John Latham Biography

John Latham was born on 23 February 1921 in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia, which is now Maramba, Zambia. As a boy Latham was sent away from Rhodesia to boarding school in southern England. Latham considered England his home for the rest of his life.

Latham volunteered for the armed forces in 1940. He was aware of Hitler’s regime and was eager to fight fascism. Latham began duty as a seaman on the King George V. One night in May 1941 while working as a lookout, Latham witnessed the sinking of the HMS Hood, an English battleship, by Bismarck, a German battleship. Over 1400 men were killed when the ship sunk into the Atlantic. Latham was disturbed by the disaster and his spray-gun paintings of the 1950s have been interpreted as a residual reaction to the violent explosions and destruction that he witnessed that night.

In 1946 Latham began attending art classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic during periods of leave in London. As a student there he received a traditional and classical training in draftsmanship. After Latham was released from duty later on that same year he applied to study at the Chelsea School of Art. Latham received little formal instruction at the Chelsea School of Art and was largely left to improve his skills on his own. Latham worked primarily on his oil painting and etching skills.

While he was still a student at the Chelsea School of Art, Latham was invited to mount a solo-show at the Kingly Gallery in London’s Soho neighborhood. Latham did not have enough work to mount a successful solo-show and thus invited his friend and classmate John Berger to participate as well. The noted art critic, Eric Newton, gave the show a favorable review in the Sunday Times.

In 1950 Latham left art school short of receiving an official qualification and married Barbara Steveni, a fellow student at the Chelsea School of Art. The two moved to Fleet, Hampshire after their wedding. Latham and Steveni had three children together.

While in Fleet, Latham met two scientists: Clive Gregory and Anita Kohsen. Gregory was an astronomer and Kohsen an animal ethologist. Latham’s father had been a devout Christian and Latham’s childhood had been saturated with religious education. As Latham matured and was exposed to science he began to question the faith he had inherited from his father. The relationship Latham developed with Gregory and Kohsen was contingent on his eagerness to seek out a more satisfying theory of reality than that which he grew up with. Gregory and Kohsen were frustrated by the separation between science and culture that had developed in western thought and sought to join them through interdisciplinary exploration. They believed that if they could develop a more inclusive theory of the cosmos they could overcome dualism and thus the conflicts that divided men.

Latham adopted their cause and began infusing his art with his newfound interest in science with the spray can paintings. These paintings are Latham’s attempt to visually represent Gregory and Kohsen’s ‘least-event’ theory, which reduces reality to events instead of to particles or any other type of matter as had been traditionally done. The burst of the paint spray is meant to represent the event on which reality relies. Latham referred to his new technique, which he discovered while working on a ceiling mural for Gregory and Kohsen in 1954, the ‘quantum of mark’ or the ‘quantum of action’.

Latham was named an honorary founding member of Gregory and Kohsen’s Institute for the Study of Mental Images, also in 1954. Through to the end of the 1950s and into the 1960s, Latham continued to develop and elaborate the ideas and theories that Gregory and Kohsen had introduced to him and which were published in their book The O-Structure: an Introduction to Psychophysical Cosmology in 1959.

By the 1960s Latham was using books as a major art material, and the reliefs he made with them, as well as his paintings, films, and performances, were staring to be of interest to critics and museum curators. He signed with the acclaimed art dealer John Kasmin and exhibited his work in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, and U.S. As well, he became a media magnet. He was filmed, interviewed on television, and even profiled alongside his wife in the Sunday Times.

In 1961 Latham spent three months in New York City. Here he met Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Noland and Clement Greenberg. Though Latham’s visit did not significantly alter his artistic direction, it could be seen as the precursor to one of his most celebrated performances, Art and Culture of 1966. For this he borrowed Greenberg’s Art and Culture from the library at Saint Martin’s School of Art, where he was working as a lecturer. He then invited students to chew the book’s pages into a pulp. Several months after taking the book out, he returned it in it’s new form. Needless to say, his teaching contract was not renewed.

In 1966 Latham and his wife Steveni founded the Artist Placement Group (APG). The APG was a utopian project that aimed to develop a more holistic and intuitive social structure. The group worked to place artists in working environments with politicians, scientists, engineers, etc. to achieve this aim. It was essentially the beginning of artist residence system that still operates today.

In 1970 Latham was injured in a car crash. His productivity continued, but was decreased as he recovered from the accident. Over the course of the decade his work was featured in several exhibitions and the Tate Gallery mounted the first major retrospective of his work.

Latham’s ill health persisted into the 1980s. At the beginning of the decade he dedicated himself to writing. Two booklets resulted from his concentrated intellectual activity: Event Structure: An Approach to a Basic Contradiction and Report of a Surveyor. The first booklet was an account of his event-structure theory, and the second was a statement of concern for the divided state of man and a pitch for the APG to act as the remedy. The APG did become a serious focus for Latham in the 1980s. He was frustrated that conservative government did not support the APG and he even fired a distress flare over the Parliament buildings in 1984 in an attempt to bring attention to his cause. Interest in Latham revives at the end of the 1980s, particularly in Britain, Germany, and the U.S.

Latham died in Kings Hospital at Camberwell, near his home in south-east London, on 1 January 2006. At the time of his death, there was a display of his work at the Tate Britain. Latham continued to make new works up until his death.