The best-known fact about the painter Prunella Clough is that she kept the price of her art low. Once, when moving house, she turned the contents of her studio into a bonanza sale. "PRICES SLASHED!" announced the cards she sent out, ornamented with the clichés of the marketplace, dynamically arranged. "Seconds. Slightly damaged goods. CASH AND CARRY. No reasonable offer refused. RACKS MUST BE CLEARED. TELL YOUR FRIENDS." For six days, people came and went, while she operated a cheap goods stall. For a prolific artist, it was a pragmatic way of reducing the contents of her studio. But it was also a sly dig at the commodification of art. Some of her friends found it embarrassing to see drawings, collages and paintings fast disappearing, at prices that bore no relation to their worth.
There have been various attempts by artists to challenge or subvert the art market. But earlier this year, when a version of Cézanne's Card Players reached the highest price ever paid for a work of art, it was Clough who first came to mind, and then Fernand Léger. If both have relevance in the 21st century, it is in no small part due to their belief that art can be made out of the ordinary and has a place in the everyday world. Léger wanted his mural-size canvases to be the kind of objects against which you could lean your bicycle. Clough in the early 1950s painted a series of pictures based on lorries and their drivers. She went down to London's docklands to draw cranes and pile drivers, but it was the lorries arriving and departing and the labour involved – in this pre-container age – in the loading and unloading of their cargoes that caught her attention. She closed in on the drivers in their cabs, catching moments of waiting, when the driver takes a nap or reads a newspaper, while pressing in on all sides are hints of the larger environment, a coil of rope, ladders, a factory chimney or segment of a crane.
Did Clough know of Léger's work? Almost certainly. She had a highly cultivated knowledge of art, and in the 1950s was an intimate friend of John Berger, who championed Léger. Together Clough and Berger went drawing down by the mainline marshalling yards at Willesden Junction in London. As a critic, Berger was then promoting realism, in whatever form it took, and he liked to compare Léger with Masaccio. Both, in his view, were painters of a new reality and of the new values associated with that reality.
Berger asked of Léger: "In the work of what other artist can you find cars, metal frames, templates, girders, electric wires, numberplates, road signs, gas stoves, functional furniture, bicycles, tents, keys, locks, cheap cups and saucers? Léger in fact forces us to consider a phenomenon which is so widespread that we scarcely notice it – the extraordinary degree to which most 20th-century art ignores any direct reference to the 20th-century environment. It is as though in our paintings we wish to be nowhere."
Clough, like Léger, was unusual in her attention to aspects of urban and industrial life that are mostly overlooked – if not deliberately ignored. She looked at things that bear the residue of use, are blighted by time or fallen into desuetude. Long before the term "edgelands" was coined, she was familiar with those areas where housing estates or factories peter out and the borders between urban and rural are renegotiated, infringed or forgotten.
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