Become a Member
Life

Paper, scissors and glue to turn a writer into an artist

It was only towards the end of his life, with his health failing, that Wolf Mankowitz decided to ditch the pen, and take up scissors à la Matisse

May 11, 2018 09:40
17.Dream Falling
3 min read

Playwright, novelist, producer, the man writer Anthony Burgess called “a sort of East End Joyce”, Wolf Mankowitz is back as never seen before.

From today, Lorfords Antiques in Chelsea is exhibiting 45 Dada-inspired collage works made by this late stalwart of post-war British culture. A Cambridge graduate who studied English under F R Leavis, Mankowitz was everything from chat show host to (unbeknown to him) a suspected Soviet spy. Novels, short stories, biographies, film scripts including the draft for the first James Bond film, Dr No — words just poured out of this East End Jew, who (as the Daily Telegraph put it in his obituary) “helped to lighten the gloomy post-war years”.

It was only towards the end of his life, with his health failing, that Mankowitz decided to ditch the pen, and take up scissors à la Matisse.

As one of the writer’s sons Daniel, an antiques dealer, tells me from his flat on a smart West London street, where every spare inch of space is currently taken up by Mankowitz père’s artworks in the run-up to the auction, collage was his father’s “way of expressing his cultural intellect through art, without being an artist”.