“It takes time to appreciate the pictures of Euan Uglow – a lot of time,” said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. “But then it took him a lot of time to paint them too.” Uglow (1932-2000) was a “meticulous, methodical and exacting” artist “who could take years” to complete a single painting.
His relatively few completed nudes, still lifes and landscapes bear testimony to his “intense” observational rigour. He sought to capture what he saw with “uncompromising precision”, scrutinising his subjects with no concession to flattery, and aspiring to clinical degrees of accuracy. His paintings have an “almost eerie serenity”, whether he was studying “a single daisy”, “a geometric skyline” or, in his most famous pictures, stiffly posed young women in various states of undress.
Largely due to his reticence – he turned down invitations to join the Royal Academy and to be painted by Lucian Freud – and his “fastidious” style, he has been largely forgotten since his death. This career retrospective in Milton Keynes brings together around 70 paintings spanning the arc of his career – including some of his best-known works, as well as others rarely exhibited in public (and some by artists who influenced him).
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Uglow is what they call “an artist’s artist”, said Chloë Ashby in The Guardian. His paintings show visible evidence of his method – “complex little dashes and crosses and plumb lines and geometric grids” – and display obvious “technical prowess”. I warmed to the earlier work: witness the “striking” “Marigold” (1969), a portrait of a Ghanaian painter and activist.
The large-scale nudes for which he is best-known, however, are “static” and inhuman. He made great demands of his models, asking them to sit in awkward poses “for days, weeks, months, years”. (Many sitters, including Cherie Blair – who appears in two paintings here – quit partway through the process.) “The Diagonal” (1971-77), his best-known work, is both “extraordinarily elegant” and “excruciating”, a vision of a model “stretched plank-like” over a chair; it took both artist and model six years to realise. The impression is of an artist who took himself “very seriously”. This doesn’t make for “an enriching viewing experience”. Frankly, his work leaves me “cold”.
Uglow’s work is “elegant and technically brilliant”, said David Trigg in Studio International. There’s a marvellous memento mori of a skull, on a bed of desert sand, against a flat, modernist background; and a “standout” still life of a honeysuckle plant in a jar, set against a blue wall – which shows his mastery as a colourist, and his interest in “complex pictorial games”. But, impressive as all this is, it’s difficult to love “the stark minimalism and exacting geometry” of Uglow’s paintings, which turn “warm, human flesh into something austere and lifeless”.
