Michael Upton (lots 123-138)

Tiny, intimist interiors and exteriors exquisitely coloured like some latter day Vuillard
John Russell Taylor,

Introduction
Upton grew up in Birmingham where he attended the College of Art before joining the Royal Academy Schools in 1958. In London he became close friends with David Hockney and Patrick Proctor, shared a flat with nascent pop artist Peter Phillips, and was awarded an RA Leverhulme Scholarship. His work was featured in the influential annual ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibitions that Phillips masterminded over four years (1959-63). The reviewer of the 1962 show in The Times commented: 'The exhibition fairly bubbles with bright ideas and visual excitement... its weird mixture of impudence, whimsicality and beautifully tender painting is well exemplified by Derek Boshier [and] Michael Upton...'

A year later, however, after completing six identical canvases, Upton abandoned painting entirely, turning instead to conceptual art. He spent 1967-68 in New York, the recipient of a grant from the Cassandra Foundation. Others who received grants from the Foundation included John Cage, Bruce Nauman, Christo, Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton. Increasingly Upton's interests lay in performance, and in the 1970s he founded London Calling with Peter Lloyd Jones which became an influential part of London's performance art scene. One of his works included burying a number of his paintings on a Dorset hillside. But at the end of 1970s Upton returned again to painting, taking up a teaching role at the RA Schools.

In this later period Upton's preference was for small scale works. He often used photocopy or newspaper print as the support and he regularly produced series of images, similar to stills from a reel of film (lots 123-126). Upton considered them 'conceptual paintings', and gained a new fan for his work in John Russell Taylor the influential art critic of The Times. In a review of 1979 Russell Taylor enthusiastically described Upton's paintings as 'tiny, intimist interiors and exteriors exquisitely coloured like some latter day Vuillard', and in his review of the British Council touring exhibition Picturing People, British Figurative Art since 1945, he singled out Upton as one of a handful of 'highly sophisticated stylists'. Also won over to Upton was the critic Mel Gooding who commented on Upton's 'subtle allusiveness (hints of Piero, Vermeer, Sickert)...another way of deepening the game, of adumbrating the mystery. An art of intimations'.

As his work evolved so Upton also gave it more loaded political messaging, inspired in part by both his earlier pop art years and current events (lots 129 & 130). But following retirement and his retreat to Mousehole, Cornwall in 1996 his artistic focus shifted. He put aside subversive messaging, urban subject matter and his customarily muted palette. Instead the innate beauty of the local landscape and coastal views became his primary focus (lots 135-138).


123
MICHAEL UPTON (BRITISH 1938-2002)
THE STUDIO: BED - A PAIR
thinned oil on board
each: 18 x 13cm; 7 x 5in
46 x 56cm; 18 x 22in (two framed as one)
(2)

Exhibited
London, Anne Berthoud Gallery (1980s)