(posted 7464 days ago)Telegraph
Colin Hayes
(Filed: 17/11/2003)Colin Hayes, who has died aged 83, was one of the most significant art school teachers of his generation; his appointment to the Painting School of the Royal College of Art in 1949 coincided with its emergence as the dominant force in British art school teaching immediately after the war.
With such colourful characters as John Minton, Carel Weight and Ruskin Spear also on the staff, it represented a formidable array of talent; and if Hayes's name is less familiar than these, it is only because of the essentially reticent temperament of the man, and the largely "back room" nature of so much of his work there.
When he was appointed, aged just 30, by the then Professor of Painting, Rodrigo Moynihan, Hayes already had a considerable reputation as both a painter and intellectual. He soon formed a close association with Carel Weight, who was to take over the Professorship in 1957, and through the influence he exerted Hayes can be seen as the quiet dynamo of the College's golden age.
A whole stream of gifted students - Hockney and Blake, Kitaj and Caulfield among them - emerged in these years, establishing Pop Art as Britain's first truly international contribution to 20th-century art.
Something of the character of Hayes's role at the College can be gauged from Moynihan's famous and revealing group portrait of this time. In The Teaching Staff of the Painting School, the bow-tied Hayes can be seen leaning against a plan-chest, behind Carel Weight.
Together, over the next 20 years or more, Hayes and Weight established a reputation for the Royal College that has been matched since then only by Goldsmith's in the 1990s. After Weight's retirement in 1972, Hayes stayed on for a few more years, before becoming Roger de Grey's deputy at the City and Guilds School of Art in Kennington in the early 1980s.
Such a lifetime of high level and committed full-time teaching might well have left little room for his own work; yet, as a retrospective exhibition mounted for his eightieth birthday in the Friends' Room at the Royal Academy made plain, nothing could have been further from the truth.
A regular over the years at the Academy's Summer Exhibition, Hayes had frequent solo shows throughout his career, most particularly with the late David Wolfers' New Grafton Gallery; and it was Wolfers who once shrewdly observed of Hayes that, although he might give the impression of being a reticent man, "his manner shrouds a colourful and talented painter with a steely core".
It was, though, a steely core combined with an enlightened, if nowadays outdated, concept that artists should practise their art within the art schools at which they teach.
Colin Graham Frederick Hayes was born on November 17 1919. His artistic talent showed itself early: "At 14 I could do a very detailed and accurate rendering of a Hawker Fury," he once observed. After Westminster, he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, but soon found himself working in the Ruskin School of Drawing there.
Further studies were interrupted by the war, which he spent as a map-maker with the Royal Engineers, emerging as a captain. Much of his service was in the Western Desert, where he found time to record the war in some vivid watercolour studies.
Back in England, he resumed his studies at the Ruskin, then situated in the Ashmolean Museum and sharing its space with the evacuated Slade School. His friendship with Peter Greenham (later Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools but then teaching in Oxford) was significant.
As well as both then sharing a preference for a much quieter, darker-toned colour in their painting, they also had a passionate painterly interest in the history of art that expressed itself in some fine critical writing.
Hayes's taste in other artists was always nicely eclectic - Stanley Spencer, Renoir and Rembrandt being among the subjects of his writings; art history, in his view, always formed an inherent part of the make-up of any articulate artist. As for the particular artistic influences on his own work as a landscape painter, Matisse was always a figure of major importance, as was Bonnard.
For Hayes, it was always above all the idea which, for him, "made" the painting, and without which it becomes merely an illustration, a "thing" without meaning. Looking at the boldly coloured paintings from his later life, many of them executed on the island of Evvia, in Greece, where he had a house for 17 years, it is immediately apparent that each one of them starts from a powerful visual idea, a concatenation of form and colour in the landscape that captures a moment of clear sensation - what Matisse called "the feeling I have for life".
Hayes was elected an Academician in 1963, one of a group of younger figures (they included Leonard Rosoman, Freddie Gore, Bernard Dunstan and Hugh Casson) who came to the Academy in the 1960s and played such a vital role in initiating the process of modernisation at the institution which is often attributed solely to the 1970s and 1980s.
Although towards the end of his life a Senior Academician, and therefore no longer involved in committee work, Hayes continued to take an active interest in its affairs, trenchantly observing a couple of years ago (at a time of considerable internal turmoil there), "We can still shove our oar in when it comes to voting".
Colin Hayes died on November 1. He married first, in 1949, Jean Westbrook Law, who died in 1988; they had three daughters. In 1992 he married Marjorie Christensen.