Think of the great Pop artists, and names like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns in the US come to mind; in Britain, David Hockney, Richard Hamilton, Allen Jones, Peter Blake, and Gerald Laing.Gerald Laing? If the name is less familiar, the most convincing argument for his talents is in London right now. The Fine Art Society is staging the first retrospective of the artist, who died in 2011. His output is extraordinarily varied. The exhibition includes his pop art as well as sculptures, which range from the hyperrealistic to the abstract.Laing's life and career shifted many times. After a short military career, he moved into art. In the 1960s, he was in bustling New York and on the verge of becoming Britain’s answer to his peers and friends Warhol and Ed Ruscha. He painted skydivers, dragsters, and astronauts, but the female form was never far away, such as the bikini bathers in the “Baby Baby Wild Things” series. Laing also portrayed starlets such as Brigitte Bardot, using tiny photos from newspapers that he then blew up. Each had the print dots and flat comic colors loved by Lichtenstein.Laing’s future looked secure. If he had stuck to this, his fame would have been immense.I had lunch with Laing exactly five years ago in what turned out to be one of his last interviews, focused mainly on his pop art and the then recent Amy Winehouse images, but we inevitably went over his career, starting with the abrupt change of location and style that followed his 1960s American years. “It was time to move: America was not so nice after all!” Laing said. He was growing disillusioned by the Vietnam war and Kennedy and King assassinations. He broke up with his first wife and married Galina Golikova, who sailed with him to the UK the very next day. They relocated to a ruined 16th-century pile they had found in the remote Highlands of Scotland, Kinkell Castle, and spent years restoring it. “I saw it and fell in love,” Laing told me.Laing said in the interview that the move was accompanied by a shift away from Pop art for much the same reasons. “I had to follow my eye,” he explained. At that point, he looked at one of his bronze sculptures of Galina displayed on the window sill in London’s private club at the Ivy where we were dining. He endlessly portrayed her — some of these key works are now on show in the Bond Street gallery.Was this shift of artistic style the right thing to do in retrospect? “It was not easy,” he recalled. “But it seemed right at the time.” His early abstract forms gave way to stylized statues and then the lifelike busts of Andy Warhol and Luciano Pavarotti.Only toward the end of his life, after about 40 years, did Laing return to pop art painting. By 2004, he was horrified that the American dream of his youth had turned into a sour “war on terror.” To him, American good-guy heroes were becoming villains. He was particularly moved by photos of prisoners being tormented at Abu Ghraib prison. “The images were so potent,” he told me. “I believed they could not be ignored.” The powerful pictures were not always understood.At the same time, he became fascinated at the “media obsession with celebrity froth.” He created many portraits of stars such as Victoria Beckham and Kate Moss — also included in the show — though Winehouse fast overtook them. The retrospective includes the best-known “The Kiss,” which shows the singer with her husband, and “Domestic Perspective,” where she is vacuuming a room. Laing had told me: “Amy was just such an amazing figure, with that beehive hair, eyebrows, and tattoos. There was something classical about her.” He implied that many other images had inspired him too, but at the suggestion that he would do more, he simply said: “It would be nice, we’ll see.”Winehouse died in July 2011 aged 27. Laing spoke to me in September that year, shortly before his Winehouse show opened at Thomas Gibson Fine Art. He looked less of an artist than a gray-haired gentleman farmer in a tweed jacket, slightly hard of hearing and frail, yet mentally strong and sure of himself. He died of cancer that November, aged 75, shortly after his Winehouse exhibition had ended. His prices have eased up since then, with Christie’s selling one of the 1963 Bardots in 2014 for £902,500. The following year it exceeded this price, with “Commemoration,” 1965 touching $1.86 million. Prices in the London show start at about £1,500 and go up to a few works with values only on application.In another sign of Laing’s talents, he set up a bronze foundry at the castle. A car he had constructed was parked outside the private view, watched over by his eldest son Farquhar, who runs Black Isle Bronze making commissions for other artists (“We worked closely together and it set my own future.”) Farquhar now lives in Kinkell Castle with his family, and has authored a catalogue raisonné of his father’s work, who he confirmed had returned to Pop art because of the horrors of war.The only way to pick highlights from the current show is to look at each category. Among the early pop art, the back wall of the gallery is dominated by a 12-foot oil-on-canvas in nine panels of Anna Karina, with thousands of monochrome newsprint dots done in 1963.The Bardot image, with its superimposed circle, is much smaller yet as striking; and the bikini girls are alluring. The abstract sculptures, some of them austere pyramids, are a more acquired taste, though the figurative works are stunning, leading up to the 1977 “An American Girl” — the culmination of the Galina series — and the more realistic “Flora” from 1982 near the entrance.The chronological mixing up of old and new works through the rooms is smart, with political paintings ranging from depictions of the Kennedy assassination in the 1960s to the Iraq War protest works. Still, the show reaches its peak with the oil-on-canvas and screen prints in the basement, soon acquiring a lot of red dots. Among the crowning glories are Laing’s trademark geometrical shapes, such as the lower triangle and superimposed oval added to the Moss and Winehouse pictures — witty, sexy, and daring, or Pop art at its best.“Gerald Laing: A Retrospective” runs through October 13 at the Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street.
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