Kenneth Brazier

There is one undated letter (probably 1960 or 1961) from Ken Brazier to Ruth Borchard, from an address in north London. He writes, 'If it is convenient for you, I could meet you in the Grosvenor Hotel at 2.30 pm on Jan 5^th and will bring 2 self portraits.' Ruth had seen his work in the 'Young Contemporaries 1959' exhibition of nationwide students' art in London. Self-Portrait with outstretched arm –  probably the picture which Ruth bought – was on sale in 'Young Contemporaries 1960' at £20.

In what she called 'a tentative introduction' to her proposed book on the collection, Ruth wrote that 'English painters still have the courage to paint from the heart... I would... like to see one barrier broken through in English painting. This is the careful avoidance of human drama as subject matter. The drama, the excitement is confined to the surface of the canvas, to the handling of form, to intensity within the medium. Why cannot we have paintings, also, like Goya's? Why not the 'cri de coeur', also, in what is being painted? This I find in Anthony Whishaw, Kenneth Brazier, and a very few others only. Perhaps the present re-emergence of figurative painting will bring this in its train.'

Brazier became a student at the Slade School in 1958. In 2003, the painter Ben Levene recalled him as a rather bohemian, wild young man from an East End working class, artisan background, and that it was with Lucian Freud's help he had gained entry to the college – whose records show he graduated in 1961. In 2017, the painter Anthony Green said, 'Ken Brazier was a British Soutine – so wild, you couldn't pin him down.' However, Green recalls Brazier's background as being definitely middle class. Both Green and Levene recall Brazier as an exceptionally talented student. Among his fellow students at the Slade, Green singles out Brazier and Tim Behrens (1937-2017) as the most promising young painters at the time: 'Behrens was another wild artist... as a young artist very good and promising like Brazier. Behrens's later works, made after much personal tragedy in his life, I found a great disappointment.'

Levene told me he had painted Ken Brazier's portrait. Though, as far as I am aware, this fact has not been recorded in print before, Brazier was also the subject of Freud's 1958 portrait A Young Painter, a mesmerising study of an introspective, troubled, gaunt-faced young man. In the latter, the somewhat asymmetrical representation of Brazier's eyes confirms Modigliani's observation about himself as an artist – one that can be extended to artists more universally – 'With one eye you are looking at the outside world, while with the other you are looking within yourself.' 

Ken Brazier's self-portrait is indeed a speedy cri de coeur, an edgy, exuberant crisis painting. Holding a cigarette aloft in his right hand, the subject, seemingly frozen in an attitude of existentialist alarm, nevertheless manages to contemplate himself dispassionately.

Singular strokes for his nose, right ear, cheeks make it appear as though the skin has been excoriated. The matted fair-brown hair, stunned-seeming, blotchy pupils against whites of the eye, off-key orangey skin, bulbous red lips, brown upper (nicotine-stained?) teeth, apparently numerous fingers holding the cigarette – none are at all intended to look pretty or tasteful. The tempestuous background is close in spirit to surging painterly passages by the American Abstract Expressionist, Willem de Kooning. There is a raw vulnerability – but also an uninhibitedly upfront quality – to this self-portrayal which renders it poignantly humane. 

Another remarkable Figure painting by Brazier has recently come to light in the Collection of Charterhouse School in Surrey; it was acquired in 1959 by the school's Beerbohm Society, then run by the school's art master, Ian Fleming-Williams (1914-1998), who over 23 years encouraged and inspired many pupils with his progressive attitudes towards modernist painting (see the essay in this book on Frank Willcock's self-portrait for more background information about Fleming-Williams). The Beerbohm Society was founded in 1950 'to promote the study and enjoyment of the visual arts amongst members of the school'. The Society started acquiring works of art in 1957, as the introduction to its catalogue of purchases records: 'The Beerbohm Society, finding itself with a large profit in 1957, decided that it was profitable to spend this money on buying works of art, rather than on food for a party.' The final entry in the catalogue was in 1967, although the Beerbohm Society itself continued for many more years.

Brazier's Figure, measuring about 45 x 20 inches, depicts a young man of curiously elegant aloofness as a quite diaphanous (though half-shadowed) standing figure against a riveting, fluid green turquoise background, his long fingered hands (one in shadow, one quite luminous) enigmatically expressive. On seeing an image of this painting in August 2016, the painter Frank Willcock (who had been a pupil at Charterhouse from 1953-50, and had been galvanised by Fleming-Williams's teachings on art – and enthralled by a Brazier still life on show at the school) pointed out the affinity between this painting and probingly perspicacious full figure self-portraits by the  seminal Austrian Expressionist painter Richard Gerstl (1883-1908). 

The original handwritten catalogue entry for Figure describes the painting as a self-portrait but Roger James Elsgood –  who started out as a student at Norwich School of Art, where he was taught by Brazier, and is now an arts producer for the BBC and has made documentary films and programmes (including one featuring the sculptor Henry Moore and several in collaboration with the art critic John Berger) – says 'it doesn't look like a picture of him at all. Especially the face, it's not his face – even seen through layers of near-abstract expressionism. And the body shape is not quite that of the person I knew. Ken was around five foot six.' 

Jan Thomas –who knew Brazier well in the late sixties, when he would stay for long intervals in the Camberwell house where she lived with Roger – concedes that it may be a self-portrait by Ken. She says it is certainly a painting by him – but that her first impression is that it didn't portray the man she knew so well from 1967-9 – both in stance and formal attire – unless it was perhaps a painting of him, say, in wedding garb made from a professional photographic image, backlit in the studio.

Frank Willcock, who never met Ken Brazier, said he believed strongly that the picture is a self-portrait – as the contemporary handwritten Charterhouse records say so (and Willcock says Fleming-Williams was very meticulous about such details), and says the large forehead here resembles that in the self-portrait Ruth Borchard acquired. My feeling too is that this is a Brazier self-portrait – not only the forehead but the shape of the nose and the long structure of the face, as well as the colour of the hair and the expressiveness of the gesticulating hand, seem more or less to tally. And, to my eye, this could be the self-portrait of a man who 'was around five foot six'.

In May 2016 Roger sent me an evocative memoir he had written about Ken Brazier: Days with Ken, in which he wrote:

'When I was 17, I gained a place at Norwich School of Art. In my first year there, it was an unremarkable regional art school, functional and dull, staffed by late-career people – well-meaning and diligent but conservative. But amidst the deadwood there, was a visiting lecturer known to staff and students alike as 'Ken'. Ken Brazier was not long out of the Slade. He came up from London to teach in Norwich more than occasionally, and quite a lot of his teaching took place in the pub across the road from the art school. He was the epitome of what, to our impressionable regional eyes, a real artist should be. He was small, dishevelled, inarticulate, more than a bit of a drinker and lacking in almost all of the social graces. But he was a painter of blazing energy and integrity. 

'Ken knew nothing about the pedagogy of art education but wanted the best for his students and due to an overwhelming inarticulacy – words were not his medium – he reinforced his attempts at communication with expansive, gestural mimes as to how we should look, see and paint. 

‘One night in The Fountain pub across the road from the art school, Ken mentioned that he was a good friend of Lucian Freud. Seeing my fleeting look of scepticism, he reached into his baggy jacket and retrieved a postcard of Freud's painting, A Young Painter, saying it was a painting of him. Which it very clearly was.

'Ken was what we now would call a homeless person. He had no fixed abode. In London he slept on painter friends' floors, including a period  sleeping on the floor of Tim Behrens' rather grand Georgian house on Liverpool Road in Islington. [The artist Tim Behrens (1937-2017) was the subject of several remarkable portraits of a red-haired young man by Lucian Freud from 1960-63, and one of the subjects, alongside the painters Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews, in a now-celebrated 1963 photograph by John Deakin, taken at Wheelers oyster bar in Soho.] Ken's undemanding way of life continued when he was in Norwich; he either slept on the life models' mattresses in the art school studios or else on floors of student lodgings, mine frequently, at our house in Elm Hill. So developed a bizarre yet most nourishing friendship that was to last six years.

'The Governors of Norwich School of Art came to realise they had to take  steps to no longer be a provincial, small-time art school – and become a degree-awarding, national centre of excellence. And so, in the late spring of 1963, a paradigm shift took place. The old brigade of art school staff were either retired or made redundant and a new regime was brought on board. But Ken Brazier was quite mysteriously spared the cull.

'The first significant change came with the appointment of John Brinkley as Principal, and Ed Middleditch, a leading figurative painter, as Head of Painting. These two men had the dynamism, awareness and contacts the previous staff lacked. They asked five students, including myself, if we would stay on for another year. When we reassembled in September '64, we found ourselves being taught by leading contemporary artists. I recall days with Keith Vaughan, Dorothy Mead, Peter Kay, Roger Cook, Michael Andrews, William Pye, Paul Hogarth and, of course, Ken Brazier. 

'One morning, we were called into a small studio and Ed Middleditch announced that someone rather special, “probably the finest painter of his generation”, was coming to teach. He would make two, two-week visits. It was Lucian Freud. We were astonished.

'Lucian Freud arrived a few weeks later. He was then in his early forties. We, the five gathered again in the same small studio. John Brinkley brought Lucian in and introduced him. It was all rather awkward. Lucian was extremely shy and looked very ill at ease. John Brinkley coaxed a few hesitant words from Lucian who told us that for our first project with him, he wanted us to paint a still life – but using only black oil paint.

'A few weeks later, in preparation for Lucian's visit, we were told by Ed Middleditch to set up a still life from found objects that would be the subject of our black painting; he distributed large cans of black oil paint around the room. Following a morning scavenging cupboards and nearby streets for objects to paint, my assembly consisted of a wooden dining chair placed on a tabletop, a sheep's skull placed on the seat with an old white bicycle mudguard draped over it. I reckoned that using a monotone set of objects would help in making a black painting; it did. On the Monday morning, Lucian came into the studio wearing a very sharp suit and tennis shoes. His silent anxiety suffused the room. As the afternoon wore on and our canvases became more defined, Lucian slippered silently around the room; half an hour later he slipped out of the studio and disappeared for the day.

'Next morning, taking a tour of the easels, he stopped at each, asked us our names and whispered a few words to each of us but without any eye contact. It seemed to break the ice and by the end of the week we all had relaxed and went on to evolve an easy if respectful relationship with him. My abiding memory from this time was a magic twenty minutes when Lucian and I, both constantly swapping brushes and both dabbing in the same black puddle of oil paint, worked simultaneously on my still life. (I subsequently took great care not to over-paint the bit he had worked on.) I still have the painting.

'The 'Black Still Life' project passed, Lucian departed to London after his allotted two weeks. I made occasional winter visits to London to meet Ken and duly found myself sleeping on floors at his friends' houses. Our friendship developed significantly in this period. 

'Lucian's second teaching period at Norwich came towards the end of the autumn term. His next proposed project was audacious. “You are going to paint a life-sized nude self-portrait – from life”, he said. “The girls will have one studio; you two boys will have the other. You will all paint for the next two weeks completely naked.”

'None of us cavilled. Art Schools were populated with naked models. Four of us students went on to produce our self-portraits over the fortnight in the art school – in studios locked to thwart prying eyes; only we and Lucian would have a key. After a few days, now feeling at ease, we started wandering around naked watching each others' work develop and blithely chatting away to Mr Freud. Lucian's naked self-portrait project was an occasion that changed all four of us. We gained so much confidence in our bodies, ourselves and our work. '

Interviewed for William Feaver's 2007 book on the artist (published by Rizzoli), Lucian Freud recalled those days at Norwich School of Art. Roger firmly recalls that Freud visited the art school for two, two-week teaching stints but Freud said, 'I remember when I used to go down to Norwich one day a week (to teach) the one thing the students had in common was a sort of innate timidity of a very agreeable kind, but the antithesis really to the cheek of making art. So I thought the best thing I [could] do to make them reveal themselves ...[was for them to make] naked self-portraits. And now the very least I can do is paint myself [naked].'

Roger's last months of his Pre-Diploma course at Norwich (before he went to study at Camberwell School of Art) were spent 'increasingly in Ken's company, trying to develop my skills as an artist but Ken was beginning to show signs of what would later manifest itself as seriously disturbed behaviour. Amid alternating bouts of drinking and manic thrash painting, sometimes in a purposefully darkened room, he was becoming more and more difficult to be with. His teaching virtually ceased, as did his interest in people in general. It was all he could do to care about himself. Eventually he was asked to leave the art school. One day he just disappeared, presumably to London, without saying goodbye to anyone.

'I didn't see Ken for several months after that and can't recall the exact circumstances of meeting him again. But it was in London where I was at Camberwell. We picked up our relationship as if little had changed since the days in Norwich.

'I was now living in a flat in Camberwell with a fellow art students. I met up with Ken occasionally in town during 1966. 

'The house in Knatchbull Road became a frequent lodging for Ken after February 1967. He came and went haphazardly. He would go out to buy cigarettes at the corner shop and not return sometimes for a day or two – and then turn up, blasting on the doorbell in the middle of the night. He took long London walks; he walked everywhere. Ken's friends on these journeys, on whose floors he often slept, included the painters Harry Diamond, John Deakin, Dom Moraes, Tim Behrens, Helen Lessore, Jeffrey and Bruce Bernard, Lucian, and Francis Bacon, most of whom I had the pleasure of meeting through Ken. In earlier days, Ken had been close friends with Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, and Johnny Minton.

'During the time of this coming and going, I met Jan Thomas, in November 1966.' Jan was a medical student studying at nearby Kings College Hospital; she says, 'I was studying the psychiatric component of my medical degree at the time and was contemplating a career in psychiatry.'

Jan describes a period starting in Spring 1967 when Ken was living at the Camberwell house: 'he had no money, we were supporting him. I spent hours talking with him. I found him very generous-spirited; he talked openly and uninhibitedly and without malice – talking was a diversion for him as he suffered from extreme anxiety – but it was painting that was the focus of his attention. He talked about Lucian a lot, and was somewhat puzzled by Lucian’s commercial success. This latter observation was highly evident and not surprising as Ken had very little, if any, commercial success, and clearly considered himself to be Lucian’s equal in talent.

'But we couldn't afford to supply Ken with the art materials he needed. He visited friends, including Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, returning with rejected canvases with incomplete work by these artists, and would then paint over them. Ken always displayed symptoms of anxiety with a continuous  pressure to talk, thereby rendering dialogue very difficult.'

Jan and Roger recall Ken painting a large, mostly red painting of two dead pigeons, probably killed by his own hands, which he brought into the house and strung up on the inside of a wardrobe door in the room they had provided for him. 'He seemed to be preoccupied with Chaim Soutine at the time', says Jan. 'The presence of the Soutinesque pigeons soon made itself obvious and rather difficult to live with but Ken remained oblivious to our protestations; quotidian domestic life was a notion alien to him. 

'And it was also the time when Ken announced to us one day that he and Lucian had decided to paint portraits of each other, simultaneously. Ken went back and forth between Camberwell and Freud's Paddington studio over a period of possibly weeks to undertake this work.' Roger recalls that 'Ken  took away a painting he had made of a modern block of flats at Loughborough Junction in Brixton, and came back from his time at Lucian's studio with his portrait of Freud superimposed'. Composed of big, sketchy swathes of black, white and flesh-coloured paint, this rawly caricatural portrayal has a vivid immediacy.

A large, consummately assured yet viscerally forthright 1967 portrait of Brazier –  painted in Freud's studio on the obverse of the pigeons painting, and originally presented to Jan as a self-portrait by Ken – shows the characteristically garrulous artist open-mouthed, wearing a cable-knit sweater brilliantly rendered with free, abstracted strokes. The thin, bony, alert features here are those of a deeply vulnerable yet open-spirited man straining forward in precarious equipoise. Jan recalls that Ken had 'beautiful sea-green eyes and chestnut-coloured or auburn hair', and says this picture is 'a startling likeness of him'.

The picture was, by Brazier's own account, painted in Lucian's studio (Ken had wheeled the original large-scaled dead pigeons picture all the way from Camberwell to Paddington, and then back with the fresh portrait of Brazier on the back, in a pram, Stanley Spencer-style). Jan believes that 'Ken did not have the capacity for making such a coherent composition at that time', as he was suffering from disintegrating mental health (though with lucid and relatively tranquil intervals). She says, 'maybe it is possible that material in the Freud archive at the National Portrait Gallery [an archive of Lucian Freud's letters and 800 drawings, dating between the 1940s and the 1990s, allocated to the NPG in 2016] will cast light on the precise provenance of the images of both Ken and Lucian.

'With the understanding that there was a joint painting session with Lucian, with each artist painting the other, the question is open as to the whereabouts or which is the painting of Ken by Lucian.'

Roger recalls that 'when Ken brought the ‘self-portrait’ into the Knatchbull Road house I was amazed at what he showed us. It was a work unlike any that he had produced in the months preceding. It was a complete, resolved painting made over many hours of rigorous looking and mark-making. All of his recent work had been haphazard, unfinished, multiply revised - often for the worse, and executed with a very limited palette; he could not afford to buy oil paint in any quantity or range. The ‘self-portrait’, however, is executed with a full and rich palette of colour. Ken did indeed say that it was a self-portrait and at the time I took this statement, literally, at face value. But with hindsight and fifty years of making and looking at paintings, I am now of another opinion. I do not believe that Ken was capable of producing a work of this nature at that time in his life. I would go so far to say that he did not paint it. So who did? I know for certain that it was produced during the short period of time when Ken was working with Lucian in Lucian’s house in Paddington on what he described to us 'a mutual portrait painting project'.  I’m convinced that Ken’s own portrait of Lucian was done from life; he always painted by looking at things. But where is the reciprocal painting of Ken made by Lucian?'

In a small, wildly jaunty self-portrait by Brazier (c.1967), pronounced arched eyebrows are rendered by curlicues of turquoise paint – and three shapeless yet spirited blocks of Prussian blue are seen emanating, with an absurdist beauty, from the top of his head.

Roger wrote, 'Over the next two years, Ken continued with his disorderly life, endlessly circulating amongst friends and acquaintances, living on hand-outs whilst trying to paint and attempting, usually unsuccessfully, to sell his work. His mental health was in obvious decline and he was a cause for concern about which little, seemingly, could be done.'

The last Roger and Jan heard of him was on the day of the first moon landing, July 20^th 1969, a memorable date; they were hosting a party at home in their top floor flat in Camberwell. 'The doorbell rang below. It was Ken, oblivious to the events of the day. I opened the window and shouted down to him to wait a few moments. He didn't seem to understand what I was saying, and as I returned to watch the touch-down on the moon, I heard a few angry, inarticulate and dismissive-sounding words shouted from below. By the time I went down to let Ken in, he had gone. We never saw him again.

'I made enquiries after a while but no one we knew had seen or heard of Ken. It wasn't until the mid-90s, when I interviewed the artist Roger Cook for a programme, that the likely reality emerged. Roger Cook had been one of the visiting tutors at Norwich and knew Ken from those days. He was now teaching at Reading University and had, coincidentally, married Ken's ex-wife, Nina. I asked him about Ken. He said that neither he nor Nina had seen Ken since 1969 and they too did not know if he was dead or alive but suspected, as did Jan and I, that Ken was dead.

'And that to the best of our understanding, is how it stands today.'

Hopefully more information about Ken Brazier, and the whereabouts of more of his paintings, will emerge in time. No photographs of him are now known to exist. Yet his gaunt visage, his turbulent yet dedicated creative character and his searching openness are still urgently and palpably present both in his friend Lucian Freud's 1958 portrait of him, and in the surviving paintings by him that we can identify as self-portraits.