Lust for life
Judith Flanders
MAGGI HAMBLING: THE WORKS AND CONVERSATIONS WITH ANDREW LAMBIRTH Unicorn Press, £40, pp. 240, ISBN 0906290848 Imust declare an interest. At my solitary meeting with Maggi Hambling, she suddenly barked, ‘Would you like to see my hysterectomy scar?’ (She was dissuaded by the rather nervous men present.) I had been ‘Maggi-ed’: hit with a piece of confrontational behaviour, simply to see what the response would be. Andrew Lambirth had a similar introduction: he first saw her as, fishnet stockings waving in the air, she performed at a cabaret for a friend’s birthday; she then announced he must be gay because the friend who introduced them was. Despite the terrible drawback of being hetero, he was permitted to stick with her, recording conversations over the next two decades, which now make up the text of the book that summarises her career to date.
The work is, of course, the raison d’être, and in The Works it is given ample space and elegant reproduction. A watercolour and a gouache painted when she was 14 begin the story, which concludes with the bravura seascapes that occupied her in 2005. In between come nearly 300 works — oils, collages, sketches, bronzes, monotypes, even a brief excursion onto the wilder shores of conceptual art — there is not much Hambling has not attempted. The quality, the seriousness, the dedication to her art are formidable. The lavish illustrations give insights into a number of Hambling’s subjects and media that are not often seen: beautiful, shimmering landscapes in both watercolours and oils, dating from the 1980s, or a series of bronzes and oils that developed after of a visit to Mexico in the 1990s.
These latter revolve around the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead, and mortality and death are a striking thread running through much of Hambling’s work, from her well-known images of Francis Bacon’s (and Hambling’s) muse, Henrietta Moraes, both before and after her death, to images that are less often reproduced, of her father in his last years. (There are also two reproductions of her father’s own paintings, which are completely delightful.) Unfortunately, this thread is left unexplored in the text. This shows the primary weakness of the ‘in conversation’ format. Hambling, like many artists, is not really very good at talking about her own work, and Andrew Lambirth, who is, by contrast, very good at it indeed, is restricted to being, as he candidly acknowledges, ‘the straight man or feed’ to Hambling the raconteur.
Hambling’s stories are often great fun, but they are more enlightening about her life than her art. Towards the end of Henrietta Moraes’ life, the two women discussed a second autobiography Moraes wanted to write.
Inspired by the label on the bottle of water, I suggested as the title ‘Still Henrietta’. She looked more closely at the label and said, ‘No, we’ll have the whole thing: ‘Delightfully Still Henrietta’.
Other stories, which on paper lack the vivid force of Hambling’s personality, are not even fun, and some are barely stories. Hambling’s acclaimed series of pictures of Max Wall is accompanied by this commentary:
[Wall] has the true face of the sad clown, and possesses that power I can only call magical, to make one laugh and cry at the same moment ... When the work was over, we ate and drank together, and talked long into the night.
Lambirth, unconstrained by this unsympathetic format, could have told us so much more.
There is, however, much to enjoy. Hambling was born in Suffolk, the daughter of a chief clerk in a bank and a schoolteacher, and there never seems to have been a moment’s doubt as to her vocation. By the age of 14 she knew she was going to paint, and at 15 she was already studying at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing under Arthur Lett-Haines and Cedric Morris, moving on to Ipswich Art School and then Camberwell and the Slade. Painting was then and always ‘the most real thing there was ... more real than real life’.
Nevertheless, real life, especially Hambling’s (and everyone else’s) sexuality, is a subject of enduring interest to her. In between the pictures, there is an everflowing stream of parties, gossip, lovers and friends, fame and public commissions. A more analytical and in-depth discussion of the paintings would have been welcome, but it is clear from these conversations that for Hambling sex and friends are for talking about, work is for doing. Hard, really, to argue with that.
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