Clifford Hall

There are five letters from Clifford Hall to Ruth Borchard, all dated 1965, sent from London W2. In the first, Hall writes: 'Your collection must be unique & I would of course like to know that something of mine was included. I have a self portrait, an oil painting done in 1942 which I could let you have for 21 guineas.' In autumn 1965, Ruth visited Hall, and then in December, Hall visited Ruth in Reigate. His letter, written the following day, begins: 'I feel I must tell you again how much I enjoyed my visit of yesterday & seeing your collection of self portraits. Self portraits always fascinate me, They are, inevitably, so revealing.'

Myself, in a Bad Mood, signed 'Clifford Hall 1942 Chelsea', is impeccably measured. Rarely has ill temper been so dispassionately observed! The Prussian blue of the artist's barely-glimpsed shirt adds a strong tonal note to the conservative palette of greys, golds, olives and browns (though the right side of his face is sharply illumined). Otherwise, there is a desiccated, disappointed air to the man seen here. His head and upper torso are commandingly modelled; with his neat moustache and goatee beard, he looks distinguished. Yet he exudes melancholy, a certain barely suppressed anxiety, evoked especially by the rugged lines etched beneath his eyes, also around his gaunt features, his gaunt cheekbones and on the puckered flesh of his neck. The vivid shirt seems to hint at other possibilities, a vibrant yet perhaps all-too-obscured inner life. The bare, orderly background, appearing to depict an empty canvas on an easel, speaks less to us of artistic possibilities than of inertia. Yet Hall was able to make a candid record of his unhappy state of mind.

Another oil self-portrait is illustrated in black-and-white in 'Portrait of the Artist' (Art News and Review, 7^th October  1950) in which the artist appears, suave and debonair in appearance, in a gentler, more equable frame of mind – one still observed with lucid objectivity.

Hall's artistic career surely contained, in its latter part, one of the most curious, offbeat developments in modern British painting. Born in 1904 in London, as a student at the Royal Academy Schools from 1926-28, he came under the influence of Sickert; subsequent pictures resemble the master's in palette and low-life subject matter. The Art News and Review article notes that he 'has written a book on Constantin Guys [the French painter], and is a fund of information about Whistler and the Greaves brothers.' Irving Grose, Director of London's Belgrave Gallery, which hosted a Hall retrospective in 1977, has written: 'While still at the R.A. Schools he obtained a number of portrait commissions which, together with the money from a Landseer Scholarship, helped pay for his studio-room in Twickenham [...] His friend Edwin John (son of Augustus) wrote from Paris urging Clifford to join him. Accordingly in 1928 Clifford shared a studio with Edwin [...] forty-five minutes walk from Montparnasse. Clifford and Edwin used to draw in the Cours Libre at the Grande Chaumière several times a week, and for a short time Clifford worked in André l'Hôte's studio near the Gare Montparnasse.’

Clifford Hall died in 1974. Until the late 1960s, his paintings were a mix of restrained English tonal values and contemporary French modelling, and, often, bohemian subject matter – cafés and circuses of Montparnasse, for example.

From 1940 he painted Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) – the courageous convention-defying English writer, raconteur and art school model (he was 'The Naked Civil Servant', which was the title of his 1968 autobiographical memoir and the subsequent 1975 television version, starring both John Hurt and Quentin Crisp himself) – three times; the current whereabouts of these works is unknown.

Hall's life was often marked by a depressive note, exacerbated by constant difficulties earning a living as a painter – despite exhibitions in leading London galleries, including a one-man show at Helen Lessore's Beaux Arts Gallery in 1935, shows at the Roland, Browse & Delbanco gallery in London in 1946, 1947 (this one alongside Graham Sutherland) and 1950, the Leicester Galleries in 1952, the Goupil Gallery, the Redfern Gallery and the Anthony d'Offay Gallery. At first, existing as a poor student in and around Montparnasse, there was something enthralling about the bohemian poverty he 'enjoyed' there. Yet, as Grose has noted, 'Throughout the Journal one is conscious of his perpetual struggle to make ends meet. Yet he was acutely aware that others had produced fine work under more difficult circumstances [In] 1958 [...] he recalls in his Journal advice that Gwen John had given him thirty years before and which he had failed to heed. During the winter of 1928 in Paris Edwin John became ill with pneumonia and Clifford got him into hospital and contacted Dorelia, Edwin's mother, and his aunt Gwen, then living in France. Next day Clifford met Gwen at the Dôme café. Clifford mentioned to her that he must soon leave Paris since his money was almost gone and he did not wish to take money from his parents. He recalls Gwen almost shouting at him, “Young man, you should be ashamed of yourself. Remember this. If people help you they will do so because they like to and you have no obligation to them, none whatsoever. Only this, do good work.” Clifford commented in his Journal in 1958, “Gwen John gave me the right advice thirty years ago. In theory I agreed, in practice I never gave it a chance. The accumulation is with me now.”'

In the 1930s, in London, Hall painted scenes of street markets, elephants in the circus and mournful clowns, and some oddly mysterious, sombre scenes of men, huddled and withdrawn in overcoats and hats, sitting in cafés. Some of the drawings made during his wartime service as part of the stretcher party in Chelsea are in the Imperial War Museum Collection. His harrowing experiences of helping rescue and bear away wounded civilians in London in the Blitz no doubt help account for the desolate air, the frozen feelings, the desolate air, the quietly desperate struggle for equilibrium, so apparent in his 1942 self-portrait.

Homeless, a 1940 monochrome watercolour (Collection: Imperial War Museum, London) by Hall, depicts two women in shawls, one a back view, the other in eloquent profile, and a back view of man in cloth cap and heavy overcoat, on a road scattered with debris, all the buildings and houses wrecked around them. It is a subtle, compassionate and incisive record of the kind of harrowing scene that no doubt Hall witnessed a good deal.

A late exhibition in 1970 at the Ansell Gallery in London showed Hall in a hitherto unsuspected and surreal new light. The huddled yet recognisable figures, say, in cafés, had given way to radical new portrayals of the human condition: bizarrely moving, claustrophobic pictures of faceless bathers on beaches, all shrouded in massive towels, and girls suffocatingly 'wrapped in polythene'.

In his oil painting Two Figures on a beach (1965), one girl is seen from behind with long black hair straggling over the vast white towel covering her; the other seen hunched forward (as if in grief) in side view, her face hidden by another towel, only her bare, delicate feet and one hand visible. These enigmatic, monumental, immobile figures – their features ominously hidden, their youthful attractiveness still somehow apparent through scant clues and details – are set starkly against a lustreless expanse of pale ochre sand (a setting not unlike the abstract canvas backdrop in Hall's 1942 self-portrait painting), with leaden bands of sea, surf and sky beyond.    

In his catalogue introduction, George Melly (1926-2007) – the English jazz and blues singer, and expert and lecturer on Surrealist and Outsider Art (l'Art Brut) – praised these haunting new works exploring dissociated human feelings and psychic withdrawal:

                  Clifford Hall is not a young man [...] His early paintings are not, I                            

                  must admit, to my taste, competent work in the tradition of the     

                  New English Art Club, very English in their restraint.

Then, in 1950, he recognised a certain sterility in what he was        

doing. He stopped painting for a year and drew. Through drawing

and thoughts, he recognised what he must do to express certain

ideas which haunted him [Now in 1970] Hall paints images

which are convincing, strictly personal, genuinely 'Surreal'.