‘I have taken risks, but Damien is a staggering risk-taker’: Michael Craig-Martin on style, the YBAs and being the great late bloomer of British art

In 1961, aged 20, Michael Craig-Martin enrolled at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture and immediately found himself all at sea.

“Back then,” he recalls, “abstract expressionism was still lingering and painting was painterly. The first thing I realised was that I was the only person on the course who really couldn’t do it. I was just not given to that kind of painting. I remember thinking, ‘That’s it. It’s all over for me.’”

Now 83, and about to have his firstfull British retrospective at the Royal Academy of Art, Craig-Martin sees that moment of panic and self-doubt as a necessary part of a creative epiphany that has underpinned his subsequent journey as an artist.

“That’s when I learned what I later passed on to my students in my years as a teacher. You have to use what you’ve got. You cannot try to become something you’re not. The people who work in that painterly way are doing what is natural to them. If you are struggling to try to do the same, even with the best will in the world, it ain’t gonna work.”

In the company of other gifted graduate students including Chuck Close, Brice Marden and Richard Serra, Craig-Martin embraced nascent conceptualism and began making small geometric sculptures. Painting, of a playfully conceptual rather than painterly kind, would come years later. “I was totally green when I wandered into it – and it made my life,” he says of the heady, ideas-based environment at Yale.

As his career-spanning Royal Academy exhibition will make clear, Craig-Martin’s creative life has been singular in its long, slow-burning trajectory, deeply informed by the genres he encountered as a curious art student and afterwards: minimalism, pop art and what he calls “thought-process art”. He is, by his own admission, one of contemporary art’s great late developers, having worked quietly for decades until, in the mid-1990s, he created his signature style – large-scale, boldly coloured, minimalist paintings of everyday objects such as spoons, chairs and lightbulbs. By then, he was 55 years old and more widely known as an art teacher than an artist, having been the most important mentor of the YBA [Young British Artists] generation – Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume et al – while a tutor at Goldsmiths College in London in the late 1980s and early 90s.

Although he has had previous retrospectives – at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1989 and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2006 – this one is larger and more definitive, tracing a long arc from what he calls his “monochrome prehistory” to his embrace of colour and beyond into digitally generated work. “To be honest,” he says, “I did think that the chance to do a retrospective show of this scale in the UK was gone, but here it is. It could hardly be later, but, in another way, it’s happening at exactly the right time.”

The show will begin in 1967 with a small-scale sculptural pop-up book and culminate with Cosmos, a single-room, immersive digital-video installation created specifically for the exhibition. “It’s half an hour long, with sound and vision on four walls, and features around 300 images,” he says, palpably excited. The installation has been in gestation for nearly a year and, as we speak, is still unfinished. “It will be ready on the night,” he tells me, confidently.

* * *

I am chatting with Craig-Martin in his expansive, light-filled apartment high up in one of the Barbican’s modernist tower blocks. His view of the capital extends from the glass-and-steel skyscrapers that now loom over the east of the city to the vast expanse of north London as far as Alexandra Palace’s towering television transmitter mast in the distance. In his open-plan living space, the decor is immaculately stylish, ultra-minimalist and carefully curated, from the white leather Corbusier sofa and armchairs to the large black-and-white canvas by Mark Lancaster on one wall and the small silhouetted figure by Julian Opie that stands atop a plinth in front of a wall-length window.

Dressed in a black T-shirt and trousers, and sporting pristine white Prada trainers, Craig-Martin exudes an air of self-assuredness, his thoughts on art and culture expressed with the clarity and confidence that, one senses, made him such an inspiring teacher at Goldsmiths.

“Michael hand-picked his students, and those who weren’t in his group tutorials were always inquisitive about them and maybe slightly envious,” says artist Michael Landy, who graduated from Goldsmiths in 1988. “For me, he is right up there as a tutor, because it is no mean feat to simplify things for students who, like me, could find so many reasons to not do stuff. Plus, he always had such great anecdotes from his own life.”

Craig-Martin’s early life, as with several preceding generations of his family, was initially nomadic. He was born in Dublin but his family moved to London when he was an infant, and soon after they were evacuated to Colwyn Bay in Wales, where he spent the following four years. When the war ended, his father, an economist, was offered a job by the World Bank, and they relocated to Washington, which he hated as a boy – “it seemed unbelievably provincial” – but now considers it to be the first of many strokes of good luck that have attended his life. Working on the retrospective, he says, has made him reflect on his life as well as his work.

“It has really made me realise how much luck has to do with everything, including success, of course, and the one piece of luck you have no control over is when you get born. I was born in 1941 and as I grew into adulthood in the 60s, postwar America was thriving culturally and economically. Things were changing with such momentum. I saw out the old world and saw in the new.”

From the outside, his upbringing seems gilded. In the 1950s, his father was granted extended home leave from work every three years, which enabled the family to travel to Europe for the summer. Their first destination was always his grandparents’ house in Dublin.

“There were lots of cousins and I remember my grandfather as a kind of Edwardian pater familias,” he says, wistfully. “He drank whiskey and would have crates of soda siphons delivered to his house by horse-drawn cart. The laundry was collected and delivered that way too. I have rich memories of that world, which, of course, has now gone without trace.”

As a boy in 50s America, he was “visually alert and interested in everything that was modern”. To this day, he can identify every make of classic American car from that time. When he was 15, his father was transferred to Bogotá, Colombia, where the young Craig-Martin first took drawing classes at the Lycée Français with an artist called Antonio Roda, an exile from Franco’s Spain. His college education, like his young life, was peripatetic: he studied English literature and history at Fordham University in New York, then art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris before, as he puts it, “stumbling into Yale” in the autumn of 1961, “when a dean there took an incredible chance on me”.

It was Craig-Martin’s great good fortune that, during his time at Yale, a cultural shift occurred that resounds to this day. Painting, as he puts it, “began to be doubted as the central concern of art, and indeed treated with a degree of suspicion, as other ways of doing things were suddenly in the ascendant”.

That shift had begun a decade before, when Josef Albers, one of the luminaries of the Bauhaus movement, instigated a dramatic transformation of the teaching of art at Yale. Albers integrated the disciplines of painting, sculpture, graphic arts and architecture departments under the single heading of design. More importantly for what was to follow, he asserted that the process, rather than the finished object, was the defining element of artistic creativity. Craig-Martin imbibed it all and, when he found his style decades later, the bright brashness of pop art and the formal logic of minimalism somehow came together.

After Yale, he says, he couldn’t find “a teaching job anywhere in America that I wanted to go to”, so he travelled to England on the advice of fellow artist Victor Burgin. There, he was immediately offered a teaching post at Bath Academy of Art at Corsham, and began to create his series of box sculptures at home in the evenings. In 1972, the year before he began teaching at Goldsmiths, one of his early wall pieces, Six Images of an Electric Fan, was included in a pivotal group show, The New Art, at the Hayward Gallery, the first British survey of conceptualism. The show also included work by Burgin, Gilbert & George and Richard Long and, perhaps unsurprisingly, divided critics. Richard Cork, writing in the Evening Standard, hailed the exhibition’s “brave new voices”, while the Telegraph dismissed it as “a journey into nowhere”. The gallery’s director of exhibitions took the middle view, confessing to a colleague, “I cannot find much to love in it, but a lot to think about.”

In 1974, Craig-Martin made headlines of his own with what, for the next few decades, was his defining work and is now recognised as a landmark moment in the history of conceptual art. First exhibited at the Rowan Gallery in London, An Oak Tree, created in 1973, comprised a glass of water on a glass shelf mounted high on a gallery wall with accompanying text describing how “the actual oak tree is physically present but in the form of the glass of water”.

As well as being a mischievously provocative statement about the nature of the artistic imagination, the text echoed the Roman Catholic idea of transubstantiation: the moment when the communion wafer and wine become the body and blood of Christ. “That’s where the initial idea came from,” he nods. “Only a Catholic would know what the term even meant, but what I was really saying was that works of art only work on the basis of a certain kind of faith. If you don’t give yourself to the piece, it won’t work.”

In 1976, aged 35, Craig-Martin experienced a period of traumatic upheaval in his personal life, coming out as gay after 13 years of marriage to Jan Hashey, whom he had met at Yale, and with whom he has a daughter, Jessica. I ask if, having been raised a Catholic, he had grappled with his sexuality for a long time.

“Oh, definitely. I stopped going to church at 19. At that age, there was nothing of help for me there. I came up against the absolute failure of Catholicism at the exact point that I needed it. When I sought help and guidance, I was dismissed. It was made very clear to me that I should shut my mouth.”

He smiles now at the absurdity of that moment, before becoming more reflective. “Today, one has a clear idea of gay and straight, but in 1960 the language wasn’t the same. I was 21 before I heard the world ‘gay’. It was a closeted word. The change that has happened since has been remarkable. Back then, though, like many people at that time, one’s greatest wish was that it wasn’t true and that, if one did the right things, it might go away. So, yes, there was a trauma for me and it came out eventually in the marriage, which was impossible.”

The art world, he tells me, as a kind of afterword, is not really as gay as he expected it to be. “There are many gay artists, of course, and if you are gay, you get to know virtually all of them but, like most worlds, it is essentially straight.”

* * *

In one of the most ironic twists of fate that have accompanied Craig-Martin’s life, he retired from his teaching post at Goldsmiths in 1988, just at the moment the YBA generation he had nurtured first gatecrashed the public consciousness. The catalyst for their breakthrough was the now legendary Freeze group show curated in 1988 by Damien Hirst, who would go on to become the most stellar of Craig-Martin’s former students. “I gave up teaching the moment I could afford to and suddenly found myself a spokesperson for an institution I no longer had anything to do with,” he says, laughing.

The YBAs’ extraordinary success was also a dramatic vindication of Goldsmiths’ free-form teaching environment in which there were no classes, no year divisions and no departments. Students were simply given a studio to create in and a tutor to bounce ideas off. “We were essentially taught to present work and talk about it in order to understand what we were doing,” says Michael Landy. “It was not prescriptive. You could go in there a painter and come out a poet. It was all a bit daunting, but liberating, and it gave us an incredible confidence to go out into the world beyond.”

Why, though, is Craig-Martin alone so fondly remembered by his former charges? “He was just so enthusiastic about us making things, which was different from some of the other tutors, who seemed as if they were weighed down by their own practice and somehow transmitted that to their students,” says Landy. “Michael didn’t have any of that anxiety. He was always so encouraging and positive.”

For his part, Craig-Martin remembers that halcyon time at Goldsmiths with deep fondness and remains friends with many of his former students, but he is also keen to clarify his role there. “There is still this idea that I suggested to people that they should network in order to make it in the art world,” he says. “This is a misunderstanding. What was important to me was to let them know that they were on to something and that the existing art world was not going to do anything for them. No gallery was going to pick them up, so what they had to do was create their own exhibitions, which they did in such an amazing way. I remember I was invited to see Freeze a few days before it opened, and I was utterly flabbergasted.”

Did he anticipate how successful they would become? “Well, in terms of my teaching experience, it was a completely exceptional time. I’d never seen anything like it in terms of creativity and engagement. I thought they could be the next generation of British art, but no one could have predicted what actually happened.”

More than once he singles out Hirst for his most effusive praise. “I sometimes talk to Damien about the importance of taking risks as an artist,” he says. “I have taken risks with my work, but he is an absolutely staggering risk-taker. He risks his own reputation by doing things that people think are abominable.”

What, I ask, does he make of the recent controversy arising from Hirst’s supposedly cavalier approach to dating some of his signature sculptural pieces, which were made in 2017, but dated to the 1990s.

“Are the people who bought them complaining?” he replies without hesitation, before elaborating. “Imagine if I produced a sculpture in an edition of three, and let’s say I made the first one in 1995, and maybe two of them sold then. Now, you could come to me years later and want to buy the third, so what happens? We will make it for you, but date it from the year the first one was made. That is normal practice. It’s about the date of conception, not the date it was physically made. And besides, is one piece somehow more authentic than the other?”

* * *

Craig-Martin’s own pivotal moment as an artist actually began in the mid-1990s, when he belatedly discovered colour and applied it to the big monochrome wall drawings he had been making since the late 1970s. Before then, he tells me, he was “frightened” of colour: “It was daunting to me as a very logical person. Also, I didn’t want to do just red, yellow and blue.”

Instead, he created “the reddest red, the yellowest yellow and the bluest blue” to further transform the everyday objects he had already altered in terms of scale and context. “Colours at their most intense become exciting,” he says. To his still obvious delight, he found that audiences responded to his new paintings, “not with respect and interest, but emotionally. There was a sense of joy in the gallery.”

Often in his work, he says, he is “playing with things to see what happens”. He is loth to explain his art further. “I absolutely believe the most essential things about a work of art are unsayable. The explanation is the work of art itself, which is one of the reasons that you make it. You can’t look for that explanation in some other language because the art itself is the language.”

As we wind down our conversation, Craig-Martin tells me that there are a couple of mistakes that people often make about his work. The first is that they confuse the subject – everyday objects – with the content, which he describes as “an exploration of the wonder of making a two-dimensional image”. I ask him to elaborate. “A painting of a shoe looks nothing like a shoe, being entirely flat and made of bits of colour put together,” he says. “The miracle is that we look at it and can see a shoe as clearly as if there was a shoe in the room with us. It is that disparity between the object and the image that I play with.”

The other misconception hinges on the term “man-made objects”, which is often used to describe his ordinary everyday subject matter. “We tend to describe the world in terms of natural and man-made as if the two are fundamentally at odds with each other. That is wrong, because we are nature as much as the plants, the trees and the animals. And when we make things, we are doing something that is natural to us. In a way, the iPhone is as natural as a stone.”

As one of art’s elder statesmen, what advice would he give those starting out in today’s more brutally commodified art world? “Well, the one thing they could take heart in is that it is much easier to be creative in your 20s. One has a mental and emotional fluidity and an energy at that age. It is much harder to sustain that creative capacity over a lifetime.”

How did he manage it? “One realises that success creates opportunities and, if you seize those opportunities and act on them when they arise, they create further success. It’s circular. The people who have lasted have acted well on their opportunities. So, with this new work, Cosmos, it may be that I’m about have a whole new career as an immersive artist.” That would not surprise me.

• Michael Craig-Martin is at the Royal Academy, London, 21 September-10 December