Leonard Kenneth Hammond Bennetts (1933–2004)
“The original retrogressionist (the way forwards is backwards).”
It is a rather brilliant way for an artist to describe himself.
It is even better when you know the story.
Leonard Bennetts travelled halfway around the world to become an artist. He left New Zealand for Australia, worked his passage to Britain, hitchhiked through Europe drawing what he saw, established himself in London, exhibited repeatedly at the Royal Academy, worked for Shell, taught for decades and, even when already established, repeatedly put himself back into the position of being a student.
Eventually he returned to New Zealand to paint the places of his childhood.
Through all of it, he kept looking.
New Zealand: 1933–1954
Leonard Kenneth Hammond Bennetts was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1933, the middle of three sons of Douglas Bennetts, a motor engineer, and his wife Evelyn.
His childhood was far removed from the romantic idea of the European artist. He grew up in an environment of sheep farming and rugby where, according to later accounts, wanting to become an artist could be regarded as rather precious.
There was, however, encouragement at home. His mother supported his interest in art, as did his maternal grandfather, Henry Blanchard Hammond, who created decorative ceilings in Britain and New Zealand.
Bennetts spent part of his youth in Temuka, a place he would return to and paint many decades later, and studied at Canterbury University College in Christchurch.
But New Zealand was only the beginning.
Australia: 1954
In 1954, aged around 21, Bennetts left New Zealand for Australia.
It wasn't an immediately glamorous artistic existence.
He spent nine months working as a gardener at a mental hospital, travelled through the Australian interior and Northern Territory making drawings, and then studied at East Sydney Technical College under the sculptor Lyndon Dadswell.
Dadswell was an important figure in Australian modernism. He had trained under Rayner Hoff, worked with Paul Montford on the monumental sculptural programme for Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance, won the Wynne Prize in 1933, and subsequently studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London. During his time in Britain he encountered the work of a remarkable generation of modern sculptors including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Jacob Epstein and Frank Dobson.
During the Second World War, Dadswell became the first sculptor appointed as an Australian official war artist. He later returned to East Sydney Technical College, where his commitment to experimentation and to developing the individual abilities of his students made him one of the influential teachers of Australian sculpture.
It is an interesting place for the young Bennetts to have begun his serious training.
Dadswell believed that art could not simply be taught by imitation. His students were encouraged to investigate, experiment and find their own means of expression.
Bennetts, although primarily a painter, was therefore being introduced to art by a sculptor concerned with structure, observation and independent thought.
To support himself in Australia, Bennetts worked nights in a telephone exchange.
During this period he also participated in group exhibitions under the name “Benno”, before returning to his own name.
It is the beginning of a pattern that runs through his entire life: ordinary work paying for the opportunity to paint.
Chasing Europe
For a young artist growing up in New Zealand in the 1940s and 50s, Europe must have felt very far away.
But that was where Bennetts wanted to be.
The museums were there. The galleries were there. Paris and London were where generations of artists had gone before him and, to a young man on the other side of the world, where the action appeared to be.
So he found a way there.
Bennetts worked his passage to Britain as a kitchen porter aboard a cruise ship.
The dream was Paris and the bohemian life of an artist. The reality was somewhat less romantic.
After an early exhibition in a pub in Hampstead, Bennetts hitchhiked through Western Europe, drawing constantly. He later remembered “drawing everything I laid my eyes on” before arriving back in London “gaunt and penniless.”
But he had brought the work home with him.
And that work began his professional career.
Bond Street: 1959–1960
In 1959, Bennetts exhibited at Walker's Galleries in Bond Street, London.
A second exhibition followed there in 1960.
For someone who had recently arrived in Britain with little money and no established London network, it was significant progress.
Around this period Bennetts met the owner of a factory on the Old Kent Road, who allowed him to live rent-free in a studio above the premises in exchange for keeping an eye on the building.
He stayed for around eighteen months.
It is easy now to romanticise the struggling post-war artist in London.
Bennetts appears actually to have lived it.
London and a life built around painting
Bennetts married in 1962 and initially lived in Totteridge.
His subjects weren't necessarily grand. He painted a local pig farm, neighbouring houses and autumn landscapes. Later, after settling in Muswell Hill, he found material in markets, railway stations and even rubbish tips.
That matters when looking at Bennetts' work.
He wasn't simply interested in picturesque landscape.
He was interested in place.
If something made him stop and look, it could become a painting.
For a time he worked nights as a Post Office telephone supervisor, specifically allowing him to paint during the day.
Again, the job served the painting rather than the other way around.
Shell: 1962
By 1962, Bennetts was also working within one of the more interesting intersections between British fine art and commercial design.
Working as Ken Bennetts, he produced Londonderry for the Shell/BP Shilling Guides.
These small motoring guides were illustrated using work commissioned from established painters, printmakers and illustrators. The series included John Nash, Julian Trevelyan, Richard Eurich, S. R. Badmin, John Aldridge, Walter Hoyle, George Hooper, Rowland Hilder and Keith Shackleton.
Bennetts was therefore working in very good company.
Shell's relationship with artists was unusual. Across its wider advertising programme it had commissioned artists including Paul Nash, John Piper, Vanessa Bell, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland and Edward Bawden, deliberately allowing the worlds of modern British art, illustration and commercial design to overlap.
Bennetts' Londonderry, a gouache and watercolour, became part of the historic Shell Advertising Art Collection.
More than twenty years later, the same work would reappear in one of the most interesting exhibitions of Bennetts' career.
New Zealand in London: 1964
Although Bennetts chose to remain in Britain, he didn't sever his relationship with New Zealand.
In 1964, he initiated an exhibition bringing together 26 New Zealand artists at the Qantas Airways Gallery in Piccadilly, London.
Later accounts describe it as the first exhibition of New Zealand artists in London.
And Bennetts was evidently attracting attention back home.
In August 1964, a wonderfully irritated letter appeared in the New Zealand Listener. Its writer complained about the regular publicity being given by NZBC news bulletins to an expatriate New Zealand painter called Ken Bennetts, asking whether his work was really so good or whether he simply had a good public relations officer.
Whatever the answer, it tells us something useful.
Bennetts wasn't invisible.
By 1964 his activities in London were receiving enough coverage in New Zealand for people back home to know his name.
Exhibiting in Britain
As his career developed, Bennetts became part of London's wider artistic community.
He joined the Chelsea Arts Club and the Hampstead Artists' Council, exhibited at the Mall Galleries and Whitechapel Art Gallery, showed with the Contemporary Art Society, and was awarded first prize by the Hesketh Hubbard Art Society.
His work was also selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition on a number of occasions.
By this stage the young artist who had worked his passage from the other side of the world had established a genuine professional life in Britain.
But he never seems to have become particularly comfortable with standing still.
New Zealand House: 1976
Travel continued to feed the work.
In 1976, Bennetts held an important solo exhibition at New Zealand House in London.
It contained more than sixty oil paintings, with subjects ranging across France, Wales, Devon, London and the River Thames.
That list of places tells us a great deal about him.
Bennetts' subject wasn't one particular landscape.
His subject was wherever he happened to be looking.
Becoming a student again: 1975–1985
One of the things I particularly like about Bennetts is that becoming an established artist didn't stop him becoming a student again.
Between 1975 and 1982, while already in middle age, he undertook further part-time and full-time study at Sir John Cass College.
There he studied under Paul Drury (1903–1987), a distinguished British draughtsman and etcher.
Drury belonged to a tradition of British art in which drawing remained fundamental. His own work had been strongly influenced by the visionary nineteenth-century landscape artist Samuel Palmer, and he became a significant teacher as well as an artist, eventually serving as Principal of Goldsmiths.
Under Drury and at Sir John Cass, Bennetts was pushed increasingly towards portrait and figure painting.
The results formed much of another important exhibition, held at the New Zealand High Commission in 1979.
And still he wasn't finished learning.
In 1984–85, now in his early fifties, Bennetts spent a year studying with Cecil Collins (1908–1989).
Collins was an altogether different character.
He had trained at the Royal College of Art, briefly associated with British Surrealism and exhibited in the famous 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London. But he ultimately rejected Surrealism as a movement and developed an intensely personal, visionary form of painting, drawing inspiration from nature, spirituality and the writings and art of William Blake.
So Bennetts' artistic education stretched across some remarkably different traditions.
As a young man he had studied with Dadswell, the Australian modernist sculptor concerned with experimentation, form and structure.
In middle age he studied with Drury, the exceptional draughtsman whose artistic lineage looked back towards Samuel Palmer.
Then came Collins, the visionary individualist with connections to Surrealism and William Blake.
Bennetts absorbed all of this while continuing to remain recognisably himself.
His former wife Olivia later described him as a “driven artist, never satisfied, always pushing his work on.”
His willingness to become a student again, even after decades of exhibiting and teaching professionally himself, perhaps tells us more about him than any list of exhibitions could.
The teacher
Alongside his own practice, Bennetts became an important teacher.
He taught at Hendon College from 1968 until 1992, at Barnet College from 1977 to 1982, and later at the Working Men's College from 1995 to 1996.
Teaching therefore occupied more than two decades of his life.
But throughout those years he continued to exhibit, travel, study and paint.
Landscape in Britain: 1983
In 1983, Bennetts appeared under the name Ken Bennetts in the Arts Council/Hayward Gallery touring exhibition:
Landscape in Britain 1850–1950.
It was a substantial historical survey containing work by more than 200 artists.
The accompanying catalogue arranged the artists chronologically by birth date, beginning with David Cox, born in 1783, and ending with Ken Bennetts, born in 1933.
There is something rather appropriate about that.
Decades before Bennetts called himself the original retrogressionist, an exhibition surveying almost two centuries of British landscape painting had effectively placed him at the contemporary end of that tradition.
And the work selected was Londonderry, the picture he had originally made for Shell in 1962.
The commercial commission had become part of a major historical exhibition of British landscape painting.
Recording a disappearing London
Meanwhile, Bennetts had become increasingly interested in the River Thames and London's docklands.
He recognised that the old industrial landscape was changing.
Warehouses, wharves and working river scenes were disappearing as London redeveloped.
According to Olivia Bennetts:
“He was on a mission to record what was there before it changed forever.”
This idea of recording places before they vanished became one of the most interesting threads running through his later work.
Bennetts wasn't merely painting scenery.
He was recording change.
It was therefore entirely appropriate that he became a member of the Wapping Group of Artists, the long-established group of painters associated with the Thames.
The Wapping Group's own records list Leonard Bennetts, DFA, as a member from 1996 until his death in 2004.
Home: 1987
For all his travelling, Britain had become Bennetts' home.
But New Zealand never quite left him.
In 1987, after decades away, he finally returned.
It was the first of several return journeys.
The Timaru Herald found the returning artist almost as interesting as his paintings, describing him as something of a picture himself in a straw hat, crimson shirt, shorts and iridescent green socks.
More importantly, Bennetts went back to Temuka, where he had once attended school.
And he painted.
The circle is rather lovely.
In London he had painted docklands and buildings because he knew they were disappearing.
Back in New Zealand, he began recording the landscape and buildings of his childhood for much the same reason.
He had spent his life travelling forwards only to become increasingly interested in looking backwards.
The Original Retrogressionist
Towards the end of his life, Bennetts held another major exhibition at New Zealand House in London.
Writing around the time of that exhibition, he supplied the phrase that now seems to explain so much of the work:
“The original retrogressionist (the way forwards is backwards).”
It is funny, slightly contrary and very Bennetts.
But there is something more serious underneath it.
He had lived through enormous changes in art after the Second World War. Abstraction, conceptualism and successive avant-garde movements had transformed what contemporary art could be.
Bennetts continued to draw.
He continued to paint.
He continued to look at landscapes, buildings, streets, people, rivers and ordinary places.
And throughout his life he repeatedly went back.
Back to drawing.
Back to teachers.
Back to being a student.
Back towards older traditions of British landscape and figurative painting.
And eventually back to New Zealand and the places he had known as a boy.
That wasn't an inability to move forward.
It was a choice.
Leonard Bennetts, 1933–2004
Leonard Bennetts died in London on 24 September 2004, aged 71.
He had travelled a very long way from Dunedin.
New Zealand to Australia.
Australia to Britain.
Britain through Europe.
Paris, London, France, Wales, Devon, the Thames and eventually back to Temuka.
Along the way came Walker's Galleries, Shell, the Royal Academy, Whitechapel, New Zealand House, the New Zealand High Commission, the Hayward Gallery touring exhibition and the Wapping Group.
There were important teachers too: Lyndon Dadswell, Paul Drury and Cecil Collins. Artists whose own careers connected Bennetts to Australian modernism, the British landscape and drawing tradition, the Royal Academy, Surrealism, Samuel Palmer and William Blake.
There were also telephone exchanges, a mental hospital garden, a kitchen aboard a ship, a studio above a factory, night shifts and decades of teaching.
And there were paintings.
Lots of them.
What becomes apparent when looking across Bennetts' life is that he wasn't particularly interested in separating the grand from the ordinary. A European landscape could matter. So could a pig farm. A railway station. A rubbish tip. The Thames. A disappearing building in Temuka.
He looked at what was around him and recorded it.
Perhaps that is why the work feels interesting again now.
The way forwards is backwards.
Perhaps Bennetts had a point.