Albert Adams: Finding His Time

Greg Thorpe

Greg Thorpe explains how the life and work of the South African artist Albert Adams (1929–2006) is well worth an exploration in his feature highlighting key pieces of Adams’ artistic output housed in the University of Salford Art Collection. Adams employed Expressionist tactics to resist the apartheid system, communicating abhorrence for the state-sanctioned violence of the regime with a simultaneous love for humanity.

The University of Salford Art Collection is home to a significant collection of works by the South African artist Albert Adams (1929–2006) as well as a compelling trove of his personal artefacts and studio items stored in its archives. This important body of artworks and life materials was partly purchased and partly bequeathed due to the generosity of Adams’ surviving life partner Edward ‘Ted’ Glennon, and the national charity Art Fund.

The landing of these works in Salford in the first place is thanks to a decades-long friendship between Adams and the Salford artist, Harold Riley. Adams and Riley had been students at the Slade School of Fine Art together in the 1950s, a time when British art was deeply and thrillingly in flux, and when a small number of artists from British colonies were able to take advantage of scholarships or placement programmes that brought them to the UK to further their art education in a new context. Adams was one of this generation of artists.

The experience of coming to London was of particular significance for him as a mixed race Indian and African citizen of South Africa, where he had been formally rejected from studying art at university level due to the white supremist apartheid system formalised into South African law. This state rejection, along with Adams’ sense of identity and keen critical eye on the subjugation of citizens under any and all types of state violence, combined to form a rich stream of creative resistance and response in his work that lasted his entire life, crossing disciplines, eras and continents.

There are two prevailing images of Adams I have in mind whenever I think of him. The first of these is the triumphant return he made from London to South Africa to exhibit two milestone triptych paintings at a Cape Town gallery. His mentor, the Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokochka, recorded a rousing speech for the launch, praising Adams’ commitment to look unflinchingly at human misery. His triptychs are entitled simply South Africa 1958–59 (Deposition) (click here to view) and South Africa 1959. The first of these shows a scene of Christ being removed from the cross following his crucifixion, a subject often visited in Renaissance art. In Adams’ hands the scene is an unusual and poignant staging, the figures are in close cropped view, insisting somehow on their shared humanity. It is a moment following extreme violence, presented to South Africa in a period of state terror, a reminder of the central image of suffering in the Christian world. It is a plea to and for humanity. His reference to the crucifixion as a kind of crucible for human cruelty recurred throughout his life’s work.

The second of the triptychs (click here to view) has been posited as a kind of missing link between Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and Dumile Femi’s African Guernica (1967), expressing and foreshadowing upheaval and death, this time in less metaphorical terms. There is a choreography of violence in the images as bodies are twisted and upended in a destructive tableau. The work represents Adams at his most upfront and politically forthright, forming a kind of Expressionist takedown of an amoral racist governmental system and the violence it both encouraged and depended upon in maintaining racial divisions.

The second image of Adams that I have in mind is of the solitary artist working away for long hours inside his studio, a room on an upper storey of the house in Delancey Street, Camden Town, very far from Cape Town, where he lived with his partner Ted. For forty years Adams resided and made his work there. He was a deeply focused and productive practitioner, a skilled technician and experimental thinker, a chef and teacher, a storyteller and a Londoner, and one half of a mixed-race same-sex couple who must have witnessed both unimaginable social progress and failings occurring all around them, upon which Adams’ work generated both visceral reflection and emotional insights all the way into the twenty-first century.

My previous writing on Adams has offered an introductory approach to his life and art (see ‘From South Africa to the Slade: Repositioning Albert Adams’ on Art UK), and a more eclectic look into his works and artefacts, attempting some kind of material approach and speculating on possible subtexts or recurrent themes in his practice. (see ‘The Filofax and the Ape: Material approaches to the work of Albert Adams’ for the University of Salford Art Collection) In this article I want to focus on a few of Adams’ works on paper with a view to encouraging those who can to see some of this work in person in Salford, an experience that inevitably draws the viewer more deeply into Adam’s form, technique, and life story.

An online symposium in March this year, Albert Adams: In Context, brought together an impressive team of researchers, critics and curators who each took a different approach to this eclectic elusive artist. The talks were recorded for posterity and can be viewed online. They cover Adams’ work in painting, drawing, portraiture, and printmaking, as well as etching, at which Adams is considered a master. His work is considered in terms of style and influence, as well as post-colonial and queer contexts. The pieces in The Albert Adams Room span many decades of work and are a great introduction to his field of interest and skill, featuring portraiture and figure studies, spanning carceral and other political subjects, and rendered in graphite, drypoint etching and aquatint. Here are a few from a 40+ year timespan.

Adams created numerous self-portraits over many years, often producing images and versions of his face that are unrecognisable from era to era. It’s tempting to consider the self-portraits as emerging from two artistic intents – a changing vision of himself as an individual that he desired to reckon with aesthetically, politically, and perhaps also spiritually; and as a means to explore new artistic techniques on a subject that was known and within his grasp. The truth is likely some kind of synthesis of the two, and consequently what they produce over time is a record of both skill and self-interpretation. This early work from 1956 is touchingly youthful and probably one of his earliest etchings. Already the simple use of hatching and clear space shows a deft skill at communicating expression.

Twenty years on and the subject’s face is not detailed but deliberately obscured, a common tactic in Adams’ work. The obfuscated face seems like an act of violence itself and so the subject of the work itself may be violence. What appears to be an ear locates the head of the sitter, but note how the shadow isn’t generated by the physical form itself but seems to come from outside, to bleed in like ink. The pulling in of the limbs suggests a defence against pain, again from outside or in we cannot know, but the discomfort and implicit anguish might be considered a trademark of Adam’s style. The use of white space and half-completed lines give a sense of the work being unfinished which in turn communicates a kind of urgency, some type of energy that only burns for a short time. Adams is usually described as an Expressionist artist and this was certainly his main mode of influence, as his teachers and personal papers attest to. Works such as this encapsulate that school of art expertly, bringing forms and images that can’t be fully explained by light or perspective, but rather by emotion and intent.

The spectacle of the jail, the prison, the concentration or internment camp is a setting for several of Adams’ works. Often the more complex the setting the simpler and more brutal its expression. Rarely since the South Africa triptychs does he use colour in pursuit of imagery related to political violence or suffering, rather he returns to the barest bones of his materials, here a mono-coloured etching with aquatint. The ambiguity of this figure is what is troubling and interesting. Not even a person, merely a ‘figure’, a spectre almost. Is The Prisoner victim or perpetrator? Such binaries fall apart in Adams’ hands as so many of his images represent the impossibility of justice from the state. The figure may be stalking another person, or peering in fearful anticipation of a punishment seen in their near future. Either way its eerie appearance contributes to carceral dehumanisation and makes the viewer somehow troublingly complicit in their fate.

Inside the Old Fire Station building at the University of Salford, The Albert Adams Room houses a permanent but rotating selection of Adams’ work. A visit to The Albert Adams Room makes for a compelling experience and many visitors will no doubt leave wondering why Adams is not better known and more widely discussed. Fortunately, the University of Salford Art Collection has been engaged in a lively project to remedy this neglect. As well as the Symposium mentioned above, and Adams’ inclusion on Art UK, Dr Alice Correia, Research Fellow in Art History, has produced a great essay about one of the typically complex and arresting works that has its home there, titled Celebration Head, produced by Adams in 2003. Her essay links the visceral and curiously titled image to our contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, while Danny Morrell’s essay Room for Albert Adams gives a broad overview of particular works and contexts.

In getting closer to Adams’ work, I have sensed an artist about to find his time. The political chaos of our times, the critical tools of intersectionality, and the hope of decolonising art and art history, all combine to offer a setting in which Adams’ work might be reignited. How might we move towards a major Adams retrospective, artistic scholarships in his name, more writing and deeper exploration of his work? I’m excited to both find out, and to participate.

Greg Thorpe is a curator and creative producer, and former staff writer for the Fourdrinier.

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The Albert Adams collection was purchased and gifted with Art Fund support, made possible with the generosity of Edward Glennon.