The Artist and the Spy: John Miller and John le Carré
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There is something immediately compelling in the encounter between John Miller and John le Carré: the painter who sought what lay beyond the visible world, and the novelist trained, both by profession and imagination, to distrust appearances. Miller turned towards light and colour in search of revelation, whilst le Carré approached the world with the wary attention of a man accustomed to concealed motives that disclose themselves only gradually. The spy may have found contradictions and exposed concealed truths behind an individual, but Miller preserved his mystery in his work. A mystery that we celebrate this month at 12 Bury Street. What follows is a personal account by John le Carré on his friend, the artist John Miller.
"It is a little strange to be introducing John Miller's work for the second time in eight vears Land, since I like to think of him as my good friend, you might suppose that i appointed myself something like his in-house writer or, worse still, his starry-eyed publicist.
In a sense, the reverse is true. I have always been a little embarrassed by the aura of sanctity conferred on John by his less critical admirers, and by the image, almost of the painter-monk, that has grown up around his name as his work advanced, not always flawlessly, to its present peak.
That Miller is a visionary painter as well as a figurative one is self-evident. But so, in one way or another, are most good painters. That he is constantly stretching for glimpses of the infinite is also true. So do most of us, whether we paint, pot, write, take photographs, or work humbly in an office and love our children. That is the common bit of us that Miller, like most good artists, strives to appeal to: but he is not alone in that, or remarkable, except that he has allowed this search to become rather more apparent than it is in some other painters - and at times, because he is cursed with a great verbal fluency to disguise his shyness - more apparent than I for one would wish.
But the trouble is, of course, Miller's restless mysticism is real. It does spread into everything he does, whether he is passing the time of day with the milkman, or embarking on yet another of his spiritual journeys, the last of which took him into the lower ranks of the Franciscan order and sadly, but as so often, firmly out again. The pilgrim in John is never defeated. If a path disappoints, he does not retreat, but picks up his staff and takes a different one, knowing that the mountain is still there, and there's nowhere to go but up. All that, for those who know John, is true. Nothing is trivial for him, nothing lazy, nothing that does not contain its paradox.
But the paths he takes are not always of the spirit, not by a long chalk, and his quarrels with his Maker have often been quite as noisy as his respect for Him. Miller is a painter first and last, and painters are nothing if they are not of the flesh. So when you start to look at these paintings, I hope you will also remember the pagan in Miller, and not be sweet-tongued (by him or anyone else) into thinking that, as with poor old Maradonna, it is God who is guiding his hand.
For what you see here is, quite simply, the summation of thirty years of work: a reduction, and at the same time a flowering, of everything that has gone before, in the work and in the man.
Every act of creation has an outside reality and an internal mystery. The outside reality of this particular generation of Miller's paintings will already be well known to his closer friends and admirers. The mystery will remain, 1 hope, a mystery. As Rene, his mother, slipped slowly into death, John became a prisoner in his studio, always on call, locked up with his past, his frustrations and desires, and of course with his obsession with the slow dying of the one woman he had loved and cared for all his life. Unlike most of us, his grief was without remorse. No guilts, no "if only's". The love between John and Rene had always been royally served and spoken for, and Rene, witty, wise and doughty to the end, was not hard to love.
But now this love was proceeding to its final consummation, and the painter's studio where John endured the final months became its chapel, its theatre - comic as well as tragic
- and its confinement. His only escape was to her bedside. His only escape from the bedside was to the studio. A telephone was installed and it became a time bomb. Visiting John in those days was like visiting a dozen men at once; the caged traveller, the anxious son, the impatient survivor, the celebrant, the despairing lover, the angry mourner.
The dreamer was grappling with reality, the realist was driving himself inwards towards the dream, the prisoner was staring out of his cell window. And that most ruthless opportunist who is in all of us - the artist - presided over all of these characters, taking the best from each, so that light remembered became love remembered, and life denied became life defiantly reached for, a voluptuous flight of the frustrated spirit. If living well is the best revenge, he seems to have thought, then let the painting do the living for him. Let it celebrate Rene's survival and his, let it speak for the loves to come and the journeys still to be made, let it look back at a past that in recent years had been too often circumscribed by Rene's need of him. And forward to the possibilities of a future set free by her departure.
Gone was the painter of eight years ago, still in search of his nineteenth-century connections. Gone the safe link to Victorian romanticism, with the hasty journeys to the obvious places - into the Cornish landscape of the old Newlyn painters, to Venice, Athens and the Palestine of Lear and Roberts. The daring force and vividness that had entered into Miller's landscapes by 1988 had already prepared us for that farewell.
But gone too was the mysterious human diffidence that till now had informed those landscapes, even while they were moving into an almost tropical lushness. Man, in Miller's work till here, has been invisible. The world he painted contained not a human figure or one stick of modernity. It was prepared, if for anyone, for the feet of ancient time. The unpleasing face of modern humanity was allowed to see, but not be seen. We were at best transitory guests in his sad and fragile paradise.
For a man so frankly fond of good company, this seemed a strange and unnaturally fastidious exclusion. Even at its most carnal, John's work seemed to be in the spell of a mysterious taboo, like questions the interviewer is not allowed to ask.
Now at last - explain it how you will - man has finally been permitted on to his stage.
Not man in motion, it is true. Not man in love, not yet, not man in his carnality, either; but rather, I think, man in waiting, glimpsed almost covertly, as through a chink in the door, a view granted to someone waiting to come in or get out. Is he in mourning? Is he in ecstasy?
Is he joining us or leaving us? Is he the most he can ever be, or is he at the brink of life, or left behind by it? Is he observing, or being observed? Is he standing at the door and knocking?
Has he been cast out, rejected, an orphan for the remainder of his days? Or is he - here's a gloriously irreverent thought for you - waiting to be picked up?
Whoever he is, he is certainly more than one of these things, and perhaps more than all of them. But please, I beg of you, don't accept my answers. And don't let John anywhere near you, or he'll give you twenty more. The answers to these pictures are no longer in the painter but in the beholder, and that's what good painting is about.
What will he do next? - perhaps you wonder, for this is clearly a series that has reached its goal. There I can answer you with certainty. Nothing that is easy, nothing that is safely within the circumference of his questing talent. Like the circumstances that inspired them, these pictures mark an end of one life and the beginning of another. The Miller who is setting out will offer us nought for our comfort. Or not unless life tells him to."
John le Carré on John Miller © le Carré Production 1990
A fully illustrated catalogue for John Miller: A Life in Colour can be viewed below.
All works are available to buy online and from our gallery in St. James's
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