On Saturday I took a trip to Notting Hill to meet Jane England at her gallery, England & Co, in order to look at a range of works by Albert Herbert and choose an etching to purchase. I came away with an iconic Herbert entitled Moses Climbing the Mountain of God.
Looking back I think that I first encountered Albert Herbert's work in the Art in Worship exhibition that was shown at Tewkesbury Abbey and Worcester Cathedral and would then have come to Albert's show at the old location of the gallery in Nov/Dec 1991. I had not long began to develop an interest in and understanding of modern art, triggered initially through the work of Marc Chagall, and Albert's show and England & Co would have been among the first commercial exhibitions/galleries that I visited. I have loved his work ever since.
Since that time I have begun painting myself (see http://www.veritasse.co.uk/community/artists.html?artist_id=72), have written on the Arts for various publications and, since ordination, have been involved in a number of public arts projects. It has been my fascination with the work of Albert and others that has stimulated by own involvement in the visual arts and my attempts to integrate this with my ordained ministry.
To illustrate some of the reasons for that fascination, here is a review that I wrote of the show at England & Co which, in 2004, celebrated 50 years of Albert's painting:
Albert Herbert was at one time lauded as “the most significant religious painter to emerge in England in the 1980s”, so this retrospective commemorating his fifty years as a painter is an opportunity to set such statements in the context of a wider body of work. Jane England, who has championed Herbert’s work since his first exhibition at her gallery in 1989, has assembled an exhibition drawing on most phases of Herbert’s work from the ‘kitchen sink’ social observation paintings of the ‘50s, through the child-like symbolic etchings of the early ‘70s to the major Biblical themes of the ‘80s and on to his current nostalgic rememberings of childhood and early adulthood.
Herbert’s instinctive desire “to make figurative, emotive, symbolic paintings” has meant that he has always laboured in the shadow of other more fashionable art movements. For many years, he was inhibited by the prevailing attitudes - whether of Euston Road realism, formalism or abstraction - to the extent that in the early ‘70s he says that he was unable to paint at all, viewing his desired style as “retrogressive, obsolete nonsense”. He was rescued from this stagnation by, in a sense, being born again through study of children’s art which enabled him to make the etchings that returned him to figurative, emotive symbolism.
These etchings laid the foundation for the Biblical paintings which attracted the attention of the likes of Sister Wendy Beckett and Patrick Reyntiens who began to speak of him as a significant religious painter. Such recognition, welcome as it must have been, did not in any sense place him in the mainstream of contemporary art movements though. Since the explosion of figurative symbolism at the beginning of the 20th century in Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism and Surrealism, Herbert’s chosen style and that of others in this field, has been viewed as no more than a minor stream in the flood of contemporary art movements.
This is problematic for a faith that expresses itself figuratively because of the incarnation and symbolically because God cannot be contained by the literal. Herbert’s art and story illustrates both, the continuing archetypal power of Biblical imagery and our increasing need to find manifestations of that power that connect with the mainstream of contemporary society.
Despite the backwater reputation of figurative symbolism, Herbert’s art has at times proved too controversial for the Church to handle. In 1987 a commission for 14 Stations of the Cross was abandoned when his images proved too disturbing for the PCC. These pieces, some of his strongest images, remain available for purchase by the Church and, given that next year is Herbert’s 80th birthday, there could be no better gift than to find a permanent home for these works in a Church setting.
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Victoria Williams - Crazy Mary.
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