Maggi Hambling: Real time by Marlborough Gallery

Maggi Hambling Real time

545 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 +1 212 541 4900 marlboroughnewyork.com

An Ocean Apart. Who is Maggi Hambling? Sarah Wilson

Maggi Hambling is an artist. She is an English painter. She is a flamboyant character with a challenging reputation. She enjoys the company of extraordinary friends. She is “old, female and queer,” as she declares with her characteristic chuckle. Queer is the word she prefers, in homage to her friend, the late artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman. Queering, a nobly performative action, extends our visions and interpretations of the world beyond its variously gendered bodies, embracing the wildest possible twists and turns, auras and resonances. Maggi Hambling’s art requires our attention. New York was an ocean away. “America is not a country, it is a world,” said Oscar Wilde, Hambling’s first literary hero, who also claimed that only language separates our two countries.1 To introduce Maggi Hambling to an American public, to present her alternative world, means going beyond the spoken language and beyond the visual language of this show. Hambling’s Ipswich (once Gyppewicus or Yppswyche) has few similarities with Ipswich, Massachusetts, in Essex County, USA. Essex in England embraces the estuary of the River Thames, meeting the county of Suffolk with its border constituted by the River Stour. Every place, every place name, has a deep history containing personalities and stories, memories and images which Hambling lives and breathes with all her senses: “In a Constable drawing, for instance, you can smell Suffolk mud, feel the hide of a cow, touch the side of a cart, hear the wind charging through the leaves of native Suffolk Black Poplars.”2 She was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, home to the gracious landscapes of the painter Thomas Gainsborough, the first “real” painter she encountered. His silvery drawing of a fallen tree with a split-open trunk is

perhaps the ghost inside her magnificent silver sculpture to the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, erected on London’s Newington Green in 2020.3 She was brought up in Hadleigh, whose part-fourteenthcentury parish church of Saint Mary displays her striking Good Friday portrait of a bleeding Christ on its north wall. The surrounding undulating farmland—so brightly and tenderly painted by her father Harry, during his retirement—is dotted with churches of medieval origins.4 It is a repository of far from idyllic stories: the puritan iconoclast “Smasher Dowsing” stripped many churches in Suffolk bare of sculpture and ornaments, while Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, expanded his terrifying operations outward from Essex to the whole of East Anglia, burning unmarried women as heretics. Rural beauty is countered by the violence of the elements, a long history of cultural and class divisions and political struggles. We have to understand the difference between Cavaliers and Roundheads—the battle at the heart of our English Civil War and English Puritanism—to understand Maggi Hambling. Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf ’s bisexual “Orlando,” Edith Sitwell and her English Eccentrics (1933), Derek Jarman or Vivienne Westwood today—all chose the side of the cavaliers, as does Maggi in drag, in extravagant cabarets, at fancy dress balls, preening and parading on street floats. She is a formidable doyenne of fashion as lead artist (in 2020) for Middle Plane Magazine— with many a meringue in evidence—or for Karl Plewka’s Beauty Papers (2021), where Zanele Muholi and Sunil Gupta are her new contemporaries.5 A stricter nonconformist tradition, curiously entwined with British Modernism, marks out our cultural puritans: an alternative tribe of writers and artists, critics and curators. Never the twain shall meet.

After initiation by an evidently lesbian painter of bulls, Tony Stoney, and her adorable Edinburgh School of Art-trained schoolmistress, Yvonne Drewry (who encouraged her to keep a sketchbook), it was the couple Cedric Morris and “Lett” (Arthur Lett-Haines) who welcomed Maggi Hambling with open arms, delicious food, wine, and merriment to the sixteenthcentury Benton End House near Hadleigh.6 Illustrious guests included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, W.H. Auden, the artist duo Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, writers Antonia White and Marion Milner. Cedric by this time was a devoted painter of flower pieces, specialising in irises (he was an inspiring and widely travelled botanist). Lett, who had experienced the best of 1920s Paris, translated it into his Modernist pictures, adding decorative elements and calling himself an “English Surrealist.”7 Surrealism proper had indeed penetrated high society with the International Exhibition in London of 1936; its legacy continued into the era of The Beatles and Monty Python, and on to Beauty Papers today. One of Maggi’s closest friends and portrait subjects, the impresario George Melly, provides a direct link to the early surrealist artists and galleries in London’s Cork Street.8 While the 1960s seem familiar, it is important to highlight a late 1970s turning point. In 1976, Hambling exhibited in The Human Clay, curated by the artist R.B. Kitaj, self-appointed leader of a so-called School of London, where painting, in the era of conceptualism, had never been abandoned.11 (Kitaj’s drawn portraits were also exceptional). In 1981, her friend, and by now the quasi-fearsome Exhibitions Secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts, Norman Rosenthal, launched A New Spirit in Painting.10 Painting was definitively back, while early 1980’s London was

simultaneously marked by a Surrealist revival. Veterans of the 1936 show were part of the scene.11 Only the rise of the YBAs, the Young British Artists, again propelled by Rosenthal, would change the game. Yet the Surrealist heritage was irrepressible, whether a case of Damien Hirst’s sharks or Sarah Lucas’s phallic cucumber with two oranges, Au naturel, star of the exhibition Sensation in 1997. The gothic streak, so present in Maggi Hambling’s essence and her work, again epitomises transgression as style. What queered English Surrealism in 1940 was its collision with the Second World War and with bomb damage. Falling medieval masonry added a lived dimension of the gothic to John Piper’s depiction of Coventry Cathedral in ruins, heralding a so-called neo-romantic turn.12 The Gothic Romantic nineteenth century flowering of English art and poetry had its origins in the revenge tragedy of the Jacobeans, Thomas Kyd or John Webster; its influence continued through to punk and Gothic rock, contemporary with Maggi Hambling’s 1970s.13 “Webster was much possessed by death, and saw the skull beneath the skin,” said T. S. Eliot in his poem, ‘Whispers of Immortality.’14 Hambling sees, always, the skull beneath the skin. Whispers of immortality lurk in her lines of ink, her strokes of paint, her slivers of bronze. The greatest critical voices in London over the decades have chosen to engage with Hambling. David Sylvester, celebrated for his conversations with Francis Bacon, memorably invited the student artist to witness his installation of the Tate’s Giacometti retrospective. Long afterwards, he would install Hambling’s own imposing Serpentine Gallery exhibition of 1987, alternating wounded bulls and dramatic

sunrises. Bryan Robertson, the great director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in east London, the first to introduce a British public to Nicolas de Staël, then Jackson Pollock (prior to some years in America), sought her out in 1995 and prefaced her bronze sculptures, referring to her recent trip to Mexico and its joyous transformations of the “grimmest memento mori.”15 John Berger, the painter and critic, best known perhaps in Britain for his Ways of Seeing TV series, asked to write about Maggi’s relationship with Henrietta Moraes, Francis Bacon’s former model. He was characteristically unafraid to broach fundamental questions of existence and of love: “These drawings remind us that in sex and in pity, touch is as primordial as in drawing.”16 A cascade of splendid essays and publications have followed. Many interviews are now available, preserving not only Maggi’s throaty voice, dark with years of whisky and cigarette smoke, but the whole person in live broadcasts, beginning with her period of public fame in 1983 with the TV art quiz Gallery (the participants, including Maggi, appear frightfully young and well-behaved; Lady Diana-era hairspray abounds…).17 Now James Cahill has taken up the baton from Mel Gooding or Andrew Lambirth (both critics with ties to Suffolk). Even longer histories and revivals simmer under Hambling’s painted surfaces. In Rendham, the village where her studio is today, George Crabbe, an eighteenth-century man of the church, started writing his collection The Borough, including the tale of Peter Grimes. The composer Benjamin Britten was in exile in the USA, with his lover Peter Pears, when he read E.M. Forster’s article on Crabbe in 1941.18 Overwhelmed with a homesickness for Suffolk, he started writing Peter Grimes, his most famous opera, starring Pears. His retelling of the story with

its rough and smooth male attractions, its brutal drowning of an apprentice, includes the Four Sea Interludes, so important for Hambling’s painting and her notorious Scallop sculpture on the beach at Aldeburgh (now famed for its annual music festival). Letters are pierced through the metal of her huge split scallop shells; the ghost of Peter Pears’s mellifluous tenor voice may be heard in words written by the sky: “I hear those voices that will not be drowned.” Wilfred Owen, killed in action in 1918, wrote the poems sung in Britten’s War Requiem under fire and the threat of gas. Britten’s music inaugurated the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962. It is this music and these lines which Hambling revisited in her twenty-seven victims’ faces, and seventeen battle landscapes of fire and darkness constituting the War Requiem series, exhibited inside the rust-coloured dovecote, for Britten’s centenary at the Aldeburgh Festival of 2013.19 While Hambling made a similar “conceptual” installation at art school, this was different. Its narrow constraints recalled Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, while it resounded with the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) of the War Requiem. The visitor entered a dark and narrow sacred space alone. Eight minutes of music were followed by two minutes’ silence.20 The magnitude of the subject, where both first and second world wars— all wars—come together, demanded this response. The smashed and bloodied features of the victims here dissolved back into mud, “the mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.”21 The War Requiem paintings are typical of the huge expansion of Hambling’s last period, where subject matter and matter itself are locked in an embrace: a fight to the death between paint and meaning. Her

handling has become looser as subjects and formats become more grandiose. Victims are the antithesis of her long career in portraiture and yet also its extension: no introduction to the artist’s work could ignore this vital aspect of her career and practice. Hambling is surely Britain’s most skilled and recognisable portraitist, appearing a whole generation after Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, both of whom she knew. Jonathan Reading of 1960, eyes cast down, is her first finished and solemn work in oils with a blue background (Picasso’s Blue Period works were shown at the Tate that year), and strikingly different from the flatter, crisper 1920s portraits of Cedric Morris. Despite a brighter palette, momentarily responding to Pop Art and Robyn Denny’s teaching at the Slade School of Art, the vitalising power of lines and the trace of the hand were giving life to portraits. The ink drawing of a sad and stuffed rhinoceros in Ipswich Museum of 1963 is premonitory, anticipating the pathos of her ice floe-stranded Polar bear of 2019. During a moment when hyperrealism was all the rage, Hambling showed accomplished photo-based work—see the cold, destroyed portrait of the loathed politician, Enoch Powell, in 1969, or the animated hilarity of Lett laughing, 1976, with its double-side ground, one half-yellow; a series of figures, not portraits proper, in the early 1970s exhibit a strange and humorous anonymity.22 Painted portraiture’s very origins are linked to the dead. The Coptic Egyptian mummy portraits in the British Museum are no flat, symmetrical masks but three-quarter bustlength portraits, full of life and character, with white glints in the eyeballs—mostly beautiful young people—not effigies but personalities speaking through time. We do not know who these people loved or who grieved for them. We know Maggi Hambling’s loves, and for whom she grieves. For me, Jean Genet, posing for Alberto Giacometti, best expressed the relationship between the intense moments of intersubjectivity that portraiture requires. Genet, like Hambling, spent much time looking at the Rembrandts in London’s National Gallery, an experience which preceded his hours as a sitter (over forty days for one painted portrait).23 While in his writing the greatest intensities were represented by blanks— silences separated

[1] Charlie Abrew, 1974; oil on canvas; 55.5 × 44 in. / 141 × 113.6 cm

by rows of asterisks—the present of the pose experience is superimposed by the memory of an epiphanic moment: “Suddenly I had the painful, yes painful feeling that each man is worth exactly the same as another… Anybody can be loved, I said to myself, however ugly, wicked or stupid…A question of recognition which Giacometti has seen for many years and restores to us.” Giacometti comments in return that Genet is beautiful: “like everyone else, neither more nor less.”24 An equivalent love emanates from Hambling’s portraits, even those commissioned, such as Archie Gordon, 5th Marquess of Aberdeen and Temair, 1981, with sprawling robes, fur and ribbons, yet the shadow of the alternative man with a gleam

in his spectacle lens behind—or the scientist Dorothy Hodgkin (such a typical Oxford woman) entirely engrossed behind the coloured lace of her molecular models. Three portraits strike me in particular. Charlie Abrew [1], the blind Scottish-African boxer, possesses such dignity and pathos in his face and large, twisted hands: yet exuberant squiggles on his 1970s shirt and tie also voice his personality. Noble and contemplative, Archie the Warder (Archie MacDonald, security guard at the National Gallery during Hambling’s residency in 1980) reminds me of Joshua Reynolds’s affectionate portrait of his Royal Academy porter. Finally, I would choose Hambling’s little-known Christ of 1986: a close-up of a head and torso with

a bleeding wound on the chest against a dark, blood-red ground. The unique raised viewpoint, looking down onto the body which fills only half the canvas, surely relates to a high hang, where, for once, Christ also looks down to those raising eyes or prayers to Him. It is a work intensely human and humanist, and intensely sacred. Hambling visited St Mary’s Hadleigh, where it hangs, every Sunday throughout her childhood. The profane is always present with the sacred. A thirteenth-century “mouthpuller” in an Essex church is perhaps the anonymous ancestor not only of Hambling’s series of laughs and bared teeth, but also her eyelash fetish (see Beauty Papers again).25 The ancient tradition of priapic figures and archaic Baubo carvings and sculptures which heads crushed into genitals—a joyful confusion of orifices—re-emerges, as does the tradition of England’s medieval Green Men who invaded the medieval church: lusty couplings took place in many stone carvings hidden from view, under wooden miserere seats, or even pew ends.26 So often these painted or sculpted figures have tongues sticking out, open mouths, bared teeth. Apotropaic, their function was not just linked to fertility, but to ward off evil.27 Hambling’s own small sculptures retain just such personalities and functions. Placed in rows on shelves in her sculpture studio, like so many Daumier parliamentarians of the natural world, they have become gnarled and grouchy through the course of time. Morsels of trunk and root, natural or with additions and subtractions, and with tactful or unnatural colour, they converse silently in their still universe. A sense of powerful caricature was apparent in Hambling’s first ciment fondu sculpture of the Suffolk-based sculptor, Bernard Reynolds, 1963, created a year after Lett’s little joke, Witch Fetish: Portrait of Maggi Soop, twin ancestors of future developments.28 While treated as the composite work, Aftermath, by James Cahill (who named many pieces), I prefer to see each sculpture as an individual.29 My encounter with Henrietta eating a meringue, a work in plaster, now nestling among potted plants, preceded our visit to Hambling’s sculpture studio (how interesting it was to see models for Scallop and For Mary Wollstonecraft). White, delicious, Henrietta eating a meringue is, one would suppose, an

[2] Henrietta eating a meringue, 2001; plaster; 20 × 23.5 × 23.5 in. / 50.8 × 59.7 × 59.7 cm

entirely non-sculptural subject: irreverent towards sculpture’s materiality, irreverent towards Henrietta Moraes, Maggi’s great love. And how entirely wrong that would be — firstly in the whipped-and-crumbliness of the plaster itself, indeed like a great meringue, secondly in terms of this tribute to a larger-than-life woman caught in the midst of a huge laugh. The sculpture rears itself like a foamy wave; cavities and teeth look enormous. The notion, unarticulated, of the apotropaic returns: the sculpture is ferocious, yet fearful, attempting to ward off an unknown evil. Poised between motion and the stillness of death, it is saying, “Please don’t leave me; please still love me” (between bites of the meringue…). When I first entered the Suffolk studio on a slightly grey December day, I felt almost surrounded by paintings which foamed with sea or were frozen in part with ice.

Here was a feeling for paint that could be free to run, clot, drip or be flicked. The work confounded my expectations… I immediately thought of China, and of the monochrome “abstract defiguration” paintings of Yan Pei Ming.30 And I discover that with the title For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, Hambling’s Wall of water paintings were shown in 2019 at Beijing at CAFAM, the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum of China.31 I can imagine the fascination of the young artists there, caught always in the dialogue between calligraphic painting, with its skilled, priestly tradition and the call for realism inherited from the West.32 The two modes come together in Hambling’s work: brushstrokes that heave and dissolve with extraordinary representational power in Wall of water V [plate 3], where hints of cream and of jade give the sea more colour. Similarly with Henrietta, June, 1998, the “likeness” of the

the terror of beauty lost.36 The protagonist’s hidden portrait, once discovered, has a vermicular, wormy horror that indeed reappears in certain aspects of Hambling’s works. I realised, suddenly, that the painting studio was dominated by two large, late, posthumous portraits—of Maggi’s father [4] in grey and white, the word “Certain” written in red at the bottom, and of her mother [5], a sparer monochrome work with an intense gaze and magenta lipstick slash. How extraordinary—with “ordinary” parents (yet one discovers parents loving, imaginative, encouraging, accepting)—to live with these intense stares presiding over an artist’s creative space. Surely an invitation to a profound psychoanalytic study? Precisely it is the marvel of the “likeness” of a portrait and its gaze, the look of Maggi in her mother’s face, inscription as a selfinscription, that needs no words.37 Just as Maggi’s dawn ink traces, a daily practice, are made, eyes closed, with a stopper in her left, not right, hand, so the reciprocity between self and other has a quasi-palindromic dimension, reflected in her most important statements:

[3] Laughing II, 2018; oil on canvas; 26 × 24 in. / 66 × 61 cm

face, a strong, yet melancholic look, comes through the curves and flicks of blue, of white, of brownish red and traces of erasures with a turps-soaked rag. Laughing II, 2018 [3], illustrated in Ran Dian, the Chinese newspaper (one of so many laughing paintings, originating with Lett) transposes the energy of the meringue sculpture into paint, almost monochromatic—where the laugh could also be a grimace of sexual ecstasy or a rictus of agony. So powerful, so free—and impossible in this context to censure. And Henrietta died in 1999. Laughing II, emotion invested in every baroque twist, is a reliving of memory. The extended sequence of Henriettas, paintings and drawings covering her illness, death, her lying in state (“dressed to kill, with props and looking furious”) were made close to her flesh at that time.33 As conversation progresses, I discover Maggi is indeed both haunted (the

painting Ghost of Cedric, 1983, was explicit) and a master of the depiction of death: a long tradition, taboo today.34 The vanitas tradition is continued explicitly when skulls are featured in the work and in sculpture too: the crusty structure of the bronze My father, 1994, becomes retrospectively elegiac. It takes its place among the more elongated or miniaturised bronze work, with timeinformed patinas that look back to Etruscan funerary sculpture.35 The humorous tradition of the funeral wake is continued in Hambling’s controversial Oscar Wilde monument in London of 1997. Wickedly transformed into a grande horizontale (the epithet for an experienced French courtesan), Wilde sits up abruptly in his coffin, to enjoy, yet again, his last cigarette. Death for Wilde must always have style. His Picture of Dorian Gray, Maggi’s first childhood novel, insists on portraiture as a lifelong haunting; it is about aging and

The subject chooses you, you don’t choose the subject. (quoting Yvonne Drewry): I have become Henrietta’s subject rather than she mine. Maggi Hambling inverts Oscar Wilde’s maxim, putting flamboyant talent into her life, but genius into her work.38 It is deadly serious. As are relationships where the lived and the pictorial become one, whether a mouth, an orifice, or the sea: “the mouth becoming a meringue and the meringue becoming a mouth, was the energy I wanted to get into the sea paintings. I feel the sea is like a mouth because it’s devouring.”39 In the studio, black calligraphy on creamy pages: the shaky words “Doesn’t matter, NO FEAR.”40 Maggi’s parting gift: white calligraphy curling through black pages opposite waves and flecks of foam. This poem always to Henrietta, to life outside and within death, is also to us all who face ultimate dissolution:

impossible heights, into realms of the mysterious, sensual, cosmic and profound.” Maggi Hambling, “Father, memories of a mentor” (Arthur LettHaines); typescript in the Suffolk studio, 14 December 2021. 8 See Melly, George. Don’t Tell Sybil: Intimate Memoir of E.L.T. Mesens. London: Heinemann, 1997. Aka Don’t Tell Sybil: A Libidinous Memoir of the Unusual Impresario of English Surrealism Atlas Press, 2014 (seemingly Melly himself ). Inspired by Magritte’s The Rape, 1934, glimpsed in reproduction at school, Melly assisted Mesens, the Cork Street gallerist of the Surrealists. 9 Kitaj, R.B. The Human Clay. London: Hayward Gallery, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976. On the analogy of the immigré School of Paris, there were several painters involved of Jewish origin such as Frank Auerbach, or Leon Kossof, an aspect Kitaj elaborated in his First Diasporist Manifesto of 1989. The continuing expressionist tradition was much appreciated in the 1980s. 10 Joachimides, Christos M. and Norman Rosenthal. A New Spirit in Painting. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1981. 11 Following John Golding and Dawn Adès’s Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, (Hayward Gallery, 1977) a new generation of scholars of English Surrealism such as Michel Remy, James Birch, Silvano Lévy and Hambling’s friends Mel Gooding and Andrew Lambirth mixed with artists Eileen Agar and Conroy Maddox. See Gooding et al., Angels of Anarchy and Machines for Making Clouds, Surrealism in Britain in the Thirties. Leeds: City Art Gallery, 1986. 12 Surrealist André Breton admired Edward Young’s Night-Thoughts (1742-45) and ‘Monk’ Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and only as literature from another age. For English neo-Romanticism see Mellor, David. A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain, 1935-1955. London: Barbican Art Gallery/Lund Humphries, 1993.

[4] Certain, 2019; oil on canvas; 60 × 48 in. / 152 × 122 cm

I am the shifting shingle...you approach with stealth…then in the dark moons of your curves…I am tossed, lost, displaced…with greedy lovers’ tongues and lips…you suck me in and in again… we rise together, we rise together… then float safe on liquid breasts…until the dance begins again…and you thrust deep…and my resistance is low… dissolve, dissolve,…no defence against your relentless advances;…I am but a ghost of the shore…disappeared in you.41 An ocean apart…we will ultimately come together: “You are the sea.”

1 Wilde, Oscar. The Canterville Ghost. London: The Court, 1887; Hofer, Matthew and Gary Scharnhorst. Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010. 2 Ramkalawon, Jennifer. Maggi Hambling: Touch; Works on Paper. London: Lund Humphries, 2016. 3 Thomas Gainsborough, Fallen Tree, 1754, graphite on paper. Collection Gainsborough House, Sudbury, Suffolk. 4 Hambling, Harry and Maggi Hambling. A Suffolk Eye: Harry Hambling 1902-1998. Suffolk: Lux Books, 2018. 5 Monhait, Roni. “Maggi.” Middle Plane 3 (2020); Plewka, Karl. “Defence and Dusty Springfield: The Eyes of Maggi Hambling Have It.” Beauty Papers 9 (2021). 6 The couple had previously founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, Essex in 1937. 7 “I think this label limits our response to his work. His imagination rose like the skylark, soaring us to

13 See Krithika, M. Sai. Gothic in Revenge Tragedies: A Study of Select British Plays. Chennai: Notion Press, 2017. The Jacobeans were precursors to Shakespeare: let us not forget that transvestism and historical charades were essential to theatre at this period. See also The story of goth in 33 songs at pitchfork.com. 14 T.S. Eliot. Whispers of Immortality. London: Hogarth Press, 1919. 15 Robertson, Bryan. Maggi Hambling: Sculpture in Bronze, 1993-1995. London: Marlborough Fine Art, 1996. 16 Berger, John. Maggi and Henrietta. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. 17 See notably Gallery (1984-1990), television series, with George Melly, Frank Whitford, Maggi Hambling, Joanna Lumley and guests; Hambling, Maggi. “Hambling, Maggi.” Interview by Mel Gooding. British Library Sounds, National Life Story Collection, 24 October 1995. 18 Forster, E.M. “George Crabbe: the Poet and the Man.” The Listener, 1941. 19 Purchased by the Monument Trust, War Requiem is shown annually in the dovecote at Snape Maltings during the Aldeburgh Festival. 20 Cahill, James and Maggi Hambling. War Requiem and Aftermath. London: Unicorn Press, 2015. 21 Bergson, Henri. Le rire. Paris: Revue de Paris, 1900.

22 Several of the works I discuss are thanks to Maggi Hambling The Works: And Conversations with Andrew Lambirth (Unicorn Press, 2006). 23 Wilson, Sarah. “Rembrandt, Genet, Derrida.” Portraiture, Framing the Subject, edited by Joanna Woodall, 203-216. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996. 24 Genet, Jean. “L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti.” Derrière le miroir, 25. Paris: Éditions Pierre à Feu, 1957. 25 Weir, Anthony and James Jerman. “Rude gestures and ruder postures.” Images of Lust, Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches, Chapter 9, Plate 55, p. 107 (Photo J & C Bord); Plewka, Karl. “Defence and Dusty Springfield: The Eyes of Maggi Hambling Have It.” 26 Basford, Kathleen and Paul Hardwick. The Green Man, Woodbridge. Suffolk: D.S. Brewer 1978. 27 The pink, pig-like Hunger, 2016, with protruding tongue, while Orwellian, reminds me of Claudio Lange’s photographs for Islam in Kathedralen, media revolution in eleventh century anti-Islamic Europe. 28 Half MirÓ ceramic, half Venus of Lespugue, this petite sculpture is called Maggi Soop, in homage to the famous soup brand started by Julius Maggi in Germany, 1897. Henceforth Maggi with no ‘e’. 29 Cahill, James and Maggi Hambling. War Requiem and Aftermath. 30 Romero Sanchez, Vladimir. “Yan Pei-Ming: Le portraitiste de la défiguration abstraite.” Atuart. http://www.actuart.org/page-yan-pei-ming-leportraitiste-de-la-defiguration-abstraite-8149733. html. 31 The Beijing show (March-May 2019) combined the Wall of water series (exhibited in London’s National Gallery, 2014) with ten monotypes coming from the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg; Hambling, Maggi. Ran Dian. Interview by Ran Dian. 6 March 2019; For Beauty is Nothing but the Beginning of Terror (directed by Philip Dodd) was expanded for the Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (July-August 2019). 32 In the mid-1970s, Hambling went often with her friend Seal to look at Japanese and Chinese painting and calligraphy in the British Museum. 33 Berger, John. Maggi and Henrietta. 34 Beyond transi tombs, and other memento mori, I think of Van Dyck’s Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed, 1633, London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery; recent parallels may be made with Bill Viola (1991), Sophie Calle (2006), etc. 35 Hambling surely experienced the Etruscan funerary sculpture influence on Giacometti’s chariots in the Tate Gallery retrospective. See Sylvester, David. Alberto Giacometti, Sculpture, Painting, Drawing. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1965. 36 Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Philadelphia: Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, 1890. 37 Hambling has nonetheless acknowledged how essential therapy has been for her, and her brother’s mental health issues. See Wyeld, Mike, director. In the studio with Maggi Hambling, 2011. 11:02. 38 Oscar Wilde: “Put your talent into your work, but your genius into your life” (evidently, he too, however, did the opposite).

[5] Lipstick, 2019; oil on canvas; 60 × 48 in. / 152 × 122 cm 39 Hambling, Maggi. “The eye, the hand and the heart. An interview with Maggi Hambling.” Interview by Christopher Moore. Ran Dian, 6 March 2019. 40 Hambling, Maggi. “6am MH Sketched.” Middle Plane Magazine 3, 2020. 41 Hambling, Maggi. Maggi Hambling: The Sea. Salford Quays: The Lowry Press, 2009.

PLATES

1. Self Portrait, 2019 oil on canvas 72 × 84 in. / 182.9 × 213.7

2. Wall of water I, 2010 oil on canvas 78 × 89 in. / 198.1 × 226.1 cm

3. Wall of water V, 2011 oil on canvas 78 × 89 in. / 198.1 × 226.1 cm

4. Wall of water VI, 2011 oil on canvas 78 × 89 in. / 198.1 × 226.1 cm

5. Wall of water IX, 2012 oil on canvas 78 × 89 in. / 198.1 × 226.1 cm

6. Wall of water XII, 2012 oil on canvas 78 × 89 in. / 198.1 × 226.1 cm

7. The last baboon, 2018 oil on canvas 67 × 48 in. / 170.2 × 121.9 cm

8. Baby elephant abandoned, 2019 oil on canvas 48 × 36 in. / 121.9 × 91.4 cm

9. Elephant without tusk, 2019 oil on canvas 48 × 36 in. / 121.9 × 91.4 cm

10. Lion in enclosure, 2019 oil on canvas 48 × 36 in. / 121.9 × 91.4 cm

11. Rhino without horn, 2019 oil on canvas 48 × 36 in. / 121.9 × 91.4 cm

12. Dancing Bear, 2020-2021 oil on canvas 48 × 36 in. / 121.9 × 91.4 cm

13. Young elephant, stunned, 2019 oil on canvas 60 × 48 in. / 152.4 × 232.2 cm

14. Polar Bear, 2021 oil on canvas 48 × 36 in. / 121.9 × 91.4 cm

Maggi Hambling: On the Edge James Cahill

Indigo, the dominant shade in Maggi Hambling’s new Edge paintings, is a colour with ancient, mythic origins. The Roman historian and naturalist Pliny the Elder records, in his catalogue of the pigments used by artists, that “indigo, a product of India, [is] a slime that adheres to the scum upon reeds. When it is sifted out it is black, but in dilution it yields a marvellous mixture of purple and blue.”1 A substance sifted out of nature, indigo is an apt choice for Hambling’s new depictions of the natural world—for all that Pliny misrepresents its actual origin. Out of raw or dilute pigment, interposed by white paint, the artist has conjured visions of bluish, melting worlds: mountains rise and recede from view, waters churn around a sinking polar bear, and skies appear as sheets of perfect white, mirroring the snowdrifts below. The imagery is elemental, echoing art’s earliest subjects—animals in landscapes— and the stories of painting’s earliest incarnations. Pliny’s catalogue of pigments occurs in a chapter that deals with the genesis of painting itself. He alludes obliquely to the fable, already famous by his era, of the Corinthian girl who traced a line around the shadow of her lover on the wall. From this simple act of tracing, Pliny relates, the art of painting evolved: “A second stage, when a more elaborate method had been invented, was done in a single colour and called monochrome, a method still in use at the present day.” The use of a line to memorialise a living presence, and the emergence of a monochrome style of representation, are dually reflected in Hambling’s painting Edge XVI, in which a line of dilute blue describes a polar bear. An expanse of the same pigment around and beneath the creature, descending into

multiple rivulets, provides the faintest intimation of ground and space. The white of the unprimed canvas resolves, by a kind of interpretative reflex, into the implacable whiteness of sky or ice. This, the simplest of Hambling’s new Edge paintings, lays bare the elemental dynamic— expressed in Pliny’s text—between line (or colour) and image. We witness, in the flickering thread of paint denoting the bear, the point at which the mark becomes an image—and vice versa, as the descriptive line merges into inchoate wash.2 Throughout these evocations of arctic wildernesses—each made on a narrow vertical canvas—she lingers at the edge of the representational, evincing the capacity of paint both to disclose and to withhold an image. Her imaginary scenes of the literal edge of the world cast us into a space that is visually—materially— liminal. Landmasses appear alternately palpable and insubstantial. The image itself seems under threat of dissolution. There is, in this, a political and moral imperative. Hambling’s essential subject, as in her first Edge paintings of 2017, is the climate emergency, instanced in the melting of the polar icecaps. For all their stark, luminous beauty, the paintings are mournful and admonitory. In Edge XV [plate 18], another silhouetted polar bear appears amid watery strata of blue-grey paint that imply a dissolving icesheet. Above, the peak of a mountain—or perhaps just a mass of cloud—hovers against the white of the canvas, an accumulation of white streaks and indigo flecks. The creature is ghostlike, a blank space as much as a presence, and the world around it seems also to be fading. Hambling’s scene is both a protest and an elegy. Those two distinct qualities coexist throughout her new Edge paintings. They

[1] Waterfall III, 2007; oil on canvas; 108 × 36 in. / 274 × 91 cm

play out—exist within—the handling of the paint, which shifts between hard purposive marks and larger, more ambiguous expanses in which washes of dull blue teem with flecks of thicker pigment. Outrage and melancholy are anatomised into streaks, veils and rivulets. The repeating vertical format of the paintings constitutes an insistent, rhythmic refrain (the drumbeat or rallying cry of a protest) while also—in its tall, narrow proportions—intensifying the vertiginous effect of each picture. The format is, at one level, incongruous— the reverse of the panoramic proportions usually employed for landscape scenes. And yet the narrow confines have a logic, both in terms of Hambling’s theme and in the long historical context of landscape painting. She has used this format once before, in her 2008 series of Waterfalls, where the subject matter—tall, plunging cataracts—dictated the canvas shape. In the Edge paintings, despite the relative stasis of the scenes depicted, the narrow shape contributes to an equivalent sense of freefall. Each image is a vertical panorama, compelling the viewer along a perpendicular axis. Space and gravity are ambiguous quantities. (This remains the case even where she has joined two canvases to form a diptych: the composition develops—builds or unravels—in a strictly vertical direction). Mountains appear to rise or hover like clouds—reduced to mere contours—or conversely to bear down in blackening masses. Often, the impressions of weightlessness and immensity are inextricable. In the diptych Edge XIII [plate 16], for example, receding—progressively higher—mountains, are conveyed by floating strokes of indigo that tail off like plumes. Below, across the centre and base of the composition, an accumulation of dark washes and lateral

streaks implies a snowless plateau. And yet that darker phase might equally suggest a dissolution of representational form—a melting of all that is solid. Hambling denies us an interpretative foothold. In this way, the gravitational flux of the Edge paintings—their dual sense of airborne and earthbound matter—is discernible within individual forms, even individual marks. The distinction between hard and ethereal, heavy and light, is ever shifting as we navigate the vertical axis of the canvas. Her visions of a world that materialises and recedes from view, suspended within narrow confines, find an historical counterpart in the ink scroll paintings that first appeared in tenth-century China, enduring for centuries. Drawn with a brush on silk or paper, these were the products of artists’ imaginations and memories. Often, they depicted mountains emerging out of vaporous cloud—or landscapes simply interrupted (rendered fragmentary) by the ‘thin air’ of the unmarked scroll. Woods and Valleys of Mount Yu (1372) [2], by the wandering recluse Ni Zan, shows two superimposed scenes: a crop of trees below; rugged mountains above. They might or might not be contiguous, just as Hambling’s stacked mountainous forms exist in ambiguous spatial relationships— take, for instance, the wisplike peaks and darker ‘foreground’ terrain of Edge XVIII, which suggest a concatenation of the artist’s mind as much as an actual landscape. Like the pictorial episodes of Ni Zan’s scroll, Hambling’s scenes are fragments—fleeting and evanescent, apparently poised between coalescence and dispersal. They are also, despite their apparently remote and barren spectres, profoundly personal— testaments to her own moods or reactions.

[2] Ni Zan 倪瓚; Woods and Valleys of Mount Yu, 1372; hanging scroll; ink on paper; period: Yuan dynasty (1271–1368); Ex coll.: C. C. Wang Family, Gift of The Dillon Fund, 1973

In this respect, too, the Edge paintings resonate with Ni Zan’s scroll, in whose tranquil imagery the artist saw his experiences refracted. Written above the ink drawings is a poem that expresses his contentment with the life of a recluse: We watch the clouds and daub with our brushes We drink wine and write poems. The joyous feelings of this day Will linger long after we have parted. A scroll from two centuries later by Lu Zhi [3], working in the style of Ni Zan, shows a similar rising sequence of trees and rocky promontories—as if a lateral panorama had been condensed into a column-like stack. Once more, nature is felt and thought rather than observed. The compressed, vertiginous space of the landscape, which beckons the viewer’s eye on a course analogous to climbing or descending, offers a conduit, of sorts, into the artist’s psyche. The landscape is also a portrait. Hambling’s Edge paintings are, in an equivalent way, both visions of the external world and ‘inner visions’. A painting titled The last baboon [plate 7] constitutes a bridge between the Edge series and Hambling’s new group of animal paintings. In this wider rectangular picture, she evokes staggered landmasses using rapid washes of paint, stacked like rings of smoke beneath a calcified sky. The effect of warm light puncturing—melting into—a blanket of cloud, calls to mind the skies of J.M.W. Turner, such as in The Slave Ship (1840)— another work in which savage, indifferent nature forms the setting of a human outrage: Turner depicted a real-life massacre of slaves, thrown overboard during a storm in the Atlantic.

[3] Lu Zhi 陸治; Mountain, trees and pavilion, 1560; hanging scroll; ink on paper; period: Ming dynasty (1368-1644); © The Trustees of the British Museum

At the base of Hambling’s image, four amorphous black forms appear in a rising sequence, echoing both the implacable imageless presences of Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic and (a more fanciful projection) the progressive stages of the evolutionary ‘March of Progress’, an illustration showing the stages between ape and man. Do these dark corporeal shapes signify the last baboon of the work’s title, or the men who have driven it to the edge of extinction? Is the animal lurking elsewhere entirely, as a glancing impression at the top

of the picture? The ambiguity of the scene, its sense of a picture under pressure of dissolving into arbitrary blackness, sounds the same note of elegy as the title. It is a portent of annihilation. In six smaller paintings, Hambling has depicted animals in various states of entrapment, abandonment and injury. Executed in thinned black paint on unprimed canvas, these harbour a strange combination of the visceral and the spectral. The animals’ heads and bodies cohere out of turbulent, agitated strokes—Hambling’s marks often possessing a kind of centripetal energy—to produce a vivid sense of physical, animate presence. And yet, suspended against the blank of the canvas, each creature is a phantasm, dislocated from the world. This double resonance accords with the subject matter. Reflecting the artist’s many depictions of people dying or dead, the creatures are suspended—in several cases— between life and death. A rhino with its horn sawn off lies in a bedraggled heap—the mass of its body conveyed by bleary contours and yet seeming to deliquesce at the centre. Hambling’s snarling black and white marks express the agony of the creature as it edges towards death, or perhaps just the grim fact of its decomposition afterwards. Lion in enclosure imagines an animal similarly felled: the flickering vivacity of the dilute paintwork is at ironic odds with the torpor and stasis of the body depicted. The mere act of existing, here, is a kind of slow death. By contrast, Young elephant, stunned pictures a sudden and violent rupture. A condensed array of marks depicts the animal’s head and trunk and eye, while fainter—vaguer— strokes ripple away from the recognisable nucleus like after-traces. Here, for once, the inward-turning energy of the compositions is reversed—projected outward—in order to evoke the explosive, discombobulating power of a stun gun. We are presented, as it were, with an X-ray of the moment of shock. Dancing Bear [plate 12] intensifies the contradictory moods of the series to a frenetic pitch. A chained, tortured animal takes shape from (or disappears within) a torrent of black, white and grey. The gestural verve of the picture—conjuring fear, confusion, even a wild exhilaration—is redolent of the cadenzas of Joan Mitchell

subliminally) as the water exploded in front of her—before the intercession of intellect, of words, of ‘self ’. It is this unmediated quality—an apprehension of ‘real time’— that she has sought continually in her paintings and sculptures. The revenants of history and memory are grappled with as living presences in the artist’s mind. Like the prototypal painting of the Corinthian girl who drew her lover straight onto the wall with a traced line (an intuitive gesture that required nothing in the way of artistry), Hambling’s art is contemporary in the most literal sense—a direct tracing of real life, in real time.

[4] For Cy Twombly, 2011; oil on canvas; 36 × 48 in. / 91.4 × 121.9 cm

or Cy Twombly. But it also carries a searing descriptive power and polemical edge. Amplifying and enshrouding its subject by turns, the medium acts once more as a livewire to Hambling’s own sensations, channelling her moral outrage and empathy. There is a reminder, in this, of Francis Bacon’s desire for paint (never simply an end in itself ) to “give the sensation without the boredom if its conveyance.”3 Since the beginning of her career in the 1960s, Hambling has been known for her portraits—representations of figures from her own life and beyond it. All of her paintings are, in an expanded sense, self-portraits— repositories of thought, feeling and gesture. This aspect of self-reflexivity is palpable in her Wall of water paintings (a series begun in 2011), large-scale canvases showing explosions of seawater—nine of which were first displayed at the National Gallery, London, in 2014. In these, the contradictory impressions of the Edge paintings—their concurrent evocations of presence and absence—are prefigured in images that equally compress the fractured, incoherent emotions of the animal pictures. In Wall of water XIII [plate 6], chimeras of colour (streaks and ribbons of gold, blue and pink) surge in an upward cascade whose dissolution is presaged, simultaneously, in

the fainter blue pigment that plunges across the white ground of the canvas. Each of the works in the series was inspired by the experience of watching waves crash against a sea wall in Southwold, Suffolk, producing spectacular explosions of water and refracted light. In Wall of water I [plate 2], the rising and falling motion of the water implies a towering, teetering architectural formation— an etherised version of Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings. Hambling evokes a blaze of energy that is also, inevitably, an expiration and dispelling of energy—like a lit cigarette, or a human life. (In one of the Wall of water paintings, she embedded a cigarette—stained on its filter with pink lipstick—in the paint; the piece was made in response to the death of Twombly). As throughout her work, aliveness and death glimmer out with a chiaroscuro power. The primordial forces implied by the paintings pertain to real life— just as the beautiful, quixotic wildernesses of the Edge paintings refer to the ‘here and now’ of the overheating planet. Indeed, the Walls of water are reflections in paint of the chaos and formlessness of present-tense experience, prior to the ordering logic of retrospection. Rather than portrayals, they are re-enactments of what Hambling glimpsed and sensed (however

Pliny the Elder. Historia Naturalis, Book 35.

2 Gombrich, Ernst. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. London: Phaidon Press, 1960. Podro, Michael. Depiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Wollheim, Richard. Art and its Objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. 3 Sylvester, David. Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985.

15. Edge XII, 2021 oil on canvas 84 × 36 in. / 213.4 × 91.4 cm

16. Edge XIII, 2021 oil on canvas, diptych overall: 84 × 72 in. / 213.4 × 182.9 cm

17. Edge XIV, 2021

18. Edge XV, 2021