| Canon Dr Richard Davey writes:
ALBERT HERBERT, who died on 10 May, aged 82, was one of the great religious artists of recent times.
An artist of singular and poetic vision, he deliberately chose to paint figurative, childlike images at a time when most of his contemporaries were following an abstract or conceptual path that sought to challenge and expand the boundaries of art. Herbert, however, always wanted to make “figurative, emotive, symbolic paintings”, images that engaged their audience by being “accessible”, “positive and wholesome”.
Herbert was born in London in 1925. After serving as a soldier in the Second World War, he went to Wimbledon School of Art, before winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. Here his friends and contemporaries included John Bratby, Peter Coker, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch, and Jack Smith, a group of artists whose fascination with gritty social realism earned them the title “Kitchen-Sink Painters”.
Herbert briefly exhibited with them, but then realised that their concerns were not his. While at the Royal College, however, Herbert came across the work of Francis Bacon, who had a studio there from 1951 to 1952. He used to slip in, and look at these works that seemed so emotionally “true” and “serious”, and so utterly different from his contemporaries’ work.
After a few years’ teaching in Leicester and Birmingham, Herbert became a lecturer at St Martin’s School of Art in 1964, remaining there until 1988, when he finally retired after 21 years as Principal Lecturer. In the 1960s, St Martin’s was a melting-pot of artistic ideas and experiments. The influence of American art, and particularly abstract expressionism, had caused both staff and students to re-evaluate their practice.
Initially, Herbert went along with the abstract fervour, considering the intimate social observation of his earlier works to be retrogressive nonsense. But the strain of communicating his ideas in, effectively, a foreign language became too much, and Herbert stopped painting.
His salvation lay in the subterranean depths of St Martin’s. This was the location of the print room, and it was here that Herbert began to make figurative images again: small, witty, illustrative prints, which allowed him to pursue the subjective, interior vision that had always inspired him. But, while these were figurative images, they were no longer the outwardly realistic images that he had once painted.
He put aside the art training he had received under John Ward and Vivian Pitchford, and set out to draw like a child, painting an inner, innocent vision that was uncorrupted by either the influence of the outside world, or learnt, adult knowledge. By painting in this way, he hoped to discover the “common vision” — the language of art that we all share.
In later life, Herbert saw these etchings as the most creative things he had done. Their surfaces, which are encrusted with scabs of congealed black ink, provide the eye with a rich variety of textures and patterns, reminiscent of the abstract work he had abandoned, a quality that can also be seen in his paintings, where clouds of vibrant colour provide the unformed dream space out of which his childlike figures are born: Noah in the ark, Eve, the Tower of Babel, or Moses and the burning bush — haiku of visual theology which seek to communicate across a divided world with their universal themes: the desire for safety in a storm-tossed world, our search for a shared humanity, and a desire to encounter the divine.
Herbert had been a practising Roman Catholic since the late 1950s. Although, in 1959, he had painted a powerful Deposition, it was not until his return to figuration in the 1970s that he began to use biblical subjects consistently. He did so not to make dogmatic statements, but because they provided an obvious means of dealing with universal themes without being too personal and subjective.
Yet these are incredibly personal paintings — works of visual poetry rather than narrative prose, in which Herbert plays games of visual theology through the juxtaposition of apparently unconnected individuals or subjects. These games were reinforced by his persistent use of simple texts in the composition.
Herbert received only one commission from the Church. In 1987, he was asked to make a set of Stations of the Cross for a church in London. When the incomplete set was seen by the PCC, they were felt to be too disturbing, and the commission was never completed. Sadly, there will be no more opportunities for a church to commission a work from this unique artist, who, like his hero William Blake, saw this life to be made for Joy and Woe, a man with a twinkling smile and gentle humour, whose lyrical and poetic works allow us to see the world with the innocent wonder of a child.
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