Death becomes her

11 April 2012

In the midst of life we are in death and in the midst of death we are in Maggi Hambling's studio in south London, looking at the wobbly face of her dead girlfriend. Hambling has remade Henrietta Moraes's features in bronze and they stand, quivering, on the end of a thin wire pole at what was her own height. Moraes, a lustrous bohemian known as the queen of Soho in the Fifties, whose subsequent careers included alcoholism, drug-addiction and cat-burglary (for which she went to Holloway), was, in her last months, Hambling's model and her lover. When she died, Hambling wrote in an obituary: "I became her subject rather than she mine." This macabre lollipop has the same effect on me. Henrietta seems to scrutinise me and find me wanting. I strongly feel we would not have got on.

"It is called Henrietta Furious," says Hambling. I can see she's furious. "Yes, she gyrates with fury. She could get very cross when she was drunk."

But didn't she get angry with Henrietta back? "I got furious with her when she drank, yes, of course. It was the battle of the drink. And the drink won."

We move from the sculpture studio in her garden back to the painting studio at the top of her house. Here, spectral Henriettas are joined by multiple apparitions of Maggi's father, Harry Hambling. He died in 1998, aged 96, a year before Henrietta, and she has meticulously recorded his death too. Particularly imposing is a tall painting, Father Standing, which has the old man dressed in a suit and tie, a third of his face white bone, materialising from a block of wood.

"It only occurred to me the other day that the last time I'd seen these people they were horizontal and the first thing I do is make them stand upright. I mean, if you don't count the coffin ones."

At this point in Hambling's career - she is 56 - death has hijacked her talent. Her exhibitions, Father and Henrietta Moraes, have just opened and the British Museum has bought her sketchbook recording her father's decline. But death has frequently flagged her down in the past. Her mother, Marjorie, died in 1988 and Hambling sketched her in her coffin, one of the drawings inspiring an unusually serene painting, My Mother Dead, which was also bought by the British Museum. In the early Nineties, she painted a watercolour sequence called The Happy Dead. In 1993, she made her first sculptures, a procession of little coffins called Coffin In a Hurry, Coffin With An Erection, Coffin for Marilyn Monroe.

"I shall go down in art history as Maggi 'Coffin' Hambling," she says, although I think she'd prefer this to being remembered for her drinking and partying, her Marlene Dietrich impersonations or as the dykey, grumpy, not particularly well-informed panellist on George Melly's still lamented arts quiz, Gallery. To meet, she is gruff - a gruffness abetted by cigarettes - confrontational and dryly witty. Since Henrietta's death, however, she has shorn her billowing grey hair and, it seems, shed with it some of her theatricality and harshness. Her work divides critics. You either get her sunrises and sunsets, her Minotaurs and her abstract paintings (which she denies are abstract) or you find them a mess. Her portraits, however, of Melly, Max Wall, George Solti, Stephen Fry and AJP Taylor, have always been admired by the public with whom she had a love affair until a major falling-out three years ago over her Oscar Wilde statue near Trafalgar Square. I was going to write that nobody likes this, but then I heard of a gay friend who loved it so much that he once sat on it for an hour. Generally, however, it got a pasting. The Independent devoted a whole page to the "disaster", its critic calling it "tourist tat".

Hambling's face ignites with pleasure-when I mention it. So she doesn't get upset by criticism? "Oh, no," she whoops. "When Brian Sewell had a go at Wilde, someone telephoned me nervously: 'Have you seen the Standard?' I went and got one and then telephoned everyone I knew: 'Go and get the Standard!' "

She learned to live with critics almost as soon as she learned to paint. It began accidentally when, aged 14, at school in Suffolk, she completed an art exam in 10 minutes and stole the art prize. She remembers afterwards staying up until 3am painting the night sky from her bedroom window and laying the results out the next day to the scorn of the other girls. Her teacher told her that insults were "water off a duck's back" to a true artist and she believed her. After seven years in art colleges, she held her first commercial exhibition in London in 1973, where, to her astonishment, her portraits of solitary pub drinkers sold out.

At what point, I ask, did her parents, the Suffolk bank clerk with a show-off 's love for amateur theatricals and his devout but Philistine wife, Marjorie, stop asking when she would settle down and have children?

"When I told my mother I was queer she was upset. As she was quite a church-goer, she went on a weekend retreat to a monastery and put her name down to talk to one of the monks. She said, 'I have a daughter who is married with three children and a son who's married, but I have one daughter' - and she managed to bring out the word 'lesbian'. And this monk, whoever he was, said: 'I hope you've never held it against her. There's all kinds of love, Mrs Hambling.' She was different after that."

For years, Harry Hambling was such a distant father that Marjorie played both parents' roles. Maggi and he became close only when she gave him a painting set on his retirement and he discovered a talent for art that would lead him to become an exhibited artist in his own right. Many of her sketches of the last five years of his life show him painting, his eyes squinting, his head bowed further and further towards the paper until he is so weak that he uses his left hand to support his brush-bearing right. The final pictures are of him in Ipswich Hospital, "lying there like a little, tiny Gandhi".

These works are sad because they show a human being closing down, but they also celebrate a long life lived fully to the last hour: Harry's animation, his flirtatiousness, his jealous staking out of his territory on a sofa at Christmas. The last picture he worked on was a protest painting about hunting - pro-hunting, of course.

The record of Henrietta's last nine months offer less consolation. Although the portraits are shot with black humour, her subject's reckless charisma and the shade of her once legendary beauty, one's admiration is pre-empted by the anger that a death from addiction always provokes, however unworthily. Sixty-seven was too young for her to die, but for all Hambling's frenzied, swirling, often inspired, occasionally gimmicky, attempts to capture her spirit (one sculpture is topped off with a can of Special Brew), it takes more imagination than I can muster to love someone who hurt Maggi so badly.

She had had lovers before, of course, but having taken literally a tutor's advice to make her work her best friend, Hambling had always felt most "real" working alone in her studio. This must have made her hard to live with, I suggest. "Impossible," she says.

At a dinner at the Hayward Gallery, two days after her father's funeral in February 1998, Moraes began undermining Maggi's impossibilities. "I think I was in quite a vulnerable state," she understates. She came for supper and then rang to borrow £400 to settle "some annoying bills" in exchange for "some work". Hambling suggested she model for her. They began at the end of May, working on Mondays, Henrietta posing on a table against the studio wall. Hambling studied her. Her eyes were the colour of sweet sherry. Her nose was broken. Her mouth, skewed rightward because of that rearrangement, was large and sensuous.

In July, she asked her to pose with a skull. Did she know she was dying? "She occasionally said when she was very, very depressed and going to AA meetings, 'If I have another drink it will kill me.'"

So it wasn't exactly tactful to have her pose with a memento mori? "How could one be tactful with Henrietta? I remember she said I'd made the skull look much more alive than her."

We look at the drawings in sequence. "She'd had the last drink by now and it was driving her a bit potty. This was September. I remember going to collect her on a Monday and she was convinced that gas was escaping from her fire. I telephoned the gasman and there was no escape. She went into the mental-health unit at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for a couple of weeks. When I collected her, I took her to an AA meeting on the Monday evening. But by the end of the week she'd had the nerve to drink again, secretly." Suicidally? "It was heroic self-destruction. She defied death. She was very drunk in this drawing. I did it with my left hand. I was furious with her. She would sit for two minutes and then say, 'Oh, f*** it, I'm going downstairs to look for a drink.'"

"... This was December. She couldn't eat any more and she could only drink water so she began to lose weight and look younger again. She was incredibly brave, and said: 'Don't worry. It's only gastro-enteritis.'"

I see no self-pity in her face. "No, she died undefeated. It was the spirit of the woman."

On 6 January 1999, Henrietta greeted Hambling from the bathroom window of the house in Chelsea where she was lodging. She was making jokes, but wasn't feeling well. The front door of the house was stuck and Hambling had to clamber through a window in the basement to get to her room.

"I was getting very cross. I said, 'I have to get you to the hospital.' And she said, 'Shut up and come here and give me a hug and another cigarette.' I said, 'Why don't you try and speak to your doctor?' and I managed to get straight through to her doctor. I was fiddling with some flowers, some white lilies I'd taken her, at the sink, and she was joking with the doctor, being very funny, and then her voice changed and she dropped the phone. A huge groan, like an enormous kind of animal noise. And that was it."

Her liver had capitulated. Yet there was unfinished business between them - and although Hambling must have painted her a hundred times since her death (she destroys as much art as she exhibits) it is still not finished. "My dog, Percy, died last week so I made some paintings. His left eye insisted on looking like Henrietta's left eye. God knows how long it will go on for."

Does she talk to her? "Sure. 'What do you think about this, Henry?'î

It sounds as if Henrietta was the love of her life. "She said she was.î

A long afternoon on a dismal autumn day has been more frequently interrupted with jokes than you'd imagine. From Max Wall to Oscar Wilde, laughter has always been her other subject. Ten years ago, she painted a series of oils with "Laugh" in their title - Secret Laugh, Champagne Laugh, Brothel Laugh - the most impish of which was Laugh Defying Death, which had a dismembered prostitute's fishnet stockings high-kicking a tombstone. Hambling is like the classics master in Alice in Wonderland, the one who taught "Laughter and Grief" rather than Latin and Greek.

"Well, Andrew, if we can't laugh at death what can we laugh at?"

But how does she really feel about extinction, this chain-smoker who excuses her suicide-by-nicotine because "99 per cent of the time it's hell working in this room"?

"There are rare moments, when I'm floating in the sea and looking up at the sky, when I think it wouldn't be so bad to die. But those are very rare moments."

Otherwise? "Otherwise, of course, I am terrified of it. Like most people."

For a moment, every item of her arsenal flees the room - bravado, beauty, laughter, art, love. Maggi Hambling and I are left alone, looking at each other.

? Henrietta Moraes by Maggi Hambling: Marlborough Fine Art until 3 November. Father by Maggi Hambling: the Morley Gallery until 8 November.

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