Keith Critchlow
'All self-portraits are – in my view – “who am I” if they are of value’.
Three letters from Keith Critchlow to Ruth Borchard are all dated 1962 and sent from south-west London. In the first, he writes: 'I can make a special price for you of one small – but I consider as valuable a self-portrait – exhibit in a new Gallery opening in Museum Street [near the British Museum] on the 28th of this month. I will send you an opening card. My price is 18gns but I will let you have it for 12gns in this case.' In the second latter, 'I trust the picture will improve with time.'
In a postcard to the author, Keith Critchlow writes: 'All self-portraits are – in my view – who am I if they are of value.' This particular self-portrait was one of a number that the artist made in 1960, when he was around twenty-seven years old. Its dynamically sparring brushwork shows the influence of David Bomberg as well as the mutual influence of Bomberg's pupils and followers, several of whom Crirchlow had studied alongside at St. Martin's School of Art in London, just a few years earlier.
Critchlow's strong head and neck and naked shoulders appear to thrust upwards, as though his whole being was engaged in straining at once nervously and forcefully after true vision and authentic expressiveness. One of his pupils is made up of a swathe of strokes in deep Bombergian burgundian, the other composed of a spontaneously applied patch of black. But it is also possible to interpret the eyes ambiguously, their dark formlessness makes them seem shadowed almost to the point of being occluded, even obliterated. This is a self-portrayal by a young man who appears both to intuit and express reality not only in vigorously sensuous terms but also inwardly – as a clear and incisive seer of what is ordinarily dark and occluded.
The way the mouth here puckers to the subject's right, twisting the face, suggests that that the artist is at least deliberating or being on the verge of articulating some subtle, perhaps anguished thought. The slight contortion of the features finds a parallel in the more extreme way Francis Bacon, at about the same time, was manipulating his subjects' countenances, so that flesh is seen to shft and slide about as if registering a succession of states of mind, and so transcending any fixed, or indeed 'fixated', snapshot identity.
The brushstroke are applied with a kind of disciplined self-abandonment, which in Bombergian style, endows the picture with resolute structure and spontaneous freshness. Tonally, the subject's prominent quiff of thick black/brown hair is echoed in the deep, dark eyes; this is in contrast to the lucid flesh tones on his nose, left cheek and temple, and left shoulder – whose golden brilliancy seems to be as much metaphysical as physical. Critchlow's head and shoulders are set against an abstracted background of brown and turquoise (tonal variations of both colours actually seem to be pervading the figure itself); the naked subject takes on an almost timeless (as well as strikingly contemporary painterly) quality, resembling, say, a figure in an Old Master painting set against elements of earth, sky and water.
In 1960, Critchlow painted other self-portraits, some of which Ruth would have seen in his 1962 London show. These show the artist in a relatively similar pose – one with his mouth closed but still slightly twisted in emphasis, another with his mouth barely open, the third with his mouth open-wide as though in plaintive appeal. The background to these pictures tend to mauve, purple and, in one case, vivid red. Two further self-portraits show the artist in a sweater or tee-shirt; here the features are more smoothly painted but with a similar sense of melancholic yearning and fierce self-enquiry. A further self-portrait from that year – midway in style between Sickert and Bomberg – shows the artist standing in the nude, one arm outstretched and gesturing. His facial features are indiscernible, partly obliterated in a field of light; his body is seen to glisten similarly.
Keith Critchlow was born in London in 1933. He attended the progressive Summerhill School, run by the renowned educational thinker A.S. Neill. He studied at St. Martin's School of Art from 1954-7, and taught at the Royal College of Art in London from 1973. David Buckman has noted that 'He was an early disciple of the American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose first London exhibition he organised, and he ran his own architectural consultancy.'
Critchlow has written a number of books which explore the cosmic inter-relationships of art, nature and mathematics. Buckminster Fuller is quoted on the back of his volume, Order in Space: a design source book (Thames & Hudson, London, 1969): 'Keith Critchlow has one of the century's rare conceptual minds,,, he lauds the work of others while himself pouring forth, in great modesty, whose vista-filling new realizations of nature's mathematical structuring.' He is also the author of Islamic Patterns: An Analytical and Cosmological Approach (Thames & Hudsonm London, 1976), which includes quotations from mystics from a wide range of mystical traditions. His book Time Stands Still (Gordon Fraser, London, 1979), with colour photograph by Rod Bull of nuemrous objects such as an archaic 'jade pi' and 'an early Bronze Age gold buckle') investigates, inter alia, the secret geometries of neolithic standing stones, about which he comments, 'Our fascination for the dignity and mystery of the megaliths stems from the recognition of our own mute “creation myths” in stone. Their very presence seems to pose the perennial question, “what does it really mean to be human”.'
In the documentary Chartres Cathedral: A Sacred Geometry (2002, directed by Louise R. Illig; the cathedral's interior and exterior atmospherically filmed by an acclaimed BBC cameraman), Professor Keith Critchlow and Malcolm Miller, guide to the cathedral, act as co-hosts and explain the sacred meanings of the building's manifold features, ranging from the Biblical and mystical content of the stained glass-windows to the medieval labyrinthine patterns impressed in the cathedral nave – a way for the pilgrim to find his or her own spiritual path through life's seemingly endless maze. In a subsequent filmed interview, Critchlow was asked, 'Are we given buildings like Chartres Cathedral to experience heaven on earth?' He replies, with a laugh of recognition, 'I love that question! I would say yes.... taking the idea that one is given it in the form of revelation, in the form of inspiration, in the form of knowledge and learning, which puts a building like this together, yes, it is given, and yes, it is for our upliftment, our self-discovery, our experience of unity, anything which brings us closer to our completeness and our rediscovery of our own relationship to God.'
In 1977, Keith Critchlow had written the script for a remarkable Arts Council film, Reflection (directed by Lawrence Moore). A magically moving sequence from this film (viewable on YouTube) – with a resonant note of 60s psychedelia – shows three figures (Keith's children) meditatively walking the Cathedral Maze, barefoot, to haunting rhythmic music by Mike Oldfield – with sudden cuttings to film of the cathedral's statuary and to views of neolithic stone circles structures, such as Stonehenge, in glowing dawn or dusk. Amidst this sequence is a voice-over from Critchlow: 'Heraclitus says that for those who are awake, there is one common cosmos but for those who are asleep, each turns into his own world.'
In Critchlow's 2011 book The Hidden Geometry of Flowers: Living Rhythms, Form and Number (published by Floris Books) – with a Foreword by the Prince of Wales – working from his own flower photographs and geometric hand-drawn patterns, divine symmetries, seen to be underlying flower forms, he says that flowers can be treated as sources of mystical remembering, the geometry in the face of a flower capable of reminding us of the geometrical structures underlying all existence.
For twelve years Critchlow was a lecturer at the London School of Architecture, and has been a professor of Islamic Art at the Royal College of Art from 1975 for many years. He founded the Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts (VITA) school in 1984, which moved from the Royal College to the Prince's Institute of Architecture in 1992-3. The institute later evolved in The Prince' Foundation. He is president of the Temenos Academy; in 1980 the poet and scholar Kathleen Raine, along with Keith Critchlow, Brian Keeble and Philip Sherrard, had launched Temenos, a journal for poets, artists, writers and thinkers who believe the value of the arts lies in their spiritual and mystical foundation. From these beginnings, the Temenos Academy itself was founded in 1990, as a teaching organisation dedicated to the same precepts of 'the perennial philosophy' that had inspired the Journal.
Crithlow's practice of sacred geometry can be seen to underly his architectural commissions around the world, including the Krishnamurti Study Centre in England, the Lindisfarne Chapel in Crestone, Colorado and a medical studies' institute in Puttaparthi, India. Critchlow's 1976 lithograph Nasr (Victory) – 'nasr' being an Arabic word – in the Tate Collection (published by the Curwen Press), is an immaculately intricate rendition of a sacred geometric form which may act as a focus for mystical contemplation.
In 2001, writing to the author, Keith Critchlow recalled seminal periods as an art student, and after graduating:
I was at St. Martin's School of Art in the same student entry as Leon Kossoff, Franck Auerbach, Warren Kenton (author Ben Shimon Halivi now, David Hamilton-Fraser, Joe Tilson... It was a remarkable group. I recall the deep seriousness of Frank Auerbach (his parents were were killed by the Nazis). The exceptional skill at table tennis and humour of Leon Kossoff... Joe Tilson was a very sociable student, highly skilled in practical things like woodwork. Warren Kenton keenly observant, always challenging the unexplainable or more subtle factors of experience. Frank A. and Leon K. naturally deeply concerned to work at creatively mending the horrendous crime against the European Jews.
All of us deeply concerned with the cleaning of the paintings at The National Gallery – we all wrote a collective letter to the 'Times' which I believe was published. Art and particularly painting was deeply serious to us then as the only way we could see of rebalancing the horrors of imbalance of world war.
Vivian Pitchforth (1895-1982), the distinguished watercolourist, was a great influence on us all in his teaching of life drawings [at St. Martin's].
David Bomberg who taught in south London... had the magnetic and creative energies to ignite and show a way of approaching seeing and drawing that transformed the confidence of Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and many other distinguished painters consequently.
I was a great admirer of Bomberg's paintings (and owned two at the time) but I held back from attending his 'Bottega' due to the what I felt rather overwhelming sway of drawing. I still believe he was and is one of the most important British artists of his day. His wife came to see my wife and I after he died and borrowed a painting for the Tate Retrospectve. The great achievements of Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach are marks of his inspiring mastery without diminishing them whatsoever.
He recollects 'writing a review to Leon Kossoff's first exhibition at The Beaux Arts Gallery where I got my first job after college with Mrs Lessore [Helen Lessore, the gallery's director]. I also recall helping Leon carry his frame drawings to show Mrs Lessore. She was a most important figure in the art world at that time, with deeply held convictions and great courage.'
In the same letter, Critchlow meditates on contemporary values in art and society:
We live in extraordinary times of cultural crisis where even paint has been said to be redundant to computer printout ink. Where the search for wisdom in imagery has been reduced to Information Technology and the human dignity of a personal address had been reduced to a data base – the lowest definition possible.
The crisis in the modern world is clearly linked to the lack of cultural continuity, to the recognition of the importance of the 'ikon' or image itself. Great painting has always been deeply connected to the deepest questions of identity, source, and goal, 'Who am I', 'from whence did I come?', 'what am I doing here?', 'what will be my ultimate destiny?' Those who paint the human condition have not abandoned these questions without presuming to answer them, at least offering the opportunity for each to take responsibility to answer them for themselves.
I still paint occasionally, I am still passionately committed to cultural continuity and deeply concerned with others, about the cardinal questions of life and its purpose.
Written just a few weeks after the terrorist atrocities of September 11th 2001, the letter concludes:
A prayer for peace at this time seems the most urgent issue whatever other duties or task one has to perform.
