Norman Rechter studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford where he was awarded the University of Oxford prize for Life Drawing in his second year. In his final year, he was invited to exhibit a series of large oil paintings on the theme of Callisto in the Senior Common room at Wadham College.
His next large exhibition was at the Zaydler Gallery in London where he showed tonally brilliant landscapes in watercolour; this exhibition was virtually a sell-out and the critic Pierre Rouve wrote in the Arts Review that "rarely since Burra's halycon days have watercolours been so amply orchestrated and yet so completely unaffected by the actual measurements of the composition. Rechter's gem-like miniatures and self-asserting swerves are equally subtle and incisive".
In 1983, the artist moved to France and established his own School of Painting offering summer courses to students from all over Europe and the United States. His new surroundings seemed to galvanize him creatively and ushered in both a new style of painting and a very productive working period. Working in watercolour, his paintings became much more brilliant in effect although he was using a much more limited palette. There followed a series on a theme of split images, attempting to introduce an element of time into the image by means of a multiple view point, sometimes within a single image, and sometimes four intimately related images within one frame. These paintings were exhibited in a one man show at the Galerie France in Bordeaux and at the Church Gallery, London W1.
A series based on the human figure followed and formed the main core of his next successful exhibition in London. After this, he turned to painting huge close up studies of Poppies and Irises which sold too fast to ever make up a single exhibition. At the same time, he was working on a series of paintings based on the story of King Arthur which formed the exhibition "Arthur, Myth and Magic" at the Hyde Park gallery in 1996.
Since that exhibition, the artist has worked on mythic figures in movement, primordial landscapes and images of gender conflict. Recently, he has concentrated on a series of smaller watercolours exploring both pure colour and symbolic form. His most recent exhibition at the Lennox Gallery in London showed a selection of both types of work and dazzled by its creativity and variety.
Below is Norbert Lynton's review from August 1996, reviewing the exhibhition "Arthur, Myth and Magic" mentioned above:
"Around 1960, when The Times still believed in authorial anonymity, it printed an article on watercolours. Its theme was that the great tradition of watercolour painting, finest flower of English art and our gift to those Continentals, had passed away, killed by Modernism. I wrote a letter to the editor. He didn’t print it; perhaps he passed it on. I pointed out how important the medium had been to some of the early Modernists and how plentiful and beautiful modern watercolours were. I mentioned Continental painters like Cezanne, Nolde, Mondrian and Delaunay, and especially Klee’s masterly use of the medium by itself and in various combinations. I pointed to the best of the many British using watercolour, Wyndam Lewis, Paul Nash, Henry Moore etc. Today I’d want to add the name of Norman Rechter.
Watercolour is not dead, no deader than King Arthur. In any case, modern art hasn’t killed anything. The media present art as warfare. The fact is that art adds and enriches, and in doing so often illuminates the past. Norman Rechter is an outstanding watercolourist, that is obvious to anyone who encounters his work at first hand. He is also an artist in the tradition of Romanticism, which I believe to continue at the heart of Modernism. More specifically, he works in the tradition of Post-Impressionism, that all important reorientation when the best artists, Gauguin and Cezanne, most particularly, promoted the medium (in Rodin’s case, the sculptural media) to leading roles. Paint on canvas or paper, colour, form, texture, scale and their affective properties took over from more or less naturalistic description and entered into close collaboration with the artist to join in generating the image.
Modernism at first rejected art’s old habit of working with highbrow texts ‘Away from Literature’ was the slogan. Once the convention had been broken, contact could be re-established. Klee used texts in his pictures; Matisse did brilliant illustrations to Baudelaire, Mallarme, Joyce and others. Surrealist artists fed poetry into their pictures. And on occasion modern painters have found themselves passionately involved in some literary and possibly historical theme and have used their art to complement and comment on this subject. The results can be close to illustrations and film, as in Nolan’s famous Ned Kelly series; they can also be more akin to symphonic poems. This opportunity is one of modernism’s key achievements and here is the genre to which Norman Rechter’s King Arthur watercolours belong.
I don’t apologise for the musical analogy. If you don’t listen to Rechter’s paintings, you don’t see them. Listening takes time. Remember the Arthur legend if you can, but above all look with all your senses. You will find, most obviously, differences of size and complexity. There are images that are delicate or suave in colour and their formal relationships; there are others that are firm, with colour contrasts and clear edges. There are scenes suggestive of landscapes, buildings, cataclysmic skies. Though watercolour, especially when the paper shows as a major constituent, speaks flatness – a medium without thickness on an absorbant plane – space as experienced in these compositions varies quite surprisingly, from more or less flat to slow steppings back and sudden, dreamlike folds that jolt our responses. Take time; there is always more to see/hear in these complex, resonant works. Watercolour is particularly beautiful in the form of luminous washes and these are prominent, but so are Rechter’s surprising textures, and sudden tiny details in a context of large, broad forms. Discs and colours address themselves to familiar symbolism but not without ambivalence. A disc may be Sun or Moon, or Earth itself, but perhaps it is the Round Table or a shield.
This multiplicity has always been close to the heart of poetry, and ambiguity of meaning and circumstance is essential to the history and legend of King Arthur. Seizing the right to be poetic has been one of the glories of modern art. Rechter asserts this right out of strong instinct and of course he is not alone in doing so (Turner, Delacroix and the Post-Impressionists are his ancestors in this matter), but to do so is a particularly courageous act at a time when media attention goes more readily to the clever and cool. There is no room for the clever and cool. But thank heavens art can still be new and fresh and yet speak openly of passion."