John Yau on William Tillyer

 

England is the only advanced, industrialized country that I can think of where portraiture and postwar painting have become nearly interchangeable. One cannot think of painting in postwar England without recognizing the work of Michael Andrews (1928–1995), Frank Auerbach (born 1931), Francis Bacon (1909–1992), Lucien Freud (1922–2011), David Hockney (born 1937), Leon Kossoff (1926–2019), and Euan Uglow (1932–2000), all of whom are known for portraits that required the sitter to pose for hours.
 
With the possible exception of Howard Hodgkin, not a single English abstract artist has attained anything comparable to the status achieved by Freud or Hockney. (Don’t titles such as “Mr and Mrs E. J. P.” (1969-1973) and “DH in Hollywood” (1980-1984) suggest that some of Hodgkin’s paintings are meant to be seen as portraits, no matter how abstracted their imagery might be?) The fact that portraiture is an important component of England’s long-held perceptions of its artistic achievement and modern painting is something I want to examine.
 
In 1976, the American artist R.B. Kitaj organized an exhibition, Human Clay, at London’s Hayward Gallery. Kitaj got the title from W.H. Auden’s poem “Letter to Lord Byron” (1937), which contains this stanza:
 
‘To me Art’s subject is the human clay,
And landscape but a background to a torso;
All Cézanne’s apples I would give away
For one small Goya or a Daumier.’
 
According to Kitaj, his friend Hockney (the “DH” in the Hodgkin painting) liked to quote this passage. And yet, reading the show’s catalogue essay, it seems likely that Kitaj implicitly agreed with Auden’s hierarchy that the human figure was art’s greatest subject, and that the main function of landscapes and still lifes were to be a “background to a torso.”
 
This is what Kitaj had to say about painting the figure:
 
‘Don’t listen to the fools who say either that pictures of people can be of no consequence or that painting is finished. There is much to be done. It matters what men of good will want to do with their lives.’
 
“Painting” and “pictures of people” are synonymous for Kitaj. It was also in this catalogue essay that he defined “the School of London.” This is how he described its members:
 
‘The bottom line is that there are artistic personalities in this small island more unique and strong and I think numerous than anywhere in the world outside America’s jolting artistic vigor. ‘
 
There is something about Kitaj’s emphasis on “artistic personalities” that disturbs me. Is it wrong to think that there is something misguided about his stress on celebrity, particularly since the ones he is calling attention are portrait painters? 
 
One of the fascinating things about the “School of London” is how its members — except for Kitaj, the American interloper and inventor of the term — have attained a secure place in English history.
 
If I am to believe the official chronicles, there has never been a rebellion against these artists nor any comment about their focus on portraiture, at least by English artists of the same generation, born between World War I and World War II, during what Auden called the “Age of Anxiety.”
 
It would appear that no one in this generation was the least bit bothered by its perceived devotion to signature styles or characterizations, to resemblance, and to the figure. The best-known artists are the ones who wedded their style to “human clay.”
 
America, on the other, hand has seen Pop Art, Minimalism, and Color Field painting challenge their predecessor, Abstract Expressionism, which had challenged Regionalism and Conceptual Art; the proverbial “Death of Painting” challenge all of painting; and marginalized artists challenge all of these implicitly conservative narratives focusing on the end of history, art, and painting.
 
The reason I started thinking about England’s attachment to portraiture and the collective refusal of many English artists to acknowledge any criticism of this deep affection is because of two paintings that were largely overlooked at the time they were made and, to my mind, still have yet to receive their due.
 
In the summer of 1978 — after Human Clay claimed figurative and portrait painting to be one of the crowning achievements of postwar English art — William Tillyer (born 1937) first used wire mesh, which he described in an email as “an off-the-shelf garden product” (December 9, 2020), in his paintings, including two that were titled, respectively, “Portrait, Head and Shoulders” and “Portrait, Head and Shoulders (Lattice)” (both 1978). The paintings were done in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he was preparing for a solo exhibition.

 
While the titles do not single out an individual — which itself is a meaningful part of the works — Tillyer used the mesh differently in each painting: in one, it is diagonal, and in the other, orthogonal.
 
Tillyer cut the mesh into two sections, which he collaged directly onto the canvas. One section is an open rectangle, whose edges either extend beyond or align with the conventionally stretched canvas, suggesting a frame in both works, while the other section is an irregular rectangle, signifying a head; the second section is placed above the center of the framed area, where the head would typically be located in most portraits.
 
By collaging the wire mesh onto the canvas, Tillyer causes a number of things to happen. He calls attention to the painting’s surface while imposing an open barrier in front of it. He prevents the paint from smoothly coating the surface, so the artwork is not painterly nor does it achieve any of the dramatic effects that are generally associated with either a loaded or dry brush. He elevates the importance of the frame, which can be seen as an ironic commentary on the art of portraiture.
 
Tillyer’s conceptual gesture exposes the fallacy of the assumption that the brush should be able to touch the canvas anywhere that the artist wishes, and that this freedom is an essential component to the masterpiece tradition and a sign of the artist’s genius. By undermining his ability to paint freely, he hints at England’s preoccupation with class and lineage, as well as the belief that for a portrait to be important it must be done in the masterpiece tradition.
 
Is it any wonder these two paintings have been largely overlooked by the English art establishment? They can be seen as a direct critique of the cult surrounding artist’s personalities and their signature styles, which eventually become packaged for the viewer’s consumption. 
 
In these paintings, beginning with the format, Tillyer undermines everything we normally associate with portraiture and its emphasis on resemblance. Instead of surrounding and enhancing the portrait, the mesh becomes part of the painting, and summons associations with self-taught art and Art Brut. 
 
At the same time, the wire mesh evokes the grid that portrait artists often use to define the contours of the head and to aid in the proportional placement of facial features. Additionally, it suggests an imprisoning enclosure, not unlike that of the historical assumptions about portraiture from which Tillyer needed to disentangle.
 
More than being the incisive works of an outlier, Tillyer’s two featureless portraits made of wide, straightforward brushstrokes sever the bond between the artist’s signature style and the sitter. By doing so, the artist comments on the hierarchical construction of English society, the gaps between the much photographed and gossiped about royalty (both real and invented), the faceless commoners, and all those existing on the rungs in between.
 
By turning the head into an anonymous, abstract shape, Tillyer removes all traces of the flattery, decorative details, and painterly flourishes that are considered integral to portraiture.
 
By de-emphasizing the individual, he calls into question the hallowed tradition of English portrait painting, its long lineup of notable artists and subjects, and the special bonds between them. The addition of the featureless subject is a reminder of all the nameless and forgotten people who have contributed to England’s well-being.
 
I cannot help but think that Tillyer is being implicitly critical of the portraits of Lucien Freud, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, and even Howard Hodgkin, each of whom gained wide attention during the period in which Tillyear made his paintings.
 
The flat insistence of Tillyer’s brushstrokes underscores his desire to clear a space for his work without resorting to a signature style or personal marks. At the same time, his rejection of what Kitaj dubbed the “School of London,” and its focus on portraiture, figuration, and personality offers a clue as to why the London art establishment has never fully embraced him. They like it when their boys and girls are “rebels” as long as they behave correctly and take the right path.
 
Some Thoughts About England’s Obsession With Portraits. By John Yau. Hyperallergic, January 9, 2021.

At 10.00 in the morning of July 2, 2018, during a seven-hour layover in London, I went with the artist William Tillyer to see his new painting “The Golden Striker” (2018), which was installed for a day at his longtime gallery, Bernard Jacobson, on Duke Street, less than a stone’s throw away from the Royal Academy of Arts. The temporary installation was mounted because the painting was being filmed for a feature-length documentary on Tillyer, whom I consider to be one of most adventuresome painters of his generation.
 
Born in the industrial city of Middlesbrough in North Yorkshire in 1938, Tillyer is part of the generation that includes Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005), David Hockney (b.1937), and Margot Perryman (b.1938). As a student at Middlesbrough College of Art and later as a post-diplomate at the Slade School of Fine Arts, he began to immerse himself in the long, rich history of English landscape painting. In an email (dated July 10, 2018), he offered this succinct description of the two schools of thought governing his education: “There was [the] ‘dot and carry’ Euston Rd. School,” while the other involved using “lots of thick earth colours. I didn’t follow either.”
 
Tillyer’s early independence has been a hallmark of his entire career: he is one of the few English artists I can think of who is not associated with a group or a stylistic tendency. His work has never been included in an exhibition of English Pop or allied with what RB Kitaj called “The Human Clay,” and rightfully so. Often, isolation from the mainstream suggests that the artist is eccentric or perhaps hermetically personal, but this not the case with Tillyer, either. His subject is the English landscape of Yorkshire, where he was born and has lived and worked for much of his life. The challenge for Tillyer boils down to this: how does one make a landscape painting that recognizes the main currents of 20th-century art — the readymade and abstraction or, more recently the digital realm — without devolving into parody, pastiche, or irony? Is it possible to make a painting about painting and still be fresh?
 
One of the forces driving Tillyer’s work is his belief that the possibilities of light cannot be exhausted in landscape painting. His lifelong pursuit of the invisible forces animating the landscape has led him to establish intense dialogs with two very different masters of light, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, along with a variety of English landscape artists, including Samuel Palmer and the central figures of the Norwich School, John Crome and John Sell Cotman. His knowledge of the artists working in the Yorkshire landscape, as well as the motifs, and locales they returned to, is unrivaled. I have happily listened to him talk about the myriad challenges presented by ordinary subjects, such as flowers in a vase or a stone footbridge traversing a river in the countryside.

 
A man of impeccable thoroughness, his interest in landscape extends all the way back to its origins: Albrecht Altdorfer, Adam Elsheimer, Joachim Patinir, and Pieter Breughel the Elder. Beyond their contributions to landscape, what seems to attract Tillyer to these particular painters is their intensely observed focus on opposites, such as trees clinging to rocks and golden sunlight bursting through the dark, tangled branches of a cool, clammy forest. The dynamics of change lie at the core of Tillyer’s paintings. His interest has never lay in the picturesque, which is perhaps why he is not better known.
 
The supports of the five-part painting featured at Bernard Jacobson are sheets of flexible acrylic mesh with quarter-inch square openings; paint can be applied to the front or pressed through the back, a process that the artist has self-deprecatingly compared to pushing cheese through a grater. As you look simultaneously at and through the surface, there is a sense that what you are seeing is about to dissolve or change. There is a tension between solidity and disintegration, between the boldly colored passages of impasto and the noticeably perforated field.
 
The open, porous surface infuses your experience with a low visual hum, which is accentuated by the presentation: the five sheets of acrylic mesh are attached to brackets extending out from the wall so that each hangs freely, like a tapestry. When I asked Tillyer about the painting’s title, he told me that it came from the jazz composition, “The Golden Striker” (1958), by the Modern Jazz Quartet.
 
Tillyer began applying paint to porous supports in the late 1970s. With this combination of what are essentially construction materials and paint, he brought together the readymade and a traditional medium – long considered divergent, incompatible tendencies in modern art – while reminding viewers that the depiction of an untainted, unoccupied landscape was a fiction: mankind has made inroads everywhere. Unless the landscape has been manicured, and therefore artificial, nothing is truly pristine. The use of porous supports also upended notions of beauty that have been integral to landscape painting for centuries, and which artists of an earlier generation, such as Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, challenged through the expressionistic use of thick, mud-colored paint.
 
Over the years, Tillyer’s support has varied from widely spaced, stiff architectural cladding to flexible mesh with small perforations. He has used a brush and pressed gobs of paint through the tiny holes, as well as splashing and pouring it. Ephemeral light and paint’s durable materiality are neither separated nor set against each other.
 
Another distinguishing feature of “The Golden Striker” is that it isn’t a picture of something, at least in the conventional sense. And yet, I would not call it an abstract landscape either. Rather, by using a radically different formal vocabulary in each panel, he refuses to reduce the subject to a single style. The painting contains different ways of presenting the landscape, from digital image to dispersed clouds of paint to optical veils to impasto.

 
The subject of “The Golden Striker” is a golden field, specifically the one seen in John Constable’s “The Cornfield” (1826), which Constable referred to as “The Drinking Boy,” after the prostrate child apparently drinking from a stream in the foreground. Constable’s vertical painting depicts a path that starts in the middle of the bottom edge and moves up painting’s surface, passing between copses of trees until it arrives at a field ripe with golden-colored grain. (Here, it should be noted that in England all grain is called “corn.”)
 
Our eye is gently pulled into the painting’s middle ground by the path. To the left, we see the boy, wearing a red vest and lying on the ground, as he gazes into or drinks from the stream running before him. A flock of sheep walks up the path toward the golden field, watched over by a dog.
 
Tillyer uses Constable’s painting as a starting point; it offers him a readymade subject, which he can examine and reassemble. On one level, “The Golden Striker” is the artist’s considered analysis of landscape painting in the 21st century. On another level, it is a celebration of light hitting a yellow field at a specific moment, with clouds passing overhead and a breeze moving across the field. At once ordinary and highly charged, this moment of stillness and metamorphosis is what Tillyer evokes in an abstract painting. His ability to construct this complex state without becoming picturesque is what makes “The Golden Striker” remarkable.
 
Tillyer’s multi-part painting expands Constable’s single vertical into five abutting rectangles, which can be associated with a panoramic view. However, rather than relying on illusionism, as if Cubism never happened, Tillyer invites viewers to see through the painting. In further contrast to Constable’s scrupulous spatial construction, he reverses the spatial position of the cornfield: it becomes a rectangle of thick golden paint protruding from the mesh’s surface— something tactile that is reaching toward us.
 
In dialog with Constable’s use of trees as framing devices, Tillyer poses his two outer acrylic mesh sheets in contrast to the inner three sheets. The image on Tillyer’s far left panel consists of rectangles in a variety of sizes and colors derived from a digital rendering of the left section of Constable’s painting. All the rectangles but one are on the same plane. The palette is predominately blues and greens, with some umber and red. The one exception to the spatial unity is the reddish-orange square partially superimposed on two similarly sized squares, one brownish-orange and the other green, forcing them to retreat behind it. According to the artist, the color is Gauguin Orange. The boy’s vest in “The Cornfield,” or perhaps the red poppies in a Constable study in a Birmingham museum, likely inspired Tillyer’s rectangle, but beyond these associations, I think what he was really after was the creation of a layered space.

 
Starting on the far left edge and running along the bottom of each of the five sections, a band of deep violet further implies that this is a landscape we are looking at, not an abstract painting where everything sits on a flat surface. His sensitivity to tonality is evident in the deep violet, which can briefly appear to be black before settling into itself. Tillyer orders especially ground pigments from the paint maker Wallace Seymour: Tillyer Turquoise T1, Tillyer Turquoise T2, Esk Green, and Tees Blue are some of the ones he uses.
 
In the far left panel of “The Golden Striker,” the palette shifts from blues, deep violets, and grays along the left edge to luminous greens on the right. The changes in color seem to register the passage of light and shadow in and across a changing landscape, whose central section is largely gold. Meanwhile, overlapping the two section on the right, a large circle spills a cascade of mossy green from a dark turquoise hole in its center while the surrounding form shifts tonally from turquoise to gold.
 
How do we read the vertical washes color that seem to have melded to the perforated surface? What about the layered golden rectangles in different viscosities — from evanescent to gloppy — that take up the middle section of the painting? So much is going on with the paint, color, and opticality in “The Golden Striker” that it feels nearly impossible to take it all in.
 
Why isn’t Tillyer better known in England and the larger art world? Is it because he has been too experimental in a country where entertainment is more prized than daring? Is it because he doesn’t try to be agreeable or enjoyable, or play the bad boy or grumpy elder? Is it because he isn’t a showman capable of delivering some interesting pitter-patter at the drop of cap? Whatever the reason, I think Tillyer’s work deserves far more recognition. It is the work that should count, not the artist’s mastery of social media.
 
One Painting Can Go a Long Way. By John Yau. Hyperallergic, July 15, 2018.