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Anthony, Dante, Seamus & Jack by Sir Peter Stothard
Dante Alighieri famously begins his Divine Comedy 'In the Middle of the Journey'. Wild beasts and a Dark Wood stand between the poet and his heavenly goal in the opening section of a First Canto that has inspired successive generations of writers since the Fourteenth Century.
In the works here by Anthony Lawrence, an artist in oils and watercolours who has made Dante his focus for twenty years, the Renaissance pilgrim poet has become himself a painter. The ancient dark Italian wood is made from a painter's English fears; and Dante’s leopard, lion and wolf are for Lawrence a range of powerful
modern women: The obstacles, distractions, supports, obsessions in an artist's life. Lawrence is not a simple illustrator of Dante. He does not picture individual scenes using the extraordinary images that Dante has given in the past to Gustav Dore and so many others. Lawrence's own long and difficult experience with
Dante's poetry is rendered rather in different idiosyncratic ways. Look at the works individually and you might not think of the poet at all. Taken together, they show a painter's powerful engagement with the Florentine master of six hundred years ago.
This set of oils on canvas has emerged from Lawrence's own struggle which, in parallel with the battles of Dante’s own poet hero, has included much interruption, doubt and despair. His only way through his personal Dark Wood and its 4 AM fears has been to paint himself through them. These are works which were almost stillborn. Appropriately for the Divine Comedy, in which Dante's guide to Hell is the Roman poet Virgil, it was the chance intervention of the Nobel poetry laureate, Seamus Heaney, Dante's finest modern translator, who five years ago restored in Lawrence the confidence that he had begun to lose. What the visitor to the gallery can see now is a small glimpse of the result.
The first large canvas is the closest to the setting of the poem itself. The artist, with bowed baseball-capped head, sits on a white chair with his palette and his brushes; beneath him is a glowing Turkish carpet - and before him are thick trees with a thin light shining through.
In Dante's depiction this Dark Wood of Error is not to be crossed. The notorious three beasts - variously seen as signifying the sins of youth, maturity and old age or lust, pride, and greed, form an impassable barrier. Lawrence presents his own beasts in female forms. In the first circular canvas a slender woman, with cat's arms and hands, walks on all fours across the carpet under a calm starry dawn sky. A second beast is rampant, more aware of her power, and clawing against a wall of fire.
Dante's character has to bypass this blocking bestiary and he takes instead his guided journey into Hell, Purgatory and out to Paradise. Only by descending deep into humanity's failings, in all their foulest forms, can a man see beyond the idea of sin as an obstacle and out towards reality and repentance. Half way he will
reach his guide to the final stretch, his lost beloved Beatrice, his obsession and, for Lawrence, also the beast that Dante made for himself.
In the Seventh Circle of Hell, still with Virgil at his side, Dante’s hero meets those who have committed violence against God, Nature and Art, sinners condemned to eternal torture by flakes of fire and hot, glowing sand. This is the theme of Lawrence's second large painting. The treatment here has links to the first - but is
altogether more playful.
A suaver painter this time, with dinner-suit trousers, brilliant white shirt and brush behind his back, looks critically at his own version of a pointilliste Dark Wood. On his right, in a separate space on a fiery Turkish carpet, is the curled and naked comeand- get-me figure of a beast. Who here is committing violence? And is it against God, Nature or Art? The hero of these paintings is a painter. So must it be Art?
This hero bears, in fact, a strange similarity, in look and poise and nightclub style, to the best-selling Scottish artist, Jack Vettriano. That is a man who, in many critics' eyes, does violence to Art every time he puts paint to canvas. But is Lawrence agreeing with Vettriano’s opponents? Lawrence is himself a predominantly figurative painter whose Oxford education at Ruskin in the 1970s followed an unhappy year at London's radical St Martin's School of Art. Like Vettriano, Lawrence has had his own battles with contemporary orthodoxies - and is maybe more concerned with why his subject is studying the wood rather than that so very seductive beast in her chair.
Seamus Heaney is the subject of the final work - a portrait of the Irish poet whom Lawrence met, by chance one night in Leeds in 2001, when he was struggling with his Dante themes and wondering if the whole project was not destructive for both himself and for his art. Heaney persuaded him to hold on to his course - and sent him his own translations and suggestions to keep him there. This last painting is a form of thanks to Heaney – a gratitude which many visitors to this challenging exhibition are now set to share.
Sir Peter Stothard is Editor of The Times Literary Supplement
Why Vettriano’s agent hates The Untold Lie
Rarely is the image of the Jack Vettriano himself as controversial as his erotic and cinematic paintings.
However, this week as the self-taught Scottish painter, one of the most popular artists in the UK, opens his latest exhibition in London, his image is at the centre of an artistic spat between his agent and an artist who has painted Vettriano for his own exhibition.
Anthony Lawrence, whose show opens in London this weekend, has included a painting of Vettriano in a series on the theme of Dante's Inferno.In the painting entitled The Untold Lie, Vettriano stands with his back to the viewer, brush in hand, while a naked girl sits curled on a chair.
Mr Lawrence, who has exhibited regularly since 1972, will display the work at his show at the Tapestry Gallery in the capital.
The work has apparently provoked the ire of Tom Hewlett, Vettriano's agent and owner of the Portland Gallery, which last night opened the private view of Love, Devotion and Surrender, the artist's latest collection.
Mr Lawrence claims he received a phone call from Mr Hewlett earlier this week, first asking him to stop "copying" Vettriano's work, and then asking him to cease painting images of the artist.
The artist remains bemused, as the image of Mr Vettriano is based on a photograph in a magazine article.
" I thought, as a courtesy, I would invite Tom Hewlett to the opening of the exhibition," Mr Lawrence said.
"Then a couple of days ago I got this phone call, saying 'Could you please stop copying Jack's paintings'. I thought that this was mad, because our works are poles apart.
"Then he said, 'please do not paint Jack again'. God knows what is wrong with doing that."
Last night Mr Hewlett declined to comment.
The painting represents Dante's seventh circle of hell, for those who have committed violence "against God, nature and art". It is described in the exhibition catalogue as a "playful" piece.
Mr Vettriano has sold more than three million posters and other reproductions. Of the 24 paintings in Love, Devotion And Surrender, 20 have been bought by collectors.
Two works, Exit Eden and On Parade, have been bought for £120,000 each, with total sales from the exhibition set to reach £1.2m. The gallery has received 300 advance orders for a set of six limited edition, previously unpublished prints of Vettriano's more erotic work.
"I liked the image of him and I thought it was apt for my depiction of the Seventh Level, but it is not about him, people can put their own interpretations on him," Mr Lawrence said.
Lawrence was born in Cambridge in 1951 and studied at the St Martins School of Art in London and the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford.
Glasgow Herald - April 7th 2006 - Reported by Phil Miller
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