Norman Rosenthal remembers the multi-talented artist Tom Phillips

Again in 1966 I used to be requested for assist by Diane Uhlman, the left-wing but high-born, English-as-they-come spouse of the faux-naive refugee artist Fred Uhlman. She needed me to clear up the remnants of the Artists Worldwide Affiliation (AIA) gallery, in Lisle Road, central London, and to return works I discovered to artists so far as I might. There I discovered a small green-bordered, collaged, lithograph print, For Morton Feldman—the New York avant-garde composer up to date of John Cage—by an artist then unknown to me, Tom Phillips.

Phillips’s print has on it a child’s face, plenty of music staves criss-crossing, a picture of a piano keyboard and an odd phrase within the center: “cacoethes”—of Greek origin and that means “compulsion” or “mania”, a high quality that Phillips would have acknowledged he had in spades. As an avant-garde music lover myself, I’ve acquired nice pleasure over time from the print, which evokes in an English means what Kandinsky known as his “little joys”. Music had clearly influenced the then younger Phillips, and, judging by this early work, he appears to have sprung up absolutely fashioned as an artist—even when a seemingly limitless stream of photos and concepts in lots of media lay forward.

Tom Phillips was born in 1937 in Clapham, south London, and spent a lot of his life in a home in Peckham that had been purchased by his mom. I acquired to know Phillips after I joined the Royal Academy (RA) in 1977 the place he was later to grow to be essentially the most great chairman of exhibitions, whose aesthetic and political judgement—sure, exhibitions have their political dimensions—was in tune with mine, and a supply of big knowledge and valued recommendation. For Phillips was nothing if not discovered—he appeared just like the south London model of the fabled homunculus; he knew about every little thing and was in a position to extract information of common significance from essentially the most banal of every day sources: a park bench, the prostitute playing cards in telephone packing containers, and a replica of a seemingly trite novel picked up for 3 previous pence, A Human Doc by W.H. Mallock, who had been a famous right-wing Victorian novelist.

Mallock’s title was compressed, within the remedy Phillips product of the e book, into A Humument—arguably his most necessary work—the topic of many iterations over 50 years (1966-2016), by way of collage and overpainting; what I would like to name illumination-overlay. As a result of, considering of Phillips, it’s troublesome not to think about the monk in his (Peckham) cell, with pen and colored inks spontaneously elaborating inside and out of doors the borders of the printed margins, deciding what authentic phrases, or half phrases, of his unlikely hero writer Mallock ought to be preserved. The phrase “opera” would possibly seem, beforehand a part of, say, “operation”; and a squiggle above the phrase “the shortest” may be a reference to Phillips’s 15-or-so-minute opera Irma—a title which arose in flip from one other masked-out phrase.

Enjoying with notes and letters

Phillips performed the piano and he was a founding member of the Philharmonia Refrain underneath the path of its legendary grasp, Wilhelm Pitz. I should have unknowingly heard him singing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony underneath Otto Klemperer or the Verdi Requiem underneath Carlo Maria Giulini on the Competition Corridor, however Phillips equally participated within the London avant-garde music world of John Tilbury, Mary Wiegold, Cornelius Cardew and his Scratch Orchestra, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, and Gavin Bryars.

Regardless of recordings, music is in its essence an ephemeral artwork. Much less so maybe the literary and visible worlds which mixed within the heyday of concrete poetry—a kind to which Phillips was inevitably drawn. His oeuvre has connections to the works of contemporaries comparable to Ian Hamilton Finlay and Dom Sylvester Houédard, as he performs with letters, phrases on bronze forged skulls, inside wired crosses, massive panels, tapestries, quilts, non-public meanings and messages. The phrases are generally in complicated acrostics and but the thing in entrance of the viewer has its personal specific and recognisable Phillips aesthetic and wonder. And allow us to not overlook his many portraits: Salman Rushdie, with whom he performed desk tennis, Iris Murdoch, and Harrison Birtwistle. When he painted me, he included a French tricolour as a result of it was 14 July 1989, the 2 hundredth Anniversary of the French Revolution.

Phillips was keen about cricket. He employed the Oval for a match with pals for his fiftieth. He was additionally a collector of postcards, not solely within the picture on the entrance however the nuance of the written message on the again. His superb e book The Postcard Century, printed for the millennium—which for him, being one thing of a pedant, started in 1901—incorporates 100 chapters to the 12 months 2000, and is a memento of a now misplaced world.

Although Phillips was carefully married to his south London, he nonetheless had huge horizons in Europe, the US and most notably in Africa. He was particularly drawn to Ghana, which he visited typically, and to Kente textiles, and their yellow and pink regal striped patterns that had advanced over centuries, but appeared to him like modernism avant-la-lettre, although not within the sculptural means that Picasso and his like had beforehand valued the artwork of “Africa”.

Encyclopaedic information

In Ghana he found the world of Ashanti gold weights, a supply of bottomless architectural and sculptural invention in miniature. He made a group of 1000’s of those lovely little objects that could be a research in tradition in itself and gave rise to a small e book. However inevitably he was drawn—like his nice and all-knowledgeable pal David Attenborough—to gather examples of the humanities of Africa extra usually, increase an encyclopaedic information of the topic, that led to one of many nice exhibits on the RA, Africa: The Artwork of a Continent (1996). The exhibition bore witness to the earliest origins of human tool-making, multiple and a half million years in the past within the Olduvai Gorge in what’s now Tanzania. There are lots of wondrous, even loopy, tales round this exhibition. However most necessary was the revelation of the superb creativity in so many elements of Africa south of the Sahara—on the time of Christ, or for that matter throughout the interval of the European Renaissance, lengthy earlier than colonialism was underway with all its complicated and devastating results.

Phillips’s work and prints require cautious studying and clarification. His home/studio was overflowing with books on each topic. He launched into complicated, by no means to be accomplished encounters with Dante and his worlds, along with the film-maker Peter Greenaway. He by no means acquired on a bus with no copy of the Instances Literary Complement, due to the random info it absolutely contained. He was a devotee of Scientific American for a similar purpose. He absorbed all of it with love and pleasure and but at all times with a powerful sense of irony that hailed from a self-conscious melancholy. Meals, wine, cigarettes have been additional pleasures, although lunch at dwelling was often little greater than a tin of sardines. However he lived his life, together with his personal sense of the importance of artwork, to the complete. The issues, the artwork, he left behind for us—a lot of which is able to discover itself in collections at Palazzo Butera, Palermo, and within the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visible Poetry, Iowa Metropolis—will certainly discover a place within the collective reminiscence of issues.

I simply rediscovered on my cabinets his e book Merry Conferences (2005). For Phillips these have been evidenced by typed agendas for gatherings on the RA, the Nationwide Portrait Gallery and the British Museum, on whose committees he was “a pure”, however the place he used the papers to doodle extravagantly, producing decorative fantasies that turned a novel kind. And, only a month or two earlier than his demise, he printed a “new Humument”: Humbert (2022), a “transforming” of Humbert Wolfe’s Cursory Rhymes (1927).

Some phrases from Brahms’s German Requiem, a bit that Phillips absolutely sang on the Competition Corridor, discovered their means right into a 1971 collage portray of his (in English: “For all flesh is as grass and all of the glory of man because the flower of the grass”). But his works of greater than 60 years are, in all their multifarious varieties, endlessly fascinating and, of their self- and cross-referencing methods, as if one.

• Trevor Thomas Phillips; born London 25 Might 1937; RA 1989; chair, Exhibition Committee, Royal Academy, London 1995-2007; CBE 2002; Slade professor of tremendous artwork, Oxford College 2005-06; married 1961 Jill Purdy (one daughter, one son; marriage dissolved 1988), 1995 Fiona Maddocks; died London 28 November 2022.