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Rather than attempt any general survey of the state of painting in Britain today, I want instead to examine the content of the work of certain artists who may reasonably be considered representative. This may at first seem an unfashionable line of inquiry at a time when art-critical writing is primarily concerned with the abstract qualities of the visual arts (space, form, colour, tone, texture, rhythm, proportion, etc.) and often with what is called abstract art itself, but by ‘content’ I do not mean ‘subject matter’, but something a little more fundamental, as I hope will become clear in due course.

     The idea that paintings have a subject does however provide a convenient starting point. It used to be held that there were a number of possible subjects, all more or less distinct, that a painter could tackle. The most important were religious or allegorical themes, but associated with these were subjects drawn from history or legend or literature. All paintings of this kind had a moral, and were therefore superior to portraiture — which however had the virtue that it dealt with man — and to landscape — though the Romantics gave landscape a moral quality which elevated it to the status of great art. Genre painting (e.g. peasants drinking) always remained a pretty low form of art, and as for still life, that was held to be of very minor consequence.

     This rigid hierarchy of the different sorts of subject was still very powerful a hundred years ago, and its influence persists today in a more subterranean fashion. The work of certain modern painters — Kokoschka for example — can still be neatly divided up into the traditional categories, though it’s a bit sparse at the top end. The general tendency over the last century and a half has been towards an evening-out of the hierarchy, and latterly towards a blurring of distinctions between one genre and another. Some years ago, Roger Fry spent a great deal of time arguing that still life was the highest form of painting, but this was a turning of the convention on to its head, in order to draw attention to the above-mentioned abstract qualities in art which Fry’s elders and contemporaries were neglecting to their detriment as painters. Anybody can see today that the most miserable of subjects — a pair of old boots — can in the hands of a Van Gogh be used for the greatest of painting, but the doubt persists in many people’s minds whether, other things being equal, a painting of, say, the Crucifixion isn’t inherently, by virtue of its subject, superior to any still life or landscape.

     This is a difficult question, for which there is no straight answer. Fortunately it rarely arises, because today it is almost impossible to paint a picture with a religious subject. Society as a whole has lost its certainty about Christianity, and the artist is the first to sense this. A public statement of the resounding kind that Rubens could make is inconceivable. Painters wanting a specifically Christian message in their pictures tend to be individualists to the point of eccentricity: I think of Stanley Spencer or, to move into the present, of Francis Hoyland and Craigie Aitchison. All three have had very little to do with what is called ‘modern’ art, preferring, in the younger men s case, the naiveties of the distant past to help them express their private faiths.

     We no longer live in a Christian society, but perhaps we may claim that ours is one in which humanist values prevail. A painter who takes man as his subject could therefore hope to make a broader appeal, and once committed he is unlikely to move away to anything else. Josef Herman and Francis Bacon are cases in point. As painters, their styles could hardly be more different, but both share a preoccupation with the human image which they plainly find the essential channel through which to express certain feelings. In his paintings of miners and peasants, Herman is, I take it, reiterating Millet’s message of the dignity of labour. This may be old-fashioned, as Herman’s formal language certainly is, but is it any the worse for that?

     Bacon’s account of the human condition, like his language, is on the other hand a more characteristic part of our time. It has frequently been called existentialist, and the blurred image in the cage, trapped behind glass, is a forcible reminder of Sartre’s melancholy admission that it is impossible ever to make real contact with other people. But Bacon’s ancestry is a longer one; he belongs with that line of mocking Anglo-Irishmen of whom the first and greatest was Dean Swift. Parallels can be drawn between the two men, especially in regard to their attitude towards the human race and its activities, both public and private. Though his subject may be man, Bacon is hardly a humanist.

     I can see that one might argue that Bacon is the only serious painter in Britain today, because he alone in his work goes always to the heart of things. He once said that ‘art is a method of opening up areas of feeling’, and the choice of phrase is a revealing one. Bacon’s painting is a little like the prolonged and painful probing of an open wound, and one soon begins to fear such remorseless concentration. If one wants an art expressive of a humanist attitude to life, one would turn instead to someone like Keith Vaughan or even to Ben Nicholson who may not paint man as such, but whose work is a very positive affirmation of man’s experiences of the world.

     This demands a little explanation, because of the widely-held notion that a painter obsessed with a desire to render the appearance of objects is concerned with real life, whereas someone more interested in man’s sensations of shape, colour, space, etc., is not. But these are quite different things, and which a painter chooses to do is probably a matter of temperament, not of humanity. I would not for a moment question the value of a painter’s searching of visual appearances, trying to capture the feeling of what he sees in the paint. This is a discipline necessary at recurrent intervals in the history of painting, and one can see why it should attract some of the most serious young artists at a moment when much abstract painting has degenerated into mannered triviality. But one is sometimes led to believe that there is something peculiarly true about what is usually called realist painting, as if it were not as dependent on conventions as any other kind of painting. What could be more conventional than the Bomberg-style? Or more limited in range, when a landscape, a still life, a flowerpiece, a religious subject all end up looking much the same in colour, tone, handling and composition?

     It is important to insist on this, because of the apparent plausibility of the argument that an Auerbach painting of a building site is somehow more ‘real’ than, say, a Patrick Heron of red discs on a red ground. The latter is dismissed as ‘abstract’ and therefore out of touch with ‘reality’, but will such an argument stand up to examination? I cannot do better at this stage than quote words written in defence of abstract art by Ben Nicholson some twenty years ago:

     ‘Every movement of human life is affected by form and colour, everything we see, touch, think and feel is linked up with it, so that when an artist can use these elements freely and creatively it can be a tremendously potent influence in our lives . . . so far from “abstract” art being the withdrawal of the artist from reality, it has brought art once again into common everyday life — there is evidence of this in its common spirit with and influence on many things like contemporary architecture, aeroplanes, cars, refrigerators, typography, publicity, electric torches, lipstick holders, etc. But like all the more profound religious, poetic, scientific, musical or artistic ideas its deepest meaning is only understood by a few, and these interpret it to a few more who pass it on to the rest of the world who unconsciously incorporate it in their lives.’

     Nicholson has shown very clearly in his work of the last twenty years just how elements of form and colour can be used freely and creatively. As he himself foresaw, it took time for his work to make its authority felt, and even now, perhaps because he quietly left England to settle in Switzerland three years ago, he is more readily regarded as the outstanding British painter since the death of Turner outside this country than within it. What is indisputable is the present extent of Nicholson’s influence, which acts not so much in a direct way as indirectly, and can be seen at work in such very different painters as Lanyon and Scott and Pasmore.

     Nicholson more than anyone brought non-representational art into the English tradition, and the White Reliefs of the 1930s remain a landmark in the English assimilation of modern painting (and perhaps the only distinctive English pre-war contribution to it). His most individual and characteristic recent works are however not the abstract reliefs, but the paintings which combine forms derived from still life with the colour and space and light of landscape; a merging of genres which has become increasingly common among young British painters. William Scott for example began as a still life painter, and evolved his formal language from the shapes of kitchen utensils. Now, like Nicholson, he moves freely into complete abstraction, or away from it, as he pleases; and at times his paintings take on elements of other genres, so that one is no longer certain whether one is looking at a still life or landscape or figure.

     The same sort of thing happens in Peter Lanyon’s paintings, but here, as in so much British art, it is the response to landscape that is used as the focus of the artist’s experience. For Lanyon landscape is not something we occasionally see, but something we live in. He doesn’t sit still and paint what lies before his eyes: he constructs his pictures out of the shapes and colour and space of the landscape he moves about in, concentrating impressions formed at separate moments in time into an image that is as integrated as a person, and as saturated with associations. There are no figures, but the landscape-image may take on human qualities, giving the picture an unusual passion and sensuality. Much the same sort of process seems to me to be at work in the painting of other artists — Terry Frost for example — who seek out pictorial equivalents for visual and sensory experiences.

     One doesn’t need to be a landscape painter to proceed in this manner: an urban environment provides just as good a starting point. Prunella Clough uses an industrial landscape: chemical plant, electrical installations, mining gear. The most interesting recent development in British painting has been the appearance of a group of young painters, some still at the Royal College of Art, who use all the imagery of city life — from graffiti on walls to advertising slogans — as their raw material, building it up into a comment on the daily existence of most of us that is perhaps fond, perhaps satirical.

     Ambiguities of such a kind are the stuff that much modern art thrives on. What more than anything destroyed the old painting with its rigid distinction of genres was Freud’s conception of the unconscious. The relevance of fantasy, dream-imagery, free associations, etc., was suddenly seen to be central and not peripheral, and ambiguities of meaning were sought instead of being suppressed. The immediate artistic result was Surrealism, which at one time seemed to be the anti-movement to abstraction, but the opposition is not a genuine one, and most of the more exploratory painting of the last twenty years has drawn from both sources.

     Graham Sutherland at one time would, like Paul Nash, isolate natural objects, and use them as visual equivalents for ideas and feelings, but now he tends to create an abstract form as the medium for his substitution. However abstract the standing forms of his pictures may be, they are always subject to rules of organic growth, and this is another general principle that has left its mark on modern painting.

     Ideas of growth and decay, generation and dc-generation lie at the heart of Ceri Richards’s painting, underlying a profusion of imagery that results from the unhampered pursuit of associations. These associations are often musical or poetical, and the quickness of Richards’s mind and its inventiveness must make him at times a difficult and even a ‘literary’ painter, whose work requires verbal explanation. But the meaning of his pictures resides essentially in their forms, and here we arrive at what is I believe the key to much modern painting, and the mystery that obsesses many of its most original practitioners.

     In a broadcast talk entitled ‘Symbol and Image’, Sir Russell Brain last year said that ‘in a way which we little understand, sensory patterns have a power to move us which is independent of the object they may represent’. This means in terms of painting that colour and especially shape are in themselves meaningful, and further that they are perhaps more meaningful than any kind of imitation of appearances because they appeal to a deeper layer of experience. It is quite obvious for example that the emotional power of some of the greatest masterpieces of painting lies in the fact that they embody certain elemental forms: Leonardo’s ‘Virgin and Child with St Anne’ is an excellent example. Other painters — Millet for instance — have been obsessed with a shape that constantly recurs in their work, whatever the subject may be. They were probably entirely unaware of this, but in the twentieth century painters have begun to realize the significance of such obsessional forms and to exploit them. How far this has been an altogether unconscious process, one cannot always be sure: did Paul Nash for example know that all but the most prosaic of his paintings are full of forms with a manifestly sexual implication?

    It is the investigation of these primitive forms that occupies many painters in England and abroad today. Much modern art is the result of a stripping down to essentials, and an inquiry into one particular thing at the expense of everything else, so that one finds in a Turnbull painting apparently nothing but one colour plane meeting another. It is not easy to say very much about this kind of art because of its newness: our verbal concepts about it are still in the process of being formed. There is little help to be gained from the psychologists and physiologists who can offer no totally convincing explanation for the fact that the simplest of shapes excite and interest the spectator who can share something of the artist’s feelings when he painted his picture.

    Again, as one would expect, artists pursuing such a course differ widely in their own interpretations of what they are doing. Victor Pasmore says he is making a new pictorial language; for him abstract form is ‘a new tool for human expression and human development, which has emerged at a point of crisis in the evolution of the human mind when traditional techniques are proving inadequate’. William Scott hopes to embody in his forms ‘deeply buried elemental truths about life’; Roger Hilton regards the artist as someone tapping mysterious sources of truth, searching for a more profound reality beneath appearances. Alan Davie is striving for spiritual illumination, and in his art, from a conflict between chaos and order, clear-cut images emerge. In much of the work of these artists, forms are often recognizably male and female, and this is hardly surprising, but more one hesitates to say. The content of the painting and the form have become one, an indivisible unity that provides the culmination of the slow process of breaking down the division between the subject matter and the abstract qualities in painting.

    It seems likely that no rational explanation will be forthcoming for the emotional power of paintings of this kind. They have a different meaning for different people, and no doubt one should learn to use them to fill one’s own particular needs. I imagine that one turns to art to intensify and deepen one’s own experiences, and this may be a search for consolation or excitement or for anything else. The work of Britain’s painters today has much to offer: as many important names have been left unmentioned as have been discussed, and there is I believe a vitality and an abundant variety that is without parallel in the history of British art. Once familiar with its aspirations, one finds that the art of one’s contemporaries has, for obvious reasons, an immediate relevance that the art of another time or another place altogether lacks. It is more attuned to the age we live in, a commentary on the situation of the present: nobody will understand it better than those of us who learn to appreciate it today.