In 2017, the artist Anthony Green had a show at the Royal Academy in London called The Life and Death of Miss Dupont. This included The Fur Coat: Hazana, a life-sized portrait of the Frenchwoman in mink; a cut-out painting of the same, dressed as a young bride and flying ceilingwards on a wire; others of her, middle-aged and naked, lying on a pink satin eiderdown; studio photographs of Miss Dupont;and pieces of official paperwork recording her birth, marriage and death.
In the middle of the gallery was a cut-glass powder bowl from her bedroom. This contained its late owner’s ashes. “The show is a son’s tribute to his mum,” said Green, whose mother had been born Marie Madeleine Dupont. “At last, she’s in the Royal Academy.”
The show was, variously, emblematic of his work. For half a century, Green, who has died aged 83, had mined the domestic details of his life for subjects to paint. Visitors to the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition waited eagerly for the latest despatches from Green’s cottage in Little Eversden, Cambridgeshire, or from his mother’s flat in Lissenden Mansions, north London. It was a world of lustre tiles, tasselled curtains and heavily patterned carpets. Also, of sex.
Part of the fabric of life chez Green was an uxurious fondness for his wife, the artist Mary Cozens-Walker, whom he had met as a student at the Slade School of Fine Art and married in 1961. Many of Green’s paintings showed the pair embracing on sofas, or lying naked in their post-coital bed. “I took the decision when I came out of art school that I didn’t want to do abstract painting,” he said in 2000. “I had just fallen in love with a beautiful girl. I suppose sex was the thing that got me painting in this way.”
This frank celebration of intimacy was often compared with Stanley Spencer’s at Cookham, although works such as The Chinese Lantern (1974) were less analytical than Spencer’s. Green’s revelations might have seemed at first glance happily cartoonish, but they were also unsettling: figures spreadeagled on beds, painted from vertiginous angles that felt voyeuristic. Whether his eye for petit-bourgeois bad taste was affectionate or mocking was difficult to say.
This yearning for a domestic bliss that inevitably ended as tinged with darkness carried echoes of Green’s childhood. His father, Frederick, was, in his son’s telling, an ugly drunk. After 18 years of unhappy marriage, Madeleine left him in 1951, and their 12-year-old son was sent as a boarder to Highgate school in north London. “My world was destroyed,” Green recalled.
Encouraged to paint by the school’s art teacher, the Welsh landscapist Kyffin Williams, Green went to the Slade from 1956 to 1960, winning the Tonks drawing prize and a French government bursary to study in Paris. His early paintings show the influence of his time there, and an exposure to the expressionism of Chaïm Soutine.
It was a decade later, after two years spent in the US on a Harkness fellowship, that he hit upon what was to become a second trademark, evident from the work in The Life and Death of Miss Dupont. Reasoning that he did not dream in rectangles, Green saw no reason other than convention that he should continue to paint in them.
Mr Green Looking at his Wife, shown in the RA’s 2017 Summer Exhibition, is triangular; Montbretia, The Reflection (2009) is square, but with its right-hand edge cut into the shape of Green’s own profile. The self-portrait J’admire Beaucoup Marcel, Mais Reflexion Faite, Je Préfère Ma Femme (1991-2016) shows the artist sitting in a room whose shattered shape makes it seem as though it has exploded. The canvas of Trimming, October (1994), of Green and his wife pruning their garden, had been cut into a two-dimensional topiary. “I let the subject dictate the shape,” Green said.
Many of these departures seemed like gimmicks, but they had art history on their side. The exploded room of J’admire Beaucoup Marcel played games with cubism, fragmenting the frame rather than the picture plane. The green carpeted swirls of My Mother Alone in Her Dining Room (1975-76) made a distant nod to Matisse, the profiled edge of Montbretia to the surrealism of Magritte. Critics, though, tended to be unimpressed.
If Green had legion admirers at the RA Summer Exhibition, and in countries such as Japan, the contemporary art establishment could be savage in its dismissal of what it saw as a facetious conservatism in his work. This was not helped by his own description of it as being “rather like a strip cartoon of people’s lives”, and a friendship with the artist Beryl Cook.
A tutor at the RA Schools recalled citing Green as an influence at his interview at the Chelsea School of Art in the 1990s. The result was a horrified silence, broken by one member of the panel, kinder than the rest, saying, “I suppose you can have him as a guilty pleasure, but who do you really like?” Suggestions that a show of Green’s work transfer from Tokyo to London were met, the artist remembered, with a frosty refusal.
The culmination of his eccentric practice was a vast millennium project, called Resurrection, which toured the cathedrals of England in 2000. Three metres high by six long and three years in the making, Green dubbed this “a pictorial sculpture”. It was part Balzacian human comedy, part personal psychodrama. Where Spencer’s treatment of the resurrection had had the people of Cookham raised incorruptible, Green’s saw the extended Green and Dupont families wafted to paradise.
Sex was, as ever, no hindrance to this. In one passage, his mother emerges naked from a clock; in another, Green and his wife float upwards from a tent in which they have clearly been lying together. Touchingly, the artist’s delinquent father, 30 years dead, was also admitted to heaven. “By the time you grow up you come to the realisation we are all imperfect,” Green said. “So Dad is on his way to paradise with everyone else.”
Critics inevitably compared the work with Spencer’s The Resurrection, Cookham, but its maker saw different antecedents. “It really comes from Sassetta, Van Eyck and Giotto,” Green told the Sunday Times in 1999. “Particularly Giotto. I see myself as belonging to the great tradition of painting, and that is the moment when people reach for their cutlasses and say, ‘Cut the bastard down, he’s too big for his boots.’”
He was the Royal Academician par excellence, clubbable, garrulous and kind to students and visitors. Elected RA in 1977, he was made a trustee of the Academy in 2000, having narrowly missed out on election to its presidency.
Mary died in 2020. Green is survived by their daughters, Kate and Lucy.
• Anthony Eric Sandall Green, artist, born 30 September 1939; died 14 February 2023
