The stable, the artist, the poet but rude
Frances Donaldson
WHAT A GO: THE LIFE OF ALFRED MUNNING$ by Jean Goodman
Collins, £17.50, pp. 274
There has been at least one previous biography of Sir Alfred Munnings and he himself wrote three volumes of autobiogra- phy. Yet his story is worth another re- telling.
He began his own first volume with a description of the five horses left to him at the time of the second world war, told in the authentic language of a stud groom. Then, of one of the horses, he remarks that she was 'the best over a gate I've ever ridden', a statement which casually reveals both high courage and considerable skill. On the back of the jacket of this new biography there is a photograph of a jaunty figure in a tweed suit with waistcoat, a silk scarf tied like a stock round his neck and a soft hat worn well to the side — a horse toper perhaps or more likely a successful trainer.
Speaking of horses, Munnings wrote: 'They have been my supporters, friends my destiny'. He had other passions — he 'thrilled' to the plays of Shakespeare and said that were he forced to make a choice between pictures and books in his home he would say without hesitation, 'Give me the books'; and he regularly composed verses which he sang to the tunes of ballads. But he lived to paint. Adoring the English countryside, he was happiest in the com- pany of grooms and gypsies; happy too when chosen in the first war to go to France to paint the Canadian army, where, with a brand of courage that allowed him to ignore any personal danger, he painted in full view of the German lines. He was least happy when staying in the houses of the international rich, who paid him a fortune to paint their portraits on their favourite mounts. He said of himself that he was a good painter but not a great one, and today he is acknowledged as second only to Stubbs as a painter of horses in a landscape.
Mrs Goodman tells the story of his life almost on a day-to-day basis, without much narrative line. Probably this is the only way it can be done since, apart from the period of the war, it was a steady progression without great peaks. After some slight initial plodding through the inevitable antecedents and childhood, she makes a great success of it, conveying excellently Munnings' zest, his dedication to his art, his talent for speech and song.
What is nevertheless difficult to under- stand is why people put up with him. He was the rudest man I have come across either in life or in books. He appears to have been sexually incompetent if not impotent and his first wife was pathologi- cally cold. Yet on the evening before she committed suicide, when at a large party she complained that she was tired and wished to go to bed, he shouted: 'All right, you bloody whore, buzz off!' He was vulgar in every sense of the word; pro- German and anti-Jew; when he visited an art gallery in Norwich as President of the Royal Academy, he refused to meet the curator, scolded one of the employees and in the middle of the chairman's speech jumped up and said: 'If you don't stop this I shall walk out.' Yet he was adored by his own employees, welcomed in the houses of the rich and famous, and was a friend of Winston Churchill. Laura Knight said: 'I could not take my eyes off him. He was the stable, the artist, the poet, the very land itself! I adored everything about him.'
Munnings had an obsessive hatred of modern art, referring to Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso as 'those foolish daubers' and maintaining that their influence had 'de- filed the British tradition'. At the 1949 dinner of the Royal Academy he lashed out at the Academy itself, the Arts Coun- cil, the Tate Gallery and at Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the King's Pictures. How could it come about that someone with these views came to be elected President of the Royal Academy? Only, one must neces- sarily reflect, if the majority of the Associ- ates of the Royal Academy agreed with him.
The book is well illustrated and some- times decorated with sketches by Mun- nings on the printed page.
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