John Lessore - A painter’s painter

ENGLISH ART, or English painting to be more specific, often puzzles outsiders - meaning mainly, in this context, Americans and continentals. It persists firmly, though quietly, in being itself and true to itself, individual and often rather private, instead of dutifully echoing New York or Berlin. Definitions of what is “mainstream" are bandied about dogmatically in the art magazines, yet the better, original, English artists rarely conform to these dogmas. Of course, there are many fresh from the art colleges who do conform, and generally these have an innings of five, ten or fifteen years before they fade out of public view, usually into the anonymity of teaching. This has regularly provoked the charge of insularity, yet in fact, English painters have traditionally looked to France and elsewhere, and many of them have lived for periods abroad. Some, like Hockney, settle in America; others, like John Lessore, divide their lives between living and working at home, and in another country. In Lessore’s case, he has a studio-home in Carcassonne in the south of France but keeps a studio in London (Peckham) as a pied-a-terre.

Lessore, now 55, has come up rather late in the reputation stakes. He had the reputation of being a “painter’s painter“ but had a limited public profile, though he was well enough regarded officially to be included in the important exhibition “The Pursuit of the Real”: British Figurative Painting from Sickert to Bacon; which was mounted in Manchester, London (the Barbican Centre) and Glasgow in l99O. Earlier, he had been a prize-winner at the Spirit of London show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1978 and at the 1982 John Moores Exhibition in Liverpool. Painters, in my experience, tend to speak well of him within the trade. So do several influential critics. Giles Auty of the Guardian made ‘him his “Critic’s Choice” in 1991. Lessore has been a wheelchair case since he became paralysed from the waist down in his teens, yet he teaches (at the Royal Academy Schools since 1965) and some of his paintings are on a surprisingly large scale, even monumental. His stock rose considerably last year after his exhibition at Theo Waddington and Robert Stoppenbach’s London gallery in Clifford Street, and when he was shortlisted from nearly 300 artists for the Jerwood Prize, together with Uglow, Aitchison, Cockrill, Hoyland and Shiraishi. Theo Waddington has been a stout believer in Lessore’s quality for 15 years, and he knew that many good artists and distinguished collectors shared his opinion. Yet even he was surprised by the depth of goodwill and respect which that exhibition, held a year ago, called forth, especially from leading painters of what it has become fashionable to call the School of London. “Lucian Freud, Auerbach, Kossoff - they all came to the opening and they all wanted to buy one of his pictures. Not just a swap, as painters often do, but actually to buy one. They had admired him for years.” “l had 35 paintings on the walls, and 31 were sold."

With his French wife, Paule, he was in Dublin to attend the opening yesterday at the Solomon Gallery. Quiet and almost impassive, with a profile of aquiline distinction, which suggests a jurist or scientist rather than a painter, Lessore is reserved and rather introverted in conversation, though with a quiet humour. Essentially, he says, he is an observer, a contemplator of life from the outside. Yet his paintings are not in any way cerebral, they are full of human activity and often depict scenes of domestic intimacy, or people on beaches, or a woman writing letters (obviously his wife) on a garden table. They show his debt to the great French Intimistes, Bonnard and Vuillard, and also to the living artist he most admires, Balthus. He met him once, when Balthus was head of the Villa Medici in Rome, and Lessore was given a recommendation by a mutual acquaintance to call on him. “So I screwed up my courage and went to see him, and he came out on tiptoe and said: ‘I am so proud to meet you” but told me he was very busy. He gave me his telephone number and told me to ring him. I never did, I didn‘t think he really meant it. Later, l learnt that he had made the daughter of a friend walk all the way to the British School and deliver an invitation to dinner. When I never turned up, the person who had given me the invitation to call on Balthus in the first place was furious and didn‘t speak to me again. Derek Hill, then head of the British School, showed him round Rome: “Every day we went to places like the Palazzo Doria and saw Baroque ceilings, or met people who had their own Botticelli. I remember that in one place we visited, footmen in uniform followed us round to see that we didn’t take anything.” He was also deeply moved, journeying through Italy, to see the great fresco cycles in the original: "It was so strange, coming out of these places, to see that the landscape outside was essentially the same as when the artist had painted it. ”Did landscape in itself interest him?” “I used to paint landscape, but I am really only interested in people. If I painted landscape, it would have to be landscape with figures - people in a specific setting. I am a very passive, contemplative person; I just observe, and that is what you get. My great interest is in composition, and after all, that is what composition is about - ‘people in places’.” He has also painted portraits, but does not see himself as a portraitist. He and his painter-friend Leon Kossoff (whom he much admires) spent sessions painting each other, but he reckons that Kossoff got the better bargain. “Some years ago, l was included in a book of contemporary British portraits. I was asked to supply a page of text to go with it. I thought a lot about it, and then I put my credo into one sentence, ‘I am interested in composition.’ They never printed it, although my portrait did appear.”

Lessore comes from a family in which art runs on both sides, and he grew up in a house where Sickert paintings hung about: “Yes, he was my uncle. My aunt was his third wife, and he was her second husband.” His father was a sculptor, and his mother Helen Lessore was a famous - and formidable - personality in the London art world, who ran the Beaux Arts Gallery until it closed in 1965. A painter in her own right, she supported many artists through tough times, and painters associated with the Beaux Arts at one time or another included Bacon, Auerbach, Kossoff, Lucian Freud, Craigie Aitchison, Michael Andrews, and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky. When the gallery finally closed, an entire chapter in British art came to an end. Several of these people, he says, gave him advice on his own painting, “which was really helpful." Almost inevitably, he saw the Soho bohemian milieu of the time at first hand, including the Colony Room and the redoubtable Muriel Belcher. He studied at the Slade, where his chief interest was in learning to draw - drawing virtually obsesses him, and he sketches continually. A contemporary of his there was Stephen McKenna, whom he greatly respects, both as a man and as a painter: “He’s very brave: he comes out in public and makes statements which most people wouldn‘t have the courage to do.” Lessore is reluctant to be drawn into discussing younger, and sometimes ultra-fashionable, British painters, although he did comment on one very topical name: “He sees himself as Francis Bacon’s successor - he wants to be the painter of mortality."

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