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Ian Massey, in his superb but sadly out-of-print monograph of Patrick Procktor, helps us to see again the power of this artist’s intelligent defence of an aspect of painting that the artist named ‘theatrical’. It re-opens a perspective on art that is no longer represented in mainstream art history, or is perhaps actively suppressed. For to Procktor, the key to the word ‘theatrical’ is in its extension of form and technique in art to exert power over the imagination of its audience. Procktor’s summary of what was required in the development of modern painting was to say: “It is the expressive possibilities of the imagination which need to be extended.”’[1]  This blog reflects on Procktor’s necessary attack on the unhelpful separation of painting from the purposes of other arts including our lived lives using Ian Massey’s (2010) ‘Patrick Procktor: Art and Life’ Norwich, Unicorn Press.

NOTE: For another blog on Ian Massey’s more recent work on queer art history (Queer St. Ives and Other Stories published 2022) use this link.

This blog is not as much a review of Ian Massey’s superb biography of Patrick Procktor as a rather opinionated welcome of a perspective of art that has been, in my view, suppressed in art historically based criticism. That perspective was marginalised went almost as an effect of mid twentieth-century prejudices against the figurative and narrative content of visual art. Massey makes available to us a notion of the ‘theatrical’ in painting, promoted by the practice of, and informal commentary on art by, Patrick Procktor as an artist. At its nearest to theoretical formulation Massey describes the artist’s participation in a ‘symposium on the theme of narration and figuration in art’ in March 1966 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. At this event Procktor addressed himself only to particular paintings that he considered ‘theatrical’ by himself and others in that they seem to be still moments from an observable present but with ‘an implied past and future’, although the latter could be realised only in imagination. He addressed in particular, amongst the paintings of people other than himself, a painting we should see: ‘Boston Staircase, by the American realist painter Lowell Nesbitt’.[2]

This painting is not itself to my taste but Procktor uses it theoretically merely to address how imagination works in painting. He claims that “the power of the painting is over the imagination”. He went on to elaborate that point in terms that again evoked the term ‘theatrical’ and prejudice in art history and criticism against that term. In my view that prejudice was often part and parcel of a reaction to what was or seemed queer or unconventional in art and which pointed to content felt unseemly and indecorous by artistic and other cultural elites, and sometimes, even less forgivable, against artists identified as ‘queer’ (or by the medical term ‘homosexual’) with whom Procktor associated, such as Derek Jarman. The latter embraced the word ‘queer’ in public statements and could perhaps be described as almost responsible alone for re-establishing its radical use– see my earlier blog thereon. But the term was also not forbidden by the less well-known and art-activist queer man (at the time – see my blog on the early art linked immediately above) David Hockney. Procktor, unlike both of these men, hated the word ‘queer’ and was, at varying times, with varying people and with wildly varying intensity ambivalent (to say the least) about his own passion for sex and romance with men) as Massey chronicles brilliantly (a point I’ll consider later):

I detest the condescension towards the ‘theatrical’ by critics who know nothing of the theatre. Usually they mean flashy. What I mean is the broken chord-string in Chekhov; you have this real situation in a real place in real daylight and then you have this sudden inexplicable sound. The imagination vaults. The equivalent of this extension in painting is to my mind as important as the extension of technique and formal language. The attempts to make painting independent of its occasion have succeeded in extended merely its repertory. It is the expressive possibilities of the imagination which need to be extended.[3] 

What those critics he references meant by the word ‘theatrical’ Procktor guesses to be the word ‘flashy’, but they also probably meant ‘camp’ as well. We will consider the term ‘camp’ later in this piece.

For Procktor the attempt to ‘make painting independent of its occasion’ refers to the trend in twentieth-century art to displace the notion of ‘content’ in art, the content that might be said to be the external ‘occasion’ which brings it into being: whether that be the representation of external scene, social meanings, figure(s), narrative, describable feeling, or imagined thought. What takes the place  of such content, at least in extreme formulations such as the influential ones of Clement Greenberg, was to claim the essence of painting was the creation of formal designs realised on the surface of a canvas at different levels of the ‘purity’ of the abstraction involved. In Boston Staircase Procktor tells us, as already cited above, the ‘power of the painting is over the imagination’. He goes on to explicate that function in recreating the ‘occasion’ that prompts the painting’s design. We can intuit this ‘occasion’ to be emotions and cognitions circling about human experience of narrative time. For the painting is, in Massey’s words; ‘a half-landing vantage point from which staircases curve both upwards and downwards’. In this painting the codes of surface design such as the relative position of marks in the space occupied by the painting such as above and below, to the left or the right not only indicate illusory depth of perspective but ideas and feelings about future and past seen from the still moment of the present that are also reflected in patterns of interacting shapes made by line or colour or both. That ‘still moment of the present’ as I express it is anyway our only vantage point in a painting, like the landing referred to by Massey. Procktor describes, although actually about another painting (one of his own), what we see as: ‘Like a play’ [for] ‘it has a real present and an implied past and future’.[4] Thus every painting is merely a vantage-point in time.

This moment in Procktor’s career as an artist wherein, as Massey says, he made ‘explicit the parallel between [his] artistic enterprise and the theatre’ could be considered as definitive of his method or mode of being throughout that career. Yet great biographers, as Massey definitively is, makes it clear that real lives are more nuanced and that the play on fascinations, such as that exerted by a rich area of experience, thought and feeling we call ‘the theatrical’ are not merely those defined by theoretical thinking. To show the contrast, we could compare Procktor to another twentieth-century artist; one almost consumed by obsession with theory, for we find that Procktor was not the first artist to feel a fascination for theatre. Of past twentieth century artists the closest to having worked, and been visually creative, in the theatre is Edward Gordon Craig. The latter’s influence though spread to others.

One such, but a very different artist to Procktor, as we shall see from his use of theatre as a means of developing artistic method, is Paul Nash.  His work in creative design (based on but not necessarily applied in the theatre as such) is explored in a in a chapter of a very recent book by James King. King quotes Nash thus:  ‘the English theatre prefers to keep the artists outside, and so it is from outside that I, an English artist, look at English theatre’.[5] Much of Nash’s work was book illustration for dramatic text or two dimensional imaginations of three-dimensional scenes, although he designed the set for a Wagner production, in the manner of Craig, which survive as exquisite wood engravings. Nash’s book illustrations for King Lear will give us a start:

King sees these scenes as influenced by Craig’s earlier production Hamlet. This was described by someone who had seen it in 1911 as being without the features of what usually passes as ‘scenery’ such as trees and realisable and conventional architecture, but rather seen as a pattern of layered screens creating a ‘simple composition of straight lines’. The aim, translated into prints of Nash’s imagined visualisation of scenes in King Lear, appears to be to create angular and regular shapes that confront each other in a clash of very sharply defined light and dark suggestive of turmoil and conflict between opposing binaries, whilst the mystery of human survival in which conflict is created by patterns of multiply toned mixes of criss-cross patterns.[6]

Nash’s reinvention of the art as a drama is however is clearly NOT the kind of use of the ‘theatrical’ in visual art that characterises Procktor, and nowhere does Massey present the moment of clarification of the appeal of ‘the theatrical’ to the latter as reductively simplified, even to what in itself is a complex theoretical agenda, as could be the case for Nash. Massey evokes not Nash and other committed, if ever metamorphosing, English modernists like Nash but models like Walter Sickert, whose sense of theatre also came from complex life sources and from aspects of a not altogether consistent personality (see my earlier blog – from this link – which only almost gets to this perception). With forensic perception, Massey sees the ’intriguing parallels’ between Sickert’s life trajectory and artistic methods and Procktor’s as only a ‘key influence’ but only from the mid-1980s.[7] For you cannot pin down Procktor to any theoretical reduction and Massey does not try to do this (great biographers never do). Indeed despite that moment of theoretical clarity at the ICA, Massey really only attributes the insight to highlighting the ‘performative aspects of the person and artist’; aspects which he characterises by Susan Sontag’s notion of the modern ‘dandy’ and the behavioural repertoire of being ‘camp’.

Even as a designer for the theatre, which Procktor, was for a time (from 1965 when he designed a John Whiting play, Saint’s Day, for the Theatre Royal Stratford), his work is a long way from the Nash application of a model of theatrical drama.[8] The Victoria and Albert Museum holds his 1967 design for the Sadler’s Wells production of the ballet Cage of God. It is dominated by faces performing (or posing) at one time but never quite communicating, though they smile in ways that advertise a superficial well-being at the very least. The whole drawing is bathed in blood-red, against which (to gauge the size of the backcloth’s giant images) Procktor has drawn finely the dancers diminished and drowned, as it were, by their background of appearances.

The insistence of the theatrical as a play with appearances is borne out in Massey’s account, based on contemporary sources, of his ‘Carnaby Street’ production of Twelfth Night for the Royal Court Theatre that emphasised the theme of what we call the genderqueer. It is a theme aimed at shocking “boring people” who said when they watched TV (in the sixties that is) that “oh, you can’t tell the difference between boys and girls these days”, the ‘smudging of sexual distinctions’ and queer ‘sexual confusions’.[9] This desire to shock went too for his blend of camp and the homoerotic for the costume, programme and sets for Christopher Hampton’s play Total Eclipse, about the love between poets Verlaine and Rimbaud. For the latter play, according to Hampton, he “painted the whole proscenium arch and the whole back wall pink, and he had a sort of Moroccan lamp … hanging down in the middle of the auditorium over the stalls”.[10] Hampton loved it. Critics of the production found it neither funny nor clever and the play only had a three week run on this first production (although later as a film it was to be a major vehicle in the career of Leonardo di Caprio), seeing it as, according to The Times, “less like a production than a camp costume party”.[11]

In the days of queer theory (usually an amalgam based on Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) we can cope with the notion of a performative theatrical as a description of the interplay between persons which marks out binary norms of a punitive kind. However, that was not I believe how it felt for queer people in the fifties and sixties, whose very nature (or what one perceives to be such from the evidence of one’s insistent desires) did not match norms and must be enacted as a role that faces down social critics in family, school, and work. Indeed, I guess this is still the case now for some LGBTQI+ people, and especially trans-identifying people, where the norms which turn viciously against them are also found in a vocal branch of an LGB minority allied with powerful heteronormative celebrity (J.K. Rowling to name one only but also the present government) strategically allied to them or this purpose of turning back the clock on the relaxation of amative typologies.

I find the examination of queer biography, and especially of queer pride, particularly beautiful and nuanced in Massey’s book. It is not that the author theorises on this but the empathy with which he speaks the contradictions of Procktor’s development as both artist and person shows an insight far beyond that ordinarily encountered in either gay liberation propaganda, necessary though that is, and self-help books on ‘coming out’. Theatricality is at the root of this. I’d assert that although most thinking people, who do not have recourse to creation myths, now believe some version of the distributed self that accepts we learn, modify and change roles as a reflection of psychosocial and cultural contexts and practices, this version based in Mead and Goffman of the representation of the self cannot account for the experience of some gay young of being considered, and perhaps being, behaviourally ‘theatrical’.  As a child, my own experience of this was an emergent preference for playing roles and fictive dramas with others to being involved in games in which I needed to prove myself. It was considered a ‘girly’ trait, even by my little sexist self at that age.

Massey records that at Highgate Boys School according to one correspondent speaking from memory, Procktor at ten was considered to stand outside the norms although it could be played as a kind of elitist form of superiority to others: ‘It was partly height, and partly his looks – and he was theatrical. … he did a touch of the Greek look. He did a very successful act’. This drew the boy to art, through an art teacher who interpreted the boy’s emotionality as a love of ‘great art’.  Yet Procktor still, as far as the public record goes, felt that his romantic future both at school and at his Naval college posting in a school for linguists lay in a heterosexual direction, though a preference for male company is more apparent than his odd passion, for Carol for instance, and even a kind of ‘theatrical’ preference for drag in amateur dramatic playing, about which he hoped “the vicar wasn’t too surprised”.[12] This kind of confusion of self (and certainly ‘conflict regarding his sexuality’) was later apparent in Procktor’s artistic life.[13] It involved a kind of conflation of both his psychosocial life and his persona as an artist with a notion of a sex-and-gender-queer identity that was not always presented as sexual and could seem settled in a long term partnership with a man or in his eventual marriage (although all seemed doomed by his uncertainties).

If his life was ‘theatrical’ in its constant exchange of roles and personae, it was also played under masks that changed according to his audience. Thus Massey can cite people who found him untroubled by his sexuality and others who witnessed great psychological disturbance up to the level of self-hatred and which certainly expressed itself in his dependence on alcohol and extreme self-destructive behaviour (leading to an accidental fire that destroyed many of his own paintings and effects as well as a significant collection of others’ art) in later life.[14]   Massey cites his extreme response to Derek Jarman’s self-conscious defence of queer identities, his distaste for political queer identity and pervading sense of guilt, as seen by others, but contrasts all this with Mirella Boetti’s belief that ‘he was quite sure of himself’.[15] In my own view such multiple appearances of extremely shifting attitudes is a sign of the deepest oppression, that finds an outlet for libidinal energy (I don’t just mean sexual energy) in playacting and in alcohol’s enhancement of one’s self-belief in these often contradictory and shifting attitudes. Again I find this in my own back-story.

In Procktor the role-play was also linked to some particular loyalties to the marginalised that fed his Communism and allied him with the Marxist artist-critic John Berger and working class origin artists like David Hockney. Massey tells us that the artist’s Communism, citing Hockney’s evidence in the process, was of a ‘particularly idiosyncratic bent’.[16] As a person, Procktor’s life reads as one damaged by his perceived marginalisation (but not only when his art went out of favour) and the transformation of the potential that ought to come of an ability to survive by continual Protean adaptation into the ordinary tragedy of the eventual disintegration of the alcoholic without (or which they have alienated) external resources to reply upon.

The beauty of Massey’s book is that he shows how some of the disadvantages of the thinness of social being that was the only appearance in social life that Procktor could adopt also led to some very fine artistic achievements and finely idiosyncratic means of painting that had special appeal. Massey’s analysis of the ‘Swagger’ portrait in which the artist excelled is remarkable. Swagger is a reflection of the short-lived glamour so important in the period and in which Procktor was a part. The fashion for these led him to create portraits of a peculiar fineness where distortion played its part in creating irony around the claims of his sitter to notice, by exaggerated features not unlike caricature or over-extended pose or gesture, as in the portrait of Jill Bennet (where the irony is one that inspires admiration of an aura that surpasses a recognisably real body) or ‘a form of distortion related to caricature (as in The Columnist, a portrait of Andrew Duncan).

For Massey, these techniques are a source of great power in the paintings, that emerge as it were from the way in which the artist shares with his models the theatrical swagger that is manifest in them and in their reproduction. It even becomes a factor in painting style that is marked by the fact that ‘not all brushmarks are fully harnessed to the image’ (and is not unlike the manner of Manet) and which “imposes a touch of inconsequentiality, a subtle but defiant pointlessness” (in Carter Ratcliff’s cited words), that makes the swagger in artist and sitter that produces it ironically transparent.[17]

This playful art of swagger aligns with camp manner and the role of the dandy, all of which Massey uses to characterise Procktor as artist and person, utilising theory from such people as Sontag along the way. This produces art too of a queer cognitive and emotional tonality that evokes nature and the supernatural, conscious and unconscious, waking and dream images that evoke the profound and yet do so in a way that refuses to take it seriously. This too is a kind of defensiveness that can produce very great art. Thus Untitled (1972) evokes a landscape full of fauna, flora and minerals that might be angels (or devils). I will give examples without me giving their titles, including though (ironically) Untitled. I encourage you to find them in the book.

I would like to end this admiring reflection on Massey’s subtle thought as a historian of queer painting (and other painting) by making a much cruder point of my own about the reflection of queer male sensibilities. For it seems to me that a wondrous aspect of this art is its true reflection of the clothed male body as a site for exploration visual and sensuous, even sensual. From his portrait of The Leather Boy in a Field (1965), the obvious socked but otherwise nude Joe Orton (1967), Lord Montagu (1968 -famous for his prosecution for the crime of soliciting sex with another man), his lover Gervaise, and his portraits of soldiers for the Imperial War Museum (1983). For these portraits, whatever their varied intentions and commissioning history, always focus centrally on the men as nervous motile bodies with a prominent gaze elicited on their groins, emphasised by the placing of crossed hands or evident bulges elicited around the depiction of a crease (especially for lord Montagu). How are we to theorise this? For me the answer lies in the analysis of caricatured distortion as suggested by Massey but not applied by him in this way. I believe that the essence of the queer is most often to emphasise that which is usually distorted out of norms, flattened and desensitised. For me Procktor shows the artist as a restorative seer: honest about the potential of a different motivation for seeing with a difference that is democratic (in the way Walt Whitman is) and refuses to segregate experience between the seen and unseeable. It will seem that he or their viewer is distorting reality of course. That is the point.

But read this book not for my mad perceptions but Massey’s downplayed brilliance as biographer, historian and critic. I love it. If only it were not out of print. I had to send to the USA to get mine, paid a lot and secured (I think) the copy once belonging to Jack Hagstrom (medical doctor, literary critic and LGBTQI+ rights pioneer) – mentioned in the text as a friend lost to Procktor’s alcoholism. Here’s the bookplate.

All the best Steve

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[1] Ian Massey (2010: 78) ‘Patrick Procktor: Art and Life’ Norwich, Unicorn Press

[2] Ian Massey (2010: 78) ‘Patrick Procktor: Art and Life’ Norwich, Unicorn Press

[3] ibid: 78.

[4] Ibid: 78

[5] Cited in James King (2022:82) Paul Nash: Designer and Illustrator London, Lund Humphries. The chapter is called ‘The Artist Outside The Theatre’ (ibid: 63 – 84).

[6] Ibid: 74 – 79.

[7] Ibid: 167f.

[8] Ibid: 91ff.

[9] Ibid: 93

[10] Cited ibid: 94

[11] Cited ibid: 93

[12] See ibid: 16 – 20

[13] Ibid: 178

[14] For fire see ibid: 198f.

[15] Ibid: 178 for citation & 178f. for mixed evidence described here.

[16] Ibid: 46

[17]  Ibid: 140