Robert Medley, a centenary celebration at James Hyman Fine Art 2005

Date: 18-12-2005
Owning Institution: James Hyman Fine Art, London
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2012    
Subject:   20th Century      

Tomorrow marks the centenary of the birth of the English painter Robert Medley. Medley, who lived to the ripe age of ninety-five, is something of a forgotten figure, although that may be about to change. Plans are afoot for a retrospective of his work at the Royal Academy; meanwhile, James Hyman Fine Art in London is currently showing a selection of his paintings, principally from the early 1960s, in a small exhibition intended to celebrate what would have been the painter’s hundredth birthday.

Medley was a distinguished and sympathetic teacher – the catalogue to the present exhibition contains a number of tributes from those whom he taught, including David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj – as well as a highly regarded artist in his own right. He has faded from view, unlike a number of English painters with whom he was once frequently compared, such as Peter Lanyon and Terry Frost, largely perhaps because no dealer or gallery has, until now, represented his estate. But on the evidence of the work assembled by James Hyman, would-be reviver of his reputation, Medley is a painter worth rediscovering.

He was born in London in 1905 and educated at Gresham’s school in Norfolk, where he presciently encouraged his fellow pupil W.H. Auden to write poetry. The pair remained lifelong friends. Medley subsequently went on to study fine art, first at the Byam Shaw School of Art and then at the Slade, under Henry Tonks, whose teaching he found uncongenial. He later claimed that his real education in painting came from conversations with Roger Fry and from first-hand experience of the work of Cezanne, Matisse and Bonnard. Like his close contemporary Francis Bacon, he spent much time in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s; and like Bacon, he was a relatively late developer. Unsure of which direction to follow, he worked extensively in the theatre. He frequently collaborated with his longtime lover, the dancer and choreographer Rupert Doone, designing the costumes, lighting and sets for numerous London productions – for Auden’s “Dance of Death”, for Auden and Isherwood’s “The Dog Beneath the Skin” and for Benjamin Britten’s “Timon of Athens”, among others. He read the works of Karl Marx and wrote on social problems including, among other things, the plight of Welsh miners. In his work as a painter, he flirted with Surrealist fantasy and with a form of social expressionism, but remained dissatisfied with the results. His career as an artist was further disrupted by the Second World War.

It was only in the 1950s that he began to find a way of painting that satisfied his fastidious sensibility and his high sense of self-expectation; and it was only in the early 1960s that recognition first came his way – in the form of a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, staged by the most dynamic and influential English curator of that time, Bryan Robertson. Robertson alluded to the slow gestation of Medley’s painting in his preface to the catalogue of that exhibition: “It has taken Medley almost thirty years to realise, with proper confidence, that he is not a visual painter in the usual sense of the phrase but an abstract-philosophical painter concerned with the shifting convolutions of space, time and memory.”

It is on the work of this period of Medley’s career that the current exhibition at James Hyman Fine Art focusses. As a measure of the distance travelled by the artist, during a relatively short compass of time, a work from 1959 entitled Studio Interior has also been included. This is an impressively austere view of the artist’s studio, complete with easels and a ladder propped against the far wall, although hardly a literal representation. Forms seem to shift and swim before the eye, details rendered in a haze of sparkling colours, with space suggested rather than delineated by a network of cursive lines. Perhaps the picture is a kind of self-portrait, or a picture of Medley’s state of mind at the end of the 1950s, when he was on the brink of reinventing himself. He sees the studio as a place of flux, with no fixed points of reference.

The other, only slightly later works on display depart yet more boldly from conventional representational languages of painting. Formed from wonky abutting shapes set adrift on fields of colour, and enlivened by traceries of dense line, they are none the less full of hints and glimmers of figurative reference. The ambiguities of Yellow Figuration I (1964) seem to disclose a kind of drama or mythical confrontation of the kind often painted by J.M.W. Turner. A square-headed figure, reconceived as a shattered, kaleidoscopic jumble of wedge-like arms and legs, plunges itself into the mystery of an eggyolk-yellow sun. Untitled (1967) pitches an arabesque of lines, seemingly drawn with the stub end of the brush, into a geometrical structure of squares and rectangles unevenly decorated with touches of cool and elegant colour – silvery greys, lemon yellow, tan, olive green. The flurry of line at the heart of the composition resembles a pair of embracing male figures. This urgent but laconic painting suggests homosexual passions, hidden or constricted by an unwelcoming environment.

Medley was painting these pictures in the immediate aftermath of the first series of exhibitions, in London, of the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and their contemporaries in the New York School. He wrote of the liberating effect that seeing American Abstract Expressionist painting had on his own work, although he never believed that paint and gesture alone might constitute a meaningful work of art. “I was completely committed to the idea that paintings had to have a subject – the concept that the picture was itself the subject did not strike me at the time as convincing. I was able therefore to take what I needed from the example of the New York painters: it gave me the courage to proceed towards further abstractions of my own by ruthlessly eliminating unnecessary descriptions.”

Medley was never so ruthless as to eliminate all description. Although his pictures often intrigue they always suggest some pathway or pointer to the subject that originally triggered them. Players (1967) is a flurry of blurred forms, a maelstrom of shape and colour that evokes, simultaneously, a mob scene and a game of football being watched by biomorphic spectators wearing abstract striped scarves. Bathers: Red and Green (1963) is perhaps the best picture on display, a congregation of fleshy forms, seemingly floated on to the canvas, half-materialising around a column of vivid scarlet and green. The picture resembles one of Cezanne’s paintings of bathers, but made deliberately unexplicit, subject to an abstract veiling which reflects both Medley’s sense of pictorial elegance and his reticent sensibility. This exhibition is only the tip of the iceberg of his oeuvre. It would be interesting to see more.