Party like Michael Andrews

Party for Ad's Sake

Jonathan Heath

Mar 31, 2025

Michael Andrews was described by friends as a painter who only made masterpieces.

Throughout a long and healthy career he only created 240 works – but he never missed.

His first smash was the brilliantly titled and captured painting “A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over”.

Michael Andrews - Artworks for Sale & More | Artsy

The painting has a sort of dream like quality to it, thick washy-woozy brush strokes surrounding the main figure’s descent to the ground add a sort of surreal element, as if we can actually see the air being displaced by the movement through the air.

But the man’s face is so comical, his neck at such an awkward angle that it’s hard not to envision the sickening crunch of the inevitable impact. The woman behind shrieks as though she can see it too.

Andrews was a quiet type. “In danger of being mistaken for a rumor” said one Tate director. Maybe it’s because of this that he was cast as a deaf mute in 1956 film called Together, directed by his friend Lorenza Mazzetti.

Despite being somewhat of a quiet observer, he fell naturally into the Colony Room set after coming up at the same time fellow artists Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach. During the sixties he would cement his position as the fly on the walls of all the hip parties – by painting them.

Elementary My Dear: Michael Andrews At Gagosian | The Quietus

His painting ‘All Night Long’ from 1964 is perhaps the quintessential image from this period. A connected triptych, each panel contains scenes of various revelers in various states. It’s sort of like looking at the timeline of one gigantic night out in stills, as the scene lurches from serene to somewhat haunting and ominous at times.

It’s a cinematic montage of frivolity and horror, and looking at it one can’t help but feel almost drunk. And as a product of 1964, it represents an eerie premonition of the 9:16 reels and TikToks that inundate our feeds today.

The original Sunday Scaries…

He pushed the haziness of the party paintings even further with works like ‘Good and bad at games’ from 1968, which features bulbous heads with sinewy frames, inspired by the sculptures of Giacometti.

Downgrading his cinematic quality to that of a dodgy cathode-ray television there is distortion and weirdness, reminiscent of imagery favoured by David Lynch. He enjoyed capturing behavioural dynamics at parties, where people routinely ‘put themselves to the test’ and ‘allow themselves to be judged. They perform… they increase in stature or flop.’

Of Good and bad at games, he wrote:

“I was thinking about the variable effect a number of people had on each other. This might range from, or change gradually from, stage fright to indifference or boredom, or someone's composure or agitation might remain almost unchanged. At any rate I was trying for a definition of how these fluctuations of self-consciousness showed.”

After the parties period, he would move away in an altogether different direction into landscapes. His paintings of Scottish highlands, the magnificence of Uluru, and the Thames beaches containing a spiritual serenity that stood in sharp contrast to the frenetic craziness inspired by his time with the Colony Room set.

All of them masterpieces of course.

Party for Ad’s Sake

How do you explain the art of capturing parties?

Sometimes it’s about turning the volume all the way up and going into the absurd and obscene, the totally unattainable, the beyond aspirational – into Saturday nights we can only dream about.

But sometimes, it’s also about keeping it ridiculously relatable, almost cheap, naff or just plain down to the grubby earth.

Michael Andrews does a great job at capturing the feeling, but we get to sit with his paintings for a lot longer. What can we do with 3-90 seconds?

Here’s some ads that came to party:

Watching this makes me feel rather drunk. It couldn’t have been mistaken for AI in 1996, but nowadays… 🤔