Ian Massey is a writer, artist and lecturer and this is his first book. There have been two previous books on Procktor: a ghosted autobiography and a slim volume to celebrate his 60th birthday. About the second, one reviewer wrote that what was next required was ‘a full retrospective to answer the critical question that has been asked repeatedly over the last 30 years, “Is there anybody there?” ’ This handsome, copiously illustrated, well-researched and sensitive appraisal of the art and artist fully meets that requirement.
Massey did not know Procktor, but he shows there was much more to him than facility and a façade. Half the book is devoted to the post-1970 career and gives abundant evidence that some of the finest work dates from these so-called lost years. It is painful to read of the snubs he endured at the hands of the establishment. His anarchic temperament did not help, but he suffered unduly for not playing the game.
If Procktor was turbulent by nature so was his upbringing. His accountant father died when he was four and his mother had to take a full-time job. Patrick and his brother spent the war in Malvern with their maternal grandparents. After the war they were boarders at Highgate. Kyffin Williams was the art master and later recalled: ‘Some boys I taught, but Patrick I didn’t have to.’ He lived to see his star pupil join him as a member of the Royal Academy.
When Procktor was 16 the money ran out. He was expected to win a classics scholarship to Oxford; instead he had to leave school. He was saved by National Service, his superiors selecting him to learn Russian. His friend, Christian Wharton, remembers her first sight of him, at Craill, in Fife:
There was this incredibly beautiful young man: very tall, bronzed, with wavy hair tinged with gold, smoking a cigarette with a long amber cigarette holder, and riding on this magnificent horse along the sands against the sea.
But for his exceptional height Procktor might have chosen the stage in preference to art; as a youth he shone at both.
In the year between National Service and the Slade Procktor made a living working as an interpreter, twice for British trade delegations to the USSR. As he flaunted his support of communism this raised persistent rumours he was a soviet spy. Christian Wharton says he was never a party member, a Highgate friend, Mark Cohen, that it was a typical fantasy: ‘He cast himself in roles’. His sexuality was similarly mysterious. Wharton thought she was his fiancée until he disabused her: ‘I pray my homosexuality will pass.’ Another friend, André Gallard, says: ‘Sexually, I don’t know … He loved beauty first.’ Gallard also says: ‘He loved mischief and he loved the sense of the ridiculous’; and that when Nureyev visited the studio and criticised the drawing of a leg he was told, ‘If I want a few plié lessons I know where to come. You stick to what you do and I’ll stick to what I do.’
For all the high times, in every sense, of the 1960s, when Procktor and Hockney were twin stars of swinging London, Massey rightly never fails to emphasise his subject’s artistic seriousness and achievement, how ever much he liked to play the dilettante. David Shilling sums it up: ‘I think the sadness is that some stupid people allowed his persona to get in the way of his work.’
Thankfully there were notable exceptions. Procktor’s relationship with the Redfern Gallery was exemplary, from the overnight success of his debut in 1963 to the quality of the reproductions in this book. From Harry Tatlock Miller and Maggie Thornton to Richard Selby, the gallery has been his rock; also Editions Alecto, with a special nod to co-founder Joe Studholme, who introduced him to aquatint. And Gabriella and Paolo Cardazzo of the Venetian Galleria del Cavallino, who encouraged him to be the latest inspired interpreter of Venice.
That these associations bore most fruit in his unfashionable years says everything about fashion. It was also during this time that he married Kirsten Benson. Apart from paternal pride in their son, Nicholas, this brought him the joy and support of the Benson family, stepchildren and cousins. It is indicative that after so many latter-day travails — the death of Kirsten, the gutting of his studio by fire, wrongful imprisonment for assaulting his mother — his penultimate year as the guest of Giles and Eleanor Benson in Gloucestershire was very happy, despite ill-health.
All this, too, found a place in his art. Procktor is rightly extolled here as an outstanding portraitist, and especially for his brilliance as a water colourist and master of aquatint etching. More could be said in praise of his wildly expressionist late oil paintings (and for Keith read Michael Vaughan on p. 67, an editorial mistake), but this book should restore him to the artistic prominence he briefly enjoyed and never deserved to lose.