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| Adrian Henri | Paintings |
AndyRobertsMusic is pleased to present a selection of Adrian Henri's paintings with the consent of Catherine Marcangeli. Please note that these paintings are copyrighted. Where paintings are on public display we have added this information.
Adrian was equally at home working with both visual and poetic ideas and very often combined the two forms to create something unique in British Art.
PHOTO: Adrian Henri in the basement of his home in Liverpool (1962) along with icons of the sixties pop art culture (Omo packet) and the (both unfinished) 'Entry of Christ into Liverpool' and the 'Death of a Bird in the City'.
(photo credit: Cheniston Roland)
ENTRY OF CHRIST INTO LIVERPOOL (1962/64)
Painted between 1962 and 1964 this is Adrian's largest canvas. It is a homage to James Ensor's painting The Entry of Christ into Brussels (1889). The view is Lime Street in Liverpool, famous for St. Georges Hall, on the left of the painting, and Lime Street Railway Station on the right. Adrian changed and added figures during the time it took to paint the picture.
Adrian's picture contains some local friends and some of his heroes including; William Burroughs, Mark Rushton (friend and fellow art student), Heather Holden, Philip Jones Griffiths (Photographer - holding the camera), Norman Stevens (painter), Pete Brown (beat poet and lyricist), The Beatles, Norman Rowe (artist), Charlie Mingus (jazz player), Pete McCarroll (artist), James Ensor (as Christ), Alfred Jarry with Pere Ubu, Arthur Dooley (sculpture), Roger McGough, John Gorman (Scaffold), Charley Parker (jazz musician) and Mike Evans (Liverpool Scene musician and poet). PAINTING 1 (1972)
"This picture and others like it that I painted are about mortality - in the way that cut flowers die and meat is dead. Somehow or other they seem like opposites. Meat is heavy and bloody and the flowers I chose were things like narcissi and lilies of the valley, snowdrops - delicate spring flowers".
This and the other meat and flower pictures that Adrian Henri painted during early 1970 were much sharper-edged and smoother-surfaced than the earlier paintings of the same sublect - a response in part to the values of American photo-realism imbubed in a trip to New York in 1969.
(with acknowledgement to FRANK MILNER'S excellent book)
ADRIAN HENRI PAINTINGS 1953 - 1998 (ISBN: 1902700074)FLOWERS FOR LIVERPOOL (1989)
"I wasn't actually at Hillsborough but I was in Liverpool that weekend. At the end of that traumatic few days I was left with two abiding images. One was the sound of the Great George bell in the Anglican cathedral which rang on Sunday - once for each person who died on the Saturday. I ended up eventually writing a poem called The Bell which attempted to evoke that sensation in words. the other was the flowers at Anfield which led to this paiting called Flowers for Liverpool.
In a way it is quite an abstract painting. It is just a study in white and red with variations, like a painting by Whistler - conceived if in variations of colour. At the same time it is in a very emotionally - loaded subject - the football pitch at Anfield covered with flowers all of which are either wrapped in white paper or cellophane and in amongst them people were putting their scarves and hats and other kinds of souvenirs. So it was red for Liverpool and the white of the paper against the green of the ground.
That sort of public grief expressed in flowers laid out somewhere has now almost become - not a cliche - but a repeated image - after the shooting of the children in Scotland and obviously most spectacularly with Princess Diana's death. This was the first time I remember seeing this kind of mass public tribute of flowers".
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