The Paintings of Miles Richmond by Paul Trewhela

Brochure introduction for exhibition ‘Miles Richmond. Paintings Early and Late’, Bartley Drey Gallery, Chelsea, London. August 2001


The second half of the twentieth century was a bed of Procrustes for the art of painting. Assailed as irrelevant, stretched to the point of meaninglessness under the idea that anything goes, or seduced into what Miles Richmond’s teacher David Bomberg described as the ‘horrific side of the attractive,’ this has been a very difficult period for the serious artist and a dismal period in western visual culture.

The present exhibition offers a very small selection of Miles Peter Richmond’s work from the years immediately following the Second World War into the beginning of the new millennium, drawn from a professional working life of over fifty years. These paintings affirm the art of painting and its central place in western culture. They do what is not done: they bring forward the tradition imaginatively, freshly and in a grounded way into our time. It is extraordinary to find, as one does in this exhibition, such continuity of meditation upon western culture – focussing on two world capitals, London and Rome – from the immediate aftermath of war to the hedonistic glories and savageries of our own day.

In an integrated process mediated through a period of near-abstract investigation of colour in the late Sixties (Red Studio, 1969), the ‘early’ paintings and the ‘late’ paintings speak of their own time and reflect backwards and forwards to stimulate further insight and appreciation from each other. London from St Paul’s, painted from the roof of London South Bank University in Southwark in 1993, communicates across the room with Richmond’s dark and ridged St Paul’s among the ruins, painted in 1948 in Bomberg’s classes from the roof of the Borough Polytechnic, which much later became London South Bank University. The survival, growth and change of this city find their analogue in Richmond’s art, through which we see ourselves.

From early to late, Richmond’s imagination creates a pictorial equivalent for his and our lifetimes, helping us to see who we are, where we have come from and where we are going. Moving from earth tones to a richness of colour, these paintings are that exceptional thing in contemporary western culture: art grounded in a notion of transcendence. The paintings are poised in eternity, the finite realised momentarily in the infinite, giving pleasure to the senses through the form of beauty. Even with the most brutal and the most ancient and modern of subjects (The Colosseum, Rome, 2001), these are works that refuse the aesthetic of the ugly.

It is clear from these paintings that Richmond has been in continuous conversation with his teacher, David Bomberg – and his teacher’s teachers, Giotto, Michelangelo, Cezanne – in a prolonged rite of passage through which he found his way to an independent idiom grounded in an independent vision. This is what Bomberg would have wanted, and taught towards.

The two artists were formed by different times. Richmond was in his early twenties when the atom bomb exploded at Hiroshima, absolute proof if it were needed of the physics of Einstein and Heisenberg, and the end of the Newtonian certainties. Bomberg’s mid-twenties, by comparison, were spent in the trenches; the experience of gravity is central to his subsequent work. The movement from a Bombergian, Newtonian sense of mass to an Einsteinian vision – mass constituted transitorily by moving atoms – is palpable in Richmond’s achievement: a metaphysical progression in western consciousness made sensuously visible in these paintings. They speak to us in ways of multiplicity and ambiguity, while affirming the central tradition. They are guideposts in a desert.

Clearly, too, in opposition to the functionalist drive of present-day consumerism and its society of the spectacle, these are spiritual paintings. Bomberg taught his practice and his vision. Richmond learned in these classes, and at Ronda, working beside his teacher, and ultimately on his own, in London, to become his own man.

Bomperg’s ‘spirit in the mass’ becomes in Richmond’s ‘late’ paintings an exploration of spirit in an expanding universe, whether its subject is a bowl of flowers, St Paul’s or the artist himself in self-portrait. In these paintings Richmond is at one with Milton, Blake – and Bomberg – in creating space for vision in difficult times, times when the spirit of the artist is tried. In these ‘cosmic explosions,’ as Marion Milner described his late work, he affirms his faith in a pictorial language accessible to all cultures, but often not easy to interpret exactly or immediately. The symbolic, the imaginative, the metaphorical, nurtured within the unconscious, here fuse with the results of intense looking. The best of the academic tradition, in which Richmond received his first training, is worked into something fresh and unseen before. Outer and inner worlds come together. These works speak new things over time.

Some ‘later’ elements are latent from the beginning. The large, near-abstract painting, The living know that they shall die but the dead know not anything (1949) – its title from Ecclesiastes – sums up for Richmond the fruit of his apprenticeship. It is an extremely ambitious painting for a man still in his twenties, and stood outside the norm in the Borough classes. In terms of new ways of seeing, this painting was among the most original done in Britain – or anywhere else – in that period, and parallels the development of abstract expressionism in New York at the same time, first seen in Britain some years later. Out of the destruction of war, here is the suggestion that learning begins with humility.

The apex in Richmond’s transition from ‘early to ‘late’ – represented merely in suggestion in this exhibition – was in the late Sixties. Returning to Britain with his family in the course of over twenty years’ painting in Spain, he put to himself the most difficult question for a pupil of such a strong teacher: if I remove from my work what is put there by my teacher, what is left? His rite of passage through this crisis of maturation, which lasted several years, is visible in his exploration of form through colour in Red Studio (1969). Colour for Richmond is clearly a major acquisition of the ‘late’ period, speaking in independent voice by comparison with drawing: form and sense realised in colour, which simultaneously hides and reveals. Rilke’s idea, important to Richmond since his twenties – ‘Beauty is but the beginning of terror’ – is central in his invocation of transcendence, and in his creed as an artist.

Working in obscurity at the Borough, in Spain and in a number of teaching posts in Britain, Richmond’s work shows the results of an extraordinary commitment. He has kept in touch with the tradition of western art, with his times and above all with his own integrity as an artist, and in doing so has created and independent and living body of work. No-one else has done paintings like these.



Paul Trewhela
August 2001