Ralph Rumney, artist, writer, and co-founder of the
Situationist
International, died at his home in Manosque in
Provence, aged 67.. In the
last four weeks he had been receiving treatment for
cancer at the hospital
of La Timone in Marseille. His funeral will take place
in the cemetery of
Montparnasse in Paris on Saturday.
?I think the trick, as far as possible, is to be sort
of anonymous within
this society. You know, to sort of vanish?. So said
Ralph in a recent
interview. And indeed, until the publication last year
of the marvellous
book by Alan Woods which includes that interview, The
Map is Not the
Territory (Manchester University Press), Ralph seemed
almost to have been
forgotten in his home country, except by those of us
fortunate enough to
have known him, off and on, over the years. In 1989,
the Tate bought one of
his paintings, ?The Change?, dating from 1957. And
there have been a few
retrospective shows of his work here in the last few
years, most recently in
his home town of Halifax. Ralph produced a vast body
of work over the years
-- from informal abstracts to large canvases using
gold and silver leaf,
from plaster moulds to polaroids, montages and videos.
But only now are
these being reassembled, and reassessed. As he put it:
?They?ve been
scattered all over the place. That corresponds to a
particular way of life,
to luck and different circumstances. Things are sold,
things are lost. You
could almost say that today I?m an artist without
works, that they?ve become
accessories.?
Ralph?s vanishing tricks were notorious: an essential
part of a life of
permanent adventure and endless experiment. He moved,
as his friend Guy
Atkins said, ?between penury and almost absurd
affluence. One visited him in
a squalid room in Neal Street, in a house shared with
near down-and-outs.
Next one would find him in Harry?s Bar in Venice or at
a Max Ernst opening
in Paris. He seemed to take poverty with more
equanimity than riches.? Only
latterly -- and partly because of ill-health did he
seem to settle down,
in the little town of Manosque where he shared a flat
full of his paintings
s with his cat, Borgia. For The Consul, another book
of interviews with him
soon to be published in Britain, he chose as an
epigraph a phrase from
Marcel Schwob: ?Flee the ruins, and don?t cry in
them?. Throughout most of
his life, Ralph was a nomad, wandering from country to
country, into and out
of trouble: in London, Paris, Milan, or Venice, or on
the tiny island of
Linosa, south of Sicily, one of his favourite places.
?I?ve always felt
entirely at ease among the four hundred inhabitants,
regularly cut off from
the world for long periods. Some people have accused
me of having a morbid
love of solitude, but I would claim that what I found
there was in fact a
small society on a human scale.?
Claiming not to believe in avant-gardes, he has
nonetheless crossed paths,
and sometimes swords, with just about every radical
movement in art and
politics of the last fifty years, made his
contribution, and moved on.. He
was born in Newcastle in 1934, and moved to Halifax in
Yorkshire -- where
his father, son of a coalminer, was a vicar -- at
the age of two. He
endured boarding school, discovered Sade and the
surrealists in his early
teens, turned down places at Oxford and at art school,
ran away to Soho
bohemia, and to Paris. What followed was a long,
erratic journey. En route,
his travelling companions have included E. P.Thompson
(who gave him a room
when he was 17 so he could escape his parents, and
deepened his
understanding of Marxism), Stefan Themerson (a
collaborator on the magazine
Ralph produced in London in the mid-?50s, Other
Voices), Georges Bataille(
with whom Ralph argued about eroticism), Yves Klein
(whose work, like that
of Michaux, Fontana, and others, Ralph introduced to
the London art world),
William Burroughs, and the philosopher and
psychiatrist, Félix Guattari --
who gave Ralph sanctuary in his clinic outside Paris
when he was accused --
unforgivably -- of murder. Ralph had married the
artist Pegeen Vail,
daughter of Peggy Guggenheim. They had a son, Sandro
(today a well-known art
dealer), whilst living in Venice in 1960. In 1967,
Pegeen -- whom Ralph
had saved from earlier suicide attempts -- killed
herself with an overdose
of barbiturates in their Paris flat. And Peggy
Guggenheim, who had always
hated Ralph (for reasons that he describes with great
wit and a surprising
lack of bitterness in The Consul), took out a civil
action against him for
murder and ?non-assistance to a person in danger?.
Ralph, already devastated
by the loss of Pegeen, had to endure months of
persecution, before the civil
action was dropped.
It was Ralph?s involvement with the Situationists that
was most important
for him, and which has in part led to the rediscovery
of his work as an
artist in recent years. There is a much-reproduced set
of photos of the
first meeting of the Situationist International in the
Italian village of
Cosio d?Arroscia in July 1957. All the now-celebrated
founding members are
there: Walter Olmo, Michèle Bernstein, Asger Jorn and
of course Guy Debord,
smiling at the camera. Only Ralph is missing --
because he took the
photos. His membership of the S.I. did not last long.
Debord ?politely, even
amiably? expelled him less than a year later, accusing
him -- wrongly, as
it happens -- of failing to complete a projected
?psychogeography? of
Venice. But his association with the situationists
didn?t end there. It
endured throughout his life. He remained friends with
many of them. In the
early 1970s he married Michèle Bernstein -- who had
formerly been married
to Guy Debord -- and, though they later divorced, the
two stayed close
friends for the rest of his life. To Ralph she was
?the most situationist?
of all of them, the one who from the very start fought
to stop the group
turning into an ?ism?, an ideology, a sect. In that
case, they were
perfectly matched. A couple of years ago, with the
mediatisation of the
situationists in full swing, a whole slew of books on
the movement and on
Debord were published almost simultaneously in France.
But it was Ralph?s
book, The Consul, that was, as the paper Libération
put it, ?the most
lively, the most passionate?. Ralph, it always seemed
to me, embodied the
best of the S.I., in his political intransigence and
his intellectual
curiosity, in his playfulness and wit, and in his
anger at those who are
running, and ruining, this world.
Ralph Rumney, born 5 June 1934, Newcastle, died 6
March 2002, Manosque.