GEORGE WEISSBORT Still life with Coca Cola cans, a glass tankard & popcorn

GEORGE WEISSBORT (1928-2013)

Still life with Coca Cola cans, a glass tankard & popcorn

Oil on canvas laid onto board 37.1 x 71.8cm; s. & d. ’68

Handmade replica of our painted French Louis XVI entablature profile frame

Overall framed size 51.1 x 83.8cm

Click on image to view at larger size

Another study in ephemera and the discarded remains of a modern meal, this uses the emblems of 20th century America – Coca Cola cans and a container of popcorn – in tandem with icons of Englishness: the glass tankard, and the fragmented pattern of a Union Jack on the paper wrappings. This might well have been a political statement when it was made, which was probably in 1968 (a symbolic year); now the John Bull/Uncle Sam juxtaposition has been lost in the homogenization of international styles. However, the study of heroicized detritus remains, with the elevated viewpoint, frieze-like composition, careful arrangement of objects and drapery, and the balanced colour harmonies, of Weissbort’s more conventional still life paintings.

Biographical details

George Weissbort (1928-2013) was born in Belgium and moved to London at the age of 7.  He attended the Central School of Art & Design (now St Martin’s) where he was taught by Ruskin Spear and Rodrigo Moynihan. He was influenced by Arthur Segal to move from the abstract expressionism of the 1940s to realism, and by Bernard Meninsky, who taught life drawing at the Central School, to study the Old Masters.  He turned first to artists such as Cézanne and Matisse, and later to Vermeer, Chardin, Velasquez, Corot, Titian, Holbein, and Piero della Francesca, amongst others.

He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the Fine Art Society. In 1964-65 he had a large exhibition in Paris, and in 2006 he had a  one-man retrospective at the Chambers Gallery, London, followed in 2008 by another at the Denise Yapp Gallery, Whitebrook, Monmouth.

He wrote essays on art and criticism which look both at the techniques of making a painting, and of appreciating a work of art. The latter skill he believed came only after years of consciously training the eye to see as the artist saw, considering for example the ‘negative’ spaces around and between objects. He also discussed the work of specific artists, such as Lucien Freud and Vermeer.

His obituary in The Independent quotes Brian Sewell, a friend, as saying of him that Weissbort ‘painted the right pictures at the wrong time’. His appeal was to those who understood his models and influences; he could be described as a painter’s painter, and the same obituary quotes Paula Rego describing him as ‘a truly honest artist who knows so much about painting’.

Publications: George Weissbort, Paintings and Drawings (Parnassus, 2008), ill. 130 colour plates; includes transcripts of a filmed interview; essays by Tony Rudolph, David Lee and Bernard Dunstan RA.

YouTube video:  A tribute to George Weissbort by John French.