by Located on a street off London’s Park Lane, the Michael Werner Gallery is the epitome of wealthy art world elegance: housed in a Georgian house, so discreet that a passerby would never know it was there. It really shouldn’t be a surprise to find the late Don Van Vliet’s paintings in this setting: Michael Werner has been his gallerist since the early ’80s, when Van Vliet stopped calling himself Captain Beefheart and abandoned music entirely to devote himself to the visual. . art – and yet it is. The paintings in his first London exhibition in decades seem somehow at odds with his surroundings.
In part, this is because they are visibly a product of the California wilderness (for a time, Van Vliet lived and worked in the Mojave Desert). Depictions of wild animals and cacti abound, his paintings seem increasingly overwhelmed by his surroundings: later works are full of blank spaces, as if bleached by blinding sunlight. It’s partly because they seem so frenetic and untutored: wild brushstrokes, thick impastoes, paint applied to the canvas straight from the tube. But it’s mainly because, name change or not, they are obviously the work of Captain Beefheart, one of the truly legendary rock figures of the ’60s and ’70s.
The titles often correspond to their old songs or lyrics: anyone who knows the track listing of their 1969 masterpiece, Trout Mask Replica, will recognize the name China Pig, while Crow Dance a Panther and The Drazy Hoops are taken from lines from Ice Cream for Crow and The Dirigible respectively. Even when they don’t, they sound like they should: Dream Sloth, Full Grown Babble, Bird With Cotton Shadow. And, like his music, which was inspired by blues and free jazz but never really sounded much like either of them or anything else in pop history, it’s a work that people have clearly loved. difficult to categorize.
Reading art magazine articles about his painting, you are struck by the feeling that critics are wildly throwing comparisons at them in the hope that one of them will stick: Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, expressionism, primitivism , outsider art. “Well, this is definitely not outsider art,” says Gordon VeneKlasen, managing partner of the Michael Werner gallery. “Because outsider art implies that someone is doing naïve work that is interesting simply because of the way they do it. Don was not naive in any way. He knew the history of art from the beginning. I talked to him a lot, sometimes two or three hours a day on the phone, and there was nothing random in anything I did, in any word that came out of his mouth or in any thought. It was really precise. Everything was carefully chosen. And I always felt that the same thing happened with paintings.”
In a sense, the story of how Captain Beefheart, avant-garde rock legend, became Don Van Vliet, visual artist, begins long before he adopted his famous pseudonym and formed the first incarnation of the Magic Band. As a child he was a sculpting prodigy: he won awards, appeared on television creating animal sculptures and, at least by his account – Van Vliet was rarely the most reliable witness to the story of his own life – he was offered a scholarship to study art in Europe at the age of 13, which his parents forced him to reject, claiming that art was “queer.”
He continued to paint throughout his musical career (his work was used on album covers and was the subject of an exhibition in Liverpool in 1972), but you can see why he became overshadowed by music. At the time of Trout Mask Replica, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band sounded absolutely extraordinary. Fifty-four years after its release, it remains almost invariably the most challenging listen on any list of the greatest albums of all time, a record on which each instrument seems to play in a universe of its own, with only the most tangential relationship to each. other. To its detractors, it barely qualifies as music. For his devotees, it was a work of unparalleled and unprecedented genius. “If there has been anything in the history of popular music that could be described as a work of art… then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work,” suggested John Peel. John Lydon called it his “confirmation”: “From then on,” he said, “there was room for everything.”
Among his fans was the East German artist AR Penck, represented by Michael Werner. When he defected to the west in 1980, VeneKlasen says, “he kept saying, you’ve got to find Don Van Vliet, you’ve got to find Don Van Vliet, this is the artist you need to find. Don was his true hero.”
Penck’s suggestion presented a problem, even after Werner saw Van Vliet’s paintings and was impressed enough to propose to represent him. “Now it seems very normal for someone to have two careers,” says VeneKlasen, “but at that time, in the 80s, you couldn’t be a musician and a painter, it was considered a joke. “There was a seriousness about creating art and creating music was something totally different.”
It is unclear who suggested that Van Vliet abandon music entirely, abandon the name Captain Beefheart, and concentrate on painting. One story says that Werner and Penck approached him with the idea, another suggests it was his wife Janet, a third maintains that it was entirely Van Vliet’s initiative, driven by the fact that no record label was willing to shell out enough money for a continuation. to 1982’s Ice Cream for Crow, which, as usual with Captain Beefheart, failed to translate ecstatic reviews into sales. But if it was someone else’s idea, he didn’t need much persuasion. He was, by all indications, tired and discouraged by his musical career: he had already pulled out of a planned tour; Hardship had forced him and his wife to move into a trailer previously owned by his mother. “The music business had screwed him up pretty badly, so he decided that the music business hadn’t been very kind to him anyway and he decided to quit completely and become a painter,” VeneKlasen says. “He wasn’t a bitter man, but he sure was bitter about the music industry.”
It’s tempting to wonder if there were other factors in his decision to leave music. Van Vliet’s relationship with his fellow musicians was often strained. More than one former Magic Band member has described him as “tyrannical”; Former guitarist Zoot Horn Rollo’s book Lunar Notes describes life in the Magic Band as absolute misery: broke, practically starving (they subsisted on a cup of soy a day) and subject to “psychological warfare” by their leader. which occasionally turned into physical violence. .
The most charitable interpretation is that Van Vliet had a singular artistic vision, involving incredibly complex and demanding music, which he was determined to achieve at all costs. But, as VeneKlasen points out, a singular artistic vision is easier to pursue if you’re the only one pursuing it. “I think he was incredibly controlling, but [the music] It involved other people. And, as she grew up, she didn’t really like people. I visited him once in Eureka, California; he basically he lived in the middle of nowhere. “I think painting was a lot more exciting for him because it was just him.”
But despite Van Vliet’s commitment to his career change, there were problems. Encouraging Van Vliet to leave California could be a struggle: VeneKlasen tried in vain to get him to come to New York, but was met with the response that “there’s so much human skin in the air there” (Van Vliet also memorably dismissed the city). as “a bowl of underpants”). His first shows were packed with Beefheart fans: “People were like, ‘Okay, so you talked to Don on the phone, so your proximity to him is…’” says VeneKlasen, “almost like he was a sacred figure.” ”, but the artistic establishment was disdainful. “It was very, very difficult. Jack Lane, a famous museum director, had an exhibition of Don at the MoMA in San Francisco around 1986, due to his own passion for him and his work, and he was almost fired. Because everyone said ‘this is not an artist, this is a musician who doodles’. Only in the last 10 years, sadly after his death, have we seen a change, and really through the eyes of other artists, not curators. I’ve talked to a lot of painters who look at Don’s work all the time. [German abstract painter] Charline von Heyl told me that she looks at Don’s work every morning. “If you went to see a curator at the Tate or anywhere else, they would just roll their eyes, but if you asked the artist they respected, they would be completely surprised.”
Van Vliet continued working until his death from complications of multiple sclerosis in 2010. As his illness progressed, the gallery built him a contraption that would allow him to paint from an armchair, but he eventually switched to drawing. He never returned to music. “He was really fierce and uncompromising,” says VeneKlasen. “He did exactly what he wanted and that was it. It was a real product of a time in California, when bombs were exploding and roads were being built. I mean, he told me a story where he said he was a vacuum cleaner salesman for a while, and he said he sold a vacuum cleaner to Aldous Huxley!
He laughs and then, recalling Van Vliet’s penchant for self-mythologizing and his often tenuous relationship with the truth, offers a nuance. “I didn’t verify it. You should probably look and see where Aldous Huxley lived in that time period. But as a story about California at the time, I thought it was very good. It’s like Brave New World and it’s just weird. “California was weird.”
• Don Van Vliet: Standing on One Hand is at the Michael Werner Gallery in London until February 17.
