William Hallé

Of the three letters from William Hallé to Ruth Borchard, two are dated 1959, the third undated and apparently from the following year. In the first sent from Battersea, south-west London, Hallé writes: 'I understand from Brian Crouch [q.v.] that you might be interested in a self-portrait of mine. I have done one which to me is very much myself. Perhaps you would care to see it?' In the second letter, posted from Totnes in Devon, where he was on holiday, he writes: '... am returning to London on Tuesday and will be glad to meet you in the Grosvenor Hotel lobby on the 11th at 2.15 with my self-portrait.'

Hallé was around forty-seven years old when this self-portrait, signed and dated 1959, was painted. It is a touching and quite curious painting. There is an almost jokey dichotomy between the persona of conventional, pipe-smoking, black moustachioed man in suit, tie and spectacles, with serious, still, rather melancholic yet benign mien and the vibrant, fluid means of expression. The rich, deep, coalescing colours give the picture a flavour of semi-abstraction –  with a sense of abstracted landscape, waterscape and skyscape emerging variously in the swathes of brown, green, blue, indigo and pale pink painting which flow within and over the figure, face and background.

A 1965 exhibition catalogue contains a black-and-white photograph of a gently smiling William Hallé. With his clipped, neat moustache, receding, slick-backed dark hair, heavy, horn-rimmed spectacles, dark tie, white shirt, pullover and checked tweed jacket, he resembles more closely the stereotype of, say, an affable, conventional businessman or bank manager in smart-casual clothes than that of a 'wild' artist. In his 1959 self-portrait, this kind of respectability is still present, yet it co-exists with an evocation of refined poetic sensibility in an image of the artist as a mysterious, semi-abstracted presence, conjured up in from a beautiful, fluctuating palette.

Hallé was at his best a rare colourist, whose use of deep colour expressed a fresh, pristine vision of the world. He had evidently learned a good deal from Bonnard, the Fauves and the German Expressionists, and perhaps even from the colour field paintings of contemporary American painters such as, notably, Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011).

An undated Self-Portrait with Pipe (oil and possibly gouache on board; BAC Moving Museum: Wandsworth Collection) is clearly from an earlier date, maybe five or ten years earlier. With a predominant palette of browns, black and glowing ochre, it is a more grittily naturalistic painting than his 1959 self-portrayal. It also shows him with an impressive pipe suspended from his lips, black horn-rimmed glasses, and somewhat thicker black hair, less receding. Here he wears a fawn pullover and white shirt. His look is much more incisive and direct than in the later picture; and quotidian details of his room or studio are evocatively described: heavy, black clock on the mantelpiece, glowing framed picture above, metal pot on the stove.

A 1970 self-portrait, Red, White and Black Self-Portrait (oil on board; BAC Moving Museum: Wandsworth Collection) is simpler and plainer than Hallé's previous two self-portraits. This time without the 'prop' or accoutrement of a pipe but with a similar pair of spectacles, wearing a red-striped, open-necked shirt and grey sweater, against a backdrop of spontaneous black, red and pink brushwork, it portrays the artist looking at us (and his mirrored reflection) with an unadorned immediacy and an unflinching honesty about himself as a fifty-eight year old man.

Such unsentimental self-awareness is clear in this written meditation on himself as a late middle-aged man, living very much in the present moment, looking back dispassionately at his troubled younger self (from a diary entry, Monday 18th September 1967): 'On Saturday I went into Bournemouth and stood on the spot on the cliffs where I must have stood as a young man of twenty or thereabouts. All those years & the elderly man returns but it only struck a vague chord and I wasn't really all that interested. It's my life now that interests me. I'm not greatly interested in myself of forty years ago, my terrible heartache then. Forty years. How healthy my body must have been then to have lasted so long & so well, yet I was not aware of that at the time, in fact I remember walking these pine-clad rocks and longing for death.'

William Hallé was born in Richmond Surrey in 1912. His father, who left his mother, his sister Annette and William when the latter was a child, was related to the Hallé who founded the orchestra, and his mother was a direct descendant of Sir Peter Lely, court painter to Charles II. In a catalogue essay for his 1965 exhibition, he recalled that:
 
From early days my contemplation of objects went with a longing to procure not information of the ordinary kind, but the fullest possible visual impression, so that when I was sent to bed I could take my seen object with me.

I wanted things to keep an aura of mystery: I did not want to know too much about them...

When the object itself contained a source of mystery, such as the mouth of a cave, I was haunted and obsessed by it. Such an object was the Reculber Towers, first glimpsed on arrival at Herne Bay when I waseight years old. To look at them was not enough: I had to reproduce them in some concrete form. And so over a period I must have spent hours cutting the shape of the twin towers from cardboard. I never made the slightest enquiry as to their history and origin: all I wanted was the ochre-coloured stone and the uneven shape of the towers with their narrow windows looking out across the flatness of the Thames estuary, which filled me with such an unaccountable mixture of expectancy and dread.

I was unconsciously and in a childish way laying the ground for a much later and more conscious attempt to come to grips with the meaning of form.

It was while living in the East End of London, aged twenty, that, contemplating reproductions in an art book in a public library, he decided to become a painter. He attended evening classes at Bethnal Green Men's Institute, and, during wartime Army service, enrolled in local art schools wherever he was stationed. After being demobilised, he studied further at Battersea Men's Institute, working at night as a telephonist. His painting, Going Home (1956), an affectionate back view of a family wandering through a Utrillo-like street, was reproduced in Jack Beddington's 1957 Young Artists of Promise. He had a series of exhibitions at Wildenstein's, a leading London gallery, and then at the O'Hana Gallery in London – a prestigious gallery in Carlos Place, off Grosvenor Square, which showed his works for many years with varying degrees of success – until it closed in the mid-70s. With nowhere to exhibit, he stopped painting (but kept on sketching) for about twenty years. With revived interest in his work in the mid-1990s, he began to paint and exhibit again in London.

Hallé's work became virtually abstract in the early 1960s, somewhat in the manner of Nicolas de Staël. He soon returned to his own kind of poetic figuration, depicting firmly outlined cellists during a rehearsal (in a 1965 painting); expressionistic faces of figures on a boat (in a 1968 drawing); and, for a 1973 exhibition, processions of human figures appearing to meld, fairy tale-like, into one another and their surroundings. This latter picture indeed evokes 'an unaccountable mixture of expectancy and dread' in the spectator. There were also, in the 1970s, a number of quite phantasmagoric pictures, at once delicate and sumptuous in colour, with distant views of solitary human figures meditating amid exotic scenery.

Hallé's hand-written diaries from 1949 to 1998 were deposited after his death with the Wandsworth Heritage Service. In the summer of 2017, I spent three days reading these at Battersea Library in south-west London. These thoughtful, engaging, candid writings record Hallé's daily life with lyrical acuity: his struggles and satisfactions as an artist, his sometimes fraught and mercurial relations with galleries (notably London's O'Hana Gallery), the difficulties and occasional pleasures of selling pictures to private collectors, the frequently straitened circumstances which led him to undertake exhausting, grinding day and night shift work at the Telephone Exchange, the rejections slips he all too often received from publishers for the novels and plays he also created. The diaries describe too his close, often lifelong friendships with other men, as well as sexual relationships with various men until near the end of his life. He clearly remained very close to his sister Annette, who lived in South Africa, and he often expressed concern about her and tried regularly to send her money; he visited her there in the early 1960s.

He lived for many years at 7a Mexfield Road in Putney – a home which he shared with Julia and Norman McLachlan – Hallé referred to Norman as Mac; Mac was a close friend of Hallé's until he died in 1984, and Hallé mourned this loss deeply. Hallé had a studio in nearby Battersea.

A lengthy early journal – its first entry, dated Wednesday 7th September 1949, detailing his arrival at a hotel at Olliergues in the Auvergne – conveys Hallé’s immense solitary, postwar joy in being free to roam, and paint, villages and countryside, and encounter local people, in this region of central France over a period of several weeks.

'This morning went out with watercolours again. Painted a hillside. Afterwards paddled in the Dore [river], standing upon a rock and glad of the delicious colours of the water. Gorged some blackberries... panoramic views in all directions. A chateau on a hillside, the curving river, little groups of houses, some with painted turrets, and salmon pink roofs, patched ancient walls. A golden light seems to glow upon everything... There is so much calling to be painted that one feels pardonably in despair.'

He describes his first impression of a hillside village: 'A few gardens slope down steeply, chickens peck here and there, but everything is crazy & yet classically beautiful, a little poverty-stricken perhaps. It is all hidden & cupped in the green hills, very tender somehow.'

The pleasure of delicious, abundant hotel meals – after the dreary, grey, ration book culinary privations of Austerity Britain – comes across in simple detailing such as:

'lunch today -
small crayfish
tomato with meat stuffing
sort of lentil dish
Chicken
Goat's cheese
fruit (peaches & grapes)'

Not all his experiences in the post-war Auvergne were so full of blissful content – he relates encounters with some singular, disquietingly suspicious and awkward parochial characters, and some of the medieval towns and villages he visited he found quite sinister, and he was glad to move on.

Over the years, Hallé appreciated day trips to countryside around London. A summer 1967 diary entry noted that 'This spending a day in the country and my painting are my only sources of contentment, but they do very well.' He also wrote, 'I love to record these days in the country.' On Tuesday 4th July 1967, for example, he wrote: 'The footpath between Otford and Shoreham [in Kent, an area associated with 19th century visionary artists Samuel Palmer and William Blake] lined with wheatfields and poppies. The line of fields looks particularly lovely today in colour ranging from green to orange.

'I laze in a field, but my body is not relaxed. I think of the battles being waged in parliament over the Homosexual Bill [after an intense late night debate in the House of Commons, at the third reading, the Bill was passed 101 votes to 16. Then after passing all stages in both houses, the bill received Royal Assent on the 21st July 1967, resulting in The Sexual Offences Act 1967, decriminalising homosexual acts in private between two men, both of whom had to have attained the age of 21; the Act applied only to England and Scotland, and did not cover the Armed Forces or the Merchant Navy], of whether it might be possible to bring [friends] Hugh and Fred and perhaps Geoff on this walk before summer is quite over, of tomorrow at Nine Elms [at a venue – possibly a gay pub or sauna, Turkish Baths or cruising grounds – in this south-west London district in north-east Battersea, neighbouring onto Vauxhall, at which Hallé over the years recorded a good number of often enjoyable and therapeutic – though sometimes monotonous and disappointing  –homo-erotic encounters]. A white butterfly trails raggedly across the field... disappears; a lark is singing. An aeroplane jets across. Two helicopters have just gone over; insects buzz yet it is peaceful. I am too busy within myself to be alone, and nature is too busy with its bird noises and insect buzzings to leave me alone. A warm blast seems to come up from the earth.

'Hedges of wild roses. I went and stood on the little grass-covered railway bridge where Hugh & I once stood, watching the trains race by underneath and talking – oh, a few years ago now.

'Made two sketches of the hillsides with some Woolworth crayons which kept snapping off.'

Hallé then goes on to describe that evening in a pub, the Rising Sun at West Malling, with a friend called Alf behind the bar:  'A few locals came in – looking at evening papers. The Rolling Stones drug case was featured on the front page and there was also a headline 'Sex Bill Gets Through' [decriminalising homosexual acts between men over the age of 21 in certain circumstances in England and Scotland, as outlined above]. 'A plump little man with a moustache snorted and said, "I'd shoot the lot of them." A short discussion on the subject followed in which those homosexual were careful to preserve a complete lack of personal interest in the matter although suggestions were, as usual, made about leading personalities in the entertainment field [such as:] If you went to a certain part in London you could see them... all with make-up on and calling each other by girls' names, and so on.

'I noticed that neither Alf nor his son, a rather tall, handsome looking man of thirty five, made any comments on the subject at all, for which I mentally applauded them.'

On Thursday 3rd August 1967, he noted, 'Last Tuesday the best time ever at Nine Elms – a perfect little episode', adding, somewhat enigmatically, 'I am afraid, owing to adverse circumstances, it may never be repeated.'

There are many intriguing glimpses of his encounters with modern and contemporary art, film, theatre and literature: he went 'to the Vaudeville Theatre to see "Chips with Everything", [Arnold] Wesker's new play [its protagonist Pip Thompson, a National Service conscript and socialist who has witnessed the squalid deprivation of London's East End, characterised by greasy spoon cafés offering ‘chips with everything’]. The theatre was cold and almost empty. The play still came across in the empty house, where the audience, what there was, sat in mufflers and overcoats'; he writes about reading Keith Vaughan's newly published Journals and Drawings 1939-1965 (published in 1966), commenting tersely, 'alright, I suppose – all that philosophising'.

In a 1967 entry, he describes eating at a Lyons Corner House with a friend, then going to see Luis Buñuel’s new film Belle du Jour (which he says was 'rather superb'). On 14th November 1994 he went to the Barbican Centre to see the 'War Artists Exhibition. Huge painting by Bomberg and knock-out Menin Road by Paul Nash [the apocalyptic 1919 painting of a devastated Belgian battlefield]. The painting affected me deeply and lastingly. Risen Christ by Epstein. Fine show.' On 5th December 1994: 'Cork St[reet] galleries. Patrick Procktor at Redfern. Big Kitchen Sink show and Michael Andrews 'Deer Park' [1962 painting] at Waddingtons.'

Diary entry, February 2nd 1963: 'Very undecided what to do. In this mood I always end up in the studio and this I did. Got to work on the workmen [painting], going at it with the boldness and daring of near-desperation.

'Find my 'avenue' somewhat tame and must get fresh ideas about it. Posted letter to Annette.'

Then on Tuesday February 5th 1963: 'I did not go to the [unheated] studio today. Until it is warmer I do not feel able to start new paintings. [That winter was an exceptionally cold one.] I had an early lunch at the Express [Dairy café], then walked in the snow waste of Kensington gardens. The round pond solid with snow on top, making it indistinguishable from land. People walking on it. Some men in Wellingtons were nearby beside a charcoal brazier and a hand cart such as one does not often see nowadays. The idea came to me for a composition of men clearing snow-drifts, to include the cart. I made a sketch of this then one of the men & a snow shovel. Afterwards borrowed a chair in the V and A and drew until 4pm.'

Wednesday February 6th 1963: 'I must remember the colours of my "two workmen" painting, for future use. Off-white, dark blue, light blue, yellow ochre, pale faded green and just a dash of red or pink.

'I like the avenue painting too. Both pictures are painted thickly and the style of both is the same without any conscious attempt to bring this about.

'I must start to think about the London Group. I shall submit the two workmen & possibly the sleeping woman, which still makes an impression.' [Sadly, he became deeply dejected following the consequent rejection of his paintings by the LG.]

Thursday February 7th 1963: 'Got up late, lunched, then went by bus to the wood yard at Battersea where after looking over some dead hardboard I came away with a nice 30 x 24 panel of live white wood. Pete was back in Den's sitting room, bearded and rather romantically attired. He is on his way through France by canal to the Med; at present he is ice-locked at Calais...

'I put two coats of button polish on my board and painted a snow scene with black figures on it. I did some wiping with a rag. The polish had stained the wood deep yellow and this I left showing in patches through the white grey and black paint.'

Wednesday February 13th 1963: 'Which way is art going to jump? That is what is occupying the writers and all those who make a living out of art. One has only to put oneself in their place to see this. One critic has dared to criticise the Kitaj exhibition. One artist exhibits charred and mangled books and receives an accolade. Myself, I don't see what is wrong with the picture painted because the artist feels deeply about a certain thing – Permeke, Millet. One could add Rouault and Sutherland.'

Thursday 5th March 1963: 'Straight to the wood yard by bus, where I bought wood for a 40 x 50 stretcher. I made it up roughly, enough to stretch the canvas on, which I had already primed over an old painting of the palm tree. I spent a joyous afternoon on it, luxuriating in colour. I am determined to worry less about art theories and trends, which would only drive one into total sterility in the end, and intend to paint fluently the scenes I like. I have started to use colour again after a brief almost monochrome period. I like colour, so why not?' His 1964 oil painting, The Bridle Path, showing a path running through woods and vegetation towards distant hills, has a gorgeously subtle use of colour, with vibrant accents of scarlet, lime-yellow and ochre standing out amid an otherwise muted palette of cool blues and pale browns.

Wednesday 6th March 1963: 'Met Lloyd at the gates of the British Museum. I had not been inside before. We walked through the great rooms up to the Print Room where there was an exhibition of Raphael drawings. I found them wonderful and moving. Before a simple chalk drawing of a girl's head and torso and one of nude men fighting (also the Massacre of the Innocents) in swift slashing, perfect ink strokes, one could only be lost in admiration and love.'