‘Horizons’, Wednesday, 22nd May 1963, BBC West of England Home Service

Introduced by Vivian Ogilvie

OGILVIE: Good evening. There’s a gulf between much of the work done by contemporary artists and the general public. With the best will in the world, it isn’t clear to many honest citizens why painters produce pictures that don’t seem to portray anything they can recognise. To throw some light we brought together three painters who work in Cornwall: Peter Lanyon, Cornish born, who commutes between St Ives and New York; Paul Feiler, who in term time teaches at the West of England College of Art, Bristol; and Michael Canney, who is Curator of the Passmore Edwards Art Gallery, Newlyn. Michael Canney acted as chairman of this discussion of what is meant by the subject in painting.

CANNEY: At its simplest it is, of course, the object, or objects, depicted by the artist: it could be a bowl of fruit; a nude; it could be anything, even something that’s never been seen: such as an angel. Do you, Peter Lanyon, agree with this definition of subject?

LANYON: I think the general meaning of subject is something which is outside the artist. The idea is that there is some reality which the artist is going to paint; but I would insist myself that the artist is usually painting a reality, which has not been seen before.

CANNEY: Paul Feiler?

FEILER: Well this reality is really a kind of story telling that an artist will put across in order to make something, as you say, which has not been seen before, and which he will make sure will put across his own sensations of a way of life and a way of looking.

CANNEY: But there are some artists, abstract artists, who dispense with subjects for their pictures – at least subjects as most people understand the word. Now, put very briefly they feel that the bowls of fruit, the nudes and the angels detract from the painting; they introduce extraneous ideas into painting. The abstract artist would prefer painting to be pure, like music; just concerned with problems of colour, shape, line, form and so on. Peter Lanyon, do you think that an artist can dispense with the subject?

LANYON: Yes, I think the artist can dispense with the subject,

but I don’t do so myself. I’m quite prepared to defend an artist who wants to do this, because I think it has been one of the main forces in contemporary painting: the attempt to dispense with subject. What happens here, I think, is that the artist comes to the conclusion that what he’s doing is making shapes; this is the reality he’s dealing with: just making shapes, designs and organisation on a flat surface. And those are the facts that he has to deal with. He then goes on to develop variations on these facts, and in doing these variations he finds a lot of new ground which had been lost, as it were, while concentrating on subject. Now I myself reject that personally, because I find that every shape I make has some reference. I make a blue shape and it becomes a sky. It’s an awful nuisance, I’d like to get rid of it but I am, therefore, attached, as it were, to a very specific subject which is landscape.

CANNEY: Paul Feiler?

FEILER: The problem arises here, whether this mark that you make is a conscious affair, or whether this is due to experience of seeing certain things in their particular context. Wouldn’t you say, for instance, that the landscape in this particular area has a certain subject matter, therefore, it has a certain scale of shapes that you’re putting down, and by doing so are implying a landscape?

LANYON: I think when you say that there is a subject matter here it is quite true. There’s an immense amount of information, which is purely within the specialist world of the artist: what we call plastic values, and colour values, and these sort[s] of things are stronger here and they do attract artists. I think there is a very strong subject as well, which is quite apart from these things, which is the sort of mood which has been referred to, probably ever since Cornish paintings have been known – the odd moods which occur in the atmosphere and the weather of the county.

FEILER: Therefore you’re saying that the subject matter is mood, as well as tactile matters.

LANYON: Oh very much so for me, yes. I’m probably letting into myself, as it were, or feeding into my own consciousness a lot of information and a lot of varied information just as the weather is varied. I believe that this is what happens, the artist is like a sponge and he absorbs a lot of information; now his process of actually making this into a painting owes a lot today to the abstract painters, because he has to turn it into shapes which, not only represent, say, specifically one apple in a very definite time and space or place; it has to represent not only an apple, but a bald head, or maybe a football: things which are closely related to an apple; but which will give overtones of meaning to the shape that anybody is looking at. It requires in fact from a spectator that they should look at the picture and be prepared to invent for themselves information about what they’re looking at. I have claimed before and I think it’s so, that today the person who is looking at the picture is very much the subject. This may be a very difficult thing to understand that in fact the picture doesn’t come to life until somebody looks at it. And this person who is looking at it, participates in it, just as we participate in jazz, or if we hear twist music we begin to move in a twist movement. A picture can set somebody going, not only physically moving, but in a poetic sense: an imaginative sense; and then they become, as it were, the person who is acting this picture out. The picture is a lot of things which are generating information, which anybody who is receptive can pick up, if they’re prepared to do it.

FEILER: Ah, but anybody who’s receptive to your way of putting matters across?

LANYON: Well, of course this is so. Both you and I, Paul, have different ways of talking about exactly the same thing, or painting exactly the same subject, and each of us have our own language. But the interesting thing is, that it is the same subject being painted, but that we can react, probably somebody more to you or your painting, than they would to mine, or some other people would react to mine, more than they would to you.

CANNEY: This really leads us on to whether the modern artist does communicate or not, because most people are totally confused; they look at the title underneath a picture; they look at the picture; they search frantically for points of reference in it, and they can’t find it; and then they feel convinced, of course, that the artist is pulling their leg. Do you want to communicate, or is this of no interest to you?

FEILER: I think my greatest interest is to communicate an enormous amount, and one pours into whatever one does as much as one possibly can. My own form of communication is to do with light and it’s to do with space. To me there are certain aspects which deal with wider problems than merely looking at a particular spot, or a particular landscape.

CANNEY: Peter, do you feel any sympathy with people in this dilemma in that they can’t really establish any communication with the artist?

LANYON: Yes, I feel sympathy certainly, because it’s always probably very difficult to accept a new language and, if somebody comes with a visual image which is new, it’s much more difficult to understand. But I have no sympathy at all for the people who say  “I know what I like and that’s all I’m going to like”: this is pure philistinism of the worst sort. Let them go from that to the next step, and then the next step and so on; but it is difficult for people to have brand new works, completely new ideas shoved right at them; and I think it’s very often just plain misunderstanding of how to take something like that. It should be taken in little bits.

FEILER: Would you say though, Peter, that in a very short time whatever is being done today will be as readily accepted as a landscape by Constable, or Turner, largely because most people are living the same kind of lives as the artists do, in other words they get around at great speed and, therefore, whatever they’re being shown in the pictorial sense will make sense gradually.

LANYON: Yes, we hope this. This is the really basic thing about communication. That is the level of communication that occurs in the visual arts, that in fact as you say – it’s very well put I think – that if you are travelling around in the same way that the artist is, the only difference between the artist and the ordinary person who is travelling around in cars is that the artist is particularly receptive.

FEILER: And observant.

LANYON: Yes, and observant, and is capable of making what we call a plastic image: a thing which will give sense and form and the actual flavour of the experiences which he’s had; and is able to do it very often twenty years ahead.

CANNEY: It is, I think, important that the artist often reveals the innate aesthetic possibilities in new subject matter; often subject matter that hasn’t been considered suitable, or worthy as a pictoral subject before. Turner, of course, discovered subject matter in something which was as unpromising as mist and fog. This, I think, was really quite a terrific achievement. What do you feel about this, Peter?

LANYON: I think this is so. Probably landscape painting has done more to alter the sort of space that is used in painting, the sort of illusion I mean, than probably still-life painting or portrait painting, or historic paintings of scenes and figures. Turner certainly and Wilson – Richard Wilson – before him, used quite extensively a spiral where you felt you were being drawn into a spiral; and it got smaller and smaller away into the distance. Today it’s possible, I think, and this is why I do gliding myself to get actually into the air itself; and get a further sense of depth and space into yourself, as it were into your own body, and then carry it through into a painting. I think this is a further extension of what Turner was doing.

CANNEY: Now pop art today is an interesting return to the subject in a superficial sort of way, isn’t it, with a satirical twist when we get these pop artists making abstract paintings, possibly from Liquorice Allsorts, or using detergent packets, and cut-outs of Marilyn Monroe and so on.

FEILER: That depends on what you call abstract painting, of course, doesn’t it?

CANNEY: Yes.

FEILER: You see, they’re really producing a kind of accumulation of subject, aren’t they, or objects, and putting them together in an arbitrary kind of way, apparently, rather like the surrealists did.

LANYON: Yes, I want to set up a chair for pop art. I think it’s wonderful. It’s just what we’ve wanted for a long time; it’s the fairground, which has come back into art.

CANNEY: You don’t think it shows a poverty of ideas?

LANYON: Not at all. It adds a great deal of fun to it. I think this – you know this – fun of going to a fairground, it’s wonderful it’s another world. A fair comes into town, and suddenly you go away into this fantasy world; and you’re just like children again, and I think this is very much the artist’s fantasy world, and why artists are said to be rather naive or childlike at times, and I think this is a fine thing that it should have come back. I think, mind you, that there are some people who are exploiting it in a very odd way; but to see Marilyn Monroe sort of grinning at you from a back of a car; and this car probably having a catherine wheel for a wheel, instead of a tyred one, and probably painted on about fifty foot square, with six colours, all primary; it’s grand; it’s marvellous – I don’t think it’s even crazy. I think, you know, up boys and at ’em: let’s have a go; it’s the twist and it’s the pony; it’s the hully-gully; and the madison and all the rest of it; it’s all coming alone and really giving everybody a fine kick in the pants.

CANNEY: Yes. Now what interest do you think these paintings can have for future generations?

LANYON: You mean the pop artists. I think they will have the same interest as, say, social realist art had – the kitchen sink school, say, in England. They happen to occur in a certain period and they reflect actually the atmosphere, very often the political atmosphere, of that period. They belong very closely to propaganda. I think pop art belongs to propaganda. I think it originated certainly in Madison Avenue, from the Madison Avenue advertising which is the most powerful in the world. I can’t imagine, for instance, pop art occurring in Russia, because social realism and the kitchen sink is really going strong there at the moment; but we have definitely a western form of art occurring in pop art as an antithesis to the self-conscious realist paintings from the east.

FEILER: Yes; but once the political overtones and implications are forgotten; now Michael was really thinking farther ahead; what artistic value or aesthetic values will they have?

CANNEY: Yes, I was thinking of this.

LANYON: But I personally can’t decide myself whether there are any artistic values in it; I enjoy it hugely.

CANNEY: Well, I think in this short discussion we’ve covered both the meaning and the implications of the subject in a work of art; and it’s obvious that the subject and its treatment will vary from age to age; and that this will continue as long as man is a creative being.