Located on a street off Park Lane in London, the Michael Werner Gallery is the epitome of art world chic: housed in a Georgian townhouse, so discreet that a passerby would never know it was there. It should come as no surprise to find the paintings of the late Don Van Vliet in this area. Michael Werner has been his gallery owner since the early 1980s, when Van Vliet stopped calling himself Captain Beefheart and gave up music completely to devote himself to visual arts. art – and yet that is what it is. The paintings in his first London exhibition in decades feel somehow at odds with their surroundings.
Partly this is because they are visibly a product of the California wilderness (for a time Van Vliet lived and worked in the Mojave Desert). Depictions of wild animals and cacti abound, his paintings seem increasingly overwhelmed by their surroundings: the later works are filled with white space, as if blinded by blinding sunlight. That’s partly because they seem so frenetic and unskilled: wild brushstrokes, thick impastos, paint applied straight from the tube to the canvas. But that’s mainly because – name change or not – they are clearly the work of Captain Beefheart, one of the truly legendary figures of ’60s and ’70s rock.
The titles often correspond to his old songs or lyrics: those who know the track listing of his 1969 masterpiece Trout Mask Replica will recognize the name China Pig, while Crow Dance a Panther and The Drazy Hoops are taken from lines from Ice Cream for Crow and The Blimp respectively. Even if they don’t, they sound like they should: Dream Sloth, Full Grown Babble, Bird With Cotton Shadow. And like his music – which drew from the blues and free jazz, but never really sounded like either, or anything else in pop history – it’s work that people clearly have a hard time categorizing.
When you read articles in art magazines about his paintings, you are struck by the feeling of critics wildly throwing comparisons at them in the hope that one of them will stick: Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, expressionism, primitivism, outsider art. “Well, it’s definitely not outsider art,” says Gordon VeneKlasen, managing partner of the Michael Werner Gallery. “Because outsider art implies that someone makes a naive oeuvre that is interesting just because of the way he makes it. Don was not naive in any way. From the very beginning he was aware of art history. I talked to him a lot, sometimes two to three hours a day on the phone, and there was nothing random about anything he did, any words that came out of his mouth, or any thoughts. He was very precise. Everything was carefully selected. And I always had the feeling that that was the same with the paintings.”
In a sense, the story of how Captain Beefheart, avant-garde rock legend, Don Van Vliet, became a visual artist begins long before he adopted his famous pseudonym and formed the first incarnation of the Magic Band. As a child, he was a child prodigy in the field of sculpture: he won prizes, appeared on television making animal sculptures and – at least according to his story: Van Vliet was rarely the most reliable witness to his own life story – was offered a scholarship to study art. to study. Europe at age 13, which his parents forced him to reject because art was “queer.”
He continued to paint throughout his musical career – his work was used on album covers and was the subject of an exhibition in Liverpool in 1972 – but you can see why it was overshadowed by the music. By the time of Trout Mask Replica, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band sounded utterly extraordinary. Fifty-four years after its release, it almost always remains the most challenging listen on any list of the greatest albums of all time, a record where every instrument seems to be playing in a universe of its own, with only the most tangential relationship to each instrument. other. To its detractors, it hardly qualifies as music. To its devotees, it was a work of unprecedented, unparalleled genius. “If there has been anything in the history of popular music that could be described as a work of art… Trout Mask Replica is probably that work,” John Peel suggested. John Lydon called it his “confirmation”: “From that moment on,” he said, “there was room for everything.”
Among the fans was the East German artist AR Penck, who was represented by Michael Werner. When he defected west in 1980, VeneKlasen says, “he kept saying, you have to find Don Van Vliet, you have to find Don Van Vliet, this is the artist you have to find. Don was his real hero.”
Penck’s suggestion presented a problem even after Werner saw Van Vliet’s paintings and was impressed enough to propose that he represent him. “It seems so normal now that someone has two careers,” says VeneKlasen, “but at that time, in the 1980s, you couldn’t be a musician and a painter; that was considered a joke. There was a certain gravity around making art, and making music was something completely different.”
It is not clear who suggested that Van Vliet give up music completely, abandon the name Captain Beefheart, and concentrate on painting. In one story Werner and Penck pitch the idea to him, another suggests it was his wife Janet, a third claims it was entirely Van Vliet’s initiative, spurred by the fact that no record label was willing to put up enough money for a sequel. to 1982’s Ice Cream for Crow, which, as usual for Captain Beefheart, had failed to translate ecstatic reviews into sales. But if it was someone else’s idea, he didn’t need much persuading. By all accounts, he was tired and discouraged by his musical career: he had already withdrawn from a planned tour; poverty had forced him and his wife to move into a trailer previously owned by his mother. “He was pretty screwed by the music world, so he decided that the music world hadn’t been very kind to him after all and decided to quit altogether and just become a painter,” says VeneKlasen. “He wasn’t a bitter man, but he was certainly bitter about the music industry.”
It’s tempting to wonder if there were other factors that played into his decision to quit music. Van Vliet’s relationship with his fellow musicians was often tense. More than one ex-Magic Band member has described him as “tyrannical”; The book Lunar Notes by former guitarist Zoot Horn Rollo portrays life in the Magic Band as unmitigated misery: broke, virtually starved – they lived on a cup of soybeans a day – and subjected to ‘psychological warfare’ by their leader who occasionally turned into physical violence.
The most charitable interpretation is that Van Vliet had a unique artistic vision – a vision of incredibly complex and demanding music – that he wanted to realize at all costs. But as VeneKlasen notes, a unique artistic vision is easier to pursue when you’re the only one pursuing it. “I think he was incredibly controlling, but [the music] other people involved. And as he got older, he really didn’t like people. I visited him once in Eureka, California – he actually lived in the middle of nowhere. I think painting was much more exciting for him because it was just him.”
But despite Van Vliet’s dedication to his career change, there were problems. Encouraging Van Vliet to leave California can be a struggle: VeneKlasen tried in vain to get him to New York, but was met with the response that “there’s so much human skin in the air there” (Van Vliet also memorably fired the city as “a bowl of underpants”). His early shows were filled with Beefheart fans – “people were like, ‘Okay, so you talked to Don, so your proximity to him is…’,” says VeneKlasen, “almost as if he was a holy figure” – but the art establishment was dismissive. “It was very, very difficult. Jack Lane, a famous museum director, did an exhibition at the San Francisco MoMA of Don around 1986, because of his own passion for him and his work, and he almost got fired. Because everyone said, ‘This isn’t an artist, this is a musician who makes doodles.’ Only in the last ten years, unfortunately after his death, have we seen a change, and really through the eyes of other artists, not curators. I’ve talked to so many painters who look at Don’s work all the time. [German abstract painter] Charline von Heyl told me that she looks at Don’s work every morning. If you went to a curator at the Tate or wherever they would just roll their eyes, but then if they asked the artist they respected they would be completely shocked.
Van Vliet continued to work until his death due to complications from multiple sclerosis in 2010. As his disease progressed, the gallery built him a device that allowed him to paint from an armchair, but he eventually switched to drawing. He never returned to music. “He was really fierce and uncompromising,” says VeneKlasen. “He did exactly what he wanted and that was it. He was a true product of the California era when bombs were going off and highways were being built. I mean, he told me a story where he said he was a vacuum cleaner salesman for a while, and he said he sold Aldous Huxley a vacuum cleaner!
He laughs, but remembers Van Vliet’s tendency to self-mythologize and often weak relationship with the truth and provides a nuance. “I didn’t fact check it. I should probably see where Aldous Huxley lived during that period. But as a story about California at the time, I thought it was so good. It’s like Brave New World, and it’s just weird. California was weird.”
• Don Van Vliet: Standing on One Hand is on view at the Michael Werner Gallery, London, until February 17