Oct 03, 2010 Euan Uglow, Curled nude on a stool 1982-3 Oil on canvas 30 x 39 in “Most people who have the opportunity to look for hours at one painting by Uglow find their eyes traveling over the surface, perplexed that marks, shadows and forms so limpid could crystalize conflicted emotions. Euan Uglow, who died in August 2000, was one of Britain's most distinguished contemporary painters. There have been relatively few major exhibitions of Uglow's paintings, and a review of the work this important artist is long overdue.
Condition Report: The canvas is original. There are some incredibly fine lines of craquelure to the extreme edges of the canvas at the overlap, this is particularly noticeable in the lower left quadrant along the left edge. There are some further very fine lines of craquelure scattered elsewhere, most noticeably running vertically through the centre of the canvas, only visible upon extremely close inspection. There is one particularly noticeable horizontal line of cracking above the figure's knee. There is some very light surface dirt in places, including a few spots of possible staining in the lower half of the work. The work may benefit from a light clean. This excepting the work appears to be in excellent overall condition. Inspection under ultra violet light reveals a few minor flecks of retouching which have been sensitively executed, including to the figure's legs and posterior. There are some further minor flecks elsewhere in the left and upper edges. There are also some areas of fluorescence in line with the possible staining mentioned above. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any further questions regarding the present lot. 'In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue. NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS' IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE.'
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The Waddington Galleries in London is showing 30 new pictures by one of the old masters of British art, Craigie Aitchison RA. The artist is 80, and he stoops. But his pictures are as magnificent as ever. His favourite subjects are all here: St Sebastian, crucifixions and Bedlington terriers monumentalised against backdrops of flat colour, blues as black as thunder, and yellows and greens as bright as slices of jelly.
Visiting Aitchison's house in south London is like stepping inside one of his pictures. The walls of the living room are a favourite pink. Three Bedlington terriers snore on the floor. And on a glass coffee-table are the objects you see in his still lifes: a clay whistle in the shape of a bird, a pipe-cleaner twisted into the form of a sheep.
Craigie - as even strangers call him - picks up a miniature birthday cake made of plastic. He does not want to talk about his own exhibition, but instead about one he has curated at the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath: a retrospective of Euan Uglow, who was his best friend for 50 years. Aitchison gave the toy cake to Uglow as a birthday present, and it became the subject of a still life now on show in Bath. 'I don't know how he did the icing - it's so difficult, isn't it?' Next, he wonders where he can buy candles that will fit. Uglow died six years ago, but it might be yesterday.
Uglow has been admired as one of the best figurative artists in Britain ever since the 1950s, when he was a star pupil at the Slade School of Art and a protégé of the critic David Sylvester. However, he hated to explain himself and he died an enigma to the public. The idea for the Holburne exhibition came from Andrew Lambirth, a critic who was friends with both artists. If anyone could unlock the mystery of Euan Uglow, he knew it would be Aitchison. The exhibition is a rare thing: an interpretation of one great artist by another.
Uglow himself did not enjoy exhibitions, recalls Will Darby, his dealer for three decades until his death. 'Euan only wanted to paint, and felt he couldn't waste time on exhibitions of his work.' When Lucian Freud wanted him to sit for a portrait, he refused: that, too, would be to waste time when he could be at his own easel. He could spend up to six years on a picture. As he once put it, each new painting was a visual problem to be solved: 'I'm trying to find out why a subject does look so marvellous, and trying to make that sensation manifest on a flat surface.'
I became fascinated by his work when I borrowed a tiny still life of half an apple for a museum exhibition. I cannot remember which pictures hung beside Uglow's apple - one, I think, was a self-portrait by André Derain - because week by week they receded as the apple became fresher and fresher, more and more three-dimensional. But turning to catalogues of Uglow exhibitions and newspaper profiles was frustrating. Writer after writer has described the formal qualities of his compositions, but no one explained the artist, beyond reproducing black-and-white photographs of an unsmiling man with a black beard and a baggy sweater. In interview after interview his answers began with 'No' or 'I don't think so'. All he was happy to talk about was the technical challenge of recording reality.
In consequence, critics have focused on his unique technique of measuring by means of plumb-lines in the air, tape on the floor and, sometimes, chalk marks on the models' flesh. In the pictures you see the criss-cross marks by which he transferred the measurements to the canvas. It is striking that he left the marks in the finished pictures. Are they a kind of signature, a self-conscious mannerism? Why else leave them? 'How can you lose those marks when the next second you may need them? I don't really finish a painting, it stops.'
Uglow's circle swap stories of his perfectionism. One model claimed to have posed for seven years. Six, responded Uglow: she was sick for 12 months. Another was told off for coming back from a holiday with a sun tan. Diary of a Pear (1972) might be a mockery of himself. He placed the tip of a pear at the exact centre of a perfect square, but he painted so slowly that the pear rotted, and the tip drooped. So he began a new square with a new centre point ... The finished picture - the picture as it stopped, rather - records the impossibility of his own process, with a series of marks showing where the tip had once been.
Uglow divides people, passionately. Few owners of his work ever sell, although he commands higher and higher prices - in part, because he painted fewer than 400 pictures. But there are those who find his pictures lifeless. This newspaper's critic Adrian Searle spoke for those in his review of an earlier retrospective at the Abbot Hall Gallery in Kendall in 2003: 'He lets you see all his difficulties, all those mechanical notations, the surveyor's plot-lines under the paint ... I think there is more warmth in a dusty Morandi painted pot than in most of Uglow's figures.' Baffled by Uglow's obsessive precision, he looked at photographs of the artist's studio in south London, each pose recorded by tape stuck on the floor so that when he returned to a picture his chair was not a millimetre out of place. He lived in the studio, cooking on a 1920s gas stove and sleeping in a single iron bedstead. To Searle, it was a 'monastic dedication' to a selfish ideal.
When Aitchison asked Uglow to look after his dog, Uglow notched a mark on a blackboard each time the dog wet the studio floor. And, Aitchison remembers, in his private life he had a routine so strict that on Tuesday he would buy groceries, on Wednesday play table tennis, on Thursday go to the pub, and so on.
They met in 1952, during Aitchison's first year at the Slade. Uglow was in the year above and - Craigie recalls - the 'pet' of William Coldstream, head of the school. One day Aitchison climbed to the top deck of the No 14 bus on the Tottenham Court Road. It was empty but for Uglow and his friend Myles Murphy. Who spoke first? 'Euan did. He and Myles were the stars of the school. I wouldn't dream of speaking to them.'
Uglow gave Craigie the easel at which he still paints. Craigie was Uglow's best man at his wedding. Their mothers became good friends, too, although Uglow's had been in service while Craigie's father had been the Lord Justice-Clerk of Scotland. After Lady Aitchison died, Craigie would spend Christmas with his friend's family. Mrs Uglow knitted waistcoats for Craigie, and took them out at the sides when he became a little chubbier.
They quarrelled at table tennis - for Uglow, inevitably, the angle of the net was never exactly right - but not about painting. The two were finalists in the first Jerwood Painting Prize. Aitchison won, but thinks 'the organisers muddled us up'. Of course, the two men's art is very different; all they share is a delight in bright vivid pigments sparsely applied - for each, every brushmark had to be justified - and, more significantly, a single-minded dedication to their own way of representing the world.
A dreamlike St Sebastian by Aitchison hung in Uglow's studio; over Aitchison's chimney-piece is Uglow's landscape of rooftops in Florence, a precise study of angles and shapes, inscribed 'Wishing you many happy nights at the Orange Tree', the student pub for the Slade. A second landscape Aitchison bought was stolen from his house in Italy. A third he bought for £50 in the 1950s but sold when he was short of cash. He tried to buy it back several times, but each time the new owner refused. It was recently sold in the US for a six-figure sum.
The exhibition is his opportunity to choose the pictures that best represent his friend. Although he has been working towards the Waddington show - his first since his retrospective at the Royal Academy in 2003 - he has written letter after letter, all by hand, to ask for loans, in one case to every participant in a disputed inheritance. But does a biographical approach to Uglow's work - however moving - explain the pictures?
Take Mimosa (1970-71), in which a sprig of mimosa is stuck in a jar, its yellow leaves cascading downwards. Uglow was as ungiving as ever in his public explanation: 'As far as I'm concerned, that's all about movement.' But Aitchison reveals that the sprig was taken from the funeral wreath of his own mother, who had been deeply fond of Uglow. A year to the day after her death, Uglow knocked without warning at the door of Craigie's house in Kennington. It was the only occasion that Uglow ever interrupted his routine. 'Let's go to Covent Garden,' he suggested, and the two spent the day walking around. But Uglow never once mentioned Lady Aitchison. 'That's just how he was.'
It is impossible to look at Mimosa in the same light again - or A Tongue for Rudi (1997), when we know that the boiled oxtongue in the still life was the favourite supper of a close friend, and painted in response to his death. To Craigie, the key to Uglow is not those marks visible on the canvas but how he suppressed - and metamorphosed - emotion.
One of Uglow's many models told me how, brought up in the far east, she could only compare his need for control to that of a Japanese patriarch. But for her, as for Craigie, his discipline did not represent a coldness of character. Rather, it was the opposite: he created a system of discipline in order to protect himself from his own emotions, whether in or out of the studio. After several months, she recalls, she was bored of posing. She knew that Uglow had sometimes had relationships with models, but only when the painting had ended: any sooner, and it would unbalance the picture. 'So I decided to seduce him. I knew that if he became involved with you he became emotional, and that if he was emotional he could not get the picture right. It worked. We went to bed, and he gave up on the picture.' When Adrian Searle looked at photographs of Uglow's studio, he interpreted the iron single bed in the background as the symbol of a kind of self-absorbed asceticism. 'But do you know which book he kept under his pillow?' continues the model. 'The Charterhouse of Parma.' That is not just any old classic: it is the novel of middle-aged Romantics. The Sicilian writer Tommasi di Lampedusa once wrote that no man under 40 can get the point of Stendhal's story; once a man turns 40, however, it is the most meaningful book in the world.
It is surely that tension between discipline and emotiveness which gives Uglow's pictures their intensity. And it is an exceptional intensity, in which months at the easel make a moment of seeing timeless - a moment that could be, as he put it, 'a kind of flashed image on the retina'.
At the Holburne, Craigie is choosing their sequence. 'Higher,' he says, indicating with his walking stick: 'That's the height Euan would have wanted.' A centrepiece is a landscape of a white dome of a church against a deep blue sky, painted in Cyprus in the open air. When farmers began to build a greenhouse that obstructed his view, Uglow persuaded them to stop until he had finished.
'It's just perfect in every way, isn't it?' is Aitchison's only comment on The Church by the Sea. 'I can't say anything about it - it's perfect.' And what would Uglow say about the exhibition he has curated? 'Oh, he'd say, 'Craigie's chosen all the wrong pictures.'
· Euan Uglow: A Personal Choice by Craigie Aitchison is at the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath (01225 466669), today, then from January 9-28
· Craigie Aitchison is at the Waddington Galleries, London W1 (020-7851 2200), until December 22