The world is burning. Fascism is rising. Countries are falling. And we’re on the brink of incredible technological change, which will either be the end of everything or a new beginning. So, who needs artists?
An August night in 1944. Robert Colquhoun’s hand shakes as he lights a candle in the blacked-out Notting Hill studio shared with his lover, fellow artist, Robert “Bobby” MacBryde. They are known – from Soho alleys to Bond Street galleries – as the Two Roberts: inseparable, incandescent, often in trouble. Where is Bobby tonight? The Colony Room Club, probably. Safe, Robert hopes. Though never from himself. Bombers prowl the skies above. Who will survive the night? “Fuck it,” Robert mutters, fag dancing on his lip. And he picks up his brush.
The Two Roberts were real, though in my new novel I’ve reimagined them as literary characters – putting flesh on biographical bones. Two young Scotsmen on the make, with boot-black hair, talent matched only by ambition, generosity surpassed only by thirst. Robert Colquhoun and Bobby MacBryde were born in Ayrshire just before the first world war, meeting at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) in 1933 then becoming stars as the bombs fell. They were the original “Golden Boys of Bond Street”: nicknamed MacBraque and McPicasso, which they pretended not to love. Photographed in Vogue and filmed by Ken Russell, they were twin suns. Everybody else was in their orbit, if they were lucky.
At one of their weekend-long studio parties at 77 Bedford Gardens you could share a whisky with Elizabeth Smart, birl with boys from the Royal Ballet or strain to hear Dylan Thomas over the music. Somehow, despite rationing, there was always plenty to eat and drink and smoke. Bobby could feed the five thousand with one fish. Robert was a beguilingly brooding host. You could feast on the gossip for weeks. Smart would later employ them at Tilty Mill in Essex as live-in nannies for her four children with George Barker, the poet she fictionalised in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. They knew everybody and had everything then suddenly they had nothing and almost nobody and then they were gone. Robert dead at 47. Bobby, never far behind, at 52.
Who were they? How did they blaze such a trail? And why are they now barely remembered?
Growing up in Maybole, South Ayrshire, Bobby worked in a boot factory to save for tuition, convinced he’d get into the big art school in nearby-but-faraway Glasgow. In Kilmarnock, Robert was taken out of school by his father then returned on a scholarship by a minister who saw potential in the meticulous drawings his father envied. They were first in their families to get to university. In my novel I have them meet on their first day – each seeing something secret in the other.
At the GSA they won every prize, the greatest being each other. Knowing the prodigy pair would only split any money, the GSA awarded them a joint travelling scholarship, sending them around Europe just a step ahead of Hitler. They survived street encounters with Blackshirts, sketched Michelangelos in Rome, got a taste for wine and had their eyes opened by Picasso’s Guernica in Paris. Their travel diaries, held in the GSA archives, smoulder with drawings of hot young priests.
I fell in love with Bobby and Robert during lockdown. I saw a tweet of a painting of Two Women Sewing and the blue of the cloth stopped me – who made this? Bobby. Next I found Robert’s Grieving Women. These were great artists, great Scots, why were they not up there with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Glasgow Boys and that minister ice-skating on a million shortbread tins?
Bobby becomes famous for his not-very-still still lifes – apples and pears dancing out their bowl, fish flapping on a plate. He offers the viewer a glimpse of rationed deliciousness and a secret taste of what he’s cooking for his man. Robert becomes famous for his mysterious and often tragic portraits – mask-like faces contorted in the mystery of mourning, often a pair of figures holding each other: one with his long face and the other Bobby’s low brow. They are pioneering a radical queer domesticity.
I stumbled across them as footnotes in the biographies of people who used to want to be them. Soho survivors claim Francis Bacon is supposed to have said “Everything I learned about drawing, I learned from Robert Colquhoun.” Endless enraging articles describe them as “friends” or “roommates”: polite closeting elisions, more final than any coffin. When Bobby was 27 he wrote to Robert: “We must be certain to create our legends before we die.” By the time I discovered them they were almost forgotten. Could fictionalising them bring them back?
Obsessing, I found them in an issue of the Picture Post from 1949 with Prunella Clough, Keith Vaughan, Patrick Heron and John Minton (Minty). Rich Minty was in love with Robert and would eventually move into their studio, making a couple a throuple – that’s a fun chapter. The Roberts’ interview is titled The Artists Who Live, Travel, Work and Exhibit Together. The photo, by Felix Man, shows them at their easels in matching shirts and ties. Robert is in a fisherman’s jumper probably knitted by Bobby who made most of their clothes, ironing Robert’s shirts with a spoon heated on their single gas ring. On the easels are Bobby’s Woman in a Red Hat and Robert’s Two Scotswomen – both bought by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Metropolitan Art and sadly no relation. On a mission to acquire the best young British artists, Barr’s other purchases were Bacon, Edward Burra and Lucian Freud.
Looking at Man’s photo I found myself imagining the rest of their studio-high windows capturing pale north light and looking over to the glossy magnolia tree still growing in the garden opposite. Savouring the smell of pencil shavings and linseed oil. Wondering at the audacity of two young men building an illegal and illicit life in this one room. Finally standing outside their studio felt like completing a pilgrimage to fallen gods.
Bobby and Robert were pioneers who spoke to me like prophets. Handsome, talented and foolhardy. Each believing in the other and making the other love more and paint better. Until they didn’t. Until drink and debt and the ceaseless memory of the horrors of war and the undeclared war on people like them – people like me – became too much.
Like them, I arrived in London knowing almost nobody and wanting to be somebody – to become a writer. Just before the millennium, I discovered the three parallel streets in Soho: Greek, Frith and Dean. A world of pleasures and stories for a young man who’d grown up in a former pit village near a dying steel town where you could get a train to Glasgow and find the one gay club, if you knew where to look. I found freedom on the streets Bobby and Robert had danced down before my parents were born. Hardly any of their haunts remain but get drunk enough in Soho and you’ll see ghosts. I imagined them eyeing me up across a smoky bar.
Every second person in wartime Soho was from somewhere else. So Bobby and Robert are lumped together by their new English friends – and subsequently by art historians – as “working class”. But Robert’s mother was a housewife and Bobby’s sold rags. The Colquhoun’s council flat still stands, Bobby’s childhood street was demolished. Robert’s lot were Protestant, Bobby’s Catholic. These differences mattered, forming fault lines that flourished in their work but fractured their relationship.
Art was their life but also their work and they had the temerity to need paying, unlike their mostly monied pals. The Roberts spent faster than they earned – hosting parties, helping friends and having fun. They came from nothing. They didn’t know how to be rich. When art tastes changed they couldn’t afford time to experiment. The Roberts really did not get on with “the Bloomsberries”. In Frances Spalding’s book Duncan Grant she describes them as “abrasive young Scots” claiming their “begging letters arrived regularly”. Were they abrasive or just direct in the Glasgow style? Begging or just asking for what they were owed?
They were fiercely loyal. When Bobby met Barker, who was leading Elizabeth Smart a merry dance, he is alleged to have ground the base of a broken whisky glass into the palm of his hand while purring “Pleased to meet ye”. Their Notting Hill neighbour Wyndham Lewis knew this, writing in an Observer review: “Robert Colquhoun is generally recognised as one of the best – perhaps the best – of the young artists. Perhaps I should have said Colquhoun and MacBryde for they work together, their work is almost identical, and they can be regarded almost as one organism.”
One organism. Two Roberts.
But how did they get to London and break into the art world? In my novel I conjure a cruising encounter in a blacked-out Waverley Station: Bobby picking up John Tonge, art critic for Horizon magazine, then showing him some etchings after. Why not? Sex and art are happy bedfellows. We don’t know this happened. We don’t know it didn’t. We do know Tonge introduced Bobby to Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon, and Peter Watson, millionaire backer of the magazine, over a lunch of partridge at Edinburgh’s Café Royal. Bobby, ever hungry, thought they were very small chickens. This life-changing lunch opened a new chapter in art history.
When lives are not valued or actively devalued – as the lives of Bobby and Robert and everybody like them were and often still are – they are not fully known. They can’t be. That doesn’t mean they weren’t fully lived. Writing to your same-sex lover in the 1930s was drafting your own arrest warrant. Or suicide note. You wrote in code, you burned letters, you memorised names and addresses. Or you were caught. Bobby and Robert knew many people who were imprisoned, or worse. Their close friend Denis Wirth-Miller was arrested for “gross indecency” on his way to a party at their studio and jailed for nine weeks – a remarkably light sentence. They collected him from the gates of Wormwood Scrubs. The prosecution in 1954 of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Peter Wildeblood and Michael Pitt-Rivers, was a national festival of bigotry.
The laws the Two Roberts defied would not be lifted in their too-short lifetimes, and remained in Scotland until 1984. By then I had already been kissed by another boy. When the facts of our lives can never be fully known there isn’t just room for fiction, there is a moral imperative for it. To write it. To paint it – to light a candle in the dark then pick up your pen or brush. Even, and especially, when the world is ending.
• The Two Roberts is published by Canongate on 4 September. Damian Barr is curating an exhibition, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde: Artists, Lovers, Outsiders, at the Charleston in Lewes gallery, from 15 October to 12 April. For details of events UK-wide, visit bit.ly/TTR-tour.
