MC Escher: 'Only Those Who Attempt the Absurd will Achieve the Impossible’

'We adore chaos because we love to produce order.'
MC Escher

I recently watched a film documenting the life and work of Dutch graphic artist MC Escher (2018’s ‘Journey to Infinity’ by Robin Lutz).

‘I don’t belong anywhere any more…I hover between mathematics and art.’

Through his drawings, lithographs and woodcuts, Escher prompted us to reflect on perspective and perception; dreams and reality; order and chaos. Through his mesmerising tessellations and fantastical landscapes; impossible objects and implausible architecture, he bridged the divide between art and mathematics. His was a playful world of visual paradox, magical metamorphoses and infinite possibility. He cultivated a sense of wonder.

'Wonder is the salt of the earth. Originality is merely an illusion.’

M. C. Escher tessellation

1. ‘Enjoy the Tiniest Details’.

In 1898 Maurits Escher was born into a wealthy family in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. He was a sickly child and struggled at school. But he was always good at drawing. 

‘The only bright spots are the drawing lessons. Not because I am any good at it, but because it’s my only comfort during this awful time.’

Escher attended the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts. Still suffering from weak health, in 1922 he set off on a recuperative trip through Italy, visiting Tuscany and the Amalfi Coast. It seemed to do him some good.

‘I cannot describe the curious feeling this lovely beauty gives me. My poor eyes are straining and my poor brain is trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Rarely if ever have I felt so calm, pleasant and comfortable than lately.’

In Italy Escher created richly detailed drawings of hilltop towns and seaside communities; houses clustering around imposing churches; monasteries nestling alongside monumental mountain rocks.

On his travels Escher also met Jetta Umiker, whom he married in 1924. 

‘She exerts an influence on me similar to that of an electromagnet on a scrappy piece of cast iron.’

The young couple settled in Rome from where Escher continued to make study trips. He was beguiled by the beautiful intricacies of nature.

‘I want to learn to look and see better whilst I am drawing. I want to enjoy the tiniest details…With your nose right on top of [a small plant] you see all of its beauty and all of its simplicity. But when you start drawing only then do you realise how terribly complicated and shapeless that beauty really is.’

2. Be Open to Inspiration

Escher travelled to Spain where he was particularly inspired by the fourteenth-century Alhambra palace in Granada. He was fascinated by the Moorish architecture, the intricate decorative designs on the walls and ceilings, the coloured tiles with their infinite variety of geometric patterns.

‘What fascinates me in the tiles of the Alhambra is the discovery of a motif that repeats itself according to a certain system.’

Escher determined that Moorish tessellation could provide the basis for a new direction for his art. But, in contrast with the designs he had studied at the Alhambra, his would accommodate wildlife.

‘What a pity the Moors didn’t use figures derived from nature.’

Starting with a series of geometric grids, Escher created complex configurations of interlocking birds and butterflies; intertwining fish and reptiles; intersecting lizards in red, green and white. His work explored the mesmeric effects of pattern and repetition, the relationship between space and time. 

‘I began to see the possibilities offered by the regular division of the plane. For the first time I dared to create compositions based on the problem of expressing endlessness within a limited plane.’

3. Follow your Passion No Matter What Others May Think

Escher was increasingly drawn to think of his art in mathematical terms. In this respect he felt a fellowship with Bach.

‘I am smitten by Bach’s music. A short motif that repeats itself in various ways – identically in a different key, back to front or upside down. They’re almost mathematical figures.’

Escher pressed on in pursuit of his passion, even though he was unsure whether what he was creating was art at all.

‘The mathematical interest is becoming so dominant that I am wondering whether it is still trying to be art and whether it even belongs in an art exhibition.’

Escher’s colleagues and companions were not impressed with his new direction.

‘Deeply saddening and hangover-inducing remains the fact that I’m starting to speak a language that is understood by very few people.’

4. Cultivate a Sense of Wonder

Gradually the political climate in Italy under Mussolini became more toxic. In 1935, when his nine-year-old son was obliged to wear a military uniform to school, Escher moved his family to Switzerland. Later they decamped to Brussels and finally, in 1941, they settled in Baarn, the Netherlands.

'What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness.'

As the Second World War closed in around them, Escher focused single-mindedly on his work. His designs became more and more inventive. Drawing on childhood games of word association, he let his imagination run free.

'My work is a game, a very serious game.'

A river flows from day to night. A flock of black birds emerge magically from white fields, while white birds flying in the opposite direction appear mysteriously from dark farmland. Reptiles rise up from a two-dimensional picture, crawling across a series of three-dimensional objects before re-entering the picture once more. A waterfall is in perpetual motion. Two faces are formed from one continuous ribbon. A hand draws itself. An endless series of faceless figures rush downstairs, passing a continuous stream of characters running upstairs at different angles.

Day and Night (1938)

'Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?'

Escher created magical, slightly disturbing worlds that prompt us to question our notions of reality and illusion, order and chaos. He was driven by a sense of wonder.

'He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonderful.'

5. Be Your Hardest Taskmaster and Your Harshest Critic

Of course, although Escher’s work was playful and imaginative, it required an innate gift for mathematics and a phenomenal eye for detail.

‘It is really only a matter of dogged persistence and continuous pitiless self criticism.’

Escher was motivated by a fierce desire to attempt the impossible.

‘Any schoolboy with a little aptitude will perhaps be better at drawing than I am. But what he most often lacks is the tough yearning for realisation, the teeth-grinding stubbornness, and saying: even though I know I cannot do it, I want to do it anyway.’

6. Pursue a Vision that Cannot Be Realised

In the 1960s Escher was surprised to find his work enthusiastically adopted by the counterculture in the west coast of the United States.

‘What on earth does this young generation see in my work? Doesn’t it lack all the qualities that are hip these days? It is cerebral and rationalised instead of wild and sexy. And how can they reconcile it with their addiction to narcotics?’

So Escher wasn’t impressed when Mick Jagger asked for an image to use on an album cover.

‘Please tell Mr Jagger that I am not Maurits to him, but, very sincerely, MC Escher.’

In 1969 Escher finished his last woodcut, ‘Snakes’, in which three serpents wind through a pattern of linked rings that shrink to infinity. He died in a hospital in Hilversum in 1972, aged 73.

Portrait of M.C. Escher by Nikki Arai

'Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible…. I think it's in my basement... Let me go upstairs and check.’

Escher’s designs should resonate with people in the business of brands and communication. We too work with pattern, rhythm and repetition, bridging the fields of art and mathematics, endeavouring to create a sense of wonder in our audiences. We would do well to embrace something of Escher’s dogged persistence, his childlike playfulness and his relentless quest for the impossible. 

‘I always pursue a vision that cannot be realised.’

'As around the sun the earth knows she's revolving,
And the rosebuds know to bloom in early May.
Just as hate knows love's the cure,
You can rest your mind assure,
That I'll be loving you always.’
Stevie Wonder, ‘As'

No. 372

Gentle Grip Socks: Answering the Questions That Haven’t Been Asked

'I see my path, but I don't know where it leads. Not knowing where I'm going is what inspires me to travel it.’
Rosalia de Castro

On a dull Tuesday afternoon I was wandering around the sock department of my local Marks & Spencer - with a view to stocking up, so to speak.

It was all rather confusing.

Did I want Egyptian cotton, organic cotton or just cotton-rich? Merino wool or lambswool perhaps? Did I need thermal socks, sport socks or slipper socks? Would I like dots or stripes or sea-life emblems? Would I prefer them long or cushioned? Maybe a special finish? Freshfeet TM or Cool and Fresh TM? The latter, I discovered, ‘draws moisture away from the skin, while a peppermint oil-based finish fights bacteria to prevent odours.’ Blimey.

Then suddenly I spotted a small section dedicated to Gentle Grip socks. 

I had not heard of this category before. And yet, as I inspected the explanatory literature, I sensed a sharp pain in my ankles. The elastic in my incumbent, rather run-of-the-mill, socks was squeezing my flesh like a tourniquet. I could feel the blood struggling to flow properly. My calves were bursting. 

At that particular moment there was nothing I wanted more in the world than Gentle Grip socks. 

In a wave of enthusiasm I invested in a number of pairs, in sober shades of blue and grey (no sea-life emblems). And I rushed back home to try them on. 

My Gentle Grip socks seemed instantly considerate and calming. As I carefully pulled them over my heels and up, they gave my ankles a firm caress, a reassuring embrace. And they were secure - sufficient to stay in place, but not so tight as to cause any discomfort or leave a mark.

This was a revolution in my sock drawer.

'Knowing what you want is the first step toward getting it.'
Mae West

Perhaps there is a lesson for us all here.

My Marks & Spencer Gentle Grip socks solved a problem I didn’t know I had. They answered a question I wasn’t asking.

Too often in business we take a literal and linear approach to innovation. We commission research and ask consumers their needs and desires; their nagging problems, their hopes and aspirations. And then we set about addressing them.

But sometimes the public don’t know what they need and can’t articulate what they want. They don’t envisage a superior product or improved service. And this can set limits on innovation.

'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’
Henry Ford

Category leading brands anticipate change. They have an expert understanding of what technology makes possible, and an instinctive feel for where tastes and preferences are heading. Predicting tomorrow’s demands and passions, they surprise and delight. By inventing Gentle Grip socks, for instance.

The best brands imagine the future, rather than delivering it to order.

'A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.'
Steve Jobs

'I like the dimple in your chin.
I like the tricky way you grin.
Still you ain't no kind of cat.
(You know why, don't you?)
Boy, your socks don't match!’
Louis Jordan and Bing Crosby, ‘Your Socks Don’t Match' (L Corday / L Carr)

No. 371

The Aftermath: How Postwar Artists in Britain Responded to Collective Experience

Full Stop (1961) The Estate of John Latham/Tate 

‘Am I standing on my head, or is the world upside down?’
Franciszka Themerson

I recently visited an excellent exhibition of art created in Britain in the wake of the Second World War. (‘Postwar Modern’ is at the Barbican, London until 26 June.)

The show features the work of 48 artists: paintings, sculpture, photography, collage and installations. We witness how, over a twenty-year period, a creative community responded to the world around it - initially with shock and horror at the recent past, and then with growing confidence about future possibilities.

On entering the first gallery, we are greeted by a sombre symphony in black. There’s an agonised Christ on the cross by Francis Newton Souza. There are the vaporized heads of Eduardo Paolozzi. And there’s a big bleak ‘Full Stop’ by John Latham – like a bullet wound or an eclipsed planet or a black hole. 

It’s grim stuff.

Perhaps that’s entirely understandable, given the upheaval and destruction that people had witnessed. The war had blitzed cities and blown away certainties, leaving an anxious world under a nuclear cloud. Britain had become a home for refugees from Nazism and migrants from its now crumbling empire.

‘The 1950s found most of us in London, each of us independently examining the images left in our minds and souls in the aftermath of World War II. In some sense we felt that new images might help us to prevent the repetition of the inhuman and unseemly past. It was with some excitement, then, that we approached the new and tried to erase the old.’
Magda Cordell

Artists depicted the dereliction, damage and decay that they saw all around them. William Turnbull, who had been a fighter pilot, created desolate relief landscapes in bronze. Bill Hardy photographed kids playing in urban bombsites. Elizabeth Frink sculpted strange, monstrous, menacing birds. 

‘They actually became something else…They became like bits of shrapnel and flying things…with very sharp beaks.’
Elizabeth Frink

There are not many portraits of people here. Rather artists reconfigured the human body from abstract shapes and machine parts. Magda Cordell painted pulsating internal organs in bold crimson. Inspired by television and science fiction, John McHale imagined a family of wired cyborgs. 

‘We extend out psychic mobility. We can telescope time, move through history, span the world through visual and aural means.’
John McHale

First Contact, 1958 by John McHale

Some sought a completely new visual language, experimenting with industrial materials like sheet metal, Perspex and household paint. Mary Martin created pure white reliefs, austere, abstract geometric forms. Victor Pasmore abandoned figurative painting and threw himself into work prompted by science, geometry and mathematics. 

‘Today the whole world is shaken by the spirit of reconstruction… In painting and sculpture, as also in architecture, an entirely new language has been formed.’
Victor Pasmore

In time artists began to document the budding new society that was rising from the rubble. Jewish refugees Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff presented the city under construction, in thick layers of earth-toned paint. Eva Frankfurther portrayed ordinary workers at the Lyons Corner House, weary and pensive. Shirley Baker photographed the street life of multicultural Manchester and Roger Mayne celebrated London’s emergent youth culture – poor, but cool and fun-loving. 

‘West Indian Waitresses’ by Eva Frankfurther c1955. Photo Courtesy of the Ben Uri Gallery.

And there was a spirit of righteous rebellion in the air. Francis Bacon and David Hockney referenced their homosexuality in their work, despite the fact that it was still illegal.

‘What one must remember about some of these pictures is that they were partly propaganda of something that I felt hadn’t been propagandised… homosexuality. I felt it should be done.’
David Hockney

Gradually colours became brighter and bolder. Patrick Heron painted radiant abstract landscapes. Gillian Ayres produced intense organic shapes, full of feeling and possibility.

‘A shape – a relationship – a body – oddness – shock – mood – cramped – isolated – acid – sweet – encroaching – pivoting – fading – bruised.’
Gillian Ayres

Detail of Gillian Ayres, Break-off

And so we arrive in the ‘60s, a decade of fearless innovation and wild experimentation; of mobiles, installations, auto-creation and rotating sculptures. The shadows of the war have for the most part departed.

We often characterise artists as solitary individuals, ploughing their own furrows, expressing their own unique perspectives. But what struck me about this exhibition was the extent to which the creative community was responding, together, to the times in which they were working. These artists were challenging social norms and being challenged by collective experience. They were fully immersed in their environment.

In the sphere of commerce, brands sometimes seem to exist in their own secluded space; articulating their own particular point of view, untouched by cultural or competitive forces. This show suggests to me that brands must breathe the same air as their consumers; they must feel their anxieties, share their enthusiasms. Brands must participate in society, not stand aloof from it. 

‘Postwar Modern’ deals in the aftermath of war. Aftermath is an appropriate word. It was originally an agricultural term: ‘a second crop or new growth of grass (or occas. another plant used as feed) after the first has been mown or harvested.’(OED).

Aftermath suggests rebirth and renewal. Even in the darkest times, there is hope.

'Yes, we're different, worlds apart.
We're not the same.
We laughed it away
At the start, like in a game.
You could have stayed
Outside my heart,
But in you came.
And here you'll stay,
Until it's time for you to go.’
Buffy Sainte-Marie, 'Until It's Time for You to Go'

No. 370

Robert Moses, ‘Trapped in a Dream’: How a Leader Can Go from Hero to Villain

Robert Moses, urban planner. Roosevelt Island, New York, 1959.Credit...Arnold Newman/Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery

Moses: The dynamo of capitalism is restlessness. Nothing is ever enough. For us, nothing is ever settled. We are always on the move.

I recently watched ‘Straight Line Crazy,’ a fine new David Hare play about the urban planner Robert Moses. (The Bridge Theatre, London until 18 June)

Moses: Once Americans cease to believe they can remake America better, then it ceases to be America.

Though he was never elected to any public office, Moses was often described as the most powerful man in New York. As head of the New York City and Long Island State Parks Commissions between 1924 and 1963 (along with holding many other official roles), he built a system of 627 miles of expressway, connecting the city to the great outdoors. He created bridges, parks and swimming pools.He led the construction of the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs in New York and helped persuade the United Nations to locate its headquarters in Manhattan. 

Moses: A leader makes the mood, he’s not a victim of it.

Moses began his career with an avowed intent to improve the lives of ordinary city dwellers. But he ended it a pariah - criticised for the destruction of communities to make way for his road schemes; for his unwavering commitment to the car; for his refusal to embrace mass transit; for his disregard for public opinion.

Moses: Your principal error is this: to imagine that the people’s views are of any importance at all…We must advance their fortunes without having any respect for their opinions.

Moses provides a case study in how a leader’s resolute commitment to a vision can evolve into intransigence and anachronism; how a hero can over time become a villain.

Moses: People may not like me, but they need me… I’d rather be right and alone, than be soft and with other people.

Robert Moses with a model lower end of Manhattan and the bridge with which it is proposed to connect Battery Park with Brooklyn, March 1939. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

The play focuses on two significant years in Moses’ life: 1926 and 1955.

We begin with a young Moses planning a scheme to build two big expressways across Long Island. Alert to changing social needs and aspirations, he wants to give New Yorkers access to the region’s woods, open spaces and beaches.

Moses: The people have discovered a new occupation. It’s called leisure. And one day it will be as popular as work.

Long Island is peaceful, sparsely populated and controlled by a few aristocratic families who are united in their opposition to his scheme. Moses has learnt that in order to get any project off the ground, he needs to be comfortable with confrontation and conflict.

Moses: People characteristically revolt against any innovation…Nothing worthwhile has ever been achieved without initial resistance.

Indeed Moses is prepared to press ahead with road construction ahead of attaining final sign-off.

Moses: Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up. Public work relies on one thing. Impetus… Anyone can argue about where a freeway ought to be. But it’s pretty damn hard to argue about where it is.

Moses is highly intelligent, hard working, rational and uncompromising. He has fixed views, and is particularly convinced of the liberating power of the motor car.

Moses: People like cars. You own something and you’re in control. That’s a nice feeling. When I was young, America was sitting there, like a tin can. The car was the can opener. Still is.

Though Moses is reserved, socially awkward and wary of the public stage, he is driven by a fundamentally democratic urge. 

Moses: I’m in a hurry, and I’m in a hurry to help – to help the millions out there who have no access to a good life. And if a few fences get kicked over in the process, does that really matter?

At length Moses achieves his objective on Long Island with the help of a supportive Governor, a sympathetic New York Times and an amenable judge. 

The play then leaps ahead to 1955. Moses is proposing to put a four-lane highway through Washington Square in Manhattan. The scheme will alleviate traffic congestion in the area and create horizontal routes to match the existing vertical expressways.

Moses: What kind of city have we created where roads run up and down, but nothing runs across? …It’s an offence against logic and against reason.

Moses has little regard for the impact the development will have on the local neighbourhoods.

Moses: Things must exist for a purpose. SoHo has no purpose. Vitality is dependent on function. And when function decays, so does life.

However, Moses comes up against a group of community activists, foremost amongst whom is architectural journalist and writer Jane Jacobs. She challenges his view that the automobile should drive decisions about urban development. And she thinks he is ‘straight line crazy.’

Jacobs: Mr Moses is a man under hypnosis. He got hypnotized at the age of twenty-five by two ideas and they’re both delusions. First, he has this insane idea that the answer to the problem of too many cars is more cars. And second, he’s convinced the answer to the problem of congestion on our roads is more roads.

Jacobs believes cities are vibrant, organic ecosystems that should be planned from the bottom-up. 

Jacobs as chair of a Greenwich Village civic group at a 1961 press conference

Jacobs: Cities grow up. They just happen. Bit by bit. Hand a city to the planners and they’ll make it a desert. Hand it to the people and they’ll make it habitable. Robert Moses looks at the West Village and he sees a slum. I look at the West Village and I see a healthy neighbourhood. I see life.

We realise that Moses’ forceful, top-down style of leadership, which once made him so successful, now represents an impediment. He has lost touch with public sentiment. He’s a man out of time.

Moses: The people lack imagination. The job of the leader is to provide it.

Ultimately Moses is defeated by an alliance of middle-class campaigners, political progressives and broader public opinion. In the play his long-time colleague Finnuala Connell (a fictional character) summarises the cause of his demise.

Finnuala: Once you believed in cars because you thought they would liberate people. Now you force people into cars and you force cars onto roads because you want to be vindicated. It’s no longer about the people. It’s about you…You’re stuck. You’re stuck with an idea you had thirty years ago. And you can’t move on. Is there anything worse than being trapped in a dream?

Robert Moses provides a lesson for us all. Leaders need insight into cultural change, a vision that addresses that change, a strategy to deliver and the iron will to see things through. Moses had all these capabilities. But as the world evolved, his views remained the same. What once was self-confidence became arrogance; what once was resolve became intransigence. He loved progress, but only in the direction he envisaged. He liked to regard the city from a distance, from above: all grand schemes, expansive concepts and logical systems. But the broader his perspective, the less room it had for empathy and community. And in the end he was wrong.

This does not mean however that Moses’ opponents were entirely right. At the close of the play Jacobs reflects on the fact that theirs was a hollow victory.

Jacobs: Our efforts to preserve Greenwich Village and SoHo succeeded in transforming it into the most expensive piece of real estate in the world. What was once a community was cleansed of everyone but the rich. The Village was saved, but it was also destroyed.

[If you’re interested in learning more about this subject, I’d recommend the 2016 documentary about Jane Jacobs, ‘Citizen Jane: Battle for the City’.]

'Oh, can't anybody see,
We've got a war to fight?
Never found our way,
Regardless of what they say.
How can it feel this wrong?
From this moment,
How can it feel, this wrong?’’

Portishead, ‘Roads’ (B Gibbons / A Utley / G Barrow)

No. 369

A Studio of One’s Own: Designing an Environment for Ideas

Helen Frankenthaler in 1957, photographed by Gordon Parks. © The Gordon Parks Foundation

'No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.’
Virginia Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s Own’

I recently attended an excellent exhibition examining the artist’s studio over the last one hundred years. (‘A Century of the Artist’s Studio’, curated by Iwona Blazwick, runs at the Whitechapel Gallery until 5 June.) 

Through a selection of paintings, sculptures, photographs, films and reconstructions, the show considers the diverse characteristics of a successful creative workspace.

A studio can be an attic, a loft apartment or a spare room; a shed, a farmhouse or a disused factory. It is a place for escape, reflection, experimentation and creation; a location for catalysts and stimulus, for intimate exchange; a scene for collaboration and collective effort. 

No surprise perhaps that studios often feature in artists’ work. Wheelchair-bound Frida Kahlo painted herself painting her doctor. Mequitta Ahuja depicted herself bent over her desk, deep in thought. Lucien Freud’s portraits often included his own furniture. Bruce Nauman filmed a man dancing on the perimeter of a square marked out on his workshop floor. 

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter), 2008, Acrylic on PVC panel in artist’s frame, 73 x 62.9 cm. Collection of Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III. © Kerry James Marshall.

'I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.’
Joan Miro

A painting by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham presents us with an image of a clean, well-lit studio, a blank canvas waiting at the easel. But the norm for most artists seems to have been much more chaotic. The walls of Francis Bacon’s workspace were daubed in paint, the floor strewn with passport photographs and Polaroids of lovers; with old newspapers and pages torn from magazines and medical textbooks. 

Studios are often expressions of an artist’s personality and creative style. Robert Rauschenberg’s looked like a tip, Jackson Pollock splattered paint everywhere. Here’s half-naked Picasso surrounded by his canvases, revelling in his genius.

Studios often include props and prompts for inspiration. Matisse liked to work alongside the same jugs, ornaments and textiles. Sculptor Kim Lim carefully pinned images that interested him to a board. 

'I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.’
Albert Einstein

Mequitta Ahuja, Notation, 2017 (detail). Oil on canvas, 213.4 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tiwani Contemporary.

Studios can be a hub for exchanging ideas, a centre for a creative scene. Andy Warhol’s silver walled Factory played host to parties and Velvet Underground gigs. Wolfgang Tillmans photographed his loft space after a late night event - a mess of Malboro packs, Peroni bottles and Stella cans.

But studios are also a retreat, where the artist can process thought and work things out in private. Alberto Giacometti sketched ideas on the walls. Alexander Calder’s workshop looked like a garage where he could tinker away endlessly at his mobiles.  

'When you start working, everybody is in your studio - the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas - all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.’
John Cage

The studio of Francis Bacon, ‘luminous dabs blossoming across the walls’. Photograph: Perry Ogden © The Estate of Francis Bacon All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021

For Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant the studio was their home. They painted their fireplaces, walls and screens, filled the space with their own furniture, pictures and pottery, blurring the lines between art and craft, between figurative and abstract. Kurt Schwitter turned his house in Hanover into an art installation: a magical white wooden cave of stalagmites and stalagtites. 

Kurt Schwitters’ Hanover Merzbau

'Room service? Send up a larger room.’ 
Groucho Marx

I left the exhibition reflecting that our offices are rather bland, anodyne, corporate affairs - all polite modern furniture, brightly coloured walls, ping pong tables and witty atrium displays. Not that different from our Clients’ workspaces. 

A properly creative business should be a place for stimulus and inspiration, for experimentation and discovery; a place that enables privacy and seclusion, but also congregation and exchange. Surely a creative business should have a creative environment.

At the exhibition there’s a fabulous 1957 photo of Helen Frankenthaler by Gordon Parks. Sitting on her studio floor, her head resting on one hand, she regards us with quiet confidence. She is surrounded on all sides by her paintings – big, soft and colourful; fluid, organic and abstract. Her studio seems to have become her art. It projects and protects her. It just seems to be her.

'I've really got to use my imagination
To think of good reasons
To keep on keepin’ on. 
Got to make the best of a bad situation,
Ever since that day I woke up and found
That you were gone.’
Gladys Knight & the Pips, 'I’ve Got to Use My Imagination’ (B Goldberg / G Goffin)

No.368

The Fertile Metaphor: Louise Bourgeois and ‘The Woven Child’

Louise Bourgeois: The Good Mother (detail), 2003 © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021. Photography by Christopher Burke

'I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.'
Louise Bourgeois

I recently attended a fine exhibition of the fabric art of Louise Bourgeois. (‘The Woven Child’ is at the Hayward Gallery, London until 15 May.)

The show collects the textile-based work Bourgeois created in the last two decades of her life: a multiplicity of sculptures, installations, collages and embroidery that revisit the traumas of her childhood and her complex feelings about her family. It is all the more powerful given the age of the artist and the distinctiveness of her chosen media.

‘My subject is the rawness of the emotions, the devastating effect of the emotions you go though.’

Bourgeois, born in 1911, grew up in the Parisian suburb of Choisy-le Roi, where her parents ran a workshop that repaired antique tapestries.

‘My mother would sit out in the sun and repair a tapestry or a petit point. She really loved it. This sense of reparation is very deep within me.’

Louise Bourgeois: Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), 2001

In her eighties and living in New York (which had been her home since 1938), Bourgeois took her mother’s old clothes and some of her own, and redeployed them in her art. Delicate white camisoles, underwear and nightgowns; a pale pink blouse, a red apron and a little black dress were suspended from hangers, hooks and bones, in oppressive constructed rooms and cages, accompanied by two large white marble spheres, a small model of her childhood home and lurking spiders. 

‘You can retell your life and remember your life by the shape, weight, the color, the smell of the clothes in your closet.’

These are rather disturbing domestic pieces - claustrophobic, soaked in secrets and lies; memory and loss. Bourgeois was haunted by her childhood: by her father’s brazen infidelities with a string of women, including her governess; by her sick mother’s quiet acceptance; by her own sense of impotence and confinement.

‘Sewing implies repairing. There is a hole…you have to hide the damage…you have to hide the urge to do damage. There is a background of drama here… that something bad you must have done must be undone. I sew… I do what I can.’

Bourgeois repeatedly returned to the metaphor of fabric and weaving. Throughout her work she included scissors, bobbins, threads and needles; scraps of fading tapestry. Sewing implies mending. Seams are like scars. Clothes suggest second skins. Stuffed fabric prompts associations with soft flesh and fragile emotions. 

‘The needle is used to repair the damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It’s never aggressive, it’s not a pin.’

And though her spiders seem at first sinister and threatening, for Bourgeois they represented creation, restoration and motherhood.

'The spider is a repairer. If you bash the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.’

Bourgeois made stuffed heads covered in bright, colourful material: wincing, screaming, kissing; sometimes seeming masked and gagged. The pained head of her brother Pierre, who was institutionalized with mental illness, is loosely stitched - as if to suggest he is coming apart at the seams. 

‘I had a flashback of something that never existed.’

Louise Bourgeois: Pierre

There are twisted torsos hanging limp, copulating couples, body parts sagging with age. There are embroideries of flowers and clocks, collages of abstract patterns and spider’s webs. Bourgeois arranged cushion-like shapes in neat columns, perhaps trying to impose order on a chaotic world.

‘It is a world that is not going to disappoint me because I am building it myself. I am the author of my own world with its internal logic and with its value that no one can deny.’

What particularly struck me about the exhibition was that Bourgeois had been inspired to such variety of thought and depth of feeling by one broad theme. Weaving is a fertile metaphor. 

This may resonate with those of us working in the fields of commercial creativity. When we invent brand worlds and campaign ideas, we should fully explore the opportunity for texture and nuance. A well-chosen metaphor contains layers of meaning. It suggests a diversity of interpretations. It offers rich rewards.

Louise Bourgeois

‘My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery and it has never lost its drama. I refuse to let go of that period because, painful as it was, it was life itself.’

In the late 1930s Bourgeois ran her own gallery in Paris. In 1945 she had her first solo show. In the 1950s she exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists in New York. And yet she was marginalised by the art establishment. Only gradually through the 1970s did she receive recognition, and only in 1982 was she given her first retrospective - at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

'You learn for yourself, not for others, not to show off, not to put the other one down. Learning is your secret, it is all you have, it is the only thing you can call your own. Nobody can take it away.'

Bourgeois died in 2010, aged 98. She finished her last pieces the week before. Although her work had explored pain, anxiety and loss, she consistently returned to a message of repair and restoration. We all deserve a second chance.

‘The repair of a tapestry or a costume is precisely a plea in favor of a second chance, it is a plea in favor of x and against y.’

'Back through the years
I go wonderin' once again
Back to the seasons of my youth.
I recall a box of rags that someone gave us,
And how my momma put the rags to use.
There were rags of many colors,
Every piece was small.
And I didn't have a coat,
And it was way down in the fall.
Momma sewed the rags together,
Sewin' every piece with love.
She made my coat of many colors
That I was so proud of.’

Dolly Parton, ‘Coat of Many Colors'

No. 367

Changing the Conversation: William Forsythe, Kinetic Energy and Intense Emotion

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

'I don't care so much about choreography, I care about dancing.'
William Forsythe

I recently watched a splendid double bill of William Forsythe’s dance works performed by the English National Ballet (at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London).

The American choreographer has taken the vocabulary of traditional classical ballet steps, cut it up and reconfigured it around contemporary music. In so doing, he has created dance of radiant beauty and unconfined joy.

‘You have to remember that the origins of classical ballet lie in fetes, in social celebrations. I wanted to make a celebration for today.’

Blake Works 1 is set to the mournful melodies of James Blake. Bleak romantic sentiments, articulated in luminous fragments through a fog of electronic effects. Playlist (EP) is danced with elegant precision, to the disco, house and neo-soul of Barry White, Peven Everett, Natalie Cole and others. 

'I don't live here anymore.
Put that away, and talk to me.
I'm not the only one with a fantasy.
As lonely as you feel right now,
Put that away, and talk to me.’
James Blake, 'Put That Away, and Talk To Me'

Precious Adams and James Streeter in Playlist by William Forsythe. Photograph: Laurent Liotardo

Twenty, and then more than thirty, dancers of extraordinary athleticism occupy the stage, the women in fuchsia pink, the men in claret and blue. They are together as one, relishing their own technique, all high kicks and long extensions, carefree and yet in crisp time - and with the occasional playful flourish. It’s completely dazzling, entirely exhilarating.

‘All these dancers are Olympic-level athletes, truly Olympian.’

Some years ago I attended a party where there was a group of ballet dancers on their night off. As the sounds of Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King and Shalamar boomed out from the stereo, they took to the floor. They were, of course, nimble and refined. But they were also deliberate, accurate, controlled. No mindless swaying or primal boogie for them. They were not lost in music; they were consciously inhabiting it. And this is what made them so compelling to watch. 

'It’s intellectual and it’s physical. In other words, you use your body to solve problems, and these problems are basically physics problems.’

In an interview with Sarah Crompton of The Times, Forsythe, now 72, explained how he approached his iconic 1987 work, ‘In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated.’

‘The ballet steps were the alphabet. What I did was put them in novel arrangements, taking them out of their usual sequences. Basically, I was surprising the expert reader. That’s how I changed the conversation.’

I like the analogy of changing the conversation. We all sometimes find ourselves, at work and play, trapped in discussions that are tedious, familiar, irrelevant. Often we sit passively in silence, feeling frustrated, constrained by a sense of impotence and inertia. But it is possible to shift the direction of a discourse: by bridging to another theme, by raising a seductive subject, by proposing an amusing gambit. It just takes skill, timing and courage.

Brands too should recognise that they don’t have to accept the codes and customs of their sector. If they are innovative and seditious - if they have a genuinely fresh perspective - then they can rewrite the language, reframe the dialogue and create a new set of conventions. Bold brands change the conversation.

As Forsythe suggests, we experience more intense emotions when we move.

'As human beings we're a little bit more inclined to feel an intensity when we’re involved in any kind of kinesis.’

‘You can suffer me to lay it on the line,
How I feel, though you can see it in my eyes.
Think about you when I see you stuck in time.
Freeze on the mind, neon devotion.
I never ever try to hide the way I feel.
You know I can’t resist that private sex appeal,
All that you reveal for me.
Surely, surely, surely you know,
You’re what I want.’
Peven Everett, ‘Surely Shorty’

No. 366

Andre Leon Talley: ‘The Past Is Always in the Present’



André Leon Talley: Photo: Squire Fox/August

‘I don’t live for fashion. I live for beauty and style.’
Andre Leon Talley

On the death earlier this year of fashion journalist, editor and stylist Andre Leon Talley, I watched the 2017 documentary ‘The Gospel According to Andre’ (directed by Kate Novack).

'People need to be edited. Life needs to be edited. I need to be edited.'

Talley was a tastemaker, a raconteur, a permanent fixture at catwalk shows for more than four decades. He was the creative director of US Vogue, a close confidant of Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld and Paloma Picasso, a style consultant to Michelle Obama. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of fashion history and he drew on an extraordinary breadth of cultural references. He was a rare Black man in a predominantly white world. 

‘Andre is one of the last of those great editors who know what they’re looking at, know what they’re seeing, know where it came from.’
Tom Ford
We can learn a great deal from Talley’s journey to the top of the fashion runway.

1. ‘You Can Be Aristocratic Without Having Been Born into an Aristocratic Family’

‘It was an amazing life based on narrative and anecdotes.’

Born in Washington DC in 1948, Talley was raised by his grandmother, Binnie Francis Davis, in Durham, North Carolina. Davis, for 50 years a cleaner at nearby Duke University, was a stylish woman with exacting standards.

‘My grandmother taught me about dignity and values and striving for excellence; rigour, discipline, maintenance; cleanliness next to godliness. It’s aristocratic in the highest sense of the word. You can be aristocratic without having been born into an aristocratic family.’

Highlight of the week for the young Talley was the fashion parade that he witnessed at his local church.

‘Going to church was the most important thing in life. Getting up and getting dressed to go to church on Sunday.’

Aged nine Talley discovered Vogue in the Durham public library. The magazine opened the door to a romantic world of elegance, taste and invention. He read it avidly, tore pages out and stuck them on his bedroom walls. 

‘My escape from reality was Vogue magazine…  It made me think about style, culture, poetry, music, beauty.’

Talley and Diana Ross dancing

2. ‘Success is the Best Revenge’

Growing up in the segregated South, racism was a daily reality. Talley remembered how at Jo Belles store in Durham only the Black women were asked to wear protective veils when they tried on the hats. On one occasion, walking to collect his copy of Vogue from a newsstand on the white side of town, he was pelted with stones by a group of students.

At all-Black Hillside High School, Talley was taught that ‘success is the best revenge.’

‘Excellence without an excuse.’
‘You couldn’t be good. You had to be better.’

Enchanted by the way chef Julia Child said ‘Bon appetit!’ on her TV cookery show, Talley gravitated towards French culture. He studied French Literature at North Carolina Central University and went on to earn a scholarship in the same subject at Brown University, where he graduated with a Masters in 1972. 

‘I knew I had to get out of Durham… Brown gave me a freedom, a liberation and propelled me into the world that I know.’

3. ’The Past Is Always In the Present'

While at Brown, Talley socialised with students from the Rhode Island School of Design and wrote about its vibrant fashion set for the college magazine. 

‘Luxury is in your mind.’

Through his new connections, in 1974 Talley attained an apprenticeship with Diana Vreeland, legendary former editor-in-chief at US Vogue, who was then curating exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute. The two struck up a close rapport.

‘She taught me the language of clothes, the language of style.’

At the Costume Institute Talley learned that an understanding of history is the foundation for an understanding of fashion. In years to come his commentary on catwalk shows was embroidered with diverse references: Beau Brummell, Oscar Wilde and Lady Ottoline Morrell; Josephine Baker, Madame Gres, Visconti and Dorothy Dandridge; Tsarist Russia, Belle Epoque Paris and Swinging London. 

'I take my story with me wherever I go. The past is always in the present.'

Photo By PL Gould/ Getty Images

4. ‘Dare to Be Daring’

Soon Vreeland had secured Talley a receptionist’s job at Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. He found himself at the heart of ‘70s New York’s decadent social scene.

‘The word promiscuous doesn’t begin to touch it. We thought sex was good for you – like orange juice.’ 
Fran Lebowitz

Talley’s role at Interview gave him access to a galaxy of creative stars: Calvin Klein, Gianni Versace, Stephen Burrows, Anna Piaggi, Pat Cleveland.  

‘I was inspired by people who dared to be daring.’

5. ‘See the World through the Kaleidoscope Eyes of a Child’

In 1975 Talley interviewed Karl Lagerfeld and impressed the designer with his knowledge and research. He subsequently secured a job at Women's Wear Daily, becoming in 1978 its Paris bureau chief.

6ft 7in tall, poised and elegant, Talley cut a dash on the Paris scene. He made extravagant gestures and dressed flamboyantly in shorts, seersucker jackets, sable coats and fedora hats; pinstripe suits, silk scarves, turbans and trenchcoats.

Talley: Fashion should have more joie de vivre.
Interviewer: But why don’t we see it on the street?
Talley: Darling, it depends on which street you’re walking on…and what time of day it is.

Admitted to the inner circle of Yves Saint Laurent and fluent in the local language, Talley thrived in the French capital.

‘You have to see the world through the kaleidoscope eyes of a child and just be in awe of everything.’

6. ‘Make People Feel the Dream’

In 1983 Talley joined US Vogue where he soon established a decades-long partnership with editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour. He was promoted from news editor to creative editor to editor-at-large.

Wintour recognised the value of Talley’s familiarity with fashion heritage.

‘My fashion history is not so great, and his is impeccable, so I think I learnt a lot from him.'
Anna Wintour

Talley wrote articles, arranged shoots, brokered interviews and negotiated covers. He had an instinct for the zeitgeist and a natural ability to communicate his love of clothes to a broader public.

‘No one really needs another handbag or another sweater or another coat. It has to be emotional. And Andre could always make people feel that dream and feel that emotion.’
Anna Wintour

After his grandmother’s death in 1989 Talley struggled with his weight. He increasingly wore the theatrical capes and kaftans that became his trademark. In 2013 he finally left Vogue and withdrew to his home in White Plains.  Believing that he had been frozen out by Wintour - for being ‘too old, too overweight, too uncool’ - he hit back in a 2020 memoir, ‘The Chiffon Trenches’. He died of a heart attack aged 73.

‘You have to hydrate yourself with beauty and luxury and style.’

Andre Leon Talley rose to the top of his profession through prodigious talent and mental toughness. He was a luminous character - funny, intelligent and bold - a passionate advocate for the power of fashion to uplift the soul.

‘Voltaire says one must cultivate one’s own garden… You must cultivate your own aesthetic and your own universe. Create your own universe and share it with people you respect and love.’

Above all Talley teaches us that, even in the most cutting edge contemporary spheres of work and life, the past sheds light on the present. 

As author Michael Crichton has observed:
'If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.'

John Lamparski - Getty Images

'My mama told me, she said, "Son, please beware
There's this thing called love, and it's everywhere."
And she told me it can break your heart
And put you in misery. 
Since I met this little woman I feel it's happened to me,
And I'm tellin' you
It's too late to turn back now.
I believe, I believe, I believe I'm falling in love.
It's too late to turn back now
I believe, I believe, I believe I'm falling in love.’

The Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose, 'Too Late to Turn Back Now’ (E Cornileus)

No. 365

‘My Nails Are Longer Than My Future’: ‘Our Generation’ and the Power of Verbatim Reporting

'They make you remember so much things. And it’s just like a waste of brain space. Yeah, like my brain’s only thirty-two GB.’

I recently watched ‘Our Generation,’ a fine play articulating the perspectives of contemporary teenagers. (The National Theatre, London, until 9 April, and then the Chichester Festival Theatre, 22 April to 14 May.)

‘If I-I don’t get my top grades I’m just gonna go into policing. I feel like I’m good at investigating like when something goes on at home. I’m very good at solving the crime.’

Over a five-year period Alecky Blythe and her team of ‘collectors’ interviewed twelve young people in London, Birmingham, Northamptonshire, Anglesey, Glasgow and Belfast. She then edited these testimonies into a tapestry of the concerns, obsessions, fears and fantasies of a generation. The teenagers are played by talented actors who retain the hesitations, repetitions and deviations of the source material.

‘I switched, um, friends groups. Er, I’m hanging more round with Sienna, cos like, Sienna’s a quiet girl and she hangs around with, like, people like Amy and Charity and they’re, like, quiet people. And then, yeah cos of that, I think that if I continue hanging around with her then I will get myself into less trouble.’

The young people come across as at once charming and frustrating. They oscillate wildly from one subject to another. Sometimes they are uncannily wise and sometimes extraordinarily foolish. They worry about exams and fitting in and relationships. They dream of wealth, celebrity, America and Primark. 

'Celebrities are a big part of my life because I’ve always wanted to become one.’

‘I’ve gotta be at a hundred per cent health so I can watch Love Island.’

‘I’m not falling in love because one, I’m not allowed; two, I can’t be bothered with it; three, it never works out.’

Their worldview is naturally narrow and self-centred. And they have a tendency to catastrophize.

‘Be obsessed with yourself because you never meet anyone like yourself.’

‘I’ve stopped going out, I’ve got no friends, I’ve got no life.’

Occasionally they reveal heart-rending vulnerability. 

‘So, mm, as I got older I started realising that, you know, um, I’m not really, like, I don’t know I just feel like… I’m not pretty.’

To some extent these concerns are timeless. I recognise many of them from my own distant youth - with a pang of melancholy. But then there are also themes that are particular to the modern world.

‘I love my phone. So much. It’s my life. I’m not even lying. It’s got my whole life in it.’

‘I just need to take a picture, like, yeah? That’s my mentality, take a picture. Instagram’s gotta have a picture.’

‘I got nine’een likes on that, eighty-two on that, hundred and twenty on that, a hundred and three on that, a hundred and twenty-two on that.’

‘Maybe it’s FOMO culture; we’re constantly seeing what everyone else is doing so we wanna be involved, so we never get a break.’

‘Our Generation’ is an excellent example of what’s termed verbatim theatre. It documents the spoken words of real people, and as such it has a very particular, authentic resonance.

I have always been struck by the way verbatim text sounds so different to what we are accustomed to hearing on stage and screen. Here we are confronted with the pauses, stutters, malapropisms and grammatical errors of everyday speech. It’s raw, genuine, true.

‘I’m not accepting this. This isn’t, this isn’t, this isn’t my result. I can do much more better than this… I don’t want to be in this class any more. I made the choice. I don’t wanna be in this class.’

I began my career as a Qualitative Market Researcher. I’d go up and down the country talking to consumers about beer and boilers and baked beans. When we presented our findings, I tried to impress my Clients with my insight, analysis and eloquence. One day I realised that the Clients were not that interested in my intellect. They were, however, fascinated by the occasional direct quotes that I inserted into the debrief. Suddenly they looked up and leaned in. These verbatim statements put the consumer in the room - unfiltered, unmediated, unvarnished. When subsequently we were able to video respondents, the effect was enhanced still further.

‘I don’t like to think about my future, like ever. I literally haven’t thought about what I’m gonna eat for dinner.’

I had to come to terms with the fact that real people articulating their opinions in their own voice are more compelling than my interpretation of what real people say. Perhaps we should all endeavour, not just to report what consumers are doing and thinking – but to bring their perspectives into the room with us.

‘That wasn’t me, that was someone else.’

I left ‘Our Generation’ with a greater understanding of, and sympathy for, a much younger generation. It’s tough out there. I also emerged with a commitment to introduce a little youthful levity into the too earnest world of Middle-to-Old Age.

‘I don’t want to be like serious adult then have serious children and have serious future in a serious house and serious everything.’

‘It's a rap race, with a fast pace.
Concrete words, abstract words,
Crazy words and lying words.
Hazy words and dying words,
Words of faith, tell me straight.
Rare words and swear words,
Good words and bad words.
What are words worth?
What are words worth? Words.’

Tom Tom Club, ‘Wordy Rappinghood’ (C Frantz Christopher / S Stanley) 

No. 364

The Odd Couple: What Warhol and Basquiat Teach Us About Collaboration

Andy: We’re very different…You’re all spontaneous and wild and so deep and mystical… and I’m still a commercial illustrator really, a photographer, obsessed with the surface of things.

I recently enjoyed ‘The Collaboration’, a play by Anthony McCarten that explores the period in the mid-1980s when artists Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat worked together.

We open in a New York gallery. Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger is expressing to Warhol his concern that the output of the celebrated master of Pop Art is becoming rather familiar.

Bruno: I mean all the brand names, the icons, reinterpreting things we see or use everyday. Everything silkscreened. As great as they are, they’re expected from you now. Forgive me, but when was the last time you picked up a brush and actually painted?

The ageing Warhol has not been focusing on his work. Rather he has been hanging out at Studio 54, partying with aristocrats, models, actors and rock stars. Bischofberger proposes a collaboration with hot young talent, Basquiat.

Bruno: It might be good for you, Andy. You can learn a lot from the young.

In the next scene Bischofberger puts the idea of a collaboration to a sceptical Basquiat.

Bruno: This could be incredible for you, Jean. Your name linked, as equals, with the most famous living painter in the world.

Jean: Is he living?

At length Warhol and Basquiat are persuaded. They begin work together, hesitantly at first. 

Warhol is cool, cautious and considered. Basquiat is daring, instinctive, fluid. Warhol sets up his tracing projector machine and sketches the outline of the General Electric logo. Basquiat adds bold blocks of colour, enigmatic scrawls and a smiling figure with its arms in the air. 

As they apply themselves to the task, they discuss their differing views of art. 

Warhol explains his fascination with commerce.

Andy: One of the things I hope history will remember me for, if there’s any justice, is that I’ve broken down the walls between business and art. Business is art, it’s the best art. And art has always been business. It’s all commerce now.

Warhol also rebuts the criticism that his work lacks passion.

Andy: I am commentating. In a neutral way. No one ever gets this, but I’m trying to make art that forces you to ignore it…the same way we’re ignoring life.

Basquiat, by contrast, believes that the best art has mystical properties.

Jean: Paintings can have supernatural power if you imbue them with them. These symbols, these images. Wherever they come from, they have a power. They’re like… incantations.

He suggests that art should have meaning and purpose.

Jean: Art should disturb the comfortable…comfort the disturbed.

Inevitably, with such contrasting opinions on their craft, there are occasional flashpoints.

Andy: I make beautiful things. Carefully. Very carefully. I produce out of what I see.

Jean: ‘Produce’? You re-produce.

Nonetheless the Odd Couple work well together. Despite their differences, or perhaps because of them, they gain energy and inspiration from each other. They revel in the exchange of ideas and approaches. They enjoy the challenge. 

Eventually Warhol picks up his brush again and paints.

Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (General Electric II)
acrylic, oil pastel and silkscreen ink on canvas

Looking back on this collaboration that took place nearly 40 years ago, one can’t help but be struck by the chasm in age, career stage, style and perspective. Warhol was world famous, but stuck in a rut. Basquiat was in the ascendant, but with a lot to learn. Warhol was concerned with brands, media and fame; with surface and repetition. His work was aloof and distant. Basquiat’s art was populated by skeletons and skulls, masks and symbols. It was vibrant, dreamlike and magical.

Jean: Don’t you need a new challenge? You can’t just screenprint your life away.

Perhaps in the world of commercial creativity we should spend more time plotting irregular collaborations. Successful team alchemy is not just a matter of putting together like-minded soul mates. It is achieved by combining diverse skillsets, temperaments and outlooks; by creating the conditions for provocation and exchange, discovery and inspiration.

By the end of the play Warhol and Basquiat have produced enough paintings together to fill the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Bischofberger is satisfied. It’s time to move on.

Andy: I think we’re done. Don’t you? Let’s just say we are. That’s the great thing about contemporary art – who can fucken tell?

'We came the long way,
And I thought you knew,
It was the long way.
My darling, I thought you knew.
We came the long way.
So don't break my heart. 

We been through the desert
Where no water flows.
We've walked streets and highways
Where kung fu is afraid to go.
It was the long way.’

Junior Byles, ‘It Was a Long Way’ (W Boswell / J Byles)

No. 363