TWO

MODERN BRITISH PAINTINGS

Clifford Hall (1901-1973), Red Settee, Oil on Board, 1953
Michael Ayrton (1921-1975), Poros, Greece, Oil on Board, 1957


British art of the mid-1950s necessarily reflected the transitions experienced by
artists and society. The second of the two World Wars was a decade behind. The
threat of the Soviet Union remained sharply in public focus. The loss of old
certainties and the instability of the new social framework opened eyes and
troubled minds. The New World had taken over leadership in the visual arts,
with abstract expressionism leading the charge.

Each of the two works examined here is by an artist well regarded by his
contemporaries, who then fell out of favour, as the tide of modern painting left
his preference for figurative work stranded on the sandbank of the past.

In one sense, their choice to change was a reflection of the failure of each artist to
appeal in in contemporary terms. Yet to set the choice of each one in the context
of their individual artistic development and the nature of their times, is not
without interest.

CLIFFORD HALL (1901-1973), the older
artist, suffered a continuously difficult
professional and personal life as he
gradually moved away from the
influence of Sickert (who taught him
in the 1920s at the RA Schools where
he won the Landseer prize) - despite
enjoying shows at respectable
galleries1 during the 1930s; he
established himself post WWII with
Roland, Browse and Delbanco before
falling out with Lilian Browse; and
mutated in the 1960s to produce his
signature late works - women
anonymised and isolated behind
towels or cloths, or with their heads
turned away from the viewer.

Michael Ayrton was very different.
The precocious son of an MP and a
physicist, he mixed with the artistic
and intellectual pre-war elite and developed a high degree of self-assurance,
appearing on the BBC’s Brains Trust, and laying claim to being an artistic
polymath – painting, theatre design, printmaking, criticism, radio programmes –
all these were his domain, which tended to annoy the establishment. His early
work had the spikiness that became associated with Herbert Read’s “Geometry of

1 Beaux Arts (1935); St Martin's (1929); Leger (1932, 1938, 1941)

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Fear”, but trips to the Mediterranean – to Italy and Greece - transformed his way
of seeing the world, and led him to an obsession with the myths surrounding
Daedalus and the minotaur, which in turn led him on a journey from English neo-
romanticism, through classically-inspired painting and into a world of myth-
derived sculpture.

Each of these two paintings - Michael Ayrton’s Poros, Greece (Oil on Board, 1957)
and Clifford Hall’s Red Settee (Oil on Board, 1953) – represents an inflexion point
for its painter, after which the artist’s work will evolve in a radically different
direction; despite which, in each painting, one still senses the echoes of his past,
and the resonant influence of his country’s history.

Red Settee is not dated, but we know from an
almost identical pencil study marked 9-11-1953,
that the painting must have been completed
around then. Each of its subject and structure, its
palette and technique tells us of the past and
points to the future.

Clifford Hall’s early work has been compared to
Sickert, and like Sickert his subject-matter
comprised street scenes and interiors, including
in later years images of decadence and
prostitutes. However, Red Settee moves us into an
interior that is domestic – Grant Waters,2 talking
of Hall’s painting of Hanna Weil, ‘Nude on a Sofa’,
says: “The artist's son, Mr Geraint Richard Hall, has advised us that when the
picture was painted the chaise longue sofa would have been in the artist's large
studio room at 8, Trafalgar Studios, Manresa
Road, Chelsea, London SW3.” So, Chelsea it was.

Though the line of the
sofa-back is the same,
the sitter this time does
not appear to be his
friend Hannah Weil,3
but she is nonetheless
treated respectfully. It
is noticeable that while
Hall’s technique remains semi-impressionistic, and is
indeed reminiscent of Sickert in brushwork, the palette
has moved far from the dark colours of his earlier years,
managing to be simultaneously energetic, cool and
harmonious, with more than a hint of expressionism in
its refusal to be realistic, and its preference for conveying emotion over literal
representation. In addition, each part of the painting occupies a clearly defined
colour-coded space. The ambiguities, the ‘floue’, watery quality of the
2 http://www.grantwatersfineart.co.uk/InTheBedroom.html
3 https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/clifford-hall-1904-1973-portrait-of-hanna-5645864-details.aspx

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impressionistic elements of his earlier paintings have been replaced, in Red
Settee by complementary tonal zones that could be considered abstract work,
once detached from their representational form. This treatment was also visible
in his early 1950s Seated Nude depicting a figure on the same sofa, face turned
down and his 1952 painting Figure Draped in Purple - almost Japanese in its flat,
collage-like treatment of the subject.

If Red Settee shows that Hall has escaped from a certain seediness that could
characterise past work, and that he can
now embrace a lighter, more positive

outlook (he divorced his first wife Marion Zass in 1952) and adopt a style that is
both leaner and more psychologically interesting, it also displays a range of
features that foreshadow his ‘Bathers’: the hooded women he depicted through
the 1960s, their faces often hidden from the viewer.

So, in Red Settee, the sitter is presented with the sofa wrapped around her, partly
turned away - quite different from the directness of the Hannah Weil portrait. In
addition, while the palette is brighter, the coolness of the sitter’s body, rendered
in mint green - a distinct contrast with the warmth of the sofa’s red and coral
tones - speaks of her isolation. The slightly acid chrome yellow of the book
behind her contributes an
energy the passivity of her
pose denies. Only the red, thin,
compressed lips and nipple
echo the warmth of the sofa.
And behind her the table is
cloaked in a grey cloth, that
seems to presage the time
when the face of the sitter will
be turned completely away or
hidden in the folds of a towel,
as in Bathers (1967, Pencil and
Oil on Board).

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MICHAEL AYRTON, as previously discussed, was a far more confident and complex
artist than Clifford Hall, but like him ended up regarded by the critics somewhat
as Henry Moore had described him: a significant eccentric, rather than a heavy
hitter in the art world. And like Hall, the shift in his world is revealed via in the
subject, structure, palette and technique of this single painting: Poros, Greece.

This work combines English Neo-Romantic cues with Attic subject-matter; it

hints at European and British experimentation with social and psychological
themes; and suggests Ayrton’s own exploration of myth to come.

Its composition is unusual for
Ayrton, whose early, Neo-
Romantic and later
Renaissance-influenced
works, such as ‘Sudden
Shower’ (1948) favoured an
open treatment of landscape,
drawing the viewer in, and
presented their human
subject-matter in
declamatory, even theatrical
pose. In Poros, Greece, the
figures avoid connexion with
the viewer. A wall blocks off
the foreground from the background. Behind are hints of the English landscape
as treated by Ayrton in the 1940s. In the foreground, the lighter grasses and
amphorae suggest the Mediterranean, as does the cloaked figure, which
simultaneously reminds us both of Corot’s gleaners and the poverty of life on a

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difficult land and Bacon’s sinister treatment of gardens and delimited spaces in
his pre-‘Crucifixion’ works ‘Figure Study I and Figure Study II.

Ayrton’s 1945 painting
‘Entrance to a Wood’
combines a similarly
confused, wild and slightly
sinister landscape, though it
also offers light in the
distance beyond the broken
trunk and the thorn-like
broken branches,
reminiscent, doubtless
deliberately, of various
treatments of the
Crucifixion by Ayrton and
Sutherland: such was the
world in 1945.

But unlike his earlier Renaissance-inspired paintings of Mediterranean
fishermen and farmers, which started with his visits to Italy from 1946, and
caught his subjects’ simplicity of daily life through a simplicity of painted form
and background, while not neglecting the complexity of the inner, psychological
life and its interaction with the fates, by 1957 Ayrton seems to have reverted to
the language of English Neo-romanticism, most evident in the brushwork and
colouration, in Poros, Greece suggesting profusion and confusion combined with
an ambiguous and slightly disturbing darkness lurking behind: the opposite of
the hard, empty, bright spaces within works like Sudden Shower.

This return to the themes of the past also links Ayrton’s Poros, Greece to Francis
Bacon’s work in an earlier style, dating to 1935: Figure in a Garden. In Bacon, the
hints of cruelty are more
express. The sinister
remains concealed behind a
dark wall, but can be
sensed in the visually
absorbing impermeabilty of
that wall - the kind of wall
that our childish memories
feared. Other elements of
Ayrton’s paintings from
1957 and later in his
sculpture seem also to have
been influenced by aspects
of Bacon’s oeuvre – notably
the framing devices that he
deployed to such effect, and which Ayrton used in a variety of self-portraits.

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In choice of subject-matter, this scene set on the island of Poros in 1957 reflected
an important change: Ayrton’s nascent fascination with Greece and Greek myths,
nurtured by his visits to Cumae, which began in 1956. Behind the splashed paint,
and its implied wildness of nature, this composition unites the social awareness
of Corot, Ayrton’s own Neo-Romantic sensibility and Bacon’s sinister qualities.

Ayrton came to admire Bacon, and noted how his work could ‘serve as a process
of exorcism’.4 Ayrton’s caging of the rearground Poros figure behind a wall, and
the uncertainty created by his decentred placing and orientation of both human
figures (so different from his treatment of people in his ‘Italian’ works) hints, as
in Bacon, at ‘things which society fears and
dislikes’. Ironically, though Ayrton in 1944
criticised Picasso and in the 1950s various
fellow contemporary British artists for
elements of pastiche and imitation, we can
see the influence of Bacon’s Figure Study I
and Figure Study II (1945/46, image left) on
Ayrton’s foregrounded Poros woman, who
foreshadows, in her hardness and human
indifference, Ayrton’s later interest in
prophetesses such as the Cumaean Sybil
(painted in 1957) and Demeter, who
presided over cycles of life and death. For
Bacon too, Greek death-myth mattered: the
Eumenides, or Furies - who wreaked
vengeance for the Gods – were embodied in his 1944 Three Studies for Figures at
the Base of a Crucifixion, intensifying Bacon’s emotional expressiveness. Still,
Greece was Ayrton’s parallel, transformative discovery, not Bacon’s revelation.
After Ayrton’s experiences at Cumae, he sculpted far more and painted less,
mostly pale, open landscapes, often in watercolour or ink wash, a major change.

So for both Michael Ayrton and Clifford Hall, discovering the new – for Ayrton a
place, for Hall a perception of human relations – led in a short space of time to
the transformation of their artistic language. For Ayrton his move into sculpture
and his obsession with Greek myth, for Hall his embrace of the isolated female
figure as a symbol of man’s indifference to man and the separation of the sexes.

These two small works also encapsulate two distinct shifts in artistic outlook:
one (in a self-aware rebellion against the anti-figurative trends of art history) an
attempt to make myth incarnate in bronze; the other (in surrender to subjective
social reality) a decision to express in paint the existential anomie, which the
artist felt fate and society had imposed indifferently on all, but on him especially.

Paul Serfaty, Hong Kong, December 2018

4Ayrton, quoted in Richard Branson’s Student magazine, Vol.1 No.1, 1968: “[Art] serves as a process or
celebration - which is a very important part of society’s recognition of the splendours of the world it inhabits.
Contrary to this it also serves as process of exorcism, which is a way of bringing out the things which society fears
and dislikes - Francis Bacon does this.“ see https://www.virgin.com/entrepreneur/michael-ayrton-art-celebration-
and-exorcism last accessed 18 December, 2018

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