Where Beauty Is

By Edward Fisher

After art critic Edward Fisher died, author Giles Ward discovered a lifetime's collection of notes and transcripts the writer had made in preparation for his biography of controversial twentieth-century British artist Wallace Slade. Fisher's biography reveals previously undisclosed details, often shocking, of the artist's personal life, his tangled loves, powerful artworks, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death. Based on interviews covering a twenty-six year period – from 1963 to the very day of the artist's death in 1989 – much of this material has never been published and reveals a deeply personal lifelong relationship between Fisher and Slade. Where Beauty Is explores the dangers involved when such a relationship between a critic and his subject becomes too close.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Impress Books
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781907605796

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Editor’s Note

When art writer Edward Fisher died he left a lifetime’s collection of correspondence, interview notes, cuttings and diaries in preparation for a biography he was writing about artist Wallace Slade. Much of this material has never been published before and reveals a deeply personal relationship between the writer and his subject. Where possible, all notes have been ordered as the author intended.

Birth

November 4th, 1983, Tate Gallery, Millbank, London

EDWARD FISHER:

Does it feel strange being the subject of a retrospective?

WALLACE SLADE:

After forty years I’ve forgotten how to care.

EF:

The exhibition’s not themed chronologically. Is that deliberate?

WS:

Eddie, I’m disappointed in you. I thought that would be obvious.

EF:

So how is it themed?

WS:

By light and dark.

EF:

What do you mean?

WS:

There’s lighter periods and darker periods throughout life, and I think the different rooms reflect those periods.

EF:

So, the thing the visitor sees when they enter the first room is these giant images of your dead father.

WS:

Yes, there’s a couple here that have never been shown before.

EF:

That’s a pretty shocking way to open a show, isn’t it?

WS:

It’ll wake a few critics up, I hope! A gallery retrospective is like a biography. But I’m not fucking Monet – I don’t want my biography to be a tedious straight line through my life from beginning to, you know, now. You want to get to the shocks as quickly as possible.

EF:

But these images will shock those who know you for your earlier movie star images and collages of the fifties and sixties.

WS:

It can’t all be Four Seasons. You need a bit of Die Walküre in there! There needs to be different movements. I chose to start my symphony with a big bold discordant crash of instruments.

EF:

Has the divide between the light and dark of your work been accelerated by time?

WS:

Okay, so I grew up. I saw life for what it is. Perhaps my work has got darker over the years.

EF:

Hasn’t it?

WS:

There’s beauty in the dark. The beauty of realising that you’ve finally tapped into what life is.

EF:

It sounds as though you’re saying there is no light in reality?

WS:

Life is dark Eddie. You’ve known me long enough – it’s bleak, it’s meaningless. You can either drown in that realisation, or you can celebrate it. I’m celebrating it.

EF:

Is there a point in your career when that realisation, as you call it, was made?

WS:

It’s an evolution, nothing more. One thing I see looking at all these disparate images coming together is that it’s all about that progression. Do you know what I mean? There are significant points in time. There’s no individual one.

EF:

Is that why you have put these images of birth next to those of your dead father?

WS:

Well that’s all there is, isn’t there? Birth and death? Maybe a little copulation in the middle. We start and then we stop, and all that is left behind is a story of ourselves for other people to pick over.

EF:

And these pictures, you’ll leave behind these pictures.

WS:

And these pictures. Pathetic, isn’t it? These bits of fabric will last longer than I will. But nothing’s eternal, is it?

Growth

Wallace Slade often told me he viewed his childhood with detached resentment. He claimed he felt his memories were like watching someone else’s old cine film and that it was as though his life had only begun the day he had walked out of the small red-brick terraced home. This resentment bred directly from his relationship with his father and the untimely death of his mother.

Born in 1926, Slade’s childhood home was a two-up, two-down in one of Manchester’s growing industrial satellite towns. It’s where his father lived out his days and where Slade visited as rarely as he could. When he did return, he considered the building, its contents and surroundings, an extension of his father and all that he had spent years attempting to escape. On the few return visits he did make as a famous artist, he would find everything just as he had left it. Including his father, sat resolutely in his armchair, his fingers curled along the armrests and its high back turned away from the window.

EF:

Tell me, you’ve said before that you blame him for a lot of what has happened in your life …

WS:

Well he cared for his fucking dogs more than either me or my brother, so …

EF:

You can’t really think that?

WS:

He had a number of them, terriers. Horrible yapping things. When one died he just got another exactly the same and called it the same name. How’s that for the denial of mortality? All called Jackson. He had a fertile imagination, my father.

EF:

But, you blame him for …

WS:

Oh that’s all part of the image. The story, you know? I’ve said lots of things about my family, both my mother and my father. There are things I felt at the time, maybe yes, but also reactions to people knowing me, or not knowing me.

EF:

What do you mean by that?

WS:

I mean people – like you – waste their time trying to double-guess my work. My motivations, my intentions. Pathetic cod-psychology. Tell me about your childhood … Ha!

EF:

You don’t think it’s played a part? Surely how you are as an adult is formed by how you are as a child?

WS:

Isn’t that just a cop-out for people to justify their actions as adults? I was abused, so I now abuse. It’s nonsense; we are all responsible for ourselves and our actions. And I’m responsible for my career, not my father.

EF:

You don’t think he’s had any influence on you as an artist?

WS:

As an artist or in my art?

EF:

Either. ws: Well he’s certainly had no influence on my art, but I can’t help any deformed genes the old bastard may have kindly given me.

EF:

You’ve said before that he was a very domineering presence in your young life?

WS:

I’ve said that he was a bully. And I still maintain that. He was a bully, what can I say? He controlled the family, controlled my mother and tried to control me.

Throughout his career, Wallace Slade created a smokescreen around his past. At times he would appear embarrassed by his humble, working-class upbringing, at others he would ham up his northern, everyman roots to ridicule the arty, middle-class world that fawned over his work. He would continue to deny the influence his father had on his work throughout his life, but it is clear that, consciously or otherwise, Slade’s childhood, and his father in particular, inspired some of the most controversial artworks of the twentieth century.

In Joseph Kellerman’s 1975 retrospective, Mind & Body, the author purported to have once discovered Slade in his studio: ‘drunken and ranting like a madman about his father.’ According to Kellerman, Slade was inconsolable:

I, at once, leapt to hold the fellow by his shoulders. He had the devil in his eyes, a fire that I had not seen before or since in anyone. He stared at me as though I had just placed my own hand in a cauldron of boiling oil. I uttered calming words as I might a rabid dog, and by and by the artist calmed. He sat, clearly disorientated, in a small paint-splattered wicker chair in the corner of his studio and started talking about things it took me a while to understand.

EF:

Your father claims you tried to kill his dog?

WS:

(Laughing) Which one? He said lots of crazy things.

EF:

You didn’t, then?

WS:

What, try to kill his dog?

EF:

Yes.

WS:

Of course not. He trained them to follow him around. Part of his need to control, I suspect. They were a part of my childhood, always there yapping. Even now I have to block my ears when I hear one yapping in the street. I blame him for my lifelong dislike of dogs.

Escape

EF:

Tell me about your first studio.

WS:

It was just off Brick Lane, behind Spitalfields Market. It was a very inspiring area, people running and shouting everywhere. From four in the morning it was alive with the most incredible characters. There was real camaraderie. I would walk through the market in the mornings. The stench was unbearable but stimulating. And the smell stayed with me all day. It was everywhere I turned.

Only a handful of visitors ever saw the inside of Slade’s first studio. The building was an old stone warehouse that had long fallen into disrepair. The original pillared entrance had been eaten away by time and petty pilfering. By 1961, the only reliable way into the building was through a wooden side door. Increasingly frustrated by both the limitations of space and the distractions of the terrace house he lived in at the time, a friend alerted him to the empty, ramshackle building. Over the next two years, Slade moved all his materials, brushes, canvases and books in. Left empty, the building had been home to down and outs since the end of the war. Nobody really knew who had responsibility, and the council, keen to avoid an expensive overhaul, preferred to leave the building alone. In the meantime, the tiles slipped from the roof, broken glass was left unreplaced and nature was allowed to slowly take its grip. The very things that immediately appealed to the artist. Years later, he would fondly describe the studio as having had a ‘real heart’. It was in this building that he began painting larger works for the first time, some over twelve feet in height. The lack of restriction was liberating for him, and in the first half of 1961 he produced over fifty paintings. Many, of course, are now lost.

EF:

It was an old warehouse?

WS:

A scent factory, soap, cleaning fluids. And that was the other smell that was always with me. I can’t go anywhere where there has been carbolic soda without being transported back to that studio.

EF:

You’ve said before that it was the best working space of any that you’ve ever used?

WS:

Well, that may have been an exaggeration. But the light was incredible. Really white, you know. In the mornings it would flood in from the west. And of course I could make as much mess as I liked.

EF:

And the studio burnt down?

WS:

The council should have paid me for doing their dirty work. I made them a fortune.

EF:

So, you were responsible?

WS:

I didn’t say that.

I remember the occasion of the fire clearly. I was working as a freelance arts journalist by then, and word spread quickly along Fleet Street about a big fire in the East End. By the time anybody got there, the top floor had all but disintegrated. The rotten joists succumbed to the intense heat in minutes. A sharp-eyed observer might have seen a figure loitering by the far entrance, watching as the flames leapt along the walls, splintering glass and wood relentlessly. Tubes of paint bubbled where they had been left and tins of emulsion exploded under the pressure of the heat, sending their metal lids like Frisbees, embedding them in the brickwork.

EF:

But you miss it?

WS:

Well, yes and no. I mean, it was like a revelation when I first moved in there. But, leaving it was cathartic as well, you know. And it was so fucking cold in there …

EF:

But cheap rent?

WS:

The cheapest, yeah. I think the council knew something was going on in the building but they couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it. So they left me to it.

I crushed myself in amongst the crowd that gathered and we watched open-mouthed at the free bonfire display. It was only when someone suggested that the artist might still be in the building that panic began to spread. The police and fire brigade, assuming they had been called to a rudimentary insurance demolition, suddenly found themselves battling the heat to secure an entrance. Inside they found little but the blackened remains of charred canvases, books and the odd stick of furniture. In the shadowy hollow of an old built-in fireplace were the burnt remains of some poor creature.

EF:

After the fire you disappeared?

WS:

That was all blown out of proportion, of course.

EF:

Where did you go?

WS:

I can’t honestly remember. I don’t know, a friend’s flat or something. I wasn’t really thinking straight. At the time I just wanted to stop it all. I suppose I was doubting myself as an artist.

EF:

Didn’t the police ask you about the fire?

WS:

Oh yes, of course, but there was no evidence. So, what could they do? Anyway, as I said, they weren’t that bothered.

EF:

Were you aware at the time that the press were searching for you?

WS:

Well not really, I wasn’t really thinking straight at the time. Friends told me that I was on the front of several of the tabloids at the time – and of course I’ve seen them since. Sensationalism at its British tabloid best. They thought I was going to become their very own Howard Hughes. I genuinely think they were all disappointed when I turned up again. I think they were hoping I would be found dead in a hotel room somewhere. No such luck.

EF:

And there were rumours at the time that a body had been found in the building?

WS:

Yes, that was hilarious wasn’t it? It was a stray dog.

EF:

Really?

WS:

Yes, it was dead long before the fire. Then I returned to the warehouse and