The rebellious British abstract artist that time forgot
Artist Robyn Denny was cool personified. Then he vanished. Lucy Davies tells the story of a true rebel
When Robyn Denny arrived at art school in London, in 1951, he might not have known exactly the kind of art that he wanted to make, but he certainly knew the kind he didn’t. While fellow students slaved diligently over “awful art school compositions: interior with flowers, street scenes”, as Denny described them in an interview recorded shortly before he died in 2014, he busied himself with being radical, bucking at the smug sentimentalism that he believed was suffocating British art.
“One or two of our teachers said to me, ‘Are you with that Denny chap?’” recalls the artist Anna Teasdale, who was married to Denny from 1953 until 1975. “‘He’s a bit of a rebel isn’t he?’ And while I did think they were being old fogeys, I was a bit shocked myself.”
Denny’s bold assurance, though, chimed perfectly with the end of post-war gloom, as Britain began waking up to a new world. Indeed, he was one of a gifted group of artists who chose to turn their back on dreary, dusty European tradition, and look towards America, where the Abstract Expressionism and Pop movements were agog with a new consumer world.
Denny absorbed it all, and began producing colossal, colour-drenched abstract paintings. Critics could hardly restrain their indignation. (“What will they think of next?” wrote one, huffily, of a 1959 show in which Denny and his friend Richard Smith bolted their paintings together to form a maze. “To ignore it would be unforgivable. To praise it would be impossible.”)
By the mid-sixties, one of his murals was chosen as the background for a Beatles publicity shot, and Denny was showing with Kasmin, the hottest dealer in town (David Hockney was a fellow protégé). In 1966, he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, where he posed coolly for photos in a white T-shirt and Ray-bans – a world away from the gentlemanly artists of St Ives, whose whimsical, landscape-infused brand of abstraction Denny thought rather feeble. Then, in 1973, aged 43, he became the youngest artist ever to be given a retrospective at the Tate.
Unlike other experimental artists of that time – Peter Blake, Howard Hodgkin and Hockney, all of whom he knew and socialised with – Denny is not a household name. His vital contribution to the British art scene has been neglected. “I must have had as many exhibitions as anyone in the past 15 years,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 1973, when the world seemed at his feet, “but I still feel invisible.”
“Partly it’s because he went to America in 1981 and dropped out of view,” says Simon Hucker, senior modern British art specialist at Sotheby’s, where this week four of Denny’s paintings, none of which has been seen since the 1973 retrospective, will be presented for sale. “Partly it’s because art became more figurative, and by the end of that decade, you had the conceptualism of Damien Hirst and the YBAS. Things had moved on and Denny looked out of step. I think it’s at that point he became forgotten.”
Recently, though, Denny has been attracting interest. In the Noughties, two exhibitions of Fifties and Sixties art helped bring his work back to prominence and a painting estimated to sell for between £10,000 and £15,000 surprised everyone by achieving nearly £60,000. Denny, who had moved back to London from Los Angeles in the Nineties, having missed “the weather and the history”, was delighted.
“Although I think he found it strange to be rediscovered,” says Hucker, “when he’d never really gone away.”
Born Edward Maurice Fitzgerald Denny in 1930, it was his mother who called him Robyn “because he had the same bright eyes [as the bird],” explains Teasdale. His family, which counted a confidant of Henry VIII, a maid of honour of Elizabeth I and a friend of William Blake among its ancestors, were “posh, a bit snobby, but kind. Horrified when we told them we were getting married, because we’d only just met. Of course that just strengthened our resolve.”
Denny decided that he wanted to be an artist at 14, mostly, he later joked, in pursuit of “pretty girls and a wild and free life”, but once he set his course, he never wavered. His father, then a rector in Burwash, Sussex, said: “If you’re going to be an artist you can paint the reredos,” which he did, in primary colours. It caused such a scandal you’d have thought Robyn had peed in the chancel,” says Teasdale.
When he was 18, confronted with National Service, Denny declared himself a conscientious objector, and underwent two stints in naval detention at Portsmouth. Forcibly marched in just his underpants because he refused to wear uniform, he treated it “as a kind of challenge,” he said. The officers nicknamed him “Gandhi”.
Teasdale and Denny met at Saint Martins when she posed for one of the Saturday life drawing classes. Denny proposed within a week, and the pair moved into a tiny flat in Notting Hill Gate. Peter Blake and Richard Smith lived nearby, and the foursome would often meet for tea in the evening.
Back then, Teasdale says, “Robyn’s rebellion was in his head. You felt he was undecided: going through the motions, but looking. Then came the big American show at the Tate in 1956 and it was like the road to Damascus.” Confronted with works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, “It released something and he just went for it,” recalls Teasdale.
Scale was everything, “some of his paintings were as big as houses”, so to accommodate them, Denny acquired a studio near Portobello Market, in a building formerly used for donkeys. It was here that Kasmin came to see him in 1962, offering him a monthly stipend, then unheard of in the art world.
Denny was quick to agree, “though he made it seem as if he was doing me a favour,” recalls Kasmin. “He was sure of who he was. Somewhat cool at first, but charming and good-humoured when
Denny bucked at the smug sentimentalism that he believed was suffocating British art
he was sure you were taking him seriously… he had an almost sacerdotal view of the artist’s position in society.”
Blake and Teasdale were particular friends. “We felt a bit out of things when Dick and Robyn talked about abstraction, because we painted things as they were. But I’d never have looked at Peter then and thought of him as Sir Peter Blake. I think if we’d known back then, we would have been appalled, we were rather against the establishment.”
Though Denny and Teasdale divorced in 1975, the couple, who had two children, remained in touch until Denny died in 2014. Does she think he was happy with the way his career panned out? “He stayed true to that absolute belief in the abstract. It was like a light: once he had found it, he carried it around forever. Whether the rest of the world saw it or not, it doesn’t really matter. Creative people, the true ones, don’t create to be rich and famous. They do it to get out what they feel inside. If it hits the mark, it hits the mark, and if it doesn’t, it might one day, sometimes you just have to wait.”