"Paul McCartney Paintings"
PUSSSYKATT
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ONE way or another, the art world is always being used. Plutocrats acquire a
touch of class by purchasing Tuscan bronzes and getting themselves elected to
the boards of major museums.
Scholars score minor political points by deconstructing the Old Masters. And
showbiz types, proverbially the flimsiest of species, gain a prosthetic
gravitas by hanging around the galleries of Chelsea and Cork Street.
And so it is that Steve Martin writes a play about Picasso, Madonna invests
heavily in Francis Bacon and David Bowie buys Modern Painters, the British art
quarterly.
And now Paul McCartney, like Sly Stallone, Tony Curtis and the late Jack Lord,
reveals his painterly ambitions in "Paul McCartney Paintings," a sumptuous book
based on an exhibition last year in Siegen, Germany.
How good a painter is Sir Paul? Judging entirely from the reproductions
included in this book, he is unquestionably good enough to be called a talented
amateur, were it not for the fact that many prominent professionals of recent
years - one thinks of Julian Schnabel - are less talented than he is.
As he explains in an interview with the curator of the Siegen exhibition,
Wolfgang Suttner, he was 40 years old before he began to indulge this artistic
vein, largely out of deference to John Lennon, who had been to art college and
had hoped to have a career in painting before his life took an unexpected turn
toward music.
McCartney, however, discovered painting quite a bit later in life, largely
through his friendship with Willem de Kooning, that grand old man of Abstract
Expressionism. Several photographs in the book, taken by McCartney's late wife,
Linda, document this friendship.
Yet the paintings themselves, especially "Tara's Plastic Skirt" and "Unfinished
Symphony," bespeak an even deeper debt to the older artist. In a sense,
Abstract Expressionism is God's gift to amateurs.
By abandoning, or seeming to abandon, the requirements of draughtsmanship,
which can be mastered only through painstaking study over time, this style of
painting gives anyone the license to "express himself" by indiscriminately
slathering pigment onto paper or canvas.
The essential question is whether the resulting image looks arbitrary and out
of control or has a core of method and painterly intelligence to it.
Often this element is lacking in McCartney's oils and acrylics. But sometimes -
and this is far more important - one has a real sense that Sir Paul knows what
he wants and how to get it.
In the 70-odd paintings produced between 1988 and 1994 that are featured in
this book, Sir Paul adopts many styles. If a painting like "Unfinished
Symphony" is abstract, "Ancient Connections," with its trinity of Easter Island
faces, is overtly figurative, even though it was made only a year later.
Some paintings, like "Red Triangle Sand," are little more than blown-up
watercolors, awash in vast, undifferentiated fields of color.
Other works, like "Dark Faces," seem to be nervously hyperactive, the schematic
heads scratched frantically into the canvas with the back of the brush.
What emerges from these radical shifts in style is that, for all his emphasis
on self-expression, Sir Paul is constantly indebted - as one would expect of an
amateur artist - to the moods and manias of others. Which is why, in these
works, you repeatedly find traces of the graffiti of Basquiat, the childlike
stick figures of Dubuffet and the scribblings of Cy Twombley.
If there is one thread that runs through all these paintings, however, as it
runs through McCartney's music, it is an overarching eagerness to please, to be
"pleasant." Though the decomposing head in "Insect Face" invokes the rantings
of Bacon, poet of the primal scream, in fact it is little more than a pleasant
meditation in red and green. And while "The Queen After Her First Cigarette"
aspires to something vaguely racy and political, it, too, is essentially
deferential, toothless and polite.
Perhaps McCartney's best painting is "Large Yellow Face" from 1990. It is
nicely composed and the use of oils to attain a gouache-like effect is deftly
done. It is not the most demonstrative of Sir Paul's works, but it has the ring
of honestly to it, reflecting as it does the condition of an essentially happy
man a little dazzled at all the attention being paid to him, no matter what he
undertakes to do.
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