Hugh Mackinnon - A Retrospective
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Illustrated front cover: Santa Maria della Salute 1990 - 95
Acrylic on paper 20.25 x 13.75 (51.5 x 40cm)

HUGH MACKINNON
© Nicholas Usherwood
February 2006 

As Hilary Spurling's revelatory biography of Matisse made so particularly evident, for critics and art- historians to ignore the implications, familial and financial, physical and emotional, in the evolution of an artist's life and work, is to leave a gaping hole at the heart of our understanding of their art and what has driven it forward. This is not the same thing as assessing its final significance within a historical context, of course, but, unless we do try to make that kind of enquiry, any speculation about the artist's aims and intentions really amounts to little more than hopeful guesswork. While there has not been the time (nor is there the space!) to embark on any such in depth study in the case of Hugh Mackinnon's life and work, as we see it represented in this, his first (at the age of 80!) retrospective exhibition, there are, nonetheless, enough hints and clues in his remarkable and turbulent biography to allow us to make a start at comprehending how his serene, intensely thoughtful and visually satisfying work has come into being. And, perhaps more importantly, why it is only now that his paintings would seem finally to have reached that point of repose and fulfilment which makes this the first, and also the best, moment at which to come to terms with the true nature of his achievement.

Portrait of Betty in Red Dress 1955 Oil on canvas 26 x 37.5 (66 x 95cm) - Private Collection

Born in 1925, Hugh Mackinnon's childhood and upbringing was a curious mix of the precocious and the unpromising. His adored mother worked for some 25 years in a grand and artistically distinguished household in Tite Street, Chelsea, her job, nominally as a servant but, in fact, as companion and friend of the young daughter of the house. An obviously sensitive and unusual person, her marriage to a retired naval man of conservative views and potentially alcoholic tendencies does not seem to have been a happy one, their move to Stevenage after his retirement from the Navy in the late 20s, to run a pub, being followed not so long after by her death in 1936, shortly after Hugh, their third child, had won a scholarship to Alleyne's Grammar School, Stevenage. With his father regarding the signs of his early artistic promise as disappointingly 'sissy' and not worthy of interest, Hugh was effectively orphaned, only to be 'rescued', emotionally and intellectually, by his friendship with a fellow class-mate, Eric Parkin. Already a precociously gifted pianist and later to have an eminent career on the concert platform, Parkin and his family provided the warmth and stability he had lost at home, at the same time encouraging the kind of curiosity into the common roots of musical and artistic creativity that still animate his thinking today.

With his father recalled to the navy at the outbreak of war, Hugh supported himself by working in an ammunition box factory, managing to be accepted by the Slade in 1942. After he arrived there (the Slade had been evacuated to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford), he paid his way by firewatching for £1 a night on the roof at night and during the holidays. It was doing this that he also met a fellow student, Betty Butler, who became his wife a year or so later. Already engaged in an intense process of artistic self-education - he had discovered van Gogh and Picasso through books before he had gone to art-school - his most significant understandings while at the Slade seem to have come through friends and fellow-students rather than the teaching staff. It was a cultured, older German Jewish refugee and fellow Slade student Leo Schlesinger, for example, who first showed him photographs of an Indian sculpture, its dancing figure 'contained' within a stylised decorative form providing, as he puts it, "an intense moment of revelation about the relationship of a gesture to a frame" that has remained with him ever since. As too did another book Schlesinger showed him on Russian icons, while a brief, intense period, right at the end of his Oxford years, working from clothed models and portrait heads with fellow students Elvet Thomas (still a friend), Marjory Humphreys and Miriam Plantte, taught him "enough to last a life time."

Voices 1946 - 1950 Oil on canvas 36 x 60 (91.5 x 152.5cm)

After an interruption to his studies for national service in the RAF (1944-47) he returned for a further two years to the Slade (now back in London again) on a government grant, during this period winning the art-history prize, his art-history professor assuming, wrongly, that he had already studied at the Courtauld Institute! Now, aged 24, he also had twin sons (b1946) and, no longer with a grant on which to depend and no private income, the need to start earning a living became much more urgent. He already had a job teaching drawing at the Central before he had left the Slade, the first in a series of increasingly demanding art-school posts that were, as time went on, to leave less and less time for his own painting. For the time being however, living in a flat in Fane Street, Fulham, rented from another Slade student, the sculptor Raymond Mason, he was able to make a start on the process of getting his work shown in London. At this point his passion was for the work of Mondrian and Klee and the largely abstract work he was producing at this time, for example, Voices, (ill. p6) reflected these interests. It was works in a similar vein which, most significantly, attracted the attention of Victor Pasmore who showed him side by side with his own work at the 1949 London Group exhibition and recommended him to his own gallery, Gimpel Fils, then among the most influential of dealers in contemporary art.

Hedgehog c1955 Oil on wooden panel 9 x 12 (22.5 x 30.5cm) Private Collection

By the time he had his first solo show there in 1952 however his painting had already begun to take on the more outwardly figurative appearance that characterises it to this day. Outwardly, only, however, since the subject matter of his paintings, then as now, has only ever provided the starting point for what have always remained, for him, profoundly abstract explorations of the nature of pictorial space and what finally makes a painting into a satisfying pictorial object. Hugh's letters over the years constantly return to this theme: "The curious thing about a subject is that it is of no importance whatsoever and yet without it nothing can transpire" he writes at one point, at another " the subject is like a 'north star' which holds together the artist's mind while he experiments and improvises with the phrasing of the elements of language" and again simply as "the piece of grit which starts the irritation - the ITCH…" Having learnt very thoroughly the language of abstraction over the previous five years or so, he had now come to the conclusion that this was, on its own, simply not enough to make a painting, a conviction he has held to firmly ever since. "I settled on the idea of a still image within a rectangle describing space, volume and light" he observed recently "since then all my concentration has been on a subject dragged from the imagination by improvisation and intuition."

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