Boris Tietze: a Life in Art
- Anna Tietze
- Feb 17
- 14 min read
Updated: Feb 28
Boris Tietze (17/2/1928-15/2/2024), my father, died last year after a long life dedicated to art. From the earliest days he had felt that art was his vocation and, having completed his training in the 1950s, he was to devote the next 70 years of his life to teaching and practising in the fields of painting and sculpture, working up until just weeks before his death.
He was born in the Lancashire town of Chadderton, to parents of very modest means. Both encouraged his ambitions. When, around the age of 11, Boris decided that he was destined to become an artist, his mother accompanied him on trips to the local Manchester City Art Gallery and on one of these visits enquired on his behalf where they could find an art-materials supplier. She was given a recommendation (probably B. Wilson and sons of Oxford Road, Manchester). As an elderly man, Boris recalled still the young boy’s embarrassment at his mother doing this on his behalf, while gratefully acknowledging that having materials of his own to work with at home marked the beginning of a serious engagement with art.
An inspirational art teacher encouraged him at school, and his interest grew. By the age of 17 he had been accepted into the Manchester School of Art, the second oldest art school in the country and one which had sustained an excellent reputation since its establishment in the 1830s. But it was now 1945 and the war in Europe had just ended. For men of 18 and over, compulsory military service remained, so Boris spent only a first term at the art school before joining the army in February 1946.
War years
Military service involved a period of preliminary training in Britain and then a move to Germany where the Allied forces were occupying the towns and cities shattered by the war. It was an astonishing sight for an 18-year-old, even one accustomed to the war damage suffered over the previous 6 years by Manchester and its satellite towns. Many of the urban areas Boris travelled through in Germany’s British zone – Bielefeld, Hamburg among them - were devastated, though other towns – Badenhausen, Plön – retained their pre-war charm. Glückstadt, a northerly town on the Elbe river, retained many of its old buildings also and it was to this town that Boris was finally posted, to the cypher division of Royal Signals, Codes and Communications, where he was part of a group who de-coded messages (many of them to or from nearby Denmark) before passing them on to senior officers.
In off-duty periods he spent time at the local NAAFI (clubhouse of the Navy, Army and Air Force Institute), based just outside the town. A grand building with oak-panelled walls, this had probably once been an officers’ club for the German army. It was now occupied by the British – but in a back room, bizarrely, was German artist Hans Steinberg, who in a makeshift studio was quietly painting portraits of the new VIPS, the British officers. Boris asked if he could join Steinberg and began to work with him regularly in what now became their joint working space, with paints and some fine Whatman paper that his father sent him for the purpose from England.
The older Steinberg was a generous critic of the young man’s work and offered valuable guidance during this enforced break from art school. Together the two of them painted portraits, including portraits of each other, Steinberg’s of Boris travelling back to Britain with him when his military service ended. In 1951, Boris submitted to the Young Contemporaries art exhibition in London a watercolour study of a man’s head that he produced in the Glückstadt studio. It was seen on exhibition by Leonard Duke (1890-1971), the well-known collector of works on paper, who bought the work. Duke’s collection was exhibited at the South London Gallery shortly after, and parts of it presented to the gallery. It is not clear whether the Male Head was part of this exhibition and then gift.
By 1947, the compulsory military service was over. It had not been onerous, and it ended particularly happily at the end of that year with a short spell at the beautiful University of Göttingen where British ex-soldier-students were allowed to attend, free of charge, short courses in their subject areas, taught by British lecturers. Göttingen had been the first German university to re-open after the war and it was regarded as a test-ground for the British government’s ‘re-education’ policy for German universities, a policy designed to de-Nazify these institutions ideologically and at the same time make them more socially inclusive. Largely, this was an Allied effort designed for the German students who were now re-entering the university world, but there appears to have been, as an extra, a policy of exchanges between German and Allied institutions – Göttingen was ‘twinned’ with University College, London –which allowed for Boris and others to experience this prestigious university, if only briefly.
Student days
Back in Britain in 1948, Boris re-joined Manchester art school, starting his undergraduate training again from the beginning. Along with him were others who had completed post-war service, and still more who had seen active service. There were many women students too, including my mother. She and Boris had met when they had started at Manchester in 1945. She was now close to graduation, he was back at the beginning. But they resumed their friendship and would marry in 1949.
Boris’s own graduation came in 1951. His training had been wide-ranging and had included plenty of further work with painting, some of which was exhibited at Manchester’s Mid-Day Studios, a relatively short-lived private gallery opposite the Manchester City Art Gallery and a favourite haunt of L. S. Lowry in the immediate post-war years. But there was also at Manchester a dynamic sculpture department. Here one of Boris’s fellow-students was (Eric) Ian Hanson, a highly skilled sculptor and some years later (1977-92) to become Head of Studios at Madame Tussaud’s in London. Boris’s interests were always less commercially driven but in the final-year exams, it was his sculptural work that caught the attention of final examiners; he was awarded for it the Manchester Institution’s Heywood Medal for that year. The external examiner was a lecturer in sculpture from the University of London’s Slade School of Art who suggested that Boris should apply to the Slade to pursue graduate work. With the application accepted and a scholarship secured, my parents moved to London in 1952.
Boris’s Slade period lasted from 1952 to 1954 – a time during which Paula Rego studied at the School, along with many other distinguished British and overseas students. Lucien Freud was an occasional tutor, Reg Butler a lecturer in sculpture. This was the time of the Institute of Contemporary Art’s Unknown Political Prisoner competition in 1953, a competition won by Butler. Butler’s entry, and the others for this competition, exhibited at the Tate that year, revealed the directions now being taken by sculpture in this early post-war period. Work was tending to non-figuration and to increasingly pared-down forms, rendered in ‘industrial’ materials. Where it was figurative, highly abstracted facial features rendered figures anonymous and generic, symbols of a brave new mechanised world.
Teaching and public sculpture commissions
These movements towards abstraction would affect most aspiring professional artists in the coming decades, but for Boris the immediate question, on graduating from the Slade, was simply one of survival. Jobs were scarce and particularly so for art graduates, even in London. The next couple of years were filled with some bizarre short-term work placements, mostly entirely unrelated to his artistic training. One of them, however, involved working as a secretary to American artist, Hilaire Hiler (1898-1966). Hiler had spent the pre-war years in France before returning to America. His visit to Britain in the 1950s was only a short one and was connected to the exhibition of his work at the Mansard Gallery in 1955. Boris’s work with him involved designing publicity material and arranging meetings relating to this exhibition, as well as being a general factotum. It was inevitably a short-lived appointment. As it came to an end and other relevant posts dried up, he turned to an agency who found him at an art-teaching position at a local school.
For the next ten years, he taught with varying degrees of success at a series of secondary schools in Greater London and Kent – at Picardy (now Trinity Church of England School) in Belvedere, at Chislehurst County Secondary School in Edgebury, now demolished, and at Fort Pitt Technical School for Girls (now Fort Pitt Grammar School) in Chatham. The first two were challenging boys’ schools and constituted a baptism of fire for someone without any teacher training. At Picardy, he was advised to watch a highly-regarded teacher at a nearby school in Crayford and so met Paul Twine, who later made a reputation as painter of historic steam trains. At Chislehurst, the teaching experiences were as trying as they had been at Picardy but he had, at least, a good friend in fellow art-teacher Alan Lewis who later went on to develop New Clay, in recent years notably used by Aardman Animation Studios for the Wallace and Gromit productions.
The teaching in these early years was unrewarding, but some serious engagement with art emerged in the form of two public commissions in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The first, for The Basketball Players, came from the Coventry City Council Education Committee and was for a large sculpture to stand in the courtyard of their new Binley Park School (later Binley Park Comprehensive), opened in 1960.
We had no direct connection with Coventry at the time so this commission probably arose via a friend of my parents, architect Fred Roche, who would go on to be lead designer for Runcorn and Milton Keynes New Towns but who at the time was a schools architect for the Coventry area and probably the designer of Binley Park. Both the school and the sculpture, with their spartan modernist aesthetic, summed up the spirit of the time. At a very different time, in the 1990s, both were demolished.
A second commission came from Horne Bros men’s clothing company, who wanted a contemporary sculpture to mark the outside of their Castle House head office in King Street, Sheffield. This work, Vulcan, was commissioned in 1961 but was completed and mounted on site in 1962 or even 1963 since it appears, still in the process of being constructed, in a family photo of 1962. It took up a large part of our garden while it was being built and the smell and texture of fibre glass, and the resins used to bind it, formed an evocative part of my early childhood.
At approximately 8 feet in height, the Vulcan is a compelling landmark, and again, stylistically, very indicative of its time. One of the impressive features of the work, technically, is perhaps just how well it has aged over the past 60 years. Built over a metal armature, the light fibre-glass structure has darkened but this has only added to the figure’s power and presence. Around 2010, there were plans, as with the Coventry school, to demolish Castle House (and presumably the sculpture), but both remain in place for now. The sculpture’s future survival - in the short-term at least - has perhaps been helped by an excellent 2016 Guardian article on it and other pieces of public art by Rachel Cooke.
Focus on painting
After the 1960s, sculpture featured less in my father’s life and he concentrated increasingly on painting. There were occasional sculptural commissions still – some to private clients and one to commemorate the retired Principal of Wrexham’s Cartrefle Teacher Training College (later incorporated into Wrexham Glyndwr University) where he now worked – but it was painting that he dedicated himself to in his studio at home, painting that he exhibited, and largely painting that he sold to private buyers in the years ahead. Part of every day of his life was given over to work in his studio; along with the creation and development of a large garden at our converted farmhouse in Wales, it was his raison d’etre, his way of being in the world.
Therapeutic as it was, however, there is no doubt that painting in the 1970s had an emotionally restrictive quality. After the exuberance of the Pop Art experiment – and this was a genre my father never felt at home with – the era of radical abstraction was more solemn, and far more cerebral. References to the world and to the specifics of personal life disappeared almost completely and were replaced with the abstract marks and shapes believed to constitute a universal visual language. Under the influence of American Abstract Expressionists, or post-painterly abstractionists – or the earlier Op Art work of British artists like Bridget Riley – painting eschewed story-telling and allied itself instead to instrumental music, music without words. In this era, Boris produced such works as Flux and Interception.
I don’t remember his registering any criticism of this trend at the time – it was almost too powerful an orthodoxy to be questioned – but there is no doubt that as the trend toward radical abstraction passed, Boris worked with an increased energy on paintings that were now fully figurative and narrative in intent. The narrative in these works was not explicit, however – anything but. The world depicted was marked by a strangeness that was surreal and generally unsettling. But a focus on the world of human life and relationships was now always present.
The Sleep of Reason – the figurative paintings
Viewed as a whole, Boris Tietze’s post-abstract oeuvre is extremely homogeneous. Although he was a highly proficient draughtsman and painter/watercolourist in all subject areas, he returned obsessively to the theme of the human figure, viewed alone or in couples or groups. There are no landscapes or still-life works after the early years; everything is given over to human drama. Male and female figures, mostly adults, are pictured either in indoor settings, or against indeterminate backdrops. For a man whose other creative passion was the cultivation of gardens, it is notable that nature is almost entirely absent from the paintings. And this is largely because, unlike the gardening passion, painting did not serve the urge for picturesqueness and calm, but instead the confrontation of deep and generally unsettling emotions. Behind many of the paintings is a sense of unease – or at the very least a sense of puzzlement.
It is hardly surprising that in recent years he cited the Spanish artist Goya as an admired old master. The Goya of the etching/aquatint series Los Caprichos (1797-9) particularly comes to mind. This series of prints is generally described as a set of veiled satires on the politics and mores of the day, but at a more immediate level they are personal statements of angst, fear, embarrassment, insecurity and entrapment. They open with the plate loosely translated into English as The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters.
This image, assuming that the works serve as political critique, might be interpreted as a warning to those in society who dismissed the cultural importance of the Enlightenment. But it is surely also a warning about what lurks in the recesses of the unconscious in each individual. What do we become when we are not thoughtful and mentally alert? What hides behind our measured and cautious selves? Goya’s image, with its bat-like creatures bearing down on a figure cringing in self-defence, speaks of the fear of unreason.
As Boris Tietze returned to figurative work, he focused increasingly on a Goya-like world in which events are topsy-turvy, and relationships between figures hard to fathom. Sometimes, as in Korny Krispies, there is a mad gaiety to this, although with an undercurrent.
A female figure inexplicably dances with a brown paper packet on her head. She is alone in a room whose décor is vaguely reminiscent of the 50s or 60s – an oppressively patterned wallpaper, a lighted standard lamp, a white fur rug with snarling open-mouthed animal head still attached to it. The woman’s shoes suggest a party, but she is alone. Only the dead animal head makes contact with the viewer. The mood is simultaneously exuberant and disquieting.
Likewise in The Rapture, whose central figure – and title – suggests ecstasy but in which there is again a powerful undercurrent of anxiety. Is this mad rapture?
As so often, in this image blurred facial features create ambiguity and the emphasis instead is on ‘body language’ – head flung back, back supported by two flanking figures, arms grasped to keep the body in check. Something similar is seen in Solo, where a male figure, trance-like, dances alone.
This work is an unusual case of the male figure embodying freedom and spontaneity. Generally it is the female figures that exude energy and confidence, or unreason. As in Korny Krispies or The Rapture, in works such as Friends or Two Girls in Petticoats, the female figures are exuberant, even dionysiac.
An odd feature of this contrast is the clothing and apparent age of the two sexes. Male figures appear old and are generally dressed formally in jacket and tie; women, younger, are frequently in the ‘petticoats’ of the title – some state of undress. They are uninhibited, unashamedly exposed, overtly ‘loose’, while the male figures are metaphorically ‘buttoned up’ in their formal work-wear. This is strikingly seen in The Jetty where, despite a rare out-of-doors setting, a group of elderly men gather together in suits, one holding a newspaper, another a briefcase. Facial expressions are again largely obscured but bodily postures tell of tiredness, some resignation. There is some conspiratorial closeness between the two central figures, but the intimacy is held in check by the overall sense of restraint, signalled by the clothing.
The suited male figure becomes particularly poignant in works such as The Hold-up or Jolly Japes where the man’s age and his formal dress seem to mark him out as an object for humiliation.
In The Hold-up, the slumped male figure in jacket and tie contrasts strikingly with the three female figures and particularly with the gesticulating, semi-clad young woman behind; in Jolly Japes, a humiliation that is anything but jolly befalls the suited man in the armchair as a young girl in school uniform tweaks his tie.
In a different vein, though no less moving, is the beautiful Old Man and Child where the formally-dressed elderly man leans forward to stare at the baby, his hands loosely cradling it. The contrast in clothing is again mobilized for expressive effect, the infant partially covered in a loose white wrap, the man heavily dressed in buttoned shirt, tie and jacket.
These images were the fruit of a brooding on old age as well as of perennial fears of embarrassment and powerlessness. But the mood could be lighter, and even sweet or whimsical, as in Lydia, Angels and Putti or The White Horse.
The stylistic principles remain the same in these works – a predominantly cool tonality with a grey base and only small touches of brighter colour, elongated figures filling much of the front plane and establishing a slightly etiolated upward pull, and an ever-present conspicuous brushwork. This conspicuous marking of the surface increased as the artist aged and his eyesight deteriorated, but it was essentially always there, in a dislike of overt ‘finish’. A loose fretwork of brushmarks was always sought for, giving the images a strongly tactile as well as visual dimension, and increasing their sense of openness – in Lydia, a lack of definition that adds to the sweetness and vagueness of the image, in Angels and Putti, an openness that enhances the sense of the heavenward-floating bodies.
The artist’s dislike of finish could often take an obsessive form. Works close to completion might be suddenly, savagely, re-thought or abandoned altogether and put to one side. In many cases, scribbled white chalk markings indicated the direction of new compositional ideas – but as time ran out and the very elderly artist approached the end of his life, these ideas could not always be realized. One work – Girl with Rabbit – was completed in a large version.
The theme was then reworked, with the same title, on a smaller scale. This smaller version of Girl with Rabbit was completed also, but then revised. Chalk markings on the canvas reveal thoughts about slight adjustments of poses and positions, and above all betray the reluctance to see the image finished. Under these chalk markings, however, still clearly visible, is one of the most charming studies in humorous mode: as in the large version, an Alice-type figure meets a fully-dressed rabbit in a drawing-room. Some knitting lies abandoned on the floor. A pot-plant sits on an ornate stand behind. Girl and rabbit approach each other quizzically. Reason has given way to unreason. But in this work of a very old man whose deepest feelings had been transmuted into painting for so many years, human life and relationships are explored in a mood that is tender and humorous, if ultimately baffled.
Many of these paintings – the more Goya-esque, as well as the more lyrical ones – were exhibited over the years, at exhibitions in venues across the North West and Wales (including the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts, selected Oriel galleries, the Welsh Eisteddfords, the Royal Cambrian Academy, the North Wales Open in Mold, the University of Glamorgan, and Ffin y Parc) as well as overseas, in the US and South Africa. A major contact with the public was via the Group 75 exhibition group which was founded in 1975 by Margaret Tietze and toured for over 25 years. But the artist rarely exhibited more than one or two at a time since his working process was painstakingly slow, held up by his perfectionism and an ever-present desire to re-work. It was something of a triumph that a number of the works were sold over the years and have entered collections in Britain and Europe. His studio is now silent, but the works that remain there – finished and unfinished – are an enduring testament to a life lived in art.
(Note: all works oil on canvas. Dimensions provided where possible)
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