The Artist's Studio publication

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artist’s studio

Edited by Giles Waterfield

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Artist’s Studio

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First published by Hogarth Arts in association with Compton Verney to accompany the exhibition ‘The Artist’s Studio’ Compton Verney 26 September-13 December 2009 Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich 9 February 2010-16 May © Hogarth Arts 2009 ISBN 978-0-9554063-3-1 Distribution by Paul Holberton Publishing 89 Borough High Street London SE1 1NL

Catalogue design dnhdesign Production David Hodgson Printed in Wales by MWL Print Group

Frontispiece Frank Auerbach Photograph by Snowdon Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (presented by Lord Snowdon, 2007) © Snowdon/Camera Press Ltd

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the

Artist’s Studio Edited by Giles Waterfield

Hogarth Arts Compton Verney 2009

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Contents Acknowledgements

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Foreword

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1 The Artist’s Studio

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Giles Waterfield 2 Everything, including the kitchen sink:

studio squalor from Barry to Bacon Martin Postle 3 Locating the Studio

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John Milner 4 Where worlds collide:

the Studio and Beyond Antonia Harrison 5 The Contemporary Studio

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Stephen Bayley 6 Artists on Film

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Robert Mcnab Catalogue List

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank all of those who have helped with the exhibition and this accompanying book, including Bruce Barker-Benfield, Stella Beddoe, David Beevers, Katrin Bellinger, Mark Bills, Stephen Calloway, Tim Craven, Jane Cunningham, Shezad Dawood, Barbara Dawson, David Dawson, Gautier Deblonde, Jeremy Deller, John Erle-Drax, William Feaver, Andrea Fredricksen, Peter Funnell, Antony Gormley, Andrew Grassie, John Harris, Charles Harrison, Rachel Hewitt, James Holland-Hibbert, James Holloway, John House, Jeremy Howard, Nicola Kalinsky, Alan Kirwan, Catherine Lampert, Fred Mann, Simon Martin, John Milner, Lisa Milroy, Daniel Moynihan, Jane Munro, Philip Mould, Diane Naylor, Charles Noble, Tom Phillips, Martin Postle, Hilary Pyle, Paula Rego, Christopher Ridgway, Paul Ryan, Nick Savage, Richard Shone, Reena Suleman, Barbara Thompson, Juliet Thorp, Virginia Verran, Nigel Walsh, Meghan Weeks and The Dowager Countess of Wemyss and March.

Thanks, too, to those who have given voluntary assistance: Jocelyn Anderson, Yolanda Kasper, Jordan Mearns, Meredith Nichol and, in particular, Christopher Griffin. And to those who have contributed to the exhibition book: John Milner, Stephen Bayley and, once again, Martin Postle.

This exhibition has been made possible with the assistance of the Government Indemnity Scheme, which is provided by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and administered by the Museums, Libraries and Archives agency. And the studio film section of the exhibition was made possible by a generous grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Trust.

I am particularly grateful to all the staff at Compton Verney, most notably to the gallery’s Director, Steven Parissien, who edited the book text; to Antonia Harrison, who as the exhibition’s internal curator was invaluable in shaping and delineating the exhibition, and who has contributed a significant essay to this book; and to Abi Pole, Verity Elson and their colleagues in the Art Department for their tenacity and skill in pursuing loans, finding images and arranging the hang. Lastly, a special thank-you must go to the former Director of Compton Verney, Kathleen Soriano, who originally commissioned this exhibition.

Giles Waterfield September 2009

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Foreword The artist’s studio has been not just the cockpit of creation, but also can be the environment in which the artist locates and defines him or herself. It can be a detached sanctuary, or part of everyday life; an office, a shop, a retreat, or a home.

To Stanley Spencer in 1939, his small apartment-studio in Adelaide Road in London’s Swiss Cottage inspired his great painting Christ in the Wilderness. ‘The great adventure that Christ had all by himself with leaves, trees, mud and rabbits’ was, he wrote, shaped by his immediate, though rather unlikely, studio environment. ‘Among two chairs, a bed and a table… I was as it were in a wilderness.’ But the studio also proved the agent of an intensely personal epiphany: ‘I felt that there was something wonderful in the life I was living my way into, penetrating into the unknown me… I loved it all because it was God and me all the time.’

Yet while Spencer found his ideal studio conditions in solitary, contemplative isolation, other artists have benefited from proximity: by 1880, Tite Street in Chelsea and Melbury Road in Kensington had become renowned as the centre of celebrated house-studios, the Kensington colony gaining much of its international reputation from Lord Leighton’s Arabian art-palace in Holland Park Road; Walter Sickert and Spencer Gore hugely enjoyed sharing a studio together in Mornington Crescent after 1905, the older Sickert generously acknowledging how much he had learned in the studio from his younger colleague; while by 1937 Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Piet Mondrian’s studios were all at different addresses in Parkhill Road, Hampstead – part of what Herbert Read felicitously labelled the ‘gentle nest of artists’. In the late eighteenth century, Benjamin West ran his studio on markedly commercial lines, treating his visitors as potential customers (one visitor of 1785 records that ‘we were conducted down a long Gallery furnish’d with drawings, into a large square Room lighted from the Roof and fill’d with paintings’), while Johan Zoffany actually established his studio with Robin’s auction house in Covent Garden. Other artists, before and since, have preferred to maintain their studio as an explicitly private space.

Nor, of course, does the studio have to be a single room or house. From 1972 Reading University’s Fine Art graduates memorably occupied whole swathes of short-life council housing, primarily in the London Boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets, in order to create their ‘Acme’ studios and living spaces. By 1980 the number of properties owned by Acme had reached 200, and included a former pie factory in Acre Lane, Brixton. In 2001 Acme had 580 artists on its studio waiting list.

The diverse range of studio types in use today does, however, have one element in common: studios’ dependence on galleries or museums to bring their work to a broad or target audience. Galleries provide an invaluable platform for gaining a greater understanding of how artists work today. It is, then, fitting that one of Britain’s most ambitious and inclusive art galleries, Compton Verney, should provide the venue for what is the UK’s first in-depth exploration of this enduring phenomenon – the 2009 exhibition The Artist’s Studio – which this book was originally designed to accompany.

Our thanks go to all the lenders to the exhibition – and, of course, to the artists themselves, many of whom have opened the doors of their studios to make this project possible. We are delighted to include newly commissioned works for The Artist’s Studio exhibition at Compton Verney, and would like to particularly thank Mark Fairnington, Paul Ryan and Sigrid Holmwood for their responses to the subject. Sigrid Holmwood will take up the role of artist in residence during the run of the show, creating a studio within the exhibition itself. The exhibition will also include important footage of artists in their studios past and present, and for this we are indebted to Robert McNab and John Wyver for their advice and expertise. We are also very grateful to designer Calum Storrie and graphic designer Tim Harvey for their contributions to the exhibition, and to publisher Robin Simon for his design proficiency and art-historical know-how.

The exhibition’s guest curator Giles Waterfield thanks all those who contributed to the show in his acknowledgements.

It would, however, be highly remiss of me if I did not take this opportunity to thank Giles himself, on behalf of all of us at Compton Verney, for sharing with us his vision, his profound insights into the subject, and (last but by no means least) his unfailing good humour.

Dr Steven Parissien Director, Compton Verney September 2009

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The Artist’s Studio Giles Waterfield

How have artists’ studios been seen by the artists who occupy them, and by other artists, and by their publics, over the past four hundred years?

What are the myths that have developed around this type of space?

Do certain ideas, or motifs, characterise depictions of the artist’s studio?

And can types of studios be arranged into valid categories?

These are some of the issues that this book, and the exhibition that inspired it, attempt to illuminate, using examples primarily taken from the British tradition.

The word ‘studio’ has substantially changed meaning over the years. It first emerges in Renaissance Italy with the sense of a ‘studiolo’, a study, a place for reflection. As Michael Cole and Mary Pardo have discussed,1 in Renaissance Italy the word for the place of production was a bottega, a workshop, whereas the studio was a private room to which a learned artist such as Tintoretto might retreat, alone, for study and contemplation. In this definition two of the most important qualities of the studio were adumbrated. First, it presented the artist not as a craftsman but as a scholar: his private room, like a study, became (in contrast to his workshop) ‘a vision, or a materialization, of the learned person’s well-stocked mind’.2 Secondly, it was a private space, to which outsiders were scarcely admitted. But the word has strayed a long way from these early associations. In Britain, the artist worked for many years in what was known as a ‘Painting Room’, the word ‘studio’ (bearing, by this time, different connotations) being absorbed into English only in the early nineteenth century.3 Today, particularly in France, the word has borrowed from the quasi-domesticity of the inhabited studio the meaning of a one-room apartment – and indeed, one of the ambiguous aspects underlying later depictions of the studio is how far it is a space dedicated to work, and how far it is applied to domestic use. Additionally, in every major European language, the word has been applied to the film studio, another place where illusions are created.

Studio or associated academy images have acted as a form of manifesto, from the sixteenthcentury prints of Baccio Bandinelli (1493-1560) onwards. The idea of the studio as a statement of the artist’s nature and achievement, to be taken at face value, continues to the present. Thus, for Alice Bellony-Rewald and Michael Peppiatt, the authors of Imagination’s Chamber (1982), there is no need for scepticism over the clarity and reliability of the image of the artist’s space. The authors treat the photographs (for the most part) of the studios that they discuss, as sound physical evidence of something non-physical. This space is full of clues into the nature of the artist’s work, clues that can be deciphered. For them, ‘Art history can be told through the studio,’ and even, ‘The studio is the artist.’4

1 Stephen Lewin Portrait of the Artist at the Easel 1891 Oil on wood, 31 x 23 cm Private collection London

On the other hand, the apparent encapsulation of the artist’s being by a studio is, like the nature of the art that he or she produces, not necessarily a reality, more a construct. Artists place themselves within a frame, seeing themselves and showing themselves to the public (as any self-portraitist before the age of the camera had to do) through a mirror. While the studio becomes, apparently, a reflection of themselves (just as any habitation reflects the character and background of its inhabitant), this form of seemingly accurate and revealing information is infinitely manipulable. Artists were for many years concerned about their position in society, and the studio, fictitious or actual, allowed them to present themselves in a setting that could make them appear learned, prosperous, respectable or, from the early nineteenth century

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