<div><p>She tells Art Basel about sharing a muse with the legendary artist and painting the dead</p></div><p><strong></strong></p>

Skye Sherwin

Queer icon and Francis Bacon confidante: an interview with Maggi Hambling

<p>When Maggi Hambling was an art student in 1960s London, visiting Francis Bacon’s exhibitions at Marlborough gallery was, she chuckles, ‘regarded as a bit of a dirty habit.’ The master of existential dread and tortured human meat was a ‘figurative painter when everything going on was Abstract Expressionism.’ ‘Of course,’ she adds, ‘it was fantastic paint.’</p><p>Hambling, famously, is not an artist who has ever toed the line when it comes to art world dictums. A Queer icon who lit up old Soho’s drinking dens and gay clubs, her five-decade career has been dedicated to expressionist renderings of people and places. She and Bacon were in many ways kindred spirits, both as bastions of figurative painting and in the social scene they sometimes shared. For Hambling, the connection is first and foremost material. ‘It’s the physicality of his paint,’ she says. ‘You can feel the sweat of his bodies and you can feel that they’re breathing. Mine is a very physical painting too.’</p>

<p>At Art Basel Miami Beach, Marlborough’s presentation of a selection of Hambling’s portraits of loved ones, animals, and seascapes alongside Bacon’s <em>Man at a Washbasin</em> (1989–1990), throws the crossovers and departure points for their projects into relief. They both speak to big, timeless themes like death and loss. The hulking nude before a skeletal sink against a grey void in Bacon’s painting revisits his first works of the 1950s depicting his former lover, Peter Lacy. A twist on art history’s many women at their <em>toilettes</em>, the bruised pink, disturbingly swollen flesh of this animalistic figure suggests both masculine energy and vulnerability, sex and violence. It’s less a painting of a person than angst made flesh.</p><p>Hambling’s portraits also conjure ghosts, but what fuels them is empathy. A case in point is <em>Double Portrait</em> (2001–2002), in which the face of her late lover Henrietta Moraes materializes from swirling serpentine brushstrokes. Though her skin is an uncertain tumult of smoky hues, her gaze is strong. ‘I try to paint the spirit of the person,’ says Hambling. </p>

<p>Moraes was herself a bridge between the two artists: this ‘Queen of Soho’ had been one of Bacon’s key muses in the 1960s. When Hambling first met her at a Boxing Day lunch in the late-1990s she says, ‘it was like being with a Bacon painting, but alive.’ In the nine months leading up to her death from liver disease, Hambling made many portraits of the woman she describes as ‘One hundred times more alive than anyone else in the room.’ These works continued after Moraes had died too, including a portrait of her in her coffin. ‘She looked absolutely furious,’ Hambling recalls warmly. ‘She was still very much “there”.’</p><p>While Bacon was concerned with death as a brutal reality, Hambling has painted actual deceased loved ones, beginning with her mother to whom death gave a ‘serenity [&hellip;] It’s the last time you’re going to see them so it’s obvious to make drawings or paintings.’ The posthumous portraits in Marlborough’s presentation however have been created from memory. ‘They just come, years after the person has died,’ she says. </p>

<p>As a Queer woman Hambling has made her own alternative family, and its members are the subjects of these works. They include Arthur Lett-Haines, her friend and mentor who, with Cedric Morris, ran the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, a rural Suffolk art school, where the teenage Hambling first encountered Bacon in person. ‘People ironically called Lett “father” because he was rather frightening, though not to me,’ she says. Sebastian Horsley, the artist and well-known dandy who died of a heroin overdose in 2010, appears in a chaotic Egon Schiele-esque sweep of black and purple: ‘He always called me “mother”, and I called him my “wicked son”.’</p><p>As with Bacon, Hambling’s work upends heteronormative structures, including the dichotomy of male artists and female muses. Yet she doesn’t see identity as a useful vector for thinking about her art. ‘It’s a question of whether it’s any good or not,’ she says. ‘I agree with Picasso who said we are all partly male and partly female and you have to bring the whole thing together to make a work of art.’</p>

<p>Furthermore, she considers her paintings of animals and nature to be in the same vein as those depicting friends or famous faces. Her most recent subjects include the waves crashing on the Suffolk beach near her rural home, captured in paintings like <em>Wall of Water VI</em> (2011) – an ecstatic crescendo of icy spatters and churning darkness. ‘Every wave is different from the last,’ she says. ‘My paintings of them are portraits just as much as those of people.’</p><p>She recalls some crucial advice that her school art teacher once gave her: ‘The subject chooses you, you don’t choose the subject.’&nbsp;Whether it’s Henrietta sitting for me or the waves, the subject has to dictate every mark that I make. It’s all a question of being a channel for the truth to come through me into the paint. The subject is in charge.’</p>

<p>Maggi Hambling is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1800/Marlborough-Gallery">Marlborough Gallery</a>, New York.</p><p>Skye Sherwin is an art writer based in Rochester, UK. She contributes regularly to <em>The Guardian</em> and numerous art publications.</p><p>Caption for full-bleed image: Maggi&nbsp;Hambling, Winter wave crashing, 2010.&nbsp;Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York.</p>

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