03-06-2025
‘Sometimes he cast spells over them': the raging beauty of Derek Jarman's black paintings
In recent years, the late artist and film-maker Derek Jarman has been celebrated for his house, Prospect Cottage in Kent, which was saved for the nation in 2020. Visitors flock to its extraordinary garden, in the shadow of Dungeness nuclear power station, in search of solace and relaxation. Yet focusing on this artistic haven threatens to overshadow Jarman's actual work, which was far from tranquil and domestic, and often angry, dark and disturbing.
Two examples of this more challenging side of Jarman's output are about to resurface. The first is the publication of a treatment for an unfinished film called The Assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Garden of Earthly Delights, which Jarman wrote in 1984 as he was struggling to get his film Caravaggio made. Like Jarman, Pasolini was a queer film-maker (and writer) whose work often expressed a cri de coeur against political and sexual repression. 'I think Derek related to Pasolini because he carved his own path and made films in a very singular, distinctive way,' says Tony Peake, Jarman's biographer. 'He was also someone who stuck his neck out.'
Pasolini was murdered aged 53 in November 1975, three weeks before the release of his final film Salò, an indictment of fascism and a gruelling depiction of its sadism. A 17-year-old rent boy called Giuseppe Pelosi confessed to killing Pasolini after the director picked him up, and it's this interpretation that Jarman riffs on in his film treatment, a vision of decadence and gay desire leading to doom, inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's painting, which Jarman saw in the Prado in Madrid.
Yet since Jarman's death at 52 in 1994, new evidence has come to light suggesting that Pasolini, an outspoken Marxist who often wrote newspaper articles excoriating the Italian government, was killed by a far-right terrorist group working with the tacit approval of the secret services, a possibility Olivia Laing imagines in their compelling forthcoming novel, The Silver Book. Pelosi retracted his confession in 2005 and it's hard to believe that a single teenager could be responsible for the violence that Pasolini suffered in his final moments. He was run over several times by his car and his testicles were crushed, probably with an iron bar.
Though Jarman wasn't aware of these horrors, there were plenty of others that oppressed him. On 22 December 1986, he was told that he had contracted HIV, a diagnosis that then meant certain death, and a stigma which Jarman defied by being open about his condition – kicking off the activism that coloured the final years of his life.
The following year, the British government's campaign of leaflets and TV ads to warn the public about the danger of Aids brought forth a savage backlash against gay people, cruelly whipped up by the tabloid press. In response, Margaret Thatcher's government brought in Section 28, which banned local authorities from 'promoting' homosexuality and seemed to have work like Jarman's, with its unequivocally queer perspective, in its sights. 'All those things together felt particularly difficult and hostile,' Peake says. 'And he felt that very, very strongly.'
Jarman's fear and fury came out in his 1987 film The Last of England, which depicts the nation as a crumbling, authoritarian dystopia, culminating in a scene in which a screaming Tilda Swinton, playing a bride whose husband has been killed, tears off her wedding dress. He also started to make a series of 'black paintings', which are going on show in chronological order at Amanda Wilkinson's gallery in London this week. Wilkinson says that Jarman's companion Keith Collins told her Jarman insisted on total privacy when making the paintings, 'and sometimes he used to cast spells over them. I don't know whether that's true or not.'
Thick black oil paint is smeared on to the canvases, into which Jarman has embedded objects ranging from sticks, a pebble and a circular blade in Dead Souls Whisper, to toy cars, barbed wire and broken crockery in Home Counties. Some paintings include text that draws on the formidably well-read director's fascination with psychoanalysis, Shakespeare and alchemy; another, called Strange Meeting includes two wedding rings and a protractor, and alludes to the Wilfred Owen poem in which he descends to hell and meets the German soldier he killed in the first world war. Then, in a second tranche of black paintings, there's Dear God, whose chalked text, laid besides nails and a pressed flower, implores the deity to 'send me to hell. Yours sincerely, Derek Jarman.'
The paintings' darkness speaks to a current moment in which LGBTQ+ rights are once again being assaulted around the world, as fair-weather corporate 'friends' take down their rainbow flags for fear of getting on the wrong side of Donald Trump and other authoritarians. It's also apt that the black paintings are being exhibited at the same time as the UK Aids Memorial Quilt being displayed in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, each homemade panel commemorating a beloved friend, partner or family member whose life was prematurely claimed by the disease in the 80s and 90s.
Yet for the modern viewer, there's also something galvanising about Jarman's resourcefulness as well as his rage, his protean creativity, and his determination to live his life and make his work regardless of the forces of repression ranged against it. 'He kept flying through the flak,' Peake says. 'He kept going forward and he was extremely unapologetic about who he was and what he liked to do. Shadowing his work is a great deal of distress and trauma, but you were very seldom aware of it in his company because he was immensely warm, positive and joyful.'
Despite his work being unashamedly left-field, Jarman was also a prominent public figure in his later years, in a way that has few – if any – parallels now. I remember him being interviewed on Nicky Campbell's late night show on BBC Radio 1 in the early 90s when I was a teenager, around the time he published his journals, Modern Nature, which had caused tabloid outrage due to sections in which he described cruising on Hampstead Heath (Sun journalists expected gay men with Aids to become celibate). Jarman chose the Rolling Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want for the DJ to play, but stressed that the title didn't express what he felt about his life. 'I did get what I wanted,' he said. 'Or most of it, anyway.'
The Assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Garden of Earthly Delights is published by Pilot Press on 7 June, £12. The Black Paintings: A Chronology Part 1 are at Amanda Wilkinson, London, 6 June to 11 July. The UK Aids Memorial Quilt is at Tate Modern, London, from 12 to 16 June.
