Great leap forward
Let me at once state an interest: I have just written a book with Maggi Hambling about her life and works, currently available from all good booksellers. But long and intimate knowledge of an artist’s oeuvre should not disqualify the critic from writing more; in fact, it’s to be hoped that experience may bring with it increased insight and understanding. So let me say at the outset that, in her new paintings at the Marlborough, Hambling (born 1945) has produced something remarkable — an extension of her territory as an artist and a great leap forward in terms of her mastery of paint.
As the title of this exhibition — Maggi Hambling: Portraits of People and the Sea suggests, Hambling maintains that she paints only one kind of picture: portraits, whether of people or the sea. This is a little difficult to take for those who like their portraits to look like one thing, and their seascapes another. The relationship in Hambling’s work is indeed far closer. Portraiture suggests the vivid description of the individual, and this is precisely what Hambling achieves, whether it be an individual person or a wave. Look at ‘Henrietta/North Sea Wave’, which hangs at the front of the gallery. In this painting the features of Henrietta Moraes, Queen of Soho and Hambling’s close friend and muse (she was the subject after her death of a moving exhibition of paintings and drawings at the Marlborough in 2000), emerge from the cresting swirls of a large wave. Here a sort of fusion has taken place: the muse on land and the muse of the sea have become one. The colours Hambling uses to delineate the face in the water are pitched high above the grey of the sea: vivid green, orange, blue. The features jar on the eye and are made to stick in the mind like fishbones. Henrietta would have liked that.
The visitor is greeted by three smallish sea pictures in the first section of the Marlborough show. From the far-end wall of the gallery a striking close-up head of Samuel Beckett glowers down at you. If you thought to take refuge for a moment with the sea paintings, think again, for here the bathing is dangerous. Look, for instance, at the vortex of ‘Wave Breaking, October 2005’. The newest painting, hot off the easel, is ‘Wave Breaking, August’, presumably based on a memory of the sea last summer, or done from one of the brief notational drawings Hambling makes in front of the subject. It’s a luscious study, throbbing with greens and blues, with turquoise, black and white, and encapsulates a tremendous sense of movement. These sea paintings are all about pent-up energies reaching a climax and dissolving into fret and spume.
The next section of the gallery is also given over to a powerful selection of the recent seascapes, from the vertical wall of water (note the portrait format) of ‘High Sea, August 2005’, to the long thin horizontal (a rewarding shape) of ‘Sunrise, January 2006’. Here the ruffed-up flurry of breaking wave is as sexy as a feather boa or lace mantilla. This extremely recent painting, with its knifed accent of pink sun slicing across the canvas at top left, reminds us that Hambling for several years painted the sunrise with great dedication. There is indeed a continuity of interests to be noted. She’s painted the sea before, though never with such concentration and empathy. And she’s always loved the sea of her native Suffolk. Now she’s discovered how to celebrate it appropriately.
There are large paintings on show, but perhaps Hambling should work on an even more extended format, the scale seems to suit her. These are proactive waves. Not for Hambling the long melancholy withdrawing roar of the tide. Here waves rear dizzily, peak and crash, with the force and splendour of orgasm. And her pictures, for all their seethe and rush, are rather wonderful examples of pure painting, delivering not only her expected concision of drawing, but also a considerable variety of mark from thin staining of the canvas to lush impasto. Look, for instance, at the subtle delights of ‘Wave breaking, early morning, August 2005’.
The other sections of the exhibition are devoted to paintings and charcoal drawings of people. A trio of self-portraits suggest the complexity of this artist, a woman who for all her public forthrightness often describes herself as being in ‘a bit of a muddle’. There are excellent paintings of her neighbour Giovanna and her friend Squeaky with a hangover, splendid drawings of Stephen Fry, Amanda Barrie and John Berger, and a moving study of her mother from memory. But it is the sea paintings that steal the show. Seasoned Hambling watchers are beginning to say this work constitutes the finest of her career: they may well be right.
Down in south-east London a very different kind of realist painting is on show. Rose Wylie (born 1934) makes vast grubby paintings which look naïve but have a strange, ungainly sophistication, like a gawky schoolgirl bluestocking who’s lived a bit. In a spacious gallery called Union, made from a couple of railway arches, Wylie’s large canvases spread out like the narratives of a dysfunctional but essentially optimistic life. There is warmth and humour here, and an overwhelming vitality. The paint is walloped on to unstretched canvas (the finished paintings are then stuck to stretched canvases for display purposes), leaving great areas of it bare. The images are often built up from two, three or four canvases conjoined. The subject matter can be anything that has lodged in Wylie’s mind — seen on TV, in nature or a newspaper, or in a shopping mall. References are to high as well as low culture (echoes of Old Masters abound in her work), the essential thing being to blur the distinctions and meld all received impressions into a distinctive new language, an image-writing that is intensely personal and all Wylie’s own.
In the main gallery, the subjects vie in their quirkiness to hold your attention. ‘Flying Witches and Joanna M’ depicts a mad pianist against voluptuous pink and green, while ‘Hotel Volcano’ is a bathaunted hideaway where you might wish to hang ‘Pin Up’, after you’ve folded along the dotted lines. A painting of a privet dog in a tub from a Faversham garden centre completes the cycle of wondrous imagery with ‘Lily and Palm Trees’, which for Wylie is verging on the lyrical. Proceed into the next space, undeterred by the rush-hour thunder of trains overhead. Two paintings here: a triptych of St Francis, and a diptych entitled ‘H&O Lawn Tennis’. St Francis is depicted like a moustached stealth bomber in the central panel, with a close-up of his head, eyes raised to heaven, on the left, and to the right a great spotted woodpecker, with green beak and skull like a cockpit. The male and female tennis partners in the diptych are both shown from the rear, but with no opponents in sight. In the far room, four more paintings bombard the senses with scrambled information (some of it written). I particularly liked ‘Regent Street’, and one of Wylie’s Bette Davis-type figures in ‘An Ant and Enid’, whereas ‘Rosemount Coffee Label’ has a little of the eclectic dynamism of early Hockney, though a lot messier. Wylie’s paintings look deranged, but what is so extraordinary about them is their ability to Maggi Hambling: Portraits of People and the Sea is at Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albemarle Street, W1, until 25 February; Paintings: Rose Wylie is at Union, 57 Ewer Street, SE1, until 25 March.
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