The Shared Subject Matter of Art – Matthew Spender

Our house was crammed full of art, but my father was not a collector in any usual sense. Except when he couldn’t afford to buy more, he never thought about the value of what he owned. His ‘collection’ followed no rules, he merely bought what interested him. Prints from the cancelled etching plates of Picasso hung up the staircase, and he’d often stop to study them, ignoring the writhing tendrils of the William Morris wallpaper against which they were hung. (They were sold by Zwemmer’s on the Charing Cross Road, and in the sixties they were so cheap even I could buy them if I saved up my pocket money.) My father’s love of art was connected to his own creativity. He believed in what he called ‘the shared subject matter of art’, and he studied his collection hoping to find clues about his writing. Looking at a painting or a sculpture, or reading a poem, or listening to a piece of music, were to him part of the same experience, because the initial spark of creativity came from the same interior experience.

The only instances where this interconnection of the arts might fail would be in works that had no aim beyond their own craft: words with rhythm but no meaning, paintings that were just brushstrokes, music that was merely sound. He developed this idea in six Mellon Lectures, which he delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in the spring of 1968. The period was confused; between the first lecture, on 3 March, and the last, on 7 April, Martin Luther King would be assassinated and President Lyndon B. Johnson announce that he would not stand for re-election. As if to echo this confusion, the text of my father’s lectures is full of deletions and second thoughts. They were never published. Fifteen years ago (eight after my father’s death), my mother asked me if something could be made of them. I read them several times but in the end I gave up, because I couldn’t produce a readable version from the confused typescript.

As part of my research for the book that never materialised, I went to speak to two artists who had known my father: John Craxton and Frank Auerbach. I asked them how they felt about ‘the shared subject matter of art’. (The phrase comes from the first Mellon Lecture.) They were dubious. Painting, after all, is physical and writing is not – or at least, not in the same way. But they did not dismiss his idea automatically, because ‘vision’ is also necessary for painters, even if theirs is not the same as that of writers. The arts are also unified by the fact that to understand any of them, you need empathy. You identify with the perceived object. If you are looking at a figurative sculpture, you judge its success by the echoes it evokes in your own body. You might even say, ‘I didn’t know I had that muscle.’ Or, ‘I didn’t know I looked like that.’ Both Craxton and Auerbach added some useful details to what I already knew about my father and art.

Craxton told me they’d met during the war, thanks to Peter Watson, the sponsor of Horizon magazine, where my father worked as an associate editor. Watson paid for drawing lessons for Craxton and Lucian Freud, and off they went to Camberwell to make drawings of ageing prostitutes. My father lent Freud the front room of his rented flat in Maresfield Gardens, where he worked diligently on paintings of dead birds. Craxton reminded me that before the Maresfield Gardens episode, in 1940, my father and Lucian had shared a cottage together in Wales. Freud was little more than an adolescent at that point and his paintings were wild. They kept a joint ‘commonplace book’, which later Freud mysteriously appropriated, extracting his drawings and throwing away the rest. (It was a low blow. Dad never forgave him.) My father nevertheless published the work of Freud and Craxton in Horizon. The editor, Cyril Connolly, did not trust his own opinions on art and delegated this editorial task to Stephen and to Peter Watson.