Despite the fact that Ken Kiff (1935–2001) was a Royal Academician, his paintings are unequivocally nonacademic. His figures are monstrous and absurd, far from any notion of “royal.” He’s been characterized as a modernist in the mode of Paul Klee and Joan Miró, but his art lacks their aesthetic eloquence and cognitive subtlety. His paint handling is crude and coarse, and his palette does not have the expressive resonance and insistence of the works of his so-called confreres.
However one may classify them stylistically, his images are unadorned fantasies, as he himself frequently acknowledged. Because of this, many of his works, such as Yellow Woman in Street, ca. 1975; Painting in a Signature (Serenade), late 1970s; Untitled (Woman and Black Hat), late 1970s; and Woman Watching a Murder, 1996, feature depictions of nude women. All of these pieces were included here in “People of the Otherworld: Ken Kiff in Dialogue,” a modest survey of the British painter’s output that featured contributions from other artists, such as Kim Dingle and Ken Gun Min—painters who, as Kiff once did, labor in a similarly unfettered field.
Perversion, from the Latin pervertere, usually means having sex the wrong way, or deviating from a “normative” form of genital intercourse to satisfy some deep-seated desire viewed as taboo. Kiff’s paintings convey an aberrant state of mind—nothing new about that for a male artist, of course—but what seems to be novel in his work, if also age-old, is his idealization of woman as goddess. However conflicted or reluctant Kiff’s women may appear, they are a far cry from the typical modernist view, which is particularly evident in Picasso’s malicious disfigurations of his female subjects.
Sometimes Kiff’s women are peculiarly comic, as we see in the oil-on-canvas Goddess in Street (Narrow Version), late 1970s: The titular divinity, pink breasts erupting from a layer of thick orange skin, sticks her tongue out at the viewer. Naked and menstruating, she seems to be mocking our inhibitions while reveling in the wild, resplendent fecundity of her own body and Mother Nature. At other moments, his women are radiantly at ease, like the figure in the acrylic-on-paper Goddess, Attendant and Cloak,late 1970s, who seems to be sitting at the center of her own verdant queendom, confident and noble.
Kiff, whose wife was a psychotherapist, received psychotherapy intermittently for many years in part to deal with what psychoanalyst Henri Ellenberger famously referred to as a “creative illness,” a malaise during which one works through and abandons an old conventional self to become a newer, better version. A little later, Kiff began his 1971–2001 series, “The Sequence,” made up of some two hundred pieces, a number of which were on display here. A few are notably bizarre, including Man on Island with Gentle Cloud, 1990, a pastel rendering of a malformed Brobdingnagian creature dancing on some grimy atoll, and Head with Red Tongue, mid-1980s, a pastel-on-paper portrait of a twisted Goyaesque beast. Perhaps the most striking work from “The Sequence” is the acrylic-on-paper The Poet (Mayakovsky), 1977, in which the namesake Russian writer, Vladimir Mayakovsky, is shown blowing his brains out with a pistol: A number of fantasy heads gush out of the wound. (Mayakovsky did in fact commit suicide at the age of thirty-six, though by shooting himself in the heart.)
Kiff may have identified with the author, but he certainly didn’t seem anything like him—by the time of his demise, Mayakovsky had seen his career run its course, as his avant-garde works were scorned and censored by the Soviet establishment. Kiff’s art has certainly fallen into some obscurity since his death, likely owing to its vogue-eschewing aggressivity and unpleasantness. But within all the unrepentant ugliness of Kiff’s oeuvre is something lovable, and worth examining more closely.
