At forty-seven, John Bellany is emerging as the most outstanding British painter of his generation. That, at least, is the conclusion I have reached after seeing the works which he has been producing since the death of his mother in November 1989. Bellany's paintings have always been notable for their audacity and ambition, but these new works reveal an achievement commensurate with those high aims.
Inevitably, the themes of these paintings are often harrowing. Some concern themselves with the skull which waits to expose itself from beneath the veil of even the most lovely flesh. And yet the sheer radiance of Bellany's colours and the exuberance of his brush-work transform what might have been a requiem into a paean. In the presence of his mother's death, he comes to celebrate the life which she gave him, and in so doing, has produced some of his most moving and memorable paintings.
John Bellany was born in Port Seton, in Scotland, in 1942. His father and both his grandfathers were fishermen. His family, and indeed the whole community in which he grew up, was steeped in dour Calvinism - with its unrelenting emphasis upon toil, sin and the depravity of fallen man. When he was eighteen, Bellany went to study at Edinburgh College of Art. There he and his friends Alexander Moffat and Alan Bold came under the influence of Hugh MacDiarmid, poet and drinker, author of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.
MacDiarmid believed in the renaissance and replenishment of Scottish national culture. He dreamed that Scotland might once again make a contribution to European high culture - on its own uniquely Scottish terms. Such ideas influenced the way in which Bellany thought of himself as a painter. Although he came to respect the teaching of drawing he received at the Edinburgh School of Arts, he rejected what he considered to be the effeteness and parochialism of the still-prevalent traditions of the Scottish Colourists. MacDiarmid's well-known lines - 'I will have nothing interposed / Between my sensitiveness and the barren but beautiful reality' - might have been his motto. Bellany began to look for inspiration in the grand masters of European Realism - Velasquez, Goya, and Courbet. He became a frequent visitor to the Scottish National Gallery, being shaken and challenged by the realisation that Velasquez was only nineteen when he painted his great picture, An Old Woman Frying Eggs.
Beckmann became a major influence after Bellany saw an exhibition of his work at the Tate Gallery in 1963. Beckmann's pictures encouraged Bellany in his realisation that ambitious, contemporary realist painting of the kind to which he aspired could transcend the limitations of naturalism through drawing upon a world of potent symbols. All these influences were galvanised when, together with Moffat and Bold, Bellany visited East Germany in 1967. There he saw not only Dresden, Weimar and East Berlin, but also Buchenwald. This visit changed Bellany's painting. For him, Buchenwald became more than the site of an historic holocaust. The concentration camp re-emerges in his paintings as a symbol of humanity fallen irredeemably from a state of grace into desolation, cruel degradation and death.
From the mid-1960s onwards, Bellany's art began to depend more and more on an evocative and shifting cast of symbols - strange, palpable ancestral presences, whose 'meanings' could never be easily or definitively translated into words. Is it, I wonder, mere foolishness on my part to recall that, unique among Protestants, the Calvinists emphasise that the sacraments are much more than simple signs, being rather symbols which are permeated with the real presence of the body and blood of Christ? Certainly the most ambitious picture of this period is the vast Gothic triptych, Homage to John Knox, which consciously evokes the claustrophobia of Port Seton's Calvinism.
In this painting, Beckmannesque imagery merges into memories of Port Seton's fish and fishermen and recollections of the anguish of Buchenwald. For much of the 1970s, Bellany's familiar iconography evoked ships of fools, and feasts of fate in which perception, memory, imagination, history and references to the great masterpieces of the past merged and mingled indistinguishably. I can think of very few contemporary painters who work in a comparable way. Indeed, the only one whose methods seem to me to be remotely comparable is the Australian artist, Arthur Boyd.
Bellany's iconography has been much discussed, with the religious, psychological, sexual and historic resonances of his imagery providing endless food for speculation. Bellany himself refuses to talk about the meanings of specific symbols as he does not wish to tie his pictures down to particular verbal interpretations. He prefers to confront the viewer with something visually engaging and open-ended.
But we should not neglect the other level at which symbolism operates in his paintings: that is through the forms and colours themselves. The way in which Bellany's paintings are actually painted is an inseparable part of their content. Bellany can represent the self-same image - say, a bloody skate or a fishheaded man - in a score of different ways. Sometimes, it may appear almost naturalistic, at others engulfed in a frenzy of expressionistic brush-strokes; or yet again, frozen in the bizarre and stifling stillness of psychotic detachment. The way in which the paint is put down contributes as much to the diverse 'meanings' of Bellany's paintings as the changing imagery itself.
This struck me forcefully when I reviewed Bellany's exhibition held in Birmingham in 1983. At that time, I was not greatly impressed by what were then Bellany's most recent pictures, works like Confrontation and Time Will Tell. It seemed to me that, in such works, Bellany's vision was becoming lost in what I called an 'indulgent melange' of loose brush-strokes. I argued that Bellany was in danger of simply discharging inchoate emotions in a way which denied the possibility of bringing about that 'redemption through form' which is necessary to the creation of successful works of art.
I now feel that I was too dismissive of the works which Bellany produced during what were, for him, years of personal agony in the early 1980s. Certainly, when I saw a more extensive retrospective of John Bellany's work at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1986,1 revised my opinions about some of the pictures I had previously seen in Birmingham. The Gambler, in particular, struck me as a painting which was not only raw and loosely painted, but vivid and compelling - and, in its own way, entirely successful. The Gambler shows a hideous woman with a grotesque head almost like an inflated scrotum, or swollen fish-head, attached to her skull; her haggard breast is bare. She is seated alone at a table, playing cards. What makes the picture truly shocking is that this terrible image has its own undeniable beauty. The handling is so loose that, in parts, it borders on the slapdash, and yet it never goes over the edge. I doubt whether Bellany could have conveyed the feelings he wished to communicate through this painting in any other way. Image, symbols and brush-strokes all convey the idea of life on the brink, teetering close to that moment of loss from which there is no return, yet never quite succumbing to it. The image coalesces with frightening clarity out of the maelstrom of brush-strokes: the old hag has nothing but aces in front of her.
The circumstances of Bellany's life at the time he painted this picture are now well enough known. His first marriage, to Helen, had ended in separation. He married his second wife, Juliet, in 1979, but she suffered from an illness which affected her mind as well as her body. Bellany himself sought solace in drink. In 1984, the nadir of his fortunes, he became seriously ill and was hospitalised. The following year was marked by the deaths of his father and of Juliet.
Bellany's resurrection as both a man and a painter from this low point in his life has been remarkable. He managed to stop drinking and rediscovered his love for his first wife, Helen. They got married again. His work became much more controlled and precise. At times it seemed that his strange birds and fishes looked almost too much on their best behaviour. The versions of Russian roulette he played with his paint brushes began to disappear, but his life still hung in the balance.
The huge picture, The Presentation of Time (Homage to Rubens), which Bellany painted in 1987, is a testimony to the continuing scale of his ambitions and the tenuous hold he had upon life at that time. In this complex painting, which still hangs in the artist's studio, he depicts himself seated, anxiously, at the head of a banqueting table, next to Helen, while Salome offers him a clock upon a platter. A herring gull overlooks the scene with the morbid menace of a vulture.
It was remarkable that Bellany could have painted on such a heroic scale given his physical condition. Even so, the mood of this picture is one of unrelieved apprehension. In 1988 that changed. Bellany was again admitted to hospital and Sir Roy Caine successfully conducted a liver transplant. Bellany realised, ecstatically, that he had been given a second chance at life. 'The day he came out of the intensive care unit,' Caine has written, 'he asked not for analgesics but for paper and paint.'
I am sure that when the dust has settled on the recent history of British painting, the oils and water-colours which Bellany produced as he recovered from his operation will come to be seen as among the most enduring works to be produced in England in the 1980s. They are an extraordinary testimony. It is not an exaggeration to say that paintings like The Patient II and Bonjour, Professor Caine show the victory of life over death. As always with Bellany, this is not just a question of the imagery and symbols used, but of the way the pictures are painted. A new, glowing lightness enters into Bellany's palette; colour itself becomes the symbol of a life snatched back from the grey silence of the grave. (Perhaps those teachers in the Scottish Colourist tradition whom he had shunned as a student had taught him something after all.) His brush-strokes now show neither the frenzy of the pictures of the early 1980s nor the meticulous stasis of those painted in the middle of the decade. They flower into a confident exuberance which is not so much life-enhancing as life-proclaiming.
The paintings Bellany produced in the early months of 1990 strike me as even more powerful than those he painted immediately in the wake of his transplant. His mother's death unleashed in him a hymn of praise for the life which he still possessed. There is nothing sentimental in this vision. Indeed, some of the paintings, like those which deal with the familiar theme of Salome's dance, have subject matter which is in some respects even more grotesque than that offered in The Gambler. While Bellany never seduces us into feeling that death has lost its sting, the imagery of his Ancestor paintings seems to emphasise the continuity of life, passing on from one generation to the next. The shimmering beauties of these pictures celebrate the abundant potentialities of that life.
1990
