Painting This article is more than 2 years oldObituaryMark Lancaster obituary
This article is more than 2 years oldBritish artist and stage designer who in the 1960s served as an emissary to London of New York paintingHad you been in the Gibbs Building at King’s College, Cambridge, one summer’s day in 1969, you might have come across a pair of English artists taking tea. The older was the Bloomsbury painter Duncan Grant, then 84. The younger, halfway through his tenure as the university’s first artist-in-residence, was Mark Lancaster, who has died aged 82.
It was, variously, an unexpected pairing. Lancaster, at the time, was painting works such as Cambridge Green, now in the Tate collection – resolutely modernist, grid-based acrylics, seemingly derived from American minimalism. The resemblance was not coincidental.
Five years earlier, while still a student at Newcastle University, Lancaster had gone to New York. While there, he had taken up an introduction from his teacher, the pop artist Richard Hamilton, to meet Andy Warhol. Warhol, captivated, offered the young Englishman both casual work at the Factory and an introduction to Henry Geldzahler, curator at the Metropolitan Museum.
Geldzahler, in turn, introduced Lancaster to the pantheon of new American painting: among others, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns. When he returned to Newcastle that September, it was with a first-hand familiarity with the New York art world that other English painters could only dream of.
This made his meeting with Grant all the more unlikely. Known for his portraits of Charleston habitués, Grant and his work were, by 1969, viewed by most young modernists as hopelessly outdated. The 30-year-old Lancaster’s invitation to tea had been prompted by the suite of murals that Grant had made for the rooms of King’s fabled bursar, John Maynard Keynes, in 1920.
Keynes and Grant had been lovers; art aside, Lancaster, also gay, had gone to New York “planning”, he said, “to get myself some sexual experience”. His curiosity about Grant was piqued in part by the older artist’s quasi-mythical reputation for open bisexuality. Lancaster’s own experience, as both an artist and a gay man, had been delayed by family circumstances.
Born in Holmfirth, West Yorkshire – the setting, as he liked to point out, for Last of the Summer Wine – Mark had been destined to go into the textile business, James Lancaster & Son, founded by his great-grandfather. After boarding at the Quaker Bootham school in York, he had worked for six years for his father, Charles, in the family mills at Mytholmbridge near Huddersfield, studying textile technology at the same time. It was his mother, Muriel (nee Roebuck), who encouraged his painting, leading to his signing up first at Newcastle, and then at the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham, Wiltshire.
By the time he left Newcastle, Lancaster was already showing at the Rowan gallery in London alongside artists such as Bridget Riley and Phillip King – hard-edged canvases that spoke of his time in New York. When, in 1972, he was offered a show at the Betty Parsons gallery in NYC, he returned and stayed until 1985, working as both assistant to Johns and resident set designer to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. From his studio on 14th Street, Lancaster also explored the gay world of pre-Aids Greenwich Village, favouring the nearby Ninth Circle bar patronised by William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.
In the Village, too, he painted the series of works called Vanessa Bell I-VIII, based on Grant’s circa 1917 portrait of his fellow Bloomsbury artist and lover. These portraits show an extraordinary understanding of Grant’s art, unpicking and re-weaving the brushwork and colour of the original into gestural compositions that are entirely of their day.
It was during a short return to Britain in the late 1980s that Lancaster heard of the death of his one-time mentor, Warhol. “I was kind of stunned,” he recalled in an interview in 2004. “The next day I decided I wanted to make some sort of painted ‘souvenir’ in memory of him. I thought of a soup can and went out to get one, to find that the design of the Campbell’s label had completely changed.”
Instead, he spent the next year making 200 small canvases based on Warhol’s Marilyn portraits. Fifty of these were shown at what was by now the Mayor Rowan gallery in 1988 under the collective title Post-Warhol Souvenirs. This was to be Lancaster’s last exhibition in Britain, and his last major show anywhere. In 1989, he returned to the US, first to Rhode Island and then to Florida.
Despite his obvious talents, this early retirement from professional painting means that his legacy is as a catalyst for other artists of his own generation, an emissary to London of New York painting. Curious, generous and formidably well read, Lancaster was, in this sense, among the most influential figures in the British art of his time.
He is survived by his husband, David Bolger, also an artist.
(Christopher Ronald) Mark Lancaster, artist, born 14 May 1938; died 30 April 2021
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