William Crozier

Two letters from William Crozier to Ruth Borchard, from Blackheath, south-east London, are both dated 1964. In the first, signed William Crozier, he writes: 'Your idea of a collection of self portraits sounds a good one and I would like to help you in any way I can. Some years ago I did a number of portraits which I still have. One of these I think would be suitable for your collection. The picture I have in mind is at present in store with some others and in a few days I will search it out, see that it is in good condition, and send it to you.'

In the second letter, signed Bill Crozier, he writes: 'As I am planning on going abroad in the next few months I have arranged with my gallery that I may sell a number of small paintings and drawings which so far I have kept in my own collection. As you have shown an interest in my work I would be pleased if you would now consider purchasing one of these small pieces.' In her notebook, Ruth writes that she paid £20 for this picture, which is signed but undated.

This may or may not be literally a self-portrait. Apparently, dating from 1961, it is a kind of existentialist self-portrayal, representing perhaps a flayed, screaming Everyman figure. In fact Crozier affirmed later on that his gaunt skeletal subjects – though perhaps initially inspired by individual friends or acquaintances, or, maybe in this case, himself – were gradually pared down to an irreducible essence. As such, they go on to become universal symbolic figures.

In 'Extracts from a forthcoming autobiography' (published in a 1970 catalogue for one of his many one-man exhibitions at Halima Nalecz's Drian Gallery, London), he wrote:

                I would like a art that is as a razor slash. Some ten years ago I

                 painted my first skeletal figures. Today with a micrometer screw

                 gauge you could measure the flesh that has grown upon them.

Indeed, it is tempting archly to ask an entirely, and appropriately. Absurdist question about his self-portrait: 'How much more infinitesimally discernible flesh can be gauged upon this skeletal figure, now that nearly sixty years have passed since it was conceived?'

The picture's shocking visceral immediacy is inseparable from contemporary moral, philosophical and historical influences that helped define its birth. In 1947 he had visited Paris for the first time with his friend the artist William Irvine, staying in tented accommodation for refugees and displaced people in public parks.  After graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1953, Crozier spent a period living in Paris, enthusiastically imbibing the current intellectual atmosphere of venues like Café Flore and Les Deux Magots - where Sartre and de Beauvoir reigned intellectually (though he implied since that some of the goings-on there were in fact tediously self-regarding). He since reflected too on the significance of his 1953 sojourn in Paris: 'I had been there some years before but I didn't know anyone. The only thing I did know was something of the intellectual life of Paris. I was very influenced by my reading. I had read Sartre, Aragon, Céline, Breton, Éluard, René Char and the writers associated with Les Temps Modernes. I had seen the first great exhibition of Matisse's cut-outs and Picasso's war paintings. I was excited by Hartung and Soulages. And so I was actually going home intellectually and aesthetically speaking. It certainly changed my life forever.'

Speaking to the author in 2006, Crozier said that 'the painters I liked then [in the early 50s] I have continued to appreciate: Serge Poliakoff, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Alfred Manessier. Despite their break with the past they retained the qualities of 'good painting' A few years later the New York School made them look academic, but I think that time has reversed that opinion.' (See William Crozier, ed. by Katharine Crouan, with essays by S.B. Kennedy and Philip Vann, Lund Humphries, London, 2007).

In the 2007 essay, I noted that 'Crozier appreciates Manessier's richly chromatic, densely interlocking forms... present in abstract paintings that the French artist made following a spiritual awakening... in 1943...Crozier's own particular pleasure in using black paint has an affinity with the approach of Pierre Soulages, a painter of... calligraphically abstract paintings in black (or predominantly in black).'

Crozier's self-portrait has something in common too with French wartime portraits by Wols (the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913-1951), the German painte  who had moved to France in 1932), in which figures seemingly compounded of blood and excreta are represented in oil on paper as if smeared mortar-like on rough walls; and also with 1950s Art Brut-influenced pictures by Jean Dubuffet, whose mask-like figures with splayed-out physiognomies united what Dubuffet called 'the metaphysical and the grotesquely trivial'.

Though Crozier's own picture can be seen within a larger European tradition (ranging from medieval memento mori pictures to Ensor's grinning skull-like masks), its traumatised atmosphere is peculiarly modern. Yet his image is more fearfully vivacious and expressionist than either Wols's or Dubuffet's, and less clinical in feeling than Francis Bacon's contemporaneous figures. The 'eye' of Crozier's figure is a void – a deep black eye socket 'contemplating' (or indeed blotting out) God knows what horrors – but the skeletal figure is hardly moribund: it cries out against a blood-soaked landscape, or what may be literally a field of blood, above which flows a weird-seeming calligraphy of bloody waves (resembling perhaps bloody entrails). Death has never seemed more vivid. Crozier wrote: 'I have made an anatomy that is emotionally accurate. A study of Gray's Anantomy reveals a norm to which none of us conform... More accurate information can be found in the mummified remains of an Inca woman found at Chillan and in various manifestations of demonology, Satanism, necromancy and religious fanaticism.'

'Witty etchings in the subversive Mexican tradition of the Day of the Dead by the engraver and illustrator Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) were another influence: skeletons, clothed often in bourgeois finery, performing everyday rituals.' (Philip Vann writing in William Crozier, 2007)

A simple autobiographical extract by Crozier casts light on what perhaps haunts this self-portrait: 'The image of man in the twentieth century will not be the cinema stars or the pop idols. But the victims of Belsen.'

In the 2007 essay, I wrote: 'Crozier has commented that his visit in 1969 to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen 'haunts me still'. A year after this visit he said:

                  [I] was surprised [the place] was not like my paintings. I expected

                  the imagery of the place to be like that which I had created in my

                  imagination and in my work. The very thought of Belsen had      

                  haunted my imagination all my life and I froze with horror when I

                  turned a corner and saw a sign marked Bergen-Belsen. The

                  enormity of that horror I have not fully dealt with.

His skeletal figure landscapes are suffused with the shadow of the Holocaust.'

'But the Second World War was only one part of the mental framework of these pictures... Crozier's 'skeleton' images...', Katharine Crouan has written, 'which evolved from a complex filter of influences drawn from art, poetry, film and Crozier's personal experience of Spain and Ireland...

'Crozier had become engrossed in images of the First World War, from films and books, out of which came the painting Bourlon Wood (1962) [Collection: IWM, London], based on one of the bloodiest conflicts of the war.' This harrowing painting of a skeletal soldier in a tin hat lying in rigor mortis on blood-soaked ground against green foliage and a minatory black sky, forms the poignant, potent Coda of the 2018 book Conflicting Views: Pacifist Artists by Gill Clarke (Sansom & Co., Bristol), which examines pacifist and conscientious objector British artists of the two World Wars, including, for example Mark Gertler in his vertiginous masterpiece and anti-war statement Merry-Go-Round (1916; Collection: Tate) and Reg Butler in his Final Maquette for 'The Unknown Political Prisoner' (1951-52; Collection: Tate) which, as the sculptor explained, represents 'a tower... on a rock... [on which] stand three figures gazing up [to] the tower and remembering the political prisoners that died in the concentration camps.'

Crozier's skeletal portraits were also inspired by a need he felt in the early 1960s to make pictures that were not limited by what he felt to be (in the words of a critic who knew him) that decade's 'shabby and meretricious' character. 'I felt that what we should be doing was making an art that was comparable to the art that I held in reverence and awe. We should be able to paint a picture and say “how does this compare with a Rembrandt portrait? Could it be hung beside Grunewald's Crucifixion? and be a contemporary picture holding its ground.”.'

In the 2007 essay, I wrote: 'The artist recalls one day seeing an Edvard Munch lithograph at the Marlborough Gallery in London:

                 I managed to have translated what was written underneath it. He

                 had written: 'I hear the scream of nature.' Now when you look at

                 Munch's pictures of The Scream, the man is not screaming, he's

                 listening. So it's not a scream. He's appalled at the noise, the

                 horrendousness of nature. So it's the very opposite of what it's

                 presented as, and I thought that's more what I'm interested in.

'… In his [1962] painting Lambeth Gardens [Crozier] is 'much possessed by death' and sees 'the skull beneath the skin' (to take T.S. Eliot's poetic phrases about the playwright John Webster) in a setting, with its tree trunks and branches like bloody waves undulating against a black sky, reverberating with apocalyptic awe. The figure's black eye-sockets transfix us with abysmal emptiness, as does the huge gaping mouth, bordered with a thick red stain.

'This skeletal figure is hearing the scream of nature, not screaming at nature.'

Born in Glasgow in 1930, Crozier had Irish roots on his paternal side, and his second wife the art historian Katharine Crouan has said, 'He was taken to Ireland frequently as a child and as a teenager he used to hitchhike around the 32 counties.' He became an Irish citizen at a time when the Troubles in Northern Ireland were escalating. His painting of a grimacing figure with skull-like head and flayed body in Crossmaglen Crucifixion (1975) – whose crucified agony is echoed in  he forms of the surrounding landscape with its distant, winding red road and crimson shapes ribboning the sky – was inextricably linked to the violent political and sectarian history of Crossmaglen in South Armagh, Northern Ireland; it serves as a powerful and subtle anti-war statement.

Crozier father was a plumber who enjoyed carpentry and model-making. 'I have inherited the best qualities of my mother and father. Their energy, a love of music and sentiment, sane common sense and a love of liberty. My failings are of my own invention. In an Obituary of the artist in The Independent (30th July 2011), I wrote: 'In 1954 Crozier married the actress Elspeth McKail (from a partly German-Jewish background), and they moved to Dublin. Their son Paul – named after the poet Paul Éluard – was born the following year. In 1956 the family returned to England, settling in Folkestone, where Crozier made playfully absurdist assemblages from beach detritus. The family then moved to Essex, where his daughter Siobhan was born in 1959. He likened the paintings he made there of fire-ravaged sugar-beet fields, whose intricate entrails of black lines evoke "fields burning at night", to black-and-white photos of First World War battlefields.

'Essex – like Málaga (and the nearby Spanish village where he settled in 1963 for six months of raw existentialist living under Franco's regime) and, later, West Cork – felt like living at the edge or end of the world. In 1965 his first marriage ended, and in 1973 he became an Irish citizen. Showing at Halima Nalecz's Drian Gallery in London's Porchester Place for the first time, in 1958 [and contracted to the gallery in 1960; in 1990 Halima Nalecz bequeathed thirty works by Crozier to the National Museum, Gdansk, Poland], and then at Arthur Tooth's in Bruton Place [in 1961, and contracted to that gallery the following year], he soon built up a reputation as a leading radical young painter. In 1981 he married the art historian Katharine Crouan, of French-Irish parentage. They set up a home and studio in Winchester, Hampshire, and in 1983 bought a cottage near Ballydehob on the West Cork coast.

'In coming to Cork in the early 1980s, he "cast off something. There was this almost pristine landscape that nobody had painted. I was seeing it afresh, I wasn't seeing it through anybody else's eyes. Maybe artists have to find their own little territory". Thereafter skeletal figures vanished from his art. In his 1993 painting Departure from the Island, the view of cerulean sea, glowing red and yellow headland and dense woodland thickets through which a psychedelic pink path passes, describes the sensation of sailing in Roaring Water Bay – yet the ecstatic stillness at the picture's heart is one of classical Ulyssean adventure.

'He said, "I cannot invent anything – I've got to see it; and it can be for a quarter of a second. Suddenly it's there, and I know there's a picture there. It's got to be seen in nature. I could never be an abstract artist." None of his paintings – even his beautifully abstracted still lifes and many luminously patterned portrayals of trees – is devoid of a strong figurative element. Making a painting was, for him, "a totally intuitive situation. The last brushstroke is like a bolt, you just put it in and the whole picture coheres. I don't make any sketches at all. I just go and start the picture."

'His art reflected a lifelong absorption in European culture as well as a love of poetry and friendship with poets such as Patrick Kavanagh, George Barker, Allen Ginsberg and Seamus Heaney. Influences included Russian icon painting, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (whose building at Glasgow School of Art inspired him as a student), Francis Bacon and Robert Colquhoun in post-war London – and, perhaps above all, Picasso and Kasimir Malevich. The music of Wagner and Shostakovich permeated days of creation in his studios.

'In 1979, living at New York's Chelsea Hotel, he took up a two-month artist's residence at the Thomas Hart Benton Studio. As an art teacher at Corsham in 1959, then at London's Central School of Art and Design from 1965, and three years later, as Head of Fine Art at Winchester School of Art, one of his finest achievements was introducing students to wider continental culture, including, latterly, regular visits to Barcelona. Last year a major exhibition of his recent work was held at the Flowers Gallery in east London. As a man, he was gentle and warm in presence, often mischievous and provocative in conversation (his sparing comments were incisive and wryly witty), and generous in his attention and insights.'

An exhibition of his Early Work, including a number of the skeletal figure paintings, was held at Pyms Gallery, London in 2010. A major retrospective in two parts, William Crozier: The Edge of the Landscape, curated by Sean Kissane (Curator, Exhibitions, IMMA), was shown sequentially across two venues with Crozier’s later works from 1985 showing at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre from 15th July to 31st August 2017, and his earlier works shown at IMMA: Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin from 12^th October 2017 to 8th April 2018. In late 2017 the Piano Nobile gallery staged an exhibition of Crozier's early paintings  from the 1950s and 60s, William Crozier: Savagery Beneath the Surface, at the Kings Place Gallery, London, in collaboration with the retrospective held by IMMA, Dublin.

In the extensive IMMA exhibition catalogue for The Edge of the Landscape exhibition, with essays by seven contributors, Katharine Crouan wrote: 'Aware that his eclectic work was influenced by the length and breadth of European art, not to mention his wide reading and his love of music, he was wary of describing himself as anything other than 'a European living at home'. Within that borderless culture to which he remained committed to the end, Crozier was happy to acknowledge the Scottish-Irish identity that had given him, in his words, '… a dual nationality of the heart, an excess of visual riches'.'