HENRY A HUNT: WELL-FORGOTTEN AND YET OVERLOOKED

The following edited excerpt is taken from D H Laven’s historic work-in-progress ‘The Story of Forgotten Art’. In the introduction to this pioneering work he writes: ‘There is no such thing as forgotten art. There are only forgotten artists. And a hell of a lot of them too’. In this passage he looks at the secondary artistic produce of the twentieth century painter Henry Adolphus Hunt

    Why don’t you write something about Augustus John? Such were the words that fell like weakling lambs from the mouth of an elderly lady following a lecture I gave on the life and work of Henrietta Goosen last year at the Paul Clark Institute of Arts. Why should I do that? Here was my strident response: delivered with reassuring insolence. The lady was under the misapprehension that John qualified to be a ‘forgotten artist’. On the contrary, I told her, John is not the slightest bit forgotten. And - I added – even if he were, I doubt whether I’d give him a second look. I do not bring the dead to life simply for the fun of it. Their work has to have some worth. ‘As for that hairy gypsy’ I said, ‘I cannot imagine what it is that people ever saw in him’. To my surprise the old woman concurred, finding my description both ‘apt’ and ‘memorable’. It turned out that she had once studied this rather tedious period of British Art herself, whereupon she had also come to the conclusion that John’s painting never reached the aesthetic heights scaled by his facial hair. What is more, her knowledge in this area was also to reveal that I was not the first man to call Augustus John a ‘hairy gypsy’. In 1921 an artist called Henry Hunt did the same thing to John’s face, whilst ‘chilling out’ with fellow artists in the Café Royal in London. A fight is said to have broken out, during which Wyndham Lewis’ moustache was severely damaged, along with half a dozen cream cakes.  Neither John nor Hunt ever got round to sinking a punch, though it is said that Hunt refused to take back his comment, preferring to supplement it with further insults, in which the primary focus tended to revolve around the comparison of his own well-shaven face and John’s super-furry chin. ‘The future of British art demands less beards and more action’ the artist is said to cried, before finally vacating the café, in the confines of which he was never to be seen again.

    A similar disappearing act took place in regards to the old woman who supplied me with this unusual anecdote. For one so unsteady on her feet, she made to the exit with some alacrity, leaving me alone with the memory of her story, a few details of which – against all my expectations – soon burrowed into the fabric of my mind. Who was this Henry Hunt? I must confess that I had never come across his name. Nor had I slightest idea of what his art might be like. However, no doubt inspired by the coincidence of our fellow interpretations of Augustus John, I was determined to track it down. Possibly, in the 1920s – a decade once described as a ‘hiatus’ in British Art – I might discover an artist of unknown talent and verve: a man who both had ideas and saw them through. I couldn’t help but wonder: was this one of the great forgotten artists of the twentieth century?

    References to Hunt turned out to be less rare than I had imagined. His name may never have made the great salmon-like leap into the national newspapers, but it was certainly known by his contemporary artists. In a letter from the young sculptor Daniel Reidstein to his mother, note is made of a ‘slightly eccentric fellow called Hunt, who is near bald, though barely twenty-five’. Elsewhere, Hunt is characterised as ‘a socialist nut, thirsting for the blood of the bourgeoisie’ who thinks that he can ‘revolutionise painting’. As to how Hunt thought he might go about this modest task, we are told that he is working on ‘a series of ten by twenty foot canvasses charting the plight of the twentieth century worker – and his subjection by the middle and upper classes’ a project by which several artists found it hard not to be impressed, even if its creator was a ‘self-made tramp’.

    As it happens, this last comment probably turns out to contain more veracity than its initiator at first imagined. Henry Hunt, for all his socialist tendencies, was actually born of a wealthy Kent family and educated at Harrow, where was described as a ‘quiet thoughtful child’ whose drawing skills were ‘proficient’. His middle name, which he made concerted efforts to conceal in later life, was ‘Adolphus’ and his bank balance – even in his late Marxist phase – of a dependably oceanic dimension. Upon leaving university, however, the young Hunt decided to change his ways. An early punk, he cut his hair extremely short, collected a wardrobe-full of scruffy road-worker’s clothes and polished off a rough Cockney accent to replace the formative upper-class South Counties drawl. Self-made tramp, indeed.

    Not to suggest that there was anything wrong with his approach. Hypocritical he may have been, but on the whole there is little to suggest that Hunt was out to deceive. It is probably safe to say that an artist who is only dallying with the concept of socialism is unlikely to order a series of ten by twenty foot canvasses on which to construct his political programme. Hunt was serious, I don’t doubt that. If anything, his continuing habit of hoarding money was more a force of habit than anything else. Either that, or he was saving it for a specific purpose which merely happened to allude him before his death only eighteen years later.

    Of course, one can hardly imagine how intrigued I was to hear of these whopping great paintings – which, as far as I knew, might still exist. So far as I could tell, Hunt’s artistic project must have been one of the most ambitious of its sort at the time: the Sistine ceiling of his time, if not more. And yet, there was the question – why had I not heard of the works before? It was not hard to find an answer. The word ‘conspiracy’ floated like a corpse to the surface of my mind’s deep lake. We were, after all, dealing with paintings of a ‘political nature’ – hardly the sort of piece you’d expect to turn up in an art museum, most of which are, after all, but vast playhouses for the full pocketed, palaces for the prosperous: steady stalwarts of a capitalist ideology. No, I thought: there is no way that Hunt’s paintings would have been given the space to breathe in the early twentieth century art world. Completed in the late thirties, they would have suffered the full brunt of communist paranoia in Britain over the coming decades: with little or no chance of survival in any place except a hidden one. Thus Hunt’s position as a forgotten artist could be said to have been directed not by aesthetic values – which is how we like to think we judge art – but by the unforgiving political climate in which he lived. All in all, another victim of the tide of untruth that laps in a poisonous line along the shingled shore of that popular and sickly sentiment ‘art is free’.

    So I thought. And in a certain sense, I was not wrong. Hunt’s unpopularity may have had some foundations in an anti-Communist conspiracy – albeit a conspiracy of a very open kind. And his vociferous belief in Marxism certainly did restrict his audience; just as his unswerving political values may since have frightened off lily-livered art historians from his trail. But this is only half of the story, as I was soon to discover.

    It took me several months to discover the whereabouts of Hunt’s large canvasses. I feared for a while that I never would. Later on, I wished that I never did. In all honesty, there cannot have been many paintings in the history of art that have promised so much and given so little as Hunt’s socialist works. Having aimed to ‘deconstruct modern society’, all that he seems to have managed was to create some of the most yawnsomely monotonous compositions ever imagined by man.

    Yet I am getting ahead of myself. I ought to have withheld the collapse of the suspense until the next paragraph; to have pretended for a sentence or two more that I might really have been on the brink of discovering great art. Alas, I cannot help myself. As Georgy Riecke might say, there is really no point in thrashing about the shrub. Barely minutes after having entered the attic room where the seven large paintings are now stored I was certain that my excitement had been in vain. Much as I have previously supported the notion that beauty can be squeezed from ugliness by repeated viewing – a theory that works wonders in relation to the works of artists such as the French painter Eugene Matendré – I was willing to draw a line in front of this example. This, surely, was work that could not ‘grow’ on anyone. I would not even extol its virtues as a historical document, lest as an example of how the thrill of post-Russian revolution communism could be watered down into a programmatic dirge – not by one of its opponenst, ironically, but by a cloth-headed supporter (albeit one more used to old car collections than collective farms). In short, upon viewing these paintings I was as disconsolate as a small dog whose bone has been stolen from him by a larger dog; as unhappy as the child who hopes to receive a bike for his birthday, but ends up with a set of wax crayons instead. Henry Hunt was not about to join my list of forgotten artists; all of whom earn their places not through merit of being neglected – anyone can do that – but through having been unjustly neglected.

    Needless to say, it was not my intention to hang around the attic where Hunt’s paintings were stored. However, disappointed that I had no intention of raising the value of his paintings, the man who owned the house was reluctant to let me leave. I do not doubt that he was himself aware of Hunt’s immense lack of talent, but this did not stop him trying to fleece me. Finally admitting that the large canvasses were ‘maybe not of the best quality’ (an understatement if I ever heard one) he tried to engage my interest with the opportunity of writing Hunt’s biography, convinced that it would make a ‘great read’. To this end, he began to uncover further artefacts that he owned relating to Hunt’s life, including letters, sketches for the paintings, old paintbrushes, art books with his annotations in the margins and an assortment of paint smattered canvasses. I turned away, groaning under the metaphorical weight of this weak yet concerted attempt to hold my diminishing attention. Quite honestly, I held absolutely no faith in the life or work of Henry Hunt. If his masterpiece proved to be so shocking, what could I expect to find in his sketches? Why should I be even remotely interested in a letter he wrote to his sister in 1915, wishing her good luck in her first London season? Hunt and I were through with each other. It was final. The love affair had finished before it had even started.

    Or had it? Having at last begun to shake off the artist’s unfortunate collector, my carelessly roving eye caught sight of something I had not expected to see. Colourless, compositionally flawed and clumsy in their use of narrative, Hunt’s outsized paintings left me unprepared for the sight that greeted me across the low ceiled room at this moment. I wasn’t so sure what it was I looking at, but I knew at once that I wanted to see more. Splashes and daubs of vibrant colour wafted towards my eye like delicate notes strung from an angelic harp. It was the song of the sirens, written in colour and form. Paint has never been so eminently edible. I thirsted, literally, to see more. My dry throat croaked an exclamation:

    What in hell is that?  The collector walked across the room. He picked up the heavenly piece. What, this? My nod was a wagging tail. My arms were  thrust forward in welcome. I wanted to take hold of the object, as a mother takes hold of her baby for the first time. What is it? My query came as I at last received my reward; the answer following shortly afterwards. This is one of Henry Hunt’s palettes. But did I hear the answer? Not at first. I was drunk with pleasure: my ears temporally disabled whilst my eyes worked overtime. The object I held was small, almost square, and no more than a scrap of cardboard, lazily cut. But it was covered with such colour, such a variety of textures, such originality of form – the lack of ambition was easily forgiven.

    Wait. What was that? One of Henry Hunt’s palettes? Of course – it wasn’t hard to see that. It explained a lot: the large blobs of colour that were layered over and over each other (maybe as many as fifty times), the fact that the piece was double-sized and the shoddiness of the support. On the other hand, I had never seen a palette like this. To start with, it wasn’t the archetypal shape. This was some relief, to be sure. If there’s anything that annoys me more than seeing artists prancing about with one of those round-ish palettes with the oval hole cut into it I’ve yet to come across it. However, I have nothing against the way in which most artists set up their palettes, with certain colours being put in certain places, often representing a crude colour wheel. There is evidently some sense in this method, based on keeping specific colours away from other colours; ensuring clean mixing and leading ultimately to a more successful way of working, the good results of which are invariably apparent in the finished painting. In Hunt’s case, yet, there seemed to be no such method employed. Splodges of lemon yellow appear above dashes of ultramarine, alongside globules of paynes grey, crimson and brunt sienna. I thought this odd at first; though it turns out, of course, to make perfect sense. It would be foolish to expect Hunt to have employed a lucrative working method, being that his results were so extraordinarily substandard. It is logical, therefore, to find his palettes bearing the mark of his confused artistry. What is so interesting, yet, is that it is this befuddled approach that seems to have led to his palettes having been such beautiful works of art in their own right. Where other artists’ palettes are no more than rough means to an end, Hunt’s appear to have much more worth than his finished paintings ever did. Where I am happy to denounce all seven of Hunt’s large canvasses that I have seen, I am equally happy to announce that I believe all eight of his palettes which have survived (and which have been painted on both sides, producing sixteen works in all) to be works of incomparable beauty and subtlety.

No.1

    The question is – how conscious was the artist of this fact? In my overexcitement I am apt to weave romantic images around the bare bones of circumstance. In my mind’s eye I see Henry Hunt idly squeezing oil paint onto one these palettes, dipping his brush into the landscape of paint and preparing to make his move onto the canvas. Before doing so, however, he pauses for a moment, caught by the unexpected splendour of his palette. Over in Germany Kandinsky has been painting semi-abstract paintings for a while, of which Hunt is certainly aware, but no one has yet contemplated exhibiting something that consists merely of splashes of colour layered upon each other. Does the thought pass through Hunt’s addled mind that maybe this is the new direction of painting – a real artistic ‘revolution’?  He sees the beauty in it surely, but does he allow himself to consider the possibilities for the future of art? Or does he treat it merely as a self-indulgent pleasure: something to enjoy momentarily, but a far reach from the realms of real art? Could he ever view his palettes as we do, much more well versed as we are in the concept of non-figurative art?

No.12

    This puts me in a difficult position regarding my attitude toward Henry Hunt. I am as an art historian prepared to treat his palettes as fully-fledged works of art, but I am very much aware that he did not. Indeed, the fact that he did not is probably why they succeed. The fact that he created them by mistake is why they are anything but a mistake. Considering this, should I put myself in the position to complement him on his genius? Is he even the author of his own work? No more, perhaps, than we are the authors of our own excrement. We create it, yes, but we have no real control over it – nor should we desire to.

    I wonder, would Henry Hunt want to be the author of his palettes? His goal was, after all, the creation of a painting that would distil the intellectual content of Marxism into pure visual information. Bright non-figurative painting may well have seemed to him to be the antithesis of this goal. On the other hand, who are we to waste our time fretting over the concept of an artist’s work being misunderstood? Misunderstanding is one life’s few certainties. If Hunt expected to be understood, why did he become an artist? And why did he keep his palettes?

No.14

    Admittedly, the situation brings with it a need to readdress our perception of forgotten art. Hunt is a forgotten artist, this much is true. However, I would not say that he was an unfairly forgotten artist. Indeed, as an ‘artist’, he was a complete failure. His primary artistic products are, by anyone’s standards, tragically unpleasant – and fully deserve to be ignored, if not burnt. However, consciously or unconsciously, Hunt was the engine behind a series of artworks of which it would criminal to neglect. What this suggests is that art historians ought not always to be blamed for their judgement based on knowledge of the principal requisites, but might well be criticised for overlooking alternative art sources. Into this group we must place palettes – the study of which may yet have further implications – but may also include hitherto ignored art products such as varnished floors, painted cupboards and the backcloths to the reptile enclosures in zoos. As to whether these other objects will prove to be as striking as Hunt’s palettes one cannot say, but it is nevertheless essential that some attempt is made to study them. For as we must know, forgotten art is not only art that was once known and now unknown, but also art that was never known as art, but may now be reclassified as such

D H LAVEN

See More of  Henry Hunt's Palettes


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