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Brit Sit Ralph Rumney, Aged 67, R.I.P.Ralph Rumney Malcolm Imrie The artist, writer and co-founder of the Situationist International, Interviewed in The Map Is Not The Territory, a study of his life and works by Alan Woods, he said: "I think the trick, as far as possible, is to be sort of anonymous within this society. You know, to sort of vanish." Indeed, until the publication last year of that marvellous book, Ralph seemed almost to have been forgotten in his home country, except by those of us fortunate enough to have known him. 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 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 London's 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 Ralph settle down in Manosque, where he shared a flat full of his paintings 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 the French writer Marcel Schwob: "Flee the ruins, and don't cry in them." For most of his life, Ralph was a nomad, wandering from country to country, into and out of trouble -- in London, Paris, Milan, 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 400 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, Ralph none the less crossed paths -- and sometimes swords -- with just about every radical movement in art and politics of the last 50 years, made his contribution, and moved on. He was born in Newcastle, and, at the age of two, moved to Halifax, where his father, the son of a coalminer, was a vicar. He endured boarding school, discovered de 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 In 1967, Ralph's wife Pegeen -- whom he had saved from earlier suicide attempts -- killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates in their Paris flat. Her mother, Peggy Guggenheim, who had always hated Ralph (for reasons he describes, with 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". Already devastated by the loss of his wife, Ralph endured months of persecution before the action was dropped.
It was Ralph's involvement with the Situationists that was most His own description of the foundation of what some now see as the most lucid revolutionary grouping of the second half of the 20th century is modest, but accurate enough: "At the level of ideas, I don't think we came up with anything which did not already exist. Collectively, we created a synthesis, using Rimbaud, Lautriamont and others, like Feuerbach, Hegel, Marx, the Futurists, Dada, the Surrealists. We knew how to put all that together."
Ralph's membership of the SI did not last long. Debord expelled him -- "politely, even amiably" -- less than a year later, accusing him, wrongly, as it happens, of failing to complete a projected In the early 1970s, Ralph married Debord's former wife Michelle A couple of years ago, with public interest in the Situationists He is survived by his son, Sandro, a well-known art dealer. |
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