14 ★ FT Weekend 17 August/18 August 2019Arts
G
eorge Mpanga, better
known as George the Poet,
has given up trying to put a
name to what he does. He
will settle for “artist”
though, at 28, he can already call him-
self a rapper, spoken word performer,
author and, most recently, podcaster.
While he has achieved success in all
these areas, it is his audio series, the
unassumingly titledHave You Heard
George’s Podcast?, that has won him
prizes, specifically two silvers and fiveGeorge the Poet|The experimental podcaster
pushes the medium’s limits while delving into issues
facing young black Londoners. ByFiona Sturges
golds at this year’s British Podcast
Awards. “‘Podcast’ is the closest word
that can encapsulate all this,” he says,
gesturing at the screens and mixing
desk in the tiny studio where we meet in
London. “But there are elements within
the experience being delivered that
don’t even have a name yet.”
He’s not wrong. Of all the series
making waves in the current podcast
boom, you’d struggle to find one as
inventive and poignant as his. Spoken
mostly in verse,Have You Heard George’sprogrammes on TV to talk about crime
and education, and mixes with royalty
(he performed a poem at Prince Harry
and Meghan Markle’s wedding, and is
ambassador for the prince’s HIV/Aids
charity, Sentebale).
George started rapping when he was
15, inspired by the nascent UK grime
scene and its stars, Dizzee Rascal, Lethal
Bizzle and Wiley. “These were MCs
using my voice, my slang, wearing the
same clothes as me, talking about the
same concerns as me,” he recalls. “Our
story didn’t officially exist in Britain
before grime. It was nice to hear it.” As a
shy, bookish teenager, few expected him
to be able to rap. “But it’s a democratic
space,” he says. “No one cares who you
are. If you’re good, you’re good.”
His growing success meant he also
began to do well academically: “Every-
thing about my life got better when I
started rapping. It gave me discipline,creativity, confidence. I was happier, so I
became a better participant in the sys-
tem. I couldn’t articulate how much I
didn’t feel like me when I first went to
grammar school.”
George talks of his feelings of dis-
placement upon arriving atschool. It
was a feeling that returned while he was
studying at Cambridge, a sometimes
“uncomfortable” experience exacer-
bated by forever having to explain his
background and race to his peers. “A lot
of white people say ‘I don’t see colour’,
and I understand the sentiment,” he
says. “‘I don’t see colour as a problem’ is
probably what they mean.”
In his late teens he began performing
at spoken word events — his perform-
ances were visceral and politicised and
gained a dedicated following — but he
became frustrated with the limitations
of the form. “I don’t like repetition, and I
feel there is a lot in that space... People
expect performers to go up and talk in
certain cadences around a certain set of
subject matter and a certain kind of pol-
itics. I just wanted more.”
George views his podcast as an exten-
sion of what he was doing with music. “I
always found it frustrating that I wanted
to convey broad arguments about the
condition of my community, and what
that might indicate about the condition
of the country. But you can’t achieve
that in four minutes, which is the length
of the average song.” Along with the gift
of time, the advantage of podcasting as a
medium, he says, is its lack of precedentand convention. “Our experimentation
has been understood and rewarded. It’s
kind of like a rallying cry to the innova-
tors in this field. It says: ‘We can do any-
thing. What we deliver can end up in
people’s minds and in their ears.’ ”
Increasingly, it also gets people out of
their houses and into venues; early live
performances ofHave You Heard George’s
Podcast?saw attendees given blindfolds
in order that they could submit them-
selves fully to the audio experience.
Next month George, alongside his pro-
ducer Benbrick (aka Paul Carter), will
be doing a show at the London Podcast
Festival at Kings Place. He’s not keen to
give anything away, but says: “I’m very
much into delivering a performance
rather than a conversation. That it
entails musical elements, and the fact
that it rhymes, triggers different behav-
iours within the audience.”
There is, says George, an unforeseen
irony in his recent successes, notably in
the demographics of his fans, who now
comprise his black, inner-city peers
alongside a new white, middle class con-
stituency. “Despite my having created a
piece of art that speaks to both sides,
there are no spaces where both sides will
speak about this art to each other,” he
notes. “This is of course indicative of a
wider problem in society. But maybe
that’s an opportunity, and maybe I’m in
the perfect position to make that point
now that I’ve got them listening to the
same piece of work. The fact that it
speaks to all these people has got to be
positive, right?”London Podcast Festival, September 6,
kingsplace.co.uk. For Fiona Sturges’s
weekly reviews of new podcasts, see
ft.com/podcast-reviewPodcast?mixes fiction, poetry, music,
documentary-style reporting and auto-
biographical experience, pushing at the
limits of the medium while digging deep
into the issues facing the community in
which its creator was raised. Bathed in
atmospheric soundscapes, the series
looks at violence, education, drugs and
poverty, and references the 2011 Lon-
don riots, the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017
and the police stop-and-search policy
that led to George being put in a van and
strip-searched outside his home last
year. The result is a beautifully exe-
cuted, illuminating and empathetic
series that made me see the world differ-
ently. The podcast is, George says, a
reflection of what he has witnessed and
what he hears in his head.
Shaven-headed and immaculately
dressed, he exudes studiousness and
Zen-like calm, and talks slowly and pre-
cisely. It’s not simply down to luck, he
tells me, that he is where he is today. His
parents arrived in Britain from Uganda
in the 1980s and set up home on a
housing estate in north London with “a
clear sense of who they were and what
the strategy was”. While his father
worked as an administrator, his mother
studied for a degree in computing.
They made sure their children read
books, and engaged with British history
and culture.
George’s mother Edith tutored her
son out of school hours, helping him to
get a place at a selective grammar school
when he was 11. At 18, despite having
been told by his teachers not to bother
attending an open day, he earned a place
at Cambridge university to study poli-
tics, psychology and sociology. He now
runs poetry workshops in schools and
prisons, appears on political discussionFrom main: George
Mpanga, aka George the
Poet, photographed for
the FT by Amara Eno;
performing at Hampton
Court Palace in June
Dave Benett/Getty ImagesIt’s a beautifully executed,
illuminating, empathetic
series that makes you seethe world differently
T
he elderly man stares at us.
His body is frail, his eyes
shadowed by snow-white
brows. In a grey shirt and
brown trousers, against a
murky background, he is almost the
essence of powerless old age. But his
face is the colour of sea on a summer
morning, an invigorating aquamarine,
as if his journey were just beginning.
Painted in 1961, Milton Avery’s self-
portrait sums up his situation at the
time. Thoughregarded by most of the
US art world as an eccentric oddity, he
knew that he was painting the best pic-
tures of his life — portraits and land-
scapes that would hold their own
against the Abstract Expressionism that
had eclipsed him in the 1950s, and out-
live much of the incipient Pop Art that
would also deny him fame.
Human subjectivity is complicated:
uncertain, shifting, plural and contra-
dictory. So often portrait painters sacri-
fice this inherent uncertainty on the
altar of realism, or — as with Picasso, say
— simply erase their models’ nature and
replace it with their own. But Avery
allows his sitters their alterity.
In “Lavender Girl” (1963), his daugh-
ter March sits, the sea behind her, a
table with a sparse clutch of objects —
bottle, plate, sunglasses — in front of
her. Her head is tiny, with a few quick
rust-coloured strokes picking outeyes,
nose and mouthagainst a pale face. It isher dress and her legs which speak to us.
Evoked in watery pinks, violet and
mauve, the broad expanse of her skirt
and long, elegant calves exudea
salutary calm. Yet the woman herself,
gazing out diagonally away from the
viewer, remains distant, reflective and
innately independent.
By the time he painted “Lavender
Girl”, Avery was just two years from
dying, at the age of 79, in his adopted
home town of New York. His career had
followed a chiaroscuro path, which saw
recognition from great painters and crit-
ics (such as Mark Rothko and Clement
Greenberg) diluted by lukewarm
responses from a wider public.
He never had it easy. Born in 1885 in
Altmar, New York, he spent much of his
youth in Connecticut. Growing up in a
poor family — his father was a tanner —
Avery was working in a factory by the
age of 16. His artistic gifts were spotted
when he enrolled at art school to learn
commercial lettering.
In 1920, despite working long hours to
maintain the family (his father and
brothers had all died), Avery managed
to graduate with top honours from art
school. He started to visit Massachu-
setts in summertime to draw landscapes
that he would later paint in his studio. It
was here in 1924 that he met his wife,
Sally Michel. The freelance illustrator
would dedicate herself to maintaining
their home financially so that Averycould concentrate on painting. Devoted
to each other, by all accounts, the couple
would spend much of their time work-
ing together in the same room.
This exhibition of portraits from the
last four years of Avery’s life, at Victoria
Miro in Venice, opens with a peculiar
work, less lyrical,possibly slightly mis-
chievous, “Artist Paints Artist” (1962).
It shows Sally in profile, head down, a
picture of sturdy concentration as she
paints her husband in a bilious green.
Avery, one suspects, didn’t take him-
self too seriously. Two other self-
portraits — “Avery Feeling Wild” (1963)and “Avery Feeling Crazy” (1962) —
show him as a shock-haired figure, his
cheeks scribbled an unnaturally bright
pink, his tiny head perched on wide,
coat-hanger sharp shoulders. Those
small heads and hieratic stances recall
the existential solitaries who haunted
Giacometti’s portraits, while the high
colour evokes a deeper, Schiele-
like anguish. Yet ultimately the lunatic
tresses suggest the painter as a mad
professor, bent on his own path of
discovery and heedless of naysayers.
Over the decades he needed every
ounce of that self-confidence. As the1930s unfolded, his prospects looked
promising on the one hand. Inspired by
Picasso and Matisse, his work — chiefly
landscapes, portraits of those he loved
(his daughter March was born in 1932)
and domestic interiors — caught the
attention of a new generation, including
Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett
Newman, who would become the giants
of Abstract Expressionism. Collector
Roy Neuberger, a champion of Avery’s
work, bought dozens of pieces which he
lent or donated to museums across
the US.
Nevertheless, sometimes the couple
were so poor they lived on peanut butter
and Spam, and recycled their friends’
discarded canvases. In 1944, Avery had
his first solo museum show at the Phil-
lips Memorial Gallery in Washington
(now the Phillips Collection). By then he
was starting to synthesise the lessons,
particularly of Matisse, into his own sin-
gular style that saw him organise col-
ours, sometimes thinned to the consist-
ency of watercolour, into monumental
planes so as to express eternal truths
through their contrasts and harmonies.
Despite remaining invisible through
much of the 1950s, Avery’s late portraits
testify to an artist who was both a con-
summate observer of humanity and
nature, yet also capable of transforming
those impressions into images that tran-
scended time and place. This evolution
must have been aided by immersion inthe luminous marine landscape of Cape
Cod, where he and Sally summered in
later life. In “Two Poets” (1963) two eld-
erly chaps, their faces grey with weari-
ness, float against a swath of oceanic
blue. But their red kerchiefs — and, in
one case, a cinder-pink jacket — tell us
that while their flame might be dying,
their art will live on.
At this time, Avery was sometimes
working with rags rather than brushes
to give his figures a sweeping grandeur.
A large painting of his daughter and her
husband, “Young Couple (Husband and
Wife)” (1963), enthrones the pair like a
young king and queen on stately yellow
armchairs, announcing that though
Avery is in his twilight, his heirs will
prove vital and conscientious in art —
March was also a painter — and life.
He excelledat intimacy. A small por-
trait of Sally, “New Hat” (1962), shows
her in a fitted jacket and trilby-style hat,
her eyes cast down in contemplation. In
cool synergies of greys and creams,
lifted by the delicate blush of hair and
cheek, she appears private, unobserved,
at liberty in solitude.That gift for cap-
turing his sitter without controlling her
is one of the secrets to the longevity of
his art.
When he died in 1965, of the heart
trouble that had long pursued him,
he left a powerful legacy.To September 8, victoria-miro.comScenes from a marriage
Milton Avery| Often at odds with the artistic fashions of his time, the American artist created powerful and intimate later portraits. ByRachel Spence
‘My life got
better when I
started to rap’
Milton
Avery’s
‘Young
Couple
(Husband
and Wife)’
(1963)
Milton Avery Trust
/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York and
DACS, London 2019
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