by
Edward M. Gómez
LONDON — Looking back at
history, one encounters certain individuals who reflect the changing attitudes,
social values, or cultural trends of their times, while certain others seem to
define and embody them; they’re the ones who become the symbols of the spirit
of an age.
The art dealer Robert Fraser
(1937–1986) became one such emblem of a particular place at a memorably
effervescent moment; his was “Swinging London” of the 1960s, with its explosion
of sexy-goofy fashion, its soundtrack of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, and
its unabashedly open expressions of sexuality. Swinging, grooving, and fueled
by pot and pills, London in the sixties was a post-imperial pop-culture hub
whose tradition-busting, style-setting forces Fraser played a large role in
setting in motion.
Known as Britain’s main
purveyor of Pop Art in both its home-grown and imported, American varieties,
his Robert Fraser Gallery became London’s — and Europe’s — unrivaled, hip-art
emporium. Around Fraser and his exhibitions orbited a vast cast of friends,
admirers and associates, including, among others, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards,
Marianne Faithfull, and Paul and Linda McCartney; Francis Bacon, Jim Dine,
Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat; the
British Pop artists Peter Blake, Jann Haworth, Clive Barker, Richard Hamilton,
and Eduardo Paolozzi; and many forward-looking collectors. A master at
assembling exhibitions, Fraser was irresponsible when it came to running his
gallery and routinely neglected to pay his artists. Often he was drunk or
drugged-up, but still he managed to function. As Dine once observed, “Robert
knew everyone in the world at one point.”
Now, Pace London, a branch of
New York’s Pace Gallery, is presenting A Strong, Sweet Smell of Incense
(through April 1), an exhibition that pays homage to Fraser and the spirit of
the gallery that bore his name during two separate periods. The first lasted
from 1962 to 1969, when it was located at 69 Duke Street, near Grosvenor
Square. Its second incarnation lasted from 1983 to 1985 at 21 Cork Street, near
the Royal Academy of Arts. It closed after Fraser’s AIDS-related death at a
time when the disease was still new.
The exhibition has been curated
by Harriet Vyner, a younger friend of Fraser’s, who wrote his biography, Groovy
Bob (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), and by the British artist Brian Clarke,
who showed his work at Fraser’s gallery and was the dealer’s close friend.
Clarke, whose works have included abstract paintings affixed or embedded with
neatly cut wooden squares or crosses, might be best known in the US for the
reproduction of one of his tableaux that appeared on the cover of Paul
McCartney’s 1982 solo album, Tug of War. (An exhibition of Clarke’s works from
1977 through 1985 is being shown concurrently at Pace London; nearby, at its
annex, his new paintings and stained-glass works are on view.)
A Strong, Sweet Smell of
Incense takes its title from a newspaper headline about a famous drug bust at
Keith Richards’s house in February 1967, during which the police reportedly
found the Rolling Stones guitarist and his guests, including Fraser, Jagger,
and others, indulging in illicit substances — and a naked Marianne Faithfull
rolled up in a rug. They arrested Fraser for possession of 24 heroin pills.
Later, after being convicted, he would spend several months in prison.
In an interview at Pace London,
Vyner explained that she had been a close friend of Fraser’s goddaughter. She
first met Fraser in the late 1970s, when he took the two young women and
Malcolm McLaren to an Adam Ant concert. Through her interaction with the art
dealer during the last years of his life, along with the many interviews with
his friends and associates she did for her book (which takes the form of an
oral-history collection of reminiscences), she acquired a deep knowledge of his
personal history. “Believe it or not, since his death, not a lot has been
written about the influence of Robert’s gallery or its legacy,” Vyner told me.
“When he died, there wasn’t even an obituary in any of the major British
newspapers.”
Robert Fraser was the son of
Lionel Fraser, a wealthy banker whose father had worked as a butler for Harry
Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges, the London department store. A
self-made man, Lionel Fraser was highly respected and, in 1945, King George VI
bestowed upon him a distinguished civilian honor. Robert, his older brother
Nicholas, and their older sister, Janet, who died in young adulthood, grew up
in a privileged setting. Their mother, Cynthia, was a devout follower of
Christian Science, that 19th century strain of religious-philosophical
kookiness that holds that illness is merely an illusion (to be cured by prayer,
not doctors). In the years before World War II, Robert’s parents traveled to
Paris, where they gallery-hopped and enjoyed seeing works by such modern
artists as Paul Cézanne, Georges Rouault, Chaim Soutine, Pablo Picasso, and
Paul Klee.
As youngsters, Nicholas and
Robert attended a Christian Science school. Both went on to Eton, the legendary
prep school whose graduates regularly became captains of British industry and
government grandees. In Vyner’s book, the American industrialist and art
collector J. Paul Getty, who became one of Robert’s friends and gallery
customers, observes, “Robert transcended class, very much in a Sixties way. But
somehow he got sent to Eton, which is what formed him to a great extent. […]
It’s still one of the best places to learn arrogance.”
Nicholas Fraser explained to
Vyner that it was his parents’ “strong Puritan ethic” and “strict humorless
attitude to life” that shaped his younger brother more than their belief in
Christian Science and “gave him something to kick against.” But as many of the
speakers in Groovy Bob point out, Robert both embraced tradition and rejected
it. At Eton, he hated sports and loved learning about art. He also became fully
aware of his homosexuality.
After graduating from Eton,
Robert headed off to Uganda, where, in the waning days of empire, he served in
the King’s African Rifles. There, he made time for partying with colonial
administrators and even, it was later rumored, a brief fling with his sergeant
major, a skilled boxer named Idi Amin. After his Africa stint, Fraser made his
way to the United States, where he spent a few years in New York and Los
Angeles meeting artists and other key art world figures. He became friends with
such artists as Dine, Dennis Hopper, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman. In
Groovy Bob, the art historian John Richardson, who also became Fraser’s friend,
remembers meeting him around 1960 and says, “My impression of him was [of
someone] bright, attractive, rather glamorous, not totally to be trusted, on
the make, very elegant, fun to be with, a bit secretive.”
Returning to England in 1962,
at the age of 25, he opened his gallery with a show of drawings by the French
modernist Jean Dubuffet, whose graffiti-inspired images shook up London’s staid
art scene. During a roller coaster ride of parties, exhibitions, sexcapades and
drugfests that unfolded throughout that decade, Fraser presented the work of
such artists as Richard Lindner, Henri Michaux, Bacon, Blake, Hamilton, Robert
Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Paolozzi, Patrick Caulfield, Bruce Conner, Hans
Bellmer, Bridget Riley, Haworth, Warhol, Dine, and many others.
In a dialog with Vyner that
appears in the current exhibition’s catalog, Clarke says the show tries to
capture “the buzz that Robert had.” He notes, “To many people he was grand, to
others groovy. Certainly, he had one foot in the 1960s, but also one foot very
much back in the 1950s.” Clarke adds that, “[d]espite all his wildness,” Fraser
“was drawn to that more formal era,” even if he played a big part in ushering
in a subsequent decade whose attitudes and aspirations seemed to obliterate those
that had come before them.
In late 1966, on the occasion
of a show of Dine’s works, Fraser’s gallery was served a summons under an
antiquated vagrancy law that prohibited the public display of “obscene”
material. As a statement issued by the gallery at that time indicated, 21 of
Dine’s drawings, “some of them showing various parts of the human body, were
seized by the police,” along with copies of the exhibition’s catalog. A court
later ruled the exhibition, but not the confiscated artworks, to have been
indecent and charged Fraser a fine. Referring to the British government’s
heavy-handedness, he sent a telegram to Dine in the U.S. It stated, “REGINA
VERSUS VAGINA. LOVE, ROBERT.”
Referring to Fraser’s lifestyle
at his home in London’s Mayfair district, the former Whitechapel Art Gallery
curator Bryan Robertson, who died in 2002, told Vyner in Groovy Bob, “[T]hey
were after Robert for drugs, quite simply.” Robertson called the Dine indecency
affair “one of those silly little vendettas that went on in the Sixties.”
In early 1967 came the drug
bust at Richards’s home, but before Fraser was convicted and sent to prison, he
art directed the famous cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band, whose unusual, three-dimensional collage concept had been devised by the
then husband-and-wife team of Hamilton and Haworth. The album’s cover image was
shot by the photographer Michael Cooper. Later that year, when the art dealer
was in jail, Cooper sent him an encouraging telegram. It said, in part, “MY DEAR
ROBERT ALL IS NOT BLACK […] REMEMBER THEY NAILED JESUS TO THE CROSS….”
A Strong, Sweet Smell of
Incense features a recreation of Fraser’s workspace in his original gallery,
complete with his modern, steel-and-glass desk, which is surrounded by
artworks. Among others, they include Haworth’s “Cowboy” (1964), a life-size
figure made of kapok and unbleached calico; Derek Boshier’s oil-on-canvas
abstraction, “Sam Spade” (1966); Barker’s “Art Box 1” (1966), made of
chrome-plated steel, chrome-plated bronze and Vitrolite; and Blake’s “Drum
Majorette” (1959), a tailor’s dummy decorated with military medals. Other works
on view in the gallery include Blake’s hand-painted drum from the Sgt. Pepper’s
album cover; a selection of Oldenburg’s large-scale electric plugs and outlets,
made of cardboard; Paolozzi’s abstract-bronze sculptures from the late 1950s
and mid-1960s; Bacon’s oil-on-canvas “Portrait of John Edwards” (1988); and
Basquiat’s oil-on-canvas portrait, “ROB’T FRAZER” (1984).
Also on view are Hamilton’s
lithograph made from a collage of newspaper articles describing the 1967 drug
bust at Richards’ house (“Swingeing London ’67,” 1967–68) along with two
paintings in different media that the artist produced using a photo from one of
those press reports. That photo shows Fraser and Jagger in the back of a car,
handcuffed together at the wrists and holding up their hands to shield their
faces from reporters’ cameras. Hamilton’s common title for these works is both
a pun on “Swinging London” and a reference to a remark Fraser’s sentencing
judge made when he noted that the punishment he was meting out was notably
“swingeing,” meaning severe, daunting or extreme.
The exhibition also features a
large vitrine packed with photographs, documents and printed items. Among them
are letters and telegrams from artists pleading for overdue payments. Others
show how chummy Fraser was with many of his art-buying customers.
After going into a short period
of receivership, since Fraser had not paid many of his creditors, his Duke Street
gallery plowed ahead, presenting exhibitions by such artists as Barker,
Caulfield, Blake, Haworth, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In mid-1969, though,
it mounted its last show, a selection of works by a group of American Pop
artists. Fraser’s consumption of booze and drugs was still going strong, and he
had become interested in Tantric art. He left England and spent the early 1970s
in India, then returned several years later to operate as a private art dealer
and to visit New York and savor its gritty charms. In 1983, he again opened a
London gallery, which became an overseas showcase for the work of such young
New Yorkers as Haring and Basquiat
At the time of his first
gallery’s closing, Fraser had told one art critic, “There has never been any
desire on the part of the English people for new things.” In Groovy Bob, the
artist Jann Haworth says, “[W]hen he did open the second gallery, where was
everybody? He was still putting on very interesting shows, but it was almost a
non-event.” Haworth partly blames “the mood of the times,” which were then
dominated by Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism. Nevertheless, Fraser’s cutting
edge sensibility was still at work, as when, for example, he persuaded London’s
Victoria and Albert Museum to acquire works by Jamie Reid, the punk-graphics
creator who had designed the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks record-album
cover, but the ailing art dealer’s involvement in his gallery declined along
with his health.
For McLaren, who is quoted in
Vyner’s book, Fraser had always been “right in the center of it, always wearing
those ubiquitous sunglasses” and looking “spookily cool.” Perhaps, as the lost
aura the artworks, letters and documents on display in A Strong, Sweet Smell of
Incense try to evoke, and as, overall, the exhibition suggests, McLaren was
right when he added that the decade of the 1960s “was not a pragmatic era” but
rather “the exact opposite — it was a romantic era.” The Robert Fraser he knew,
he noted, had been “part of a moment in pop culture, part of a time which could
afford to have such romantic figures….” After all, by the time McLaren, who
died four years ago, made those comments, the international art world had long
since become a totally corporatized behemoth, one whose swingeing hype had
decisively doused the flames of insouciance and replaced grooviness with greed.