St. Derek in Ecstasy at the Centre Pompidou

The Garden, Derek Jarman © Basilisk Communications Ltd

By JOSH NILAND December 6th, 2025

Of all the moments captured in the ninety-plus Super 8 films and eleven more widely received feature-length efforts Derek Jarman made during a brilliant three-decade epiphany falling on either side of his fatal AIDS diagnosis in 1986, the documentation of his symbolic coronation via the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at Prospect Cottage in September of 1991 is, perhaps, the most poignant and enduring depiction of the triumph of an outsider whose divine victimhood stands now as an invective against the dark regressive forces which are still so domineering in the art, society, and politics, of the world left behind just two and a half short years following that fabled summer afternoon.

This is unfortunately one reliquary left out of an otherwise outstanding trove of works in the medium that will come into focus this month as part of the new Centre Pompidou retrospective inside the currently under-renovation French institution’s adjacent mk2 Bibliothèque space, an aptly minimalist complement to his valedictory Yves Klein tribute and deathbed opus Blue (1993) beset by bright red seating and a deeper sense of his creative sainthood.

Blue, Derek Jarman. Image: © Basilisk Communications Ltd

In times like these, the existence of such an unorthodox cleric with a body of work that interrogates the brutal facsimile and subterfuge set into place by the so-called “establishment” behind our postmodern condition is as valued as much politically as he was both in a critical sense and terms of the human spirit. Jarman lived so that we might at least understand the nature of our own stigmas and ritual suffering (those of us who count as outsiders) and go on to reject them neither as a crutch nor as their crosses. His work and relation to the financially castigated, the people whom men and markets have not chosen as ‘winners,’ especially speaks volumes to the notion of artistic perseverance; flying in the face of those sanctioned and the indulgences that accompany them in being more than just commercially unchallenging or otherwise ‘correct.’ Even Robert Mapplethorpe deigned a performative cruelty toward him along such lines at one point, but in the end, Jarman was remembered as a fearless activist and crusader, and obituaries crowed of a mythic “cornucopia of gifts, talents, skills, enthusiasms, and mysteries” whose farsightedness “captured with unerring accuracy the sense of inexorably developing corruption and cruelty that since the late 70s has increasingly characterized” the everyday.

Though he may have been an anachronism in fact, the fictive visions he directed went a long way in establishing the heavily romanticized, flower-laden and Punk-infused anti-Thatcherist popular image of Britain in the 1980s and early-90s in visual memory as we think of it today. As Jarman’s many other admirers have frequently noted, the physical properties of Super 8 film confer onto every frame an emotionally sumptuous, pigmented texture—a kind of cinematic canvas which can be traced to his early brush training at the Slade School and articulate the color theory he finally put forth in the meditative 1994 treatise Chroma. Painterly music videos made for The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys, among others, are also included in the program, and indeed make this rather brief four-week exercise all the more thorough and comprehensive. One imagines the audience for The Last of England (1986) or his time collapsing hit Jubilee (1978) having fits of synesthesia to the stains of the Cocteau Twins. Jarman had a penchant for Pre-Raphaelites painting and for the Symbolists, and throughout his career, he used film as a demonstration of his belief that, as with music and painting, art is at its best and most sacred when born out of audacity and a shared imaginative undertaking.

The Garden, Derek Jarman © Basilisk Communications Ltd 

Biographer Olivia Laing reflected in i-D before a previous 2018 retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA):  “There was a feeling in the work that he’d created a collaborative world, a way of art making that involved many people rather than the individual heroic artist. You’d think that the artist is always doing that: creating a communal, collective dream world that we can all inhabit, but it’s something rare. An artist who can do that is incredibly inspiring to other artists. It's almost like he’s rising to our vision now. This always happens to artists — it takes almost a generation to see who they were and what they were doing.”

To date more than 44 million people have died from AIDS globally. You can donate to the HIV+ artists awareness non-profit Visual Aids by visiting https://visualaids.org/support. ‘Derek Jarman - The impure and the grace’ runs through Dec. 16 at the mk2 Bibliothèque x Centre Pompidou.