5 - Quartet: Ken Russell’s Painter Biopics and How they Anticipate the Later Cinematic Work

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the DVD commentary to Delius: Song of Summer (BBC, 1968), Ken Russell describes Frederick Delius’s French house, Grez-sur-Loing, as (according to the composer’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby) ‘absolutely packed with classic paintings’ such as Edvard Munch’s Death of Marat I (1907) and The Kiss (1897) and Paul Gauguin’s Nevermore (O Taïti) (1897). In The Lonely Shore, a 16-minute, post-atomic era/post-apocalyptic sci-fi faux-documentary film made for the BBC’s Monitor (1962), a team of alien archaeologists examines all that is left on a deserted beach to determine what life was like in that year. They find, among the cultural debris and detritus, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and eight Pablo Picasso paintings. These are two examples of how paintings and painters are incorporated into the cinematic/televisual space of Russell’s BBC work. While he produced numerous painter biopics for the BBC, the films Scottish Painters (1959), Pop Goes the Easel (1962), Always on Sunday (1965) and Dante’s Inferno: The Private Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poet and Painter (1967) will form the basis of this chapter’s analysis. This quartet of films demonstrates how Russell’s stylistic technique evolves from one film to the next, honing his skills, moving towards his ideal of the dramatised artist’s biopic, especially regarding the interplay between image and sound(s)/music. In doing so, the chapter hopes to show how Russell frames and employs the painters’ work within these four (somewhat neglected) films and also to show how they anticipate many of his later characteristic stylistic features and thematic concerns.

SCOTTISH PAINTERS

Scottish Painters focuses on Roberts MacBryde (1913–66) and Colquhoun (1914–62), who were both professional collaborators and lovers. It was one of Russell’s first films for Monitor and the first of his films about visual artists/painters. The ‘Two Roberts’ (as they were collectively known) are also the first of Russell’s gay artists, and he admitted that while Scottish Painters was ‘a film about love’, it ‘couldn’t be explicit at the time’. Their relationship began when they met at Glasgow School of Art in 1933 and did not end until Colquhoun died in 1962. According to his autobiography, Russell first encountered their paintings and later the artists themselves at an exhibition of theirs when working in the Bond Street art gallery Lefevre in 1948, which was selling their work.