Andrew Forge
‘I would be delighted to let you have an old self-portrait for £20… I have had two periods when I painted a lot of self-portraits – one in about 1953-54 & the other about 56-57. They are all quite small, 30” x 25” at the most. The early ones are more “like” than the later.’
There are six letters, all from 1964, from Andrew Forge to Ruth Borchard. He gives his address in London's Blackheath, although, when inviting Ruth to view his self-portraits, he asks her to come to 'my studio (which) is not in London but in a very-out-of-the-way part of Kent between Ashford & Canterbury'. In the same letter, he says, 'I would be delighted to let you have an old self-portrait for £20. As a matter of fact I have had two periods when I painted a lot of self-portraits – one in about 1953-54 & the other about 56-57. They are all quite small, 30" x 25" at the most. The early ones are more "like" than the later.' In the end, it seems that Forge visited Ruth in Reigate; he asked, 'May I bring a painter friend, Dorothy Mead (q.v.), who expressed a great desire to see your collection as she had heard about it from other artists?'
Forge twice apologises for delays in contacting Ruth, saying he has been 'terribly busy'. Indeed, as a painter, art critic (he wrote books on artists including Vermeer, Manet, Klee, Soutine and Rauschenberg), and senior lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art (from 1950-54), and then head of the Department of Fine Art at Goldsmith's College (from 1964-70), his time was precious. However, he valued the fact that he was approached by Ruth, and adds a P.S. to one of his letters: 'I am most pleased that you asked me – I have heard of your remarkable collection more than once.'
Forge's self-portrait is in the honourable, classical tradition of a self-image as clearly seen in a mirror, and then depicted more or less realistically as such. The stark framing of the mirror (possibly gilded, or simply plain but refulgent wood) makes us doubly aware that the distanced, mirrored self-portrayal takes on the form of a picture within the picture. Dated 1956, it was painted when the artist was thirty-three, and already a senior lecturer at the Slade. Forge looks relaxed and informal, leanly attractive and upstanding, in his open necked shirt. possibly denim. (The artist Julie Heffernan, recalling many years later the initial critique by Forge of her paintings as a student at Yale, gave this vivid first glimpse: 'I can still see his tall lanky frame in the doorway of my studio.') Yet his large round spectacles here give him a rather bleary-eyed, slightly guarded expression, and his puckered-lipped look is one of guided enquiry, a tentative weighing-up of self. This is the kind of ceaselessly sceptical, self-critical attitude, native to his sensibility, which is implied by his comment in a letter to Ruth that his later self-portraits are 'much better, I now think (than the early ones), although one can't be absolutely sure' (my italics).
Odd, rudimentary vertical and horizontal lines here and there indicate how carefully and methodically Forge has initially measured up the composition in the manner used by William Coldstream – who taught Forge during his time at the Camberwell School of Art and Crafts (1947-49). Christopher Pinsent , a pupil of Coldstream's, has written of his teacher: 'He taught me to draw by measuring, and to paint by what he called the division of tones. He didn't actually teach people, as far as I know, to paint with those thin, hatching brush-strokes, but of course a lot of his pupils copied that... Physical sensation... had to pass through to the pure language of paint.'
To the left and right of the figure of the artist, reflected in the mirrored background, is just the barest suggestions of anonymous, featureless female figures, very remote, ghostly presences – perhaps ghosts or memories of seated nude models in his studio or maybe figures portrayed on canvases propped up against the wall
Another of Forge's teachers at Camberwell was Victor Pasmore. A description by the painter William Townsend of Pasmore criticising the term's work for the life painting class is especially relevant to Forge's early approach and his later abstracted pointilliste developments: Pasmore spoke of 'the relation of the painted surface to reality; the theme being that it is not a question of copying lights and shades or imitation, but of understanding and controlling the seen thing and then in lines, dots (I noted especially the dots, thinking of Victor's new pictures) making shapes on the canvas in which the object is re-identified.'
From his student days onwards, Forge was always searching for 'the pure language of paint', making shapes (almost exclusively, after 1964, myriads of dots) 'on the canvas in which the object is re-identified'. His self-portrait re-identifies himself through a 'pure language of paint', which is able to evoke glowing bronzed skin against blue cotton as well as more abstract ambiguities and questionings, both psychological and philosophical.
In the early 1960s, Forge came under the influence of David Bomberg and followers such as Frank Auerbach and Dorothy Mead (q.v.) – with Mead, he had a long, close if sometimes difficult relationship – and produced some remarkable, vibrantly impastoed expressionistic portraits. In a letter to the Independent (16th September 2002), Paul Trewhela discussed 'an important (often overlooked) part of Andrew Forge's life... the period in which he approached the master/apprentice legacy of David Bomberg... This was in between his tuition by William Coldstream in the Euston Road manner in 1947 and his later turn towards abstraction (and academic work and residence in the United States) following the American Abstract Expressionist exhibition at the Tate in 1959.
'His approach towards the work of Bomberg accompanied a tortuous relationship with Dorothy Mead, who had painted and studied with Bomberg since 1944 and was a founder member of the Borough Group (1946-51). They met at the Slade during the mid-1950s while Forge was teaching there and Mead a very confident and influential student. (Bomberg had asked Coldstream to enrol her and Dennis Creffield as students when he finished teaching at the Borough Polytechnic.)
'Largely at the urging of Mead and her previous partner, Cliff Holden, who had been first president of the Borough Group, Forge curated the first serious tribute in London to Bomberg's life's work, at the Arts Council in 1958, in the year following his death. Over the next several years Forge exhibited with Mead, Holden and Dennis Creffield in a number of London exhibitions, and wrote about their work. All have work in the Arts Council Collection.
'At this time he was referred to by his friend, colleague and rival David Sylvester as (with Joe Tilson) one of "five Bomberg School painters" exhibiting in London, though the "least malerisch [painterly] of the group". The ending of his relationship with Mead, who became President of the London Group shortly before her death from a brain tumour in 1975, was roughly contemporary with the abatement of his appreciation of Bomberg.
'A powerful painting by Mead, owned by Holden in Sweden, imagines her and Forge in a tense and distanced setting in her flat in Ladbroke Grove.
'Forge's "ethical" approach to teaching... was something worked through with Dorothy Mead, who in this sense was his tutor, drawing on her experience with Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic. For Bomberg, the ethical was central in the teaching and in the imaginative creation of the work.'
It was in 1963 (as he recalled it twenty-five years later) that Forge found himself despairing and unable to work because of 'no belief in what I was doing'. But one day in New York – after emigrating to the United States in 1972 (where he was a Visiting Professor at Cooper Union (1973-74), Visiting Professor at New York Studio School (1975-2002) and a Professor at the School of Art at Yale from 1975-83) – 'I found myself in my studio, full of energy, and... without any thought I picked up the smallest brush I had and I just went like that very intensely on the canvas... It was a fantastic moment... that point looked back at me like an eye... I felt it was the most real thing I had ever done.'
In an Obituary of Andrew Forge in The New York Times (September 7th, 2002), Roberta Smith wrote: 'Over more than 50 years, Mr Forge remained foremost a painter of perception. In his early work, what interested him was his perception of the world and how to reconcile what he saw with paint on canvas. His inclinations were encouraged by his study with the exacting English painter William Coldstream at the Camberwell School of Art in London.
'But after a creative crisis in 1963, Mr. Forge seemed to have decided that exploring the perception of painting itself was sufficient. Over nearly a decade, he developed a mode of abstraction that related to Monet, Seurat and the Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko in its emphasis on the sensory effects of color.
'He reduced his formal vocabulary to two small, basic units: tiny dots and short, thin dashes of paint that he called sticks. He applied those elements meticulously, by the thousands and with continual adjustments of shape, color, orientation and density until they coalesced into luminous, optically unstable fields.
'These fields occasionally gave hints of landscapes or figures, but were primarily concerned with their own internal mechanics, which unfolded to the patient viewer with a quiet, riveting lushness. In a New York Times review of Mr. Forge's retrospective at the Yale Center for British Art in 1996, John Russell wrote that ''the whole surface of the canvas is mysteriously alive, composing and recomposing itself as we come to terms with it.'' '
Interviewed by Sarah Sands in his studio in Washington Depot, Connecticut (10th January, 2001), Forge discussed how he felt his abstracted dot lattice pictures contained, by their very nature, an ineluctable, visceral element of self-portraiture – as 'one could identify... a kind of physiognomy coming straight back at you from the canvas – [that] could perhaps make you aware, more clearly, with your own physical presence in front of the painting'. He considered that the nature of this self-presence was only rendered more enigmatic by the underlying reality of 'a much more complex... and asymmetrical world of the dots'. His later dot lattice pictures, like Pink Snow (1989) and Meadow (1992), are distinguished by an obliquely figurative component.
Forge's one-man exhibitions included shows at Agnew's, London in 1953, and at the Artists' International Association Gallery, London in 1963; a Ten-year Retrospective at the New York Studio School Gallery in 1989; a 1996 Retrospective at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut; an Andrew Forge Memorial Exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery, New York in 2002; and Andrew Forge: Paintings and Watercolors, Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York in 2007.
In 1950 Forge married Sheila Deane and they had three daughters. The marriage was dissolved and he was remarried in 1974 to the artist Ruth Miller.
In his 'Tribute' to Andrew Forge in The Brooklyn Rail (October 1st, 2002), John Hollander, the poet and the Sterling Professor of English at Yale, recalled that he 'first heard of Andrew through text, rather than image. In a memorial volume for W H Auden published in 1975 Sir William Coldstream remembered that when he had gone to visit WHA at the Downs School, where the poet was teaching for a few years, Auden had introduced him to one of his prize pupils, a young man named Andrew Forge. But the name meant nothing to me until the following year, when... I myself came to Yale to teach in 1977, and it was only then that we met him and Ruth (his wife) for the first time, and first came to know one of the most remarkable friends of my later life...
'Reading him gave one another angle of vision into his art and thought. He was, simply, a superb writer, as a working art critic in English and American journals, and in his powerful studies of Soutine and Monet, among others. He wrote as a painter in the rarest and most authentic way, never once calling any attention to himself, but revealing, on almost every page, something of how painting itself thinks...
'But the great mass of Andrew’s knowledge and acuteness of insight of which only the unsubmerged tip had been visible became apparent even more in the early 1990s when I had the unique privilege of team-teaching with him in a seminar that included Yale College undergraduates, graduate students in literature and philosophy, and students at the Yale School of Art... when talking of Diderot, Winckelmann, Lessing, Hazlitt, Ruskin, Pater or Adrian Stokes, his observations were both pointed and broadly illuminating...
'Andrew was indeed an intellectual, in the truest sense; he had strong feelings for ideas as well as for facts and images. One might say he almost saw matters of thought the way he felt what he saw of the visible world. The way he lived and worked with his eye, his mind, and his two writing and painting hands was always a wonder, and shone honorably for all of us in a darkening time.'
Many of Forge's writings on art do indeed reveal, 'on almost every page, something of how painting itself thinks'. It is worthwhile here giving some key examples of his at once poetic and incisive analysis of diverse artistic approaches to portraiture. In the 1954 book, Klee (Second Volume) with an introduction and notes by Andrew Forge (Faber and Faber, London), he writes illuminatingly about two large heads painted by Klee: Actor's Mask (1924) and Saint Through a Window (1940).
Of the former, he writes: 'Unlike [Klee's] early etchings, which are drawings of imaginary faces and masks, in the Actor's Mask, mask and face are one. The strata-like formation out of which the features grow is ancient. It is as though time had slowly pressed out the eyes, the mouth. Pressure seems to bear across the face in the parallel red lines. The yellow features, with their gathering of red lines, suggest a bursting through of the surface by an even greater pressure. Notice the subtle asymmetry...
'An interest in masks and in the asymmetry of the human features seems to be connected. Both betray a sense of human complexity, of the face as an outward sign of what lies behind. One thinks of Van Gogh and Soutine, but also of the exaggerated perspective of a Pontormo, an El Greco, and of the part played by masks in Mannerist symbolism.'
Forge goes on to compare this oil painting with the later gouache: 'Where at first sight the [Actor's Mask] is withdrawn, the Saint stares out at us... [In Saint Through a Window] the image is shown to exist in infinite depth by the blue background which flows over the red, thus placing itself in front of the red; yet it is placed behind the red by the blue eye which opens into a distance. We are reminded of certain early Byzantine ivories..., where the same precise ambiguity of space expresses the same floating, mystical character.'
Forge's long introductory essay in his book Soutine (Spring Books, Paul Hamlyn Ltd., London, 1965) is brilliantly perceptive. He most articulately identifies distinctive qualities of the Russian-French painter's art, which had a profound effect on many British painters in the 1950s and 60s, including Bacon, Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff, He writes: 'One of the most surprising impressions that one receives from Soutine's work in the flesh, is of the great clarity and delicacy of the paint. It has none of the crudities that are common in expressionistic art, or the tortured quality that one might expect from the quality of the image.' He says of the landscape paintings Soutine made at Céret, 'These are extreme paintings which push the subjectivity of painting to an unprecedented point.'
He writes: '… there is terrible poignancy in Soutine's closeness to the things he paints, his identification with them'. He discusses Soutine's c.1925 portrait of the Page Boy at Maxim's virtually in terms of self-portraiture: 'The head is not like any head we have seen, but it is terribly like a head that we know: our own. We know other people's heads by their symmetry; symmetry is an external quality that separates itself from whatever is not symmetrical. We know our own head by the action of its parts: an eye rubbed, a lip bitten, a corner of the brow cutting into the supporting hand. None of this adds up to a 'likeness', nor to a discrete form with proportions, a characteristic symmetry. But it is us, the theatre of our awareness.
'The pageboy's face is both profile and head on, his left eye and brow agree with the hook of his nose, his right eye agrees with his brow. Far from fragmenting the head, this twist suggests a more inclusive whole, within which we seem ourselves to be mysteriously included. But he can come even closer... What dominates is the paint which we feel as something active, both as matter and as gesture, as colour and as paste. There is no point at which we can unravel the process which led from pageboy to the artist's hand, to the canvas. All distances have been eliminated.'