The Visitors' Book

Jon Lys Turner The Visitors’ Book, In Francis Bacon’s Shadow: The Lives of Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller (2016).  After a shaky start the book gains momentum and I found it very interesting, but then I would, as it features the usual  Soho and Fitzrovia suspects - many mentioned in these posts - such as John Minton,  Nina Hamnett (a good friend of Wirth-Miller) and the Two Roberts, who  frequently stayed with them.  Jankel Adler’s name keeps cropping up in many of the biographies I’ve read recently – he seems to have been influential on many of the London artists of this period and his reputation may be in need of resuscitation.   His influence on the Two Roberts, for example, is clear.  See here and here.

Wirth-Miller was from a very humble background and suffered in early life for his German ancestry – the book hints that his artistic influence on Francis Bacon may have been greater than previously recognised, the two certainly worked together in the Wivenhoe studio.  Lucian Freud hated him (he referred to him as ‘Worth Nothing’) see here.  Nevertheless, Wirth-Miller and Chopping mixed in highly privileged circles and had influential friends and acquaintances (not least Ian Fleming in Chopping’s case), one of whom was avid social climber and interior designer David Hicks, who included Wirth-Miller’s art in his designs - financially useful, but this made him perilously tied to fashion, that inevitably changed.

There is an entertaining account of Hicks’ wedding to Lord Mountbatten’s daughter Pamela:  the weather was freezing blizzards – fortunately for the many guests, they had the use of a private Pullman train back to London.  Chopping narrowly saved one of the guests from being run over by a skidding bus – it turned out to be Noel Coward, who became a friend.  Hicks and his wife had a honeymoon cruise on the QE2, the only passengers apparently, which seems incredible.  Winston Churchill’s son Randolph comes across as a truly horrible individual and as with many wealthy people expected the artists to produce work for him for nothing.

Wirth-Miller was probably Bacon’s best and most loyal friend.  There is a terrible episode where WM has an exhibition in a local gallery - Bacon arrives drunk and proceeds to go round savagely criticising every picture.  This had such an effect on WM that he gave up painting from that point.  The book says that this traumatic incident didn’t affect their friendship, which again is hard to believe.  In later life WM seems to have been a drunken monster and the kind of foul-mouthed outspoken boor you would avoid sitting close to in a restaurant or pub.   His artistic reputation is not high these days.  Looking at the auction prices for his paintings, they are not valuable and are almost in my price bracket.  Despite some strange neologisms (infirmed?) and misspellings (tenor Peter Piers?) the writing carries you along and I enjoyed reading it.

Postscript:  I've since visited the Queer British Art 1861-1967 show at Tate Britain and one of the exhibits is mentioned in the book: Wirth Miller and Chopping's tin where they kept a button from the uniform of every member of the armed forces with whom they had a sexual liaison - it's a very full tin, with almost two hundred buttons.

Harry Price at Pulborough

Last week on the same excursion to West Sussex to visit Lyminster we also went to Pulborough to see the house - Arun Bank (no blue plaque) - in which Harry Price lived from 1908 to 1948 and in which his wife spent most of her time while he was travelling around investigating spirits and poltergeists and having affairs.  He died there in his study on 29 March 1948 from a massive heart attack - he was working on a third book about Borley Rectory, which was never finished or published.

We also went to St Mary's Pulborough where Price and his wife are buried and found the grave.  On this occasion there was a small bunch of flowers by the gravestone with a message "Dear Harry, Hope you enjoy your conversations with Gef the Mongoose."  Christopher Josiffe's long-awaited study of this extremely bizarre case investigated by Price will be available next month.  I can't wait to read it.

The Two Roberts

Having acquired a lithograph by Robert Colquhoun earlier this year I decided to read The Last Bohemians, The Two Roberts - Colquhoun and MacBryde by Roger Bristow.   The two Roberts met at Glasgow School of Art and were inseparable until Colquhoun's death from a heart attack at the age of 47 in September 1962.  MacBryde survived until May 1966 when he was killed by a hit-and-run driver in Dublin following an evening's drinking.  They were one of the homosexual double-acts that have cropped up a few times in the history of art: one immediately thinks of Ricketts and Shannon and Gilbert & George.

The Last Bohemians is an interesting study of the pair, but I felt by the end that I still didn't really know them that well.  Bristow is more forgiving than some commentators have been about their drunken and abusive behaviour and it has to be said that after Colquhoun's initial success and fame they certainly experienced some misfortunes.   They were, however, extremely fortunate in having a number of well-off and not so well-off friends who supported them, paying their rent and lending them cash, in some cases for years.

The book introduced me to the artist John Kashdan who I hadn't come across before, whose work seems worth looking for, as well as two enterprising ladies from Lewes, Frances Byng-Stamper and Caroline Lucas who founded the Miller's Press and ran an art gallery in the town that attracted a lot of big names.  There is an informative piece about them in Country Life (16 April 1987).   More information here and here.  Apparently, the portrait of them painted by Cedric Morris in 1935 (National Museum of Wales - see above) offended them so much that they never wanted to see it again once he had shown it to them.

I was also going to write more about some of the contemporaries and friends of the Two Roberts but I see that Richard Warren (see blog links opposite) has already done a wonderful job here.