CLARE HALL CAMBRIDGE
Michael Brick – artist and printmaker
Clare Hall begins this anniversary year with an exhibition of work by Michael
Brick (1946–2014), whose art belongs to the tradition of European
Constructivism. This vein of art began in Russia in 1915, when Kazimir Malevich
exhibited a series of paintings, all of which used simple geometry to create
emblematic images. The most famous of these was his Black Square, its
‘censoring silence’, as Malevich claimed, created a tabula rasa that cut artists
off from the past and made urgent innovation. The emptiness of the Black
Square provoked the imagining of new tomorrows, and the constructive
tradition – in art, architecture and design – proved to have vital relevance to
the modern world. Brick’s art is therefore paradoxical: his paintings appear
mute yet tap into complex allusions and affiliations, while also having an
affirmative role. A visitor, entering a room or gallery hung with his paintings,
is soon made aware that these terse, deliberately impersonal images have
undeniable authority and presence.
Although born in Leicester and brought up in Northamptonshire, Michael Brick
had spent his teens at Neath, in Wales. Both his parents were teachers. His
father, John Brick, was a Welsh radical who eventually took on a school for child
offenders and promptly had the bars removed that had been fitted to every
window of the building. Michael inherited his father’s liberal outlook and
staunch Labour views.
He studied painting at King’s College in Newcastle shortly before it split off from
the University of Durham and became what is today called Newcastle
University. Brick became part of talented gang of students, among them Stephen
Buckley, Bryan Ferry, Tim Head and Sean Scully, all of who were inspired by the
presence on the staff of Richard Hamilton, who was at that time becoming
renowned as ‘the father of Pop’. Like other of his peers, Brick worked closely
for a period with Hamilton as his assistant, also doing the same for Hamilton’s
successor Ian Stephenson. After gaining his degree, Brick stayed on for a year
as a Hatton Teaching Fellow, and then took up a residency for one term at the
University of York. He enjoyed immediate success, having his first solo
exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 1971. After this he became
associated with the Hester van Royen Gallery, and then the Anne Berthoud
Gallery, both in London, also exhibiting in many group shows at home and
abroad. His high standards of professionalism in the making of art, his
sophisticated thought and his innate modesty, earned him much respect as a
teacher, after he returned, as a half-time lecturer to the Fine Art Department at
Newcastle University.
Michael lived in Cambridge during the last twenty years of his life, became
an associate member of Clare Hall and sat on the college’s Art Committee. He
brought to this task his genial and humorous manner as well as a cultivated
mind, for he was widely read, and had a deep understanding of the Western
European tradition in art.
In Cambridge, he established a creative partnership with the masterprintmaker Kip Gresham, renowned for collaborative work with leading artists
from around the world. At Gresham’s Print Studio, outside Cambridge, Brick
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produced many prints, including the The Size of What I See (2010), a set of 12
prints, three of which are included in this show, and all of which are aligned
with poems by Fernando Pessoa (writing as Alberto Caero), translated into
English by Brick’s wife Manucha Lisboa, a specialist in Portuguese and Brazilian
literature. The images are not intended to illustrate the text: instead the relation
between them appears to be reversed, the text acting as a set of instructions,
an oblique manual, for understanding how to look at the images. What
fascinated Brick was the way in which Pessoa’s poems strip away all rhetorical
effect, in their attentiveness to the uniqueness of objects. The poems seem to
chime with Brick’s minimalist aesthetic, while Pessoa/Caero’s play upon antiphilosophical ideas also finds an echo in the conflict between idealism and
nihilism in Brick’s imagery.
A photograph exits which catches one of these prints in the process of being
made. The neatness surrounding its making testifies to the meticulous nature
of Brick’s working methods. Gresham recalls watching Brick at work: ‘The act
of measurement was like a devotion, a nod to another dimension, one in
which the unknowable could be assigned a size.’ The cruciform shape on
which he is working in the above photograph is a recurrent motif in his work,
and is in itself a satisfying shape. However Gresham, aware of the nonreferential nature of Brick’s aesthetic, quizzed Brick as to whether it worried
him that it might be read as a Christian symbol. ‘How could it not?’ Brick
replied, pointing out that the extent to which religion had influenced art in the
past inevitably gives to the cruciform, as well as other shapes and words, an
inextricable set of associations. On one occasion Brick and Gresham worked
on a Christmas card with a vertical stripe on the front and a horizontal one on
the back. He called it ‘Deposition’.
While living in Cambridge, Brick continued in his role as a half-time lecturer at
Newcastle University, lodging two nights a week for many years with long
periods with friends, including a professor in English Literature, Tom Cain. Noone knew better than he how widely read Brick was in both modern literature
and philosophy. In boyish mood, the two men invented an artist’s cricket match,
in which Rubens went into bowl against Michelangelo, and all players behaved
in keeping with their well-known attributes. In the studios, Brick’s ability to
respond to, and genuinely admire, work unlike his own made him an excellent
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teacher: one of his colleagues, the sculptor Andrew Burton, noted that the
strictures in his own paintings seem somewhat at odds with his personality,
for he was always generous, encouraging and positive about students' work 'it's really rather good' being his catchphrase.
It will be evident in this exhibition that Brick was a craftsman as well as an
artist. He was fascinated by process, loved carpentry, built his own panel
paintings and always took care over the proportion of the height, breadth and
depth of his object-like panel paintings. Their impact owes much to the fact that
many layers of pigment had been applied, dried, sanded off and then re-applied.
A similar care attended his cooking, and to share a meal with him, Manucha,
their daughter Laura in their house in Cambridge, was to be aware of ‘a cell of
good living’. The walls of the room were of course white, as Michael believed
that wallpaper and patterns of all kind were ‘the source of criminality’.
His last exhibition was held at the Broadbent Gallery, London, in 2006. His
work is well represented in public collections, including that of Clare Hall, and
can also be found in, for instance, the British Council and Arts Council
collections, in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and London’s
Victoria & Albert Museum.
FRANCES SPALDING
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