.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
A luminous, dreamlike vision of life beneath the waves, School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna (1978) is a rare masterwork by Michael Andrews. It is the climax to his four-part School series, which examines collective human behaviour through the depiction of groups of fish. These paintings were inspired by Andrews’ young daughter starting school, and the family’s recent move to Geldeston in rural Norfolk, close to his own birthplace. Turning anew to the themes of selfhood and community that had informed his work since the 1950s, Andrews found a rich metaphor in the subject of fish, with their shoaling tendencies and distinctly patterned ‘uniforms.’ The present painting depicts silvery schools of tuna and barracuda. The two species—conceived by Andrews as ‘peaceful’ versus ‘warlike’—face in opposite directions. The predators’ streamlined bodies flash like cutlasses. They hang in an azure sea above a reef mottled in yellows, greens and blues. Andrews made the painting using a complex combination of stencil, slide projection, brushwork and spray-painting techniques. It shimmers with the enigmatic, numinous beauty that defines his practice.
Held in the same private collection since 1979, School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna was included in Andrews’ touring Arts Council retrospective of 1980-1981, and in his landmark posthumous survey at Tate Britain in 2001. It was last seen in public in the only major exhibition of his work since then, at London’s Gagosian Gallery in 2017. During his forty-five-year career, Andrews was the subject of just eight solo shows. He worked slowly and in series, producing around two large canvases per year, and studiously avoided the spotlight. It was once said that he was in danger of being mistaken for a rumour rather than a real person. He came of age in the 1960s, however, as one of the well-known group of figurative artists known as ‘School of London’, among such leading lights as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Timothy Behrens. These friends, whose practices all varied widely, held Andrews’ work in the very highest esteem. ‘Mike is so economical’, said Auerbach. ‘He paints only masterpieces’ (F. Auerbach quoted in Michael Andrews: Lights, exh. cat. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid 2000, p. 9).
‘Identity and community—and identity in community; that’s my prevailing preoccupation—my prevailing idea’, Andrews wrote shortly before embarking on the School series (M. Andrews quoted in P. Moorhouse, ‘“Strange Consolation”: The Art of Michael Andrews’, in Michael Andrews, exh. cat. Tate, London 2001, p. 28). For the first, School I (1977), he painted a troop of neon tetras: small tropical fish that he had kept in an aquarium in his London studio, admiring their brilliant blue and red livery. School II: Pike and Roach (1977), like the present work, stages a tense encounter between predator and prey. School III: Butterfly Fish and Damsel Fish (1978), with its vivid blue and yellow species, pictures the idea of differentiation through uniform. The works together explore a condition of interdependence, and the constantly shifting relationships between group and individual. For Andrews, they reflected ‘How alike we all are. And our propensity to stick together’ (M. Andrews quoted in R. Calvocoressi, Michael Andrews: Earth Air Water, exh. cat. Gagosian Gallery, London 2017, p. 67).
School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna is the most spatially and technically complex among the series. Where the neon tetras in School I were identical in size and shape—stencilled in one frieze-like plane across the canvas—each fish here is individually realised. The tuna range from large, dramatically-lit specimens in the foreground to distant silhouettes, almost lost in the deep blue. They swim in smaller sub-groups and at different angles, some with mouths open, others closed, and each with its own variegated markings. The barracuda receive similarly nuanced treatment, their lance-shaped bodies ablaze with a bright metallic gleam.
Andrews’s visual research for these paintings was typically intensive. Visiting the artist in his Geldeston studio—‘a dark tank of a building at the end of a path thick with brambles’—William Feaver remembers him ‘sifting through fish photographs, pointing out the near-invisibility of the skate on the seabed and the stony markings on the wicked old pike caught by villagers’ (W. Feaver, ‘An Actual Present Atmosphere’, in Michael Andrews, exh. cat. Tate, London 2001, p. 56). To plan the present composition Andrews also used 35mm slide projections. Through elaborate layers of spraying, masking and stencilling, he went on to build a scene of precise, flickering form and soft submarine light. Sprayed acrylic allowed him, he said, to create a ‘wonderful ... atmospheric veil between you and the object’ (M. Andrews quoted in R. Calvocoressi, ibid., p. 140). He worked on the fibrous, unprimed reverse of the canvas. The reef’s granular dapple was achieved by spraying over aquarium gravel and dried pasta, and bears the textural impressions of a sponge.
Framed from a low angle, with both seabed and surface visible, the immersive vista in School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna appears particularly indebted to underwater photography. From the sandy haze below to the sparkling, exquisitely stencilled reflections above, Andrews is keenly alert to the special ways in which light travels through water. One of his key references was Robin Lehman’s 1974 short film Sea Creatures, shot in the vibrant reefs of the Red Sea. Studio notes capture Andrews’ interest in the film’s colour and motion: ‘noisy flowerbed—diverse corals, colours brilliant under light, creatures like moving vegetation, blackness beyond … glaring differentiation then dusty camouflage—motes like dust storm or locusts’ (M. Andrews quoted in R. Calvocoressi, ibid., p. 67).
Born in Norwich in 1928, Andrews studied at the Slade School of Art under William Coldstream. His best-known work, The Colony Room I (1962, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester), depicting his artistic social circle in Soho, reflects Coldstream’s observational rigour. Andrews soon began using photographs to create scenes like The Deer Park (1962, Tate, London) and, moving towards a more metaphorical and psychedelic approach, Good and Bad at Games (1964-1968, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), in which partygoers become Giacometti-like silhouettes. Paul Moorhouse has likened the party paintings to fish tanks, picturing the flux of human behaviour from an outside viewpoint. Next came Andrews’ pivotal Lights series (1970–1974), where hot air balloons symbolised the ego, floating over landscapes seen from above. Influenced by Zen Buddhism, and created using a spray-gun rather than a brush, these works marked his move away from depicting people. They explored a state of higher vision, unencumbered by self-consciousness. In the final painting, the balloon casts its shadow towards the sea.
The School paintings saw Andrews return to societal dynamics with a newly enlightened perspective. They also represented something of a homecoming, coinciding with his return to Norfolk after some fifteen years in London. In tandem with the series, he studied his riverine surroundings in watercolours: ponds, streams, the River Waveney and its tributaries. After finishing the present work, he began a new series with Melanie and Me Swimming (1978-1979, Tate, London), a poignant picture of himself and his daughter in a Scottish rockpool. Water would return, finally, as the premise for Andrews’ very last cycle of 1994-1995, which depicted the source, banks and estuary of the River Thames in canvases washed through with silt and ash. Andrews’ pleasure in discovering this fertile theme—water as a medium of connection, flow and exchange—is palpable in the School paintings. Lawrence Gowing called them ‘the freest, brightest pictures that he has ever done’ (L. Gowing, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Andrews, exh. cat. Hayward Gallery, London 1981, p. 22).
Painting, for Andrews, was a form of meditation. The painstaking process in his 1970s works reflected a letting go of the self, towards a consciousness of the unbounded interdependence of all things. In School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna, his use of sprayed paint lets the image arise slowly through mists of pigment, like a developing photograph: a revelation of preexisting truth. More than a painting of marine life, it is a picture of individuals negotiating their place in society, and maps Andrews’ emergent understanding of his own existence. If the groups of fish are in tension, the picture as a whole is one of balance and clarity, emerging from infinite depths of blue. ‘In painting, through a process of definition, I realise how I am disposed,’ Andrews wrote. ‘As none of us are so different we can share the realisation’ (M. Andrews quoted in P. Moorhouse, ibid., p. 11).
Held in the same private collection since 1979, School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna was included in Andrews’ touring Arts Council retrospective of 1980-1981, and in his landmark posthumous survey at Tate Britain in 2001. It was last seen in public in the only major exhibition of his work since then, at London’s Gagosian Gallery in 2017. During his forty-five-year career, Andrews was the subject of just eight solo shows. He worked slowly and in series, producing around two large canvases per year, and studiously avoided the spotlight. It was once said that he was in danger of being mistaken for a rumour rather than a real person. He came of age in the 1960s, however, as one of the well-known group of figurative artists known as ‘School of London’, among such leading lights as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Timothy Behrens. These friends, whose practices all varied widely, held Andrews’ work in the very highest esteem. ‘Mike is so economical’, said Auerbach. ‘He paints only masterpieces’ (F. Auerbach quoted in Michael Andrews: Lights, exh. cat. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid 2000, p. 9).
‘Identity and community—and identity in community; that’s my prevailing preoccupation—my prevailing idea’, Andrews wrote shortly before embarking on the School series (M. Andrews quoted in P. Moorhouse, ‘“Strange Consolation”: The Art of Michael Andrews’, in Michael Andrews, exh. cat. Tate, London 2001, p. 28). For the first, School I (1977), he painted a troop of neon tetras: small tropical fish that he had kept in an aquarium in his London studio, admiring their brilliant blue and red livery. School II: Pike and Roach (1977), like the present work, stages a tense encounter between predator and prey. School III: Butterfly Fish and Damsel Fish (1978), with its vivid blue and yellow species, pictures the idea of differentiation through uniform. The works together explore a condition of interdependence, and the constantly shifting relationships between group and individual. For Andrews, they reflected ‘How alike we all are. And our propensity to stick together’ (M. Andrews quoted in R. Calvocoressi, Michael Andrews: Earth Air Water, exh. cat. Gagosian Gallery, London 2017, p. 67).
School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna is the most spatially and technically complex among the series. Where the neon tetras in School I were identical in size and shape—stencilled in one frieze-like plane across the canvas—each fish here is individually realised. The tuna range from large, dramatically-lit specimens in the foreground to distant silhouettes, almost lost in the deep blue. They swim in smaller sub-groups and at different angles, some with mouths open, others closed, and each with its own variegated markings. The barracuda receive similarly nuanced treatment, their lance-shaped bodies ablaze with a bright metallic gleam.
Andrews’s visual research for these paintings was typically intensive. Visiting the artist in his Geldeston studio—‘a dark tank of a building at the end of a path thick with brambles’—William Feaver remembers him ‘sifting through fish photographs, pointing out the near-invisibility of the skate on the seabed and the stony markings on the wicked old pike caught by villagers’ (W. Feaver, ‘An Actual Present Atmosphere’, in Michael Andrews, exh. cat. Tate, London 2001, p. 56). To plan the present composition Andrews also used 35mm slide projections. Through elaborate layers of spraying, masking and stencilling, he went on to build a scene of precise, flickering form and soft submarine light. Sprayed acrylic allowed him, he said, to create a ‘wonderful ... atmospheric veil between you and the object’ (M. Andrews quoted in R. Calvocoressi, ibid., p. 140). He worked on the fibrous, unprimed reverse of the canvas. The reef’s granular dapple was achieved by spraying over aquarium gravel and dried pasta, and bears the textural impressions of a sponge.
Framed from a low angle, with both seabed and surface visible, the immersive vista in School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna appears particularly indebted to underwater photography. From the sandy haze below to the sparkling, exquisitely stencilled reflections above, Andrews is keenly alert to the special ways in which light travels through water. One of his key references was Robin Lehman’s 1974 short film Sea Creatures, shot in the vibrant reefs of the Red Sea. Studio notes capture Andrews’ interest in the film’s colour and motion: ‘noisy flowerbed—diverse corals, colours brilliant under light, creatures like moving vegetation, blackness beyond … glaring differentiation then dusty camouflage—motes like dust storm or locusts’ (M. Andrews quoted in R. Calvocoressi, ibid., p. 67).
Born in Norwich in 1928, Andrews studied at the Slade School of Art under William Coldstream. His best-known work, The Colony Room I (1962, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester), depicting his artistic social circle in Soho, reflects Coldstream’s observational rigour. Andrews soon began using photographs to create scenes like The Deer Park (1962, Tate, London) and, moving towards a more metaphorical and psychedelic approach, Good and Bad at Games (1964-1968, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), in which partygoers become Giacometti-like silhouettes. Paul Moorhouse has likened the party paintings to fish tanks, picturing the flux of human behaviour from an outside viewpoint. Next came Andrews’ pivotal Lights series (1970–1974), where hot air balloons symbolised the ego, floating over landscapes seen from above. Influenced by Zen Buddhism, and created using a spray-gun rather than a brush, these works marked his move away from depicting people. They explored a state of higher vision, unencumbered by self-consciousness. In the final painting, the balloon casts its shadow towards the sea.
The School paintings saw Andrews return to societal dynamics with a newly enlightened perspective. They also represented something of a homecoming, coinciding with his return to Norfolk after some fifteen years in London. In tandem with the series, he studied his riverine surroundings in watercolours: ponds, streams, the River Waveney and its tributaries. After finishing the present work, he began a new series with Melanie and Me Swimming (1978-1979, Tate, London), a poignant picture of himself and his daughter in a Scottish rockpool. Water would return, finally, as the premise for Andrews’ very last cycle of 1994-1995, which depicted the source, banks and estuary of the River Thames in canvases washed through with silt and ash. Andrews’ pleasure in discovering this fertile theme—water as a medium of connection, flow and exchange—is palpable in the School paintings. Lawrence Gowing called them ‘the freest, brightest pictures that he has ever done’ (L. Gowing, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Andrews, exh. cat. Hayward Gallery, London 1981, p. 22).
Painting, for Andrews, was a form of meditation. The painstaking process in his 1970s works reflected a letting go of the self, towards a consciousness of the unbounded interdependence of all things. In School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna, his use of sprayed paint lets the image arise slowly through mists of pigment, like a developing photograph: a revelation of preexisting truth. More than a painting of marine life, it is a picture of individuals negotiating their place in society, and maps Andrews’ emergent understanding of his own existence. If the groups of fish are in tension, the picture as a whole is one of balance and clarity, emerging from infinite depths of blue. ‘In painting, through a process of definition, I realise how I am disposed,’ Andrews wrote. ‘As none of us are so different we can share the realisation’ (M. Andrews quoted in P. Moorhouse, ibid., p. 11).