The Brooklyn Rail

Almost twenty years ago, I began to research the life and work of the British painter Patrick Procktor, who died at sixty-seven, alcoholic, and largely forgotten, in the summer of 2003. My interest in the artist was roused by a memorial exhibition of his paintings, presented by the Redfern Gallery in London, less than eighteen months after his death. Though aware of Procktor from my days as an art student, until then, I’d known little of the impressive range of his work. It quite soon became clear that despite great acclaim in the 1960s and 1970s, he was virtually invisible in art historical records. An approach to the Redfern Gallery, who represent the artist’s estate, resulted in them allowing access to their archives, and to holdings of Procktor’s work. They also drew up a long list of people I should aim to interview, people who had known the artist at different stages of his life. After several years of intense work, including research trips and interviews in England, Italy and Germany, Patrick Procktor: Art in Life was published in April 2010. I had become the artist’s biographer; I had been tasked with writing him into art history. During my research, it became obvious that Procktor’s queerness was a significant aspect in his marginalization.

In the London of his heyday, he appeared a man out of step with time. His theatrical persona drew comparisons to Oscar Wilde, and with the aestheticized mannerisms of the Bright Young Things of the 1930s. He was a complex, insecure man, whose cutting repartee served as a deflective shield. This, along with his overtly camp demeanour, seeded doubts in some quarters about the seriousness of his apparently felicitous art, and he gradually fell out of popular favor in art circles.

Recent years have seen a rehabilitation of Procktor with UK retrospectives in 2012 and 2016, as well as in Bologna in 2023. His understated painterly language of landscapes and of figures has found a new audience appreciative of the artist’s ability to maintain a sense of poetic distance, and lightness of touch and perspective. Considered alongside present-day figurative painting, both Elizabeth Peyton and Alessandro Raho could be easily conceived as contemporary counterpoints.

My interest in Procktor led me down a path to a queer British artist from the preceding generation, Keith Vaughan (1912–77). Vaughan had been a teacher of Procktor’s at the Slade School in London. Much had been written about Vaughan’s work, but nothing that made explicit the way his sexuality is encoded in his painting, much of which centers on the male nude. Commentators tended instead to focus on the work’s formal aspects, on the way his figures drew upon the forms of Classical sculpture, and the postures of ballet.

Like my writing on Procktor, my essay on Vaughan combined biography with a critical assessment of the work; it was published in a raisonné of the artist’s oil paintings in 2012. In it, I deal unambiguously with the fundamental relationship between Vaughan’s art and sexuality. Later still, I wrote the first-ever queer history of the St Ives art colony in Cornwall, describing how queer artists were integral to the development of international modernism. By then, it seemed clear that my mission was to establish a rightful place in history for queer twentieth-century British artists. It was a century of immense change in attitudes towards homosexuality, spanning decades of illegality, of vilification and imprisonment. A key marker was the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, legalising consensual homosexual acts in private in England and Wales. There followed the era of gay liberation, the devastation of AIDS, increased queer visibility and the legalization of same-sex marriage.

I have continued to address the under-represented project of queer art and life in Britain in the twentieth century. To this end, I am writing about another under-researched queer British artist, Mark Lancaster (1938–2021), who first came to prominence in the mid-1960s, when he showed a group of cooly sophisticated abstract canvases in London. There, his queer circle included Procktor, along with fellow artists David Hockney, Derek Jarman, Keith Milow, and Peter Schlesinger, as well as the fashion designer Ossie Clark. All were forging individual and collective identities as queer men in the heady world of the Swinging Sixties. Lancaster himself found something of a role model in the Bloomsbury artists’ bohemian mode of living, befriending the queer Bloomsbury painter Duncan Grant (1885–1978), and visiting him at Charleston, his house deep in the Sussex countryside.

Lancaster studied Fine Art at the University of Newcastle, where he was taught by Richard Hamilton. And it was he who recommended Lancaster contact Andy Warhol in New York, where he travelled on a two-month research trip, in July 1964. The visit was to prove both intoxicating and life altering. It began with a phone call to Warhol made soon after his arrival: he was invited to the Factory on the next day. The young man was to spend many days there that summer, assisting Warhol with his silkscreen paintings, and appearing in the films Kiss and Couch (both 1964). Warhol introduced Lancaster to the curator Henry Geldzahler, who in turn introduced him to pretty much everyone, including, crucially, Jasper Johns, with whom he formed an immediate friendship.

After moving to live in New York eight years later, he was to act as personal assistant to Johns for over a decade. He also continued to paint, exhibiting with Betty Parsons, and producing many set and costume designs for Merce Cunningham. The consensus (which I have come to share) is that these designs constitute some of his greatest work, for they contain qualities; of light, colour, and shape, redolent of the abstract paintings with which he first made his mark. Lancaster moved through many worlds, acting as an important bridge between the cultural and queer worlds of London and New York. His story is yet to be fully told.

Recently, I heard of how a large quantity, of paintings, typescripts, correspondence, and archival material, had been salvaged from a dumpster outside a house in London. The address was that of the former home of a male couple, who had first met and fallen in love in the late 1920s or early 1930s. They were highly creative, intellectual beings, with close links to the European avant-garde. One was a painter, experimental filmmaker, and prolific writer: of poetry, art criticism, fiction and non-fiction. He died in 1985. His partner, an abstract painter who also wrote art criticism, outlived him by 14 years. Soon after his death, the house was cleared, their things thrown into the dumpster from which they were retrieved by a keen-eyed passerby. The paintings and other materials then remained in storage for a quarter-century, some surfacing online only recently, when they were bought by aficionados, cognisant of the artists’ importance.

And what if it hadn’t been rescued, and had instead gone to landfill? For on hearing the story, I was reminded of other, less fortunate ones: of things left to rot in damp basements or destroyed. So much is open to chance and circumstance.

In my own work, a combination of curiosity, determination, the kindness of others, and a great deal of luck, have carried me forth. Yet the evidence of many queer lives remains invisible, the records of life experience, of contributions to society and culture, elusive, fragmentary, lost to time.