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(Extract)
"IT WAS DECEMBER 1975.I had got my first job since leaving university and it was my first day at the Portal Gallery. My new bosses had gone to lunch and after just two hours I had been left alone. The door burst open and Tony Curtis came in, kissed my hand, had a chat and left. Suitably staggered I thought, 'well, if this is the art world I'm all for it!' When my bosses, Eric and Lionel, returned from lunch I related the incident. 'Oh, he comes in all the time', was the airy reply. I found out only many years later that apart from being an extraordinarily original and intriguing gallery, the Portal Gallery happened to be en route to a major actors' agency on the same street. As a result, over the years, many famous faces came through the door and bought paintings: Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom, Billy Wilder, Vincent Price (who arranged a Portal exhibition in Los Angeles), S.J. Perelman with whom Eric drove a vintage MGB from London to Beijing, Fred Zinnemann, Roald Dahl, Patricia Neal, Kurt Vonnegut, Lillian Hellman, Terence Stamp, Jean Shrimpton, David Bailey, and all the Beatles, to name but a few. / Portal opened its doors at 16a Grafton Street, off London's Bond Street, on 8 December 1959. Its owners were Lionel Levy, who came / from Liverpool and had been at Art School there, and Eric Lister whom Lionel had met during his teens. Eric was from Manchester and was working in London as classic car specialist. He was a collector of antiques, player of the clarinet and a jazz enthusiast. Their idea was to start a gallery-cum-bookshop, even incorporating a café. However, when they found a stylish Edwardian shop, a former florist's at the junction of Grafton Street and Old Bond Street, they very sensibly went for location rather than space, and started the Portal in a small shop with a barber in the basement. The Portal was not large but it did have a sign and an attractive window which could be seen from the most famous shopping street in the world. / Early exhibitors included Peter Blake and the Surrealist George Jardine who had taught Lionel at Liverpool School of Art. Joe Tilson and Patrick Hughes both exhibited with Portal in the early days. Patrick Hughes was only nineteen and was living in Leeds working as a waiter so that he could paint during the day. By the late 1960s James Lloyd, a self-taught painter from Yorkshire, began exhibiting with Portal and was a huge overnight success. Lloyd had worked at many jobs before picking up a paintbrush and depicting the world through tiny dots of paint, which had nothing to do with Pointillism and everything to do with how photographs were reproduced in the newspapers. Lloyd painted rural scenes, his children, Chuck Berry and himself as Le Douanier Rousseau. When Ken Russell chose Lloyd as the subject of a 1964 BBC Monitor film, The Dotty World of James Lloyd, he went on the following year to cast Lloyd as Le Douanier himself in another of his artists' film for the BBC series. / From theoutset Lionel and Eric chose painters whose work they liked, following their own taste. Early on there was a strong bias towards quirky figurative work and some genuine naive work: Alfred Wallis, James Dixon, A.W. Chesher, James Lloyd and Cockney ex-lorry driver John Allin who painted scenes of the East End of London he had known as a child. They held exhibitions of Russian icons and paintings from Bali, Mexico and Haiti. From the start the humorous and slightly surreal were welcomed at the Portal, and these criteria remain the same fifty years later...."
