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RODRIGO MOYNIHAN AT FRIEZE MASTERS
BOOTH C03
Preview days: October 12-13
Public days: October 14-16 -
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Rodrigo MoynihanWhite Plastic Container behind Plywood Board, 1973oil on canvas70 x 47 in (177.8 x 119.4 cm)
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"Moynihan dedicated himself to seeing the world before him for what it was, and this included himself."
An excerpt from John Yau’s essay, In the Studio:The claim I am about to make might initially seem outlandish, but I can assure you that it is not. Although the English painters Rodrigo Moynihan (1910-1990) and Francis Bacon (1909-1992) were very different in their work and temperament, they were also nearly exact contemporaries who painted a substantial group of self-portraits. As far as I know, there has never been a two-person exhibition focusing on this aspect of their work for reasons that are too obvious to state. My quarrel is not with the high regard in which Bacon is held, but with the fact that Moynihan has not yet been recognized as a major artist.
Consisting of self-portraits and still lifes, Moynihan’s late paintings more than hold their own when compared to the work of artists associated with the “School of London,” a term R. B. Kitaj coined in the mid-70s to call attention to the figurative painting going on in the bustling city through which the Thames runs. By singling out a group of mostly figurative artists working in London, Kitaj was pushing back against what was known as the “New York School” at a time when abstraction, conceptual art, and the “death of painting” dominated the art world’s attention, particularly in America. Now, nearly 50 years after the “death of painting” has proven to have been a greatly exaggerated claim, and figurative painting is no longer accorded second class status in relationship to abstraction, I think it is time to relook at the entirety of Moynihan’s career, starting with the self-portraits and still lifes that he began focusing on in the early 1970s.
Rather than invite a subject to come and pose for him or to rely on photographs, as so many other studio painters did before him, Moynihan chose himself to be the subject, but with a compelling twist. Within the circumscribed world of his studio, with its changing light and evident absence of creature comforts, Moynihan dedicated himself to seeing the world before him for what it was, and this included himself. Like the things lying around his studio, he understood that he too was a thing among things.
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In his still life paintings, the objects include: sponges, soap, light bulbs, often still in their cardboard boxes, rulers, rolls of photographic papers, bottles, jars, pieces of paper, maul stick, palette knife, and a second-century Roman head and hand. The objects stir up faint associations with the tools of surgeons and architects, which fold another layer of meaning into the painting.In Still Life with Roman Hand & Roll of Photographs I and Still Life with Roman Hand & Roll of Photographs II (both 1988), done near the end of his life, Moynihan employs slate and soot gray to depict the studio walls. In both paintings, there is silvery gray band that vertically divides the room into two unequal areas. While it is the same table, the things on it have been moved around, most likely because Moynihan used them. What unsettles the gathering is the Roman hand clutching something unidentifiable. Its presence on the table underscores Moynihan’s observation that nothing is permanent, not even art.In Roman Head, Bottles & Paint Tubes (1981-82), Moynihan uses horizontals and verticals to orient the circular shape, giving it a top and bottom. However, in contrast to Bolotowsky and Glarner, Moynihan sets the shelf at a slight diagonal, going from right to left. The position of the Roman bust and the vertical green struts are also set at a diagonal to the picture plane, in quiet resistance to modernism’s insistence on frontality in the depictions of objects on a flat surface.
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Rodrigo Moynihan was born in Tenerife, Spain in 1910 to a Spanish mother and an English father. The family moved briefly to London before relocating to New York, where he graduated in 1927. After attending the Slade School of Art in London in 1928-31, Moynihan started a pioneering movement in painting called Objective Abstraction, together with a small group of artists that included Ivon Hitchens and William Coldstream. Their works were concerned with the medium itself, emphasizing painterly strokes, and were in their way a precursor of Abstract Expressionism that prompted the poet David Gascoyne at the time to describe them as an ‘explosion in a jam factory.’ Examples of these can be found at the Tate, the Hirshhorn Museum and other institutions around the world.During the war, Moynihan served in the British Army before being recruited as an official war artist through the support of Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery in London. This established Moynihan as the premiere portrait painter in the United Kingdom, and led to his appointment as the head of painting at the Royal College of Art soon after the war. Under Moynihan’s auspices, the Royal College became the hub of the British art world, as Francis Bacon occupied Moynihan’s studio, and Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake and David Hockney were students. But Moynihan, always restless and never comfortable being pigeon-holed, soon was going back to abstraction. From this point forward, he would oscillate between abstraction and figuration with a distinct fluidity as Gerhard Richter and others would later do.In the early 1970s, Moynihan began making a series of still lifes comprised of tools of a painter’s trade haphazardly strewn on tables and shelves. Of these works the artist said: “It was especially important to me not to arrange the still life so as to form a pictorial grouping—a picture. I wanted the objects to be found…so that the dictionary words of describing an object disappear. I wanted to paint them because they looked like that—without my intervention—having arranged themselves like that in that particular light.”Alongside these works, Moynihan painted numerous self-portraits, recording himself reflected in a mirror. The gold edge of the mirror acts as both a framing device and a compositional element, and changes angle, migrating throughout each canvas. These self-portraits show a contemplative painter in his later years, inextricably bound to his medium and life’s work. They also connect him with Diego Velázquez, whose court paintings were filled with humanity and physicality, and who notably recorded his own reflection in his masterpiece, Las Meninas. This group of works spanned nearly twenty years and has been written about extensively by an eminent list of commentators and critics, including Robert Rosenblum, John Russell, David Sylvester, John Yau, John Ashbery and many others. The last presentation of works by Moynihan was nearly 15 years ago in 2008 at Robert Miller Gallery in New York. David Nolan Gallery’s first exhibition of Moynihan’s work in London will be comprised of still lifes and self-portraits from the 1970s and 1980s.Throughout his career, Rodrigo Moynihan’s work was exhibited in London by the Redfern Gallery, Leicester Galleries, Hanover Gallery, Fischer Fine Arts, and Karsten Schubert; in New York, by Charles Egan Gallery, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and Robert Miller Gallery; in Paris by Galerie Claude Bernard. His work appears in the collections of the Tate, London; Royal Academy of Arts Collection, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., amongst many others.
