What was your first interest in painting?

As I recollect, nine penguins on a plank in a swimming pool was my first illustration and it went on from there. I was also very fond of The Three Musketeers and Robin Hood.

Was painting in your blood—did you have a history of artists in your family?

My mother claimed her father was the court painter to King Ludwig of Bavaria, a man called Bernard von Schlossberg. He painted those decorative Wagnerian fantasies on the ceilings of the castles. So, in the blood? I don’t know. Art and genetics; there’s a whole library on that.

Your background was one of European Jewish émigrés—what influence do you think that has had upon you and your work?

In my opinion, probably profound. At the age of sixteen I would have said none, at twenty-five I would have said occasionally, and the older I get the more embedded I find I am in real Yiddisher schmaltz of one kind or another; particularly schmilosophy as opposed to philosophy. A very strong influence, no doubt.

What was the first subject matter of your paintings?

It was the old people. My parents had a Jewish hotel that was really a lunatic asylum. It was called the Hotel Shemtov, the Hotel ‘Good-name’. It had sixty rooms and there they were: Mrs Jacobus, Mrs Frankl, Mrs Webber, Mrs Maxwell, Dickie Valentine’s grandmother, Mr Meyers, Mrs Levi and so it went on. All of them were elderly, all of them half-crazed; many of them were survivors from Auschwitz, Treblinka and Buchenwald with stories to tell.

It was the most extraordinary place. I was introduced to mental illness, human suffering and death at a very early age and thought it salutary and thought provoking. My first sitters were those people; they all posed for me on huge canvases from the age of eleven onwards. I worked in Room 3, which had green lino, prolifically and totally obsessively. When I look back on it now, I was as crazed as the rest of them.

What did they make of your paintings?

They were certainly curious about all these portraits. They would never have been painted in their lives; they were all from Russia, Lithuania, Poland—a completely different kind of thing. ‘Thou shalt make no graven image’ was absolutely inherent in their culture. I remember even having an exhibition in my room that my brother Johnnie helped with. We charged a penny entrance fee.

How did your parents view your painting?

My mother encouraged my painting tremendously. However, she thought it very odd that I would work right through the night or sit out on the flat roof with a hot water bottle and pillow and stare at the stars or even go to sleep there. I was also in the habit of dissecting pigeons pinned to the wardrobe door and making anatomical drawings. Indeed, that’s why my twin brother left the room we had always shared. I left a pigeon’s head on the bed, accidentally in my view, and he lay on it; he fled in horror and never came back. That was good—now I had the room to myself.

What sort of man was your father?

He was a tiny little man, just five feet tall, who came to Britain from Poland as a refugee in 1939. I can make no sense of his life or what his character was, even to this day.

I remember one little incident. I was very keen on horses; I’d get up early in the morning and shin down the drainpipe outside my window before school because I knew that the stables opened at five o’clock in the morning. I’d go to nearby Brondesbury Park with my sketchbooks and I would draw all these horses. I have nostalgic memories of that; early winter mornings, the horses’ shadows cast on the cobbles, the smells, the atmosphere, the old men pulling the horses out of their stalls. They were rag and bone men and they would spread out all over the city and then come back late in the evening to clean, feed and stable the horses. There must have been some thirty horses there.

One night I was in my bedroom drawing a horse from a photograph when I heard my father’s footsteps outside the door. I don’t really know why, but I hid the photograph under the drawing board and continued to do the drawing as though I hadn’t copied it from a photograph. My father entered the room and sat down on the bed next to me and said, “Sehr gut, sehr gut! But something wrong with the fetlock.” He himself had been a breaker of horses, inheriting his father’s business in Poland, and he had a cleft in his jaw where he’d ridden into a tree.

As he pulled the drawing board forward to get a closer look, a section of the hidden photograph peeped out. He continued talking about the fetlock and without making any comment he casually pushed the board back over the photograph. He never said a word about it. That’s my only communication I recollect with him, ever.

Do you think your passion for horses must have been learned at your father’s knee? It seems too much of a coincidence that he was a horse breaker himself.

It seems logical, but I cannot recollect any sort of relationship with him. But I certainly was mad on horses. I was fascinated by Stubbs’ anatomical studies of horses from a very early age.

One of the most intense experiences of my life occurred at those stables in Kilburn and it’s the only one I’ve ever had that could be described as a ‘mystical experience’. The sun was just rising and they brought a large chestnut-brown horse into the cobbled courtyard. The horse was above my eye level as I crouched down to draw it, half-silhouetted against the rising sun. Suddenly, it spasmed; its two front legs stretched forwards and its hind legs backwards. It looked like a great charger with its head arched. I wondered what on earth had happened. It was absolutely rigid with muscular tension.

Suddenly, this great dark shaft appeared silhouetted low down against the sun. It was the horse’s penis, huge and terrifying. The horse urinated violently on the ground; all it was doing was peeing. However, I was transfixed as all the urine splashed up off the cobblestones, glistening with gold and fire in the sun around the spasming horse. I couldn’t hear anything or see anything other than this fountain of light. It was a moment when everything seemed to merge into a single event—an intense physiological connection of things. Then it stopped urinating and it was almost as though the whole horse began to soften and collapse.

When did your mother escape from Germany?

I think in 1939. She met my father about a year later in Golders Green; a marriage of convenience. I think the British authorities were allowing Jews into this country provided they were under thirty-nine years of age and my parents just qualified.

She had spent some time in a concentration camp, I understand.

I’m not so sure; I think not. She claimed that she had escaped with her sister on a boat; that her other sister had been in a camp; that another sister, with hair growing down to the ground, had her hair set alight by Hitler Youth; that she herself had been nearly raped in the Black Forest near Frankfurt. However, I doubt she had any personal experience of a camp.

I remember the cook, a Mrs Bobik from Czechoslovakia, being harangued by my mother many times with “You don’t know how much I have suffered! You don’t know what I’ve been through!” Then one day I was alone in the kitchen with Mrs Bobik and as I went to reach for the porridge, she slapped me gently on the hand and said “I get it!” As she did so, her sleeve rode up and there was the Belsen number tattooed on her forearm. I said, “You were there! You were there!” But she hushed me up. I asked, “Why don’t you tell her that you were there?” —because my mother hadn’t even been in the camps. But she said, “I can be silent because I was there.” She forbade me ever to mention it to my mother.

However, my mother certainly suffered the consequences of being uprooted and dispossessed, of coming to England and not being able to speak the language. Also, in the phrase that I often use, which she coined, “There’s no anti-Semite like a Jewish anti-Semite.” She had to work for Jewish people scrubbing floors and she was worked very hard. I think she felt she had never been fully appreciated for qualities she felt she had. She was a baroness in Germany; she thought she was insightful and kind and wise, and several people who knew her did too.

How do you see your relationship with your mother?

I think it was really a rather sad affair. I think she was genuinely attached to me. She used to inform me that I was very handsome, a “good looking chap.” She made quite a fuss about it, but really I think it was a kind of inverted anti-Semitism because I was the only blond son; my two brothers were swarthy and dark. I don’t really know, but I think there was a slight ‘blond beast’ element there.

You say you were her favourite—was there a strong attachment on both sides?

My two brothers would certainly agree that I was favoured. She certainly was attached to me, but I was fairly distant.

Would you say it was a romantic attachment on her part?

Yes. Yes, quite definitely. There are other things I could say about that relationship but it just wouldn’t be fair.

Did you draw or paint her very much?

Rather a lot. I suppose the turning point in my relationship with her was when I was about thirteen. I’d painted her and thought, “My goodness, this is rather good!” I took the painting upstairs and put it on my easel by the bed. I thought I would go downstairs and get a hot water bottle and some cocoa for bed, not look at the painting, and then sit myself up comfortably in bed and finally look at the portrait and see what I thought of it. An hour later, would I think it was as good as I first thought? I believed it a significant turning-point picture.

I did all that; got into bed, puffed up the pillows and prepared to look at it. Then this horrible sinking sensation—the whole portrait had been completely swirled and smudged and scraped in the most violent way. I knew instantly that while I had been down in the kitchen my mother had sneaked up and destroyed the image because she didn’t like the way she looked in it.

I tore down the stairs to her room and said, “Why did you do that?”

She said, “Noh! It was a terrible picture, a terrible picture.”

I said, “You don’t know what you’ve done. That was a stupid thing to do. I can’t tell you how angry I am.” That would have been the turning point. I tended to freeze off after that.

Were you a solitary child?

Very, very much so, but it never occurred to me for one moment that there was anything disagreeable about it—quite the contrary; it was heaven. What was anathema to me was to be told that I should go to the nice Jewish boys club down the road or that I should play with other kids in the street; I had absolutely no desire to do that.

Perhaps the single most significant event of my youth, apart from my one-way friendship with Leonardo da Vinci, was the unexpected arrival of a family at my parents’ hotel who were placed in the attic rooms. One of the daughters, Ria, haunted my mind intensely from the first glance at an aesthetically cunning level. She was nine, I about fourteen. Her presence stained my life a silver-gold colour as I moved between the two worlds of brutish schooling and the unhinged ravings of my parents’ environment.

We used to meet clandestinely on staircases or exchange glances across rooms. I painted her, drew her, talked with her. Even the most innocuous subject matter built bridges to heaven. It was my first and probably only ‘theological’ experience.

How long did she remain at the hotel?

Oh, just a couple of years, but to me that was traversed time. I smile when I look back on it now, but it really was the most extraordinary situation. Do you know that film ‘The Summer of ’42’? How adolescent events can be so poignant they haunt the mind forever? It was very much like that.

Did the friendship endure?

Certainly. One of the most important friendships of my life.

Were there books in the house?

A few Hebrew books in the office. The nearest thing to a library was my own, which was on the marble mantle shelf in my room. There were pencil inscriptions for the sections: ‘Horses’ for the books on horses, which I was mad on; ‘Philos’ for the one-and-a-half books—there was half a book missing—on philosophy; ‘Art’, several books there; and I think there was one book on anatomy.

Was it an intellectual household?

Well, many of the survivors from the camps clearly had experienced and suffered a lot in life and some of them were scholars.

My intellectual life began entirely circumstantially when I was twelve or thirteen. I was browsing through a rather battered Encyclopedia Britannica and I came across the name ‘Nee-etski’, or so I pronounced it. I asked my mother, “Who was Nee-etski?” She said, “Who?” I said, “Nee-etski.” My mother said to me, “Go and ask Mr Plotnik if you want to know who Nee-etski was.”

I went to Mr Plotnik and I said, “Who is Nee-etski?”

Mr Plotnik said, “Who?”

I said, “Nee-etski.”

He asked, “What was the first name?”

I said, “Fred, Frederick.”

“Ah!” he said, “You mean Nietzsche!” That was probably my first great aesthetic experience—the assimilation of this incomprehensible word ‘Nee-etski’ into Nietzsche.

My mother used to go on about Novalis, Hölderlin, Heine and the German Romantics; Goethe and Schiller in particular. You had this curious sense quite early on that great things had happened in Germany, that here was one of the most phenomenal intellectual cultures ever known and yet look what it had led to.

Were there any adults around giving you special encouragement or acting as role models?

Not until I was sixteen, seventeen. Then I met a Hungarian philosopher called Alfred Rheinhold, known as Alfred Reynolds, who had a very fine library. He formed a society called ‘The Bridge’—he was friendly with Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Schweitzer and Martin Buber. I used to design the covers for the society’s quarterly magazine. I remember doing pen and ink drawings of Nietzsche, Socrates, Goethe, Buber and Schweitzer, many others.

So when did you first absorb the philosophy of Nietzsche?

Mostly when I was seventeen or eighteen, particularly ‘The Portable Nietzsche’—I’ve still got the very copy upstairs.

Did the concept of the übermensch (the Superman) appeal to you?

(Laughing). In later days when I was at St. Martin’s, yes, it did, quite strongly. I had a very powerful, immature sense of destiny; no doubt about it.

Were you troubled by the alleged anti-Semitism of Nietzsche’s philosophy?

At the time I would have been unaware of it. Certainly, I was told, “Oh, that Jew-hater!” and so on. I couldn’t see it. I looked for signs of it and yes, I saw a criticism of Jewish culture insofar as Nietzsche felt that the Jews had moved away from the Old Testament towards the New, whose sentiments he despised. However, I couldn’t see how that related to anti-Semitism; certainly not the anti-Semitism that his sister and brother-in-law encouraged in their occasional meetings with Hitler and throughout the whole South American nonsense.

I didn’t know such things as anti-Semitism existed because I went to school at the Menorah Primary School, a gentle, harmless little school where I was made Hero for a Day when I saved the beautiful Gloria Tessler from a bee by swatting it.

Was this basically an émigré school?

There would have been a lot of that, yes. It was in Golders Green and it was so gentle, so innocuous. However, my brother and I had to leave and so we entered the real world—Beckford Primary School. That’s where I encountered Harvey, the first uninitiated anti-Semite I came across. “You fucking Yid!” We were little second formers and he was a huge older boy. It wasn’t uncommon to have your head pushed into the toilet and the chain pulled simply because one was Jewish.

How did you fare academically?

I don’t really know. I remember almost none of it; no maths lessons, no English lessons. I just remember painting and drawing, painting and drawing. Anyway, I later went to the Harben Secondary Modern and there I must have taken some exam or other because I ended up at the Christopher Wren Technical School in Notting Hill Gate. That was almost entirely arts oriented; I would imagine that some two thirds of the curriculum was visual arts of one kind or another.

Which painters did you admire in your teens?

There were all sorts, but always the holy trinity—Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael—as well as Velázquez, Rembrandt, Poussin and so on. Hardly any modern painters; I didn’t even know they existed!

What sort of popular culture did you absorb—did you go to the movies as a youngster?

One wouldn’t be allowed to. I remember sneaking off to see ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’ and recall being quite struck by that as a theme. I also remember a film called ‘Rock Around the Clock’ with Bill Haley; I don’t know how because normally I wouldn’t be interested in that at all. When he sang the title song everyone in the cinema got up to dance; you could feel the building shaking. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I felt very anachronistic, as if I’d be caught. I was the only person sitting. They had these weird hairstyles and purple jackets and were dancing very skillfully to this complete rubbish on the screen. I had absolutely no sympathy for popular music

What events were inspiring you to paint at this stage?

Oh, anything at all. I would have ideas while I was at school and then try them out when I got home to the hotel. I thought, “I’ll paint the irises at the bottom of the garden by candlelight.” I took twenty or thirty candles from the store and then painted only the shadows that they made. I was interested to see whether they would look anything like irises. I would have seen the yellow tobacco stain colour of a late night slash of light on the red letter box near the hotel and go out and paint that.

I painted a huge canvas of The Passover. As a child one was supposed to sit there and watch the wine and when it began to shake and shimmer that was supposed to be the prophet Elijah flying over. Once I was asked to go out and find a shnorrer, a beggar, so I did; I found this dosser with a rough beard. There was horror and consternation; this “smelly creature” was asked to get out. My father went and fetched the neighbour instead. Of course, that’s what you were supposed to do—find a symbolic beggar.

Were you not aware of the ritual aspects of that?

Not at all. I was shocked at the time—I took it literally. I was so embarrassed that I took a shilling out of my mother’s purse and ran down the road after this beggar to give it to him. He was actually weeping. I later became familiar with enough down and outs to know that was unusual. It makes me think he was a tramp or a gypsy rather than an alcoholic dosser. I gave him the shilling and he patted me on the head. He was smelly!

Was that your first ‘Robin Hood’ experience of taking from the rich to give to the poor?

Yes, one of them. I did it a lot after that. Ruthlessly.

Does your work have its roots in your early experiences at the Hotel? Many of the Projects focus on the dispossessed and people who have known suffering in one way or another. Do you think you were taking up the task of bearing witness and of bringing into the light something which was hidden?

It’s possible, but that’s getting a little bit psychiatric about it. However, I am sympathetic to the notion of a missed opportunity with all those people in the Hotel, pouring in and out for years.

Were you aware of the cataclysm that had befallen them?

I think probably not.

The mortality rate must have been very high—were you aware of deaths happening around you?

I had to clean the bodies, to tidy things up. My mother was too squeamish to do it. My strongest recollection is of this woman who hemorrhaged all over the place when I was about thirteen or fourteen. She had grabbed hold of my hand with such intensity that her nails had sunk into the palm of my hand. Then there was this strange noise and she started to shudder. Crimson-black blood, very thick, came out of her eyes, her ears, her nose and her mouth—all over me, all over my face. It was a very large room, thirty feet long, but there were chunks of this thick blood on the far wall. She was juddering, drowning in her own blood, and I was stroking her hair waiting for her to die. That was one of many incidents with people dying.

What were your feelings as that happened?

I don’t think I had any feelings. I remember thinking “this is real”—I think I felt privileged and interested, but I don’t think I was aware of thinking “this is a privilege”.

Did you draw any philosophical conclusions from such events?

I became very aware of loneliness and that life was a tragedy. I remember one of the guests knocking on my door at three o’clock in the morning; she saw the light was on because I was painting. It was a huge painting of stablemen done from memory and from drawings I had made. I opened the door and there she was, tiny and skeletal and completely naked. She had white hair that almost touched the ground.

She looked at me and whispered, “Would you like to come to my room?”

I said, “I think you should go back to your room—you’re going to catch cold.”

“Why don’t you come with me? Come with me, my little boy.”

I told her I would take her to her room. She stopped still and said, “I was beautiful once—look!” She flung her hair forward—I can still remember the sensation of all this white hair coming down—and it was all red back there! She was a redhead, just a little of the colour remained, but she was so lined and ugly. Then she said to me, “Dreck! You woolly-haired little bastard, may you die like flies in the hot summer time, you would have cut your throat for me once!”

Then, “Do you want sixpence?” And she put sixpence in my hand and then wandered off back to her own room. I was about thirteen.

Were you often pursued sexually at the Hotel?

I don’t think she was pursuing me—she was just a bit crazy. I can remember one guest at the hotel… some things occurred which are not for this book! I did have affairs with some of the maids. There was one maid in particular with whom I’d ‘lie down’ on the landing outside Mrs Kempner’s room. She was stone deaf, so we could do it outside her front door and not worry!

What was your mother’s attitude to sex?

My mother knew that I was in love with the maids. I remember going down to the cold store room one hot summer evening when I was eleven to get a cool drink of fruit juice. Mary, the Irish maid, was cleaning the floor on her hands and knees and as I watched her I could see down the top of her jumper. She noticed me and smiled and said something like “Do you like what you see?” She came over to me and took my hand in hers and then placed it inside her jumper against her breast. I moved my hand—that wasn’t the only bit of me that was moving. Suddenly, I heard my mother’s voice. She was standing in the doorway and said, “Noh! NOH! Is that a nice thing to do?” And then she turned away and left. It was such a pleasurable and innocent thing to do that I was saddened by that reaction. I remember asking her once, “Where the hell do you think your three six-foot sons came from?” She said, “I don’t remember! I’m not suggesting you were all immaculate conceptions, but I would not be at all surprised.” I had quite a close conversation with my mother shortly before she died and she did admit to me that she’d never experienced orgasm.

At sixteen you enrolled at St. Martin’s College of Art and Design. Did you ever consider anything apart from going to art college and painting?

The only two things I ever considered were painting and philosophy. I’ve still got some of my early notes where I was relating them in a rather daft way. I was also interested in medicine; I had a fantasy at one point to become a doctor and even applied to the college—until I was told it was a seven year course! I really did think that I would join Albert Schweitzer at Lambaréné.

When did you discover Schweitzer’s legend?

Quite early on, because the small popular paperbacks about Lambaréné used to lie around the hotel. I was very interested in relating ethics to aesthetics, even at that time. I remember using this phrase all the time “The only difference is the difference; the only difference is the difference” to avoid making value judgements, but that difference was aesthetic.

I have always thought it very odd that writers, musicians or painters could deal sensitively with humanity and the tragic sense of life whilst at the same time living a lifestyle that profoundly contradicted that. So you have Rembrandt, Wagner, Renoir, Degas, Chopin—they’re all either anti-Semites or pro-slavery or violent or disagreeable in all sorts of different ways; yet their creative work can be about the highest ‘spiritual’ ideals. The notion of people dealing with inhumanity not finding it necessary to live that but being content only to write about it or paint about it was very discomfiting for me in my late teens.

Did going to St. Martin’s open up a different view of life to you?

When I was at St. Martin’s I felt as alienated as I did anywhere else; nothing changed. I wasn’t interested in particular friendships; I was quite comfortable with my own company. I think I was considered odd.

Did you get formal instruction there?

There would have been conventional attention to drawing, which I was probably fairly average at. I worked on a huge scale on very large canvases. I do remember Frederick Gore, the Principal, and some of the other teachers: Ruskin Spear, Peter Blake, Elizabeth Frink, to name just a few.

All I recall is that I worked very much harder than anyone else; it didn’t seem to be an effort for me. The other students were going every night to pubs and clubs; they’d invite me, but I had absolutely no interest. I couldn’t wait to get home to my studios.

Eventually, I found that they started coming to my studios. Since I was working consistently and fairly hard, studying and researching, I ended up attracting the lazy and the dilettantish, many of whom I painted.

Were you set on your own course and artistic style before you went there?

Being at St. Martin’s certainly initiated me into the knowledge that there were ways of painting and ways of experiencing the world that were nothing to do with simply reproducing it as a retinal experience.

There was this new development in art—that it was permissible to reproduce the retinal world provided you did it in your own way, not according to a traditional technique that simply effected a skillful presentation like, shall we say, Sargent. So it was permissible to represent the world provided there was a personal touch that still fitted in with the subjectivity of Expressionism, with the subjectivity of Cubism and of certain aspects of Surrealism. The thing these approaches had in common was this attention to the individual, the personal and the private—the sense that you somehow came first. However, I didn’t paint in that way.

This would have been the late fifties, early sixties when the London art world was dominated by New American Painting.

A lot of fuss was being made at the time over the so-called ‘kitchen sink’ gang, people like Bratby and a few others, which I couldn’t bear. I remember that the whole class had to go to see this Bratby exhibition. I went along and found it lively and energetic, but I wasn’t moved. I just wasn’t getting the same sensations as when I went to the National Gallery.

I was very attracted to the idea of technical skill in painting. I knew that there was danger in that and was frequently told so by others. I can remember Freddy Gore seeing my work and saying something like, “The trouble with your work, Lenkiewicz, is that one first thinks ‘Oh, my goodness; that’s really good! That’s really skillful, really well drawn,’ but then you look at it more closely and it all falls apart.” I once did a twenty-foot painting on a Nietzschean theme, a self-portrait, naked, with dozens of other people in it, and he said, “Very impressive at first, Lenkiewicz, and then just bloody vulgar!”

Did that hit home or did you just think him mistaken?

No, no, no; I listened. I wanted to learn and to understand, I wanted to grasp that type of sophistication that would teach me that technical skill was not what painting was about.

Were you aware of developments in contemporary painting in the fifties?

Yes. I made a special visit every single day to the library of St. Martin’s. I remember pulling out a book on Hans Hoffman and really making an effort; it was very difficult. I remember the work of Poliakoff and the early work of Michael Andrews in this country.

I lived in the Hampstead area. I would see people like the kinetic sculptor Kenneth Martin walking up and down the road and one felt very aware of, very sensitive to, the otherness of what was happening. You had the same feeling towards it as you might have to somebody who was preoccupied with mathematics or physics. You looked at it from a distance and wondered what was going on.

Did you admire their paintings?

It would have been truly difficult to do that. That wouldn’t have happened for a couple of years and then it would have been Rothko, Barnett Newman and Sam Francis. He was the first one where I began to feel that I was responding first of all to the energy and the scale and then to this notion of colourfield, of being swamped by something rather than your mental eye enveloping it. But so much was going on: Bacon, de Kooning, Pollock, and always one slid back into looking at figurative work… and then back again.

You didn’t sympathise with Patrick Heron’s view that the Americans had ‘abolished the image’ from pictures?

I don’t think I would have been intellectually aware of that notion until my very late teens. I wouldn’t have been thinking along those lines; I would have been in a quasi-mystified state and thinking there must be some sense in this, I wonder what it is? It was a riddle. You have to remember that I was drowning in this fantasy of Courbet in his studio surrounded by paintings.

Did you see abstract art as anti-humanist? Was it the ability of figurative painting to explore the human condition that appealed to you?

No, I couldn’t feel that because the names of the painters were the same names as the people at my mother’s hotel! The Hoffmans and the Rothkoviches and so on. No, there was something going on here—these were the Real McCoy, these were Jewish scholars, these were refugee mathematicians. There’s something going on here, what is it? But there was still this confusion about not being able to let go of the image and respond to the paint itself, to the calligraphy of the mark. One simply hadn’t developed that aesthetic cunning.

Was there no ongoing discussion about these issues at St. Martin’s or the Royal Academy?

I’m sure there was, but I don’t remember it. I recollect none of the students I was involved with discussing it much. I remember one incident during my early days at the RA when I saw a student painting a target on the ground. I said to him, “Ah, you’ve got an interest in Jasper Johns,” and he said, “Yeah.” So I said, “Could you explain to me what you are doing?” Anyway, it became quite clear within half a minute that he had no idea at all what it was about and somehow just found the image appealing. I asked him if he was aware that Jasper Johns had been influenced by Wittgenstein, something that may not be the case in terms of modern scholarship, but it was thought so at that time. He asked me who Wittgenstein was and that did it for me—there he was painting a target for no good reason whatsoever. I felt very uncomfortable with all that and it only made me more determined to find out what Jasper Johns actually was doing.

Did you ever do the rounds of the commercial galleries in London?

Only when I was at the Royal Academy when they were just around the corner. I was pretty astonished; it was a new world and I would go to them assiduously. But mainly, I would go to the ‘Nash’ and the Tate and, of course, places like the Wallace Collection. I became so informed on the National Gallery that I knew the position of every single painting upstairs and downstairs. I remember the day when it was all changed around and this vast amount of information in my head became instantly obsolete.

Did you copy paintings at the National Gallery?

I copied the Velázquez, the life-size Philip IV. I thought that a beautiful, cunning and skillful painting at the time and I did my thesis on it. I think I was seventeen and Velázquez became my first serious hero—Velázquez; the painter’s painter. Then it was Vermeer, then Poussin, and then it started to sneak up to Cézanne and finally a couple of contemporaries.

Were you going away from these encounters having been influenced by the subject matter or the marks of the paint itself?

No, it would have been the marks themselves. The way the paint was handled would haunt the mind, quite definitely.

Did you start to feel like an endangered species? Did you think abstract painting was going to inherit the earth?

No, because I was fairly satisfied very early on that there was no real distinction between figurative and abstract painting. I can remember arguing with the students and saying, “What’s the difference between saying ‘that’s your grandmother’ and ‘that’s a yellow square’? They’re both recognised. ‘That’s a blue squiggle, that’s Primrose Hill’; what’s the difference?” I don’t see that there can be a distinction.

Were you reading Greenberg?

Yes I was and I thought him a lovely old Jewish romantic. But sometimes, I began to feel that there were elements of aesthetic fascism in this new work, that since fascism had been operating in Europe in various guises through the thirties and forties why wouldn’t it appear in the visual arts? Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian were all absolutists. Rodchenko, the Bauhaus, some of the colour theorists—they all seemed to have this desire to fix and trap human emotion in relation to colour, shape and texture, to create rules and laws. There seemed to be an aesthetic fascism going on.

They were like the philosopher Heidegger—they wanted to have the last word?

I think so, I think so. There’s a story about Picasso that somebody mentioned to him that Giacometti was trying to define figure and space, and solve the problem. Picasso said, “There is no problem. You cannot solve it. That’s the point of it.” Or words to that effect. Of course, it’s a very attractive idea that you can somehow treat the aesthetic experience as a science—you will ask certain sorts of questions and if you ask the right ones you will finally discover the answer. I don’t think creativity is like that.

Do you think that the move toward abstraction, particularly for the refugee Jewish artists, amounted to a flight from dealing with the real world in art since the real world for them had been the thirties and forties with all their horrors?

It’s possible, but I wouldn’t want to be quite so ‘psychiatric’ about aesthetics. It seems to me that the kind of marks that Rembrandt, Titian or Franz Hals were making as they got old in their last years have something very much in common with the kind of marks that Picasso would be making in his last years—or Goya, or Michelangelo’s Rondanini. There’s just something about time breaking things up; form, concepts of space, definitions, beginnings and ends—old age tears them up, it’s all in tatters. You do get this feeling that every human life, certainly these long-term creative activities, lead to dissolution, breaking up, something eviscerated, a parting of the waves. I don’t think that this happens in culture alone, but in each human life. Looking at the last works of long-suffering thinking painters, and writers and poets, seems to me to show that tendency.

It’s not a defeatist thing. It’s almost as if after a lifetime trying to record “the white spaces in between”, which is what they felt their business was, there’s a final recognition that they cannot be recorded, of the limitations of art, and then of life as a tragedy. There is a deep humanity there, but by that I don’t mean that they should love their neighbour in a traditional sense; they were often swines. But there is a certain relentless recognition that they’re alone. It’s not self-pitying; they just recognise it as the problem of existence.

Would you say you have never lost your sense of wonder at the visual world?

I think so, but I feel very unsentimental about it. I can remember quite early on feeling an actual sense of ugliness when I caught myself being more preoccupied with the painting than with the event. I always feel uncomfortable with the notion of the painter being more interested in the canvas than the event in front of them. I know they may have to be and that they may believe that they are discovering new ways of saying old things, but I am uncomfortable with the fact that they can tear their eye away from the event and find the canvas more interesting.

What is it about the event that is of such interest—surely a painter is expected to be objective about this?

I coined the phrase, “Nothing haunts the mind more deeply than the plain fact of a thing” and by the fact of a thing I was just referring to that which was retinally experienced. Not how it existed and not why; simply that it is. Suddenly deciding to paint it or about it is in some sense to move yourself away from it.

Do you feel moved by such things?

I would certainly feel more moved by the event than I would by most works of art. I’m rarely moved by works of art. Cathedrals can achieve it; they, of course, envelop the very space that you are looking at. But to distract yourself, to convert the event into this series of marks and to make a big fuss over it, makes me uncomfortable sometimes.

Were you particularly sensitive to the ephemeral nature of events?

Yes, very much so. I was very aware of the passing of things, of decay.

When did you begin to think about organising your paintings in particular themes or projects?

Quite early on—about twenty-two years old. The first themes, almost all of them lost, were of a Rabbinical nature, quite schmaltzy. They were of old Hasidim dancing in the sky surrounded by flames. I was very taken by Hasidic legends that if they danced in a particular way a blue ring of fire would form around them. I was very taken with the image of people floating in space. I liked the idea of an individual floating in space like a planet.

Were you still living at the hotel?

No, I left home when I was at St. Martin’s, upsetting my mother very, very much in the process.

I was about sixteen or seventeen and we had some sort of row. She said, “You would not last five minutes in the real world! What do you know about the real world?” I told her I could walk out the front door, just turn right or left and I’d get on just fine. “You think so? Then do it, do it!” she shouted. So I did, then and there.

And didn’t come back?

I didn’t come back for nine months. I had nowhere to stay. I walked all the way to Soho and slept on a doorstep. I left without any desire to inflict distress—I was just determined to be independent—but I know that it upset her deeply. Obviously, as you get older you realise just how much.

Where were your studios?

It would have been Fellows Road, Adelaide Road, Eton Avenue, Primrose Hill, Regents Park Road, all that area. Probably thirty different studios over that period of time, some of them huge, derelict, some smaller. I was constantly being thrown out for missing the rent.

If someone had walked into one of your studios at that time what sort of sight would have greeted them?

They would have seen huge canvases all around the walls. Many people did visit; they were bad paintings, but they were very impressive to look at. There would have been fifty or so people dossing in the studio, most of them crazy, disturbed people.

Was it while you were at St. Martin’s that you began to paint the portraits of down and outs?

No, it would have been a little bit later at the Royal Academy. They wouldn’t have known, of course. The work they saw was fairly straightforward figurative painting done in a rather traditional way. I was expelled from the RA and I can’t remember why. I have asked my friend Aury, who was at the RCA, and he said it was through poor attendance. I find that surprising because I really liked it there, particularly the library. But I had my own set-up, of course.

Were you reconciled with your mother by the time you went to the Royal Academy?

Oh yes, I’d call round. Usually, I’d scrounge some food and sit down and listen to her problems. I was glad to get out and breathe the fresh air and go straight to my studio or the bed of any lady I was with. No, it was sad with my mother.

Did your mother think that you had failed to live up to her expectations?

I think so. She was very, very fond of me, but her last words to me were “I know you have many troubles, I know you have many difficulties and that life is very hard. But frankly, I don’t give a damn!” To which I replied, “Well ma, you’re not in a very cheerful mood—let me paint you.” She said, “Over my dead body you’ll paint me!” To which I replied, “OK.” Those were my last words to her.

Anyway, she died. I went to the hospital and they had lost the body. They were apologetic and took some time to find it. I went into the room and she was there on a trolley covered with this zipped plastic bag. I pulled down the zip and there she was with a bandage around her head and jaw, her two big toes fastened together with a piece of cord. I did drawings of it and that’s the painting shown in the frontispiece of this book.

© 1997 White Lane Press
www.whitelanepress.co.uk