David Graham Paintings

David Graham's work at The Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition

Self-portrait, 1950 (Click to enlarge)

"There are four letters from David Graham to Ruth Borchard. The first three were sent from his studio in Chelsea, London SW3 but the year was not dated. The fourth, from Gravesend, is dated '10 Aug 60: 'I have moved from Chelsea where you originally wrote to me regarding a self-portrait.'

In the first letter, he writes: 'The best self portrait I have happens to be a black and white lithograph, I also have a 15" x 10" sketch portrait in oils... The two pictures together will be 1Ogns.' At the top of this letter, Ruth has written in pencil, 'Asked for oil sketch only 14/3/59' - for which, as Graham noted in his second letter, 'The price is 8 guineas.'

The painting is dated 1950, when the artist was living in what he now calls 'a very dark room in Euston - at seven shillings and ninepence a week - in a building that was con demned'. Born into a Jewish family in London in 1926, Graham was about twenty-four years old when he painted it. 'A very dark room in Euston' is a peculiarly, poetically apt loca-tion for a painter very much influenced by Sickert and then by the Euston Road School. Graham portrays himself as a slender, sensitive, serious-minded youth with a handsome, rather noble-looking head. The rich, painterly treatment of the green-tinged background and the artist's yellow-and-ruddy skin is somewhat reminiscent of Gustave Courbet, as in the latter's portrait of the poet Baudelaire.

He was impressed early on by reading A Free House! Or The Artist as Craftsman; Being the Writings of Walter Richard Sickert, edited by Osbert Sitwell (Macmillan & Co., London, 1947). In a 1910 essay, 'The Idealism News', Sickert wrote: 'It is because the portrait-painter is not free - he fills a useful and honourable place in a world of supply and demand - that I con-tinue rather to draw attention to work outside... limitations. The more our art is serious, the more will it tend to avoid the drawing-room and stick to the kitchen. The plastic arts are gross servants, dealing joyously with gross material facts. They call, in their servants, for a robust stomach and a great power of endurance, and while they flourish in the scullery, or on the dunghill, they fade at a breath from the drawing-room.'

What, in a 1954 essay in Encounter magazine, David Sylvester called contemporary 'Kitchen Sink' art, was thus part of a long tradition - with antecedents in Chardin, for example, and Sickert. David Graham never set out consciously to make 'Kitchen Sink' paintings but his early work depicted drab and mundane urban life. A newspaper article, 'Love on the Rates: It's a little chilly for the models' by Francis Martin (Evening Standard, November 13th 1953), featured three young artists, including Graham (photographed looking tall, slender and serious in a suit, with thick dark hair, as he 'paints his favourite model- his wife, June Patricia'), who had settled into some stu-dios built specially by Chelsea Borough Council (with rents varying from 48 shillings to £3 a month). Graham is quoted as saying: 'Before I came here I had a gaslit room in Euston... An 80-year-old widow had the room above, an old woman who sold newspapers the room below. The three of us shared a sink and water-tap on the landing. All very squalid and, from the artistic angle, fascinating.' The article tells of a portrait (sold then for £35) of 'five of Graham's neighbours, whom he paid three or four shillings to pose for him, in the room at Euston. It is a strongly handled, melancholy piece.'

A Room in Euston. "Five of Graham's neighbours" (1951) by David Graham. Private collection. (Click to enlarge)

The Teaching Staff of the Painting School, Royal College of Art (1949-50) by Rodrigo Moynihan. Tate, London. (Click to enlarge)

The portrait of 'Five of Graham's neighbours' was shown in his 1951 degree show, and then illustrated in black-and-white in Young Artists of Promise. The setting of A Room in Euston is a nondescript bed-sitting room (actually Graham's 'condemned' room in Euston). A plump, bearded man in a hat and an over-coat - in life, an elderly Russian gentleman - sits on a chair. A woman stands at a canvas on an easel. At the right a youngish black man stands, wearing an overcoat and beret. Another young woman sits by him on a couch, and to the left of the Russian, a girl lies on the bed. (These in life were twin sisters, painting students). The walls are bare, except for odd sketches on the wall. Graham painted the sitters individually and separately, bringing them together for the overall composition. This may help explain not only the beautifully evoked atmosphere of nervous isolation and disconnectedness in the room, but also each sitter's meditative dignity.

Graham recollects today that sources of inspiration for A Room in Euston included two paintings, each showing the gath-ering of a group of artists in a room: Gustave Courbet's The Painter's Studio (1855) and The Teaching Staff of the Painting School, Royal College of Art (1949-50) by Rodrigo Moynihan, Graham's own teacher. In Moynihan's picture, John Minton is shown on the far left, seemingly separated from the main group. Moynihan had based his painting on a photograph taken by Ruskin Spear's nephew, Eric Stanley, which showed, among others, Carel Weight, Robert Buhler, Kenneth Rowntree, Ruskin Spear, and Moynihan himself on the far right; Moynihan had added the image of Minton - not originally present in the pho-tographed scene - to the composition. As the critic John Russell wrote in his preface to the exhibition of Moynihan's 'Paintings 1970-73' (at Fischer Fine Art, London, 1973), 'the look of John Minton, sealed up in his own apartness, is one of the most haunting of contemporary likenesses. As with Moynihan's still-lifes of the 1940s, there is a point of historical reference for these groups in Courbet's The Studio or Degas' account of the cotton-brokers in New Orleans.'

In a letter to the author (May 24th 2002), Graham wrote: 'my first three paintings exhibited in London was at the Leicester Galleries (Leicester Sq.), the annual exhibition, 'ARTISTS OF FAME AND PROMISE' in 1951, chosen by Oliver Brown (Just on [my] leaving the RCA)... It was stimulating to see one's paint-ings against Sickert, John, Piper, etc. etc..'

In 1957, Graham made two remarkable paintings of London's Piccadilly Circus, with heavily overcoated, haunted-looking figures wandering down dark streets lit by neon signs. One picture is dominated by the huge, red curvilinear sign (with white lettering) for Coca Cola, and a sign for 'Forte's Popular' (the word 'Cafe' being obscured by a lamp-post); the other by a Guinness advertisement. These pictures - at once sinister and cosy in atmosphere - seem unconsciously to unite Sickert's. 'gross material facts' of urban life with, presciently, qualities of early Pop Art.

For almost thirty years, Graham was an art school teacher in London, becoming senior lecturer at the Sir John Cass School of Art. For many of these years, he showed portraits in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Many show isolated or vulnerable yet resilient-looking figures set against starkly defined back-grounds, as in a 1975 Degas-influenced portrait of Nestoras Manetas - the Greek Student - a portly, bearded young man, hauntingly introspective in demeanour.

A frequent sitter in recent years has been Martha Graham, his second wife. In a spatially complex and ingenious double portrait, c.1988, we see - distantly reflected in a mirror - the artist at his easel. In front of him sits Martha, herself at an easel, painting a still-life of fruit, flowers and an archaic mask. The back of her head of luxuriant black hair is pictured in the fore-ground. In the mirror we see Graham standing - looking alert and quizzical- and Martha sitting - a fresh, exploratory look on her face. To the right of their own reflections, the backs of each of their canvases are mirrored: two tiny rectangles, one on top of the other.

Graham especially enjoys painting en plein air, in latter years reverting, he says, 'to what I was doing when I was younger', when 'through necessity, through lack of accommodation... I was painting out of doors.' His subjects have included the river Thames, French, Malaga and spanish landscapes, and Venice. A 1987 exhibition, 'David Graham - Recent Work; 100 Paintings of Israel', at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry was the result of seventeen visits to Israel over a period of six years.

The sombre yet evocatively distilled bedsitter palette of his early years has moved on to the vibrancy of golden-hued pictures depicting gardens, markets and religious settings like the Western or Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, deserts, oases, mountains and rocks (notably the ultra-coppery Solomon's Pillars, the sub-jects of some fine, ambitious pictures on .the verge of abstrac-tion). Though freer in their handling of paint and radically higher in light voltage than he was once used to as a young painter, his 1980s portraits of young Bedouin men in their ten~s, a Coptic priest immersed in a book, and a young Arab woman, reach back to the poignant, introverted portraiture of Graham's early days in Euston and Chelsea.

Face to Face: British Self - Portraits in the Twentieth Century by Philip Vann. Samson & Company, Bristol 2004