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Bette Spektorov - Wps
Bette Spektorov - Wps
Bette Spektorov - Wps
BETTE SPEKTOROV
is certainly true of the art of Bette Spektorov (b. 1939), an almost unknown English
painter stubbornly working within the tradition of modernism despite the latter's
father fled from the Soviet Union as a refugee after initially supporting the
painting. Putting aside her desire to attend art school, she studied history at Oxford
University and the history of art at the Courtauld Institute. Inspired by a talk given
by Ad Reinhardt in London, she determined to visit the United States. In the late
1960s she spent two years there during which time she undertook an MA course in
fine art at Hunter College, City University of New York, where her tutors included
Robert Morris and Tony Smith. At that time she was painting large-scale
abstractions akin to the work of Kandinsky. The paintings of Joan Miró and Arshile
Gorky were also important to her as a student. At present she earns a living by
teaching the history of art at Middlesex Polytechnic. [She has now retired from
teaching and moved to Lincolnshire.] In spite of the demands of the latter, her
fashionable in recent years. Seldom, however, have the objects to which it has been
applied deserved it. In Spektorov's case the word, for once, is perfectly apt: her
paintings, her colours ravish the eyes. Colours have a special significance for her
and regularly fill her thoughts. She has read colour theory of course but finds it
Acrylic pigments and pastels combine to generate hot, exotic crimsons, violets,
purples, turquoises, yellows, ochres, acid pinks and greens. (More recently she has
in either a dry, scumbled fashion or in a more fluid, direct way. It is the excess of her
combining elevations and aerial views) and imprecision in the depiction of objects
Spektorov's touchstones), they are expressive without being expressionist. They also
steer a judicious middle course between the two poles of gesture and geometry.
Colour could easily have run riot and undermined form and structure, but
force field of a pinball machine (interestingly, as a student Spektorov was once set a
project to design a pinball 'symbolic of life'). In some paintings diagonal lines criss-
cross the picture plane in relation, as in the case of Franz Kline, to the rectangular
format of the support. Other pictures feature curvilinear forms reminiscent of the
styles of Rococo, Art Nouveau and Art Deco. In spite of these links with other art,
Spektorov's originality and power of synthesis ensure that her work is never merely
derivative.
Although eminently humane, this particular series of paintings ignores the human
miniature or from images of the Zen monasteries of Japan. Illusionism and detailed
naturalism are not however Spektorov's goals. Painting for her, as for Matisse, is an
artificial construction not a copy of Nature. Truth is not to be found in the recording
Spektorov has rendered a chill Scottish vista (in the 1970s she painted a lot in
Scotland) in terms of her palette of colours, it can end up looking like the coast of
constant drive towards flatness and pattern. We are never allowed to forget that
what hangs before us on the wall is a material object coated with colours arranged
in a certain order, an artefact bearing the traces of human labour. Painting for
Spektorov is a painful, sporadic struggle - many failures are discarded along the
way - but thankfully even those of her pictures that have been reworked many times
As in the work of Seurat and Howard Hodgkin, paint often bleeds across the
thick rectangular surrounds that 'frame' her images. (Frames in fact she finds
problematical. Since they mark the division between reality and art they are
necessarily ambivalent.) The 'picture within the picture' device (a doubling of the
basic format) increases the viewer's sense of distance. Although still open to the
gaze, the paintings become more secretive. Oblongs within plan-like green
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the self in order to discover something more universal. Landscape provides her with
a starting point that is objective. But the landscapes finally arrived at hardly belong
to this world. They are invented, imaginative, visionary landscapes. As in the case of
LANDSCAPE WITH HILLS, they sometimes include a central pyramid that can be
identified as a sacred hill or magic mountain. (As an art historian Spektorov has
researched the megalithic landscape of ancient Britain.) Her pictures also feature
temples from time to time thus evoking the ideal classical landscapes of Claude and
Poussin. So, despite the emphasis on colour, Spektorov's work aspires to the
Arguably, Spektorov's paintings are good objects; 'good' in the sense of high
the child's primary experience of the good breast of the mother. (During the 1970s
Klein was a theorist whose work Spektorov read and responded to.) Adrian Stokes,
a critic whose writings on art and architecture were strongly influenced by Klein's
ideas, argued that art facilitated an integrative process: by incorporating the good
part-object into ourselves we restore a lost sense of wholeness, unity and harmony.
If this is indeed the case, then it may explain why Spektorov's paintings seem to
Without question these are decorative pictures. In our culture to describe works
minor, shallow, non-profound. And yet one of the masters of twentieth century art -
therefore to undervalue them but, on the contrary, to praise them because part of
her project as an artist (and as an art historian) has been the restitution of the
decorative in art. Of course, her paintings are too complex in composition, too
painterly in execution ever to be confused with the repeat designs typical of printed
textiles.
Landscape, (1985), 37 x 32 inches, acrylic and pastel on wood.
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quest, a search for the sacred. For, as Pierre Schneider has argued in his book on
Matisse, colour used for and in itself necessarily implies a reliance upon instinct and
Spektorov has devoted years of her life to the study of several of the world's
religions and mystical traditions (including Shamanism) and that she has taught
courses on the spiritual in modern art.
evoke a state of harmony and perfection religion locates in the Garden of Eden
before the fall of humankind, and revolutionary socialists situate in the far future
iconography not only because they were important as a quiet refuge in her own
childhood, but also because so often in the past they were symbolic of utopia.)
Where art differs from both these visions is that the insights and pleasures it offers
exist in the here and now. Therefore, the finest art provides a glimpse of paradise in
a world of suffering and strife. Some observers see this quality of art as consolation
and comfort - an escape from the harsh social realities that need transforming - but,
arguably, it is essential that a proportion of art (if not all of art) should affirm the
Spektorov are virtually unknown. Let us hope that the 1989 exhibition at the Ben
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This is a revised version of a catalogue introduction first published by the Ben Uri
http://www.bettespektorov.co.uk/
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John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author the book Art in the
Age of Mass Media, 3rd edn (London & Sterling VA: Pluto Press, 2001) and John
Latham - the Incidental Person - His Art and Ideas, (London: Middlesex University
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