36 Artists&Illustrators
TheSpectatorartcriticandauthoropensupabouthisnewbooks,
havinghisportraitpaintedbyLucianFreud,andwhatDavid
Hockneyreallylikestotalk about.Interview: STEVEPILL10 MINUTES WITH...Martin Gayford
You must have met countless artists. How did you settle
upon the 19 featured in your new book, The Pursuit of Art?
Part of the idea was that the encounter with the artists
involved an interesting journey. In most cases, I’m travelling
to see them. In the case of Gilbert & George, I actually met
them in Beijing, so I was encountering China and them at
the same time. If you go and visit an artist in their own
landscape, then you find out more about their work.Are there certain qualities all great artists possess?
There probably is an “artist type”, but defining it is difficult. I
think it’s a recognisable mixture of being absolutely
unbendingly fanatical about certain aspects of life, for
example, what something looks like, but also a sort of
willingness to go to extreme lengths.In The Pursuit of Art you write about the idea of “slow
looking”. Is that something that has been forgotten about
in the digital age?
Actually, it’s possibly something that is coming back.
Obviously, there is a tendency for us to spend all day long
looking at screens and go through to the other side of them
like Alice with the looking glass, but there seems to be a
movement in the opposite direction, perhaps as a reaction
to seeing art entirely in a virtual form.You seem fascinated by artistic process in many of your
books. Do you see your role as lifting the curtain in a way?
I sometimes think what I do is listening to artists and then
transmitting their thoughts in a way that is more easily
digestible to a wider audience. I like finding out how it
happens. I felt that’s a bit of a weakness of conventional
art history, that it grew up really as a genre written by
literary people and historians who looked at art in
museums, so there’s less about what goes on in the studio.For your last book, Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud,
Hockney and the London Painters, were there any less
famous artists you thought deserve wider recognition?
Well, certainly Gillian Ayres, who was one of my great
helpers and sources for that book. I feel she is someone
who hasn’t quite been given her due. British abstraction
vanished into a black hole in the 1970s, whereas hundreds
of thousands go along to see Rothko or Pollock exhibitions.Modernists & Mavericks covers the period 1945 to 1970.
If you were going to attempt a similar survey of the last 25years, which British artists would dominate the story?
Interesting question. Peter Doig is certainly someone I
would write about, Gary Hume is another. I’m not quite sure
it would work so well because I’m not sure whether there
was such a social network, but maybe there’s scope for it.You also wrote A Bigger Message: Conversations with
David Hockney. What’s the most enjoyable part of a chat
with someone like Hockney?
Well, apart from the pleasure of their company, I like
learning and I think you can learn a lot from listening to
artists, especially people such as Hockney and Freud.What are your chats with Hockney like away from art?
Apart from smoking – I could have written another book
about his thoughts on that – the conversations are pretty
wide ranging actually. He’s moved to Normandy and he’s
very in love with the French countryside so there are lots of
observations about that. And he’s met a huge number of
people and not necessarily in the art world. In Hollywood,
Billy Wilder and Cary Grant were great pals of his.Freud painted your portrait, which you recounted in your
book Man With a Blue Scarf. Were there aspects of the
final painting you were surprised he picked up on?
Yes, I was surprised by how forceful and confident looking
he’d made me. I didn’t always feel terribly confident or
forceful – I often felt quite tired out when I was sitting there
at the end of a day – but that’s what he picked up on. Freud
did that. He wasn’t necessarily giving a complete analysis
of a sitter in a certain work, he was making what he
thought would make the strongest possible painting.What was the last exhibition that really moved you?
I loved the Olafur Eliasson show [In Real Life] at Tate
Modern. There’s a parallel to the things that Friedrich or
Van Eyck were doing with light, but he doesn’t make a
picture, he puts you in the middle of it. There’s a passage
full of yellow fog and it’s like walking through a Turner.And finally, do you have another book in the pipeline?
Yes, I’m just finishing off the first draft actually. It’s a sequel
to the one I did with David Hockney called A History of
Pictures. This one is about three-dimensional art with
Antony Gormley as my co-author. It’s out next autumn.
Martin’s latest book, The Pursuit of Art, is published by Thames
& Hudson (RRP £16.95). http://www.thameshudson.com © TOM DUNKLEY