All night long

Michael Andrews worked slowly and meticulously as a painter, producing only a handful of finished subjects in any given year. All night long is regarded as one of the most important and resolved paintings from the artist’s 1960s ‘party’ period.

Cinematic in conception and like Panavision in scale, the three vividly ‘observed’ panels that join together to form All night long seem to capture, from today’s perspective, all the smouldering atmosphere of the swinging London of John Profumo, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies (who were at the centre of the sex-and-spy scandal that erupted while Andrews was painting this work). On a personal level, the painting’s sequential narrative of indoor and outdoor partying partially reflects Andrews’s experiences at the Colony, a Soho drinking club that he had frequented since 1954 with fellow artists Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach, among others.

In an inspired blend of the arbitrary and the intentional, Andrews derived the majority of the figures in his painting from newspaper and magazine photographs – which, taken out of context, rescaled, and partially abstracted through their translation into paint, seem both compliant with and at ease in their new, alcoholic, nocturnal surroundings. Most of these photographic ‘models’ for All night long were reproduced, as pinned to the artist’s studio walls, in the Summer 1964 edition of the journal Art and Literature. Rather than paying a Pop Art homage to the power of media and popular culture, Andrews enjoyed the somewhat impersonal distance afforded by this eschewing of the life model and adoption of a bower-bird compositional approach. In this respect his method of blending variously sourced photographic materials is akin to the fashion for ‘sampling’ in current music practice.

Text by Dr Ted Gott from 20th century painting and sculpture in the international collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, p. 96.