Adoration of the Maggi

From the archives, from the previous website, my words on Maggi Hambling's blinding performance at Marlborough Fine Arts in 2008.


Maggi Hambling at Marlborough Fine Arts, Waves and Waterfalls, Jan 22, 2008



I saw poetry readings by Ted Hughes at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in about 1977 and Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979 but I don’t remember enough about them now to be able to nominate them as ‘the best thing I’ve ever been to’. A shortlist for such a prize would include The King’s Consort’s Monteverdi Vespers at the Proms of a few years back; James MacMillan conducting Evelyn Glennie in Veni, Veni, Immanuel in Portsmouth in the early 90’s; Paul Durcan’s spellbinding poetry reading in Portsmouth Library and possibly Rachel Hunter’s Richard III in The Globe.

However, Maggi Hambling talking about her waves and waterfalls at Marlborough Fine Arts was as good if not better than any of them. Praise indeed, you might say. Let me tell you about it.

With a fearsome reputation for her strongly-held beliefs and forthright expression of them, she was introduced with the caveat that the audience would have the chance to put questions to Maggi ‘at their peril’. The champagne flowed generously considering that there was no charge to reserve a place at the event and so either Maggi was in a benign mood or her ferocity is a misreading of what is really a lively, robust sense of irony and a quite charming manner that mixes a high seriousness with a more ambivalent sense of humour.

Introducing a set of drawings of the sea off the Suffolk coast as the earliest works in the show, she explained that drawing is the basis of everything she does rather than pickling things in glass cases. One of the main items of interest was how many figures and other images were to be found in the torrential water of the oil paintings because, as when one sees faces or shapes in the flames of a coal fire or in clouds, there did seem to be plenty of them. The answer was that they weren’t deliberately put there but unless they were too obvious and had to be obscured she didn’t deny that things emerge as part of the experiment of painting. Whereas a photograph is past and gone, a painting stays alive with its own energy and there would be no point in art if the artist knew how it was going to turn out and so the possible presence of Adam and Eve in the first waterfall we looked at was a good place to begin considering the recurrent theme of sexual imagery in the exhibition.

The power and energy of the turbulent North Sea became a regular parallel for Maggi’s treatment of her major themes of life, sex and death and while the paintings are predominantly dark tipped with white spray, there was the unforgettable detail of a glimpse of red sunrise on the horizon which suggested lips in a gloriously deep red among other variations on the surging and crashing.

While making regular reference to her preference for the paintings which had red dots on their labels signifying that they had been sold, she made wary reference to critics, time and motion people and interviewers while remembering her friend George Melly in anecdotes and referencing Titian and Courbet among others in her obviously profound grasp of the history of art.

Three waterfalls that we had already identified as the highlight of the exhibition were revealed as being the works that Maggi was most ‘excited’ about on an evening in which we did very well in having covered the main issues for ourselves before the talk revealed what it was really all about. Not only was I the bravest of the gathering who answered Maggi’s only question to us- ‘when do you know a painting is really finished?’ – when it is sold, but everything and slightly more than we had noticed emerged as the right answer on a day when the whole idea of right answers was a laughable idea. The biggest surprise to me was how little travelled Maggi has been in an age when the skies are clogged with flights to all corners of the planet.

She felt no need to go to India to paint amazing sunrises when Suffolk had enough of its own and ‘there’s nothing wrong with Suffolk’. So little wrong in fact, that Pembrokeshire seemed to be the only other place she’s ever been, now at the age of 62, and she perhaps overplayed her own naivety in claiming that it had to be explained to her that the sunsets were better in Wales because the sun sets in the West while Suffolk has the sunrises in the East.

The talk, which perhaps lasted nearly an hour as the group moved around the gallery, was a masterpiece and a masterclass both in aesthetics, the philosophy of art, and Maggi’s personal set of traditional but uncompromising attitudes. Her seriousness was obvious beneath a well-practiced but entirely natural dark wit. The value of art was beyond doubt and the passion and commitment was glaringly in evidence but so was the passion for life, the enjoyment and the bonhomie. The relevance, the approach and the manner of everything she said was disarmingly accurate and utterly convincing. She finished off the second half of one glass of champagne before being served another and for a while was carrying her own bottle with her but since we were served three glasses each without any sign of demur that we might be free-loading downbeats with a taste for the bohemian life but not enough money to buy a painting, we didn’t even need to envy her that.

Towards the end of an entirely entrancing wander round the gallery, it appeared to me that the one sculpture, a very roughly worked lump of plaster entitled Henrietta Eating a Meringue, was not going to be included in the talk. And so, full of the confidence I had from being top of the class by getting the first question right, I asked if Maggi might say a few words about it, which she did. At first they were the general, official introductory remarks about when it was done and where it was first exhibited but, nudged closer to a proper answer when I asked if it had anything in common with the imagery in this waterfall painting here, she said, ‘yes, everything in here is about sex’. ‘Thanks. I think you’ve confirmed our suspicions’.

The real, most genuine test case for me about any event or performance these days is whether it makes me want to cry or not. The very, very best things always do. It’s partly an overwhelming feeling that it is so sad that there’s so little generally as good as this in the world but it might also be that I have no other reaction left that is equal to the experience. I generally don’t actually cry but there are moments when it’s best not to speak to me because it might take me some time to collect myself to answer properly and that was how it was here for some time afterwards. I was prone to compare her art and her talking about it to the endless procession of over-rated, under-talented pop stars (and I mean Coldplay, Radiohead and U2 as prime examples) who are deluded into thinking that a few gloomy tunes that sell a few CD’s make everything they say or think into profound wisdom and give them the status of prophets, seers or sages. It simply isn’t possible for me to put any pop music performance I’ve seen on the short list for ‘the best thing I’ve ever been to’ even if I have seen several of my favourites. It simply isn’t in the same game.

It isn’t even proper for me to ruin such a review by mentioning those names but it’s necessary to emphasize the gap between the real, authentic, ‘lived’ experience in art of a special painter like Maggi Hambling and the posturing nonsense of those who pretend to be of any significance.

Gill, with her usual admirable sharpness, whispered to me to look at Maggi’s fingernails when she was close to us. Black, either charcoal or paint, was ingrained around the edge of each nail in a way that many women would regard as a make-up faux-pas. I might be tempted to say that it shows how closely Maggi is involved with her medium whereas others would see it as just a way of making their fortune. I could say that Maggi is a part of the paint and the paint becomes a part of Maggi but I won’t say that because, having heard her respond to a few pretentious questions, I think she’d laugh, give me a bit of an old-fashioned look and then find some kind words to mitigate the punishment for saying such a crass thing.

But that would be if she was still in such a kindly mood.

The best things in life might well be free but even better things come with three free glasses of champagne as well. Fantastic. Monteverdi will be wishing he’d tried a bit harder with his Vespers of 1610 because he’s in danger of losing his title.