So here we are in Gallery 90 at the British
Museum where there is this great show,
Maggi Hambling – Touch: works on paper
And here I am with Maggi.
So, this show is a retrospective of your artistic
career through the medium of works on paper.
Yes, indeed, it's the first time that I've allowed
the word retrospective to be used about an
exhibition because it does make one feel about 150.
But as most of the artists here are a lot
older than 150 I'm still quite young.
You're in very good company. So the show starts
in the early 60s and the latest work is from last year, is
that right?
Yep.
So the earliest work in the show is a drawing
of 1963 of the magnificent Rosie, the rhinoceros.
Tell us about Rosie and how she came into your life.
Well I was a student at Ipswich Art School between 1962
and '64 and one afternoon we were told to go into the
Ipswich Museum next door to the art school and draw something.
I mean actually quite a lot of people went
home. But, the presence in the first great hall – and it's
still there – of the Ipswich Museum, is the stuffed
rhinoceros and she's called Rosie and I think it's possibly
the first drawing I ever did with ink, which is a very exciting
thing to try to draw with because you can't really make
mistakes. You don't change ink you just have to make the
right mark in the right place and so its very challenging
and exciting.
And although of course Rosie's dead, the interaction
between Rosie and me was certainly very alive
and I regard it as my first portrait.
It's very brilliant in that much of Rosie's form is really made from
the white of the paper and it's as much what you've left out
as what you've put in. It shows an incredible maturity.
I mean what were you looking at, that allowed you
to draw so well?
[laughs]
I don't know. I mean drawing had begun for
me at an early age at my first school. I remember
Uncle Tom's Cabin was being read to us and I was about 7 or something
and the fashion was to get more and more
exciting crayons and fill in those old arithmetic book
squares in more and more decorative ways, with gold
crayons, pink crayons, whatever...but I, actually listening
to Uncle Tom's Cabin, tried to draw the slaves being beaten.
So, I mean, drawing was sort of always there, long before painting started.
And what I think is very interesting is it introduces a theme
that I find reoccurs elsewhere in the show is your interest
in boundaries between states. I mean Rosie is a dead
animal, a stuffed animal - you can't get much more
dead than that – and yet you give her this tremendous
sense of animation, as if Rosie is still a living, breathing creature.
Well thank you, good. Good. I'm well known
for going on painting and drawing people long after they're dead.
You know George Melly said I'd go down in art history
as Maggi 'Coffin' Hambling. But maybe it all began
with Rosie, how can you tell? I mean, you know, when
somebody dies, for anyone – somebody you love or were
close to - they carry on being alive inside you. I think this is
where artists are very lucky: that they can grieve if you like in a very positive
- well for me anyway - in a very positive way. I remember
I painted my father after his death, my mother, Henrietta
and George Melly... it is something that I do I'm trying to
make these paintings and drawings as alive as possible
even though the subject is dead. Because they're
still alive inside me. And I think that's where artists are lucky,
to be able to do that.
And what was your relationship with Henrietta?
and maybe you should explain that Henrietta was a model
for both Bacon and also Freud.
Well Freud did a couple of early ones when they were
having an affair but there are at least 15 paintings by
Bacon of Henrietta. Yes, of course, for those who don't
know she was the queen of Soho in the 50s, the Colony, drink, life,
serial lover of all kinds ...
[she lived a full life] Yes, yes a full life.
And I think you see that in your drawing of her, there is that
extraordinary sense of vitality and yet also the
physical signs of a life that has been quite rough on her.
Well, she was my muse and model for the last 9 months
of her life and I made many drawings
of her. When somebody is posing you want them to be
present, you don't want them to go to sleep, you don't want
them to be too much off in a dream world or whatever, you
want them to be present and there and alive.
People said about Henrietta, if she came into a party,
she was about twice, three, four times as alive as anybody else
in the room. And these eyes looked straight through you,
there was no hiding anything from Henrietta,
those eyes just went straight through you as if you were transparent.
She was also the bossiest muse that I ever had
She would quite often tell me when
something was finished - you know the really difficult
question of how do you know when something is finished?
She'd say 'Oh no, that's finished, that's finished'.
So although you are best known as a painter you are also
a sculptor and this wonderful plaster of Henrietta eating a meringue
relates to your activity as a sculptor. What's it about,
'Henrietta Eating a Meringue'?
The minute she heard she had diabetes
she really went for the cream cakes in a big way.
And the whole of those last months was a sort of dance with the
drink - do you know what I mean? She was defiant,
she was going to win, if you like. Of course the drink won in
the end, but that defiance and challenge was part of that spirit
There's an extraordinary sense of movement in that sculpture,
and Henrietta's great lips clamping down upon it.
Yes the idea is the meringue becoming the mouth and the
mouth becoming the meringue.
The division between the two... is ..is... Is not really there.
and it's one thing and you know I always see things
afterwards - I made that sculpture in 2001 and it was a
year later that I really started to paint the sea. Because all
the movement that I try to have in my paintings of waves
and drawings of waves began with that sculpture.
You can only see this sort of thing afterwards. It's a seminal work
but you can only say that when you see it afterwards.
And what I like about it in the show is that it sits in the
middle of the room and is a kind of pivot between your
earlier work on one side and your later work on the other,
which is dominated by these amazing monotypes and
prints you've made of the sea. Now you're a Suffolk girl -
do you feel close to the sea?
I can remember when I was a toddler - 3 or 4 or something
- I'd walk into the sea and talk to it, quite a lot. I don't know
what I said and I don't think it answered back. But I was
never very good at swimming, in fact I can't swim. But I'd
walk into the sea and talk and talk to it. Now, a bit later in
life I go to the sea to draw it and I listen, I listen now -
let the sea do the talking.
My first art teacher,
she said 'the subject chooses you, you don't choose the subject.'
And that is how I've always worked,
whether it's a wave, whether it's Henrietta, whether it's Rosie,
whether it's John Berger – whatever it is – the truth of that can come through me
on to the paper or onto the canvas or into the sculpture.
So I just try to be a channel.
The connection between you and your subject matter is no more strongly felt
in this show than in the marvellous drawing you did of your father,
who after he retired from Barclays Bank took to painting.
Indeed, Father retired from the bank when he was 60 and I
gave him some oil paints – then suddenly one morning
when he was 65 - nothing to do with me - he took out
these paints and started to paint. And as he'd lived in
Suffolk all his life, the whole of Suffolk poured out of him -
wonderful landscapes, extraordinary, very personal.
So when I was there in Hadleigh I would set him up with his
paints and I would draw him while he was painting.
It was very moving the way he was determined to go on.
The last drawing of him in this exhibition which was the
month before he died and he was falling asleep
but still determined to go on till the end and you know
the skull emerging as he got more and more frail.
While your mother fidgeted and wasn't a good model
Yes, yes she was hopeless. She was ok in her coffin.
And that's obviously a subject matter that crops up on a
couple of occasions in this show – your frank and
unashamed look at the dead body and you seem to be
catching that moment when the spirit is there...
but is fading away, is that right?
For me it is quite simple – the last time you see the
person is when they are lying in the coffin...
But they often look quite different from how they looked when they were alive
which can be startling. Certainly my mother
who had been quite ill towards the end of her life and I think
there is a bit of it in my drawing of her in the coffin -
this quite serene expression, having died because all
the pain was gone from her face.
But people are surprised if I draw Henrietta lying there dead or
my mother...
But you said Henrietta looked furious
Oh yes Henrietta looked absolutely furious
Quite the opposite of my mother [laughs]
No, death had won so she looked pretty cross.
So, as we come to the end on the final wall of the show
there's an amazing burst of colour - this large drawing in
watercolour with these great swathes of brushstrokes in
red and pink with a rather ominous title of 'Edge'.
Now, what are we on the edge of when we are looking at that drawing?
You only have to look at the world and you will see
that we are on the edge ... I'm... what is a good word?
distressed by the way that we are messing up our planet -
not just the ice caps but the rainforests and the rest of it...
I don't know what is going to be left
and It makes me angry and so I began about three of four years ago
this subject began in my work of the way that we are destroying the planet
and we are on the edge of things and on that large – ish
sheet of black paper it was necessary to use colour
to say the heat rising from underneath the sea, not just from
on top, all the pollution but from the heat rising through the water
to destroy the polar regions and so the red was necessary.
It had to be there
If we look at this show there is a number of works that we
purchased from you right back to the 1980s but also
through this show you have given us works so there is
going to be a real body of Maggi Hambling.
Well I think it is a great honour – it is a great honour to have
this exhibition here. I mean I feel very honoured.
I'm not sure quite where one might have another one, because
after the British Museum it seems to me
the only grander place might be Heaven.
So I feel incredibly honoured...
They do a great retrospective in Heaven!
[laughs] yes
So Maggi, thank you so much for coming in to to talk to us.
It's a reminder really for everybody to come to the
show before it closes on the 29th of January
because it's an opportunity not to be missed.
Well thank you, Hugo, for saying nice things
and thank you British Museum for having me.