"Roth", a novel by Glyn Hughes; The Art Market, Telling It Like It Is

A great novel about an abstract expressionist landscape painter: "It counts the human cost of much of our valued art, recalling other charismatic figures such as Pollock, Bomberg, Picasso and Rembrandt".

"Roth despised photographs. Compared with paintings and drawings they were flat and illusory, because no analysis of structure went into making them; they were seizures of appearances, merely."

****

"Roth was, indeed, aware of how the Station Gallery had 'done very well' for him...

Between 1949 and 1951 Roth went through one of his transformations, from precisely observed landscapes to abstract expressionism with affinities to some of the St Ives painters, especially Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton. A wilder element was close to the maverick David Bomberg. At the time, all these artists were still on the fringes of popular taste. The St Ives painters had seemed to Roth then, as they appeared to him now, the most pregnant and forceful British painters of the century, when considered as a school. Looking over their shoulders, Roth caught his first glimpse of New York abstract expressionism....

Artists then were naive about the long-term contract, which was a new method of 'handling' painters. Paying him a retainer fee and taking in consignments of Roth's output, the Station held back many pictures from exhibitions while they worked on influential people who would raise the value...The gallery got academics to buy cheaply or to accept gifts of minor canvasses, which were really bribes for them to write monographs; to create a myth about the artist and raise his worth.

Rosblum, arriving from Paris after the liberation, had learned from Left Bank intellectuals the value of friends conversing and writing about one another. Society figures were encouraged to become collectors and then to name-drop 'Leonard Roth' into the ears of gossip-writers. With meals, flattery and small gifts of paintings, young, aspiring journalists were easily corrupted...

The marketing strategy for Roth contrasted him with the escapist landscape artists who were satisfying a reaction against the war...the Station dropped most of the romantic painters, one by one, slowly, without informing them. It ruthlessly, although not openly, denigrated its erstwhile stable in order to promote Roth".

ROTH, a novel by Glyn Hughes

Simon and Schuster, 1992.

ISBN 0 671 71764 2

Sceptre, 1993. ISBN 0 340 58601 X

High time this novel was brought back into print!

Some of Glyn Hughes' own drawings and paintings