David Redfern: Paintings 1972-1991

David Redfern: Paintings 1972–1991

To accompany the exhibition David Redfern: Paintings 1972–1991 24 February–17 March 2018

FELIX & SPEAR

Modern British and Contemporary Art

71 St Mary’s Road, London W5 5RG www.felixandspear.com Tel: 020 8566 157

Cover: January 6th 1975 Oil on shaped canvas 105 x 183

Revisiting the Claims of Social Art Recently I re-read an essay I wrote forty years ago– ‘The Claims of Social Art and Other Perplexities’ published in Artscribe magazine, an artist-run magazine founded in 1976*.

I was the editor. It was in response to a campaign against contemporary art; some of it coming from freshly arrived critics and curators. These had switched from championing ‘New Art’ to campaiging for an ‘art for ordinary people’: social realism, uplifting murals, banners, community projects. No more abstract art, no more elitism, no more inaccessible art. The audience, they said, was tiny and vanishing fast.

‘Modernism’ was finished.

Why did I bother to write a response? Today most of us know they got it pretty wrong. The Tate Modern is bursting, the Royal Academy had a run of provocative and sell-out shows– the New Spirit of 1981, Sensation of 1997– and whatever you may think of the Frieze Art Fair and the booming art market, you can’t say the public has walked away. Yes, here and there social realism turns up, but as retro chic.

Back then the hostility was real. It blew in from both the left and the right. The critic, Peter Fuller, initially a disciple of John Berger, had a keen following. It isn’t difficult to rubbish new art, and indignation was his forte. The BBC, where contemporary art never got a mention before midnight, gave prime time to ‘Phart Art’, with Fyfe Robertson ridiculing the ‘way-out’ art at the 1977 Hayward Annual. The year before Carl Andre’s bricks at the Tate had been treated as a joke by the tabloids, and only weakly defended. The Times had Hockney and Kitaj posing naked, claiming that art schools were suppressing life drawing. The Serpentine hosted ‘Art for Whom?’ (where Richard Cork rejected the open submission, replacing it with his stable of social artists). The Whitechapel put on ‘Art for Society’.

There had been a change of atmosphere, disillusionment with the optimistic art of the sixties, and among artists, a more than usual contempt for critics. The grievances, the divisions, were mixed up. Who were the progressives, who were the

radicals, and who were the conservatives? Was conceptual art, deliberately impenetrable, the avant-garde? That had been the line of Studio International under its new editor (also Richard Cork) until this change of direction. Did it mean that painting in general was ‘over’, or was it only Americaninfluenced abstract painting? Allegedly, that was empty of ‘Meaning’. It was ‘formaism’, a truly dirty trait, and probably counter-revolutionary too.

I am writing this note because in that essay I reproduced a painting by David Redfern of a factory, which was in that Whitechapel show. I did not comment much on the painting then, or on realism in general. Buried amongst all the posturing and not so wonderful artworks parading their social consciences were a few straightforward, and decent, realist painters. Contrary to all the stirred up antagonisms, most ‘abstract’ painters lived happily alongside figurative painters.

The influence of critics and magazines today is negligible.

It is all social media now, and young artists would not take to being hectored through a megaphone. Fuller used to demand that artists ‘take their standards from the future’, and whatever you took that to mean there were earnest heads nodding away. In 1978 the slogans hit home. The State of British Art conference at the ICA about the ‘crisis’ was absolutely packed. ‘Modernism’ was in the dock. I was called in at the last minute – possibly John Hoyland had dropped out– to speak on a panel. I was told I was representing ‘modernist formalism’. I was starting out as the loser-in-waiting with a bloodthirsty audience, and nowhere to hide.

That eruption of radicalism– or upmarket philistinism, call it what you will– lasted two years. Then the social guilt wilted away, or became uncool. The gossip turned to the champagne fountain at Schnabel’s opening at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York. It was ‘post-modernism’. The alliance of born-again figuration and watered-down Marxism fell apart. Some on ‘the left’ re-emerged on ‘the right’. Prince Charles lambasted modern architecture in Peter Fuller’s new glossy, ‘Modern

Painters’. Denim gave way to tweed.

In our magazine we knew we had to cope with a pluralist art world and covered whatever we could, and were not afraid to be critical. (I could see the shortcomings of abstract painting in Britain. I knew where it was provincial, mannered, and dogmatic.) You could not afford to be partisan. We had already published essays on post-modernism. What had frustrated painters, of every persuasion in the seventies was the lack of intelligent coverage. Studio magazine had a long history, and had till then been a well-regarded journal, but now it lost its way, and its readership.

What was this convulsion really about? Probably, about who controls the agenda. Some well-meaning critics set out to be engaged, and encouraged ‘art for the people’. In the process they alienated more artists than they converted.

It got them noticed, but most were already speaking from a position of privilege. It was difficult ground. Hadn’t they read Hitler’s speeches on degenerate art? Or thought about Shostakovich? Their politics could be juvenile– phrases like ‘the capitalist option’– and the art they promoted was largely awful. It elbowed what was good out of sight.

I recall a meeting chaired by the great Richard Hoggart at Goldsmiths, when Michael Compton of the Tate turned to Richard Cork, and said with some surprise, ‘so you see the critic’s role as telling artists what to do?’

In retrospect it is strange that another story never had much of an airing. This had grown from the counter-culture of the sixties, from the vitality of the art schools of the time, from the confidence of young artists, from their lack of deference towards their would-be overseers. It was the idea that artists could manage their own destiny. Artists had organised studio provision, housing, and their own galleries, with SPACE and ACME. If critics were out of touch, artists could set up their own magazines – and their own exhibitions, as had happened with Situation, and was soon to happen with the YBAs. It showed that ‘support’ for contemporary art was fragile.

There were always those on the sidelines– not necessarily in the name of ‘tradition’– ready to step in with their dreadful small minds. It showed how easy it is to discredit an artist’s oeuvre, to dismiss whole swathes of art as ‘playing with paint’, as meaningless, subjective, as merely aesthetic. Some careers were permanently damaged, just as the Prince Charles effect suppressed architectural innovation. The conceptual art movement had its sparks of brilliance, but it also had a deadening academic effect, as the late Freddie Gore once pointed out in an encounter with Joseph Kosuth at St Martins.

It devalued imagination and elevated the factual, it worshipped the document, the proof, the text, typed and cleanly framed.

It opened the way for the art theorist, for the artist’s statement, and for the art school with a hot desk instead of a studio.

I expect the controversies marked David Redfern in some ways. They left me wary of those who preach and are full of self-righteous certainty. They don’t even bother to look. (I hope I am not in that category.) I have more time for ditherers like Bonnard. Making paintings come alive is extraordinarily difficult at the best of times. *‘The Claims of Social Art and Other Perplexities’ (1978) can be read at: www.jamesfaurewalker.com/publications.html James Faure Walker January 2018

It was the best of times...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Dickens’ way with words sums up the 70s and 80s for me quite concisely.

I had just left twenty years of education and landed my first full time employment, that of Gallery Assistant at the newly opened Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London.

I wanted this position because I desired to be an ambassador for contemporary art and to allay some of the suspicions and prejudices the general public might have. Boy, did they have them; but all it needed was a straightforward and honest discussion and both parties were happy. Part of the job was installing the exhibits with artists from all over the country who had been selected from a national open submission.

Conversations with these artists in the Queens Arms were as educational as any art school tutorial. James Faure Walker writes in his piece that abstract and figurative artists “lived happily alongside” each other, coping with “a pluralist art world”. I spent my time in the gallery looking at American Photo Realism, Howard Hodgkin, Billy Apple (a conceptual American artist), Bruce Lacey, Welfare State performance group, the first Video Show, Roger Hilton, David Nash and Anish Kapoor as a young man out to make his fortune. How plural is that! I had to hold my own both in conversation with artists and in my own outlook, constantly questioning what I was doing and why I was doing it. Personal favourites at the time, who slaked my thirst for inspirational images, were Edward Hopper, Ford Maddox Brown, Piero della Francesca, Richard Estes and, weirdly, a fascination with the number nine.

But it was the worst of times that gripped me. The Vietnam War, the Irish ‘troubles’ (I was at the Serpentine when the Hyde Park bomb exploded), the Falklands War, the Thatcher Government and the dominance of ‘The Market’, the rise of the far right (marching on my Lewisham home). How the wheel of history turns and how events seem to repeat themselves in another guise. I simply could not paint a figure, landscape, stilllife or abstract whilst all this was happening around me. It was through my painting that I could nail my colours to the mast

and hopefully persuade the observer to engage in their own personal dialogue.

I got married, lost a father, gained a son, all characters strutting their stuff in my Theatre of Painting. I changed my means of “putting bread on the table” by teaching Art and Design at Croydon College, a hugely rewarding occupation and one which was to help change the way I worked. Throughout all this period I, like many other artists I knew, somehow found time to paint, in a cramped room or basement, and finally the luxury of a rented SPACE studio followed by an ACME studio in Deptford which I still rent.

David Redfern January 2018

All painting dimensions are given in centimetres, height first.

Painting 1972 Oil on shaped canvas 81 x 146

Co-operative Madonna 1974 Oil on perspex on canvas 69 x 149

January 6th 1975 Oil on shaped canvas 105 x 183

Light from the Left 1976 Oil on canvas 89 x 238

Work (Car factory) 1976 Oil on canvas 40 x 50

Work 1977 Oil on shaped canvas 87 x 122 Southampton City Art Gallery

Smash the Front 1978 Oil on perspex on canvas 59 x 119

A Different World to Harrods 1977 Oil on shaped canvas 38 x 151 Private Collection

First Class 1977 Oil on shaped canvas 28 x 160

Strife 1979 Oil on canvas 46 x 206

The Family Butcher 1982 Oil on canvas 84 x 152

Kensington High Street 1976 Oil on canvas 52 x 204

185 Victoria 1982 Oil on canvas 51 x 41

Donovan’s Paper Bag Factory 1982 Oil on canvas 51 x 61

One Swollen Belly 1984 Oil on canvas 114 x 160

Everyman Employment Agency 1981 Oil on canvas 99 x 99

October Fall 1988 Oil on canvas 137 x 91

Et En Arcadia Bingo 1984 Oil on canvas 160 x 114 Wolverhampton Art Gallery

Sailor Sam meets the State 1989 Oil on canvas 68 x 91

We Refuse 1986 Oil on flax 137 x 137

Head of Rupert Murdoch 1988 Oil on canvas 30 x 23

Head of Diana Vreeland 1988 Oil on canvas 30 x 23 Private Collection

Free Enterprise 1987 Oil on canvas 91 x 160 Private Collection

Merry-go-Round 1991 Oil on canvas 91 x 182

Ide Hill 1991 Oil on canvas 46 x 69

David Redfern 1947 1965–69 1969–71 1971–83 1984–2011 2000 2003

Born, Burton on Trent, Staffordshire Reading University, Fine Art Department Slade School of Fine Art, University College London Head Gallery Assistant, Serpentine Gallery, London (Arts Council of Great Britain) Teaching on and managing Art and Design courses, Croydon College Elected to The London Group Appointed as The London Group Archivist, continuing

Exhibitions 1974 1975 1976 1976 1977/81/83 1978 1979 1980/81/82/83/84 1981 1981 1982/83/84/86/87/88 1984 1985 1987 1989/90 1990 1993 2006 2009 2010 2011 2014 2018 2000 to present

John Moores Liverpool Exhibition 9 “Painters of Reality, Mystery and Illusion”, Rochdale Art Gallery “British Realists”, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham Arts Council Collection Exhibition, Hayward Gallery, London Tolly Cobbold/Eastern Arts National Art Exhibition “Art for Society”, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London “Lives”, Hayward Gallery, London “Summer Show 1”, Serpentine Gallery, London “The Spirit of London”, GLC, Royal Festival Hall, London (Prizewinner 1984) Foyer Exhibition, The National Theatre, London Foyer Exhibition, Southampton City Art Gallery The Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London “David Redfern: Paintings, Drawings, Prints”, Wolverhampton Art Gallery “Human Interest”, Cornerhouse, Manchester “State of the Nation”, Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry “Picturing people”, British figurative art since 1945 British Council Tour to Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong & Harare 222nd Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London 225th Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour Competition 2006, Mall Galleries, London APT Open Exhibition, selected by Mark Wallinger. APT Studios, Deptford, London “Merchants of Light”, The Cello Factory, Waterloo, London “Earthworks”, Central Booking, 111 Front Street, Brooklyn, New York “From Downs to Sea: A Slice of Life”, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery “David Redfern: Paintings 1972–1991” Felix and Spear, Ealing, London Exhibiting annually with The London Group. Venues include London, Hastings, Kent, Hampshire and Amsterdam

Collections Arts Council Collection, National Maritime Museum, Sainsbury Arts Centre, Southampton City Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Leicestershire Collection for Schools and Colleges, Camden Council Picture Loan Scheme, Basildon Arts Trust, Burton upon Trent Art Gallery, TUC Congress House, Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians, Ocean Transport & Trading, Astor Wax Factory Manchester Private Collections in the UK and Europe Publications 2008 2010 2013 2018

“The London Group: Origins and Post-War History”. Sponsored by Croydon College “David Redfern Merchants of Light” The Cello Factory “The London Group: a history 1913-2013”. Published by The London Group “David Redfern: Paintings 1972–1991” Felix and Spear

2000 to present

Numerous short articles for The London Group

Television 1983 1989 2013

Channel 4: paintings used to illustrate the “Winter of Discontent” in “A Partly Satirical Broadcast” Z.D.F. German Television: paintings used to illustrate a documentary on the Thatcher Years BBC News: interview by Brenda Emmanus on the occasion of The London Group’s Centenary

Design: David Mann 07900 901844 broodthaers@aol.com

ISBN 978-1-5272-2059-1