Michael Andrews, a famously slow craftsman, who produced only a handful of paintings compared to fellow artists of his era, is renowned nonetheless as one of the leading figures in post-war British figurative art. His dealer Helen Lessore noted how ‘in the twenty years since [1952], apart from studies and small incidental paintings, Andrews has produced barely twenty pictures – but each one memorable’.1Helen Lessore, A Partial Testament. Essays on Some Moderns in the Great Tradition, Tate Gallery, London, 1986, p. 38.
Under the banner headline ‘A name to watch’, John Russell, art critic for London’s Sunday Times proclaimed in January 1958 that
One of the most remarkable English debuts of the last ten years is that of Mr. Michael Andrews at the Beaux Arts Gallery [in London] … I fancy this will turn out to be one of the most auspicious exhibitions of the year.2John Russell, ‘A name to watch’, The Sunday Times, 12 Jan. 1958, p. 21.
Russell continued his appraisal of the young artist by noting that
He has won for himself the kind of reputation which can be summed up in the words ‘Marvellous, if he’d only get on with it’. Mr Andrews will be thirty this year. He is a slow worker, with none of that capacity to ‘bring off’ a picture which many a young artist acquires at school.3ibid.
Another critic, David Sylvester, in the Listener informed readers that in this artist’s first one-man show
The pictures are sparely hung, for all that they are a selection from the work of seven years … every one of them has a substance and a presence, the substance and presence of a necessary utterance. Each seems the pursuit of a particular obsession, nothing seems painted for the sake of painting another canvas. We suspect that many a talented painter would produce an exhibition out of the thought Andrews puts into a picture, for we sense that each of his pictures embodies a period of life, an accumulation of experience.4David Sylvester, ‘Michael Andrews’, The Listener, 16 Jan. 1958, p. 105; reprinted in Lawrence Gowing, Michael Andrews, Hayward Gallery, London and Arts Council of Great Britain, 1980, p. 49.
Andrews’s inaugural exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in January 1958 included a number of paintings of people relaxing or sunbaking in gardens, including A girl on the balcony, 1957. These works were influenced in part by Andrews’s admiration for the French Post-Impressionist artist Pierre Bonnard, which was to become apparent in the summer of 1958 when he painted an enormous copy of Bonnard’s The Terrace at Vernon, 1928 (Kunstsammlungen Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf), a lush garden scene, for the Colony Room Club in Soho, London. The Colony Room Club, which opened in 1948 as a private members’ drinking club run by Muriel Belcher and her girlfriend, became a favoured haunt of London’s gay, lesbian, artistic and bohemian counter-cultures frequented by Francis Bacon, George Melly, Frank Auerbach and Lucien Freud, among others. The art dealer James Hyman noted how Andrews’s Colony Room ‘Mural’, 1958 (James Hyman Gallery, London), ‘presents a daytime idyll of people dining outdoors as a witty counterpart to the nocturnal debauchery performed before it by drinkers of the club’.5Colony Room ‘Mural’ 1958, James Hyman Gallery, <www.jameshymangallery.com/artists/25/4290/michael-andrews/the-colony-room-mural?r=artists/25/michael-andrews>, accessed 9 Jul. 2019. The provocative imagery in Andrews’s A girl on the balcony – a woman sunbathing completely nude in a public place – reflected the liberated ethos of the Colony Room Club and its open-minded clientele.
The appeal of Bonnard for Andrews at this time was summed up well by Lessore, his dealer and the Director of the Beaux Arts Gallery:
Looking back, one can see it as a natural and necessary reaction after the long discipline of the Slade [School of Art, London], so heavily biased towards tonal painting and so firmly founded on the renaissance tradition of drawing. For a young artist resolved to look with his own eyes, Bonnard is after all a very understandable attraction, for more than anyone else he preserves the surprise of the uninterpreted flatness of our natural vision, a seeming chaos out of which he extracts unexpected contours and upon which he imposes order, and all by means of vivid colour.6Helen Lessore, A Partial Testament. Essays on Some Moderns in the Great Tradition, Tate Gallery, London, 1986, pp. 41–2.
The influence of the French painter on Andrews was also noted in 1965 by the National Gallery of Victoria Director Eric Westbrook:
This is a deceptively simple picture … The paint has a dry ‘matt’ surface probably from being laid on an unprimed or lightly primed support, and is applied loosely but with no virtuoso ‘sleight-of-hand’. The tonality of the picture is high and slightly chalky and the feeling of sunlight is well sustained but not over-stressed. The rather naïf drawing of the figure seems to come from the efforts of a good draughtsman not to produce anything showy or superficially clever. The picture shows to some degree the influence of Bonnard, although it has a British restraint which avoids the rich sensuality of the French master … This is a young man’s picture which still smacks of the art school, but which also shows a praiseworthy willingness to attempt the recasting of a traditional subject and also a healthy disrespect for current fashion.7Eric Westbrook, ‘Two paintings by Michael Andrews’, Annual Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria, vol. 7, 1965, p. 18. The influence of Bonnard is also remarked upon in Sylvester, p. 49.
Perhaps in another nod to the influence of Bonnard, A girl on the balcony shows a woman casually seated in a Parisian park on a warm summer’s day, although the exact location of Andrews’s sunbather remains unclear. In 1963 art critic Russell thought the painting depicted ‘a nude in the Tuileries gardens’,8Russell, p. 21. while Lessore later recalled that ‘this setting was taken from photographs of the Luxembourg Gardens’.9Lessore, p. 42.
When displayed in the middle of a dark London winter at the Beaux Arts Gallery in January 1958, Andrews’s sun-drenched painting with its white metal chairs and stone balustrade would have clearly evoked summer in Paris for British audiences, with the risqué nudity of its sunbather a clear reference to the perceived permissiveness of French culture. For example, in March 1957, French director Roger Vadim’s popular film And God Created Woman, starring Brigitte Bardot as a highly sexualised eighteen-year-old who appears nude in her backyard, opened at the Cameo Royal Cinema in Charing Cross, London.10See Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley, French Film in Britain: Sex, Art and Cinephilia, Berghahn Books, New York, 2013, p. 90.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria