Michael Tyzack; Painter and jazz trumpeter (Great)
Hyfler/Rosner
Painter and jazz trumpeter who exchanged Sheffield and
London for Charleston, South Carolina
The Independent
19 April 2007
David Buckman
Nice selection of work here, including his homage to Monk:
http://www.cofc.edu/studioart/bios/tyzack.html
Michael Rodney Tyzack, painter and teacher: born Sheffield,
Yorkshire 3 August 1933; married 1959 Patricia Burgin (one
son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1990), 1993 Anne
Carson; died John's Island, South Carolina 11 February 2007.
Michael Tyzack was one of the most distinguished British
abstract painters to have settled in the United States in
the last half-century. He went to teach and became a revered
mentor for many young artists, telling them that "without
risk, there is no serious painting".
Initially Tyzack did not cross the Atlantic to settle,
although he had for some time hankered to visit the country
whose artists had made such an impact in Europe after the
Second World War. When in 1971 he was invited to become
visiting artist to the School of Art and Art History at the
University of Iowa it was for just two semesters. This was
gradually extended until he remained five years before
moving to the School of the Arts, College of Charleston, in
South Carolina, where he remained as Professor of Fine Arts.
Tyzack said that the transformative event in his career was
winning first prize at the fifth John Moores Liverpool
Exhibition in 1965, where the jury chairman was the
influential American critic Clement Greenberg. Tyzack's
prize picture, Alesso B, was a seductively coloured acrylic
on canvas. Although apparently completely abstract, it
alluded in its title to the Renaissance painter Alesso
Baldovinetti's Portrait of a Lady in Yellow, in the National
Gallery, a reproduction of which was pinned to Tyzack's
studio wall.
Robert Hughes and Norbert Lynton were among other critics to
praise Tyzack's work, Lynton supporting him in his first
one-man show at the Axiom Gallery, London, in 1966. The
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, acquired Alesso B. Asked how
he would like viewers to respond to it, Tyzack answered
simply: "I hope it gives them pleasure."
Michael Tyzack was born in Sheffield in 1933, only child of
Vincent Tyzack, a cutler, and his civil servant wife,
Claire. They were proud and encouraging when Mike was
enrolled at the Sheffield College of Art and Crafts, then
achieved a place at the London University Slade School of
Fine Art, gaining his fine art diploma in 1955.
On vacation in Sheffield and lacking a studio, Tyzack heard
that the Sitwells' family seat Renishaw Hall had abundant
rooms and outbuildings. He asked for somewhere to paint, and
a space was granted. A bonus, Tyzack's first wife Patzy
recalls, was the butler bringing a cup of tea on a tray.
More daunting was a visit from the poetess Dame Edith,
demanding: "Young man, what are you doing here?"
Tyzack had influential teachers at the Slade, among them the
Slade Professor William Coldstream, Lucian Freud and William
Townsend. In 1956, Tyzack won a French Government
Scholarship in Fine Art and left for Paris, later spending
time in Menton. Pictures painted in the south showed the
influence of Cézanne and a tendency towards abstraction.
While at the Slade Tyzack had met British abstractionists
such as Patrick Heron and William Scott and in the move from
realism to abstraction he followed the course taken years
before by another Slade teacher, Victor Pasmore.
When he returned to England after his stay in France, Tyzack
spent several months working as a professional jazz
trumpeter. Jazz had been a passion from his youth in
Sheffield. He played in bands there and at the Slade, and
after marriage in 1959 with his wife visited the London
clubs to hear such admired bands as those of Ken Colyer and
Humphrey Lyttelton. For two years Tyzack played with the
Oriole Jazz Band, a Bristol group that recorded. "For Mike
it was a serious business," says Patzy. "He would listen,
whereas I thought we were going to dance and leap about."
As a trumpeter Tyzack admired Louis Armstrong and Bix
Beiderbecke, but his jazz interests were catholic. The music
informed his painted work, as in the acrylic-on-cotton-duck
picture Blue Monk (1982), finished as Tyzack heard of the
pianist Thelonius Monk's death. The sombre blue work reminds
us that a psychological, emotional significance underlies
its apparent abstraction.
Anyone who knows Tyzack's mature geometrical abstracts could
appreciate his respect for the work of such artists as
Malevich and Mondrian. More surprising might be his
reverence for those natural celebrators Matisse, especially,
and Monet. Tyzack spent his 30th birthday seeking admission
to Monet's garden at Giverny, only to be turned away because
it was closed for renovations. Patzy recalls:
So he climbed over a wall and lay in the garden among the
wistaria and rambling roses drinking his large bottle of
champagne. The photographs he took are probably among the
last before the renovations took place.
While teaching at such institutions as Cardiff and Hornsey
colleges of art, Tyzack continued laying the foundations of
a prolific exhibiting career, which would include over 50
British and overseas group show appearances. Among them were
"Painting Towards Environment" (Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford,
with an Arts Council tour, 1964), "New Shapes of Colour"
(Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam, with European tour, 1966) and
the controversial "Documenta 4" (Kassel, 1968). In addition,
he had over 20 solo exhibitions.
His first solo show after moving to the US was at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in 1973 and in 1978 he
was given a retrospective at the Frances Aronson Gallery in
Atlanta, Georgia. The move to Iowa in 1971 affected the way
that Tyzack saw the world, witness his
acrylic-on-cotton-duck Nocturne (1972), in the collection of
the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Although abstract, it is
essentially lyrical and pastoral.
"Having spent most of my creative life in dense, crowded
urban environments, I seemed to experience the open
expansiveness of the sky, as seen for the first time, in
Iowa," said Tyzack. "This spatial expansiveness became
incorporated in my paintings." He believed that the special
quality of light in the Charleston area "informs my colour
choice almost as much as my emotions".
A serious car accident in the 1980s led to long and painful
months, stretching into years of slow recovery. When he
returned to his art, Tyzack exhibited a series of Small
Nocturnes, drawings in mixed media on paper. In 1989 he went
back to his diamond motif, which had begun with his painting
Kremlin (1961). In 2001, it dominated his impressive solo
exhibition at the Halsey Gallery, Simons Center for the
Arts, in Charleston. "Appropriate to the Moment", a title
appropriated from the teachings of Zen Buddhism, comprised
18 works completed between 1989 and 2001. Tyzack's colour
variations were so subtle that sometimes they did not seem
to be there. "Pessimists see an absence of colour, optimists
the potential presence of colour," he said.
By now, Tyzack had work in three dozen international public
collections, including the Tate Gallery, the Arts Council of
Great Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Gallery
of Ontario in Toronto, the Kunstmuseum in Berne, and the
Arts Commission of South Carolina, Columbia.
Tyzack retired as head of the College of Charleston's art
department in 2005, when he became Emeritus Professor of
Painting. He retained a studio on the campus and continued
to teach, where his lust for life, generosity,
quintessential Britishness, dry wit and aphorisms were
appreciated. When a visiting former student expressed
disappointment with graduate school compared with what had
gone before, Tyzack wryly commented: "You thought it would
be Nirvana, but it was bananas."
Until a few weeks before his death, Tyzack continued to play
jazz with his Dixieland band Authenticity. On trips to
England he would jam with his guitarist son Ben, who has a
recording group, the Spikedrivers.