(Photo of Michael Andrews, courtesy of Wikimedia)
A thoughtful and caring person, Norwich-born artist, Michael Andrews, was a man of quiet sensitivity, a painter of masterpieces and a bosom friend to many and now the subject of a new book by the distinguished British art historian and curator, Christopher Lloyd, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures in the Royal Collection from 1988 to 2005. He has written extensively on artists such as Degas and Cézanne and for a couple of decades worked at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Michael Andrews was also a good friend of my family. He was a regular (and a welcome) visitor to my family home at 48 William Street, Norwich, not too distant from his family home at 13 Park Lane off Earlham Road.
Born in 1928, the second child of Thomas Victor Andrews and his wife, Gertrude Emma Green, Michael—who did his bit for his country serving his National Service in the Army between 1947 and 1949—had an elder sister Joyce and a brother David who, following in his father’s footsteps, worked at the Norwich Union.
Furthermore, another house closely associated with Michael was No.3 Chester Place not too distant from Park Lane. In the drawing-room of a large and comfortable Victorian terrace house (complete with aspidistra) owned by a dear friend of the Cooper family, Peter Ward, Michael set up a studio there. I watched him hours on end at work while acting as teaboy and general factotum.
I witnessed and well remember Michael meticulously working for the best part of a year on a grand and imposing work entitled ‘Late Evening on a Summer Day’—an imagined scene of languid and erotic decadence—influenced by the work of the French-born painter, Pierre Bonnard.
Originally destined for the Junior Common Room of Wadham College, Oxford, ‘Late Evening …’ was eventually owned by the Dean of Chichester, the Very Reverend John Hussey, who in turn ultimately rejected it owing to the salaciousness of its subject. The painting’s now in a private collection.
Another canvas partly worked on at Chester Place—‘The Family in the Garden’—portraying in a subtle way the restrained atmosphere and manners of middle-class domestic life focusing on Michael’s family relaxing in their back garden with his father prominently placed (seated) in the forefront of the picture as befitting the head of the family
Michael adored the head of my family, too, whom he always referred to as ‘Mr Cooper’. It was my father who persuaded Michael to stick it out as an artist and not follow in his father’s footsteps to the Norwich Union as his grandmother—a devout Methodist as, too, were Michael’s parents who regularly attended Park Lane Methodist Church now turned into luxury apartments – had so dearly (and clearly) desired.
There’s no doubt whatsoever, Michael was an extremely gifted and talented individual right from the outset. He got to grips and nurtured the intricate skills of oil painting by attending Saturday morning classes at the Norwich School of Art in St George’s Street in 1946. Three years later he enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art studying there until 1953. One of his favoured tutors was the newly appointed Professor of Fine Art, William Coldstream, who taught him to draw.
A good friend to Craigie Aitchison—a fellow student with Michael at the Slade – he became godfather to his daughter, Melanie, baptised at the magnificent Gothic-style church of St Michael the Archangel at Booton near Reepham by the Reverend Willis Feast, who could well be described as the unofficial chaplain to local artists. Peter Ward provided the music seated at the harmonium and I was an acolyte serving as thurifer with my brothers (Kenneth and Albert) forming the backbone of a makeshift choir. It worked well.
A regular at the Norwich Jazz Club at the Bedford Arms in Bedford Street, Michael always enjoyed the house band, the Mustard City Stompers, led by Alfie Garner on trumpet, while enjoying my brother Albert blasting the place to bits with his earthy and forceful rendering of ‘Doctor Jazz’ written by that legendary New Orleans cornet player, Joe ‘King’ Oliver.
Perhaps, this well-loved Norwich jazz haunt acted as a prelude to the era when Michael frequented (and enjoyed) the Colony Room, a private members’ drinking-club in Dean Street, Soho, in the company of such luminous figures of the art world as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach—an inseparable trio!
The capital was most certainly the right place for Michael at the time but after receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the Slade in 1953, he packed his bags and left for Italy after being awarded a scholarship in painting to the British School in Rome.
But the Eternal City, sadly, was not for him and he soon returned to London to rekindle his bohemian lifestyle whilst returning to the Slade in 1958. But this time round to teach, a post he held in tandem with a teaching post at the Chelsea School of Art. And from February 1958 to June 1960, he held a Fellowship at the Digswell Arts Trust at the same time as Lowestoft-born artist Jeffery Camp and the ceramicist Hans Coper—whose work can be seen at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (University of East Anglia, Norwich)—were there.
While in Rome, Michael befriended Italian film director Lorenza Mazzetti and painted a portrait of her at The Spanish Steps, an extremely fine work which I’ve long admired. She then invited Michael to co-star, alongside Eduardo Paolozzi, as a deaf character in her 1955 film Together which was shot in London.
And when in Rome I always walk these steps—a majestic set climbing a steep slope between the Piazza di Spagna at the base and Piazza Trinità dei Monti, dominated by the Trinità dei Monti church, at the top—with Michael deep in my thoughts.
By and large, Michael—who described painting as ‘the most marvellous and elaborate way of making up my mind’—was a private, quiet and shy person who shunned publicity. He was, by his own admission, a painstakingly slow (but meticulous) worker producing no fewer than 250 paintings and watercolours. Remarkably, he only had seven one-man shows during his lifetime.
A sensitive and caring person, too, Michael was terribly upset by the death of his bosom pal John Minton who in the mid-1950s found himself out of sympathy with the abstract trend that was becoming fashionable in art. Feeling marginalised, despairing and suffering from psychological problems Minton took his own life in 1957.
A leading member of the School of London, Michael came to prominence through an exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery on the South Bank organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1980-81, the first substantial exhibition of his work in over 15 years. It contained more than 60 works gathered from private and public collections including 20 large canvases and an exceptional group of watercolours.
Incidentally, the person who famously coined the phrase ‘School of London’ was American-born artist, R.B. Kitaj, who conceded that such a school only existed in his head. That’s good enough, I guess! Other members of this close-knit group of figurative artists included Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff. ‘There were ten or more world-class painters working in London,’ Kitaj said, ‘and they would receive a lot more attention and encouragement if they were to constitute a movement.’
While it was none too clear how much they had in common, they at least flew the flag for figurative painting when it was distinctly unfashionable. Michael also harboured a deep interest and involvement with the subject of landscape which occupied his later work especially the large and striking canvases of Ayers Rock and the Scottish Highlands.
And for the last quarter century of his life, he was preoccupied with three series of different kinds of landscape—‘Lights’, Ayers Rock in Australia, and Scotland—as well as the four-work series ‘School’ depicting shoals of tropical fish in water in a magically-luminous setting acting as a metaphor for collective human behaviour punctuated by the organised movement of the fish and people in society.
Pivotal to his work overall was Michael’s interest in group behaviour which was first seen in his ‘Party’ pictures of the 1960s manifesting themselves in ‘The Deer Park’ (inspired by the Norman Mailer novel of the same name), ‘All Night Long’ (dating from 1964 comprising a connected triptych with each panel containing scenes of various revellers in various states) and ‘Good and Bad at Games’ of 1964-8 which transforms a coterie of guests into helium balloons with their various stages of inflation marking their social standing while the ‘Lights’ series presented views, of course, from the air.
‘Michael Andrews is probably one of the least known but certainly one of the most important British artists of the 20th century,’ enthused Christopher Lloyd. ‘The range and quality of his work is vast and has never been in doubt since his days at the Slade School of Art from 1949 to 1953 while his aptitude for painting only masterpieces has been noted on more than one occasion.
‘His friendship with Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff genuinely marked his identification and his status as an important artist of the so-called School of London founded in 1976. His interests, however, were far broader and more individual than such a designation might imply while his work demands close attention not simply because he belonged to the School of London and consorted with other famous artists but because he addressed fundamental issues that are imbued with a universal relevance.’
His early figurative paintings, dating from the 1950s and 1960s, were directly inspired by the political and social changes associated with post-imperial Britain but, from the 1970s, Michael began to pursue a wider range of themes arising from his growing interest in philosophy and psychology as revealed in his two great series of works: Lights I-VII (1970-74) and School I-IV (1977-78).
Heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, ‘Lights’, a seven-part cycle featuring a gas balloon symbolising the ego encased in a bag of skin as a quest for unselfconsciousness, one views the balloon drifting across various landscapes in search of an ideal resting-place.
The first painting made the most direct use of a newspaper photograph of a balloon over Gloucestershire entitled ‘Light I: Out of Doors’ with Michael employing the use of acrylic spray controlled by templates to make mirage-like scenes while the design for ‘The Spa’ (1974) contrasted the Scarborough coastline with New York’s Triborough Bridge, renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. The immaculate execution of this work on unprimed canvas contributed a sense of distance as the balloon searches for an Elysian resting-place in its final descent before becoming a shadow.
The title of the series, by the way, derives from the French-born Symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, who penned the famous suite of prose poems, Les Illuminations, which, incidentally, Suffolk-born composer, Benjamin Britten (who died 50 years ago this year) set to a marvellous song-cycle first performed on 30th January 1940 at the Aeolian Hall, London, featuring Swiss soprano, Sophie Wyss (the work’s dedicatee) accompanied by the Boyd Neel Orchestra conducted by Boyd Neel.
Greatly inspired by his home county of Norfolk, Michael was increasingly engaged with landscape painting often on a large scale and made annual excursions to Scotland extending over two decades while also making a memorable trip to Australia in 1983 when he explored Uluru/Ayers Rock and Kata Tjuta/Mount Olga.
However, one painting of Michael’s that I’m particularly fond of is ‘A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over’ and in common with much of his work the picture is partly autobiographical and was painted for his Diploma Examination shortly before leaving the Slade and facing a period of uncertainty.
He commented that the painting was ‘about the complete upsetting of someone’s apparently secure equilibrium and about their most immediate efforts at recovery and their attempt to conceal that they have perhaps been badly hurt or upset’. This might explain why the big fat man falling over seems to grin and bear it instead of crying out in shock. Interestingly, the image of the body destabilized in space was of interest to many artists of the 1950s including the likes of Francis Bacon and Marino Marini, the Italian sculptor.
Another work held by the Tate that I admire so much is ‘Melanie and Me Swimming’, a tender and inviting work depicting Michael treading water in a dark pool while holding his daughter as she kicks and splashes happily about.
I have a postcard copy of it lodged on a bookcase in the entrance-hall of my house (it has been there for years!) as well as a framed poster hanging in the lounge of the Ayers Rock exhibition held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1991 as part of the Edinburgh International Festivalm—he first time that I had seen the Australian canvases. Michael still ‘lives’ at Bracondale!
However, Michael’s first solo show at London’s Beaux-Arts Gallery in 1958 created a tremendous amount of interest in his work. An enterprising gallery, it was founded by portrait sculptor, Frederick Lessore, in 1923 and was closely associated with the Kitchen Sink School and, of course, the ‘School of London’. The gallery—which gave a strong platform for young emerging artists—was run by Frederick’s wife, Helen Lessore. The first shows of Barbara Hepworth and her husband John Skeaping were staged there as well as the first solo shows of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff.
Eventually, Michael returned to his roots settling with his family in Norfolk. First at the village of Geldeston (near Beccles) in 1977 where he stayed until 1981 before uprooting once again to reside in the peaceful and tranquil south Norfolk village of Saxlingham Nethergate. Over the course of his 11-year stay in ‘Sax’ he painted two fine works to celebrate 1150 years of the village’s illustrious history. Both entitled ‘Sax AD 832’, the first completed in 1982 while the second followed a year later.
With few exceptions, his paintings after 1970 are devoid of people though not without an implied human presence or drama. The heightened or dreamlike realism that he achieved at this time was partly the result of painting with a spray-gun and using water-based acrylic paint which allowed him to cover the canvas with large expanses of a single colour.
There’s no other British artist that I can think of in the second half of the 20th century who immersed himself so deeply in the elements of landscape as Michael. ‘It seems to me impossible not to paint religious landscapes of aboriginal Australia,’ he wrote in 1986, ‘just as it is almost impossible not to paint historical landscapes in Scotland’.
I well remember Michael taking me to the Colony Room to see the progress of his work on the landscape mural depicting this well-known infamous Soho haunt painted in 1959. After climbing the steep dingy-looking carpeted staircase to the club, I was met by the irascible owner, Muriel Belcher, who rudely asked Michael who I was – or to spell it out: ‘Who’s this f****** little squirt?’ ‘He’s Mr Cooper’s youngest son’, Michael politely replied. Then everything was alright.
Overall, Michael’s work has always been well received but one that courted controversy was the painting recording the civic reception hosted by the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress of Norwich, Mr and Mrs C.B. Jewson, held in Norwich Castle Keep on the eve of the installation of the first chancellor of the University of East Anglia, Lord Franks, on 23rd April 1966, following the untimely death of the chancellor elect, Lord Mackintosh, on 27th January 1964.
The work was based on 50 black-and-white pictures that Michael and friends had taken from the Keep’s balcony of the great and the good of the city and county that allowed Michael to deliver a striking seven-foot square picture executed in oil and screened photograph-on-canvas. But the work proved controversial to the core with some members of the Norfolk Museums Service’s visual arts committee utterly bewildered by the technical processes that he employed.
Mr R.W. Ketton-Cremer of Felbrigg Hall thought that the painting was ‘disappointing’ while the committee chairman, Mr Leonard Howes, who appears in the picture, described it as ‘a photograph which had been painted up’ whilst James Hipwell (a prominent local solicitor) savagely commented that the work ‘is a travesty of a painting’.
However, the director of Norfolk Museums Service, Mr Francis Cheetham, heartily defended the work backed up by Professor Peter Lasko, the art historian and later Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art who came to UEA in 1965 to set up a degree course in the history of art. Cheetham profoundly said: ‘… that it was an accepted technique to use photographs in much the same way as an artist might work from sketches.’
After a 5:3 vote in favour, the painting was purchased by the Norfolk Museums Service in 1969 for the sum of £1005 but after grants from the Victoria & Albert Museum Purchase Fund and the Gulbenkian Foundation the cost to Norwich ratepayers came in the region of £320.
Like it or loathe it, one can view the painting which has a very long title perhaps the longest in the history of art – ‘The Lord Mayor’s Reception in Norwich Castle Keep on the Eve of the Installation of the First Chancellor of the University of East Anglia’ – at Norwich Castle Museum where it is permanently on display. Seek it out. It’s worth it.
Shortly before he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, Michael, his wife June and daughter Melanie, moved back to London in 1992 residing in an apartment in Battersea close to the Thames. And with grit, courage and in a poor state of health in 1995, he found time and the right energy to complete his last major work—‘Thames Painting: The Estuary’—a strong and monumental canvas more than seven-feet tall with the subject-matter focusing on six shadowy characters visible on the mudflats by the shore. It has been suggested that one could be a ferryman, a nod, perhaps, to Charon who, in Greek mythology, ferried the souls of the departed across the Styx to the underworld.
Probably the most elusive figure in post-war British art, Michael passed away on 19th July 1995 at the age of 66. An artist fascinated with the primeval landscapes found in the Scottish Highlands and how the presence of human figures impacted upon this environment, the Highlands became the setting for some of his most glorious and penetrating work and, appropriately, his burial-place, too, while his funeral service was held at St Mary’s, Battersea—the church where William Blake married Catherine Boucher in 1782 and where Turner, who painted the Thames from the vestry window, was interred in 1851.
I found Christopher Lloyd’s extremely detailed and well-researched book, aptly entitled Michael Andrews: Painter of Masterpieces, showcases to the extreme Michael Andrews as a person of kindness and, indeed, as an artist of distinction. Featuring 230 good quality colour illustrations and b/w images, the visual impact and thoughtful layout by Gillian Malpass, formerly art and architecture publisher at Yale University Press London and now CEO of Modern Art Press, is paramount. Sporting excellent typography and pasted endpapers, this handsomely printed book has a gallery-like feel to it punctuated by spacious margins thus allowing the images to breathe and sit so comfortably on the page.
Publishing date: Tuesday 26th May 2026 by Modern Art Press Ltd, 23 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4EB retailing at £30.
All works by Michael Andrews © the estate of Michael Andrews / Tate.
