I have been haunted by Cecil Collins’s painting, Wounded Angel, ever since I first saw it in an exhibition of his work in Plymouth in 1983. The picture is included in the artist’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery. The foreground is filled with the figure of an angel lying like an injured dragon-fly in front of a sumptuous purple mountain, which reaches up towards an orange sky. On the horizon, a burning sun slowly rises. As always with Collins, the quality of the painting itself is impeccable.
I am sure there are those who will say that his imagery is trite; after all, we live in a culture in which the idea of the angelic has been debased. We are more likely to use the word of a well behaved little girl than a messenger of God. With the disenchantment of the world, the angels have fallen or fled: or rather they seem to have no greater reality than the kitsch of the religious souvenir shops, Sunday schools and department store Christmases.
And yet when I first saw Collins’s painting it did not strike me as a cliché. On the contrary, I was touched by the poignancy and intensity of the image: his angel seemed to belong to an older and more potent, if still vulnerable hierarchy. The words are bound to sound pretentious, but the emotions the picture aroused – and still arouse – in me were close to those I experience when listening to music. They had much to do with that delicate beauty, underscored by yearning and loss, which I derive from hearing, say, Mozart’s Magic Flute.
After the Plymouth exhibition, I sought out Collins’s works. When I organized ‘Rocks and Flesh’, an exhibition of English drawing, in 1985, one of two studies by Collins which I included was a fragile pencil drawing The Fool, 1976. In the catalogue, I quoted Collins himself as saying, ‘You see in the Fool’s mouth this quivering, vulnerable joy and humour and sadness and melancholy – very much the voice of truth’.
I am well aware that to many – including some whose views on painting I respect – all this will sound unconvincing, even sentimental. Collins’s work divides informed opinion more sharply, and more unpredictably, than that of any other major artist at work in Britain today. His paintings excite extravagant and tendentious admiration, but, on the other hand, a sneering and embarrassed contempt. (For an instance of the latter, see the despicable review of Collins’s Tate retrospective by John Russell Taylor in The Times.)
So why did I respond so strongly to Collins’s paintings when I first really looked at them in Plymouth? Perhaps I was ready for a shift in both my taste and my aesthetic ideas; Collins’s work confirmed the feeling I already had that neither a ‘hedonistic’, nor an ‘expressionist’, let alone a ‘realist’ explanation of aesthetic experience was sufficient. Self-evidently, none of these was adequate to account for the mysteriously musical beauty of his work. Where then should I look…?
Collins was born in Plymouth in 1908; he was a sickly child and his formal schooling was limited. In this respect, he considers himself to have been very lucky. His father was an engineer who was opposed to the idea that his son might become an artist. But, in childhood, Collins had begun to discover that vision upon which he was to draw throughout his life; he experienced it first in his response to nature. He speaks of ‘seed experiences’, intense, and ultimately fruitful responses to particular details of natural form. A white cloud seemed to him to be ‘a gateway to paradise’.
After his father’s death, in 1927, he went to the Royal College. There he showed his mastery in drawing from the figure; he was drawn to the work of Ingres. He also fell in love with a fellow student, Elisabeth Ramsden, to whom he was married in 1931. She appears in many of his paintings. Elisabeth shares a similar, if smaller and more personal, vision; a selection of her pictures was shown recently at the Albemarle Gallery.
The early 1930s were a fecund time for Collins. In 1933, he painted The Fall of Lucifer, a vast picture which reveals one of the central preoccupations of his life’s work: the consequences of the loss of grace. But Collins is drawn to imagery which suggests Paradise can be regained: his paintings quiver with intimations of hope and signs of redemption. For example, the symbol of the Holy Grail often appears in his pictures in the form of a chalice.
Inevitably, Collins dissented sharply from the ideas about art prevalent among the Bloomsbury set. He felt that Roger Fry and Clive Bell were reducing the experience of great art to hedonistic pleasure, to a memory of a Mediterranean holiday in the sun. In the catalogue of his Tate show, Collins cites Wladimir Weidle: ‘A work of Art can be thought of as a pure form, but the fact is that it cannot be created as a pure form’.
Collins exhibited at the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, but he soon came to feel that the Surrealists were preoccupied with the end of a civilization; he disliked what he called their ‘psychic furniture’. What fascinated him was the possibility of a new beginning. He was drawn to the regenerative imagery which abounds in nature itself – especially to images of bursting seeds and rising dawns.
The final break with the Surrealists came when they objected to a painting called Magical Images in the Process of Time, in which Collins had incorporated the word ‘resurrection’ eleven times. He was not sorry to sever his relations with the movement. He came to believe reality had outstripped the most bizarre surreal imaginations. After 1939, it seemed that any news photograph might show imagery more fantastic than a picture of, say, human limbs protruding from a pile of rubble or masonry. When the unconscious had erupted into the world, there was nothing left for surrealism to reveal.
Despite a successful exhibition in 1936, Collins withdrew from the London art world; he and Elisabeth went to live in Totnes, largely to be close to their friend, Mark Tobey, who was teaching at Dartington Hall. Over the next few years, Collins produced a series of masterpieces, among them The Quest, 1938, The Artist and His Wife, 1939, and Dawn of the same year. In these works he drew upon imagery of the waste-land which was sometimes reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s, or even Karl Barth’s, fallen worlds. But Collins’s pictures always shimmer with hints and traces of paradise and redemption.
In 1939, as the clouds of war gathered over Europe, Elisabeth Collins made a drawing, The First Fool; this has a powerful effect upon Cecil and opened the door to the iconography that was to pre-occupy him over the coming years.
In the 1940’s Collins went on to paint some of his best known images, like the Tate Gallery’s The Sleeping Fool, 1943. A few years later, he and Elisabeth moved to Cambridge. Here he seemed to recognize that something had, perhaps, been missing from his work. At least, in the 1950s, many of his paintings acquired a fiery fierceness which was quite new for him.
The response to what he was doing remained muted. Formalist critics, like Patrick Heron, tended to ignore his work, or to dismiss it as illustrative. Collins never showed the characteristic modernist interest in the medium for its own sake, or that of an evolving history of contemporary art. But, for a social realist, like John Berger, Collins was ‘an entirely introspective artist’, whose painting was of no consequence because it lacked a social or political dimension. But Collins himself felt totally at odds with the expressionists, whom he accused of reducing art to ‘the vested interests of the ego’.
And yet he was never entirely isolated. He started to teach life classes, at the Central School in London; thus began his career as one of the most outstanding of post second world war drawing masters; to this day, he inspires an unswerving loyalty among his students.
Nor was Collins without influential supporters in the art world. Kenneth Clark admired and bought his work. Although John Rothenstein, then director of the Tate, found his trustees incredulous when he recommended acquisition of paintings by Collins, he nonetheless managed to obtain a significant holding of them for the Gallery. Bryan Robertson was another early enthusiast.
Even so, Collins still seemed to be working at a tangent to the ‘mainstream’ of British art. Much of the critical writing about him was produced by those who were themselves ‘outsiders’, and published in relatively obscure journals. It is only in the last five years or so that a major Tate retrospective seemed even a possibility. But Collins’s exhibition, ‘The Music of Dawn’, inspired by this prospect and held, of all places, at Anthony d’Offay’s Gallery a year ago, was a revelation.
In one of the pictures first shown there, The Dream of the Angel, 1987, a figure of an angel lies upon the ground in a sparse, blue-grey wasteland; his wings encompass him. As so often with Collins, a glimmering sun is rising on a distant horizon. A cool, grey light seems to suffuse the whole painting and to shine forth from it; everything is redolent with a sense of coming dawn.
At least one other painting at d’Offay’s – also included in the Tate show – seemed to me to be a small masterpiece: Collins painted a head of a fool in a conical cap, gazing out at the world with eyes of wounded innocence. The paint has been laid down in luminous layer upon luminous layer, so that the fool’s face glows, warm and golden.
So what are we to make of Collins’s achievement? I believe he is addressing the central aesthetic problem of our time. That is, how can the artist find beauty and meaning in a world from which God has apparently departed?
No doubt it is an obsession of mine, but, in my recent critical explorations, especially in Theoria, I have found myself returning again and again to the 1850s, and to what happened to British painting in those years. The Pre-Raphaelites had hoped to revive the ‘spiritual’ dimension of art; but, with the advance of the new geological sciences, they had to confront the absence of God from a world in which they had assumed His immanence. Hence the terrible, searing absurdity of Holman Hunt’s Scapegoat.
Hunt’s preparatory sketch for this painting had included a rainbow – a sign that the covenant between God and man would never be broken; but, in the bleak finished version, even this remote symbol of redemption was erased. For Hunt, the Dead Sea symbolized the world as a godless wasteland; on its shores, he found not, as he had hoped, evidence of his Redeemer, but rather a mangy goat which dropped dead on him. The bleak terrain he reveals to us is emptied of the presence of God. Aesthetic response to the world of nature, it seemed, could never be the same again.
There is a sense in which this great spiritual dilemma of the mid-nineteenth century remains our dilemma. If we mock the Pre-Raphaelite failure, it is perhaps because we wish to evade the horror and desolation of that first revelation of the ‘naked shingles’ of the world. Its consequences for art, and for British painting in particular, were devastating; sensual pleasure, empirical perception, psychoanalytic insight, social realism, mechanistic functionalism, formal analysis… all these things can be evasions or denials of a deep, catastrophic loss of spiritual meaning, a sign of the withering of the transcendent face of art.
Collins had the courage to face this dilemma with a clarity as disarming as it is uncompromising. For him, the way through and beyond Hunt’s despair has been the pursuit of the vision of the fool. The fool does not see the world with the disillusioned knowingness of the scientist; rather he marvels; he looks with the eyes of a child.
However, Collins is not a conventionally religious man: indeed he is deeply critical of the world’s established faiths. He believes that they have lost sight of this ‘vision of the fool’. Sometimes, his way of seeing things reminds me of that of Thomas Traherne, the seventeenth century poet, who once asked: ‘Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir to the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold’. And yet Traherne did not doubt, any more than Collins doubts that this was in fact so. Traherne never forgot what he himself had seen as a child: ‘The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor ever was sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.’
In the early 1940s, Collins described his way of seeing the world in words. In a short book called The Vision of the Fool, written in the early 1940s and first published in 1947, he affirmed his belief in that which is ‘universal and eternal’, above and beyond the world of the intellect and the senses, ‘but not beyond the reach of the humility and hunger of the human heart’.
Collins’s paintings do not contain representations of objects seen in the visible world: indeed, he often reverses those rules of drawing and perspective through which artists attempt to transcribe appearances. And yet, despite his rejection of surrealism, or, come to that, of conventional religious belief, he insists that there is no meaning in life or art ‘excepting that which springs from the immortal surreality of that Eternal Person’. The fool - whom he identifies with the artist and the poet – embodies ‘the eternal virginity of spirit, which in the dark winter of the world, continually proclaims the existence of a new life, gives faithful promise of the spring of an invisible Kingdom, and the coming of light’.
There was a time, of course, when Collins’s ideas sounded anachronistic, but he has always insisted that they are ‘modern’, in the sense that he is concerned as much with the present and the future as with the past. He has often said that he is more interested in the beginnings of a new civilization than in the passing of the old.
Indeed, it is part of his argument that our culture has itself become moribund and stale. ‘The only future I can see for it’, he once said, ‘is to make a new covenant with divine reality… And for art to return to its normal function, which is to reflect that covenant’. In other words, he is seeking a radical rejection of much contemporary aesthetics; he wants to re-instate that old idea of art as a channel of grace providing a link between the visible and invisible realities.
Of course, in recent years, there has been wide-spread dissatisfaction with the several secular aesthetics of modernism and, more recently, of post-modernism. There has been a resurgence of the category of the spiritual, and this undoubtedly goes some way to explaining the growing revival of interest in Collins’s work.
It must be said, however, that mere assertion of ‘spirituality’ in no way guarantees quality in art. We have already seen shows like that mounted at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art two years ago, which attempted to rehabilitate the most bogus manifestations of modern art into a revisionist history which ‘proved’ that American painting was the triumphant culmination of the evolution of ‘the spiritual in art’. Jasper Johns, and even, unbelievably, Marcel Duchamp himself remained in the new pantheon, replete with a ‘radiant’ critical discourse. Needless to say, twentieth century British artists, like Paul Nash, Eric Gill, David Jones and Cecil Collins were ignored.
There are signs that this re-writing of art history is not confined to the United States: for example, an exhibition called ‘A Spiritual Dimension’ is now touring British provincial galleries (24 June-23 July, Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry, 12 August-16 September, Worcester City Museum). This exhibition contains worthless rubbish by artists like Tess Jaray, Bob Law and Carl Plackman, once heralded as minimalists, conceptualists, etc. – but now on parade in their new critical uniforms, wearing the gleaming medals of the spiritual revival. Cecil Collins rightly refused to take part in this show.
But such foolishness is inevitable. We should not allow it to obscure, or to dilute, what an artist like Cecil Collins has achieved. In his book, Real Presences, George Steiner recently wrote vividly of ‘the difficulties the artist faces when he seeks for an idiom truthful to his creative experience in a society, in a moment of history, where the frankly theological is so largely held in derision’. He insisted, however, that even in the modern world, major art, ‘like all great shaping before it’, shows us that it has been ‘touched by the fire and the ice of God’.
Steiner argues that ‘where God’s presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable’. Even if our faith has faltered we must learn to read and to look as if… We must make ‘a wager on transcendence’ or we will find ourselves cut off from the great and consoling power of art altogether. Cecil Collins’s fools and his wounded angels affirm just such a wager.
© Peter Fuller Memorial Foundation 2008
(This article was originally published in Modern Painters magazine, Vol 2, no 2, 1989)
Peter Fuller portrait Copyright Sandy Edwards 1984
