Michael Ajerman
There are three letters from Michael Ayrton to Ruth Borchard dated to the mid-1960s, sent from his home, Bradfields, at Great Yedham in Essex. In the first, he writes: 'I will certainly let you have a small self-portrait for the price you stipulate to be included in your volume of British Self-Portraits, at some time towards the end of the year. At the moment I am overwhelmed with work for three separate exhibitions and I have nothing from previous years that would be suitable. However, when the major work for these shows is completed towards the middle of the year, I shall probably be quite happy to consider my own face and make some sort of painting of it, or possibly a drawing.
'Perhaps you could write me a reminding note in the early Summer? In any case a card for my London show will be sent to you. I think the idea of the book is extremely interesting and I should very much like to see the collection of self-portraits some time.'
In the second letter, he writes: 'I haven't been able to do a self-portrait especially for you, but I have found a tolerable pencil drawing which looks like me and is a respectable piece of work. Would that do? When I say pencil drawing, I don't mean a little sketch. It's quite highly worked & measures 12 x 18”. It would cost £40 in the normal way. If you let me know, I'll send it.'
The third letter reads: 'I will accept the 21gns and I much admire anyone who can obtain so many works for no more than that figure per work.'
This self-portrait is signed and dated '23.12.1961', and so was drawn just about a month before his forty-first birthday. At around this time, Ayrton was preoccupied with what he called 'The Nature of Drawing', the title he used for a radio talk (broadcast on BBC Network Three on 20th January, 1960; based largely on his 1956 essay 'The Act of Drawing'), which was later reproduced in Studio magazine. 'The great problem of drawing,' he wrote, 'is how to make a permanent distillation, in a single image, of something which in fact has changed all the time under your eyes.' Following a bar-room discussion soon afterwards with Francis Bacon on this very subject (Bacon having asserted that he himself could not draw, nor wished to), Ayrton felt compelled to consider why drawing was, for him, an ineluctable, enriching exploratory process. He had concluded that he found 'Drawing the centre [...] not only the central activity from which painting and sculpture stem but the core of visual experience. In the act of drawing one discovers what one is doing [...] aspects of appearances of which [one] was, until then, not fully aware.'
Like so much of Ayrton's work, this stern yet quietly fretful self-portrait has a slightly self-dramatising air, but what is so admirable here is how dispassionately the artist appears to be able to look at, and evoke, this particular trait in himself. It is worth singling out the delicate and precise fine lines conjuring up his swept-back hair – with a few long lines describing the carefully rebellious strands falling onto the top of his left cheekbone, and just a couple of very fine lines for furrows on his brow – and the exquisite use of chiaroscuro throughout.
The drawing encapsulates the kind of emotional ambiguity and perplexity from which Ayrton suffered most of his life (he wrote in 1945: 'I am very ambitious and self-confident - but suffer grave doubts most of the time'). This curious mix of hauteur and painful vulnerability is partly evoked through details: the artist's slightly upraised right eyebrow, the frown and furrows just above the top of the nose and the rather sourly downturned mouth. The brilliant quality of draughtsmanship here is comparable to that achieved by Robert Colquhoun (1914-1962) in his own Old Masterish post-war self-portrait drawings (though it should be pointed out that Ayrton and Colquhoun, never close friends, ultimately became quite hostile to each other).
Above all, this self-portrait succeeds because it faithfully acquaints us with Ayrton as 'a man and a painter full of contradictions' (which is how the art critic and writer John Berger described him following his 1955 Whitechapel retrospective exhibition). Berger went on to call him 'a very competent draughtsman and a most knowledgeable, conscious designer [whose] struggle in every inch he paints is to cram his own feelings into the structure of objective truth and yet always to test, check, worry, whether by doing so he is violating either.'
A 1948 self-portrait in oils is illustrated in black-and-white in 'Portrait of the Artist: Michael Ayrton' in Art News and Review (4th June, 1949). This melancholy picture-in-profile is at once highly realistic and stylised (with a lingering hint of Vorticism) in its sharply angular details – the pointed beard, slightly curved nose, capacious forehead and helmet of swept-back hair, all captured (as Art News says of his pre-1948 work) with 'a sinuous precision which always caught the unexpected, even the sinister angle'. The accompanying text points to the strong 'theatrical element' that characterised Ayrton's art up till 'a lengthy visit to Italy in 1948 [when] he [had] found in the work of the fifteenth-century Italian masters a placidity and monumental grace which has [...] added another dimension to his own art'. Until then, 'he was very largely an Expressionist, who conveyed emotion with a vehemence which almost denied its ultimate effect. Horror was piled on horror, [with] twisted [...] and gigantic forms, exposed entrails and queer embryonic figures, contorted muscles and staring eyes, monsters of trees and dragons masquerading as segments of the landscape [...] Bosch and Grünewald, Brueghel and Max Ernst [...] Rouault, Chagall [...] there were hints of all of them.'
Born in 1921 to articulate, politically left-wing parents, Ayrton briefly attended Heatherley's Art School in London (having been expelled from school when he was fourteen), and then set out, aged fifteen, from Paris to Barcelona in 1936 – hoping (but finding himself too young) to join the International Brigade there. He next travelled to Vienna, to stay with an elderly Jewish aunt in whose house he claimed to have met Freud. Mornings spent in the museum there, making copies of drawings by Cranach, Dürer and Grünwald helped influence his future tautly linear style. Returning to London in 1937, he enrolled at St John's Wood Art School, where he befriended the young artist John Minton – Ayrton a cherubic, stocky, self-indulgent, uproariously witty (as the artist Rigby Graham much later described him) young man who walked with an elaborately carved stick, following childhood osteomyelitis; Minton, tall, gangling, and in those days, diffident. They shared a studio together for a while in Paris, where Ayrton spent time studying in de Chirico's studio. Later, Minton was to fall in love with Ayrton; this was requited emotionally but not physically, causing them both much grief and soul-searching. On returning to London, Ayrton soon became a prolific theatrical set designer, collaborating closely with Minton. Following a brief, anguished period in the RAF (dogged by ill health which flared up recurrently during emotional crises throughout his life), Ayrton was released – and in 1942 began teaching life drawing and design at Camberwell School of Art.
In 1943, having left Camberwell, relieved to be escaping its academic strictures, he took up a new career as art critic. In this guise, he could be acerbic and incisive but also brash and outrageously iconoclastic. His infamous essay, 'Picasso as Black Magician' for John Lehmann's New Writing and Daylight magazine in 1945, dismissed the avant-garde painter as a master of pastiche, and claimed the 'whole body of Picasso's work is no more than a vast erection of bones in the graveyard of experience’. (It is worth bearing in mind here the novelist Martin Amis's comment, 'insulting people in print is a vice of youth and a minor corruption of power. You ought to stop doing it as you get older' – which is indeed what Ayrton himself did.) Picasso in fact remained a powerful influence on Ayrton's own work to the end, and Ayrton's later essays repudiated (with reservations) many of his vehemently-expressed, youthful opinions on art and culture.
Like fellow young British Neo-Romantic painters, Keith Vaughan (q.v.), John Minton and John Craxton (the latter early on alienated by what he considered Ayrton's supercilious artistic attitudes), Ayrton came under the spell of the painter Graham Sutherland during the War, visiting Sutherland's remote Welsh cottage. Then, after the War, all these artists escaped the drab austerities of contemporary Britain to rediscover and enjoy the cultural and culinary pleasures of continental Europe. Yet Ayrton's painting The Captive Seven (1950) – his entry for a Festival of Britain Competition the following year – shows grotesquely distorted, sensual bodies (personifying the Seven Deadly Sins) cavorting miserably in the stifling heat and dust of Italy. Relishing the pleasurable promise of Mediterranean life after the defeat of Fascism, he was nevertheless alive to a pervasive post-war mood of accidie and regret.
In 1952, he moved with his second wife Elisabeth to a country house at Topplesfield in Essex – which proved the beginning of a largely happy married life. However, Ayrton was periodically plagued by bouts of deep self-doubt – as evoked in his Difficult Mirror self-portrait (illustrated in Arts Review, 29th April 1977), in which the bearded artist, cigarette in mouth, is looked at suspiciously by his cigarette-free reflection in a mirror, and is similarly regarded by an equally uneasy-looking (and this time, uniquely bespectacled) self-visage framed on the wall. Ayrton's pained expressions in such pictures surely reflect severe and recurrent physical pain brought about by an increasingly severe arthritic condition first diagnosed in 1952.
Ayrton quite seldom made portraits but of those he painted, some of artistic, literary and musical figures are amongst the most distinguished. The art writer and critic Frances Spalding, writing in Arts Review (April 1977) about the Ayrton commemorative exhibition at the Mappin Art Gallery in Sheffield, rightly singles out his portraits as counting among his best works:
No natural painter, his colour is often lurid. His compositions have a forced elegance and his effects are the result of thought not of feeling. Nevertheless, he compels our attention by the persistence with which the ideas have been wrought [...] In his sculpture Ayrton modelled with greater fluency [...] But here too the mental experience [...] remains dauntingly theatrical. An absorbing but somewhat dissatisfying artist, his talents were perhaps best suited to portraiture... and to illustration.
His 1941 Portrait of John Minton (painted not long before the subject's twenty-fourth birthday) deftly marries Ayrton's caricaturist skills as an illustrator with a Neue Sachlichkeit-type mordancy of perception. The result is a disquieting study of the young painter as quite cadaverous figure apparently crouching forwards over a bed; downcast eyes with deliriously large black pupils; with an exaggeratedly pointy nose; a sallow, green-and-pink-tinged complexion; and an abundant mop of wild dark hair, itself composed of a dynamic mass of sinuous brushstrokes.
John Minton as a young man is the subject of some of the most haunting portraits in modern British art, capturing 'the deep melancholy that underlay Minton's gregariousness and charm' (as the London art dealer Philip Mould has written). (Photographs of Minton in repose – like John Deakin's famous 1951 study of the artist, head in hands, with infinitely doleful eyes – bear out the veracity of Mould’s observation.) These portraits include Ayrton's painting; Lucian Freud's brilliant 1951 John Minton, with a self-absorbed, sorrowful look on the long, handsome young face; and Cecil Beaton's Portrait of John Minton (1951), with its long green face, vast, asymmetrical dark eyes, and head held disconsolately against the tapered fingers of his right hand. As another art dealer Peter Nahum has noted: 'Cecil Beaton's portrait recalls [the painter] Michael Middleton's perceptive description of John Minton and indeed the 'nervous energy' of Minton's own intense self-portraits: 'The scarecrow figure with its loping, fevered stride, head down, chin stuck into chest, every fibre intent on getting wherever he was bound; the lantern face under the shock of hair, its extraordinary gravity in repose and its total re-creation in gaiety; the exuberant clowning into which he was channelled, increasingly and defensively; a perpetual crackle of nervous energy.'’ (Middleton quoted in The Arts Council of Great Britain catalogue, John Minton 1917-1957 (1958).)
One of Ayrton's most successful oil portraits is that of his first wife, Joan in the Fields (1943), appearing almost disconcertingly serene as she sits in meditative mood in a Window-type country chair, set against an idyllic yet eery bucolic landscape.
In 1951, he painted a poignant, film noirish portrait of a close friend, the modernist composer Constant Lambert (1905-1951), who, at that time wracked by diabetes and drinking heavily, had only a few months to live. Lambert had made his name when his at once jaunty yet also darkly melancholic choral cantata 'The Rio Grande' (words from a poem by Sir Sacheverell Sitwell), infused with the spirit of jazz, was first performed on the BBC in 1928. In an article on Lambert in the Guardian (25th August 2001), the poet and writer Andrew Motion has written that Lambert's 'earliest compositions, which are by and large his most powerful, including the rarely heard piano concerto (1924) and the "realistic ballet in one act" Prize Fight, which was written in 1923-4 and revised and re-scored the following year.
'Both these pieces owe a great deal to Lambert's precocious involvement with Diaghilev (for whom he wrote Romeo and Juliet, which opened in London in 1926). The modernist high jinks that Lambert found innately sympathetic, his enthusiasm for mixing diverse idioms, his pleasure in shocking the establishment, were all encouraged by Diaghilev, who also confirmed Lambert's belief that ballet was the form best suited to showing the whole parade of his talents.'
In 1926, Christopher Wood had portrayed Constant Lambert (1926; Collection: National Portrait Gallery) as a young man in his prime, seated in a stylish sitting room, wearing the chic ensemble of greenish brown suit and pink-red tie against navy-indigo shirt; this is a graceful painting of a young man of urbane polish and poise. However,
as Motion has noted, there was an undercurrent of sadness and regret in Lambert's life even then: 'where the words [of 'Rio Grande'] are always and plainly extravagant, in their mildly surrealistic way, the music adds a rewarding complication. It seems determinedly fun-loving, yet its jazzy rhythms are instilled with a sadness that suggests such freedoms are an exception to the general rule. Created between two world wars, in the aftermath of the general strike, it admits to an element of guilt in its escapism, and of guilt in its melancholy.
'Lambert also had personal reasons for creating dark undercurrents beneath the bright surfaces of his work. His first marriage failed, as would his (hushed-up) affair with the young Margot Fonteyn; his amiable bar-hopping turned into serious boozing. Even the happiness of his second marriage (to Isabel Delmer, who would later marry the composer Alan Rawsthorne) could not stop the rot. The sprightly inventions of his 20s had been replaced by the demands of working for the ballet company. The zeitgeist had changed; his inspiration was baffled.
'A portrait by his friend Michael Ayrton, painted when Lambert was 46, but only months from his death, shows a slumped, dishevelled figure, more tramp than arbiter of taste. It was a pathetic end to a life of touching imaginative endeavour.' Wood's glowing portrait of Lambert shows the young composer as a handsome figure of evident creative promise in elegant, civilised surroundings, while Ayrton's portrait of him towards the end of his life depicts him (empathetically, it must be said) as a bloated, rather dissolute-appearing figure, in a murky, slightly sinister street setting.
In 1955, Ayrton painted his portrait of the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957; Collection: Tate). On the Tate website, Toby Treves has written of the mutual regard Ayrton and Lewis had for each other as artists: 'for Lewis, Ayrton was destined to be 'one of the decisive influences in English art' [...] However, it was only in the last
four years of Lewis's life that they became friends. During that period Ayrton illustrated several of Lewis's books and was commissioned by his publishers, Methuen & Co Ltd, to paint this portrait, which was worked from life. He also made numerous related drawings.'
In making this painting, writes Treves, 'Ayrton referred to Lewis's portraiture of the 1920s and 1930s, in particular Ezra Pound, 1939 [Tate Collection]. In 'Tarr and Flying Feathers', an essay that Ayrton wrote about Lewis in 1955, he explained how he had copied the dimensions of Ezra Pound and had reversed its composition as an act of homage to Lewis. Likewise, the handkerchief sticking out of Lewis's breast pocket forms the angular 'V' motif so much associated with Vorticist imagery. In June 1914 Lewis and Pound had founded the Vorticist journal Blast. Ayrton's admiration for Lewis partially stemmed from his position as the founder of Vorticism, which he described as 'the one coherent movement in twentieth century British Art'.'
In a 1956 review in The New Statesman of Lewis's Tate Gallery retrospective exhibition, just a few months before his death, Ayrton noted that 'the best of [his] portraits are, as they should be, of persons whom Lewis admires and more than admires'. The same can truly be said of Ayrton's own portraits of creative figures such as Lewis himself and the writers Norman Douglas and William Golding, the poet Dylan Thomas and the composers Constant Lambert and William Walton. It should be added that while Ayrton and Lewis became firm friends in the last few years of the latter's life, they nevertheless found themselves disagreeing on many matters, culturally and politically. So in early 1955 Ayrton painted Lewis, slumped in his armchair (the only place that, in his blindness, Lewis felt truly comfortable). As Treves has noted, 'the image relates closely to Ayrton's first impression of Lewis when he visited him at his Notting Hill flat in 1945: 'Mr Lewis, clothed in black, sat hunched in a blue-black chair squared off, partner to his ashtray and on the summit of Mr Lewis's black and formal figure was Mr Lewis's head, wedge-shaped, blade-nosed, with a forehead like a sledgehammer beneath which the girders of his spectacle-frames seemed to provide a dangerous cakewalk for ideas to cross.' [...] The one significant addition is the green plastic visor that Lewis wears in the portrait. By 1953 a brain tumour had rendered Lewis blind, and he wore the peak to protect his eyes. To Ayrton it 'added a curious dimension to his face. The forehead which hitherto had been, it seemed to me, designed for striking ringing blows, was now bisected but armed with a green obsidian cutting edge from beneath which the nose reared like a secret weapon'.'
Ayrton noted that his portrait of Lewis 'eerily, had about it some quality of making a “self-portrait” of someone else, so closely was I concerned to satisfy a man who could not see what I was doing.' This portrait of Lewis – as a blind visionary hunched in a black suit, with garishly lit, impassive features, and inert long fingers, all observed against a backdrop of deep black intercepted by a scarlet screen – shows Ayrton at his most perceptive and formally coherent.
In his later work, following several inspirational visits to Greece, Ayrton made drawings and sculpture of mythical figures such as Daedalus and the Minotaur (the latter partly in conscious homage to Picasso), and frequently showed human figures endlessly self-searching in mazes and mirrors. In an essay, 'The maze maker' (Studio International, June 1966), Ayrton wrote: 'To the spectator, another man's maze does not look impenetrably intricated [...] but to the maze-maker himself his maze is an all-absorbing thing compounded of confusion, frustration, and reverence, which continually grows in complexity.' Ayrton died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975. He was only fifty-four.
