Culture This article is more than 15 years oldObituaryAlbert Herbert
This article is more than 15 years oldA visionary artist, he found a path from abstraction to religious imagery via etchingFor the sometime art critic Sister Wendy Beckett, in her 1993 book The Gaze of Love, Albert Herbert, who has died aged 82, was probably the greatest of contemporary religious artists. Albert seemed compelled towards biblical imagery, but it is significant that she described him as a religious, and not as a Christian, painter. There is no self-conscious piety in Albert's work, and his imagery often strays into freewheeling fantasy.
It was while studying at the British School, Rome, in the 1950s that the painter, who had no religious background, was drawn towards Catholicism. "I was a bit like someone who is gay, but doesn't consciously know it," he observed. "I'm not gay, but I am religious. There's nothing I can do about it."
Over the years Albert's enthusiasms embraced Buddhism as well, and Carl Jung would have been fascinated by the shape-shifting qualities of his symbols, as female figures take on the forms of Eve, the Mother Goddess and even appear as the shameless Celtic goddess Sila Na Gig. Eve Gives Birth to Us All is an image of a giant recumbent female figure touching with one finger the hand of a tiny man, inverting and almost parodying Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco of God.
Albert was born in Bow, east London, went to West Ham secondary school and then worked in the News Chronicle picture library. He took evening classes at St Martin's School of Art until he was called up in 1943. As a diminutive 18-year-old infantryman he witnessed his comrades being picked off by German snipers in the Normandy bocage. His regiment had lost three-quarters of its men to death and injury by 1945 when it crossed the Rhine. He might have suffered that fate, but for the intervention of an old schoolfriend, John Clarke. Clarke, who took the name of Bryan Forbes, would become a famous actor and film director, but then he was a member of the Stars in Battledress forces entertainment troupe. "I had no knowledge of stage scenery," Albert recalled, "but Bryan blatantly lied and said he knew this brilliant stage designer - me. I was plucked from my regiment in Germany and sent to join him." Albert observed that after this start to his artistic career, "art schools seemed so respectable and staid and the girls so chaste".
He was demobbed in 1947 and a grant took him to Wimbledon School of Art. From there he won a scholarship, in 1949, to the Royal College of Art. There he met a brilliant sculpture student, Jacqueline Henly, and they married in 1951. A travel grant took them to Spain and Paris. Rome followed after Albert won a British School scholarship.
In 1954 he became a part-timer at Leicester College of Arts and two years later a lecturer at Birmingham College of Art. Early in his painting career Albert realised that he wanted to make "figurative, emotive, symbolic paintings", but he was fighting against the tide of the times. In the late 1950s and early 60s waves of American painting, led by abstract expressionism, burst over Britain's artistic shores.
When he joined St Martin's staff in 1964 - he was to stay for more than two decades and become a principal lecturer - the pervading view was that figuration was a bad thing and that the future was abstract. Albert, deciding that all he had been was "retrogressive, obsolete nonsense", battled to produce abstract paintings. Yet he could not escape the urge towards the literary, covering canvases with an indecipherable script. Gradually he stopped painting altogether.
It was a low period and his way back to picture-making came through etching. "Abstract art was considered inherently superior, but if you made figurative images in etching it didn't matter so much - it was only illustration."
In the St Martin's basement he doodled on etching plates, juxtaposing texts, stick-like figures, animals and monsters in a childlike way. "I worked at these little plates, literary, illustrative, with bits of theology hiding behind childish jokes; all the opposite of what my modernist colleagues were teaching on the top floor." His imagery became more profound and biblical themes appeared.
Albert also produced tiny oil paintings using the same approach. One theme was Jonah and the Whale (1987). He realised later that this was his story, the man fleeing from his calling only to be swallowed by the whale of modernism and thrown back on to the strand of figuration from which he had been fleeing.
Albert was a maverick, liked but seldom taken seriously by art establishments. He stopped showing at the Royal Academy when his paintings were contemptuously "skied" (hung high on the wall). His gallery, and champion for the last 20 years, was England & Co, in Notting Hill, but his subject matter was looked upon with suspicion by those holding the public art purse-strings, and there is no Albert Herbert in the Tate. His one major public commission - 14 Stations of the Cross, at the behest of an Anglican vicar - was abandoned. His paintings were "too disturbing" said the parochial church council.
As he lay dying he said to his daughter, Madeleine: "I am afloat on a lake." He is survived by Jacqueline, and his daughters, Madeleine, Clare and Lucy.
· Albert Charles Herbert, painter and etcher, born September 10 1925; died May 10 2008
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