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Gerhard Richter (born 1932) is one of the most influential figures in the art world. This show of his portraits is slightly more enlivening than his recent coloured-panel exhibition at the Serpentine, but don’t expect fireworks. Richter offers a subdued measure, a restricted purchase on the world of paint. He has said, ‘I don’t think the painter need either see or know the sitter. A portrait must not express anything of the sitter’s “soul”, essence or character.’ So what’s the point, then?
Richter’s popularity is a symptom of our own unease, our fear and distrust of reality, and our lack of any belief system to sustain us against this malaise. His blurring of photographic images blurs the pain, like an anaesthetic. In the early 1960s, he began using photos as subject matter, preferably found, anonymous images, which he then copied. ‘The resulting paintings,’ comments the exhibition’s curator, ‘assert nothing definite, draw attention to no particular facet or feature, and avoid making a specific point. This avoidance tactic deflects the universal human instinct to seek meaning in the appearance of people and things.’ No it doesn’t, although that might well be Richter’s intention. Even his all-pervasive greyness does not quench the viewer’s curiosity. The idea that in this context reality cannot be seen or known is just a dandy’s pose. We have the self-evident reality of the paintings to counter it.
And, despite Richter’s trademark mannerism of dragged paint, some of them can be beautiful. Take the 1977 portrait ‘Betty’, a nicely judged piece of photo-realism in colour, with even a certain sensuality to the deadpan surface. Or ‘Self-portrait’ of 1996, like a dim old photo of a Francis Bacon painting, faded, creased and out-of-focus. Slight, but undoubtedly charming. In fact, from time to time Richter can’t help painting as if he loves his medium, if not his subject. And what a painter he could be without his philosophical attitudinising! Look at another portrait of Betty turning away, her figure memorably contrapposto. Not nearly so vacuous as many of the exhibits. Oh well, they say society gets the painters it deserves…
I’m not sure it deserves Maggi Hambling. Is it by chance that we have to travel far up the country to find an exhibition of an English painter who offers real hope in our melancholy times? Hambling (born 1945) is painting better than ever, but if you want to see her new show of portraits of her old friend George Melly, you have to go to Liverpool. Nothing against Liverpool (Melly was born there, so the venue is appropriate), but an exhibition of this breadth and importance should be available in the capital city. I previewed it in Hambling’s London studio and was much moved.
Melly’s bulk looms large in these remarkable paintings, most of them executed after his death in 2007. Hambling first met him at a party in 1980 and they soon became firm friends and partners in subversion. Both enjoyed performing and being outrageous, both were utterly serious about art. In 1998, Hambling was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint Melly, and the result is the first exhibit in this show. She painted George in triplicate: in drag as Bessie Smith, on his feet performing, and seated in the robes of an Honorary Fellow. It’s a powerful portrayal, so full of life that it bursts out of the canvas, the paint-marks extending on to the frame at salient points.
Then there’s a series of 12 drawings Hambling made to accompany Melly’s last book Slowing Down (2005), of him in quintessential pursuits: singing, fishing, writing, drinking and reading. About six weeks before he died, Hambling painted her friend on his last visit to her home, holding court in hat and eye patch, like a pirate king. By now he was far advanced in dementia. When she later visited him at home, he was dying of cancer but intent on describing his starring role in a forthcoming film on the life of Christ. This is the last painting of George alive, but already he is in another world, returning perhaps to the great ocean from which we all come, his skull-like head adrift on the turbulent billows of his green caftan.
Gold paint makes its first appearance in this picture and features liberally in the subsequent images: the ghost of George singing or dancing, his belly ballooning and a fish swimming up his tie; one-winged Melly giving a surrealist lecture with a big-breasted Magrittian nude behind him; Good Time George filled with surprising depths of sadness. In these paintings, Hambling has managed to bring together the movement and wild grandeur of her recent sea pictures with her skill in psychological portrayal and her gift for friendship. It’s another breakthrough for her: the style more allusive, the paint continually on the move, the forms vibrating with possibility. George trembles like a dissolving mirage. Vale!
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Also by Andrew Lambirth
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