In August, a retrospective of work by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, the collaborators behind Radiohead’s iconic visuals for more than thirty years, opened at the Ashmolean Museum, in England.
When I stepped off the train in Oxford, it was raining heavily, which felt fitting.
An informal poll of friends had revealed that many formative Radiohead concert experiences included a dramatically timed downpour.
I find that the most memorable art speaks directly to your present circumstances.
Yorke and Donwood have long kept their process shrouded in secrecy. That extends to Donwood’s identity: Stanley Donwood is a professional title (his real name is Dan Rickwood), and the art work has often been jointly credited to Donwood and Dr. Tchock, one of Yorke’s many aliases.
The pair maintained their air of mystery during the show’s opening reception.
Surrounded by decades of their work, they didn’t betray a shred of sentimentality, and joked about their recall of the pieces.
We were only briefly introduced.
The next morning, I headed to the lobby of the Store, a hotel in central Oxford, for a scheduled interview. The hotel is a short walk from the Jericho Tavern, where Radiohead played its first gig, in 1986, and around the corner from a now shuttered HMV, in whose aisles Donwood and Yorke once loitered, scouting the competition.
Thinking about this, while navigating streets lined with baroque architecture, teeming with teen-agers on academic tours, was like experiencing several time warps.
On arrival, I got straight to the point.
Yorke, dressed in cropped black pants and a gray T-shirt, peered through oversized black-framed glasses. Donwood had thick tortoise-shell frames, with a striped denim blazer over distressed jeans. A pink happy-face button was pinned to his lapel.
I had planned to draw their portraits as we talked. Conversation flowed easily, aided by the fact that we were all looking down, instead of at one another (something that I realized, too late, was not very conducive to portrait drawing).
They were polite.
And had a wry sense of humor.
We settled around a low table scattered with half-drunk cups of tea. Yorke’s wife, Dajana, was curled up next to him, engrossed in a Murakami novel. Nearby, the hotel bartender pulverized ice in the world’s loudest blender.
Since 2021, Yorke and Donwood have been represented by Tin Man Art, a gallery based in London and Hampshire, and have put on six joint exhibitions of archival and new works. This is a marked departure from their origins.
Yorke, who is most famous as Radiohead’s lead vocalist and songwriter, met the multidisciplinary artist Donwood at art college, in Exeter, in the nineteen-eighties. Displeased with the image that the record label had chosen for Radiohead’s début album, “Pablo Honey,” Yorke asked Donwood to collaborate on the art for their next project.
Since then, the duo has maintained control over all of the band’s visual content, producing art works for every album, as well as for Yorke’s solo projects.
“This Is What You Get” draws on a vast archive of objects and images from the mid-nineties to the present day. The show is not a history of Radiohead but an exploration of the art that helped define the band’s music, and which was often integral to the experience of being a fan. (Example: a booklet of art work concealed inside the walls of every “Kid A” CD case, accessible only by cracking it open.) The drawings that filled Yorke and Donwood’s sketchbooks became some of the band’s most iconic insignia, tattooed on arms and scribbled on three-ring binders.
I’ve most often encountered these images on a screen.
And so it came as something of a shock to discover the scale of the canvases.
The pair used a computer mouse and tablet to create the digital compositions for “The Bends” and “OK Computer.” In 1998, after several years of non-stop recording, touring, and skyrocketing fame, Yorke found his way back to drawing.
Landscapes have long found their way into Yorke and Donwood’s visual art; during lockdown, Donwood would take iPhone photos out in nature and print them on a small, thermal printer.
The art for each Radiohead album was created during the band’s marathon recording sessions, often in adjacent rooms of recording spaces.
For their recent paintings for the Smile, Yorke’s latest rock band, the pair was inspired by Arabic maps on display in Oxford’s Bodleian Library.
The decision to paint with tempera, the same medium used to create those Arabic maps, proved fortuitous.
Paintings have formed the backbone of Radiohead’s imagery since “Kid A,” from 2001.
But Yorke and Donwood were always most interested in how these images could be reproduced: on products they designed, in guerrilla publicity campaigns, and online.
Over time, Yorke’s views on the original-versus-reproduction dichotomy have softened.
Yorke and Donwood first began to experiment with large, landscape-inspired paintings after Yorke’s time in Cornwall, but committed to the scale and medium after a visit to the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, where they saw David Hockney’s “A Bigger Grand Canyon.”
Six large canvases, painted shortly after this visit, were put up for auction at Christie’s, in 2021, to commemorate the twenty-first anniversary of “Kid A.” Four of the paintings sold for well over a hundred thousand pounds each, above reserve prices of ten thousand pounds.
Agreeing to a retrospective at the Ashmolean, an institution that has showcased the works of art stars such as Jenny Saville and Anselm Kiefer, would suggest that Yorke and Donwood’s attitude toward having their work in galleries has changed.
To me, the fixation on whether the work in “This Is What You Get” constitutes “fine art” or deserves to be in the Ashmolean seems rooted in a myopic definition of art.
To experience art is to take part in a conversation that transcends time and language.
The conversation can be misinterpreted and editorialized.
But it can also give shape to inarticulable feelings and memories.
It can give you permission to change your life.
At the end of our talk, Donwood had drawn a landscape. Yorke had drawn a lyrical abstraction.
I had drawn, more or less, what was directly in front of me.
The day after the interview, I took a train to Paris to visit the Fondation Louis Vuitton, where there was a huge David Hockney retrospective.
And saw “A Bigger Grand Canyon” with my own eyes.
