Rose Wylie

Rose Wylie in her studio Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

It is heartening to see that Rose Wylie, at an age when most people have long since retired from the fray, has a new exhibition in a major New York gallery. Having spent most of her time painting during lockdown, she explains, with characteristic dry wit, that ‘there was nothing else to do’. Wylie lives on her own, with Bohemian disregard for conventional order and tidiness, in a village house in Kent. Her studio is chaotic, with discarded paper covering the floor and traces of paint on almost every surface; overgrown plants find their way in through windows, and the garden is pleasingly wild. Nevertheless, out of this apparent disorder comes astonishing fertility and richness.

Wylie did not always live with this level of informality. After a conventional middle class English upbringing she went to art college, where she met the late Roy Oxlade, whose artistic career took precedence, with the consequence that she spent the next twenty years bringing up a family. It was only when the children left home that she took up art seriously, and it was a long time before her work attracted much interest. Recently, however - and unexpectedly - her career has blossomed; the art world began to pay serious attention to her work, and she has had a series of exhibitions at very good galleries.

There is always an abundance of content in Wylie’s images, although she is adamant that they are about little other than painting itself; similarly, the ubiquitous fragments of text often make little sense on their own, but they spark associations and interesting trains of thought. The pictures are large, rough, and often look unfinished; they can appear ‘primitive’ and have been called ‘childlike’, but they’re sophisticated and carefully considered. Her paintings have been compared to those of Philip Guston, but they’re looser and lighter, more lyrical and less deliberate. Drawing subject matter from every corner of popular contemporary life - from films, fashion, literature, sports, and news - and representing it without irony, her images are also intimate, augmented by memories and associations. Unsurprisingly, she is much influenced by art that goes against the grain of mainstream taste.

Although, as The New York Times recently remarked, she was brought up as one of the ‘Silent Generation’ in austere post-war Britain, Wylie has pointedly said that she ‘doesn’t like restraints’, and without making much fuss about it, she is something of a rebel or iconoclast. Nonetheless, both the artist and her work are polite and very English; she has little interest in causing offence or being controversial, and her paintings are notable for their wit and understated sense of humour. All the same, there is something about her life story that brings to mind Jane Bowles’ novel Two Serious Ladies, written in 1943, in which a pair of bourgeois women decide to stray far from the trodden path and to look for enlightenment in the louche and lowbrow. As one of them says, ‘I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I’ve wanted to do for years. I know I’m as guilty as can be, but I have my happiness which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which I never had before’. Rose Wylie might well approve of their wilful search for freedom, albeit with reservations. Typically, when once asked for advice about life, she replied ‘It’s impossible to say! I just feel that you ought to live morally, and that’s that’.

In some respects Wylie’s work also recalls the early 20th century paintings of Florine Stettheimer, who has been described as a ‘New York artist, designer, and Jazz Age Saloniste’; their paintings share faux-naif innocence and irreverent charm, as well as artful subversion. The very different styles of Wylie, Bowles, and Stettheimer are all characterised by a peculiar kind of extravagance, brought about, perhaps, by the relish of release from society’s constraints. In her earlier years, much the same might have been said of Marianne Faithfull, another strong woman whose career has flourished in maturity, but these days her music is more subdued and vulnerable. She has just released an album of poems by English Romantic poets, including Byron, Shelley, and Keats, set to arrangements by Warren Ellis and others, in which her nostalgia is as pronounced as her gratitude for life. Coincidentally, in Rose Wylie’s new exhibition there is a series of paintings based on old Mexican ‘retablos’, small religious pictures that used to be hung in churches in thanks for divine cures and healing.

For further exploration:

Rose Wylie: https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2021/rose-wylie-which-one

Jane Bowles: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-madness-of-queen-jane

Florine Stettheimer: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/arts/design/a-case-for-the-greatness-of-florine-stettheimer.html

Marianne Faithfull: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe62-_bXTTs&t=214s