Fairground Image 2

1962. Mixed media on board, 122x91.5cm

ROLL’EM UP
ONE OVER TO WIN
ANY PRIZE YOU LIKE
powderblue nylonfur poodles
against the bright red counter
children crying            runny noses
holidaymakers huddled like sheep under plastic raincoats
from the August rainstorms
coaches revving up in the carpark
ON THE RED THIRTY THREE
ALL THE THREES THIRTY-THREE
Frankie Laine  Guy Mitchell
loud through the electric nightrides
lights going out running with the heavy shutters

Adrian Henri, extract from Autobiography, 1971. 

The fairground was a fascinating alternative world. It had its own language and code of conduct. Once I was accepted I felt it was a little honour. I was intrigued by the language – a mixture of thieves slang, rhyming slang, Romany, Yiddish – designed so that you could speak in front of the customers and they wouldn’t know what you were talking about. 

The fairground pictures were the first I did that were like a visual record of what it was like to spend a summer in one of these places – a souvenir of a particular place – like a diary preserving a particular moment in time which I suppose in very different ways is a lot of what I’ve done since.

Adrian Henri interviewed in Paintings 1953-1998, Walker Art Gallery, p.48

Père Ubu in Liverpool, 1962

Oil on board, 123x92cm

I suppose like most people of my generation, I really found out about Ubu through an issue of a magazine called The Evergreen Review, I think it was Evergreen 13. It was called What is Pataphysics?

Alfred Jarry did some woodcuts of this grotesque figure that he’d invented who was based on his particularly gross and sadistic physics master at school. There were a number of rather sensitive, poetic kind of boys he used to pick on very regularly, and they used to amuse themselves at night by making up adventures in which this person – who was called Père Hebe – became King of Poland by murdering all his friends.

Ubu, I think, was meant to personify all the bourgeois vices. One thing I like about him, I think, is that despite the fact he is a monster in a way, he is also somehow a survivor.

At the time when the text of the play was printed Bonnard did drawings for it. Since then I think all the great School of Paris artists, Picasso, Mirò, Max Ernst, have all done pictures of him. It’s a long tradition.

I liked the idea of putting him in Liverpool. The first one I did was him walking across the corner of Elliot Street and Lime Street. He’s just walking across the road with a zebra crossing behind him. Then I put him in other places and he crops up in several poems located in Liverpool.

Adrian Henri interviewed in Paintings 1953-1998, Walker Art Gallery, p.54

Piccadilly Painting, 1962

Oil on board, 91x71.5cm

I first started teaching at Manchester Art College in Autumn 1961. I used to do a thing called ‘Outdoor Studies’. This meant that I had to take a group outside in Manchester once a week. I did a great number of drawings in connection with it.  It just summed up several of the things I was interested in. It was a peculiar place. Below eye level was grass. On eye level was the shops. Above eye level was the advertising. So that it had a layered feeling to it. This comes out, I think, in the paintings. In a curious way too, even the little bit of nature in Piccadilly was artificial. The flower beds were maintained by the council. One day there would be a dense mass all of one colour, the next of another colour.

Adrian Henri interviewed in Paintings 1953-1998, Walker Art Gallery, p.56

Kennedy Painting, 1963

Collage and paint on paper, 36x28cm

Collages gave me the opportunity to play with ideas before thinking about doing a finished picture. I was teaching at Manchester Art College at that time and I think that a lot of the issues I raised with the students and the problems that I set them I also worked on in my own time. Ultimately I suppose it links with the exercises that Richard Hamilton taught – cutting up colour magazines to make art, but I’d also looked at a lot of Surrealist art by then.

Adrian Henri interviewed in Paintings 1953-1998, Walker Art Gallery, p.64

Big Liverpool 8 Murder Painting, 1963

Mixed media on board, 152.4x122 cm

This is one of a whole series of paintings called Liverpool 8 which were meant to be on the one hand perceived as abstract an on the other hand to be familiar – in that they’re about the district I live in. I wanted to include objects around the streets – and the colours and textures too. Most of these pictures had a matt grey basic background – the colour of tarmac and buildings. Then within that there is always a darker shinier area – puddles and pools of oil.

This particular one started from me finding in the street a handwritten Liverpool Echo newsstand poster saying Murder Case, Court Hearing. The idea was that this would be the scene of the crime. Then I found an old handbag in the street and I stuck it on, then a pair of women’s stockings and splattered red all over them. I had some old posters lying around that I used as part of my teaching at Liverpool Art School. I used part of one that seemed to work in terms of colour – a beer poster. I got carried away a little bit. I put a very used and grotty kind of lipstick into the handbag and a little bottle of cheap scent and a rather grubby little hanky. All these things which nobody would know about. In a gallery you wouldn’t be allowed to look into the handbag anyway. They were just there to give it a feel of reality. When it was on show at the Walker, Brian Patten came to see it. He waited until none of the attendants were around and then he slipped a little poem into the handbag.

Adrian Henri interviewed in Paintings 1953-1998, Walker Art Gallery, p.66

24 Collages, N°4, Clayton Square Painting, 1964

Collage and paint on paper, 54x45.5cm (private collection)

In the early 1960s, Adrian Henri organised a series of Happenings and events, some of which involved live music by Merseybeat groups such as the Roadrunners or the Clayton Squares. The band’s alto-saxophonist and vocalist Mike Evans would later join Adrian Henri in the Poetry and Rock band The Liverpool Scene.  (CM)

24 Collages, N°6, Mulligatawny Soup Painting (Homage to Andy Warhol), 1964

Collage and paint on paper, 53x45.5cm

Adrian, while using soap-packets and posters, part of the lingua franca of international pop, was very far from the cool perfectionism of his ex-tutor Hamilton, the nostalgia of Peter Blake, still less the total neutrality of Warhol. Indeed, if any pop artist influenced him it was the American Robert Rauschenberg, but Adrian’s pop period is very much his own.

A more relevant term of reference are the collages of one of Adrian’s most admired artists, the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. There is the use of discarded detritus, for example, and yet in impact they have little in common. Schwitters’s use of rubbish is random. Henri’s however loosely, hangs together. What they do have in comment is a wonderful instinct for composition. In both cases, under the apparent ebb and flow of the found imagery, is a solid framework. Henri could no more forget he is a trained artist than strop breathing.

George Melly, Pop and Protest, exhibition catalogue, 1997

24 Collages, Liverpool 8 Spring Collage N°5 (for PGW & FB), 1965

Collage and paint on paper, 32x26 cm

Adrian Henri was, unusually, a political pop painter. Dispassionate political neutrality did not attract him. An anarchist and briefly a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s Committee of 100, he used political ephemera to make pomitical pictures – racist leaflets from the British Movement picked up in the street, and right-wing American promotional presidential campaign literature. When the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I came in 1964, he made that conflict too the subject of several anti-war pictures.

Frank Milner in Paintings 1953-1998, Walker Art Gallery, p.11-12

P.G.W. are the initials of Patrick Gordon Walker, the defeated Labour Party candidate at the 1964 Smethwick election during which a concerted racist campaign was fought.  F.B. are the initials of Fenner Brockway, a Labour M.P. and an outspoken opponent of racism who had also been imprisoned during WWI as a conscientious objector. (C.M.)

Liverpool 8 Four Seasons Painting, 1964

Mixed media on board, each piece 183x76cm

These paintings are in a sense abstracts but using elements of the landscape – like for example the yellow lines. I love the quality of yellow lines on the road – the thickness – the gooeyness in the way it was put on.

There’s the usual graffiti – goal posts drawn on the wall. In the top left hand corner; there’s this little bit of nature – Sefton Park or Princes Park with one solitary daffodil bursting through, in the middle of all this greyness.

Summer is very much based upon Rhyl Fairground.

The cream and hard-edge shape is on the one hand a reference to hard-edge painting which was on the go at the time, and on the other hand it was the colours that the fairground at Rhyl was painted. And then the little thing that looks like a bit off a spaceship is actually a lump off a fairground ride. It got broken off and was just lying around.

I’ve always felt that Autumn is a very emotionally-loaded season. It’s something I’ve written a lot of poetry about. This one has got chrysanthemums, which are seasonal, but also in a lot of European cultures they are associated with death. And in the top right hand corner is a whole pile of autumn leaves which again I dipped in paraffin wax and when it set, glazed as if it were autumn leaves that had been frosted over.

On the one hand it was simply about gathering up debris from the streets in Liverpool – things found lying in the gutter – or twisted pram wheel, a child’s handbag and a child’s teddy bear. Somehow or other when they were stuck onto the surface they seemed to be telling a story. It was almost like the idea of a street accident – a child had been run over. Again Winter is a bit like the Autumn picture – the silver was burying them as if it was something emotional or tragic that winter had covered up. The silver was slightly depersonalising the whole thing.

Adrian Henri interviewed in Paintings 1953-1998, Walker Art Gallery, p.69

The Entry of Christ into Liverpool, 1962-64

Oil on hessian, 183x243.8cm

This has portraits of lots of my friends and also various heroes as well. None of the figures were done from life or photographs because I wanted to paint the mental images I have of people – I nearly always think of a particular person dressed in one set of clothes, for instance. It is also an elaborate act of homage to James Ensor, who plays Christ. There is a quote from ‘The Entry of Christ into Brussels’ in the LONG LIVE SOCIALISM banner. And the ‘Colman’s Mustard’ advert is a quote from an Ensor drawing ‘Hail, Jesus, King of the Jews’ of 1885 which has I think the first bit of pop art in it. In the background there is a poster for Colman’s mustard. It is a kind of visual diary of the years it was painted because the townscape was finished fairly quickly but the fitures were done on the additive principle for two years and sometimes I had to add beards or substract them or change the girls’ hair-colour or style. People I quarrelled with even got painted out.”

Adrian Henri, Extracts from Notes on Painting and Poetry (1968)

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Batcomposition, 1967

Collage on card, 52x78 cm

The most specific formative influence on my thinking as a painter/poet was that of the ‘Independents’ group working in the late ‘50s. Richard Hamilton was the most obvious influence although I didn’t realise till some years later the implications of some of the things he had done at King’s with us.

Adrian Henri, extracts from Notes on Painting and Poetry (1968)

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Debris II, 1975

Acrylic on board, 122x142.2 cm

Debris II is a painting of rubbish on a demolition site. It’s an unromantic view of what has become a familiar feature of many parts of Liverpool as of every other British city. There is nothing which could place this as being Liverpool rather than somewhere else, yet it has a quiet intensity which speaks of ‘here’ rather than ‘there’. It is, I would suggest, Sickert revisited for although Sickert never painted quite such a subject as this, it is in a sense the modern equivalent of his drab Camden Town interiors, and Henri’s way of making low key colour glower and glimmer is very reminiscent of Sickert’s skill at tonal painting.

Paul Overy, The Times, February 1976

Kop II, 1977

Acrylic on canvas, 50.8x61 cm

Adrian Henri’s Kop paintings are amongst his most popular series. A lifelong Liverpool FC supporter, he attended the 1977 European Cup final in Rome, where he declamed his ‘Ballad of Chairman Paisly’ to assembled LFC fans at the Coliseum …

(CM)

Dream Palace (Homage to Ferdinand Cheval), 1988.

Acrylic on canvas, 153x180 cm

On several occasions, Henri visited Ferdinand Cheval’s folly, which had taken the postman 32 years to build, in the Village of Hauterives, South of Lyon

(C.M.)

I’d always been fascinated by the idea of The Postman’s Palace. I remember reading about the Surrealists going there in the 1930s.

Cheval said afterwards that he was only trying to prove that an artist of his class could do it as well as anybody – he was obsessed with class. There are several pathways around the palace. One of them has his wheelbarrow on it. An inscription reads ‘to my faithful wheelbarrow.’

What was extraordinary was that Cheval actually dreamt it – the story goes that he tripped over a stone shaped like a sculpture that he had seen in his dream so many years before – in rocky limestone country – and he then realised that this was what he had to do.

Adrian Henri interviewed in Paintings 1953-1998, Walker Art Gallery, p.112

Rapefield, 1988

Acrylic on canvas, 120x152 cm

This painting is very much to do with the part of my life which is spent travelling on trains. Over the last ten years or so we’ve seen the European rape seed phenomenon. What others see as a curse I found a blessing visually – this shock of yellow coming through a carriage window.

Yellow is a difficult colour to work with. I started with a base of greeny-yellow then built up the streaked lines of green – then added the yellow highlights. For a change I also painted this on a white canvas.

I suppose that once again I’m flirting with abstraction and as so often I’ve found a subject that lends itself to an almost abstract treatment.

Adrian Henri interviewed in Paintings 1953-1998, Walker Art Gallery, p.108

Flowers for Liverpool, 1989

Acrylic on canvas, 120x180 cm (collection: Liverpool F.C. Museum)

I wasn’t actually at Hillsborough but I was in Liverpool that weekend. At the end of that traumatic few days I was left with two abiding images. One was the sound of the Great George bell in the Anglican Cathedral which rang on the Sunday – once for each person who died on the Saturday. I ended up eventually writing a poem called ‘The Bell’ which attempted to evoke that sensation in words; The other was the flowers at Anfield, which led to this painting called Flowers for Liverpool.

In a way it is quite an abstract painting. It is just a study in white and red with variations. At the same time it is a very emotionally-loaded subject – the football pitch at Anfield covered with flowers all of which are either wrapped in white paper or cellophane and in amongst them people were putting their scarves and hats and other kinds of souvenirs.

Adrian Henri interviewed in Paintings 1953-1998, Walker Art Gallery, p.108

El Khazneh, Petra II, 1993-1994

Acrylic on canvas, 152x121 cm

Petra

Pink palaces 
beyond the dreams of postmen, 
rose-red rocks 
beyond the dreams of palettes, 
wait to be reborn 
beyond the dark passage.

Adrian Henri, “From an Antique Land” (extract), in Selected and Unpublished Poems, LUP, p.177

Thanksgiving Day Parade,
New York City III, 1995

Acrylic on canvas, 182.5x121.5 cm

‘I went over to visit Catherine in New York. On Thanksgiving Day she’d heard about this great parade which was organised by Macy’s, the department store, which goes down Fifth Avenue and finished up somewhere in Times Square. It included these enormous fifty foot high or bigger inflatable figures. There was Snoopy, Bart Simpson and Ronald McDonald. These enormous figures were towed by a wire. It was a particular bleak November day – a dull rather cold rainy day with these garish things floating between the great canyon of the street. At the end of the parade, the figures were deflated. Bart Simpson in this picture is in the act of being deflated. Doing the New York paintings set off a sequence of thought that influenced the later Day of the Dead pictures.’

Adrian Henri interviewed in Paintings 1953-1998, Walker Art Gallery, p.128

The Day of the Dead, Hope Street, 1998

Acrylic on canvas, 193x243 cm

Just as The Entry of Christ into Liverpool transported Ensor’s scene to Liverpool, the Day of the Dead series relocates the traditional Mexican celebration to a familiar setting, in Hope Street – the street which joins Liverpool’s two cathedrals, with the Everyman Theatre and the Philharmonic Pub on either side.

The frontality of The Entry of Christ is taken up again, but the friends and heroes represented here are now dead – the painter Sam Walsh, Adrian Henri’s ex-wife Joyce, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Aurelio Marcangeli, the artists Ed Kienholz, Frida Khalo, and the Birkenhead-born writer Malcolm Lowry, whose Under the Volcano takes place on the Day of the Dead in Mexico.

(C.M.)