History of England 1-6

The world of colour, so long occluded, found its greatest exponent in David Hockney. A true child of the grey moorland, he caught the rising sun and like a sunflower bent towards it. Coming to prominence in 1963, he went on to dominate the Sixties with paintings of swimming pools, beautiful men, sun and sea. In his paintings, colour and light, exuberant splashes and clean, crisp lines are composed in a manner that lifts the most cynical heart. In many ways, modern art had begun as an act of retreat rather than of advance. With the fashionable efflorescence of photography, it was widely predicted that figurative art would wither and perish. Yet the remarkable flourishing of art in the Sixties is best known for being shamelessly figurative in character, largely in its subverting of images familiar from popular consciousness. The ‘Situation’ exhibition in 1960 established a paradox: the primacy of all things American and the distinctiveness of all things British. The contributing artists were keen to identify with all things American, from ‘action paintings’ to Dacron suits.

But the American influence can be exaggerated. English artists did not follow the American lead in art any more than in politics. In fact, the relentless succession of stars and soup tins across the ocean found little favour in Britain. Even when they used such images, the instinct of the artists was to subvert rather than merely replicate. Peter Blake’s Self-Portrait with Badges (1961) embodied the paradox with charm and delicacy. A short and unprepossessing Englishman in middle age, standing in a suburban garden, looks flatly at the viewer, his clothes adorned with badges from America. His eyes seem to say: ‘I’m trying to look American. It isn’t working, is it?’

As much of this art reveals, the decade was increasingly exercised by the rapidly growing influence of psychotropic substances. Cannabis had been available for years, if you knew where to look. The houses and tenements of the West Indian community were widely supposed to be thick with resinous smoke, but like all such racial totems this was largely a myth. What cannot be denied is that by the mid-Sixties, a few hours of ‘ease’ was cheaper and more accessible than ever it had been before. However, cocaine was the toy only of the rich, heroin was scarcely heard of, and ‘magic mushroom’ could be found only in the less salubrious markets of the capital. To be sure, the pills known as ‘uppers’ and ‘downers’ were widely used, but they had been in circulation for years.

The peculiarly Sixties offering was lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. Its origins were innocent enough. When LSD was developed in the late Fifties, it was hailed in some quarters as balm for hurt minds. This reaction derived from LSD’s unique property among hallucinogens: it provoked what was called ‘synaesthesia’. While under the influence of ‘acid’, the subject found that his senses swapped their functions: sounds could be seen, smells heard. This was followed by a state in which the senses simply elided, leaving the subject in a state of whimsical ecstasy.

No less an authority than Aldous Huxley had praised its curative powers. More significantly still, Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, had tried acid and declared it beneficial, a remarkable endorsement from one understandably suspicious of altered states. The problem, as so often, was that the recreational user could never be sure that the acid he had bought was quite what it appeared. It was not long before acid was ‘cut’ with strychnine, producing a state of agitation and fury. Sometimes substitute hallucinogens were sold and these offered only horrible visions, lasting sometimes for days. LSD had sunk into the mire by the end of the decade, leaving little trace.

Like so many trends of the Sixties, this largely metropolitan habit scarcely grazed the consciousness of most people, yet the wider effect, as filtered through the arts, was incalculable. Michael English and Nigel Waymouth composed posters and album covers that at first recalled art nouveau, but which belonged in temper and in subject only to the Sixties. Wild images, extravagant lines, colours that refused to cooperate, swirled about and about within a fantastical vision that came to be known as ‘psychedelic’.

42

The new brutalism

Brandy apart, the prime minister himself did not indulge in mindaltering substances, though few could have blamed him. For three years, the government had been attempting to fulfil its social and strategic commitments while placating its creditors. It had even resorted to borrowing from the IMF, a humiliating position for a supposedly great power. Now there was nothing for it, it seemed, but to devalue the pound.