackened sunflower heads looming ominously large.

In late 2008, an exhibition of Green's Paintings 1958-2008 (at the Richmond Hill Gallery, Richmond, Surrey) included 'the re-creation of his first London one-man show at the Rowan Gallery in 1962'. In his catalogue Introduction to the 2008 show, William Packer quotes from the serendipitous letter Green received from his ex-tutor Andrew Forge as a young man – it came 'frustratingly, undated, quite out of the blue yet, as is so often the case, oddly timely' – stating that two inexperienced but sympathetic beginners were looking for 'young artists who have not shown before' for a gallery they were planning to open. Forge advised Green to contact them. As Packer notes, 'With Green it was to begin both a professional relationship that was to last until the gallery closed some 30 years later, and a personal friendship that was to end only with the death of Alex Gregory-Hood in the year 2000. The gallery was The Rowan Gallery which [...] was to become and remain a major force in British Art well into the 1980s.'

         After the Slade, Green says, 'I was trying to creep away from expressionism into I know not what'. Like David Hockney, at the Royal College of Art from 1959-62, he found a way forward through the example of the raw, deliberate naiveté of the Art Brut-inspired French painter Jean Dubuffet, and the inspiration too of children's art. Teaching art to schoolboys on his return to London from France in 1961, Green found himself amazed 'how the non-specialist organised the picture plane in the most miraculous way'. The result was the series of intimate, deliberately childlike paintings exhibited at the Rowan Gallery in 1962 – rapidly painted without any preliminary studies – including a delightful 1962  jeu d'esprit of a self-portrait depicting 'the part-time art teacher at Highgate School [keeping] an eye on his stepfather's poodle'; an outrageously sensuous 1961 portrait of a woman in a wedding dress, La Mariée, whose raw flesh-like hands appear manically to finger a rosary; and the dark and macabre 11 March 1963: Stillborn (1964), in which 'I try to imagine the trauma Mary suffered with the stillbirth of our first child, a girl. Eventually I understood that God never took his eyes off us.'

Though he went on to reject naturalism as 'tired', he affirmed in 1978 that 'I passionately believe in figurative art and totally refute the suggestion that it has lost its relevance to our civilisation. Since he first scratched magic images on cave walls thirty-five thousand years ago, man has looked at himself in the mirror, gazing upon his fears, loves, aspirations, quests and possessions. Too often the non-figurative artist uses a clouded mirror.'

From October 1967 to June 1969, Anthony travelled in the United States with his family (his and Mary's daughter Kate was born in 1965; their daughter Lucy was born in 1970) on a Harkness Scholarship, living in Leonia, New Jersey and Altadena, California. The paintings he made there have an elegant iconic simplicity, often portraying singular, full-frontal figures of himself and Mary against quite pristine backdrops of high-keyed colour.

In Mary Green (1968), we see his wife seated naked, against a plain pale ochre wall and muted pink floor, 'on a sweaty, plastic chair, [...] in her American hair curlers [holding] her yellow contraceptive bag'. In a 1968 self-portrait, The Picture Maker: Leonia, NJ 07605, the artist in white T-shirt, denim jeans and white loafers is seen from a distant, lofty perspective as an informally remote figure in a bland room demarcated by details of its 'air conditioning [unit], a harsh [green] nylon carpet, our Navajo rug and a Swiss cheese plant'. In the irregularly, somewhat boomerang-shaped Good Morning, Mary Green (1969), the figure of the artist is seen 'Flying into the bedroom in Altadena [over a glimpse of black-and-white zigzag-patterned Navajo rug laid out on a rich ochre carpet] to give my beloved [in her short pink negligee] some fresh camelias from our back garden' – a tender scene of aerobatic Chagall-like romance set in what we would now characterise as the Hockneyesque terrain of late 60s' California.

Green's 1968 painting, California I – in which the naked, statuesque figure of Mary sunbathes on a white Lloyd Loom rocking chair by a glimpse of turquoise swimming pool, and alongside the 'palm trees on the Pasadena Freeway [that] were very good subjects for the edges of my compositions' – demonstrates the beguiling attractiveness of the cool, uncluttered California vibe to young visiting British artists such as Green and Hockney, a million miles away seemingly from the stuffy, class-bound inhibitions and restrictions of home. However, in his painting Altadena, Margaret Croxford's Dream (1969), Green managed to imbue the contemporary Californian scene with a decidedly English familial hue:

Our Californian friends invited us to swim in their pool. Painting Mary in her curlers and swimming costume reminded me of a photograph of my mother-in-law Miss Margaret Crawford, taken before her marriage to Mr Bob Cozens-Walker.

By the 1970s, Green says, 'pictorially, my pictures are very complicated.' It was during '1962 to 63 [...] the crisis years' that he had developed, for a time, the surreally faux-naïf style that celebrated above all his love of his young wife, Mary. In Undressed Lady(1961), he depicts a statuesque Mary stripped to her lingerie, standing in a telephone box under a strong orange sun; in another picture, he sees himself as a squat, bowler-hatted figure aggressively flying through the air. Over the years, the couple appeared in many pictures together, including paintings made especially to mark their wedding anniversaries. As the writer and artist Timothy Hyman has pointed out: 'In all his pictures about his marriage, Green evokes the visual comedy intrinsic in Mary being a glamorous six footer, and he a good deal less.'

Partly influenced by the 'factual character of [medieval] Flemish painting', the German Expressionist Otto Dix and Walt Disney cartoons, Green was soon eschewing faux-naïveté in favour of his own idiosyncratic illusionism. He says that he 'was brought up as a child in a home that had lots of mirrors. You walked around in your everyday life, and you were always seeing yourself [...] Much later, you find yourself using them as an artistic device, which means you can drill holes into infinity.'

Mirrors feature in other pictures, like The Seventeenth Wedding Anniversary/Our Bedroom at Mole End (1978), but the fact that the couple is seen in various guises in the picture (Mary naked on the bed, also bare-breasted at a mirror; Anthony seen both flying in through the window in his pyjamas and ascending the stairs with a tea tray), is not solely the result of mirror-like illusionism. Normal exigencies of time and space are hallucinatorily suspended even within this ostentatiously and defiantly cosy, middle-class English milieu distinguished by its delightful bricabracomania. Green has said, 'My floating figures come straight from angels in European painting. I was brought up a Catholic; angels seem to me a most wonderful invention [...] It may be that the dilemma I face is – what are my spiritual values, when my world has been torn to shreds? [...] the fantasy-image, the floating image [...] is a thing to which one retreats. It's a bit like a man going mad, except one believes that one stays sane.'

A 1986 painting, The Silver Wedding, portraying Anthony and Mary in formal wedding garb, kissing and intertwining on their studio floor, is, he has written, 'a memory' of that anniversary, with its depiction of 'Our London studio [...] decorated with 25 pieces of wine and 25 different varieties of flowers. After a party, we flew to Venice.' The composition's spherical form, with angular edges at top and bottom rather resembling handles of antique silverware, suggests that of a concave mirror in which the image of the embracing couple is emphatically focused upon.

The Fortieth Wedding Anniversary Version 1 (2001) portrays bedroom scenes with a surprising formal inventiveness and astonishing ingenuity: the board has been intricately carved up and segmented to reflect different episodes of erotic-acrobatic intimacy amid a surfeit of sumptuous soft furnishings, including Mary reclining with naked abandon on her rumpled bed as her also naked artist husband is poised to dive off the wardrobe – and then seen poised in mid-air on his streamlined descent – towards her. The artist has written: 'Diving off the wardrobe. Loving, improper, priapic, indulgent, tender, tense, overfilled, irregularly shaped and unfashionable. A good Green for a ruby wedding anniversary.'

From 1996-2000, Green created Resurrection: An Act of Faith, a 'Pictorial Sculpture [...] twenty feet in length, bursting with characters and incident [...] more edifice than contraption [...] obviously a labour of love ' (as the art writer William Feaver has described it). The artist has written: 'The approaching millennium made me determined to make a grand work telling the story of my family's journey to Paradise. Atheists insist that I will end up a bag of compost in a garden centre. Giotto, Duccio and Spencer thought otherwise.' Each side of this inventively intricate sculptural work, centred on the prominently rendered head of the artist, recalls episodes of both Green's Anglo-French family history and his own artistic, romantic-erotic and spiritual journey through life. From out of the startling central shape of the artist's bespectacled, greying head a fecund succession of vignettes and images of personal and family life are seen to emerge in an amazing variety of jagged, meandering forms often so surreally unpredictable and uncategorisable that they appear on the verge of Art Brut. This is an artwork grounded in lifelong memories elaborated by the imagination with visionary acuity in recalling and evoking minutiae of  quotidian detail.

This 'Pictorial Sculpture' incorporates a succession of 'found objects', often evocatively familial, such as a miniature pink chintzy armchair on which the artist sits, with the figure of his father (wearing braces holding up smart pinstriped trousers) portrayed just above as he resolutely ascends to heaven. The artist writes: 'Age dilutes fury. There will, after all be a place for Dad in Paradise, with his son acting as a cosy launch pad from his chair.' Green also describes another tableau here topped by 'a 1000 watt bulb [which] mounted high on the gate, temporarily blazes to augment the light of God': 'For Resurrection, the French windows of our third floor Lissenden Mansions flat become the gates of Paradise. Skirting boards, picture rails and high plastered ceilings go to make a yellowing triumphal arch. The surface is decorated with chestnut leaves, blossom and helichrysums. These papery 'eternal' flowers assure us of our spiritual immortality while the autumn leaves remind us of our inescapable physical mortality.'

Elsewhere, a miniature version of Green's 1965 Black Crucifix appears perched on an expanse of Persian carpet. (Of this particular work, which proved controversial at the time of its making – the London Evening Standard reporting that the Archbishop of York took some time before deciding that the work was not 'irreverent' – the art writer Martin Bailey has recorded, here 'the Green family re-enact the sacred story. Anthony  appears many times – as the dead Christ, a father and a donor holding their surviving baby Kate. Mary takes the parts of St Veronica, a donor, a mother and an angel. The black background reflects the sorrow of their loss.') Green himself writes about the placement of the black cross picture within the Resurrection: 'Tragically, our first daughter was still-born. The black cross records the almost unendurable loss but also the faith which sustained us until Katharine was born in 1965. God never took his eyes off us.' He goes on to record: 'The family narrative flows from lounge to black cross and through the red crucifix – which glows with new hope as the Greens, enriched by the birth of Lucy in 1970, progress through life – occasionally resting, joyfully united, in their tent of eternal love.' Through a triangular 'window' of a miniaturist yellow fabric tent, we see the figure of the artist in meditative reverie, whilst through the tent's opening ascends a very singular figure, marrying the faces of Anthony and Mary into one blissful symbolic visage, and their garlanded forms into a single, ecstatically embracing body.

In 2018, Anthony Green told the author, 'I paint sex but I'm painting about love.' He then went on to explain how in his art 'I have been radical about all sorts of things: religion, marriage [Green, confirmed as a Roman Catholic as a child, made what he calls 'the unlikely transition to the Congregational Church and membership at Pond Square Chapel, London N6. Here Church meetings were (I suspect) more radical, communist and kind than most Bolshevik dreams']. I have found I could upset people on many levels: sex upsets people, funny shapes upset people, the blatant bad taste which apparently I've exercised for the last forty years – that upsets people of a nervous disposition. You put all three of these together [...] I used to lecture a lot, do the lecture circuits around the London art schools (and it was the students who invited me, not the staff). I used to teach them how to paint Marmite on toast! First I would say – with a glint in my eye – you had to paint the toast, then you had to mix the Marmite. It was a deliberate and provocative act on my part because I was so fed up with people then saying art had to be abstract. The more I seemed to be what I call vulgar, the more I went for it as an artist. It was no good prevaricating or using euphemisms for certain things – you've got to hit them right between the eyes.

'The last picture in the book [Anthony Green. Painting Life, edited by Martin Bailey (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2017)] – Le Cinema Fleuri, FIN – shows Mary and I going to heaven [...] I'll be sending that to next year's Summer Exhibition, it's about ten foot across, and the part depicting Mary and I soaring in white wedding attire is actually attached to a brass rod that vibrates a bit, emanating from an empty cinema screen, FIN on screen, and the lovers are on their way to paradise. The chintzy viewing armchairs are empty and the wooden steps on each side are covered in kitsch vases of flowers. I'm intentionally treading on every aesthete's nerve of what they think is good-taste-modernism. I'm not doing it through innocence, I'm doing it as a hard-nosed professional. I know in fact that history's on my side. That's why it's so important to publish the books on my art. It's politics. I'm an immensely political artist.'