[N.B All images reproduced in this and subsequent sections are copyright and reproduced courtesy The Estate of Ken Kiff and Hales London and New York. ©The Estate of Ken Kiff. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. No image should be reproduced in any form without the permission of the Estate of Ken Kiff Ltd].

Ken Kiff The poet Mayakovsky invites the sun to tea

Questions of category

Just why Kiff’s work is hard to categorise can be illustrated by looking at Timothy Hyman’s Beyond the Formalist Canon: Visionaries, Dreamers, Outsiders, Chapter Four of his book The World Made New: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century (Thames and Hudson 2016). In it Kiff is grouped with Ensor, Kubin, Rabindranath Tagore, Jack Yeats, Henry Darger, and Jacob Lawrence. Artists Hyman sees as modern symbolists who challenge ‘exclusive orthodoxies, whether academic or formalist’. I suspect this says more about Hyman’s idiosyncratic view of twentieth century figurative painting than about Kiff’s work, given possible comparisons with the work of the American artsit Romare Bearden or the Indian artist Arpita Singh; that is to the work of practitioners of various forms of expanded and inclusive “realisms” that marry the possibilities of early modern Western painting with older cultural traditions. An approach that Kiff would summarise as a ‘flexible realism’ that interacts with ‘the life inside one and outside’, so that ‘more of reality can be rediscovered, reclaimed, brought into a new wholeness’. (A view Hyman refers to, but then simply ignores). Rather than locate Kiff’s work in relation to dialogues between the different arts and the cross-cultural concerns that run through a significant proportion of twentieth century figurative painting, Hyman choses to include Kiff in a chapter dealing with “visionaries”, “dreamers”, “symbolists”, and “outsiders”, without ever making clear to which he sees Kiff as belonging. None the less, despite this Hyman’s categories, if suitably qualified, can serve to indicate something of Kiff’s orientation and concerns.

Kiff might be called a “dreamer”, for example, in the specific sense used by the Archetypal psychologist and writer James Hillman, who notes: ‘… it is in the dream that the dreamer himself performs as one image among others and where it can legitimately be shown that the dreamer is in the image rather than the image in the dreamer’. (Archetypal Psychology Putnam, Conn., Spring Publications, Inc. 2004, p.18). Hillman’s observation would suggest we might identify Kiff as both maker of, and frequent participant in, his own images, an observation seemingly confirmed by the work itself. However, if they are a form of conscious dreaming-through-painting, they also reflect his careful attention to ‘other voices of thought’, since they become an intrapsychic conversation that includes elements from history, culture, religion and nature. Kiff is certainly no solitary fantasist.

But is he a “visionary”? Cecil Collins, perhaps the best known twentieth-century English visionary painter, aligned himself with the spiritual concerns of the poet Kathleen Raine, whose work he sometimes illustrated. Spiritual concerns that are, in my view, pretty much the antithesis of Kiff’s down-to earth psychic inclusivity. If Kiff is a visionary, then it’s of a very different kind to Collins. Following James Hillman again, we might link Kiff’s dreaming-through-painting to: ‘“soul-making”, taking the phrase from the poets William Blake and, particularly, John Keats: ‘Call the world if you please, “The vale of soul-making”. Then you will find out the use of the world’. (Ibid. p. 38). Kiff’s vision then, unlike that of Collins’, is very much this-worldly, terrestrial, grounded in an expanded sense of dailiness, of the everyday. That expanded sense is, then, the basis of his radicalism and of the alternative, “pagan”, and inclusive notion of a shared modernity championed by a poet such as John Burnside.

Is Kiff in any sense an “outsider”? As a Royal Academician, an Associate Artist at the National Gallery, and someone who showed work in major galleries internationally, this hardly seems an appropriate categorisation. However, in one particular sense it points to an aspect of Kiff’s position if we take up Lynne Cooke’s suggestion that we substitute the term “outlier” for “outsider”. This, she believes, properly acknowledges that some artists gain ‘recognition by means at variance with expected channels and protocols’. (Lynne Cooke Boundary Trouble: Navigating Margin and Mainstream in Lynne Cooke (ed.) Outliers and American Vanguard Art Chicago, University of Chicago Press 2018, p. 4.) In Cooke’s very specific sense Kiff could reasonably be seen as an “outlier”, since his work gained recognition largely despite being seen by many in the art world as at variance with the dominant late Modernist theories of painting at the time of his emergence into art world consciousness.

To sum up, Kiff could possibly be categorised as a visionary, a dreamer, and an outlier, but only along the highly specific lines indicated above. All of which discussion I see as ultimately pointing to the fact that his radicalism lies in his rejection of a Modernist culture underwritten by possessive individualism; a culture predicated on the exclusivity built into the notion of a monolithic “heroic” ego and on the Cartesian splitting off of notions of self from other, of body from mind, of the imaginal from the perceptual, of the spiritual from the material, and of the so-called “inner” from the so called “outer”. By contrast, I see Kiff as embracing a plural and relational notion of self, one that requires our awareness of multiplicity at all levels.      

Some background

Ken Kiff was born in Dagenham in 1935. His father’s death at the beginning of the war resulted in family difficulties that, along with the consequences of nocturnal nervous attacks, complicated his childhood. Despite this he did well at school, studied at Hornsey School of Art, married, raised a family and, in time, won an international reputation for his work. Sadly Kiff died in 2001, aged only sixty-five. His work was then largely ignored by the art world at large until 2018, when the major exhibition Ken Kiff, The Sequence again attracted attention to its visual complexity, its variety, richness and extended emotional reach. Subsequent smaller shows suggest a growing interest in his work.

I first wrote about Kiff’s work in 1983 and subsequently, working closely with him, organised and edited the book Ken Kiff’s Sequence, published in 1998. It was clear to me then that his images were as unusual in the orientation of the mentality behind them as they were compelling, but it has taken me a further quarter-century to fully grasp their quiet but fundamental radicalism. While neither “politically” nor “socially” engaged in the sense these terms are usually deployed, I believe Kiff’s images none-the-less speak to some of the most pressing issues of our time.

Ken Kiff’s radicalism

The artist Jeremy Deller has argued that any good artist is ‘socially engaged’, presumably on the basis that he or she cannot but be critically engaged with a shared culture. It’s in this context that we might understand the art historian and critic Norbert Lynton acknowledgement that Ken Kiff’s historical and aesthetic understanding was much subtler than his own and those who shared his professions. It was this that enabled Kiff to see that early modern painting offered a radically new form of material thinking, the implications of which Chagall had grasped before any of his contemporaries. (A thinking that would be increasingly marginalised or ignored after c.1955). Kiff in turn recognised the importance of Chagall’s balancing of an old and more or less universal language predicated on figurative imagery against the socially distancing effect of Cubism’s formal radicalism. This balancing served as the basis of his own particular form of radical social engagement An insight that allowed him to take up Chagall’s distinction between Cubism’s concern with ‘a surface covered with forms in a certain order’ and: ‘a surface covered with representations of things (objects, animals, human beings) in a certain order in which logic and illustration have no importance. The visual effect of the composition is what is paramount. (Quoted in Norbert Lynton ‘Chagall “over the Roofs of the World”’ in Susan Compton (ed). Chagall London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1985: pp. 20-21). The result is images with a plurality of connections, attachments and relationships that resonate both with our multiple senses of self, yet maintain clear connections with the mundane and every-day.

Ken Kiff Woman in sky.

Kiff rejected Modernist critics’ promotion of the idea of the separateness and exclusivity of each of the arts in their “advanced” forms in favour of an inclusive approach to the making of images. Reading Yves Bonnefoy’s poetry and art writing helped shape his work, as did his friendship with Martha Kapos – a poet, art historian and a colleague at Chelsea School of Art. I will draw on both writers here. However, I will also draw on the Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, whose work Kiff almost certainly did not known. If this requires some justification, it must be that many of the folk tales in Michael Foss’ Folk Tales of the British Isles, for which Kiff made images, are Irish, and so are part of Ní Dhomhnaill’s own heritage. My reasoning, however, is less literal. They share a poetic orientation, a shared concern with an saol eile. This becomes apparent if you view Kiff’s Woman and Sky (1999) in the light of John Montague’s translation of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem Cailleach (Hag). Doing so alerted me to the fact that, despite their very real differences, they share a broadly Jungian view of folklore and an interest in the Feminine, particularly the transformative image of the spéirbhean (literally ‘sky woman’, but more usually ‘woman of great beauty or goddess’). This figure is the topic of poems by Ní Dhomhnaill such as Primavera and of her prose essay Mis and Dubh Ruis: A Parable of Psychic Transformation. The spéirbhean is, I suggest, as good a name as any for the numinous female figure present in a great many of Kiff’s paintings, drawings and prints.

I also see “linguistic” parallels. Ní Dhomhnaill is concerned to revivify the poetic possibilities of the Irish language in the face of the ubiquity of English in post-colonial Ireland. Kiff wanted to revivify painting by returning to the radical “linguistic” possibilities inherent in early modern painting at a time when these were increasing seen as passé. The animating impulse is, for both artists, ultimately psychosocial; a desire to use the psychic resources revealed by immersion in their chosen “language” so as to help us achieve a degree of detachment from our unconscious activity and, rather than repress it, help incorporate it into our lives. In this context their attention to folklore, understood as a very old way of thinking that helps link past and present, provides the testimonial aspect necessary to any empathetic imagination. In Kiff’s work this testimonial imagination, possibly fed by Picasso’s reinterpretation of major paintings in the Western canon in his later work, enabled Kiff to refigure iconography from Western and other traditions from the viewpoint of an ensemble sense of self. A viewpoint initially animated by synergies between insights obtained during sessions with a psychoanalyst and his experience of painting and taken up in the explorations of The Sequence. A viewpoint further confirmed and deepened by his reading of, and making images to accompany, British and Irish folk tales.

An aside: heads resting sideways…

Ken Kiff Desolation (Sequence 101)

Thinking about Kiff’s paintings in the context of Ní Dhomhnaill’s work may also provide an insight into an otherwise enigmatic aspect of his imagery. When he was asked about the ‘heads resting sideways’ in many of his paintings and prints by Martha Kapos, he replied that: ‘… the “music” of the painting has kind of firmed up at that point into that particular key, or concentration of themes; that each colour, form, edge or whatever will be speaking, and at that point the speaking is coming right up into the concentrated form of a head’. A response that is explicit, but only at the level of the process of composition. It does not help the viewer who wonders how such “heads” serve as one element among others in Kiff’s figuration. Ní Dhomhnaill’s discussion of dinnsheanchas (loosely “place lore”) however, suggests another way in which we might understand the poetics of these heads without diminishing Kiff’s focus on their ‘concentration of themes’.

Dinnsheanchas, as a way of knowing, bypasses distinctions between nature and culture in order to facilitate an intimate and reciprocal relationship between place and community. Thus Ní Dhomhnaill refers to a relative who, when mentioning a local landmark, almost invariably tells her that it is the petrified body of a giant. This focusing of the qualities of place through personification parallels Kiff’s sense of the music of a painting that becomes a focused “speaking”, one that then takes the concentrated form of a head. Such a head might be said to personify dinnsheanchas; not literally in the sense of a specific body of local knowledge, but as signifying the sense of intense reciprocity between humans and the landscapes that ground them that such knowledge enacts. This same sense of focused “placed-ness” can also be linked to Bonefoy’s notion of ‘true place’ as that which appears in moments of epiphany and oneness. (See John T. Naughton The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1984, p.79).

(The references to the work of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and to Yves Bonnefoy above and throughout this essay refer to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Collected Essays Dublin, New Island, 2005 and to John T. Naughton The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Listening at the confluence

…there is “a fundamental unity to everything related to the making of images”.

                        John T. Norton quoting Yves Bonnefoy

Ken Kiff Talking with a psycho-analyst: night sky (Sequence 113)

In Kiff’s painting Talking with a psycho-analyst: night sky (S. 113), two seated figures face each other across a space where two worlds meet. On the left a daylight world cluttered with tools and a cast of strange persona; on the right a twilight world attuned to the shrouded figure of the psychoanalyst. Against the implication of the title, the analyst’s stance suggests that it is he who is speaking, while the figure on the blue chair and those around him listen. The overall suggestion is of a conversational give-and-take that might stand for the orientation of The Sequence as a whole. Kiff’s concern with a “musical thinking’ is closely related to that of Yves Bonnefoy, who quotes St. Bernard’s aphorism: ‘If you want to see, listen’. The poet and polymath Erin Kavanagh notes that: ‘The process of drawing is a close study in attention. The process of writing poetry, a close study in listening’. She adds:

‘In paying close attention, making oneself become still, there arises a connection between the artist and subject, a flow. It’s an intangible encounter that the artist then dresses with skill and humility. Such as where Shakespeare holds the essence consistently in mind, then plays with accidentals to confer meaning….This experience is commonly described most with music. That feeling where one is being played by the music and not the other way around. The foremind can separate off and, for brief bursts, observe itself locked in a dance, a copulation. The result being creation’. (Email communication with the author, 06.09.2019 in response to a request to clarify points made in the abstract for an unpublished paper ‘Spirituality and Culture: Portraits’).  

These linkages relate directly to the value Kiff placed on poetry, notably that of Rilke, Yeats, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and Vladimir Mayakovsky, the last the subject of two of Kiff’s paintings. Kiff particularly valued the poets Wallace Stevens, Yves Bonnefoy and Martha Kapos, who supported his view that the work of the poet and the painter is essentially the same. I reference poets, then, to indicate significant, and often neglected, aspects of Kiff’s work.

While Kiff’s work can be seen as aligned with innovative concepts in contemporary thought, it remains important to stress its poetic qualities, its musicality and psychic openness. This, in turn, requires us to be clear about his relationship to psychoanalysis. Kiff visited psychoanalysts to discuss aspects of his work and to address his often acute anxiety. He read Marie-Louise von Franz on folk tales and Freud’s The Question of Lay Analysis. We know he was prompted to start The Sequence because of things he’d discovered to exist through psychoanalysis also surfaced in pictorial images and dynamics. None-the-less, John Elderfield’s framing of Kiff’s work as ‘the charting of an obviously modern voyage of discovery into the primal interior of the imagination’ (quoted in Andrew Lambirth Ken Kiff London, Thames & Hudson, 2001, p. 98) is potentially misleading. Kiff worked with a “language” of imagery far older and more diverse than that of modern psychology and, when discussing his work, studiously avoided any suggestion of the “heroic discovery” that underpins the colonialist history of modern cartography (‘charting’) as part of what Ursula K. Le Guin calls ‘The Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero’. His painting and print-making is related to ‘dream-work’ in Bonnefoy’s sense, where the dream is a collective event shared by a multitude of persons/persona, but where dreaming and image-making remain distinct acts. It is perhaps more helpful to understand that, through the physical act of making images in all their visual musicality, Kiff imaginatively evokes the flowing-together of everyday life and that “other life”; one that, as Ní Dhomhnaill says, even the dogs in the streets of West Kerry know exists, and where a constant moving in and out of those two worlds is understood as entirely natural. Kiff worked precisely by attending to this constant flowing together of different worlds emerging through the making of an image, often over long periods of time. (Attending to a flowing together that, we should remind ourselves, has been considered entirely normal in most cultures and at most times by those concerned to gain a deeper understanding of the world). That attention enabled the emergence of Kiff’s works to evoke, not some ego-focused process of “heroic” personal discovery, but rather as an activity closer to that of a midwife, as a process of patiently accompanying the birth of an image over time.

Ken Kiff Sun, tree and lightning (pastel)