Peter Lanyon
The St Ives School of the 1950s is past history now - so much so that many people want to hear no more about it. Its foundation went back to the years just before the second World War, when Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and the sculptor Naum Gabo (then a refugee from the Continent) settled in west Cornwall, at that time an unspoilt region inhabited largely by farmers and fishermen. Not all the St Ives painters lived in the seafaring town of St Ives; they were scattered around the peninsular area known as Penwith which terminates in Land's End. Several of them were not Cornish by birth, though Peter Lanyon was a native Cornishman and was always conscious of the fact.
Lanyon was, arguably, one of the three greatest painters in post-war Britain, along with Francis Bacon and Ben Nicholson. But Bacon and Nicholson both had long lives, whereas he was killed at the age of 46 in 1964 as the result of a glider accident. Lanyon had taken up gliding not primarily as a sport, but because he liked to see landscapes from an aerial viewpoint. In fact, his mature paintings suggest multiple views - from above and below, from a level stance, or even in a kind of existential centre of the action. They combined the contemplative with the dynamic, and a Constructivist armature with Abstract Expressionist freedom. The St Ives painters were a varied, individualistic group of people (two eminent Irish artists were associated with them, William Scott and Tony O'Malley) but the common link between them was that their abstract styles usually had a basis in nature. In that they differed from most painters of the New York School, though relations between the two groups were friendly. The great Rothko visited St Ives in 1958, while Lanyon was known and admired in New York from the time of his first exhibition there in 1957. Abstract Expressionism was an international language, which crossed cultural barriers with relatively few difficulties or misunderstandings. Few British painters of the previous generation had been known outside their homeland. Lanyon's painterly thinking is spacious - perhaps not by the elephantine scale of the 1970s and 1980s, but he never seems inflated, whereas the New Expressionists of a decade ago often seemed be blowing up their images with a bicycle pump or a photographic enlarger. There is a heroic, expansive aura to his work, like that of an explorer or aviator moving into new regions and new heights. He was an artist who took chances, so that some of his pictures appear loosely put together, but this open-ended approach was part of his essential self. He had many imitators, but few genuine followers.
The example chosen here probably relates to the Lelant mine, where at least one miner was killed and which was later inundated by the sea. As so often in his work, it suggests sea, clouds, aerial space, coastlines - a simultaneous surge of impressions and sensations beating upon the retina and the brain. It now hangs in the Tate St Ives which also houses another of his masterworks, the "Thermal" which for years I looked at regularly in the London Tate.
Ellsworth Kelly
Hard-edge abstraction (also called, in America, post-painterly abstraction) is not a movement or trend which I would like ever to see revived. During the later 1960s, in particular, it became a formula art, almost a kind of identikit which needed only an area of canvas, acrylic paints and plenty of masking-tape - the latter was used to get the edges between colour areas sharp and clean, since that was what the style was mainly about.
To take down from the shelf old catalogues full of reproductions of these flat, unresonant, soulless works, all seemingly coming out of the same period factory or workshop, is a dulling and even depressing experience. Even once-respected art histories and surveys from 20 years ago give considerable space to them, including many people who have since been banished to the limbo of faded reputations. The names of a dozens or so of them still rise automatically to my lips, but no . . . better not. Why flog dead donkeys? The most reputable pedigree was claimed for hard-edge, ranging from Mondrian and the Bauhaus - Albers was a big influence at the time - to late Matisse. There was much talk about "painting in two dimensions," ignoring the obvious fact that any coloured advertising poster achieves something similar. Colour-field painting or "chromatic abstraction" had at least a certain colour pulse or vibration, and allowed for some depth and mystery, but hard-edge prided itself precisely on its inexpressiveness, its flat, depersonalised, deadpan surfaces, its "cool" quality (usually a synonym for emptiness). The Swiss painter-sculptor Max Bill spoke of kalte Kunst (cold art) and so it was.
Can Ellsworth Kelly be classed as a hard-edge abstractionist? He has often been labelled as such, just as he has been placed alongside painters such as Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland, though not very convincingly, and already these men seem dated. He has even, with some reason, been claimed as a Minimalist. Kelly is hard if not impossible to classify, because his style depends so much on flawless taste, an impeccable though self-concealing technique, and the ability to seize essentials. Unlike most hard-edgers, he has always drawn from nature while their works were mostly sterile births of the drawing-board. Kelly, born in 1921, was a GI in post-war Paris, where he later studied, and he has deep roots in French and European art. His particular type of panache and daring, however, are purely American, though when he worked in New York during the 1950s, his clean-cut, quasi-geometric style and flat colours were dead against the powerful current of Action Painting. For a time he employed simple biomorphic shapes, but gradually dispensed with any imagery whatever apart from stripes, chevrons, rhomboids, curves and plunging triangles (some of his canvases are specially shaped). Finally he plunged into monochrome canvases, sometimes grouped together like contrasting panels, and into painted monochrome sculptures made from cut steel or bent aluminium.
All this may sound clinical or formalistic, but it is totally the reverse - joyful, brilliant, life-enhancing, full of virile lyricism and colour pulsation. Kelly is one of the great figures in modern art, who has made his own synthesis and can simplify radically without becoming simplistic or banal. Verbal description or analysis is almost useless; his pictures must be seen - and in the original, not in reproduction. His work has been seen at least twice in Dublin - at one of the Rosc exhibitions, and in the "Art USA Now" exhibition at the Municipal Gallery in 1964.
Richard Estes
In 1972 Richard Estes remarked, in an interview: "It's funny, all the things I was trained to paint - people and trees, landscapes and all that - I can't paint. We're living in an urban culture that never existed even 50 years ago." He also admitted that he disliked, even hated, many of the buildings and New York streets which he painted, yet somehow felt compelled to treat them as his subject matter. Photo-Realism was very much a movement of the 1970s, and little is heard of it today. It was almost exclusively an American event, since European equivalents were undistinguished and generally short-lived - certainly neither Britain nor France produced a Photo-Realist of real calibre. Superficially it had a deadpan, tough-minded, objective mentality which was characteristically American. It could look back to Edward Hopper's classic depictions of 1920s New York, which now seem strangely frozen in time, but it was also a radical new engagement with everyday subject matter, after decades of abstract painting. And equally, in its emotional distance, it was a legitimate successor to Pop Art. Photo-Realism, however, was in ways oddly deceptive. Certainly almost all its leading practitioners - Estes himself, Chuck Close with his enormously enlarged heads and faces, Ralph Goings with his dining-cars and shiny automobiles - made considerable use of photographs. Some even used projectors to throw the photographic image on to canvas, and then painted over it. Yet the result was something more than realism, in the sense that the Ashcan School early in the century had understood it, and it had nothing whatever in common with Impressionism. It was, somehow, "more real than real" - a glassy, arrested, frozen art, emotionally distanced from the viewer, yet with a certain poetic dimension.
Estes is strictly a painter of New York city - his later paintings of Paris, Venice etc are unmagical, even a shade touristic. His pictures are intricate organisms, made up from a multiplicity of angles and views artfully composed into an overall unity. Glass and metal reflections play an important part, opening up new vistas or creating a visual ambiguity between what is "there" and what is merely reflected. He has been widely imitated, but Estes is far more than a mere painstaking recorder of late 20th-century cityscapes. He is a man who has learned from abstract painting and gives each section of a picture equal stress, the "all over" quality of contemporary art. In that, he is recognisably Post-Modernist.
Fairfield Porter
To my knowledge, there is not a single painting by Fairfield Porter in any European gallery. His is strictly an American reputation, and this appears to mirror his personality. During my one meeting with the poet John Ashbery, who was a friend of Porter's and has written about his art, I asked him how he remembered him. Ashbery thought for a moment, then answered: "The ultimate Wasp!"
Porter's family was an old and respected one, but he came from Chicago, not New England. He studied art in a rather desultory way, travelled in Europe and absorbed the fashionable Leftist views of young men in the between-war years. His marriage, to the poet Anne Channing, produced five children of whom the eldest, John, was mentally handicapped. His early painting was rather dark-toned, undistinguished and in the tradition of American realism.
Porter was an art critic for many years and was known for his independent, sometimes cranky views. His major influence was Vuillard, whom he thought was in some ways more forward-looking than Cezanne. Though Porter's style was resolutely figurative, he was not hostile to abstraction and was a personal friend of de Kooning, who helped to "push" his unfashionable work with New York dealers. Porter was also friendly with the post-abstract set of Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers and Neil Welliver and may even have influenced some of them. Certainly he commanded private respect if not public recognition and was a major force behind the trend sometimes called "Painterly Realism".
Almost every summer he took his family to Great Spruce Head Island, off Maine, where his architect-father had designed a holiday house. This house and its surrounds appear often in his later paintings, which are light-filled, intimist, and carefully plotted. Some people viewed him as a throwback, others considered him an eccentric, but Porter knew who he was and where he was going. When the swing against abstract art began, he became rather a cult figure, but he refused to be used for propaganda purposes. "What interests me most," he said once, "is the abstract element in figurative painting and the figurative element in abstract painting".
After his death in 1975 his reputation boomed, helped by writers who had been his friends - Ashbery, John Updike, etc. Porter seems to have had little native facility; his slowly developing style was wrung out of himself by hard work, and his portraits, in particular, have a certain awkward, almost wooden quality which may or may not have been deliberate. Above all, he is a painter of the New England coast and the New England light. Today his works are in most American museums and a few of them are reproduced almost as often as Edward Hopper or Georgia O'Keeffe. Porter has taken his place in the pantheon of American art.
Patrick Caulfield
Pop art in Britain was overshadowed by its American counterpart, though certain critics claim that the British artists were in the field first. It scarcely matters now, since they two are very different schools. Hockney, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier etc are as purely British as Soho. They were an essential part of Swinging London, the contemporaries of the Beatles and Mary Quant. It was an exciting time, with the accent on youth, but sadly, many or most of this talented generation tended to fade out later. Hockney's recent work is a sad falling-off from his early, precocious brilliance, while Peter Blake's reputation survives only by his early pictures.
Is Patrick Caulfield really a Pop painter, then? He has told me, quite firmly and even emphatically, that he does not consider himself one. However, he belongs ineluctably to that age group and ambience. He was born in London in 1936 (three years before Hockney) and he first came to prominence in a much-publicised exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1964, called "The New Generation". International exposure followed quickly; it was a period when galleries around the world were scanning the far horizons for new, bright and topical talents. Caulfield has been an art teacher for much of his career, which may have done something to limit his production. He is, however, a slow, thoughtful worker with an subtle grasp of formal balance and a remarkable sense of colour. His early work was flat, bright, almost poster-like and did not at first glance reveal its secrets. He cultivated a hard black outline - discarded in most of his recent work - which became almost his trademark and was much admired by Roy Lichtenstein, who works along similar lines.
In spite of his instant, Pop-style appeal, Caulfield is something of a painter's painter and a cultured man. He is much influenced by Cubism and French art, by international abstraction, and is one of a generation which brought to figurative subject matter the disciplines of abstract art. His one-man exhibitions are relatively few and widely spaced, but his retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery a few years ago was a major event.
It showed he had kept the elegance and "cool" tone of 1960s art, but with an intellectual grasp which his contemporaries lacked. Unlike most of them, Caulfield did not burn out early; unlike them, too, he is a solitary figure rather than a 1960s groupie, and perhaps this has helped him to last the course. He has, incidentally, Irish blood yet has never been shown in Ireland. Someone or some institution should make amends for this, sooner rather than later.
Klaus Fussmann
German art suffered virtual amputation during the second World War - some would even say a violent death. The generation that survived it was soon swept aside by the New Expressionist wave of the 1970s and 1980s, which was heavily backed and promoted for a variety of reasons including political ones. Berlin had to be put back on the map internationally, and there also seems to have been a deliberate policy of encouraging the better East German artists to defect to the West. Many of them needed no encouragement anyway, as the art market burgeoned and the publicity machine sought them out. The vigorous Neo-Expressionist school which had grown up in Dresden - Ulrich Sitte, Bernhard Heisig, etc - was soon discovered in turn, as the international dealers moved in.
Today, with the Wall down in every sense, most of this no longer counts greatly in a creative sense. The generation of Kiefer, Penck, Lupertz and Baselitz is now suffering from over-exposure rather than post-war neglect. The international art machine has left a trail of debris rather like a massive demolition squad, from which it will probably take a decade at least to recover. Meanwhile, as the clouds of dust settle down other good German artists who have bided their time may now be stepping into the gaping breach. Klaus Fussman is 60 this year, which makes him contemporaneous with most of the New Expressionists, though his career has moved along different lines from theirs. In 1972 he won the Villa-Romana Prize when took him to Rome and Italy for nine months; in 1976 he travelled to Norway; two years later he was in the US, in 1980 and 1984 in Iceland, and in 1987 in India. Since he is primarily a landscape painter, wherever he goes he fills sketching pads with pastels, watercolours and small oils. More recently, he has toured all the German Lander and turned the result into an exhibition which was, in effect, a kind of visual overview of Germany. It took him six years to do it. Fussman also paints still life and a variety of subjects, though landscape is his first love. His work was seen in Dublin in the early 1980s, in a small touring group exhibition mounted in the Bank of Ireland headquarters. Perhaps some day he will come here in person to paint the Irish landscape? It seems made to order for his brush.