Fred Orton – The German Ideology: Plates from a Marx & Engels Colouring Book

This exhibition in our Project Space celebrates the work of the late Professor Fred Orton, renowned art historian and scholar of art and art history at the University of Leeds for 30 years.

Fred died on 15 February 2025 and one of his last wishes was to show his most recent work, a series of 'colourings', in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.

The 50 works on display were created by Orton between 2018 and 2025. Orton first decided to use an illustration in Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology in 2018 ‘as if it were a plate in a colouring book and use the activity of colouring it in as a way of passing time’.

Working at his dining room table, the only place he could work during lockdown, he created a series of small drawings, paintings and collages, colouring in various faces in profile, many of whom were Marx and Engels’ philosophical and political contemporaries.

With these ‘colourings’ Orton takes you on an adventure through his long and detailed understanding of Marx and Engels’ work and lives. This he does via his life-long interest in literature, his work on Jasper Johns and his own recent travels.

Fred Orton, Untitled.

About Orton’s Plates from a Marx & Engels Colouring Book

“In 2018 I decided to use a particular illustration in Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology, MECW5, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1976 (ISBN 0 85315 311 6), as if it were a plate in a colouring book and use the activity of colouring it in as a way of passing time. The illustration shows a page in the original abandoned manuscript that came to light in the early 1960s.

“Colouring this illustration, or bits of it, is a pastime to which I have become increasingly committed. By now, I’ve accumulated quite a collection of these ‘colourings’, which I’ve come to think of as variations and developments on a theme.

“It took a while before I realised a ‘what’ and a ‘how’ that suggested the possibility of going beyond the closed action of colouring the illustration, other than by using bits of it to reference what was being said in the Ideology.

“However, since April 2020, the way the surface of any colouring is divided and the individual miscellanea are arranged across it is usually (to some extent) based on how that page in the Ideology is arranged, in the way the text on the left has been cancelled and struck out, or in the doodled grotesque heads to its right, which latter are almost certainly all by Engels’ hand.

“The subject matter also relates to what’s there amongst the doodles, ink spillages, blots and negations and in The German Ideology itself, usually with reference to the polemical discussions that characterise it, and especially with Marx and Engels’ extended critique of Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum and Recensenten Stirners, which makes up the bulk of it. For example, I was, for a while, especially drawn to those passages wherein Marx and Engles play with episodes taken from Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, turning Stirner into a latter-day Quixote or Sancho Panza or synthesis of the two. Quite recently, I’ve become interested in the way that, in Part 2 of the Ideology, Marx and Engels show to what extent Bauer’s ‘Critical’ criticism relies on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

“Everything begins with an actual size photocopy of the illustration, always on A4 paper, sometimes reduced to a fragment or fragments, to which a skin of marks is applied millimetre-by-millimetre, centimetre-by-centimetre, usually with Prismacolor pencils or Derwent graphite pencils and/or Winsor & Newton titanium white acrylic. The gestures that make these marks rarely extend to the wrist. How a ‘colouring’ is made, sometimes with the addition of seemingly extraneous material, supplements its meaning and effect; for example, in 2021, after reading Ben Marcus, In the Age of Wire and String, New York, Alfred A Knopf, 1995, I incorporated wire and string in some of them.

“With warmest thanks to Joanne Crawford for putting this exhibition of ‘colourings’ together, and to Gail Day, Steve Edwards, David Jackson and Paul Wood for showing an interest in them as things that might effect interest and pleasure in others.”

Fred Orton, January 2025

Image

Fred Orton, Untitled.