Mario Dubsky

There is one letter from Mario Dubsky to Ruth Borchard, dated '6. Oct. 64', from an address in north London. He writes: 'I am at present on a scholarship abroad, Rome actually, and am here (in London) only for a few days, so whatever arrangement we make will have to be done rather quickly.' Though in her original letter, Ruth offered fifteen guineas for a self-portrait, Dubsky stated that he couldn't take less than £20 - a figure that was agreed upon. Dubsky ends his letter: 'I am very glad to hear that you so enthusiastically are making this unique collection, and I wish you all success.' The picture is signed and dated 1960.

Mario Dubsky was born in London in 1939, soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, to refugee Viennese Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity; he too was baptised but remained proud of his cultural heritage. The self-portrait that Ruth acquired was painted in the final undergraduate year of his period (1956-60) at the Slade School of Art in London, when he was around twenty-one years old; he was also there as a postgraduate in 1961. In 1956, when Dubsky started at the Slade as a highly precocious sixteen-year-old student, the painter Dorothy Mead (q.v.) had also arrived there (in Dubsky's words) 'as a mature student and practised disciple of Bomberg's - then an entirely unknown, uncelebrated and isolated figure’. For the next few years, 'under the mentorship of Dorothy Mead, whose work at that time seemed challenging, radical and heroic [...] I wholeheartedly subscribed to the Bombergian approach.' Dubsky defined this approach as 'the continual process of drawing from life with charcoal, of using thick cheap paint, and of being almost solely concerned with form, mass and structure’. Looking back many years later, he admitted: 'Many times in the years since I have realised the benefit that that long practice of using paint as a mobile, dense and expressive material has given me; "the spirit in the mass" [the evocation of which Bomberg saw as his artistic goal] still makes sense.' Dubsky says that he, Mead and Dennis Creffield (q.v.), who had arrived as a student at the Slade in 1957, 'formed a sort of grouping, in idiom, as also in [...] how the work was exhibited’.

The self-portraits by Dubsky, Mead and Creffield in the Borchard Collection are indeed close in idiom; all use 'paint as a mobile, dense and expressive medium', yet each is markedly individual in character. The authentic Bombergian impulse and influence were never didactic or prescriptive in their nature; Bomberg himself said that though he believed that 'art cannot be taught', he did consider that 'it is stimulated in contact with Art & Artists & happens - it is like life - conception Birth & this is a mystery - but no less a mystery than Art’. Of these three self-portraits, Dubsky's appears the most animated, and has the strongest hints of colour. In a 1989 essay,* Bryan Robertson made a rather dismissive point about 'the inert and muddy monochrome favoured by the followers of Bomberg and Coldstream - who appeared always to combine Coldstream's adherence to ochres and greys with Bomberg's altogether more expressive handling of paint. Bomberg's sense of colour was, in fact, always full-blooded, his darkness an intense, richly-nuanced darkness.' Certainly, the palette in Creffield and Mead's self-portraits is closer tonally to that of the Euston Road School and Coldstream, the Slade Principal in the 50s and 60s, than to Bomberg's (and this is not in fact to Creffield and Mead's detriment, as implied by Robertson). Yet Dubsky's self-portrait itself bears a closer relationship to 'Bomberg's sense of colour' and the 'intense, richly-nuanced darkness' of the latter's paintings.

In a 2015 essay, 'Mario Dubsky's Spiky Garden', the artist Guy Burch, a long-term close friend of Dubsky's, wrote: 'Bright colour and, to a lesser degree, paint were never his natural materials. Only when he put his palette into the earth did paint, oil rather than acrylic, work well for him. Sack cloth and ashes. He was a truly gifted draftsman though and his archetypal imagery has a potent and ancient feel. His best work is to be found in archaic darkness.'

Dubsky’s self-portrait excludes a literal figurative reading of individual features - we do not see his eyes, nose or mouth nor details of clothing or skin (it is not even really clear if the figure is clothed or naked). It seems that his right arm is upraised so that his hand rests more or less flat on his cheek. There are some powerfully expressive, thick individual lines delineating form such as right left arm (and indeed non-form - as it is not clear what some of the lines 'represent' at all; not that this matters within the overall poetic dynamism of the picture). The earthy colours conjuring up this nobly upright, dynamically calm, possibly sylvan figure - browns, golden ochres along with some flashes of white - and the small but tellingly refreshing patch of green at bottom right of the background - suggest that this is very much a portrait of himself as a subject grounded in an intimate, elemental experience of both the natural and pagan mythical worlds; it does not appear at all as a self-portrait of fraught, urbane, existentialist alienation.

It is fascinating to compare this picture with Bomberg's own late self-portraits, so full of majestic awe and tragic grandeur, such as Hear O Israel (1955) and Last Self-Portrait (1956), works only separated by a handful of years from Dubsky's. The latter’s presence in his painting is much gentler and more tentative in spirit than Bomberg's in his own apocalyptic late self-portrayals, yet Dubsky's brushstrokes in this work have something of the urgent dynamic sweep of late Bomberg, and his both glowing and grounded colours here certainly share something of the quality of Bomberg's 'intense, richly- nuanced darkness'.

Dubsky's work in the 1960s and early 70s became more and more abstracted and architectonic in nature, influenced by structures such as 'geophysical masses and strata [...] with aircraft and wings, spacecraft and bats, birds and pterodactyls’. However, his later pictures invariably returned to the often disturbing archetypal figuration of his mid-1950s student work. This had included a tautly scaffolded drawing of Girl with Wounded Bird (1955) and an anguished 1957 self-portrait, revealing Bomberg's influence and that of Dubsky's tutor, Keith Vaughan (q.v.).

Dubsky travelled widely – his scholarship time in Rome opened him up to classical Roman values in art and architecture, and his travels through Serbia and Macedonia – and to Mount Athos, Cappadocia, Antioch, Aleppo and Damascus – helped broaden his appreciation of how Arabic culture had culturally enriched European history. His work from this period onwards shows the ways in which he began to marry all of these interests into his own personal mythology. As his one-time student Donald Smith has said, 'Historical, classical, mythological and archaeological influences – he tried to bring them all together and make work that reflected his own life in relation to this wider history.'

Visiting Manhattan, 'a stunningly beautiful city like no other, and [...] an incomparable fund of imagery' on a Harkness Fellowship in 1969, 'was stimulating after the gentle and more frivolous climate of London or Rome [...] What Rome had done for my Christian name New York then did for my surname. I am in fact a mixture of Slav and Jewish, and baptized (as were my parents). New York was therefore a perfect modern "Alexandria".'

At about this time, as he was at long last happily discovering his identity as a gay man, he 'became increasingly aware of my own inner disposition, that a very strong part of me responded to political context, to history and to ideas, as much as to art.' In his book, Pictures and Patterns: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts (Viking Penguin, New York and London, 1999), James M. Saslow illustrates a photograph of part of the 1971 agitprop photomontage mural by the New York artist John Button (1929-1982) and Dubsky; it has since been destroyed. Saslow writes: 'The new [gay] movement's first group image [following the emergence of a fresh, self-assertive identity among gay men and lesbians in the wake of the Stonewall Inn riots in New York's Greenwich Village in 1969] was the forty-foot mural installed at New York's Firehouse, early headquarters of the Gay Activists Alliance, in 1971. The photomontage adorned one of the earliest publicly declared gay spaces, a home for community functions from political meetings to dances, and it defined and celebrated that community's emerging philosophy, politics, and cultural heritage. Its agitprop images rhythmically overlap gay protest marches with heroes of related liberation struggles like black activist Huey Newton, and cultural icons like Plato and Walt Whitman, all stencilled with slogans of gay struggle to evoke a romantic vision of justice for all.'

By 1975, Dubsky had returned to drawing the human figure (in charcoal and, for the first time since 1957, in pencil), finding 'it was marvellous to be able to draw every day; male figures in the main [...] I had re-connected quite forcibly with the human image.'

He wrote that in 1977 'and the years that followed I had an inspiring weekly drawing class at Camberwell School of Art, with some very lively and talented students. A wonderful character appeared as a model, Tom Dawson [...] Tom was amazing, he enjoyed difficult or painful poses, most of them made by himself. He was able to inject intensity, the taking on of roles, and of being a real person into the atmosphere. The characterization that typifies many of the drawings that I did of him is certainly an aspect of the Auschwitz syndrome that lies very close to the surface of my work and attitudes. [...] The eventual composition of many of the drawings of Tom into an allegorical sequence, Tom Pilgrim's Progress Along the Consequences of Christianity was an angry response to the Blasphemy Trial against Gay News [...] The moral hypocrisy of our age disgusts many. In the land that gave birth to Hogarth it would seem right for artists to concern themselves with such issues.'

Many of Dubsky's late charcoal drawings, themselves possessing 'intense, richly-nuanced darkness', are compassionate and often harrowing portrayals of naked men, their splayed bonyness and crouching fragility sometimes redolent of Nazi concentration camp victims. In his 2015 essay, Guy Burch wrote that 'Far from being welcomed in the queer community, these drawings were not popular with gay men when they were published, in the first art book issued by the Gay Men’s Press. They were not the hedonistic figures of the disco or beach. They mystified both an art world focused on the conceptual and a gay one focused on hedonism. Now they look like the warnings of an unheeded prophet, linking the corruption of a worn out morality to a parallel abuse, as he saw it, of nature and self respect. He saw the same arrogance behind the artificial ‘natural order’ that gave rise to the death camps, unchecked science and the brave new world worshiping false gods [...]

'Their rigorous whittled figures, made bone-like, bleached of any fleshy voluptuousness, meant that they were admired but not loved. I thought they were wonderful: tough like sinews and muscles on a man doing hard work on a frugal diet. The wasted figures of his pilgrim series had truth but were so angular and violent-seeming that they provoked disquiet.'

Other late charcoal drawings are more playful, relishing a wide variety of faces, physiques and postures, celebrating the sensual and imaginative uniqueness of each man. His final drawings of the male form, inspired by 'classical, pagan-inclined re-reading' in Rome in 1982 (when he was artist-in-residence at the British School there), are imperturbably serene.

Guy Burch has described in revealing detail his visits to Dubsky's house and studio in Archway in north-west London: in his studio 'Mario had a giant island work table on wheels spread with paint tubes and tubs. When I met him they were acrylic since he said he had developed an allergy to oils (I wonder now if it was not undiagnosed HIV related) with great pots and catering size tin cans packed with brushes, not pristine and carefully cleaned like a hobby painter's, but abused and showing plenty of use. Ranged around on a series of easels were huge panels from his series of paintings representing the dark and the light sides of human endeavour.'

In the artist's 'study where meals were eaten [...] against the walls around the table were bookshelves, Indian miniatures, his own work and several really fine pieces by other artists, some friends others he admired [...] these included a drawing by David Hockney, whom he knew, an early Vorticist period David Bomberg [...] bought fairly cheaply direct from Bomberg’s widow, this later sold for £50,000, helping to pay Mario’s death duties. His sister Barbara managed to hold onto a particularly beautiful nude bather by his close friend Keith Vaughan.'

From 1981-85 Dubsky was a tutor at the Royal College of Art. His first one-man show was at London's Grosvenor Gallery in 1969, and there was a retrospective of his work at the South London Art Gallery in 1984. His work is in the Arts Council Collection.

In the mid-70s, Dubsky set out his credo: 'Art adrift from the essentially humanist core that is the fundamental of modern art tends to concern itself with art alone. In our time art is already precariously too far removed from any necessary dynamic or transcendent role in the world. The maker of art is human, hopefully, and his/her audience is equally so. The attempt to bring art back into some meaningful discourse would need to address itself primarily to the human figure.'

Mario Dubsky died in 1985.

In 2017, a retrospective exhibition, 'Mario Dubsky: Xeno Factor', opened at Chelsea Space at Chelsea College of Art, co-curated by Donald Smith, Director of this gallery, who had himself been a student of Dubsky's at Camberwell from 1981-84. Interviewed by Sarah McLean for the Chelsea College of Arts Blog, Smith discussed how the works 'on display relate to the evolution of the artist's practice and personal life'. Referring to the 'series of life drawings at the start of the show, which Dubsky made in the life room at Camberwell between roughly 1975 and 1983, Smith explains that “The students would benefit from teaching through example [...] so we’d all be drawing the same model as the teacher, from different angles.”'

When Smith was first taught by Dubsky, he found his teacher (in McLean's words) an 'intellectually rigorous man who was quite a tough teacher. “He was a bit scary!” he admits. “Teaching was very different in those days. He was quite aggressive by nature and could be very provocative. He said some very direct things to me but, on reflection, they actually always contained an absolute gem [...] overall it was a very rich experience.” Camberwell during this period was “an amazing place to be”, recalls Donald. “There were three evening life classes a week, each run by different tutors with something quite different to say. In turn, each of those teachers had certain students that adopted their language or ideology and it was an incredibly vital time for drawing, something for which it quickly became renowned.”'

A major exhibition of Dubsky's work took place in 1984 at the South London Art Gallery, next door to Camberwell College of Arts. McLean writes: 'It was called X Factor, a reference to the Greek form xeno, meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘unknown quantity’. “Yes, it did have a certain connotation with ‘xenophobia’ and fear of the other,” Donald remembers. “This was something that interested him because his parents were refugees and because his sexuality made him feel like an outsider in so many ways. But as well as that there was [...] a more complex reading of it [...] that also referred to the other as in ‘the unexplained’” [...] It is with this in mind that Donald decided to name this show Xeno Factor, an homage to that exhibition and to perhaps more fully explicate some of Dubsky’s thinking around that word...

'“In the build up to the show Mario was really tense and quite hard to deal with: he had become angry and withdrawn, and generally ill at ease”,  he recalls. “He worked tirelessly and meticulously to create the installation that he wanted. On the day of the exhibition Mario stayed in the gallery pottering and brooding. By the time the exhibition opened, it seemed as if a cloud had descended on him and people didn’t even seem to feel like they could approach him to congratulate him.” Dubsky died of AIDS less than a year later. Donald isn’t sure if he knew at the time that he was ill. “It was possible that he had an idea that this show was his opportunity to wrap things up, and really take a more retrospective look at his work. In the catalogue for that exhibition he tells his life story and the show was very well-rounded. It wasn’t just a slice of time, it was a final, considered overview of his practice.”

'However, Donald is glad to recall that the evening didn’t end as soberly as it began. “Later that night, Derek Jarman turned up with Andrew Logan and a bunch of the ‘out’ gay art community and suddenly the whole event changed. It went from this very somber serious, quiet event into a kind of festival. It was very striking to see and I was pleased for Mario as it really lightened his mood. He was finally able to celebrate his work, as he deserved to do.”'

           *In the same essay written for a Patrick Procktor painting

             retrospective, Bryan Robertson reminisced about visiting the Slade in

            1960 (Procktor was a fellow student there of Dubsky’s): ’Like his

            friend Dubsky, Procktor had a keen social awareness, was politically

            if romantically left-wing, distrusted what seemed to him to be the

            easy theatre of much abstract painting […]’. At that time, Robertson

            was director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, where he put on many

             influential exhibitions of the latest, and sometimes most avant-garde,

            international figurative and abstract art.