Blog # 20

Some while ago, strolling through the National Portrait Gallery in London, there it was: Citizen Sid. I was immediately enchanted.

Citizen Sid was painted in 1962 by Ruskin Spear. A painter, a teacher, a well loved mentor, an official war artist, often wheelchair bound as a result of childhood polio. A lover of pubs, theatres, shops, jazz and sport. A contrarian, an awkward sod. A democrat and a humanist.

Ruskin spear was a realist painter in the tradition of Hogarth and Walter Sickert. His subjects were of the day to day, ordinary places and ordinary people. Pavements, pubs, advertising hoardings, theatres, living rooms, Hammersmith Streets, tea shops, barbers, dances, shops, circus performances and even industrial works.

A painter of fellow human beings, a painter of his neighbourhood, a painter of honesty and sincerity in a period of greater social cohesion. An emotional painter, a painter of the human spirit.

This sincerity was not always popular

Great art cannot survive the full process of democratisation

It is essentially aristocratic. It requires

to be removed from the world of half pints and dartboards

Eric Newton

Waldemar Januszczak criticised Spear for failing to create a new form

He could do almost anything but never thought of it first

John Spurling complained

A world reduced to the obvious and then reduced again

to a loud laugh at the obvious

These thoughts miss the point of Spears paintings. Spear used the unremarkable and the prosaic as an effective weapon that sought to reach out to a popular audience, far beyond the art world.

Others were more positive

Something has been clearly looked at, honesty and sensitivity,

without fuss of egotism and with a rare power to evoke the character

of a thing or a place.

Sylvester

Citizen Sid features the comedian Sid James, popular in the 50s and 60s on TV with Tony Hancock and a regular in the Carry On films.

We see him here in a much recognised pose with a cigarette in his mouth and a leery smile. A small black and white television sits in a room of abstract rectangles supported by a collage of ‘stuck on’ paraphernalia. A packet of Woodbines, the cover of the Radio Times, a Committee of 100 leaflet and a newspaper. The whole thing is a uniform plane with no real distinction between foreground and background. The colours are muted and restricted to a narrow spectrum, creating a slight melancholia that is lifted by Citizen Sids droll expression.

The painting reminds me of the work of Peter Blake, this is not surprising since he was a pupil of spear at the Royal College of Art and clearly influenced by his work.

Peter Blake On the Balcony

I came across this thought from Tanya Harrod

He painted . . . as if Cezanne, let alone
Cubism, had not altered the course of early
20th century art

I was surprised.

Cezanne was an innovative painter. He brought many new ideas to painting. He played around with a distorted perspective, searching for ways to create depth by subtle gradations of colour. He was considered the progenitor of Cubism.

Take another look at Citizen Sid. A single flat plane on which every day items and a TV sit. No compromise with traditional perspective here. Take a look at the subtle use of colours held in a narrow range of tones. A series of shapes and colours that somehow manages to give a feeling of depth. Not aware of Cezanne ! ?

Cubism was a revolutionary step in the development of painting and was exemplified by, amongst other elements, geometric shapes, often abstracted, that created surfaces, planes and backgrounds.Cubism was also known for the use of papier colle, paper collage.Every day flat items, newspapers, wallpaper, tickets stuck onto a painted surface creating a feeling of liveliness and relevance.

Again look at Citizen Sid.The TV floats around a collection of muted coloured mottled rectangles, abstracted, painterly, that do indeed create a plane, a surface. Spears use of papier colle clearly tell us more about his time and place.

The influences are clear

Juan Gris The Sun Blind

Gris was the most accessible and highly developed of the Cubist painters.

There is one aspect of Ruskin Spears paintings that definitely did ignore such influences. Cezanne, the Cubists, contemporaries Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon all painted with a ‘struggle’. They were all intent on deeply exploring a subject, with form, with technique. Their paintings are a combat. A combat with the tools and the ideas available. They were painters with troubled minds and anxious temperaments.

Not for Ruskin Spear. Serious, but not troubled. His paintings seem to come naturally, maybe even easily. They appear to come without effort, from the world around him. His places, his environment, his surroundings, his neighbourhood, his community. Certainly no struggle here, or so the paintings seems to indicate. He was an artisan painter who saw his work as a job.

His paintings do however pay attention to key aspects of his culture.

It is a vision. . .A rare power to evoke the character of a thing or a place .

Sylvester

He has created a complete world and has made it familiar,

commonplace elements made strange, new and provocative.

Berger

He appears to be at one with his people. At one with where he was. He had a relationship with them that was humanistic. A strong feeling for his fellow human beings. This is clear from his paintings. It is also clear from his involvement with the world around him.

His concerns were with peace, nuclear disarmament and creating strong relationships with the Iron Curtain countries. Spear was an active member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, attending meetings and demonstrations.

Ban the Bomb Ruskin Spear

He was excited by ties with Russia and managed to visit on a number of occasions, concerned to be sharing and creating solidarity. These activities were taken seriously by the security services, MI5 had a personal dossier on him, a potential threat to security!

It is not serendipity that his painting is called Citizen Sid.

I am so pleased that I bumped into Citizen Sid and discovered the work of Ruskin Spear. A very English painter in touch with his surroundings and time. Go take a look at the newly revamped National Portrait Gallery, I do hope Citizen Sid is still hanging there in all its glory.

Much of the information and quotes in this essay are taken from Humankind: Ruskin Spear: Class, culture and art in 20th-century Britain by Tanya Harrod, I am grateful for the influence. Her book covers the life of Raskin Spears in a rather biographical way but is full of detail, analysis and magnificent full colour plates.