Bleakness gives way to joie de vivre
John Minton: A Centenary
In the early Fifties, John Minton was probably Britain’s most popular artist, giving war-battered audiences an alluring vision of foreign climes, captured in distinctively spidery, “romantic” pen-and-ink lines that were endlessly imitated.
Nowadays, Minton’s once dominant role tends to be seen as reflecting the provincialism of post-war British art. He’s best remembered for his illustrations to Elizabeth David’s cookery books and as the subject of one of Lucian Freud’s most powerful portraits: a tremulously sensitive figure, whose conflicted homosexuality helped drive him to suicide in 1957 aged 39.
Celebrating Minton’s centenary and commemorating the 60th anniversary of his death, this exhibition aims to place him not just as an intriguing period figure, but as a significant artist. The first part of the exhibition plunges us into the mood of wartime Britain and its aftermath. Surveying bomb-blasted London, Minton’s early drawings record not human suffering, but a romantic melancholy that echoed his own alienation.
In Figure in Ruins, a lorry ploughs through a deserted nocturnal city, with a sad-eyed, ragged young man leaning against a wall in the foreground. Minton’s poetic reveries amid turmoil proved extraordinarily popular. This led to diverse illustration commissions, evident here in a wonderfully evocative array of archive material: from starkly drawn covers for avant garde poetry books to prints for Lyons Corner House restaurants, the Mcdonald’s of their day – copies of Minton’s delightful Apple Pickers, exhibited here, were on sale to customers at half a crown each.
A painted view of a Lancashire mining town, however, with some rather blank-faced pitmen standing in front of crimson-faced terraced cottages shows that Minton’s romantic travelogue approach is less convincing applied to a tough everyday subject. Views of ramshackle Thames-side wharves make atmospheric use of rich reds and blues, with a touch of Picasso in the cubistic interlocking of architectural forms, though the stylised, rather mannered treatment of the figures betrays the origins of many of these paintings in commissions for illustrations or decorative murals.
But it is in his illustrations that Minton’s strengths come to the fore, perfectly encapsulated in his exquisite images for Alan Ross’s Corsican travel memoir, Time Was Away, 1948. The poetic rapture of the cover with its dreaming male figure asleep in a rowing boat on a barren moonlit beach answered the mood of a moment. It embodied both Minton’s pathological longing “to be away” from his personal torments, and the parallel urge of the austerity-era middle classes to explore new places and ways of living; a desire that reached its first great moment with the publication of Elizabeth David’s revelatory A Book of Mediterranean Food with its magical Minton illustrations, in 1950.
The show’s principle revelation, the 11ft 6in-wide Jamaican Village, not seen in public since 1951, the product of a sojourn in the West Indies, shows drinkers outside a ramshackle nocturnal bar, aiming to evoke, as Minton put it himself, “a sense of watchfulness, of waiting… a disquiet that is potent and nameless.”
The supposedly more serious works in the last two rooms are dour in comparison, yet oddly timid. The largest of the so-called history paintings, The Death of Nelson, feels like a piece of overblown illustration.
Minton may have spent much of his life in despair, but the abiding impression of this delightful exhibition is of joie de vivre.