Excerpt from an article first published in the New Yorker, 1990
I HAD BY NOW ACQUIRED the habit of asking everyone I met in the London world of painting how he or she felt about the fate of David Bomberg. The neglect of Bomberg was a distressing reminder that every age – including, doubtless, our own – banishes some of its ablest talents to limbo. As I studied Cork's book, however, I began to feel that Bomberg's claim on the reader's sympathy was somewhat weaker than it had at first appeared. There was a sense, of course, in which the whole tragic story defied rational understanding, but an artist's best work often plays Jekyll to the Hyde of his private personality, and this seemed to have been the case with David Bomberg. Whatever in his nature was fractious or imbalanced did not show up in his teaching or in his more exemplary pictures, and thus all the tributes of his admiring students – which Cork quotes at length – did not really help to elucidate his plight. Yet within the tale of what was done to Bomberg lies embedded the smaller tale of what he did to other people, which, it turns out, was often rather disagreeable. Cork's narrative contains a long train of snarling, Hollywood-style metamorphoses, in which our hero's darker self blackens a fellow-student's eye; brains a certain Professor Brown with a palette; organizes a revolt within the Omega Workshops; tries to provoke a fistfight between his brother, who was a professional boxer, and Wyndham Lewis; earns the enduring hatred of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; so infuriates Ben Nicholson on a painting trip to Lugano that Nicholson buys him a ticket home to England; falls afoul of the very Zionist cultural institutions on whose patronage he subsists; antagonizes a detachment of Bedouin guards; alienates his friend Muirhead Bone; obliges his family to live in a tent; and, in a particularly absurd incident, throws a pile of baby clothes out the window. As spectators, we may find all this quite rollicking, but nothing suggests that either of his two wives found it especially entertaining. "He seems to have suffered from a deep-seated emotional insecurity which impelled him to cloak it in arrogance," Cork writes.
In Brighton, one misty, salty morning, I rang Dennis Creffield's bell. From the flight of steps in front of his building, on Marine Parade, I could see Brighton Pier and, farther off, in a shimmer of sunlight, the ruined beauty of West Pier. Creffield is one of those lesser-known English artists whom Kitaj frequently praises. He was born in London in 1931, and in his late teens he, too, studied with David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic. After three years there, he went on to the Slade, where he won the Tonks prize for life drawing, and later he taught at the University of Leeds and Brighton Polytechnic. Creffield has had one-man shows at a number of important places, including the Leeds City Art Gallery and the Serpentine Gallery, in Hyde Park. I had seen some photographs of his drawings in the magazine Modern Painters, and though photographs often fail to capture the spirit of drawings, these had greatly interested me. This was the same Creffield who was a source for the penultimate chapter of the Cork biography, in which he had borne touching witness to Bomberg's generosity and lofty sense of purpose. So by coming to Brighton I was seeking to kill two birds with one stone: to look at Creffield's drawings for whatever pleasure they might afford and to put a few questions to him about the neglect of Bomberg.
In a photograph of Bomberg's students in the book, Creffield appeared as a beardless, childish-looking seventeen-year-old with unruly fair lamb's-wool curls. Now, more than forty years later, he was a shortish, slender man in a pink Henley shirt, with a domed brow and thinning hair worn long in back. He showed me upstairs to a flat in a house that had obviously always been divided into flats, and his own instantly revealed that he either had no money or was totally uninterested in money or in any veneer of elegance. It was the apartment of an old-fashioned bohemian who lived and breathed art, with reproductions and sketches and bibelots piled up everywhere and proliferating over the walls and tables. At the front was his studio, in which piles of big charcoal drawings, about a yard square, lay on the floor. The studio was painted entirely white and lit by a blaze of watery sunshine; a large bay window gave the impression of bellying out over the Channel. Through its panes little was visible but the sea itself, a broad expanse of rippling gray, surmounted by pewter-and- foam clouds.
Creffield had barely introduced himself when he began to explain why living in Brighton suited his character: despite certain novel vulgarities that threatened to drown out the associations proper to the place – those grand old memories of dirty weekends, private detectives, correspondents, and Graham Greene crooks – Brighton, he said, was still a fine, seedy, romantic place to dwell. This had to do partly with the light, which was positively Mediterranean, and partly with the town's climate of truancy. It still was a spot to visit not with the wife and kiddies but rather with a secret sweetheart, and if one happened to end up working here – over this seafront heaving with kissing couples and screeching with penny arcades – one’s labors derived a certain benefit from it. They took on a larky, picnicky quality that nicely counterbalanced the vast moral imperative of the sea and sky, which were constantly urging one to get on with it and make something of one's moment on earth.
Creffield's big charcoal drawings were all of churches. He explained that in 1987 the British Arts Council had commissioned him to draw the twenty-six medieval monastic cathedrals of England, and that he had since drawn other cathedrals – including St. Paul's – that do not belong to this category. It was a project dear to his heart, he said, for ever since the age of seventeen, when Bomberg set him to drawing the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, he had wanted to tackle all the great Norman and Gothic basilicas as a unified theme. He explained that he was a Catholic, and that his religious beliefs had contributed to this ambition. From February to November, 1987, he wandered about with a trailer, applying to the appropriate ecclesiastical authorities to gain access to closes, naves, apses, and choirs. Since he hated to be observed while drawing, he executed most of the work in the very early morning or in the late afternoon and the evening. The project yielded hundreds of drawings, many of which were currently on tour all over England, but Creffield had gone right on drawing cathedrals, and there was unfinished work on the walls.
"I conceived of my tour as a sort of course in drawing," he said. "I wanted each cathedral almost to make the drawing by itself, and when things were going well I would leave off working not when I'd achieved some structure or definition but just when the drawing felt 'said' technically, it could have been quite incomplete. My drawings have nothing to do with transferring a retinal image onto a piece of paper, but rather with recording an emotional experience, which could include a purely mental image of a building, or a sensation of length or vastness that would never have fit on my paper if I'd rendered it topographically."
Creffield had a knack for juxtaposing the cursory and the highly detailed. He could casually hit the stride of Gothic tracery, converting it into something like the brilliant dashes on painted pottery, and he relished laying fret- works and filigrees next to staid black shapes. He used flying buttresses to get a diagonal, skipping movement that energized the whole page, but he could suddenly downshift into wariness, abandoning all his shoulder and elbow jive in favor of a tense wristy caution. He would do careful fan vaulting, like the patterns of foam the tide leaves on a beach; then, a moment later, within a broad gloom of nearly undifferentiated charcoal soot, he would float a single slot of white so cannily into place that a whole Norman crossing, with all its shafts and ribs, swam into the imagination. It was a sociable appeal to the viewer's habits of visual inference: a lighthearted flick of his crayon, pinning down the odd crocket or finial, summoned up in one's mind half-forgotten images of architectural elevations, or caused drowned memories of an evensong at Ely to rise to the surface of awareness. There was a classic, European sense of shared heritage to the whole endeavor. Creffield seemed to have learned from all the master masons of medieval England, and perhaps he belonged to the last generation that had the training or the mere sense of connectedness to do so. He knew his cathedrals the way older people know Shakespeare, and, in fact, he was eager to point out the similarity between the churches and the plays. "It's that medieval aspect of Shakespeare," he said. "The ebul- lience, the cosmoslike vastness! And then there is the anonymity, the suppression of ego. We don't really know who Shakespeare was, just the way we don't really know who built the cathe- drals. And this isn't 'a regrettable lacuna in the information at our disposal" – he mimicked a pedant's diction "it's part of the whole idea. Nowadays so much art is only ego, yet that's just what we've got to get rid of."
He plucked some photographs off a table. "Have you been to Southwell?" he asked. "It's in Nottinghamshire. Has a large thirteenth-century chapter house octagonal. All around the cap- itals, gables, and moldings of the stalls are these wonderful leaves, the so- called leaves of Southwell. A triumph of English carving. Look at these curiously realistic heads poking out from the springing of the gables. Look at the oddly swollen cheeks of that damsel with the chaplet. Splendid, eh? Here's Jack-in-the-Green, an ancient English tree spirit who looks out from among the fronds." He held up the photograph and communed with Jack for a moment, then peered at me suspiciously. There was something wild or woodsy, something Druidical, about him. His features seemed to gather themselves into a knot at the center of his face, from which they bristled in my direction.
"What, actually, are you writing about?" he asked curtly.
I had already told him over the telephone, but I reiterated my interests: Bomberg, Kossoff, himself, and so on.
"Kossoff, eh? We were in Bomberg's class together. Let me tell you something – you mustn't pay any attention to those boys Kossoff and Auerbach when they start to go on about difficulty and struggle, and all that rubbish. Those boys have always been incredibly ambitious. Those boys were showing in their teens."
Creffield insisted that he respected Kossoff and Auerbach as artists, but that they had always been great successes, had always taken the high road to acclaim. The most infuriating thing about them was that they were widely regarded as the inheritors of David Bomberg, whereas, in reality, during Bomberg's lifetime they had refused to join any of his groups and had gone their separate ways. Creffield launched into a brief version of the saga of Bomberg's last years the Borough Group, the Borough Bottega Group, the synods, the excommunications, the schisms, the ecumenical reconciliations – and of how "those boys," as he kept on referring to Kossoff and Auerbach, had never really grasped Bomberg's teaching in the first place, whereas he himself had held the Master's banner aloft. In fact he saw no reason to deny it he was Bomberg's spiritual son. Like Bomberg, he had always tried, inch by inch and second by second, to keep his painting open to the impress of his feelings, and, like Bomberg, he had been repaid for his pains with a total absence of worldly success. Yet his very failure had kept him mobile and elastic, unlike Kossoff and Auerbach, who, being tied to smart galleries, had sunk into self-repetition. They had every right, of course. To whom did it matter, certainly not to Creffield, that some people bartered their freedom for a monstrous visibility and stood about like giants in fetters, blocking everyone's way? He, at least, who was undiscovered (the fact that Anglia TV had just completed a film on him apparently counted for nothing), had used his obscurity to protect his independence, and so to this day made strictly voluntary decisions in the practice of his art.
Creffield might have gone on like this for some time had a girl not entered the room. She was pretty and blond and seemed hesitant to intrude, though it was perfectly clear that she lived there. Creffield radiantly introduced her as his "sweetie," and in a soft, perturbed voice she said something about a baby asleep in the stairwell outside, who shouldn't be wakened if possible, and how there wasn't much of anything for lunch. She must have been at least thirty years younger than Creffield, who had several times morosely described himself to me as a sixty-year-old, though in fact he was fifty-eight.
In the kitchen, we fixed ourselves some bread and cheese and wine, and then we went back into the studio. We sat down across from each other at a table by the big bay window, and I asked Creffield to give me his impressions of Bomberg.
"Well, when I came to Borough Polytechnic he was already quite ill," Creffield replied, "and he sensed that his work would not be accepted in his lifetime. So he conceived of his students as being able to take up what he wouldn't be able to do. He was handing on the torch, so to speak, and he treated his students like colleagues. Can you imagine a man of his achievement putting his paintings on a railing in the Victoria Embankment Gardens next to the work of a little boy like me? Yet that's just what he did once, in the days when public shows were authorized there."
"And was he as difficult as he seems to have been?"
"Of course he was difficult," Creffield said, impatiently. "He was difficult because he had standards! The one word I remember his using over and over was 'integrity.'" Creffield went on to recall an incident in which the painter Josef Herman – an artist who had settled in South Wales, where he created a group of pictures based on the life of a mining village – had once sent a potential buyer to Bomberg's studio. "Bomberg eventually threw this buyer out," Creffield said. "Even though Bomberg badly needed to sell, he wouldn't sell to someone buying in the wrong way. Bomberg was the sort of person who would hang a whole exhibition and then take it down because something about it bothered him aesthetically."
"What about the fact that he was Jewish and of lower-class origin?" I asked. "Did that contribute to his neglect?"
"I very much doubt it," Creffield said. "In fact, all that may well have satisfied the English idea of the artist as a colorful oddball – a Gulley Jimson, if you will. Even for conventionally prejudiced people, the Jewish peculiarity was eminently acceptable in an artist. The problem was that Bomberg simply wouldn't compromise on his standards. He had deep puritanical anxieties about that sort of thing. Well, you might say that he was difficult, but you really don't have to be very difficult to be difficult, if you know what I mean. In the backward English art world of those days, Bomberg just didn't fit in. My God, man, for fifty years this great artist wasn't even mentioned in a foot-bloody-note! He just didn't fit in!"
Creffield paused to eat some bread and cheddar. Then he said, "Another student of Bomberg's told me that Bomberg tried to help a refugee painter, who was apparently having a hard time, to get a job at Borough Polytechnic. He spoke to the principal about this painter, and the principal said, 'Well, send him along. I'll see what I can do. A little while later, the principal got in touch with Bomberg and told him, "The fellow has some very interesting ideas.' 'Really?' said Bomberg. What are those ideas?' The principal explained them to Bomberg, and Bomberg replied, 'If you employ that man, then I'm resigning.""
Creffield concluded on a triumphant note, yet it struck me that he had just weakened his case. There is, to be sure, a kind of easy sociability, a good-natured tendency to yield or agree, to which serious artists will not stoop when aesthetic judgments are in play. Creffield was all primed up on this ethic, which had clearly been Bomberg's as well; the hitch was that the ethic did not seem to fit the situation. The principal's judgment might well have been deplorable, but the refugee had initially been Bomberg's candidate, so Bomberg had been under some obligation to vet him before proposing him for a job. Failing that, he was surely entitled to reverse his opinion, but to accompany the reversal with a threat was to exceed the norms of civilized conduct. Of course, neither Creffield nor I would ever really know the details of the case, but I couldn't help being impressed by the sheer cantankerousness of the brief that Creffield was holding for his former master.
Something in Creffield shied at being asked all these questions about Bomberg, and as he answered them his voice seemed to stifle some question of his own. "Now I'm going to ask you something," he said, finally. "Are you interested in Bomberg, or are you interested in me?"
I put down my glass of wine and swallowed my bread and cheese. "Both," I said. "I'm interested in both Bomberg and you."
"I've noticed that all your questions are about Bomberg," he snapped. "You've asked me far fewer questions about myself. And what I want to know is just what I asked. Why did you come down here, anyway? Are you interested in Bomberg, or are you interested in me?"
Just then the sun came out over the Channel, lighting up half of Creffield's face, while the other half sank into darkness. The waves of the sea were tiny and innumerable, and seemed to move very slowly, like waves of mercury. Above them, the clouds rearranged themselves. It was a moment of pure embarrassment.
I said, "I'm interested in both Bomberg and you."
"Well, I think you should have told me that before you came down here," he replied sharply.
"I did tell you," I said.
"No, you did not."
I said very slowly to Creffield that I distinctly remembered calling him and telling him what my purposes were. At first, he recalled none of this, but after a moment his memory quickened, and he conceded that it was true. He fell silent, and disappointment shadowed his brow, for evidently I had failed to manifest that exclusivity of adherence – that heraldic allegiance to some person or camp – which he presumably required in people.
We lingered for a while over the wine and cheese, and then decided to go out for a walk on Brighton Pier. On the way downstairs, we passed Creffield's baby daughter asleep in a pram on a landing. The light was so finely filtered that the beautiful child's face seemed chiselled out of the air itself, and the angelic sight, like Creffield's powerful drawings, belied the dark picture of his life which he had so strenuously created for me. Apparently, he no longer saw me as an enemy or an interloper, and our chat, rid of contention, continued in a pacific vein that transparently bored him.