Jonathan Evens talks to Richard Nathanson about the significance of the clown in the life and work of Albert Houthuesen.
Houthuesen studied at the Royal College of Art with Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Edward Burra and Ceri Richards, but worked in virtual isolation all his life. His pictures are in Tate Britain, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Ashmolean, and the British Museum, yet he has rarely been exhibited. The single most important explanation for this solitary artistic existence - and the role of the clown in his work - is the childhood tragedy that befell him when he was just eight.
Seated in his father’s attic studio, he had made a small drawing of a horse which greatly impressed his father, a sensitive, gifted artist. It was a moment of joy shared by father and son. His wife who had bitterly resented her husband’s decision to leave the security of the family piano business and devote himself to painting, entered the studio carrying their fourth child, a six week old son. He turned to his wife and said, ‘He does it better than I do.’ The thought of another artist in the family was too much; she took off her shoe and plunged its heel into her husband’s head. He died three weeks later.
The family left for London. Houthuesen’s mother did everything to prevent his becoming an artist. His only way of vindicating himself and the responsibility he felt for his father’s death was through his art; to draw and paint ‘as well as I can’. Inevitably a sense of tragedy permeates his work. But there is also great joy and richness of imagination and colour, combined with the iron resolve to also carry his father’s torch. Even before this terrible incident, he knew he wanted to be a painter, but what happened gave his art a spiritual depth, a sense of the transience of life, an entirely different sensibility and purpose to the stylistic, intellectual innovations of the day; the continuing, widespread notion that art should be seen as a constant process of innovation and change. As Houthuesen said ‘‘The more you see of your own time, the more you are able to go beyond it.”
It was forty years before Houthuesen told another person, his wife Catherine, about his father’s death. It was this that helped ‘unleash’ his relentless, extraordinary series of seascapes and the increasingly rich colours that helped his work reach out to a wider audience.
Clowning, like painting, was in Houthuesen’s blood. Houthuesen’s father, a talented musician, could be a tremendous clown at the piano. And his father's first cousin Johan Buziau, became the most celebrated comic actor in Holland. His brilliantly original, outrageous, often poignant humour is evident in the extraordinary range of roles he performed. In Nazi occupied Holland, he subtly mocked the Nazi imposed Head of Government and, each night, brought the house down until collaborators explained the meaning of his parody. He was placed under house arrest and never performed again; becoming nervous, ill and dying in the late 1950’s.
Houthuesen said "anyone who clowns a great deal is the very one who, in another sense, thinks in a very serious way. It is a comment on despair. And but for this, the world would go completely mad." Houthuesen perhaps equated Buziau’s story with that of St Philemon, the greatest clown in Rome. As Houthuesen told the story, during a break in the gladiatorial games Philemon appeared alone in the centre of the Coliseum. Seeing him amid the carnage brought a huge roar of laughter from the crowd. He looked up at the Emperor and said, “I am a Christian.” The audience collapsed in laughter at this absurd notion. Finally there was silence. “I am a Christian.” he said again. And everyone realised he was in deadly earnest. The Emperor ordered him to recant or be sacrificed as a Christian. “I am a Christian”, repeated St Philemon; and was sacrificed. In Houthuesen’s lithograph Of the Company of St Philemon, the young clown is illuminated by a crucifix of light.
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