Tom Phillips

TOM PHILLIPS (RA, CBE) (1937 - 2022)

Multidisciplinary artist Tom Phillips was born in London, attending St Catherine's College, Oxford in 1957, where he read English and studied drawing at the Ruskin School. Taught by Frank Auerbach in 1961 at Camberwell School of Art, Phillips's first solo exhibition in London was in 1965 at the Artists International Association Gallery, followed by an exhibition with Angela Flowers in 1970. Phillips taught at Bath Academy of Art, Ipswich and Wolverhampton Art College between 1965 and 1972, and in 1969 he won the John Moores Prize, 

With a boundaryless practice spanning and often combining writing, painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and conceptual work, Phillips was also known for his music, both classical and, from the late 1960s with Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra, his own compositions, including as performed by the pianist John Tilbury.

In 1966 Phillips resolved to dedicate himself to making art out of the first secondhand book he could find for threepence on Peckham Rye, which was WH Mallock’s 1892 A Human Document. Thus began A Humument, the longest of Phillips's extended serial projects. A Humument is a radical treatment of a 'forgotten' Victorian novel by means of collage, cut-up ornament and other techniques, as Phillips created new works of art and poetic text from the original pages of the book. In 1973, A Humument was shown in its entirety at the ICA, London. On the fiftieth anniversary of its inception in 2016, Phillips completed the sixth and final version of the acclaimed body of work - each iteration with successively more pages reworked, until his original work had itself been completely transformed.

Tom Phillips received the Frances Williams Memorial Prize in 1983 for his illustration and new translation of Dante's Inferno. He also made a TV version of the Inferno with Peter Greenaway, which won them jointly as directors the 1991 Italia prize.

Elected to the Royal Academy, London, in 1984, a major exhibition of Phillips's work was held there in 1993. Tom Phillips also chaired the Academy's Library and its Exhibition Committee from 1995 to 2007, and curated the acclaimed RA exhibition Africa: The Art of a Continent (1995), which travelled to the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin and the Guggenheim, New York. In 1989, he became the second artist to have a retrospective of his portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Fifteen years later, he curated We Are The People, an exhibition at the NPG of his large personal collection of postcard photographic portraits. To celebrate Tom Phillips's 60th birthday in 1997, retrospectives of his work were held at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the South London Gallery. 

Tom Phillips was regularly commissioned for site-specific artworks including tapestries for St Catherine's, Oxford, sculpture for the Imperial War Museum, street mosaics for his native Peckham, and ornament and memorials for sacred spaces, including both Westminster Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, London. Phillips's portrait subjects have included Samuel Beckett, Dame Iris Murdoch (held in the National Portrait Gallery, London), Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Richard Morphet, and members of the Monty Python team. Other notable commissions were from the Royal Mint for a £5 coin marking the 50th anniversary of the Coronation, and for a gold medal, co-designed with Sir Anthony Caro, to commemorate the London Olympics in 2012. 

Serving as a trustee for the National Portrait Gallery and British Museum, Phillips was made a Commander of the British Empire for services to the Arts in 2002. In 2005, he was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, and between 2005 and 2011 he was invited as an annual Director's Visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Oxford's Bodleian Library acquired Tom Phillips's archive and with them he published his postcard collection in a series of books. Continuing his musical production, Phillips's collaboration with Tarik O'Regan on an operatic version of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, for which he provided the libretto, premiered at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Theatre at the end of 2011.

Tom Phillips lived and worked in London.