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Kiff was involved in the selection of paintings and was keen to
be involved with the design of the book. He would have been pleased
with the result, although the cover does not do justice to the strength
of his work either in terms of content or formal rigour. Kiff became
unwell in the course of this book’s preparation and died a
year later in January 2000 of cancer, aged only 65. His absence
is felt in all aspects of the book but it is nonetheless a fitting
tribute to his life’s work, and reproduces many works for the
first time. The Marlborough ‘Retrospectives’ of painting
and graphic work were also a fitting tribute and both catalogues
were finely produced.
I met Ken Kiff at Fischer Fine Art in 1988 and interviewed him
for an article for Studio International. Soon after Studio ceased
publication following the death of its owner Dr Arthur M Sackler,
so the interview was never published except in a revised form as
an obituary last year, when Studio was relaunched as an e-journal.
Lambirth notes that unlike much art produced these days at speed,
Kiff’s work was a product of slowness. I do remember spending
a long time writing my piece on his work, out of respect for the
individual and the processes he employed.
This new publication is the first illustrated monograph and thus
enables one to appreciate the great variety of work and the range
of emotions. ‘Man Cutting Image’, 1964, in pastel and
then the same title in tempera on board, 1965–71, show Kiff’s
ability to sustain concentration for a theme or image over many
years. The works are at once mysterious, moving and wonderful. They
are also sad. The childlike character of so many works helps to
illuminate ordinary experiences into a magical celebration. ‘’That
painting has to do with processes of healing and integration, that
may entail a recovery of the child in oneself – such convictions
came to Kiff very much at first hand, even if reinforced by his
later Jungian analysis’.1
Kiff was reserved and serious and his work often created the same
effect as Paul Klee. Ken Kiff stated, ‘The work of art is above
all a process of creation; it is never experienced as a mere product’.
And Klee in a similar vein, ‘Nothing can be rushed. It must
grow, it should grow of itself, and if the time ever comes for that
work – then so much the better’.2 Central to Kiff’s
art, is a series of 200 works (25 are reproduced in Lambirth’s
book) – acrylic on paper – entitled ‘The Sequence’.
Timothy Hyman states,
The Sequence unites all possibilities of Kiff’s art: vivid
immediacy and intimacy, yet each image conveying a sense of the
artist watching the picture take shape, reflecting on its meaning
within the whole...The Sequence, especially, affirms the fluidity
and depth of painted language, making most alternative media appear
brittle and one-dimensional.3
Kiff’s amorphous characters have an accidental quality and
yet they have a soundness of being, a sureness in relation to the
picture space. This is achieved by Kiff’s rigorous draughtsmanship
and organisation of the picture plane. Among the most impressive
works are the etchings and drypoints of the 1990s: ‘Walking
Past Rocks and Flowers’, 1995, (five states), ‘Clown’,
1996–99, and ‘Ladder’, 1994. Some of Kiff’s
titles are very amusing: ‘Fishing one Sunday, he caught Old
Nick’,4 shows a fabulous, bemused mythological beast on the
end of a fishing line. ‘The Selection Committee’s Fear
of the Irrational’5 of the 1980s is a brilliant parody of those
who could not perhaps accommodate Kiff’s imagery in the artworld.
Of printmaking Kiff stated,
Respect for the medium, I suppose that’s the obvious starting-point.
Some artists want to explore a number of mediums, others don’t.
Those who do are prepared to be led, to some extent by the medium.
It does feel, in stroking a stone with litho-pencil, or cutting
into copper or wood, as though you’re ‘listening to
what the wood, or copper or stone is saying’; it may sound
fanciful, but I think printers do tend to feel that. That is a
kind of deep response to print-making.6
From 1991 until October 1993 Kiff was Artist in Residence at the
National Gallery, London. There, he enjoyed access to the collections.
Neil McGregor, who organised the outstanding, ‘Encounters’,
exhibition in 2000 (see review on this website) referred to Kiff’s
studies after Patenier and Pisanello as constituting ‘a revisiting
of a painted world which I thought I knew and which I now see to
be even richer than I had guessed’.6 Kiff’s response to
the Old Masters, the dialogue between modern and classical was,
as one might expect, highly personal. He began some 50 new works
during his residency (plus monoprints and notebook drawings make
100). Lambirth states, ‘Kiff’s attitude of mind, essentially
modernist, brought a breath of fresh air into the historic galleries’.
Kiff was particularly interested in Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’
and van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’, but he also looked at
works by Rubens, Duccio, Pisanello, Bellini and others. The charcoal
and pastel works ‘After Patenier’, 1992–93, are exceptional
and dramatic works. Kiff himself felt with hindsight that he had
‘tried too hard’ at the National Gallery and that he had
paid too high a price in terms of nervous strain and was extremely
critical of them. Many remained unfinished, and yet works such as
‘From Crivelli’ (unfinished), 1992–93 and ‘Religious
Presence’ (after Duccio, ‘The Transfiguration’) 1992–93,
possess a most dramatic and passionate response both to the external
world of art and the inner turmoil of the artist’s own perceptions.
‘Boat and Cave’, 1999, and ‘Green Hill’, 1997–99,
are superb late works:
This whole cluster of new work has a spareness, a transparency,
and a delicacy rare in contemporary painting. Yet its very quality
of evanescence is counterweighed by the importance of the blacks.
Kiff himself described black as ‘the nothingness behind things’,
but this should not be taken as a negative value. In fact, it
can be extremely positive. The blacks that constitute in these
recent pictures a yawning cave-mouth could signify the entry to
another world (it could be Hades, but not necessarily so), yet
the whole concept of being on a threshold is a potentially enriching
one.7
Kiff's enduring optimism was expressed when he stated,
I believe that in the 21st century painting can flower wonderfully.
Perhaps the "signs" can flower, into eloquence, into
colour, into types of realism, maybe. If I’m getting anywhere
near, in the work I have put together as a whole, to what I believe
in, then I’m some part of that flowering of signs… Really
great paintings of one’s own period speak the deepest sense,
and they lead one into the deep spaces beyond the compromised
type of painting. The compromised painters may be very good, and
they may look very solid. But if you’ve become addicted to
what’s beyond that, what can you do? – You’ll do
things which are like straws in the wind. Only they may look stronger,
later.8
References
1 Hyman, Timothy. ‘To each, his unknown demon’, Andrew
Lambirth, Ken Kiff. Times Literary Supplement, London; March 29
2002: 19.
2 Lambirth, Andrew. Ken Kiff. Thames and Hudson, London; 2002: 70.
3 Hyman, op. cit: 19.
4 Lambirth, op. cit: 95.
5 Ibid: 84.
6 Ken Kiff, ibid: 167–168, 178.
7 Ibid: 198.
8 Ibid: 209.
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