TOWARDS A RE-DEFINITION OF THE

DECORATIVE IN ART: THE PAINTINGS OF

BETTE SPEKTOROV

JOHN A. WALKER (COPYRIGHT 2009)

Cover painting Colour World (1989), 33 x 36 inches, acrylic on wood.

An artist’s work is generally the result of several, disparate cultural influences. This

is certainly true of the art of Bette Spektorov (b. 1939), an almost unknown English

painter stubbornly working within the tradition of modernism despite the latter's

marginalisation by post-modernism. 'Spektorov' is a Russian-Jewish name. Bette's

father fled from the Soviet Union as a refugee after initially supporting the

Bolshevik Revolution. She grew up in England and as a child found enjoyment in

painting. Putting aside her desire to attend art school, she studied history at Oxford

University and the history of art at the Courtauld Institute. Inspired by a talk given

by Ad Reinhardt in London, she determined to visit the United States. In the late

1960s she spent two years there during which time she undertook an MA course in

fine art at Hunter College, City University of New York, where her tutors included

Robert Morris and Tony Smith. At that time she was painting large-scale

abstractions akin to the work of Kandinsky. The paintings of Joan Miró and Arshile

Gorky were also important to her as a student. At present she earns a living by

teaching the history of art at Middlesex Polytechnic. [She has now retired from

teaching and moved to Lincolnshire.] In spite of the demands of the latter, her

commitment to painting has never faltered.

'Jouissance' - bliss, pleasure, rapture - is a term French writers have made

fashionable in recent years. Seldom, however, have the objects to which it has been

applied deserved it. In Spektorov's case the word, for once, is perfectly apt: her

paintings, her colours ravish the eyes. Colours have a special significance for her

and regularly fill her thoughts. She has read colour theory of course but finds it

tedious. Colours, when distilled in her pictures, achieve a saturation,

voluptuousness, an intensity which overwhelms and satiates the sense of sight.

Acrylic pigments and pastels combine to generate hot, exotic crimsons, violets,

purples, turquoises, yellows, ochres, acid pinks and greens. (More recently she has

returned to using oils.) Paint tends to be applied to wooden supports or to canvases

in either a dry, scumbled fashion or in a more fluid, direct way. It is the excess of her

paintings - the surplus of effect - which endows them with transcendence.

Suspending the reality principle, they celebrate the pleasure principle.

The pictures hover - pleasingly - between abstraction and representation, depth

and surface, order and disorder. Deliberate spatial ambiguities (landscapes

combining elevations and aerial views) and imprecision in the depiction of objects

makes them multi-evocative images. As in the case of Henri Matisse (one of

Spektorov's touchstones), they are expressive without being expressionist. They also

steer a judicious middle course between the two poles of gesture and geometry.

Colour could easily have run riot and undermined form and structure, but

Spektorov tames it by means of linear or graphic armatures some angular, some

curved. These forms - repeated quarter-circles, stripes, zigzags and so forth -

frequently result in highly dynamic compositions: one is reminded of the contained

force field of a pinball machine (interestingly, as a student Spektorov was once set a

project to design a pinball 'symbolic of life'). In some paintings diagonal lines criss-

cross the picture plane in relation, as in the case of Franz Kline, to the rectangular

format of the support. Other pictures feature curvilinear forms reminiscent of the

styles of Rococo, Art Nouveau and Art Deco. In spite of these links with other art,

Spektorov's originality and power of synthesis ensure that her work is never merely
derivative.

Although eminently humane, this particular series of paintings ignores the human

figure. Nearly always the stimulus for a composition is a landscape, a garden, or a

courtyard, observed in reality or recalled from memory or even, in certain

instances, 'paraphrased' from a detail of a Giotto mural or from an Indian

miniature or from images of the Zen monasteries of Japan. Illusionism and detailed

naturalism are not however Spektorov's goals. Painting for her, as for Matisse, is an

artificial construction not a copy of Nature. Truth is not to be found in the recording

of surface appearances but by means of transformations and inventions. When

Spektorov has rendered a chill Scottish vista (in the 1970s she painted a lot in

Scotland) in terms of her palette of colours, it can end up looking like the coast of

the Mediterranean. In accordance with the fundamental principle of modernism,

everything is subjected to a process of simplification and stylization. There is a

constant drive towards flatness and pattern. We are never allowed to forget that

what hangs before us on the wall is a material object coated with colours arranged

in a certain order, an artefact bearing the traces of human labour. Painting for

Spektorov is a painful, sporadic struggle - many failures are discarded along the

way - but thankfully even those of her pictures that have been reworked many times

are not laboured.

As in the work of Seurat and Howard Hodgkin, paint often bleeds across the

thick rectangular surrounds that 'frame' her images. (Frames in fact she finds

problematical. Since they mark the division between reality and art they are

necessarily ambivalent.) The 'picture within the picture' device (a doubling of the
basic format) increases the viewer's sense of distance. Although still open to the

gaze, the paintings become more secretive. Oblongs within plan-like green

landscapes and boxes resembling ornamented sarcophagi found in certain images,

reinforce the idea of hidden, mysterious enclosures akin to secret gardens/boxes.

Visual metaphors, perhaps, for the art of painting itself.

Green painting with Flowers, (1989) 33 x 37 inches, acrylic and pastel on canvas.

Collection John A. Walker, Esher, Surrey.

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Although there is a subjective, personal dimension to all art, the paintings of

Spektorov refuse the conception of art as autobiography. They strive to go beyond

the self in order to discover something more universal. Landscape provides her with

a starting point that is objective. But the landscapes finally arrived at hardly belong

to this world. They are invented, imaginative, visionary landscapes. As in the case of

LANDSCAPE WITH HILLS, they sometimes include a central pyramid that can be

identified as a sacred hill or magic mountain. (As an art historian Spektorov has

researched the megalithic landscape of ancient Britain.) Her pictures also feature

temples from time to time thus evoking the ideal classical landscapes of Claude and

Poussin. So, despite the emphasis on colour, Spektorov's work aspires to the

classical tradition of art rather than to the romantic.

Arguably, Spektorov's paintings are good objects; 'good' in the sense of high

aesthetic quality, but also in the psycho-analytic sense of part-objects. In Melanie

Klein's psycho-analytic theory the appeal of part-objects is explained in terms of

the child's primary experience of the good breast of the mother. (During the 1970s

Klein was a theorist whose work Spektorov read and responded to.) Adrian Stokes,

a critic whose writings on art and architecture were strongly influenced by Klein's

ideas, argued that art facilitated an integrative process: by incorporating the good

part-object into ourselves we restore a lost sense of wholeness, unity and harmony.
If this is indeed the case, then it may explain why Spektorov's paintings seem to

fulfil a restorative psychic function.

Without question these are decorative pictures. In our culture to describe works

of art as 'decorative' is normally to denigrate them because decorative art is judged

minor, shallow, non-profound. And yet one of the masters of twentieth century art -

Matisse - produced decorative art and was willing to undertake commissions to

decorate religious buildings. To call Spektorov's paintings 'decorative' is not

therefore to undervalue them but, on the contrary, to praise them because part of

her project as an artist (and as an art historian) has been the restitution of the

decorative in art. Of course, her paintings are too complex in composition, too

painterly in execution ever to be confused with the repeat designs typical of printed

textiles.
 Landscape, (1985), 37 x 32 inches, acrylic and pastel on wood.

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Spektorov's exaltation of colour is, in the last instance, a religious or spiritual

quest, a search for the sacred. For, as Pierre Schneider has argued in his book on

Matisse, colour used for and in itself necessarily implies a reliance upon instinct and

intuition, a desire to go beyond mundane reality. (1) It is no surprise to learn that

Spektorov has devoted years of her life to the study of several of the world's

religions and mystical traditions (including Shamanism) and that she has taught
courses on the spiritual in modern art.

The chromatic richness of these paintings is emblematic of a state of being so

fulfilled it can only be called utopic or paradisaical. Thus Spektorov's canvases

evoke a state of harmony and perfection religion locates in the Garden of Eden

before the fall of humankind, and revolutionary socialists situate in the far future

following the ultimate overthrow of capitalism. (Gardens feature frequently in her

iconography not only because they were important as a quiet refuge in her own

childhood, but also because so often in the past they were symbolic of utopia.)

Where art differs from both these visions is that the insights and pleasures it offers

exist in the here and now. Therefore, the finest art provides a glimpse of paradise in

a world of suffering and strife. Some observers see this quality of art as consolation

and comfort - an escape from the harsh social realities that need transforming - but,

arguably, it is essential that a proportion of art (if not all of art) should affirm the

possibility of a better world by its very presence in the world.

In my opinion it is a scandal of British culture that the vivid paintings of Bette

Spektorov are virtually unknown. Let us hope that the 1989 exhibition at the Ben

Uri Gallery will rectify this lamentable state of affairs.

(1) P. Schneider, Matisse, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985).

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This is a revised version of a catalogue introduction first published by the Ben Uri

Society of London on the occasion of an exhibition of paintings held in July 1989.

See also Bette’s website

http://www.bettespektorov.co.uk/
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John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author the book Art in the

Age of Mass Media, 3rd edn (London & Sterling VA: Pluto Press, 2001) and John

Latham - the Incidental Person - His Art and Ideas, (London: Middlesex University

Press, 1995). He is also an editorial advisor for the website:

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