Mick Moon, radical British artist whose achievements were obscured by his modesty – obituary
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Mick Moon, who has died aged 86, was the youngest of four associated and internationally respected English painters who, born in the 1930s, came to prominence from the 1960s: the elder three, in order of age, were Howard Hodgkin, John Hoyland and Patrick Caulfield.
They were friends, and all – despite stylistic difference – were chosen by their contemporary, Leslie Waddington, to join his vaunted Waddington Gallery in London’s Cork Street.
Moon’s development as a painter was the most complex of the four. As an art teacher – one of his students, (Sir) Christopher Le Brun, became President of the Royal Academy – and artist, he honed his skill as a painter, printmaker, collagist and imprinter to arrive in large part Fat paintings, inspired by the later work of Georges Braque.
Braque, in turn, had been inspired by his memory of an incident as a soldier in the First World War, when his batman, with some coke and a few thrusts of his bayonet, turned a bucket into a brazier.
“Everything, I realised, is subject to metamorphosis, everything changes according to circumstances,” wrote Braque. Co-founder of Cubism with Picasso, from the age of 60 he took his workplace, the studio, as the trigger for, as Moon wrote, “immersion in his own private obsessions”.
This obsession with memory and metamorphosis suited Moon’s resolute and exploratory nature.
Moon’s last dealer, Alan Cristea, of the eponymous gallery, and earlier as his print publisher at Waddington’s, has described him as “a truly radical artist whose achievements were obscured by his own modesty”.
Those achievements included Senior Lecturer at the Slade School of Art, 1973-90; a solo exhibition at the Tate Gallery, 1976; first prize, John Moores 12 Exhibition, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 1980; Gulbenkian Print Award, 1984; and Royal Academician, 1994.
Michael Moon was born in Edinburgh on November 9 1937. When the war took his father to India, his mother, a gifted amateur artist, moved with her two sons to lodge with her mother in Blackpool. The beach became his playground, a memory which contributed to the elegiac seascapes of his final exhibition.
After the war they moved to London, where his now-divorced mother worked as staff artist at the Daily Mirror. The boys went to a private boarding school in Shoreham-on-Sea, West Sussex.
Moon’s first job, thanks to his mother, was for Amalgamated Press doing lettering in speech bubbles. National Service in Germany with the Education Corps was followed by Chelsea School of Art, where Patrick Caulfield was a fellow student.
His most influential teacher was Michael Andrews, who taught him useful painting techniques, in particular masking off a surface to concentrate on one section at a time.
Crucially, he discovered Braque’s studio paintings, which he chose as the subject for his thesis. In the monograph by the late Mel Gooding, Moon wrote that “an artist’s own concerns” are “very important and more likely to prove valuable” than “an awareness of what is going on artistically, socially and politically”.
He proceeded to the postgraduate Royal College of Art, returning to teach at Chelsea, where Caulfield and Hoyland were also teaching.
Moon’s first exhibition was of paintings, mostly done on formica “strips” slatted vertically with one-inch intervals and fixed to form an overall impression of subtly suffused colour. They were shown in a room at Hodgkin’s London house. Hoyland brought Leslie Waddington to see it, and Moon’s artistic career was launched.
In 1972 he showed with Caulfield and Hodgkin at Galerie Stadler, Paris. A year later they were included in “La peinture anglaise aujourd’hui”, Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris. The same year Moon was poached from Chelsea by William Coldstream to teach at the Slade School of Art.
The cool clarity of the strip paintings was replaced by Braque-influenced engagement with the studio and metamorphosis. Moon’s printmaking was a stimulus: process and content were literally fused by imprints, in the way of brass rubbing or monotype printing, of the studio’s contents (notably floorboards, providing grained backgrounds), which became the basis for paintings of concentrated incident.
They were hung loose, rather than stretched, to create unforeseen combinations. These “Hanging Paintings” formed his Tate exhibition in 1976.
Moon’s first marriage, to Carola Kline, had ended in divorce, and in 1977 he married the painter Anjum Khan. Visits to her relations in India encouraged him to introduce vivid colours. He became fascinated by displacement – of people, artefacts and goods. All was grist to the mill of his studio paintings.
On a 1982 flight with his family, now including his sons Timur and Adam, to be artist-in-residence at Prahran School of Art, Melbourne, the Boeing 747’s four engines cut out, choked by ash from a volcanic eruption. A terrifying half-hour ensued.
Three engines re-started in time for an emergency landing at Jakarta. “There was much kissing of the runway” was his typically laconic comment. “The Jakarta Incident” is aeronautical history.
Moon’s evolution was marked by dramatic changes. In 1992 he exhibited studio paintings which, instead of making imprints of floorboards, doors, and so on, introduced even more complex Indian and other still-life elements. These paintings further enlarged Braque’s subject, materially and in scope.
Nevertheless, as Gooding wrote, for all their diversity, Moon’s prints and paintings “function in each case as the focus for quiet and reflexive contemplation”.
Having divorced a second time, in 2000 he met his third wife, the Swedish artist Philippa Stjernsward. They travelled widely, including to India, his contentment mirrored in his final exhibition (Cristea Roberts Gallery, 2019).
Cool clarity returned, not abstracted but in the form of large seascapes. Bare of colour and collage, the grain of imprinted floorboards evoked the waves and ripples of his boyhood seas. Serene intimations of mortality, content is reduced in one instance to a single figure in distant silhouette; in another, to a monochrome fleet of small anchored boats diminishing to misty invisibility; and finally, only to the dots of their single lights in the blackness of night.
Mick Moon is survived by his wife Philippa Stjernsward, and two sons from his second marriage.
Mick Moon, born November 9 1937, died February 13 2024
