Gypsy John

(See Cover)

For the first time in a decade, Britain's most durable top-rank painter was having a one-man show. On opening day, the doors of London's little Leicester Galleries had parted promptly at 10 o'clock and the corduroy-jacketed clique of fellow artists hurried in for a long, appraising look. If anyone came with doubts, there was colorful evidence on every side that Augustus Edwin John's considerable gifts are still as full-blown and as fresh as they were when he gave his first exhibition, 49 years ago.

To the more militant admirers of modern art, there is something baffling in John's brilliance: his painting is a whole lifetime behind the times. For half a century now, he has been working right across the Channel from Picasso and Matisse, and yet he has never been swayed an inch by the powerful influence of those moderns' magnetic brushes.

Britain's conservative Royal Academicians (of whom John is one) also find him confusingly out of step. He is as fashionable as John Singer Sargent once was, and his portraits come high (-L-1,000 and up); but he gets along fine without Sargent's dramatic slickness. What's more, his art, admittedly academic, has enough sparkle to put the stuffy Academicians to shame. At 70, Augustus John and his works are living proof that it makes very little difference what "school" a really good artist belongs to.

John owes some allegiance to that once terrible fellow, James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He admits that, when he was an art student, Whistler "enslaved" him. Like Whistler, John takes all painting for his province, and paints as he pleases. But the pictures that have brought him fame & fortune are not landscapes and murals but portraits. The gallery of John's sitters is a contemporary gallery of Britain's great ones: from Thomas Hardy to Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth. (It also includes some rich Americans and some spectacular unknowns, such as a haughty-looking farmer and a deep-eyed Jamaica girl named Aminta.)

A Title for Everybody. By teatime on opening day, the artists had drifted away and the gallery had begun to fill up with John's rich and fashionable friends. "Augustus is no snob," one of his more feline cronies once remarked. "He'd like everybody to have a title." Queen Elizabeth had had a private showing two days earlier (her wartime sittings for John were interrupted by a German bomb; she is reported to think that she has taken on a bit too much weight to have the portrait continued).

The best of the portraits looked as if they had been dashed on to the canvas in an hour apiece; yet many of them had the kind of intensity that persists in the mind's eye for a lifetime. John's view of Poet Dylan Thomas, with the poet's chubby face and curly hair, hits a high pitch of adolescent sensuality, freshness and innocence; it might well outlast Thomas' own vivid verse.

One of the most ambitious paintings in the new show was The Little Concert, a huge (9 by 12 ft.) monochrome which he had delivered still wet to the galleries. The London Times thought that it was "full of recklessly mingled details." In the portraits, every detail counted. The elaborate flowered background lent a heavy air of luxury to his portrait of Massachusetts' onetime Governor Alvan T. Fuller. John had hesitated at first to accept that commission because of Fuller's part in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. ("Would his share in the tragedy invalidate him as a subject for my brush?") The question did not trouble him long.

John had gone ahead with the job, on the principle that "the portrait painter should allow no moral bias to affect his attitude to the sitter. The exploration of character should be left, with confidence, to the eye alone. Heaven knows what it may discover!" In Fuller, John's glaring eye discovered a well-fed man of conscience--dignified, amiable, and perhaps not particularly intelligent.

Goat's Milk & Whiskey. John's shaggy white mane and beard, bowing among the perfumed, chattering sea of well-dressed gallerygoers at his show, attracted more attention than his paintings. Roaring with good will, he played the lion for an hour, then ducked out to his favorite den, a pub. The time he has spent in pubs adds up to several of his three-score-&-ten years. For reasons of health John now ' alternates liquor in London with goat's milk in the country, but he much prefers the city drink.

His enemies call him a great old ham actor, a sort of Monty Woolley of art; his cronies bedeck his name with legends, most of which center around his prowess in pub and boudoir. They say that he is descended from gypsies and hint that he has lived a wild, free, gypsy life. His friends point out that he has always been an intense family man (he has had nine children), that he succeeded as a painter through hard labor, and never ceases struggling to improve his art (frequently overworking his larger pictures). A less friendly tale has it that he once dived from a cliff of his native Wales, struck his head on a rock under the water, and came up a spluttering genius. In fact, the stories told about John are as contradictory as the man himself.

For the past seven years, John has been exploring his own legend-spawning life, in an autobiography published piecemeal in Cyril Connolly's highbrow British magazine Horizon. The published fragments read sometimes like a sophisticated traveler's guidebook, sometimes like a recital of Important People I Have Known, sometimes like Major Hoople, sometimes like crumbs from Winston Churchill's table. But the mass of entertaining trivia is shot through with eloquence, wit, and an artist's imagery.

"Without premeditation," he begins, "and in an indifferent light, we set to work at one corner of the immense canvas, upon which, as it stretches into darkness, we are to weave with so little skill the tapestry of our lives. The picture will never be finished and is marred by many confused, threadbare or mutilated passages, but at last and at a certain distance a Pattern will emerge which, though not of our designing, is the key and signature of Personality."

His detractors charge that John is as much of a "personality" as an artist. His champions retort that John's preoccupation with personality, his own as well as others', is perfectly natural and proper in a portrait painter. His own exuberant, self-assertive nature looms large in his work; and some of his portraits are raised above the potboiler class only by the force of his style. John's dashing brush flourishes are as distinctive as another man's handwriting. Wyndham Lewis once described him as a man of action "into whose hand the fairies stuck a brush instead of a sword."

Golden Earrings. The beginning corner of the canvas of John's life was a town called Tenby, on the Welsh coast. His father was no gypsy, but a prosperous and eminently proper lawyer, who, John coolly recalls, "loved children, provided of course they were legitimate and well-behaved." His father appears frequently and ambiguously in John's autobiography. Having been in his own turn a father and a grandfather, John inclines to apologize for his own filial rebellions. His father's "pious admonitions," John confesses, "were met by indifference or even hostility. To this perverse and refractory spirit must be attributed many of my shortcomings and much of the ill-fortune which has befallen me in life. I appear ... to have perpetuated, only in a reverse sense, the principles laid down for my guidance as a child . . . above all, the supreme doctrine of the Value of Money . . . left me unmoved."

When John insisted on going to art school, his father dubiously packed him off with a tiny allowance and a heavy load of advice. "Be a Michelangelo if you like," the elder John said solemnly, "but first make your living." Out of sight of home, John grew a beard, took to parting his russet hair in the middle and wearing golden earrings. "In spite of a superficial appearance of negligence," he later explained, "my mode of dress was not unstudied and had a style of its own." He has since discarded the earrings, but he wears even his black Homburg with a rakish air.

Twice married, John first carried his growing family about with him in a caravan. He made a habit of dropping in on gypsy encampments, and learned some gypsy dialects. The gypsies represented everything .his father had tried to warn him against, and he devotes more space in his autobiography to happy memories of the gypsies than to his own children, with whom he was rather strict.

Occasional Grunts. Being painted by John can be a little unnerving. For a while, he impales his sitter firmly with piercing blue eyes, grunting occasionally and barely touching the canvas. As the idea of the painting takes shape in his mind, his mood lightens and he may even begin to chat as he slashes away at the canvas. But if things go too swiftly and too well, he worries ("I'm nothing but a bloody, glib--"), and embarks on an endless and exhausting series of changes which may well ruin the picture.

John lived in Manhattan for a while, lunching regularly at the Colony Restaurant, partying through the town at night. At the Colony, John used to meet Portrait Sculptor Jo Davidson, who was working on a bust of John D. Rockefeller. Roundly expatiating on the merits of his own sitters, John once took Davidson to task for being less concerned with the intellectually than the financially great.

Whether or not Davidson was convinced by John's views on money v. brains, he has always vastly admired John's work. Says Davidson: "The most outstanding portrait painter today."

Exchange of Gifts. John tried to be indifferent to money but it bothered him; ' it would keep pouring in. His genius for portraiture was evident from the start; the wealthy and the near-great begged for the chance of being immortalized by him. One of his visitors was Hirohito, whom John remembers as "an inconspicuous young man attired in a navy blue suit. Without being handsome, his features denoted breeding and distinction, and his manner was modest, easy and natural." John was advised to offer the portrait to Hirohito as a gift: "Rather mystified, I did so, and the gift was graciously accepted. Some months later I received a beautiful roll of Japanese script, together with a voluminous packet of banknotes. This was the Prince's present to me."

Such posh commissions enabled John to set up his family in a rambling, guest-filled country house on the Avon River where, between gay forays into London, he still holds court. His conversation, like his autobiography, is studded with memories of distinguished sitters, most of whom he made a point of visiting for a while before painting. "The facility," he writes, "with which many artistic explorers . . . set to work at once in cold blood and without a moment's hesitation is astonishing . . . it implies a lack of sensibility. Without long study, trial, and many a failure, the secrets of Nature are apt to be withheld. As with a beautiful woman, courtship, not violence, wins the prize . . ."

No Missing Growth. There were occasional difficulties involved in these appraising visits. John was bored by the much-touted Irish wit of Poet William Butler Yeats and embarrassed by "the obligation of producing an appreciative guffaw at the right moment... I fear my timing was not always correct."

James Joyce, John remembers, "posed well . . . He had a precise and buttoned-up appearance . . . He explained that the poverty of his beard was due to an early accident to his chin, but I didn't feel justified in restoring the missing growth. In spite of his cold and formal exterior I was much drawn to Joyce, and, to his consternation, embraced him on parting." John's feeling for Joyce resulted in a series of unassuming, and haunting, pencil sketches.

Most of John's portraits on exhibition last week shared a quality that went beyond his sharp eye and skilled, sensitive hand. They had warmth. Even the portrait of Governor Fuller, who was hardly John's sort, showed that the artist's heart, as well as his art, had been called into play. In his autobiography, the old man, looking back, decides that "Love is a vagrant and when we revisit the tents, we find the gypsies gone and nothing left of them but a few rags and the black circles of their fires." John's open-eyed love for his; fellow man illumines the best of his portraits; their fires still glow.

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