Maggie Hambling

Interview by William Furlong

from Audio Arts Volume 6, Number 2, 1983

Transcript

William Furlong: Maggie, you saw Max Wall doing a performance of Samuel Beckett's play 'Krapp's Last Tape' at the Greenwich Theatre in 1975. What were the particular things that led to this series of paintings that you made with him?

Maggie Hambling: Well, as you've just said, my first encounter with this extraordinary man, to me our greatest clown, was after Beckett's 'Krapp's Last Tape' at Greenwich when he came down and talked with the audience and I had my first vision of this face, which seems to me to be the real face of a clown; a face with no mask, no make-up, a just live in the flesh clown in front of me. And so, all these years later, when I saw this name in very big letters outside the Garrick Theatre I went straight away and got tickets. I saw his one-man show twice and found him very, very moving. I don't know how else to put it. As a painter I paint what moves me. He has this magical power to make you want to laugh and cry at the same moment which any great clown does. I wrote to him, I've not done anything like that before, and asked if he could possibly sit for a portrait. I was very excited by the idea of trying to paint him. And he replied, ‘Re-painting little me, I am flattered indeed’. I could almost add the joke 'What colour?' And so following that Easter '81, the first painting I attempted, after the residency of the National Gallery was, 'Max Wall and His Image' in which I tried to paint him as I see him. A man coupled with his image, which is what most people conjure up in their minds when you say Max Wall, they think of the wig and the tights and the walk with the bum sticking out.

WF: Your reference to clowns earlier is quite interesting because even looking at the drawings; his face without make-up on has the very acute expression of the idea of a clown. That is the public image and yet the interior reality, may well be quite opposite. That dichotomy seems to be very evident in that drawing.

MH: Well, the image of a sad clown is perhaps the corniest one you could possibly think of, but I'm not against corn, I think there's a lot of truth in it; this ability to make you feel like laughing and crying. A clown is someone who feels a great deal and I agree absolutely with the thing that Oscar Wilde said about life, ‘that if you think then life is a comedy and if you feel then life is a tragedy’. The clown brings together these two things into one moment and the clown's work of demonstrating the absurdities of life to us I think is a fundamentally important part of life. I can't imagine life without laughing.

WF: So for that reason you wouldn't have found the same interest in just painting a portrait, for the sake of painting a portrait?

MH: Well I have been trying in all this work to paint Max. I mean I often feel I haven't painted him at all. Somebody did once say to me that the only recorded statement of Rembrandt, the only thing actually written down that he ever said, I don't know whether this is true or not but I think it's very important, is ‘I have painted nothing but portraits’. Now if you think about that it means that the tiniest chicken coup in the tiniest etching is actually a portrait of that chicken coup. In other words, it is particular. In other words, the subject is in charge of him as the artist. And the subject is playing through him. I can only say that's what I try to do.

WF: What is the distinction, do you think, between a portrait becoming a caricature as opposed to a portrait really penetrating something beneath the surface. Where is the dividing line do you think?

MH: Well, I really never think about caricature at all. In my own work I certainly never attempt a caricature. And my work has, as far as I'm concerned, nothing to do with caricature.

WF: Shall we look at the paintings now that you've made, after the series of studies we're looking at now?

MH: Well, it was all very quick. When Max came to the studio I'd asked him to wear the first act clothes, the rather dirty white hat, the dinner jacket, the bow-tie and the boots, of course, the very important clown's boots. I'd set up this little stage in the corner of the studio and arranged this black curtain and, I was very excited. I didn't know what on earth was going to happen. But I always begin a portrait with some quite quick drawings to discover what the pose will be and so the first drawing was him sitting straight looking at me, on a stool, and then the next one we tried him balanced between two stools, sitting on one and his feet in the boots on the other. More or less half way through that drawing I realized that must be the pose. And so I started the canvas straight away that afternoon.

WF: At the first sitting?

MH: On the very first sitting, yes. And this is the only painting here that is bad, that is done from life. He posed I think six times for this painting. Of course, it went on much longer than that and the whole imaginative side of the picture, the side where his images are changed. One moment there were two versions of what we began to call 'The Monster.' But there are certain elements that are quite obviously from the imagination, and certain elements that are quite clearly from life. I tried to bring the two things together I regard the imagination as the most important factor in trying to make a work of art.

I didn't see Max at all between October, the one-man show at Sussex '81 and Easter '82. In that time he was living a rather reclusive life working on a second volume of his autobiography, and for those three months I didn't see him, but I knew that he was at home writing. Throughout that time we had had a great correspondence. He writes the most wonderful letters and so his letters to me were really the food for the pictures. He re-appeared at Easter and I had the most difficult afternoon's drawing, perhaps ever, because you see I'd been working from my internal image of him, and suddenly he was there in front of me again, in the flesh, and I didn't think I was going to be able to draw him. I made one terrible drawing after another. Finally arriving at the ‘Study Portrait of the Clown. From the 'Study Portrait of a Clown' I painted 'Easter '82' exactly a year after 'Max Wall and his Image', this big head and shoulders portrait of a clown.

WF: It's possibly the most incisive and penetrating of the portraits.

MH: I suppose because he's in his civvies, as he calls them. It's perhaps the most naked of the portraits. A friend of mine said that I had achieved what was clearly the portrait of an old, old man, but it had the ageless spirit of the clown in it, which I was delighted to hear because that is something I was really trying to do.

WF: But you seemed to have somehow stripped off, or peeled off, the image of Max Wall and got to the person of Max Wall.

MH: Well, I hope so. I hadn't really thought about that till this moment but it was that hell of an afternoon doing one appalling drawing after another that was probably absolutely necessary to make way for what has happened in this picture. Ridding myself of my internal image in trying to draw him and then coming out with, I hope, him in the flesh.

WF: Another predominant feeling looking at these paintings, is that Max always appears to be very isolated.

MH: Well, I think a great part of being an artist is being on your own a lot of the time, and I regard him as an artist. I do see him as quite a lone figure, on the stage with hundreds of people, but after the performance then very much a lone figure. On the stage too, apart from the pianist and the drummer, there's nobody else in a one-man show.

WF: The last time that we spoke was during your period as Artist in Residence at the National Gallery and here you are exhibiting in the building next door, The National Portrait Gallery. Does your experience of the National Gallery directly enter the works we're seeing here?

MH: Well, I think I learnt a very great deal at the National Gallery in doing the studies I did from the paintings there.

WF: Was it your decision to actually show the pictures in what is a national gallery, known for exhibiting portraits?

MH: I think it's absolutely right for someone I regard as a living national monument. This is the right place to show the pictures of him and a great many people come here, possibly because it's a portrait gallery. I think most people feel they know what a portrait is. It isn't something frightening like art.