In Memoriam: Alan Gouk

To commemorate a great painter, writer and teacher, Instantloveland has brought together six tributes to Alan Gouk by individuals who had the good fortune to work or teach alongside him.

Matthew Collings

Alan Gouk’s paintings are exciting because they’re so full of subtle visual energies and decisions and they seem authentic.  They’re intellectually and emotionally simply there like a person is there who’s intelligent and you want to see them and can’t imagine them ever not being there. They’ve read books and listened to music and been poor and managed, and had time to paint and time to write, and sometimes it was too much and they cracked up.  He created them out of the methods and means of creation. Containers of paint radiating out from a canvas laid face upwards on the floor, brushes lying in the containers, the paint sometimes a paste and sometimes liquified.  The paintings got done by feeling the way with slabs, drips, contrasts, rhythms, areas, line, sometimes architectural building, sometimes going by the overall glow. What did he have in mind? Light, colour, organisation. To get there, he says, he didn’t have anything in mind at all, he didn’t think of anything. It depends what is meant by a decision, I guess, they’re made in the front of the mind or far back, both when you’re alert and when you’re tired.  A painting at the very least is a record of moves, and with his there’s certainly the excitement of that because they’re so bold and there’s such a delicacy to every bold action — it’s not a contradiction, it’s surely what Nature and painting are always like. But he certainly concentrated all the expectations of the museum and the feel of life with a great impact in work and after work, wherever they were bold and simple and wherever equally they had a wonderful intricacy like a mosaic. Yards across or a couple of feet, done with a shovel almost like a comedy of the rugged painter making rugged paintings, and done as he really always did them, whatever the kind of paint, water based or oil, depending on what money he had available, and done with brushes or knives or whatever — in whatever decade with all the background noise of art culture and painting culture — done via experience of doing, memories of doing, with strength, thought, action, abandonment, judgment, integrity, intensity, they’re all there now, suddenly limited in how many of them there’ll ever be.  

Sam Cornish

I met Alan through Poussin Gallery in around 2005, when I was in my early twenties. Conversations and correspondence with him were very important to my introduction to modern painting and central to my research on Stockwell Depot. I’ve got a couple of box-files full of his letters and essays, with their envelopes addressed in his large, looping, urgent handwriting. Although I think naturally impatient, he was generous with his time, and encouraging of my interest. In our conversations, and his letters, Alan combined a highly committed sense of the overarching trajectory of modernism, and how this had played out in recent British art, with a store of clear, though partial, memories of artworld shenanigans and small-p politics. I was very much interested in both. A few years ago, he switched to email. This February, hearing that Alan was largely confined to bed, I sent him a copy of my book on Frank Bowling. I received a detailed reply by 3.30pm on the day after posting, Alan having already read it through.

Alan’s paintings were orthodox in their combination of Hans Hofmann and Patrick Heron within the spreading horizontals of Abstract Expressionism. In one way this orthodoxy was perhaps the point, setting out to prove that more recent developments were not worth attending to; and that this stream of modern painting still had force and the potential for meaning. He approached his paintings with full-throttle, sometimes digressive urgency, that ran counter to his desire to achieve grand, luxurious, architectural images. The result is an unstable and vital energy coursing through their dense materiality and emphatic structure, which brings them to life and into the present. 

Matt Dennis

I only met Alan Gouk once.

My visit to his Ramsgate home in April of last year to record the five-or-so hours of audio that would be transcribed and edited down into ‘Epiphanies and Misdemeanours’¹https://instantloveland.com/wp/2023/11/03/epiphanies-and-misdemeanours-matt-dennis-in-conversation-with-alan-gouk/, would be our only time together; but the collaboration that had begun in early 2019 (after Alan had left some very kind words in the comment thread of my essay on Patrick Heron²https://instantloveland.com/wp/2019/02/02/matt-dennis-on-patrick-heron-signs-for-seeing-signs-for-things-seen/, and in the spirit of ‘don’t ask, don’t get’ that has guided all of Instantloveland’s efforts to solicit contributions to the site, I had got in touch and asked him outright if he would write something for us) was so vivid, so saturated with a sense of the man and of his formidable knowledge-store of painting and of so much else, that I have to keep reminding myself now that I only ever spent a single day in his company. The pattern for our collaboration was set from early on: an essay topic would be agreed; Alan’s first sprawling draft would land; and then, with the internet a tennis net, and us either side of it hitting the thing back and forth, the rallies would stretch out into days and sometimes weeks before both writer and editor were satisfied…and when I say ‘satisfied’, I think I mean ‘too drained to do anything but declare it a draw.’

Which is not to denigrate his writing in any way: the haggling over turns-of-phrase, over sense and structure, over what to keep and what to cut, were, I would argue, the grit that made the pearl possible. I don’t think there are many who read Alan’s two-part extended essay ‘Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse’³https://instantloveland.com/wp/2020/03/18/alan-gouk-gauguin-van-gogh-matisse-part-i-open-conflicts-hidden-affinities/ and https://instantloveland.com/wp/2020/05/12/alan-gouk-gauguin-van-gogh-matisse-part-ii-the-apotheosis-of-decoration/and found themselves disagreeing with Robin Greenwood’s verdict: ‘As near as anyone gets these days to making great writing about painting.’ Here, Alan managed the extraordinarily difficult feat of appearing to linger lovingly in front of works by these three masters, whilst moving his narrative of influence and counter-influence urgently forward from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. It was my great good luck to be able to help in some small way with polishing this jewel.

By the time we sat down to record ‘Epiphanies…’ he knew he didn’t have long left; and so out it all poured, the recollections, the anecdotes, a working lifetime’s-worth of bruising and bracing encounters with art people and with art. For every tale of art-world skullduggery that made it into the final transcript, though, there were two or three that he would preface the telling of with ‘Oh, and you simply cannot publish this…’ and at the time this felt frustrating; Alan’s stocks of stories were- without exception- darkly hilarious, so why hold back? But as it turned out, his instinct for self-editing proved sound: the published piece is filled throughout with the noise of bubbles of grandiosity (mostly other people’s, but also a few of his own) being popped by his spiked wit; but none of that noise is allowed to drown out the voice speaking so lucidly and at length about the history and practice of abstract painting.

Like Heron, whom he greatly liked and admired, Alan was first and last a painter, but one blessed with the ability to frame painting (and sculpture, and architecture, and music, and poetry, and anything else he turned his attention to) in terms of the written word; and to do so (again, like Heron) in a way that he fervently believed gave painting its proper due, by never confusing the kind of thinking required for making paintings with the kind of thinking required for writing about them. A rare mix of qualities, these days, when it can often feel as if theory has swallowed painting whole, and so much is said about art having entered the era of ‘post-making’. Rarer still, now that Alan has left us.

James Faure Walker

After re-reading last November’s ‘Epiphanies and Misdemeanours’ I wonder what more there is to say. It is so comprehensive and such an absorbing read. I can’t believe I won’t again hear that voice; a voice that still rings out in the writings. And there are the paintings, the hot colour bursting across, fused, combative, urgent – and beautiful. There are the anomalies. He came to admire Patrick Heron’s paintings, and wrote about them as if with Heron’s eyes. Heron was his opposite in temperament: where Alan was robust, iron-willed and direct, Heron had a light touch; Heron’s paintings were composed, breezy, elegant and looked effortless, the surface open and fresh, the shapes happily settling into place.

I was an eighteen-year-old sculpture student at St Martins when I first got to know Alan. I had seen his photo in the 1966 Studio International – the British Council representative sharing the boat with the British artists of the 1966 Venice Biennale – Robyn Denny, Harold and Bernard Cohen, Richard Smith, Tony Caro. But here at St Martins he was thrown in at the deep end. When it came to creating a sculpture, he was as much at sea as we were.

He had been assigned to teach alongside Bill Tucker. Together, they set projects to stretch our idea of what sculpture could be: make a mask, make a sculpture that floats in the air. The more we challenged the concept the better the response. I claimed my personality was my mask; my good friend Roger Bates made his kite from iron. These projects followed Tony Caro’s teaching methods. Decades later there was a small ceremony in the foyer of Central to celebrate Barry Flanagan’s life. Tony Caro recounted how he had asked students to make a sculpture that was a noise. Most students obediently made constructions of this or that, but at the end of the crit Flanagan presented a lump of clay, threw it at the wall and said, ‘that’s my noise’.

Alan came into his own in the Sculpture Forums. Initially they were exploratory and open-ended, more questions than answers, and conducted in this spirit. What could sculpture be? At the time – Alan mentions this in ‘Epiphanies’ – there was little talk of ‘modernism’, high or low. It was about problem solving, a spur to creativity. Tutors put themselves under the same scrutiny as the students (something unheard of in the Painting Department, but that’s another story). There were rivalries, bruised egos I am sure, but it was never uninteresting; never about fashion, the latest shows, critics, or collectors. It was a rigorous public cross-examination, and you needed to have your wits about you. (I doubt whether such an onslaught would be permitted today, when the point is to be ‘supportive’). There were spin-off lectures: Edward de Bono on lateral thinking, where Caro asked about sculptural thinking; Joseph Kosuth, who was quizzed and outclassed by Freddie Gore.

Alan was always direct and to the point. He was never aloof and ‘Mr. Cool’. Up-and-coming sculptors wore dark glasses – as did Kosuth. I have a dim memory of Alan’s early shaped canvases – suave and dun-coloured, influenced by Richard Smith. His switch to the splatter paintings seemed sudden, perhaps prompted by Poons. He was distancing himself from the ‘Situation’ artists of Venice: no more ‘design’. Alan was becoming the expressionist of later years. The passion, the ambition, had always been there.

He gave a slide talk on this work. The image that stays with me was of a tea-cup atop a wall. He took the photo on a drive to Brighton. I recognised the spot on the A23. It represented the last time he saw his father. The process of painting connected him intimately to his world. He would often speak of Matthew Smith. In one essay – and by the way these essays were consistently brilliant – there was an aside: he recalled sitting in the snug of a pub, relishing the sparkling highlights of horse-brasses, firelight reflected on copper kettles. This was true province of the painter.

Ben Jones – who died last year – had been a sculpture student at St Martins. The Studio Forums he led from 1974 were an extension of the sculpture forums. They prepared the ground for Artscribe – the first issue was in 1976. Ben staged a session with a group of abstract painters (Alan Gouk, John McLean, Dick James, and Fred Pollock) in his basement SPACE studio at St Pancras (subsequently knocked down to make way for the British Library). The group interview was published in the fifth issue, ‘Painting Now’, of 1977. It was a heated discussion, deploring the lack of serious engagement by critics. The Arts Council and the Tate had embraced conceptual art, and Kitaj’s ‘Human Clay’ at the Hayward proclaimed the resurgence of figurative painting. Abstract painting was forced into a corner. Alan’s views had hardened.

I had visited the Stockwell Depot in the mid-sixties (I was briefly Roland Brener’s assistant). Roelof Louw’s 1967 pyramid of oranges was the seminal work we all saw and discussed. It was seen as ‘experimental’, even ‘conceptual’. It was exhibited at the ‘Arts Lab’. It was also a physical sculpture. The dividing lines had not been set out. The St Martins division of sculpture into the A and B courses – idea or object – was still a couple of years away.

Later on, there were the annual open studios at Greenwich. The phrase ‘good painting’ gained currency. Could there be a special category of painting, stripped to the essentials, with a high yield of ‘quality’? It was a tribal term, shorthand for a niche style – flat, stained, amorphous and lyrical – that at a stroke eliminated the alternatives. The rationale came from Greenberg’s essay on Modernist Painting, an essay that troubled Greenberg later on – it had been taken far too literally and was never intended as prescriptive. ‘American-influenced’ abstraction became the easy target for pundits denouncing ‘modernism’. Alan’s own relationship with Greenberg was complicated – sometimes on, sometimes off – but following an essay where Alan took him to task, Greenberg wrote in to the magazine saying he envied Alan’s fluency.

Controversies over the sculpture course affected Alan’s health. Around 1987 Alan called me in with Jeff Lowe to take over his teaching on the ‘Advanced Course’. By then it was a shadow of the course that had produced a clutch of Turner Prize winners. It was now made up of keen overseas students, mostly painters. If you only knew Alan through his polemical writing, his high principles, and his fiery paintings you might not have expected to find such a thoughtful and selfless teacher. He inspired long-lasting loyalties. I would not say he was a soft touch – I was ticked off for being too critical. He could get on with anyone. When he came to editorial meetings at Artscribe he would be sitting alongside contributors whose views were absolutely at odds with what he stood for – Stuart Morgan, Doris Saatchi, Tim Hyman, Terence Maloon, Andrea Rose, Adrian Lewis, Adrian Searle, Matt Collings, John Roberts, to name a few. There was mutual respect.

A final thought. What would an eighteen-year-old art student starting out today make of Alan Gouk – those paintings, the collected writings? Alan had asked me a few years ago if I would edit those. I couldn’t at the time. Alan was a well-rounded intellectual, much better informed – about music, for example – than you might have credited. But what of his range? When he delved into the careers of the modern masters his was an original voice, independent and authoritative. You knew where he stood. He had no time for art world trivia. He could dismiss whole continents of painting – as graphic, eclectic, cubist, conceptual, postmodern, derivative, illustrative, romantic. But we all do this, to some extent. I have met watercolourists who boast of never having been to Tate Modern. We avoid what doesn’t fit our template; we shut out awkward questions. Could he have made those paintings without the narrow focus? I think back to the relaxed, playful improvisation of those sculpture projects: permissive, adventurous, innovative. I think of older artists I had known in New York who kept their finger on the pulse; they would regularly say ‘you can’t paint like that anymore’. I would sit on the fence, and I still don’t know the answer. Was the ‘modernism’ he championed really marginalised? Or did it suit his mindset to have it that way? Whatever the answer, some of us do owe him big time.

Richard Morphet

In the mid-1960s Alan and I were colleagues in the British Council Fine Art Department. Under its legendary Director, Lilian Somerville, each of us was the Exhibition Officer for the British pavilion at successive Venice Biennales (I in 1964 and he in 1966). Though conscientious, we had many laughs. Neither of us could have imagined how our lives would develop, he as a significant teacher, writer and eventually full-time painter, I as a curator at the Tate, and both getting caught up in art controversies over the decades, albeit of different kinds.

Across these sixty years, Alan accrued enormous knowledge of the high points of great art in the tradition that mattered to him most, going back centuries, then developed by Cézanne, Matisse and postwar American abstraction from the 1940s to the work of younger artists, on both sides of the Atlantic, whom he knew personally. He talked and wrote about all this with a sympathetic and telling combination of acute observation and passionate engagement, relating his insights to current practice.

Though Alan is associated with heated debates in his teaching years about the nature and making of sculpture, his fundamental calling was the art of painting. It was a compulsion, driven both by the lasting urgency transmitted by great past art but also by his deep engagement with music and with literature. Alan’s painting communicates all this inherently.

In the 195-page monograph Alan Gouk: A Career Survey he conveyed the situation vividly in his texts ‘What then is painting?’ and ‘What are the minimum requirements of a work of visual art worthy of the name?’. Such a work, he declares, ‘is a clarification of the visual, reducing painting to its simplest essentials, an art of concision, making of those limits an architecture of “utter directness” where directness and the idea are one’; that ‘only “touch” can achieve this’; but also that it must be ‘the expression of a certain emotional maturity born of having lived and loved’. Thus for Alan, art – irrespective of theories – related very directly to life. It is no coincidence that viewing any of his paintings is like meeting him in person. Nothing intervenes and, like his conversation, the experience is always bracing.

The last new painting of which Alan sent me the image was ‘Pomegranate Urchin’ of 2022. Though not quite his last, this powerful work is the more astonishing owing to Alan being already ill when he painted it.

Vital to its character (as to that of so many other works) is the degree to which it asserts the very deliberateness with which each gesture and each shape is made. The painting is down to earth, almost elementary, yet at the same time impassioned, sophisticated and exciting. It is ‘in yer face’, in a way that is at once challenging and affirmative.

Each of seven or eight ‘compartments’ encloses a form, yet each thus ‘confined’ entity comes out to meet the viewer. On the surface of one of them a sudden, blunt, ‘insolent’, meaty brushstroke seems improbably to be roughly stuck on like a plaster yet also, paradoxically, to be gouged out. In either case, the idea of depicted space is boldly undermined. The colour-shapes are blaring yet luscious, coarse yet refined, and are as if lit both between and from within. The relationships and the ensemble are theatrical, electric, public and grand in scale, yet intimately revealing. They are urgent, and they shout with the assertion of life. They also combine a confident, take-it-or-leave it immediacy with a quality of permanence. This connects with a palpable sense of engagement with the peaks of achievement in modern American and European painting, communicating an awe and a kinship that seem intrinsic to the making of each mark.

Innumerable paintings by Alan could be characterized similarly, but to explore his oeuvre is to be struck by his ceaseless invention. Though each work is pure Gouk, it states and develops its own scheme. It is moving that Alan continued to make- to perform -one exhilarating statement after another in paint until his strength ran out. In his works, the vitality of his thought and of his art remains.

Tim Scott

As an aspiring young artist, one has one’s heroes, one’s mentors, but most importantly –  one’s colleagues of approximately the same generation who share one’s aspirations.

Alan, a wonderful painter and most extraordinarily also an ardent lover of and most perceptive eye on sculpture, was for sixty years or so a constant stimulus and challenge to my generation’s ideas and knowledge In his lucid and intellectually brilliantly constructed writings on the origins and achievements of modernist art, as well as in his role as teacher and advisor to young students struggling to gain mastery. I had the privilege of sharing many years of partnership with him in the latter.

He executed, over the the last sixty years, a continuing series of some of the most brilliant paintings conceived in this country. An exhibition of Alan’s work was always a thrill; the panache, the vigour, the sheer drive of his colourscapes was never less than stunning; often shocking, even, but carefully built with forethought and knowledge of his meaning and purpose. Alan may have experimented, as all good artists do, with being extemporary and wild, but underlying everything he did was a solid sense of construction and order. He was an architect of painting; not for nothing were his mentors Pissarro and Cezanne. He was also a sculptor, in thought only; but he was dedicated to its essentials, its structure, movement, spatial rhythm and song.

Alan is no more, but I am sure that in years to come his work will be treasured as some of the finest examples of abstract painting of the last sixty or so years. His work will, I am convinced, be seen as a worthy addition to that of his ancestors in British painting, Matthew Smith and Patrick Heron, and take its place in our national heritage.

RIP Alan Gouk: born June 25th, 1939; died June 19th, 2024