Andrew Lambirth

Fine Arts Special

Something for everyone

issue 22 May 2004

Over in Notting Hill, at England & Co., 216 Westbourne Grove, W11 (until 12 June), is a fascinating retrospective of that underrated painter Albert Herbert (born 1925). Herbert studied at the Royal College of Art with the Kitchen Sink painters, Bratby, Middleditch et al., but was less drawn to gritty social realism than to an art altogether more symbolic and concerned with states of mind. (‘Art is not about meanings but feelings,’ he has said.) An early dose of Surrealism was compounded by the influence of Francis Bacon, briefly a tutor at the RCA, and Herbert began to explore his own intensely personal narratives through shared stories, many of them taken from the Bible.

An intuitive painter, whose dialogue with the paint might result in an image changing radically again and again as he works on it, Herbert searches out the marvellous through favourite stories such as Jonah and the Whale or God speaking to Moses from the Burning Bush.

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