Lawrence Gowing

There are two letters from Lawrence Gowing to Ruth Borchard on headed notepaper, indicating his ascending official status in the art world. The first (dated ‘17th December, 1964', and headed 'CHELSEA SCHOOL OF ART...S.W.3.') reads: 'Thank you for your letter [...] I cannot offer to sell you the picture for less than the price that I have quoted to you. It is less than one tenth of the price which I normally receive for my portraits.'

The second letter (dated '13. May. 65'; and headed 'THE TATE GALLERY, LONDON S.W.1.') seems to refer to a planned meeting between Ruth and Professor Gowing: 'I have to lunch at King's College on Tuesday 18th and may not be back till 3.30pm.' It seems that, following Gowing's earlier letter, she agreed to pay him £40 (or 40 guineas) - the highest figure paid for any self-portrait in her collection.

Dated 1963, the picture tallies with the freer, more experimental approach of his paintings from about 1957 onwards. It certainly seems to be par excellence a genre portrait of the middle-aged artist in his studio (an apparently bare canvas and the hint of an easel being barely discernible, and what appears to be a window to the right); he would then have been forty-five years old. Here, a balding, lean figure looks wryly at himself (and us) through one bespectacled eye (the other seemingly obliterated in a mix of vivid brushstrokes extending like some out-of-focus aura - in a range of vivid staccato brushstrokes - creating an oscillating optic effect extending beyond the outlines of his face). His look is one of benign self-questioning, personal gentleness seeming to co-exist with rigorous intellect.

It is worth quoting here from Stephen Spender's Introduction to the catalogue of Gowing's 1983 Arts Council retrospective exhibition: 'I first met Lawrence Gowing when he was studying with William Coldstream (in 1938) in what was generally known as the "Euston Road School" of art [...] one of the principles taught there to students was that "there are no lines in Nature". An object is distinguished from other objects through its relation to them in space [...] in front or behind, in light or in shadow. Coldstream and his colleagues who taught there, such as Victor Pasmore and Rodrigo Moynihan (who made two portraits of Gowing - in 1938 and 1979), build up the contours of objects in their paintings not with outlines enclosing them but in small brush strokes, going up to and sometimes crossing edges.' In his self-portrait, in which he seems to be wearing smart, informal attire of a charcoal grey or black V-necked sweater, a muddy brown shirt and, possibly, lilac grey tie, Gowing has radically modified the 'Euston Road School' approach as influenced, in his case, by the examples of Degas and the French Impressionists, Cézanne and Sickert. He has built up the contoured appearance of himself 'in small brush strokes', then 'going up to' and 'crossing edges - the result giving a dazzling, at once rooted and slightly giddying edginess to this portrait of the otherwise sober-looking artist and art writer in middle age.

By way of contrast, Moynihan's perspicacious portraits of Gowing (both in the NPG Collection) - the 1938 picture depicts Lawrence at twenty with naturalistic panache as a thoughtful, dark-haired, calm-looking young man; the 1979 pictures shows him at fifty-one elegantly attired in a purplish-hued jacket and pink open-necked shirt, his piercing look (through round, gold-rimmed glasses) one that preserves something of the innocence of youth alongside the sagacity that may come with experience - do not 'cross edges' but keep sensitively to the contours of what is observed (without being at all pedantically over-precise or losing a mysterious sense of the subject's core identity).

Lawrence Gowing was born in London in 1918 and died there in 1991. He was knighted in 1982 and made a Royal Academician in 1989. His first art teacher was Maurice Feild (1905-1988) at The Downs School, a Quaker school near Malvern in Herefordshire. Feild was a painter and teacher, and colleague and friend of the poet W.H. Auden when they both taught at The Downs in the early 1930s. In her Preface to the 2015 book 'Lawrence Gowing: Selected Writings on Art', Sarah Whitfield has written: 'When Gowing moved on to another Quaker school he made a point of attending a lecture given by Auden on film as a career, a subject that so fired his ambition that he immediately wrote to the poet about a future in cinema. 'You only want to get into film', Auden replied, 'because you think it is the art of the future. It isn't. Art is the art of the future.' And pushing Gowing firmly towards that future, Auden introduced him to William Coldstream whose pupil he became in 1936. [...] So began Gowing's long association with the painters closely linked with what became known as the Euston Road School: Coldstream, Claude Rogers, Victor Pasmore and Graham Bell.'

Feild too was an early supporter of, and teacher at, the Euston Road School (which lasted from 1937 to 1939), where he influenced and inspired many pupils including Gowing (who was reported to have described Feild as 'among the unsung influences on British painting'), Andrew Forge (q.v.), Patrick George, Anthony Fry and Francis Hoyland. (In 1954 Feild joined the teaching staff at the Slade School at the invitation of William Coldstream.) In his 1983 essay, Spender speculated that Auden had had a profound influence on the Euston Road painters, writing: 'Auden impressed upon Coldstream [...] that painting should be iconographical, and encouraged him to paint portraits. Auden was particularly interested in portraiture as psychological interpretation of character.'

A seminal friendship for Gowing was with the painter Adrian Stokes (1902-1972), 'whose book Colour and Form [as Whitfield has noted] was published in 1937 while he was attending life classes at the Euston Road School. Both the book and the author made a great impression on Gowing. Stokes was another of that peculiarly British breed of art critic, a writer who was also a distinguished painter, a lineage going back to John Ruskin and Roger Fry. The two men became close friends.'

Joanna Drew has written that 'Sir Lawrence Gowing is singularly distinguished as a writer, a professor of painting and an adviser to the nation on the arts. However, the bonding principle in his life has been painting, the vocation he absorbed from the age of 11.' Gowing wrote monographs on artists such as Vermeer (whom he admired for the ability to distil layered emotional complexities into 'something miraculously definite, pure, absolute'), Matisse and Lucian Freud; he championed the gifted, self-taught painter of Welsh coal-mining life, Nicholas Evans (1907-2004), whose art he  quite fairly compared to the revolutionary murals of the Mexican painter, Diego Rivero. He was keeper of the British Collection and Deputy Director of the Tate Gallery from 1965-67, and Slade Professor of Fine Art at University College, London from 1975-85.

Ruth Borchard cut out and kept Gowing's newspaper review of Francis Bacon's paintings (Observer Weekend Review, 11^th August 1963), which included these lines: 'We are shown, suspended in their eerily functional settings, a series of single-minded experiments in the unparalleled unrepeatable ways that paint may with luck and love happen to become a man [...] it is fairly clear that Bacon is the first Englishman [albeit Irish-born] to deal radically and originally enough with figure-painting to leave an indelible mark on the art: let us enjoy the pictures at the New London before some of the best of them leave the country. Painting (I write as a critic) - it's wonderful! Criticism - it's useless.'

Gowing's lucid expository style, in which he was able to relate particular, radically innovative paintings by great artists such as Turner and Cézanne to origins of momentous shifts in the development of modern art, is clear in the following two examples from his writings. In a review of Turner watercolours from the British Museum at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, Gowing wrote (in Art News, October 1963): 'One must see Turner's curious attitude to figure-drawing, and perhaps to humanity as such, as part of a process of unlearning which most of the artists of his generation were in one way or another impelled to (and all subsequent artists) [...] It is hardly expected, by the end of Turner's career as a watercolourist [...] to find him laying patches of empty colour on paper (such colour as one can find around any studio nowadays) - deploying in fact simply the basic substance out of which a new art was to be formed.'

In his essay in Cézanne: The Last Work (edited by William Rubin, published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1977), Gowing wrote: 'The move toward a disintegration of the object in some of the most memorable works of a painter so passionately attached to objects is the attraction and the riddle of Cézanne's last phase [...] In the middle 1860s, when Cézanne for a time built pictures out of paint that was applied with a knife, in patches shaped by the knife-edge, his handling had an originality which has not always been understood [...] only Cézanne (then) realised that [...] a picture that was touched with the knife should be painted with the knife throughout. He instinctively understood that in the new age the handling was the picture.'

Gowing's occasional writings about his own paintings show him to be ceaselessly quizzical and full of wry self-doubt about his own achievements in this field, from the very start, although he felt that sometimes he succeeded in resolving puzzling ambiguities. Here are his retrospective lines on his Self-Portrait in Oakleigh Avenue, made in 1936: 'In my bedroom at home, I leaned moodily against the door brooding on what a miserable state it was to be eighteen and to admire every artist but oneself, when I looked in the mirror hanging opposite and noticed that the black of the stained wood I was leaning against infused the colour of my jacket, hair and eyes to abolish the separateness of things. It made my situation paintable. I fetched paints and took the same position again, but slyly this time to recapture the effect, and surprised myself by painting it.' The result is a fine picture evoking the young man's shy, graceful presence, along with an innate cerebral tenacity and self-awareness.

Gowing is well known for his soberly measured pre-war London vistas, such as Mare Street, Hackney (1937) and Euston Road (1939), with their plain yet poetic rendition of shopfronts, trams, buses, cars and neat pedestrians, as well as for his increasingly shimmering and (by the late 50s) abstracted lush landscapes. An oil study of Young Man Asleep (1938-40) combines close analytical representation with tender empathetic feeling. His finely observed painting of Lady with Book (1941-42; now in the Collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) - depicting a reflective young woman on a chaise-longue with a book open on her knee - is remarkable for its extreme palette, using fresh, glowing pinks for her dress, face and hands, and mournful blacks, greys and whites for most of the rest of the gloomy room. He painted models such as the Battersea schoolboy Andrew Cakebread (1945), and an aspiring young actor, Alfie Bass. But he felt constrained and inhibited when commissioned to paint portraits, and struggled to portray figures like the philosopher Sir Isiah Berlin (depicting him as bald, crusty and dusty-looking against a vivid azure background) and the poet Cecil day-Lewis, in the latter case nearly obliterating the entire painting before going on to finish it.

In a series of impressive, visceral, ungarnished late self-portraits, Gowing experimented with making literal, life-size negative imprints of his own body, in a manner which owed much to the influence of avant-garde 'body art' practitioners working from the early 1960s onwards. An oil painting from c.1981-83 showing the naked artist athletically, if agonisingly, splayed on a Trapeze (being also the picture's title), was included in the exhibition 'The Hard Won Image: Traditional method and subject in recent British art' at the Tate Gallery, London in 1984. In the show's catalogue, Richard Morphet wrote: 'In the last few years Lawrence Gowing has examined his own appearance, situation and consciousness of the inner self, in a series of demanding and remarkable self-portraits of which the largest is exhibited here. In many of these the image on the picture surface was formed by the negative imprint which remained after paint had been sprayed over Gowing by assistants as he was strapped to that surface in an outstretched position which he has described as 'an only slightly relaxed descendant of Vitruvian man, which the need for total visibility suggested'. The purpose of the severe exposure which necessitated these devices is the transmission through the finished work of a direct sense of the wholeness of the body, and of its unity with the act of representation - a sense not unrelated to that achieved by Coldstream, by entirely different means.'

Here are some of Gowing's own thoughts on portraiture, both on portrait subjects as selected by himself, and as commissioned by others:

Painting heads, I have learned something about myself. I begin the picture with a free flourish which is a kind of speculative probing. Then it may be about the fifth sitting - the head looks horrible; I have secretly almost given the picture up - at some expected moment [...] I find myself whipping up the paint, laying it on anyhow. Something, I have said, sweeps past me onto the canvas.

In three-quarters of an hour the essence of the head is there. I am aghast at what I have done but I pretend to myself that everything has gone according to plan. But at the next sitting I realize there is now only something conscious - dovetailing or neatening - to do. It may take a month but the job is done.

I hardly ever reach this fortissimo with a commission. A commission makes me afraid to despair of a picture.

The experience must be common but the excitement is that one feels it has never happened quite this way before.