Originally published in New Statesman and International, 1958
THE SOMEWHAT UNHUMOROUSLY entitled exhibition The Dying Art, at Roland, Browse and Delbanco, is a show of modern portraits ranging from about 1910 to the present day. The Foreword explains that portraiture is dying because ‘Man is slowly renouncing belief in his supreme position in the universe … the change from nineteenth-century liberalism to twentieth-century conformism ...’ etc. The apocalyptic wail! In fact – as the best paintings on show prove – only official portraiture has died: for the simple reason that the ruling class can no longer glory in any aspect of the truth about themselves.
If, however, the Foreword is hot air, the exhibition is a most interesting one. It reveals (and I weigh my words) that we have in this country a portrait painter comparable with Kokoschka: Peter de Francia is a more extrovert artist, but he submits himself to the same exacting discipline of draughtsmanship and he has the same, very rare, imaginative openness or generosity towards the character of his sitter.
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OUR CRITICS, WHO pick up their titbits of opinion like cocktail cherries, have glanced at Peter de Francia's six-by-twelve-foot canvas The Bombardment of Sakiet (Waddington Gallery) and murmured ‘Guernica’. This is about as silly as murmuring ‘Goya’ in front of the Picasso. But finally this comparison is only made possible by the fact that so few such pictures have been painted.
The Sakiet canvas represents the debris of one home in the Tunisian village just after one of the French bombs has fallen: splintered planks, torn clothes, broken wicker, a fallen sewing machine, a collapsed roof, the dead, and the living whose lives have now been irrevocably broken. The composition is roughly that of a diagonal cross of violent movement, almost as though the diagonals were the paths of the blast. The havoc caused is not merely evident in the facts just described (if that were so the painting would be no more than a gruesome illustration), but also in the actual painting itself. The forms themselves are splintered and fly like chips of wood from an axe. By a boy, dead on the ground, there is a crumpled piece of red-and-green striped drapery, and these clashing stripes ricocheting off each other are as expressive of the violence done as the boy's still, clutching hand. The brushstrokes are swift and when they describe a body their looseness emphasises physical human vulnerability: rendering a foot, a wrist, a head, they become, for all their accuracy of drawing, like straws in the wind. Before you are aware of the subject, you see a world of form split open and rent, with only the blue sky unharmed. Then, as you begin to read the incidents in the painting, the full enormity of what has happened strikes you.
This is a work of political protest. But it is also a painting in the European tradition. Like Delacroix’s Massacre at Scio (and the sketches recall Delacroix vividly) or like Géricault’s Raft, it deals with an actual event. It has been painted on the assumption that painting can hold its own with the other arts without becoming literary or theatrical. And the assumption is justified.
The picture has weak passages. It was not painted at Sakiet, nor could it have been. It was painted in a quiet studio two thousand miles away. The blast had to shrill its way through a man’s conscience and imagination and there, becoming a symbol for all modern inhumanity in a way which Delacroix and Géricault never had to contend with, it occasionally buffets a form and inflates it or knocks it sideways exaggeratedly. The stomach of the pregnant woman or parts of the fleeing child – these are over-wrenched details, where the artist’s imagination has been blackmailed by the news, where his emotion has become sharper than his power to visualise. Even such passages, however, are very well integrated into the organisation of the picture as a whole – their failure is in their relation to reality. And this power to organise reveals one of de Francia's great virtues as an artist: his intelligence.
It is his intelligence which makes him a professional in an age of amateurs. Look at the other works in this show – the portraits, the quarry landscapes, the drawings – to see what this professionalism means. He has trained himself. He can draw, he can handle paint, he can compose, he can paint a picture which won’t fall to bits. He can do what a well-trained apprentice used to be able to do after ten years with a master. That doesn’t sound remarkable? One must remember that this is a time when artists are encouraged to make a virtue of their inabilities, and when there is no master-apprentice system, so that for a man to train himself requires the wisest and most dedicated study (de Francia’s masters are Rubens, Hals, Delacroix, Courbet, Picasso, Léger) and also a belief in the dignity of painting.
It is also de Francia's intelligence which gives his work a yet rarer quality. Through his intelligence he is aware of what is happening in the world. His art deals with events. Sakiet is bombed. Men work in the sun. An Indian painter comes to London with his wife. An African girl sits thinking, her back to a reproduction of Guernica. The subjects of all pictures might, of course, be called events. But through all de Francia's paintings a wind blows, less violently than the blast in the Sakiet picture but no less certainly, and this wind brings with it a promise of time and distance and news.
In the portraits (one of which the Tate should buy if it takes note of anything apart from the small talk of the cocktail-cherry men) this sense of eventfulness is there in the swift Hals-like brush marks in the colours that dart from passage to passage like light on the sea, but primarily in the intensity and clarity with which the faces are drawn and seen – as though being scrutinised like messengers. These are not in the usual sense of the word psychological portraits: they are paintings of men and women who wear the expression of our time as others wear a smile. In the quarry landscapes the sense of eventfulness is there in the most straightforwardly visual way of all. These are paintings about the way the meridional light strikes blocks of white rock. This light appears to recut and reshape the stone along the same edges as the quarry workers themselves. And so here the labour of men appears to turn sunshine into an event.
Much of de Francia's work is disturbed and disturbing. It is always clamorous. There is no quiet. He is the opposite of a classical painter. A romantic? No, because he belongs to the mid twentieth century, and romanticism, in the usual sense of the word, cannot. It is not his own emotions which are supreme for him, but the new world he sees emerging, and which, by painting, he helps to bring about.
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PETER DIDN’T FIT in easily, did he? Why?
My answer would be because he was so large, he embodied largeness in a very distinct and unique way. He was physically large, but what I'm thinking of goes far beyond that.
Consider the way he draws, the energy, the speed, of his drawn lines – they display and express a largeness, even if the drawing itself is a small one. He's the opposite of a nature-morte painter; he’s an horizon-painter. When he’s observing a chair or a foot his gaze and scrutiny are still panoramic. In his vision there are no shelters from space. He has the vision of a helmsman navigating an open sailing boat. Alone.
If I search for a fellow artist to compare Peter with, I think of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, in the town hall of Sienna painting the frescoes of Good and Bad Government. Six centuries separate them, and their painterly idioms and iconography are very different. What they nevertheless share is the largeness. Both set out to create images for people under the immense vault of a sky which is, in part, firmament and, in part, History. The immense vault of the sky.
Something similar applied to Peter’s opinions, judgements, and questions concerning the ongoing struggles in the world today and the role of art in those struggles. He came on and spoke like a newly arrived messenger from elsewhere, always from another front. And so his company was provocative, disconcerting, illuminating, funny, often very funny. He was never local.
Peter de Francia is an horizon-painter.