“Pornography . . .” muses Robert Heindel. “Most people who go to the ballet don’t consider that they’re really looking at great pornography, dressed up in a different way.” We are sitting in a London private members’ club, our conversation whispering around the walls of the empty, circular drawing room; conversation one wouldn’t necessarily associate with the world’s greatest painter of dance. “Basically,” he laughs, “people won’t go to look at anything that’s not driven by sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.”
Heindel, as his conversation suggests, is full of surprises. His paintings and sketches, which reveal dancers’ perpetual struggle for perfection, are ingrained with raw emotion. So faithful is the artist to the dancers’ intentions that the viewer could be forgiven for thinking that the delicate strokes had been applied by not only a great painter, but also one schooled in his subjects’ technique. Yet Heindel’s passion for ballet was ignited by chance.
In 1966 Heindel, then 29, accepted two tickets to the ballet from his boss. For a sports-loving young man from America’s Great Lakes, the elegance of dance held little appeal, but that evening, as Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev wove their shifting tapestry, Heindel was transfixed. Amid the swirling bodies, he discovered a world saturated with beauty and feeling, a metaphor for life laced with sensuality.
“I believe in fate,” he says. “I don’t believe in God, rather that we’re destined to do things, and we’d better be open to do them. Growing up, I would walk down our driveway in the morning and with the low sun I could see my shadow, about 30ft long. I used to think ‘that shadow can go anywhere’.” He gestures at Robert Adam’s exquisite 18th-century interior. “Now, in this room, I feel like Napoleon sitting around plotting a campaign. This is a long way from where I grew up.”
Heindel was born in 1938 in Toledo, Ohio, an industrial city, and raised as the adopted son of parents who nurtured his artistic talent. After leaving school and working at a few odd jobs, he drove 50 miles to Detroit, where during his twenties he earned the equivalent of a modern-day $60,000 a year as a commercial artist, “stuffing people in and around cars”.
At 20, he married his childhood sweetheart Rose. They are still together. “Her father worked for a big corporation, relatively successful. He did not understand what artists did. and he would take Rose aside and say ‘Honey, you need anything, any money?’”
Heindel decamped to New York. “I was probably one of the 20 best illustrators in the world,” he says, quickly apologising for words that clash with his modest demeanour. “I was treated like a prince because I worked for Sports Illustrated and Time. But, when I was about 35, I asked, ‘Do I really want to do this all my life?’ ”
The answer, clearly, was no. Since that first night with Nureyev and Fonteyn, Heindel had sustained his love for ballet while pursuing his career. During the 1970s, however, he decided to devote his energies to an exploration of dance, an area largely untouched by the art market. Fate again played a hand when he was allowed to work backstage with the Atlanta Ballet, where he spent weeks sketching and photographing dancers in rehearsal, building a collection of images that evolved into a successful show. That process, working alongside individual productions before staging an exhibition, has proved the template for much of his career.
“I knew I was getting access to parts of ballet that no one else sees,” he says. “Everyone else sees it on stage and it’s perfect, but it’s backstage, seeing how hard dancers work, throwing up before performances, weeping and breaking their feet, that’s where you find the truest expression.”
Heindel translates these private emotions to forge his own interpretation of the human condition. The late Prince Takamodo of Japan and Diana, Princess of Wales, were among those to buy his works.
“Working with the Royal Ballet in 1983 was a breakthrough for me,” he says. “I was so worried, thinking, ‘I’m going to f*** up in front of these distinguished people, with my name 40ft across the banner’.” But a chance meeting with Andrew Lloyd Webber brought collaborations on Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, for which Heindel, on the cusp of his fifties, garnered international acclaim.
In 1990 Toby, the artist’s eldest son, died of cancer, aged 30. Heindel looked for solace in his painting. “A lot of my work in the Nineties was working through problems about my son,” he says. “I started seeking out ballets with blacker themes.” Shortly after Toby’s death the choreographer David Bintley asked Heindel to design the sets and costumes for The Dance House, which explored the human call to death. “Rather than going to a psychiatrist, I was working out my problems there,” Heindel says.
The Dance House demonstrates the breadth of Heindel’s technique, gliding between near-Cubist renditions of human form and erotic explosions of frivolity. Yet for much of the early Nineties he avoided dance, producing portraits of Toby, and Painted Walls, a vast set of near-abstract canvases evoking man’s relationship with his primordial environment.
“They're always motivated by Toby. Over time, the death of someone softens and thank god, mostly you remember the good stuff, but I get up every day and think about Toby, and so does his mother. It's part of your life that you carry around." Yet even if Toby hadn’t died, he suspects his work would have evolved. As well as exploring the traditional Noh and Kabuki theatre of Japan, the artist began deconstructing his canvases, encapsulating a basic thought or feeling. Bathing chunks of his paintings in swaths of solitary colour, Heindel imbued later pieces with a dark mystery, each conveying a deep sense of history.
“Dance is a great metaphor for life’s experiences,” he says. Fate, however, has not finished with the Toledo lad: Heindel has contracted emphysema. He does not talk about it much although when I thank him for his time, he lets out a laugh/sigh and mumbles, “Don't worry, I've got so much to do — Jesus”. The inference is there's not able to do much these days.
But he remains enthusiastic, buoyant even. Rose runs the print side of things in the States. “We are great friends. We made a decision to do this, do it together, while having fun.”
And there is still much to accomplish. “We’re all driven by the great themes,” he says. “The erotic side of dance was the drive mechanism for me, and sex is probably the drive for everything. The reality of life is that we all want to get laid.” Little wonder, then, that Heindel’s sensual expositions of dance’s fleeting pleasures stimulate so many.
Moving Pictures, The Art of Robert Heindel (Brushfire Publishing, £40)
