Ralph Rumney
Marcus Williamson
Ralph Rumney, Artist and Avant-Gardist, Dies at 67
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
(NY Times)
Ralph Rumney, an English-born artist who romanced just about every
eccentric left-wing intellectual movement he encountered over a
half-century - and helped start a few - died on March 6 at his home in
Manosque in the Provence region of France. He was 67.
The cause was cancer, the news agency Agence France-Presse reported.
Mr. Rumney founded no philosophical schools, nor did the art he
produced so voluminously bear any important influence. But he
displayed an uncanny knack for finding himself where intellectual
cauldrons were bubbling, and tossing in some memorably zestful spice.
In 1957, Mr. Rumney was a founding member of the Situationist
International, a movement that mixed Surrealism, Marxism and sometimes
spectacular hedonism and that has been described as the spiritual
precursor to the Paris riots of 1968, the Sex Pistols and the
sensationalist art of people like Damien Hirst. The tiny movement has
remained a subject of fascination in France, where books on it appear
regularly.
Within months of the group's formation, at a weeklong meeting in a bar
in Italy, Mr. Rumney was the first member to be expelled by the
group's leader, Guy Debord, who had a penchant for excommunication.
Forty-five of the 70 members were eventually expelled.
But Mr. Rumney kept the faith and as late as 2000 called together
Situationists and their fellow travelers from five countries for a
month of drinking and debating in Manosque.
"Ralph is a hero," said Michel Guet, leader of the Banalistes, a group
of avant-garde artists, at the conclave. "He has refused to concede
that the dreams of the old avant-gardes are finished. That is why
artists will build monuments to him in the 21st century."
The central belief of the Situationists, aside from the frequent
denial that they had any beliefs at all, was that people were no
longer participants in their own lives, but spectators. Reality, they
said, was being replaced by images in what they called the
"spectacular society."
The situationists rejected art as an ornament of privilege and a
commodity for consumption. Mr. Rumney agreed with his cohorts, and saw
his finished art as a necessarily muddled reflection of his initial
idea. But that somehow did not stop him from producing a vast
outpouring of art over the years, from informal abstracts to large
canvases using gold and silver leaf to plaster sculptures to Polaroid
pictures and videos.
One of his paintings hangs in the Tate Gallery in London, and he sold
his work at shows, but he refused to take art completely seriously. He
also insisted that no art could be truly original.
"The greatest plagiarist of all-time was Picasso, who if he saw a good
idea somewhere just took it and made it his own, in a flagrant
manner," Mr. Rumney said in a book of interviews compiled by Alan
Woods ("The Map Is Not the Territory," Manchester University Press,
2000).
He was born on June 5, 1934, in Newcastle, where his father was an
Anglican vicar. Anti-Establishment from the start, he was called a
pervert by the Bishop of Leeds for ordering the complete works of the
Marquis de Sade while still a schoolboy, according to an article in
The Times of London in 2001.
He attended boarding school, turned down a chance to attend Oxford,
and dropped out of art school. He was expelled from the Young
Communists for lack of moral rectitude.
When he became a draft dodger, he fled to Paris, where he fell in with
the Lettrists, a radical group led by Mr. Debord. He painted, but came
to believe, with the Lettrists, that an artist does not have to make
art; he himself never stopped, however. He returned to London, where
he started a short-lived literary magazine, Other Voices.
In 1957, he met the art collector Peggy Guggenheim at a show of his
work in London, which led to an introduction to her daughter, Pegeen.
He was so taken with her that he gave her the painting her mother had
wanted to buy, "The Change," which now hangs in the Tate. They married
a few years later.
Later in 1957, the Situationist International was formed in a bar in
the Italian village of Cosio d'Arroscia. It combined the Lettrists
with two other minuscule groups, one of them the London
Psychogeographical Association, of which Mr. Rumney was the only
member.
His first and last assignment was to provide a report on the psychic
geography of Venice. He proposed dyeing the Venice Lagoon a bright
color. He said this would serve two purposes: to see how people
reacted, and to study the flow and stagnation of the water.
He never dyed the canal (though in the riotous year of 1968, someone
else dyed it a bright green as a protest against capitalism) and he
procrastinated on the written report he had promised. An exasperated
Mr. Debord, who wanted to publish the document in an otherwise
completed collection, exiled him.
In 1967, Pegeen Guggenheim committed suicide in the couple's
17th-century house on the Īle St. Louis, a tiny island in the River
Seine in Paris. He is survived by their son, Sandro.
In 1974, he married Mr. Debord's former wife, Michčle Bernstein,
despite Mr. Debord's disapproval. They later divorced.
After a lifetime of shuttling from London to Paris to Milan to Venice
to the tiny island of Linosa, south of Sicily, he finally settled in
the south of France. His small celebrity flickered anew when his
autobiography, "Le Consul," appeared in French in 1999. An English
translation is planned for this year by City Lights Publishers.
He seemed never to lose his zeal for the avant-garde, even as he
claimed not to believe in it.
"We were fanatics," he said last year in a Times of London interview,
"but we weren't wrong."