[www.bbc.co.uk]

[www.artinliverpool.com]

[www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk]


"As we say in England, it can get a bit trainspottery"

Good find. Thanks for posting

Keep On Rolling

Marianne Faithfull’s journey to redemption through art
Russell Jenkins, April 20 2012



Marianne Faithfull acknowledged today that she was “practically destroyed” by the police drugs raid on the country home of Rolling Stone Keith Richards which famously featured the naked girl in a fur rug.
She was reflecting on how she has learnt over the years to live with the dark side of her early life through art ahead of an exhibition at Tate Liverpool, entitled Innocence and Experience, for which she has acted as curator.
A striking collage of press cuttings about the raid on the country home Redlands in June, 1967, by the pop artist Richard Hamilton, called Swingeing London 67, is one of the collection’s centrepieces. A copy, which shows her lover Mick Jagger and Richards in handcuffs, now hangs in the singer’s dining room.
Speaking in the second-floor gallery overlooking Liverpool Bay, she said that the fallout from the drugs bust “practically destroyed” her at the time.
“I will never, ever, feel right about that,” she said. “I will always feel it was a terrible injustice and that it should never have happened.”
She hailed the famous Times editorial, written by William Rees Mogg, about breaking a butterfly wing over a wheel as saving “Mick and Keith, but it could not save me. I was the slut”.
She added: “To have that picture in my dining room, looking at it while I am eating my duck a l’orange with peas and parsnips, puts it all into perspective. [Looking at the images each day] means I learn to live more easily with these events. It is not a shock or painful. It is art.”
The ensuing decade saw Faithfull descend into the gutter as a hopeless drug addict, living on a wall in Soho in the early 1970s, before reclaiming her life as a singer with the acclaimed album Broken English in 1979.
The works she selected for the exhibition represent a meditation on her artistic influences.
They celebrate the artistic renaissance of the 1960s but do not shy away from the dark side of her later life, or her fascination with the edgier side of human nature and perverse eroticism.
It features artists from the New York photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who captured her in 1976 vamping on a balcony in a Yves St Laurent print dress at a society party, to Francis Bacon, Balthus, William Blake, Marlene Dumas and Lucien Freud.
Faithfull was helped by John Dunbar, her first husband, who went on to found the Indica, an important gallery in 1960s London where John Lennon famously first met Yoko One.
The exhibition includes Bacon’s 1955 Study for Portrait ll, a stark, oil-on-canvas portrait. She said she really liked Bacon as a person.
She explained that he stumbled across her in the early 1970s when she was living on a wall on Soho, an anorexic drug addict. He recognised the waif and told her: “Ah, Marianne, come to lunch.”
He took to the fish restaurant Wheelers and if he was disturbed by her wan appearance he did not show it. It was the start of a series of such lunches over the next two years.
“I wasn’t a jolly lunch date,” she recalls. “I was very sad.
“By 1977 or ‘78, after I got off the street and did Broken English, I started seeing more of Francis at the Chelsea Art Club and I started drinking. We had long, lovely boozy lunches and dinners.
“I will never forget his kindness and his discretion. He found me; I didn’t want to be found but with great delicacy, he helped me.”
Her revival as a singer is charted in the exhibition by a video shot by her friend, the late Derek Jarman, featuring three songs from the 1979 album.
The record company bosses, she recalls, thought they had commissioned an exploitative “tits and arse” video and were not pleased with the resulting arthouse film.
Sitting beside her former husband, Faithfull expounded her theory that the 1960s represented one of those rare flowerings of art and human spirit, mentioning Greek antiquity, Florentine art and the 18th century in the same breath.
She said: “It was a fantastic time. There were no barriers. Now, it is so either/or, either ballet or art or music or theatre. We did not have that. Everything went together and everything spilled over.”
These moments are fleeting and are swiftly followed by repression, she said.
“At the moment we are going through a terrible, terrible repression, really quite as bad as he 1930s and probably for similar reasons,” she said.
“It has been the military industrial complex against the individual and that is what is happening here. And people will rebel again.”

[www.thetimes.co.uk]

Lovely picture. Thanks

Keep On Rolling

an interesting coincidence - at her home and in Mick's apartment in Paris is hanging the same work by Richard Hamilton "Swingeing London 67".
Hamilton did several versions of that work, Marianne has this one

and I think Mick has this(they don't show the actual work in that Vogue article only say Hamilton's "Swingeing London 67" III. is hanging on the wall)



Swingeing London III. 1972;
[www.moma.org]

I've added some colors on this very well known one.

HMN
StonesCave