Cliff Holden
‘What a painter has to do is not to recognise either the object or the image but to recognise the kind of sensation that has produced the image.’
There is no surviving correspondence between Cliff Holden and Ruth Borchard (though Ruth did keep a business card for Marstrand Designers, the design studio that Holden set up in 1959 in Marstrand, Sweden, along with two Swedish designers). In her notebook, by Holden's name, Ruth had written: 'Oct 62' (presumably when she first wrote to him), noting she paid twenty guineas for the picture.
Holden's self-portrait is signed and dated 1947. Born in Manchester in 1919, he was around twenty-eight when he painted it. He has said that he had been 'consciously looking for a master', and had had the great good fortune to find one of genius in David Bomberg. By the time he made this picture, he had known Bomberg for some three years.
Bomberg taught that good painting, founded on structured drawing and a formal disciplined approach, nevertheless aspires to evoke 'something that is boundless & infinite [...] something unidentifiable & yet has Form but which is not synonymous with nor can exist as form only'. Certainly, Holden's self-portrait is firmly structured and grounded yet goes far beyond the mere outward form, to partake of 'something that is boundless & infinite'.
The overall composition is at once dynamic and tight-knit, the colours earthy but shot through with swathes of light, the brushstrokes applied with sensual vigour, the impression of the face both forceful and quite withdrawn. Holden has taken great risks in the free yet determined way he evokes the shadowed side of the nose, the stretch of illuminated forehead and cheek, the thick, dark hair. His left eye is seen perhaps to focus on the viewer; the right is a couple of black marks, its apparent pupil a speck of brown (undifferentiated from the circumambient brown of cheek and forehead). The area beneath the mouth and around the chin is hard to 'read' in any academic sense: perhaps (as in a 1960 photo of the artist in a Swedish exhibition catalogue) there is a slight hint of a beard and he is smoking a pipe. The predominant flesh colour is a nutty brown, endowing the head with a plein air quality redolent of soil or earth or even the bark of a tree. The creamy light partially illuminating his features appears like shimmers of moonlight in a nocturnal wood. This is a man clearly grounded in nature. All the painterly risks Holden has taken here have paid off superbly. In a 1960 exhibition catalogue preface, Andrew Forge (q.v.) quotes Holden as saying: 'What a painter has to do is not to recognise either the object or the image but to recognise the kind of sensation that has produced the image.'
Holden took further risks elsewhere in his use of a radically sombre palette. His 1950 oil painting Seated Figure (Arts Council Collection) eschews conventional outward likeness in favour of piling darkness upon darkness: the featureless brownness of the subject's face is set against an even more opaque backdrop. A 1948 painting by Holden of a standing figure (from the collection of the late Marek Zulawski (q.v.)) is remarkable in evoking, through a range of dark brown and olive tones, the most delicately graceful stance. Light coming through what seems to be a greyish window falls on the side of the head in a fragile golden line – the only brilliant note in a painting whose palette is remarkably gloomy. Another painting from the same year, Reclining Form 1 (Collection: Manchester Art Gallery) – an abstract view of a naked reclining figure – is notable for the glowing ochres and reds of its flesh against a brooding, lustreless backdrop.
Holden has written: ''The reason why the Borough Group [created in 1946, with Bomberg as President and four founding students members, Holden, Dorothy Mead, Edna Mann and Peter Richmond] used dark paint was not because of any angst or depression but because we could not afford to buy the vermilions, the yellows, the reds and the wonderful blues – all of which were far too expensive. We also worked on boards and when we had no money we worked on both sides, which was thought by many people to be very strange. But years later, I saw that Rouault had worked watercolours on both sides of the paper and this, of course, once a painter is established, is acceptable.'
That said, early on in his painting career Holden utilised dark paints in ana daring and original way, so that sparse areas and slender lines of vivid colour and light within the surrounding darkness become subtly expressive. This is clear, for example, in his 1947 painting Seated Figure (Collection: Tate), in which, against a dark green, khaki and olive backdrop, the glowing ochres and yellows of the seated figure, and face in profile, of the young female subject, and the wiry orange legs of the chair, stand out quite resonantly.
By the time of Seated Figure (1962) (A David Bomberg Legacy - The Sarah Rose Collection at London South Bank University, Borough Road), it appears that Holden was able to use brighter colours more frequently. This painting is remarkable for the way its sumptuous palette of red, blue, orange, red, indigo and white are used to articulate the regal stance of a youthful-seeming, brown-haired woman through an audaciously assured concatenation of abstracted lines, diversely applied brushwork and vibrant patches of colour.
Though Holden went on in the 1980s to paint panoramic, Cézanne-inspired groups of bathers, elegantly simplified and abstracted in colour and form, it is his portrayals of singular, usually easeful female bathers, dynamic dancers and seated and standing contemplative figures from the late 1940s to the early sixties – often dark and attenuated in palette though with some gorgeous highlights – that are unsurpassed in his oeuvre for refined poetry.
Holden had initially studied agriculture and veterinary science but, while studying philosophy at the City Literary Institute in 1944, first encountered David Bomberg, and also the latter’s pupil, Dorothy Mead (q.v.). Holden and Mead later married. His first sighting of Bomberg – at an evening class on drawing at the Institute – was a revelation: 'There he was, patiently expounding his basic principles to middle-aged ladies. I'd been disillusioned with the curriculum of modern art schools [...] that merry-go-round of teacher training teacher who will in turn produce teachers. I had been consciously searching for a master.' There is no doubt that Bomberg fulfilled this role perfectly for both Holden (who later said he then had 'a Messianic feeling about Bomberg') and Mead, who together attended Bomberg's classes at the Borough Polytechnic in 1945. It was in the following year that the Borough Group was formed; Holden was the Group's President from 1946-48, resigning the following year over some matter of policy. The Borough Group disbanded in 1951.
Holden has said that he came to recognise that Bomberg's attitude to the creative act and the way he taught his practice were unique: 'There was nothing like this happening in London, in Paris, nor New York at that time. This was proved some 10 years later during the middle fifties, when American Action Painting, Tachisme and the New Abstract Expressionism reached London. Bomberg anticipated these movements, often using the same kind of terminology. But, compared to the American influence, Bomberg's ideas were much more fundamental and profound, which made possible a development outside the usual controversy surrounding the question of figuration or abstraction.'
Holden's lifelong radicalism of outlook, and his deep love of nature and animals, had roots from an early age. As a child of eleven or twelve, he had found himself joining his father at Quaker meetings in Cheshire, and says he 'came to sympathise with his commitment to Socialism and the Trade Union Movement'. In his late teens he gravitated 'from Quakerism to Pacifism. Later on I was to throw it all in for Anarchism.
'In the years when I was growing up my family always had land and livestock. I took an interest in my father's work as a farmer and I had a love for animals. So my thoughts turned to veterinary science but I failed my exams for university.' He then attended agricultural college, attaining a Diploma for Poultry Keeping. In 1939, he got a job on a chicken farm in Surrey; at that time he 'met an artist who ran a shop in Guildford called 'Things of Beauty and Utility', which is rather curious because later on in my time as an artist I repudiated beauty and things of utility. The artist's name was J. Selwyn Dunn (1895-1978). He had a studio in Haslemere and it was called 'The Kelmscott Studio' in tribute to William Morris. He had worked with Morris as a boy, together with his father.
'In 1940 I was running a pacifist community farm, called Crossways Farm [...] near Malvern. This farm had been bought by a Quaker [...] and the project was intended to assist military-aged people who were conscientious objectors [...] The farm was little more than a peasant holding with a cottage and a number of outhouses which were in need of repair. We had four cows, one sow. three piglets, thirty-three hens and a horse. Many prominent people were our house guests including the popular radio philosopher […] C.E.M. Joad, who used to visit us for weekends. At the same time I attended philosophy lectures in Worcester [...] My ideas evolved slowly towards anarchism and, during a stay at an anarchist community near Stroud, I came in contact with a Hegelian philosopher who had met Prince Peter Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy. I began to read people like Dostoevsky, Turgenev [...] Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. I had moved a considerable distance in my reading away from people like Thomas Hardy, William Cobbett, Henry Williamson, Richard Jeffries [...] these writers bolstered my enjoyment of nature and gave me encouragement in my lifestyle as a tramp and a gypsy [...] I also went out deliberately to meet people like H. G. Wells [...] E. L. T. Messens, Herbert Read, George Orwell and Dr Alex Comfort […]
'I led a romantic life at this time playing by turn the role of tramp, gypsy and political agitator. This led to organising strikes and I gradually became more and more involved in a militant anarchism whose purpose was to establish a society based on anarcho-syndicalist principles [...]
'I then became acquainted with the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley. I met various people in the cafés and pubs of Soho where we would discuss these philosophical ideas and a friend presented me with a copy of the complete works. Then I came to a point [...] where I had a psychological and emotional breakdown which resulted in me staying in bed, reading books for a period of between nine months and a year without any other activity or making contact with people. During this time, I kept asking myself what should I do with my life? I must do something. I must justify my existence; I must create. So I began to paint. Then all my real problems started.
'The decision to paint was a very traumatic moment, equalled only by the despair that I had experienced a year before. Having decided to do it and having started to do it, the problem then was how to do it – what kind of direction should I take? What kind of stimulus was on hand? [...] To find myself I needed direction and to find direction I needed a mentor. I needed a master.
'For several years I had been looking at the Royal Academy shows which I always found disappointing but without knowing why [...] The London Group however was a trifle more exciting but, again, I reacted negatively to most of the paintings. But, every now and again, there appeared one or two paintings by a man called Bomberg […] I knew nothing about him, but these were the paintings that I responded to [...] So I inquired amongst my friends who was this Bomberg and some of them knew him – or rather knew of him – but dismissed him as being of no importance whatsoever.
'Coincidentally, I attended lectures on philosophy at the City Literary Institute in London. This was an attempt to break out of my depression and to continue my search for truth [It was] at the City Lit. [...] that the most extraordinary coincidence occurred. The curriculum listed the name of a painter called David Bomberg who was teaching there […] in 1944. I immediately contacted Bomberg and enrolled as a student. Thus, at the age of 25, my apprenticeship [...] began.
'What I cannot remember is when Bomberg and I began to discuss the philosophy which motivated our activity. It seemed to me at the time that I introduced Bomberg to Berkeley and especially to chapters called the 'New Theory of Vision,' but I have since heard that Bomberg was probably acquainted with Berkeley much earlier. So that what emerges is a most extraordinary coincidental linking of two minds, my own and Bomberg's [...]
'I never had an art college training but I followed Bomberg wherever he was teaching, never taking part in the school curriculum, but taking advantage of Bomberg's unorthodox teaching methods and making use of the space and the model.'
Holden has recorded the Borough Group's history, and has written that 'After many refusals during 1946, the first exhibition was finally arranged in June 1947 [...] at the Archer Gallery. The works shown were mainly from that year's London Group exhibition. [...] The next exhibition was held in the same year at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead [...] In 1948 the second annual exhibition was also held at the Archer Gallery.
'Following criticism from inside and outside the Group, [I] resigned as president and invited Bomberg to take over that responsibility. At this meeting the minutes of all previous meetings were mysteriously lost and were never found. The Group was then enlarged to include David Bomberg as President, Lilian Bomberg (Lilian Holt), Cliff Holden, Dorothy Mead, Peter Richmond, Edna Mann, Lesley Marr, Dinora Mendelson, Len Missen, and Dorothy Missen.
'During 1948, the Group was invited to show at Brasenose College, Oxford. The whole Group participated in the LCC [London City Council] Embankment show with some success, especially with press coverage, and both Lilian Bomberg and [I] were invited to appear on the BBC Radio programme 'In Town Tonight'. Leslie Marr (q.v.) owned the Bookworm Gallery in Soho and very generously invited the Group to have monthly shows rent-free. These shows were not a success as no critics, press, or media came and almost no public, apart from a few friends.
'At this time, [I] was teaching one evening a week in Lewisham. One student found my teaching totally unacceptable and incomprehensible; but he had a friend who wanted to meet a "real artist" and he thought the friend would have more sympathy and understanding of [my] ideas. The friend was Dennis Creffield aged 16 years. [I] introduced Creffield to Bomberg and he was proposed and elected to membership of the Borough Group which meant that, together with all the above members, he participated in the third annual exhibition, which was held at the Arcade Gallery in 1949.'
In 1952 Holden was invited to exhibit at the Gummeson Gallery in Stockholm (a seminal modern art gallery, founded in 1912, which in early years had hosted exhibitions by artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Munch) along with three other English artists, Mead, Dennis Creffield (q.v.) and Peter Richmond, at the request of the leading Swedish sculptor and painter Torsten Renqvist (1924-2007) . Young Swedish artists had discovered a vital affinity between the work of Holden – a totally unconscious link on his part – and that of Evert Lundquist (1904-1994), a key figure in modern Swedish art (whose painting Potter, Number 9 (Collection: MoMA, New York), for example, has a visual vocabulary similar to that in Holden’s work at that time, with a comparably articulate use of a ruddy sensuous palette made up predominantly up of brown, gold and ochre tones relieved by lucid accents). In 1956, Holden, who settled in Sweden, began to work with the designers Lisa Grönwall, whom he married, and Maj Nillson, setting up an interior design studio in Gothenburg, which moved to the island of Marstrand in 1958. Over the years, Holden extensively promoted the work of British artists in Sweden, and vice versa. Cliff and Lisa had a son, Thomas and a daughter, Isabella. Lisa died in 1996.
Here is an extract from Holden's article, 'David Bomberg, an artist as teacher' (Studio International; March 1967):
Bomberg's teaching methods were dogmatic and contradictory. It was a sort of battle between a trinity of teacher, student and model, a fight which could not take place away from the materials. In this fight he was anything but restrictive. If the student was painting in perpetual gloom he would be shown means of lightening his palette. If he was tentative he would be encouraged to [...] throw it on in shovelfuls, to walk on it, or attack it with the knife – any means of making the mark was permissible [...] But if the student were facile, using an aesthetic line, then Bomberg would give him a great lump of charcoal and cite Modigliani and John as examples of men who would tie the tool to the big toe to escape the domination of a facile line. On the other hand he didn't allow any student to completely abandon himself to the line, to the paint, the sensuality of the brush; and he had no respect for the brute force of the blowlamp, the bicycle, or any other medium which savoured of trickery.
In his 1999 writings towards an autobiography, Holden further recorded his experience of Bomberg as an original and inspirational teacher: 'Bomberg also encouraged us to make small models of clay or wire and work with light shadows so that we simulated dancing figures or figures in procession or bell-ringers or boxers fighting. He suggested that we might take any object and change it into something else in the way he once did using cushions which he changed into a row of sleeping men. He also encouraged us to change the motif; for example, to start off with a still life in a vase and change it into a chicken, change it into two chickens fighting, and then perhaps change it again into two figures embracing in a kiss. He taught us to take a painting which was of little value and turn it upside down, as the Cubists did, and carefully change the value of all the colours – that is to change the colour of each brush stroke, which was a very tedious discipline. What he meant was that by turning the painting you changed the gravitational pull. The forms regained vitality partly because of this and partly because you change the colour of the brushstroke while working towards a new identification of subject.
'In working from the model Bomberg encouraged the students to engage in a few tricks which were contrary to the static attitudes of the academics. We would walk around the model and approach from different angles and perspectives. It was recognized that nature was not static and neither should the painter be static. It was in movement that the assessment of the form was possible.
'Sometimes the model was spot-lighted as by the sun, sometimes by a hard overall light and sometimes it was completely in the dark. The painting was from light to dark and dark to light. In this way both the model and the landscape were viewed as nature in constant flux and change. The subject changed, the painter himself moved and the light was in constant movement
'We, as students, worked mainly from the model because the model was available and this excited Bomberg because he regarded the human figure as being so complex. Every problem the draughtsman could encounter was contained in the human figure. But it was also contained in the apple [...]’
The painter and art writer Andrew Forge (q.v.) wrote in the catalogue for Holden's 1960 exhibition:
Holden is a difficult artist [...] His paintings don't fit into one
category [...] They catch one on the wrong foot. He has a brutal and
sometimes arbitrary-seeming approach to his matière which at first sight
might suggest the sort of nihilistic gambling with paint that has been one
of the orthodoxies of the last two years. But it is clear that Holden is
playing for far higher stakes than chancy evocative effects; whatever he
does is done with will and intention and if his image materializes under
the blade of a bulldozer or in the heart of a tornado, then its triumph is
even more substantial. What he claims in each picture is a stillness and
an absolute clarity of sensation and to make his claim good he has to risk
chaos and defilement.
Cliff Holden died on 20th April 2020. In his Obituary of the artist in the Guardian(30th April 2020), Paul Trewhela wrote of his ‘friend Cliff Holden, who has died aged 100’: ‘In 2001 I organised a show including Cliff and another Borough Group member, Miles Richmond, in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, and he took part in the last formal discussion between Bomberg’s students in Richmond’s studio in East Rounton, North Yorkshire, in 2005. He was also included in the 2015 exhibition Borough: David Bomberg and His Students at the Borough Polytechnic, shown at the Waterhouse & Dodd gallery, Mayfair.
‘His work is in collections in Tate Britain, the Arts Council, Manchester City Art Gallery, the V&A Museum and the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2006 by London South Bank University.’
- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004