NORMAN STEVENS: A PERSONAL NOTE

It is already 20 years since Norman’s unexpected and lamentably premature death, and those of us who were lucky enough to be his friends miss him still. Every bit of art-world gossip, every fresh scandal or controversy, every slap in the face of real art, will still find us half-saying to ourselves: I wonder what Norman thinks or, as would surely have been so often the case, can add to that. With Norman one never felt out of touch, the bar at the Queen’s Elm (another irreplaceable loss) our very own El Vino’s. He was a formidable critic, of his friends especially, quite as much of themselves as of their work, for his standards were high. But his was ever a rigour born of affection and real concern. Cantankerous, generous, funny, and, above all, loyal: once you were counted a friend, your interests became his own.

The telephone would ring alarmingly early. “It’s for you – Norman the Foreman,” my wife would say grimly through her toast. “Is that you Bill? I hope I’m not interrupting anything” he would go on, unrepentant. “I thought I’d better catch you before you were out. There’s something I’d like you to do for me.” But it was never for him, no matter how much, in the uneven passage of his career, he might have felt like asking, or indeed, at times, needed to ask. It was always for someone else – a friend having a hard time, another with a show coming up, a student deserving a leg up.

I first met him properly in odd but not uncharacteristic circumstances some time in the mid-1960s, during the filming of Tony Richardson’s ‘Laughter in the Dark’. The script called for a bohemian party-cum riot, for which a vast empty house in Holland Park had been taken over, completely blacked out, and in which, over the course of two whole days, the production company plied an exotic and ever more animated assortment of London’s glitterarties with limitless champagne – and rather a good one at that, at the then ruinous price of 60/- a bottle. We were told to enjoy ourselves, and we did, the only other instruction I remember being to come back the next day in the same clothes. I knew of Norman by then, and had seen his latest show – of still-lifes, I think, at the old Hanover Gallery – and so took a quieter moment to fall into conversation with him, if conversation it could be called. We had both had quite a lot to drink. Norman was wearing, I seem to remember, a smart pale linen suit and a cowboy hat, trophy of a famous tour of California with David Hockney and Patrick Procktor a year or so before. And as we talked, Norman, leaning of a certain necessity against the wall, slid slowly, steadily down: and as he did so, his legs slid out before him. So he ended, a perfect right-angle on the floor, his hat over his nose.

A little later, as I took to writing art criticism, our friendship, perhaps surprisingly, became firmer. He was one of the first artists I visited with a review in prospect, which was around the time he turned seriously to etching – indeed I have a proof of the first print he ever made, which characteristically he gave me there and then. From then on, we met with an inevitable if informal regularity. There were private views of course, and he would invite me to Alexandra Palace occasionally for a day’s teaching with his Hornsey painting students, or we’d have a drink at the Queen’s Elm or the Chelsea Arts Club. Just such a thing is a friendship – insensibly incremental, confirmed and consolidated by uncountable contacts and exchanges, whether by chance or plan, so that in the end it would seem there was never a time when we had not been friends.

In the early 1980s, I was buyer for a year for the Contemporary Art Society, with some £18,000 of other people’s money in my pocket, still a useful sum even then. I decided to buy 18 paintings, averaging out at £1,000 apiece, by artists either neglected, overlooked or comparatively unknown, and determined that Norman should certainly be one of them. But what was there to be had? He was ever more preoccupied with his prints, and when I went round to see him, his first two remarks were: “I’ve nothing for you” – and indeed the cupboard was bare – and: “How much?” His third remark, on being told, was “Can’t you make it a bit more?” In the end I gave him as much of the benefit of the average as I could manage, and he did one of his large and splendid field and hedge landscapes for me, all green and dappled light. So it is that ‘Packer’s Farm Gate’ is now in the collection of the Leeds City Art Gallery, to the eternal puzzlement of art historians, poring fruitlessly over the Ordnance Survey map.

But this show is about friendships of far longer-standing with Norman than my own. David Oxtoby, John Loker, David Hockney and Michael Vaughan were, with Norman, all at Bradford Regional College of Art from 1950 onwards.

And in common with almost every art school in the country at that time, it was still subject to the old and, perhaps, still much regretted dispensation. The teaching was direct and practical, the emphasis on skill and craft with ‘creativity’ trusted to declare itself in its own good time, if it were there at all. Objective observation and mastery of the technical disciplines of painting and drawing were all, centred upon the study of the model in the life-room. And after such a drilling, they could all draw and paint in their own confident fashion, yet with an attention to surface and quality of mark, touch and line, that, would remain evident in their work for ever, whatever the nature of any subsequent development – with John steering the closest to abstraction, the rest remaining essentially artists of the figure, the object and the landscape.

For Norman in the end, after the early still-lifes, the potted palms and the Venetian blinds, it would be the landscape that would become his principal subject and preoccupation, in his painting as in his prints – ornamental gardens; hedges; paths, fields; barns; gates; cattle-feeders. But really what seemed to fascinate and engage him most, was the fall of light and shade across whatever his subject of the moment might be, whether it was the rich complexity of tangled undergrowth or the barest of paved yards. As for his print-making, in which became so much engrossed in the 70s and 80s, and on which his later reputation, such as it was, largely rested, the mistake is only to see it as an activity distinct from his painting. In truth his work was always all of a piece, print and paint the two sides of the same coin.

At Bradford each in turn had been picked out as of high promise, and their progress South as post-graduates, either to the Royal College or the Royal Academy Schools, had an air of inevitability to it. But even at Bradford, Norman was already seen as something of a star and the first amongst his equals. Severely disabled, he had no National Service to hold him back. He went straight on to the Royal College, and by 1960 was more or less finishing there as the rest were catching up. And those of us who knew his work well, and followed closely its subsequent development, know that that early promise was more than amply fulfilled on Norman’s own meticulous terms, save only in one respect. Always acknowledged on his merits, not just by these old friends, but by his artist peers at large, the mystery is only that he never achieved the wider recognition and institutional support he so much deserved. No one could have foreseen the sudden explosion of excitement and interest in the younger English pop and figurative painters and their work in the early 1960s. But was Norman perhaps just a little too soon, missing out in being ahead of the times?

Or was it just that his quieter, more reflective aesthetic was too easily overlooked in all the excitement? As I wrote at the time of the Redfern’s memorial show a year after his death, he worked slowly, “distrustful of easy solutions and quick effects and always reluctant to leave what he thought he could improve. His paintings were never over-worked … but were simply subject to the most rigorous principles of self-criticism and self-doubt. The irony which all his friends perceived, and Norman himself perversely savoured, was that he was the most naturally gifted of painters, blessed with the lightest touch, the keenest eye and the quickest wit. Such creative modesty was essential to the man …” I would not change a word of that. I also spoke, somewhat naively as it turns out, of my confidence that his reputation would in time be properly secured on the evident strength of the work itself. It is more than time to say it again, and, with this show as a beginning, more loudly than ever.

William Packer, London, 2008