Leonard Mccomb
Painstaking artist who burned many of his paintings and caused a stir in Lincoln with a nude statue
LEONARD MCCOMB, the artist who has died aged 87, produced works of unostentatious beauty in several different media and, as Keeper of the Royal Academy, spoke up for the merits of traditional figurative work in the face of the prevailing fashion for cold conceptualism.
His art was widely admired, his painting radiant at its best, with a kind of shimmer to the brushstrokes. But he really was his own harshest critic: in the early 1970s, when he was becoming increasingly preoccupied by sculpture, he destroyed almost all of his paintings.
“Sculpturally I knew where I was going, but in painting and drawing there were so many alternatives,” he told The Scotsman in 2004. “I was trying all kinds of things. I thought there was no point holding on to all this stuff, so I put it all in the garden and burned it ... It was a bit of madness. I should have stacked them all in a cupboard somewhere and forgotten about them.” In later life he was profoundly grateful to have the handful of items his brother and sisters plucked from the blaze.
It was an uncharacteristically flamboyant gesture by a man who rarely indulged in self-promotion and whose art tended to soothe rather than provoke. One notable exception, which saw him hit the headlines, was his statue Portrait of a Young Man Standing, a striking, life-size work cast in bronze and coated in gold leaf. Mccomb had started working on the statue, modelled on one of his students at the West of England College of Art in Bristol, in the early 1960s, intending it to be a positive image of humanity in response to the escalating Cold War.
Although hardly a disturbing piece – the critic Richard Cork once declared that the “gilded bronze perfection” of this “blithely piping youth who seems to have strayed from a homoerotic fantasy” was “like a throwback to the Victorianism of Havard Thomas’s Thyrsis” – the statue ended up at the centre of an ecclesiastical controversy described by The Sunday Telegraph as “Trollopian”. In 1990 Mccomb lent the piece to Lincoln Cathedral, where it was displayed in the aisle as part of an exhibition. After receiving complaints from the public, the combative Dean, the Very Rev Brandon Jackson, declared that the statue was “too confrontational” and covered its genitals with a skirt, before later moving it to a less prominent part of the cathedral. Mccomb withdrew the statue in protest and it found a permanent home in the Tate.
He was increasingly drawn to portrait painting, holding an exhibition in Greenwich Village in 2000. The New York Times critic admired the nudes that made up the bulk of the show – mostly modelled by Mccomb’s students at the Royal Academy – but declared of his smaller portraits of “artist friends and personalities in the London art world” that “the benevolence with which they are rendered makes them not too distinctive from one another”; an exception was his compelling painting of Doris Lessing, “serene in her plainness”, that the National Portrait Gallery had commissioned.
Mccomb was a stalwart of the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition, where his most discussed work was a gigantic pen-and-ink seascape drawn on 96 sheets of A1 paper, a recreation of the view from his mother’s house in Anglesey, which dominated the show in 2005.
He continued to experiment with as many media as possible. In 2000 he was commissioned by the Vatican to design a Jubilee Medal featuring Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Hume to commemorate the new Millennium. In 2008 his mosaic of St Francis of Assisi was installed in Westminster Cathedral; Stephen Hough described it in The Telegraph as “one of the loveliest representations of the saint I’ve ever seen, garlanded with birds, teeming with life, with love of creation, with humour and gentleness.”
Mccomb was elected a Royal Academician in 1991 and from 1995 to 1998 was Keeper of the Royal Academy, tasked with maintaining standards at the RA Schools. One of the very few RAS to have been elected as a draughtsman, he tried to keep life drawing as a compulsory element of the syllabus, but he was out of step with fashion and the requirement was dropped after complaints from the students.
He protested vehemently in 2001 when Peter Blake, as curator of that year’s summer exhibition, allowed conceptual art to be featured. “Artists who take the mysteries of nature as the source of their imaginative work and express their concerns through drawing and painting on canvas or board are steadily being ignored by the dominant Turner Prize syndrome,” he said. “If art is just a matter of ‘a glass of water is an oak tree’, what else is there? I very much object to it.”
Leonard William Joseph Mccomb was born in Glasgow on August 3 1930, the oldest of six children of Archibald and Delia Mccomb, who were Irish. The family moved to Manchester, and Leonard worked in a commercial art studio in Salford before studying at Manchester School of Art and later at the Slade in London, taking his diploma in 1960.
Among his tutors were Sir William Coldstream, Sir Thomas Monnington and AH Gerrard, all of whom influenced his thoughtful, painstaking approach to his work. Attempting to reconcile abstractionism with naturalistic figurative styles, he happily worked against current trends and was concerned only with meeting his own exacting standards.
His own influence was spread through his many teaching posts, beginning in Bristol and subsequently at the Slade, Sir John Cass College, the Royal Academy Schools and the colleges of art at Winchester and Canterbury. In 1974 he founded the Sunningwell School of Art in Oxford.
His work was first shown in London in RB Kitaj’s celebrated Human Clay exhibition at the Hayward Gallery and his first one-man show was held at the Coracle Press Gallery in 1979; subsequent shows were held at venues including the Serpentine Gallery, the New York Studio School Gallery, Tate Modern, the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, and Agnews Gallery (a major retrospective in 2006).
Among his diverse awards and prizes were the Royal Academy’s Jubilee Prize in 1986; the Times Watercolour Prize in 1992 and 1993; the RA’S Nordstern Printmaking Prize in 1998; the Hugh Casson Drawing Prize in 2006; and the Turner Watercolour Award and Medal in 2007.
Mccomb said of his work: “Everything I make is a portrait, whether I paint a human head, a flower, or an object on a table ... I harmonise with William Blake in saying art and life are concerned with the minute particular. That could be said to be my cornerstone.”
Leonard Mccomb married first, in 1955 (dissolved 1963) Elizabeth Henstock; secondly, in 1966, Joan Allwork, who died the following year; and thirdly, in 1973 (dissolved 1999) Barbara Gittel. He is survived by two of his sisters, Anne and Moira.