Albert Herbert

The first of three letters from Albert Herbert to Ruth Borchard, dated 'Dec. 21st 1958' and sent from Wolverhampton, mentions that he is about 'to move to a house in Leamington Spa – having been very busy with solicitors and building societies... I find I have no money left to buy any furniture (so) your offer to buy a self portrait for about 15gns came just at the right moment. The trouble is that I cannot at the moment find one. Until very recently I have been very careless with my pictures and I am not sure where all of them are. I certainly did some self portraits at the Royal College but I have not got any here. I am almost certain that at least one is in my parents' house but I will not be going there for about a month. If you wait that long I could get in touch with you again.'

The second letter, undated and sent from his new home in Leamington Spa, begins: 'I posted the self portrait to you on Monday. I hope it arrived safely. The reason I took so long over this was that I was doing some more work on the portrait. That is most unusual for me, as most of my best pictures have been done over a period of months. I frequently leave them in an unsatisfactory state and then return several months later to improve them.' The third letter, dated Wednesday March 25th (no doubt 1959), expresses his pleasure that Ruth liked the portrait.

In a letter to the author (February 2002), Albert Herbert set out his 'rather uncertain memories of this painting... About 1958-60 I received a letter from Ruth Borchard asking if I had an 'early' self portrait for sale – At that time I was teaching at Birmingham College of Art and I had recently bought a house in Leamington Spa. I did not have a self portrait but I thought I would do one quite quickly on an odd piece of board – quite small I think. I really did think she wanted an "early" portrait so I may have tried to make myself look younger but I was about 34 and I made an attempt to make the picture look old and battered – looking back on it now this seems absurd but perhaps I enjoyed the challenge of faking an "early" picture!'

For those aware only of Albert Herbert's later religiously-orientated paintings (pictures from the mid-1980s onwards drawn in a deliberately childlike, magically naïve manner), the artist's self-portrait – dating, it seems, from 1959 but, in the artist's own words in his letter to the author, 'reputed (!) to have been painted 1949-62' when he was a student at the Royal College of Art –  may hardly seem recognisably his. Its degree of Euston Road-style realism, its apparent dedication to naturalistic appearances, may seem initially to be at odds with his later work – as by a quite different painter. However, even when one considers, and sets side by side, the artist's early, mid-career and later work, an essential stylistic continuity, based on a mystical search for identity, is seen to permeate throughout.

Although he was then about thirty-four years old, Herbert seems to have painted himself as a younger man still very much coming to terms with himself and his place in the world. Though he appears to peer at us (or his own reflection) directly through his spectacles, his abstracted, smooth-complexioned look, accentuated by nearly-pursed lips, is hesitant, elusive, slightly tremulous, still quite boyish. Interestingly, Herbert's childhood companion, John Clarke, later famous as the actor and film director Bryan Forbes, reminisced in his autobiography: 'We were inseparable (as children), and his extraordinary imagination spurred me and did, I know, sharpen my perceptions... He was the most perfect of friends and in those days outdistanced us all... Shy with everyone but me, he walked with an almost Groucho Marx-like stoop, giving the impression that he wanted people to avoid seeing his face.' In Herbert's self-portrait, made years later but still obliquely  and indirectly recalling his young adulthood, his acute perceptiveness and indeed 'his extraordinary imagination' are sensitively evoked. It seems that by now his shyness had been conquered to the point that he could gently and tentatively reveal his face to the world.

Details such as the rimless glasses, the nostrils, mouth and hair, are immaculately described, without being pedantically accurate. Though the picture's palette is ostensibly conservative, it contains many subtly moving nuances of colour and tone. The two broad rectangular bands in the background – one mainly dark brown (for the wall of the room), one apparently representing a net curtain scintillating with daylight from the window – penetratingly reflect the mix of colours on the subject's face and clothes. The light reflections on Herbert's face propel our attention to the dazzling window backdrop. Similarly, the darker facial tones are seen to relate to the quite mahogany brown backdrop to the left. It is as though the picture is deliberately setting out to explore both the physical and psychic nature of  polarities of dark and light, extremes of day and night – as they are seen to intermingle and balance themselves out in the overall composition, as they do also within the scope of the subject's countenance.

The Prussian blue of Herbert's sweater brings a heightened, indeed quite oceanic note to the picture – like a glimpse of vibrant blue sky or water in what appears, to a good degree, like an earthy, parched landscape. The brilliant light, with its accents too of light sky-blue, percolating into this dusky interior, and illumining one side of his face, appears as much symbolic and inspirational as literal. The back of the canvas in the artist's studio - visible as one striking slender vertical bar to the far bottom right of the picture – has a rusty, blood-red hue. In this detail, there may be an unconscious message that deep meaning is hidden somehow in the margins – and, unknowingly, at the back of things.

In 1994, Herbert wrote: 'It is true that I usually start with some idea that could be put into words but when I begin to paint I become entirely involved in the difficult process of making a painting. The struggle to harmonise shapes, colours and textures is worked out on the canvas. This can go on for months. The original idea becomes lost in the paint and re-emerges as something quite different, and usually much more interesting.' In his self-portrait, Herbert's 'original idea' of himself has clearly become 'lost in the paint' and re-emerges as something much more compellingly rich and strange than mere appearances or ideas about oneself.

Though at first sight this picture appears so unlike his later work, its implicit use of colour symbolism (as discussed above) is broadly similar. The large swathes of seemingly near-singular (though tonally admixed) colour are quite like those in later paintings, where broad, subtly nuanced, often vivid colour swathes are made to represent seas, skies, vegetation, landscapes etc., amongst which both biblical and archetypal mythic characters are seen to act out all kinds of poetic allegories and poignantly intimate though still universal human dramas.

Albert Herbert was born in London in 1925. It was during an air raid early in the war that, aged sixteen, he 'found a surrealist magazine and immediately responded to the ideas found there, that art was about revealing the "marvellous" and of the superiority of the inner world to the world of appearances (a notion, and distinction, especially understandable at a time when the outer, politically-driven world was being tragically marked by war and tumult). In 1943 he was called up into the Army, participating in the second wave of the Normandy landings; around three-quarters of the infantrymen around him were killed or wounded as they moved on to Germany. He said that he survived 'undamaged... except for a feeling of resentment that my adolescence had been taken away.'

As Robert MacDonald noted in his Obituary of the artist (in the Guardian, 11th June 2008), 'He might have suffered [the same] fate [as so many of his fellow infantrymen], but for the intervention of an old schoolfriend, John Clarke [Bryan Forbes]. Clarke then was a member of the Stars in Battledress forces entertainment troupe. "I had no knowledge of stage scenery," Albert recalled, "but Bryan blatantly lied and said he knew this brilliant stage designer – me. I was plucked from my regiment in Germany and sent to join him." Albert observed that after this start to his artistic career, "art schools seemed so respectable and staid and the girls so chaste".'

Demobbed in 1947, Herbert attended Wimbledon School of Art. Then, at the Royal College of Art (for which he won a scholarship), his fellow students included John Bratby, Peter Coker (q.v.), Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith – who went on to become members of the so-called 'Kitchen Sink School' in the late 1950s. Though he painted and exhibited alongside these increasingly poetic social realist artists for a while, his real intuitive interests lay elsewhere. 'In my second year at the Royal College David Sylvester gave a slide lecture and talked about Giacometti, Bacon and others. This was a most significant event for me as a student as I also intuitively wanted to make figurative, emotive, symbolic paintings. I was inhibited from doing this by the prevailing attitude – either Euston Road realism or some sort of formalism.'

Two of his early oil paintings – a strongly realist Street Scene (1952), showing two little girls pirouetting on tarmac, watched over by a mature, reserved woman, and a lovingly abstracted Mother and Child (1956) – were illustrated in black-and-white in Jack Beddington''s 1957 book Young Artists of Promise. Street Scene, re-titled Children Playing, was shown in the 2002 exhibition 'Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties' at the Barbican Gallery, Barbican Centre, London; it is also reproduced in colour in the exhibition catalogue. Muted in colour, tentative in tone, strictly composed, Children Playing nevertheless is a graceful, playful celebration of childhood in an austere, tree-less environment. In the text for the 'Transition' catalogue (Merrell Publishers, London in association with Barbican Art Galleries, London, 2002), Martin Harrison has written: '(Francis) Bacon, at the invitation of John Minton, had taken a studio at the [Royal College of Art] for a term in 1950, accepting on condition that he was not prepared to give any formal. Herbert was one of those who slipped into the studio during his long lunchbreaks to see what Bacon was up to... Herbert was impressed by Bacon's paintings and briefly integrated his influence [noticeable in the painting of movement and the overlapping of the central figures in Children Playing, 1952] into a realism that dealt with anxious, urban themes.'

With his wife Jacqueline Kenly, a gifted R.C.A. sculpture student whom he married in 1951 – they went on to have three daughters – Herbert went to Spain and then to Paris on a Royal College Travelling Scholarship. He spent 1953-54 on another scholarship at the British School in Rome, where fellow students included Michael Andrews and Euan Uglow (q.v.). Robert MacDonald wrote that 'It was while studying at the British School, Rome, in the 1950s that the painter, who had no religious background, was drawn towards Catholicism. "I was a bit like someone who is gay, but doesn't consciously know it," he observed. "I'm not gay, but I am religious. There's nothing I can do about it.".'

Herbert was a lecturer at Birmingham College of Art from 1956 to 1964. He took his students to the exhibition of new American art at the Tate Gallery in 1964. Whereas the students ('some of [whom], like Peter Phillips (q,v,) and John Walker, were to become quite famous later') were 'very impressed... by these paintings', for artists of Herbert's generation (as Jane England has written), 'the wave of American abstract expressionism was traumatic – from being regarded as up-and-coming artists, suddenly (in Herbert's own words) "we were too old, we belonged to the past...".'

In 1964 Herbert became a tutor at St. Martin's School of Art in London, and was later Principal Lecturer there until 1988. Just as 1950s social realism had proved to be a dead-end for him, so the next decade's abstract (and belligerently anti-figurative) avant-gardism – into which he threw himself with great energy – proved ultimately just as frustrating. He at last concluded that 'I really wanted to make images of people, the way nearly all artists always have, back as far as we can see, and one way to do this was to see how children did it. So I learned to draw again as if from the beginning, drawing what I felt and knew rather than what it looked like... and soon learned to draw as if I was three years old, gradually "growing up" until I had reached the stage when I could begin painting again.'

Robert MacDonald wrote that 'In the St Martin's basement he doodled on etching plates, juxtaposing texts, stick-like figures, animals and monsters in a childlike way. "I worked at these little plates, literary, illustrative, with bits of theology hiding behind childish jokes; all the opposite of what my modernist colleagues were teaching on the top floor." His imagery became more profound and biblical themes appeared.

'Albert also [went on to produce] tiny oil paintings using the same approach. One theme was Jonah and the Whale (1987). He realised later that this was his story, the man fleeing from his calling only to be swallowed by the whale of modernism and thrown back on to the strand of figuration from which he had been fleeing.'

A British Council-sponsored trip to the Far East in 1976 (notably a visit to a Zen monastery in South Korea) paradoxically helped direct Herbert – who was, in David Buckman's words, 'a Catholic convert long interested in Buddhism' – to re-explore the nature of Christian symbolism. From about the mid-1980s onwards, Herbert said, 'my subjects have been taken from the Bible. I have done this as a discipline, as a way of escaping from a private world of self-expression. The Bible stories are treated as symbols, metaphors, revealing the "marvellous", an intention which I first discovered in that surrealist magazine long ago.' Yet even in the late 1950s, Herbert had painted a hauntingly tender Crucifixion scene, in which a sorrowful, El Greco-ish Christ is set, Bacon-like, against a dark abstracted backdrop.

Herbert's late biblical paintings possess a rare, pristine simplicity, imbued with subtle, complex allusions, that took nearly a lifetime to uncover. These series include a series depicting Jesus stripped of his garments by menacingly mask-visaged figures (1987); Crossing the Water to the Promised Land (1992/94), in which doll-like humans pass through white, churning, monster-filled seas (expressionistically rendered) towards dry land and the warm, literally motherly embrace of safety and redemption; and The Tree of Life (1995), in which a tree-full of innocent-looking human faces is seen to branch out from the 'trunk-form' of an embracing, Edenesque couple – a painterly meditation on the paradisiacal origins of humankind, and also on the Zen-like, eternal paradise of the present moment that each new generation is given the grace to enjoy.

Robert MacDonald pointed out that 'Carl Jung would have been fascinated by the shape-shifting qualities of [Herbert's] symbols, as female figures take on the forms of Eve, the Mother Goddess and even appear as the shameless Celtic goddess Sila Na Gig. Eve Gives Birth to Us All is an image of a giant recumbent female figure touching with one finger the hand of a tiny man, inverting and almost parodying Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco of God.'

In 1989 at an exhibition of his work in Manchester, he met the art writer and critic Sister Wendy Beckett. In her Obituary of the artist in the Independent (19th May 2008), Jane England wrote that Sister Wendy, 'who championed Herbert's work for many years, commented that his art "comes from so deep in the psyche that it almost forces itself out".' Herbert had one-man shows at Winchester Cathedral in 1991, and at England & Co, London in 1991 and 1994. There was a retrospective of Herbert's paintings at England & Co in 1999. In an exhibition of his oil paintings at that gallery (December 11th 2000 to January 26th 2001), a seeming self-portrayal recurs in several characteristically symbolical works – each delineating an intimate mystical quest. For example, in He Finds Treasure (1990/2001), we see an alert, forever youthful, open-countenanced male figure in the midst of a river-run landscape strewn with mysterious, sacred-seeming objects. Another painting shows a man crouching in awe At the Burning Bush (2001/1), while the sky glows subtly with all the psychedelic hues of an intuitive and spontaneous rainbow palette – such a picture communicates a heartening and expansive sense of mystical fruitfulness and peace.