catalogue pdf - Austin Desmond Fine Art

Austin/Desmond Fine Art
STEPHEN BUCKLEY
REG BUTLER
Aspects of Modern British
and Irish Art
PATRICK CAULFIELD
LYNN CHADWICK
PRUNELLA CLOUGH
CECIL COLLINS
ROBYN DENNY
GERARD DILLON
CLIFFORD FISHWICK
NIGEL HALL
ANTHONY HILL
HARRY HOLLAND
MARY JEWELS
PETER KINLEY
BRYAN KNEALE
MARY MARTIN
MARGARET MELLIS
HENRY MOORE
C R W NEVINSON
BEN NICHOLSON
VICTOR PASMORE
TOM PHILLIPS
MICHAEL SANDLE
WILLIAM SCOTT
COLIN SELF
JACK SMITH
IAN STEPHENSON
JOHN TUNNARD
JOHN WALKER
JOHN WELLS
RICHARD WYNDHAM
1
MARY JEWELS
1886-1977
Still Life, c.1920
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated lower right
51 x 36 cm
Mary began painting in her mid-thirties after being given a canvas, a brush, and four
tubes of paint by Cedric Morris in 1919 and told to complete a painting by the end of the
day. Morris came to Cornwall from London in 1916 and lived in Zennor, from where he
paid frequent visits to St Ives and the studio of New Zealand artist, Francis Hodgkins,
whose portrait he painted.
Of herself as a painter, Mary Jewels repeated her often quoted words in an interview
with fellow Cornishman, Frank Ruhrmund, the year before she died, ‘I am influenced by
nobody and entirely self-taught. A true Celt, loving my Cornwall, with its lovely stone
hedges, and beautiful blue sea, puff-ball clouds, little fishing coves and corn in stooks.
What more could one wish for?’ She always disliked the ‘primitive’ label, saying it made
her sound ‘like some sort of savage’. Neither did she like to be referred to as a ‘naïve’
painter which she felt labelled her ‘an illiterate peasant’. Ruhrmund agreed and felt her
work possessed grace and skill and that the term ‘natural painter’ was more appropriate.
Marion Whybrow, The Innocent Eye: Primitive and Naïve Painters in Cornwall, Sansom and
Co. 1999
2
RICHARD WYNDHAM
1896-1948
The Goddess in the Bar, c.1926
Tempera on canvas on board, with exhibition review pasted verso
Signed in the image
23 x 18 cm
Exh: Leicester Galleries, Paintings and Drawings by Richard Wyndham, June 1926
Lit:
P G Konody, Two Kinds of Art, Daily Mail (?), 1926, illustrated
The wide range embraced by contemporary art practise is well exemplified by the
contrast between the work of two artists now holding “one-man” shows at the Leicester
Galleries.
Both are essentially modern, but whereas Mrs Laura Knight’s etchings and aquatints are
a forceful expression on a healthy, normal, robust outlook upon life, Mr. Richard
Wyndham’s drawings and tempera paintings betray an essentially modern supersensativeness which cannot be satisfied with normal, realistic representation and has to
resort to more or less arbitrary rearrangements of the visual facts in obedience to the
artist’s sense of rhythm and fitness.
In other words, Mrs Knight relies upon her eye, and Mr Wyndham upon his feelings…Mr
Wyndham’s drawings and paintings have none of that straightforward truth of
statement, but rather interpret his own peculiar reactions to the abstract rhythm he finds
in nature.
P G Konody, Two Kinds of Art, Daily Mail (?), 1926
3
C R W NEVINSON
1889-1946
High Tide West, Bay, c.1930
Oil on panel
Signed lower left; signed and titled on artist’s studio labels verso
30.3 x 40.6 cm
Prov: J Goodenday
Exh: Leicester Galleries, Memorial Exhibition of Works by C R W Nevinson A.R.A., 1947
Nevinson turned more and more to landscape subjects from 1917 onwards. In 1922 he
had a motor caravan ‘built to his own design for privacy and freedom’ (The Times
Weekly, April 1922). It was equipped as a mobile studio for sketching expeditions so that
he could avoid the public notice he attracted by staying in hotels (though the amount of
press coverage the van attracted seems to counter this stated aim: it includes
photographs of Nevinson besides the vehicle and accounts of celebrities’ visits while it
was parked in Leicester Square). Nevinson is quoted as saying ‘I intend painting through
closed windows which is a great help in getting the correct proportions of the scene to be
depicted’. He worked in Dorset, Cornwall, Kent and Sussex, producing contemplative and
often sombre landscapes in oil, watercolour and etching. He had evidently turned away
from the work for which he is now best known, as is demonstrated by his letter to the
Trustees of the Tate Gallery in 1925, asking them to withdraw La Mitrailleuse from
exhibition and saying it was ‘the world’s worst picture’ and ‘I hope you burn it’.
Elizabeth Knowles, C.R.W. Nevinson, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 1988
4
CECIL COLLINS
1908-1989
Poem (Nature Forms), 1938
Oil on canvas board
Signed and dated upper right; signed, titled and dated verso
24 x 34.5 cm
Prov: Alex, Reid & Lefevre
Norman Notley and David Brynley Collection
Galerie Roche, Bremmen
Artists know only too well that culturally the political state is the paradise of mediocrity.
Difficult though it may be for us to believe, there was a time when artists were employed
to create and set up alters to the mysterious gods of life within their temples. Now all we
have left to us is to paint for the art trade. Some artists may well feel that this is a bit of a
come down. For deep inside us we have never forgotten the standing we once had, and
the service we were once able to give humanity, and to man’s deepest experience of
reality, and that memory is still within us, and we feel exiles.
Beneath the tyranny and captivity of the mediocre culture of political dictatorships and
their mechanical systems, and beneath our own commercial traveller’s civilization, there
still flows the living river of human consciousness, within which is concentrated in
continuity, the life of the kingdom of life, animals, plants, stars, the earth and the sea, and
the life of our ancestors, the flowing generations of men and women, as they flower in
their brief and tragic beauty. And the artist is the vehicle of the continuity of that life, and
it’s guardian, and his instrument is the myth, and the archetypal image.
Cecil Collins, Notes by the Artist from Cecil Collins: A Retrospective Exhibition,
Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1959
5
CECIL COLLINS
1908-1989
Pastoral, 1944
Ink on paper
Signed and dated upper left; signed, titled and dated verso
28 x 38 cm
Collins, carrying a large suitcase full of paintings and drawings, trudged round the
London galleries. No one was interested. At the Lefevre Gallery, McNeill Reid said, after
giving one of the paintings a cursory glance, ‘It’s no good. All this Surrealism is over.’
Cecil was exhausted and asked if he could leave the suitcase. McNeill Reid agreed, but
still had not looked at its contents when Cecil returned two days later. He asked to leave
it for yet another day…A partner in the gallery, Duncan Macdonald, had returned from
New York and had seen the pictures. He greeted Cecil with these words: ‘The work you
have left here is very important. If you’ll allow me, I’ll visit you in Devon and see more.’
He came down to Dartington and as a result Cecil had his first one-man exhibition for
nine years, in February 1944.
Many pictures were sold and the exhibition attracted much interest…while the pictures
were hanging in the Lefevre Gallery, then in King Street, St Jame’s, a flying bomb hit the
gallery. Macdonald, who was a few streets away at the time of the blast, knew
instinctively that it was his gallery that had been hit. He hurried round to find the front of
the gallery destroyed together with all the paintings there. He managed to stop the
firemen turning their hoses on the interior of the gallery, where nearly all Collins’
paintings were found intact. The blast had flung them off the walls onto their faces.
William Anderson, Cecil Collins: The Quest for the Great Happiness, Barrie & Jenkins, 1988
6
JOHN TUNNARD
1900-1971
Golgotha, 1944 (July)
Mixed media on paper laid on card
Signed and dated lower left
36.9 x 54.5 cm
Exh: Redfern Gallery, 1944
McRoberts and Tunnard Ltd, London
Ref: Peat/Whitton, John Tunnard: His Life and Work, Scholar Press, 1997, No. 372
Tunnard was now a mature artist and his work during this period (1940-45) falls into
roughly two overlapping categories. Firstly there are drawings and paintings of, or
incorporating the human form. They show for the first time in a study of the human
figure which is literally drawn in black and white line with beautiful precision onto or into
the painted surface. There is an investigation both of anatomy and it seems of the
mysterious relationship between man and woman…The influence of Henry Moore is
discernable and may be partly responsible for this humanistic phase. Possibly also it was
the fruit of introspection caused by the recurrence of the war…By the end of 1942 the
figures have disappeared or have been replaced by symbols and Tunnard’s inventions
which relate to the world of technology have taken over. Semi-transparent forms and
planes, reminiscent of Gabo, gather and intersect. Clearly too the experience of gazing at
sea and sky as a coastguard has had a profound effect. The surrealists believed in
foresight as well as in searching the past and Tunnard believed that he had the gift to
foresee technological shapes in his paintings before they appeared in reality.
Rudolph Glossop, John Tunnard: A Personal Appreciation from John Tunnard 1900-1971,
Royal Academy, 1977
7
PRUNELLA CLOUGH
1919-1999
Sheds, 1946
Oil on canvas
Signed lower right
50 x 61 cm
The overlooked, the ubiquitous or the unconsidered have inspired Clough for most of her
working life. Soon after the war it made sense to explore the landscape of work as after
all it was the environment that most people knew. Clough knew it: a Londoner who has
seldom strayed far from her native city, she left Chelsea School of Art before completing
her diploma for war work as a mapping and engineering draughtsman. But the appeal of
the work place as a subject for an artist looking for her own language was that ‘…it
seemed then that there were innumerable situations in which one saw people in ways
that had never been realised pictorially’. It brought to the mind early Renaissance Italian
painters with a liking for their immediate townscape, and it seemed to her to be a
tradition worth updating. For three years from 1946 she visited the East Anglian ports,
especially Lowestoft, where she observed the different tasks of the port workers and
largely ignored the sea and tourist beaches adjacent to them. From the early ‘fifties,
London’s docks and factories gave rise to pictures with descriptive titles like Man entering
Boilerhouse and Industrial Plant. As she admits, she has always needed sense of place, and
the rural scene could not deliver that in her. Visiting Cornwall in the 1940s, her attention
was not taken by the natural phenomena but by man-made intrusions like the working
and abandoned mines that littered the area.
Martin Holman, Prunella Clough, London Magazine, February/March 1997
8
BEN NICHOLSON
1894-1982
Feb. 11th - 1952 (Green Ballet), 1952
Oil and pencil on board
Signed and titled on the reverse
30 x 38.1 cm
Prov: Lefevre Gallery, London (acquired in 1952)
Durlacher Gallery, New York
Edward Wales Root, New York
Waddington Galleries, London
Private Collection, Paris (acquired from the above in 1981)
Exh: Lefevre Gallery, Ben Nicholson, London, 1952, No.49
Durlacher Gallery, Ben Nicholson, New York, 1952, No.17
Lit:
Herbert Read, Ben Nicholson: Work since 1947, London, 1956, Vol. II, No.3,
illustrated
9
WILLIAM SCOTT
1913-1989
Untitled, 1952
Gouache, collage and pencil on card
Signed lower right
14.4 x 20.5 cm
Prov: The Hanover Gallery, London
Annely Juda, London
Achim Moeller Ltd
Exh: The Hanover Gallery, William Scott: Twenty Gouaches 1952, 1962, No.14
For the next two or three years [1951-53] Scott concentrated on the problem of
eliminating recognizable imagery. A number of other British artists were turning to
abstract art at this same period, but Scott’s approach was characteristically individual.
The colour in his paintings had been growing greyer and greyer; now he tended to leave
out colour altogether and to paint only in black and white, or with black and white and a
single colour, thereby placing colour and its problems temporarily on one side, as Picasso
and Braque had done during the period of analytical cubism. His pictures were still
started with some idea of the human figure or still life in mind, but the forms were
flattened and stretched out like a grid so as to preserve the picture plane as a continuous
surface; just enough reference to them remained to give the works an ominous living
quality. By reducing the forms to very simple, almost geometric elements, his still life,
figure and landscape themes tended to become mixed up together, so that a picture
would change unpredictably in the course of painting into something else, a figure into a
landscape, or still life into a figure – in this way undergoing a strange, imaginative
transformation. It was during these moments of transition that he felt he realized his
intentions most completely. He aimed to make his pictures as direct and seemingly
uncontrived as possible and he wanted them to have immediacy akin to that of children’s
art or primitive art. Though the elimination of so much from painting might easily have
led to aridity, the pictures were almost always saved by the mysterious sensual
animation of their forms and by the rugged application of paint, including extensive use
of the palette knife – what Patrick Heron has aptly described as ‘a controlled ”messing”
of brush-and-knife work that is one of the most invigorating delights of modern British
painting’.
Ronald Alley, William Scott – Art in Progress Series, Methuen, 1963
10 | 11
MARGARET MELLIS
1914-2009
Boats (Aldeburgh), 1952-4
Oil on canvas
55.8 x 71 cm
Exh: Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Margaret Mellis: A Life in Colour, Norwich,
2008, illustrated p.29
Empty Tins, 1957-58
Oil on Essex board
Signed and dated verso
45 x 60 cm
12
REG BUTLER
1913-1981
Circe Head, 1953
Bronze
Stamped with artist's monogram and dated, edition No.1/8 (archive No. RB 980)
47.5 cm (Height)
Prov: Private Collection, UK
Exh: Hanover Gallery, Reg Butler, London, 22 April - 4 June 1954, No.9
Institute of Contemporary Arts, Items for Collectors, London, 5 August 4 September 1954, No.12
Curt Valentin Gallery, Reg Butler, New York, 11 January - 5 February 1955, No.14,
illus b/w
Kunstverein, Young British Sculptors 1955-6, Munich, British Council, November
1955 - August 1956, touring to: Stuttgart, Freiberg, Karlsruhe, Recklinghausen,
Dusseldorf, Germany and the Netherlands
Hanover Gallery, Reg Butler, London, May - June 1957, No.2, illus b/w
Galerie Springer, Reg Butler, Berlin, July - September 1957, No. 2, illus b/w
J.B. Speed Art Museum, Reg Butler: A Retrospective Exhibition, Louisville, Kentucky,
22 October - 1 December 1963, No.31, illus b/w
Whitechapel Art Gallery, British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century, Part Two:
Symbol and Imagination, 1951-1980, London, 27 November 1981 - 24 January 1982,
No.39
Tate Gallery, Reg Butler, London, 16 November 1983 - 15 January 1984, No.47,
illus b/w
Tate Gallery, Suffering Through Tyranny, London, 1933-1984, December 1984 May 1985
Lit:
Tate Gallery, Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions 1984-6, Tate Gallery, London,
1988
Beatriz Sogbe, Reg Butler, Galeria Freites, Caracas, 1992, p.7, illus b/w
Margaret Garlake (ed), Artists and Patrons in Post-War Britain, Ashgate, London,
2001, p.64-5, illus b/w
Margaret Garlake, The Sculpture of Reg Butler, The Henry Moore Foundation,
Much Hadham & Lund Humphries, London, 2006, No.111, illus b/w fig. 68 and
p.15
13
BRYAN KNEALE
b.1930
Panic, 1954
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated lower left
102.5 x 76 cm
Prov: The Eugene Rosenberg Collection
Exh: The Redfern Gallery, Brian Kneale, 1954
The way I approach painting and sculpture is conditioned by the fact that I am basically
some kind of Manx peasant. I grew up on a small island. I can only work within limits that
I completely understand. If I experiment it is only because this is a means of realizing
that I have at least understood something: it has become intelligible to me. I cannot add
an aesthetic experience from the outside: it must work its way through me and present
itself as an aesthetic decision which is forced out of me at a certain stage in the
proceedings. Everything has to come from inside me. If nostalgia is against the modern
spirit that would be too bad if nostalgia was an important element in my work: I would
not be capable of cutting a part of my personality.
Bryan Kneale, Bryan Kneale: Sculpture 1959-1966, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1966
14
BRYAN KNEALE
b.1930
Tripod Form, c.1962
Forged iron
95 x 50 x 38 cm
Prov: The Eugene Rosenberg Collection
The Redfern Gallery
I don’t think of the sculpture I make as images, as representing any type of persona. If
imagery is present, it’s evolved accidentally. But I think that undoubtedly there is a range
of personality from a general idea imposed over the flow of working events. If there is
anything recurrent it probably has to do with a certain kind of sexual concern, though
I’am not really aware of it until it confronts me in my work. And this is hindsight I think
this sexual quality has as much to do with my background and sense of growing up on a
small island – a feeling of separation – as anything else. One of the things about the
island is that whatever I saw seemed to assume a daguerreotype-like kind of reality
owing to the extreme clarity of the light and bareness of the landscape. Objects were
invested with a particularly isolated importance. I was able to look at them in this way –
of seeing something for the first time. I find it hard to see things in London in a similar
way. This is one reason why I particularly like scrap-yards: they are the equivalents to
islands in London and I find in them the same range of feelings in sharp isolation that has
always concerned me. They are divorced from reality and I am, myself, clambering
around on a mountain of metal. I am free to see these things almost as if no-one and
nothing was between me and the object.
Bryan Kneale, Bryan Kneale: Sculpture 1959-1966, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1966
15
CLIFFORD FISHWICK
1923-1997
Newlyn Jetty, 1955
Oil on board
Signed and dated lower right
61 x 122 cm
Exh: Austin/Desmond, Clifford Fishwick: Painting Around the Fifties, 1989, No.22
While his subjects might appear quite specific and deliberately chosen – fishermen,
bathers, road menders, beached boats – of equal importance to him have been the
contrasting artist’s from whom he draws strength; Cézanne and Turner. Cézanne
stimulated the structured framework, the leaning towards cubism which occasionally
vies in the same picture, or more frequently in irregularly alternating sequences of
paintings over the years, with the colour-sensuousness and creamy impasto-work which
is to be found in some of Turner’s late paintings. Naturally, too – and especially in the
‘fifties – Fishwick’s paintings show similarities with those of the renowned British artists
William Scott and Kenneth Armitage, with their angular, starkly outlined, flattened
figures and objects. As heads of painting and sculpture, respectively, at Bath Academy of
Art at Corsham, these two artists exerted a wide influence on younger artists in the West
Country, as they brought together at Corsham leading talents from Cornwall, whose
work Fishwick knew, with others from London.
While recognising their stature and the power of their work, Fishwick developed his own
panoramic format for his views of cliffs, sea, beached boats and shore, which reached
maturity in the series he painted of the Gorad sands in 1956. This impressive stretch of
sands, revealed at low tide, between Anglesey and Holy Island, near to the family home
of his wife Patricia, herself also a painter, inspired his most ambitious essays in marrying
abstractions of matiére and paint with visual narratives of taut figures and boats brought
to rest. These paintings also demonstrate a certain familiarity with the work of the
influential, abstract, second École de Paris painters Nicolas de Staël and Serge Poliakoff,
with the starkly outlined, almost monochrome work of the young Bernard Buffet, and
later with the bolder, freer, semi-abstract and abstract painting of the New York School
which, though first shown in 1956 at the Tate Gallery, did not make its full impact until
the second, more focussed showing at the Tate in 1959, the year after Bryan Robertson
had inaugurated with Whitechapel Art Gallery’s famous series of major retrospectives of
the Abstract Expressionists with an exhibition devoted to Jackson Pollock. Beginning
with a series of nudes, Fishwick’s paintings in the early ‘sixties were to become larger,
more loosely structured darker and more abstract.
Anthony Collins, Clifford Fishwick: Painting Around the Fifties, Austin/Desmond Fine Art,
1989
¢
16
JACK SMITH
b.1928
Snowscape From a Train I, 1956
Oil on board
Signed and dated lower right
75 x 60 cm
Prov: A F C Turner
The Arthur Anderson Collection
Exh: Whitechapel Art Gallery, Jack Smith, 1959, No.17
From the autumn of 1953 on Jack Smith taught painting and drawing at the Bath
Academy of Art located in Corsham Court. Corsham (as the art world called it) was then
a strange, unique art school, run by the impressive, dictatorial painter Clifford Ellis. Smith
encountered there a different range of fellow artists. William Scott was head of the
painting school; Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter and Terry Frost taught in it, all associated
with St Ives, as did the forceful Polish painter Peter Potworowski; Adrian Heath joined
them in 1955, Martin Froy in 1956.
He went to Venice in 1955 and found himself interested, like many another painter; in the
interaction of light, water and buildings. He could not afford to go there in 1956 for the
Biennale, nor could the other three [the Beaux Arts quartet of Smith, Bratby, Middleditch
and Greaves were exhibited in the British Pavilion as ‘Quattro Giovane Pittori Inglesi’];
subsequently the British Council found it useful to arrange for exhibiting artists to be
there during the first days of the Biennales. In 1955 their presence might have helped
their paintings to meet with better attention, especially in view of their diversity as
individuals as well as artists.
Jack Smith’s major exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1959 would be of work
done during the preceding decade, opening with a Sea Painting done while at St Martin’s.
The selection, played down the so-called Kitchen Sink aspect of his work, drawing
attention to other kinds of subject matter, pursued during the Beaux Arts years, and then
emphasising the new range of object-based but in effect semi-abstract paintings he had
developed since 1957. He was doing what he could to distance himself from the sort of
commentary the label had attracted at several levels.
Norbert Lynton, Jack Smith: A Painter in Pursuit of Marvels, Momentum, 2000
17
WILLIAM SCOTT
1913-1989
Still Life on Black Table, 1956
Oil on canvas
Signed, titled and dated on stretcher verso
51 x 102.5 cm
Prov: Hanover Gallery, London
Exh: Jordan Gallery, Toronto
In 1953 Scott went for the first time to Canada and the U.S.A. While there, he heard of
the work of the New York School, sought out several of its members - Pollock, Kline,
Rothko, Brooks - and in this way was one of the first British artists to gain first-hand
knowledge of the American movements. That movement had, in the event, a two-fold
impact upon Scott’s work. On the one hand it set his brush free from Old-Masterly
techniques, showed that an art of complete directness was within his grasp, and
disabused him for ever of the idea that abstract painting and easel-painting were
necessarily related. On the other, it convinced him that his own allegiances were to a
tradition quite different from that which predominated in the New York School. Fauve
painting, Kandinsky, Klee, Hans Hofmann, oriental art, elements from Dada and
Surrealism - these were and are the bases off nearly all the ‘new American painting’.
Scott had never been tempted to employ fauve colour, his imagery has always been plain
and sober, and his affections lie with a European tradition of which Chardin, Corot,
Cézanne, Braque, and Bonnard have been the great masters.
John Russell, William Scott, Hanover Gallery, 1961
18
ROBYN DENNY
b.1930
Painting (June), 1957
Oil, stencil, collage and monotype
Signed and dated in orange printer’s ink.
48 x 35 cm
Exh: The Tate Gallery, Robyn Denny, 1973, No.3
Besides the two main themes – faces and letters – there appears in the early works a
subsidiary theme which was eventually to take up a central position in Denny’s work. It
was probably Cézanne who had first clearly diagnosed the hidden infirmity of realism:
the problem of time. Reality passes: light and shade change, things are transformed, and
so are we. And yet there is always one or other form of realism, such as recent
photographic Hyper Realism, which purports to pin down the world just as it really is.
Surely this is just passing off a corpse as the depiction of life? Denny discovered a
pictorial language which is truer than any objective reproduction of reality, because it is
capable of evoking the unofficial history of human longings: the world of graffiti. He
noted in his thesis: ‘Some walls have been decorated in this way so frequently that the
message has been obliterated, layer upon layer carrying the conflicting symbols of
passing generations, and finally expressing defiance by saying nothing.’
Often, of course, it was not far from the denotation of time to the demonstration of
contemporaneity. During his time at the RCA Denny enjoyed playing with fire, in every
sense of the term. Painting (June) 1957 set out to prove that the destructive flame, in flat
contradiction to all academic wisdom, can be just as creative a tool as the paintbrush.
Burn marks were in a sense Denny’s ‘conflicting symbols of passing generations’. In 1957,
when there were flames down in Suez, and Sir Anthony Eden was in Jamaica, Denny
started a conflagration of his own at the RCA by showing his teachers and fellow
students a great black painting which positively glinted with scorch marks. John Minton,
one of the most influential teachers and artists of the period, mounted a furious attack
on the black monster, culminating in the cry: ‘You could call it anything! Why don’t you
call it “Eden come home?”’ Why not? The painting bears the title to this day, together
with the signature ‘Denny’57’ – added by Richard Smith, who had a lighter touch for this
sort of thing. The old titles and signatures no longer fitted the bill. Robyn Denny and his
friends were in the process of forging a new language, a language without titles and
signatures.
Robert Kudielka, Robyn Denny from Robyn Denny, Tate Gallery, 1973
19
GERARD DILLON
1916-1971
Painting No.1, 1958
Oil and sand on canvas
Signed lower right; signed and inscribed Painting No.1 verso
76.5 x 102.5 cm
Prov: Mayor Gallery, London
Peter Bissell, New York
Exh: Pittsburgh, The Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting
(representing Great Britain), 1958
To write of him as in anyway humourless, will surprise Gerard Dillon’s friends. But in one
area, that concerned with the artist and his approach to his work, he was totally serious
and uncompromising. I was staying with him in his London flat during the period he was
making pictures from leather objects which he had found. He was infuriated when I
mocked at him for taking apart ladies handbags or gloves in order in order to re-use the
unravelled pieces. His eyes blazed at the suggestion that the artist might in any way be
limited in his use of materials or in the researches which could lead to the discovery of
new subject matter. He was thrilled to be able to unfold a crocodile handbag and use it as
the basis for a painting which had some of the mystery of the reptile from which the skin
had come. In the same way he used cloth sacking, sand, stones, pieces of bone and any
object which suggested itself to him. He also learnt how to use a sewing machine and to
hand-stitch. He completely made the stitch tapestry now in the collection of Bord Failte
[the Irish Tourist Board] …During the period when he was painting with sand he carried
out elaborate tests to ensure that his pictures would not eventually crack or chip after
having been fired in his gas oven.
James White, Gerard Dillon 1916-1971: A Retrospective Exhibition, Ulster Museum, Belfast,
1972
20
LYNN CHADWICK
1914-2003
Encounter X, 1959
Iron and composition
This work is unique; there was an edition of 3 cast in bronze
44 cm (Height)
Exh: Galerie Charles Leinhard, Zurich, July 1959
Ref: Dennis Farr/Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, Lund Humphries, 2006,
No.290, illustrated p.155
Chadwick’s method of beginning his sculpture by constructing an armature of abstract
shape is the reverse of more traditional processes, where a sculptor may start with a
naturalistic subject, perhaps in the form of a model which he then enlarges, only to
simplify and purge it of its more overtly representational elements. Chadwick likes
abstract shape, and he says, like Victor Pasmore, that he can’t resist thinking in terms of
pure forms, pure shapes; yet at the same time, he also admits that he ‘can’t resist adding
something’. Abstract shapes supported on legs begin to acquire movement, and hence to
suggest birds, animals, or human figures. His early figure pieces…gain their frenetic
expressiveness by the set of their bodies on their legs, but arms are truncated and an
attitude suggested by the angle at which the shoulders are set. The heads are either
reduced to pterodactyl-like beaks, or two vestigial spikes which indicate the angle at
which the neck and, by implication, the head, might be poised. Thus, while thinking
always in sculptural terms of mass, weight, and movement, Chadwick invests his
abstract with allusive vitality. References to natural forms have to be conveyed and
understood in the three-dimensional language of sculpture. Although music is not
important to him for his work, he likes to listen to it for relaxation; in the 1950s visitors
noticed that he enjoyed jazz, particularly Jelly-Roll Morton, played at high volume,
whereas now he enjoys Mozart and the piano sonatas of Beethoven as well, a change of
taste which seems to coincide with a more sober precision and structural clarity in his
sculpture.
Dennis Farr/Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, Lund Humphries, 2006
21
MICHAEL SANDLE
b.1936
Painting, 1960
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated verso
64.5 x 50 cm
Exh: Drian Galleries, London
City of Bradford Art Gallery, 1965
For Sandle, artistic traditions are a shared cultural frame of reference. In his view, any art
can serve as inspiration, first of all because he sees all culturally-conditioned artefacts as
‘phenomena’, that is to say ‘as a part of the natural world’. On a more profound level,
their associations with particular historical, social or political contexts, when combined,
create a kind of layering of meaning. This operation reveals not only the way in which we
as individuals can reflect on our own lives, but also how we interact in our society,
understanding our condition in relation to historical events as recent as the World Wars
and the war in Vietnam or within a much larger cultural framework stretching back as far
as Greco-Roman civilization… Sandle studied at the Slade from 1956 to 1959, arriving
there with what he terms a naïve, old-fashioned and romantic idea about art. He
describes himself as having been ‘very shy, insular and neurotic’, a self-image as a
‘troubled soul’ which itself corresponded to a traditional idea of the artist as outcast
which he has never completely shaken off, or wanted to shake off. ‘There are a lot of
things in my personality that have caused me a lot of trouble’, he recalls today, ‘a
tremendous amount of conflict. I’ve always seen this as the raw material that I’m working
with. Perhaps it’s a form of therapy’. What seems to him certain is that while he was at
the Slade his urge to paint Expressionist pictures was linked in his mind to a need to be
aloof and detached both socially and intellectually, a sort of ‘wild man’ uninfluenced by
other people.
Marco Livingstone, Michael Sandle: Sculpture & Drawings 1957-88, Whitechapel Art
Gallery, 1988
22
ANTHONY HILL
b.1960
Relief with Five Regions, 1960-62
Aluminium and plastic
58.5 x 53.5 cm
Though Hill’s work evolves logically, step by step, each phase is not distinct but overlaps
with the next. Important changes in style occur in 1958-59 and 1961-2 but he continued
to make orthogonal reliefs, of the type established in 1956, until 1963 and indeed, some
versions of reliefs designed in the second half of the ‘fifties were executed a decade or
more later. At the end of the ‘fifties he becomes more interested in using mathematical
ideas as starting points for art works, the space in his reliefs becomes more restricted
and less varied, he makes more use of identical units in his compositions and works more
than before in series. Examples of these developments can be seen in Prime Rhythms,
which occupied him in at least five versions between January 1959 and 1962, and the
Reliefs with five regions, six of which were made between 1960 and 1962. The sequence of
positive/negative spaces in Prime Rhythms was derived from the distribution of prime
numbers between 1 and 100 while the areas of the white planes in the Reliefs with five
regions were formed by “a partition of a square or rectangle into either equal but not
congruent area or areas using the same congruent bits but expanding”. The artist
published detailed explanations of both types of relief in 1966.
Another, and more dramatic, change which occurs in the ‘sixties is the introduction of
planes set at other than 90˚ to each other. Although horizontal/vertical orientation
continued to be crucial, Hill started to use 90˚ aluminium angle set at 45˚ to the base
plane in 1961 and in 1962-3 he introduced pieces set at 60˚ or 120˚. He first used angles
set at 45˚ to the base plane in an enormous mural/relief commissioned for the
temporary headquarters building of the Sixth Congress of the International Union of
Architects held on the South Bank in July 1961. The theme of the Congress was the
influence of new technology and industrial materials on architecture with a sub-theme of
the ‘Synthesis of the Arts”.
Alastair Grieve, The Development of Anthony Hill’s Art from 1950 to the Present, from
Anthony Hill: A Retrospective Exhibition, Hayward Gallery, 1983
23
JOHN WELLS
1907-2000
Untitled, 1961/2
Oil on board
Signed, inscribed and dated 62/6/John Wells/1961-2/Anchor
Studio/Trewarveneth/Newlyn/Cornwall verso
25 x 28.5 cm
So it is without any sense of apology that I acclaim the supreme taste with which John
Wells’ work is instinct as a major gift. No fine painter (and no great master) but has
possessed and used an abundance of exquisite taste. It is simply an indispensable part of
his equipment. In the case of Wells, the sense of refinement-not only of image and
design but of the actual means of painting - is so heightened as to make us conscious of
communication raised to the level of a passionate intensity. And I mean ‘passionate
intensity’: not ’intense passion’, which suggests the expressionist’s excesses. But Wells
forces passionate feeling through the rectifying sieve of a formal discipline; as, indeed,
did Cézanne. First, he refines his surface, painting it white or grey or possibly rose, then
partially scraping it away and painting it again, until it has the resistant, granular,
exquisite hardness of stone: next he refines his forms, until they gain a sharpness of
precision that cuts into the mind itself: finally he refines the pale, softly radiant colours,
with their aura of white light, until they quiver like the unfocusable violet shadows of
dusk. His passion is a passion for perfection; for the precise image sharpened into its
barest, most economical, essential form. It is a passion that spares the artist not at all:
the anguish of the search is directly translated into quality-into the rare beauty of the
eventual abstract form. The intensity is a sharpness of vision, a purity of emotion, an
uncompromising insistence upon finding the one elusive yet finally inescapable design-a
design which shall unburden him, temporarily, of the intolerable strain which mere
sensate existence imposes upon the artist.
Patrick Heron, The Changing Forms of Art, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955
24
PETER KINLEY
1926-1988
Standing Figure, 1962-3
Oil on canvas
198 x 137 cm
Prov: Grosvenor Gallery, London
Exh: Museum of Modern Art, Peter Kinley: Paintings 1956-1982, Oxford, 1982, No. 4
Kinley says he spent 1965 working between figuration and abstraction. Retrospectively
we could say he was looking for a viable means of figuration, but the point is that he had
been painting figures and other figurative motifs and had enjoyed success with them. His
1961 show at Gimpels, for instance, was dominated by figures and interiors – summary
accounts of the nude, in more or less straight lines and broad strokes of colour, almost
flat and with enough detail to characterize the figure without identifying it, usually in
relation to another major element such as a mirror or a canvas on an easel, and to a
space constructed of flat planes. In the 1964 show these had become almost
geometrical: the figure was now little more than a long rectangle of paint, the easel a
forked vertical space, a slightly tilted pairing of two bands of colour, one for floor, one for
wall. As design these works could scarcely have been more minimal; as surfaces they
were rich and enticing. Pigment was used generously, laid on often across the form,
striating it.
Norbert Lynton, Peter Kinley: Paintings 1956-1982, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1982
25
MARY MARTIN
1907-1967
Permutation in Black and White, 1965
Stainless steel and painted wood on Perspex and wood
Signed and dated verso
35.5 x 35.5 x 9.5 cm
The assessment of an artist’s impact on others is prone to inference and subjectivism,
along with the criticism of a partial approach to cultural history. Nonetheless, an
understanding of the relationship between artist’s practises remains a valuable aid in
understanding at least some of the changing forces which inform the production of art. A
case in point is the importance of Mary Martin’s work following her death in 1969 to
British constructivists of the next decade. Strikingly, whilst major shows such as the Arts
Council’s Systems exhibition of 1972-73 sought to promote new constructivist
formations, what often endures is as much a sense of indebtedness to the work of artists
like Martin as any radical reappraisal or rupture.
Central to an understanding of the impact of Martin’s work must be the social channels
through which British post-war constructivism was disseminated. Amongst the
‘constructionists’ who had been producing and exhibiting abstract work from the late
1940s onwards, Mary and Kenneth Martin, Anthony Hill and John Ernest surely sit at the
centre of a London-based network of acquaintances built on personal commitment to
hard-edged concrete art and to ongoing teaching activity that drew on, and informed,
artistic practise. As if to reiterate the sense of community of effort, striking points of
convergence between the work of Mary Martin, Hill and Ernest can be identified, such as
the common adoption of a diamond format in their constructed reliefs around 1964-66,
along with the investigation of 45-degree angle patterns. Whilst such affinities were
always tempered by the individual artistic project at hand, it is tempting to consider
Mary Martin’s use of these motifs from the early 1960s onwards as a prompt for her
peers.
Jonathon Hughes, An Ongoing Legacy from Mary Martin: The end is always to achieve
simplicity, Huddersfield Art Gallery, 2004
26
VICTOR PASMORE
1908-1998
Linear Construction in 2 Movements, Linear Symmetry, 1969
Oil on panel
Signed, titled and dated verso
41 x 41 cm
Exh: Galleria Lorenzelli, Bergamo, 1970, No.29
Ref: Alan Bowness/Luigi Lambertini, Victor Pasmore, Thames and Hudson, 1980,
No.417, illustrated
Pasmore’s paintings and constructions contain indications of planes. A small segment of
a black line is an invitation to us to compose the whole plane, but the other side of the
perimeter may be several yards away to the left or right of us. Straight line may end at
the top and bottom of the picture frame, but we must consider it as an indication of a
direction, and it has no limits. It is scratched or drawn very thinly because it must be
conceived without thickness. A curving wooden projection is cut off at an angle and the
section carefully painted, the plane indicated by the section must all be continued out
into space and conceived without its actual limits in the construction. The sides and the
underneath surfaces of such projections are painted different colours or the wood left
bare in section to show selected portions of other planes. Areas covered with discreet
dots which sometimes fade or get small or become thinned-out are an indication of
shapes which behave like gases. Their outer limits are fluid and it doesn’t matter exactly
where we imagine those limits to be. Yet other forms are like rubber sheets which can be
pulled and stretched out and the directions in which they are to be pulled in our
imaginations are indicated by a thinning of the paint. The indications of these planes and
shapes are deliberately casual. Sometimes the surface of the wood or board is scratched
away; sometimes the paint is a brief smudge. This casualness is to show us that the line
or area that we see is merely an indication for a plane or a form that is to be imagined.
Colours are generally unassuming and utilitarian-looking for the same reason. They are
there to indicate planes and shapes, not to have an emotional quality. Pasmore retains
the frame, however, although his compositions do not exist in the frames themselves.
The frames are there because they are a human experience. They exist within the
spectator and to create an experience for him when he is looking at them. The frame is
the spectator’s orientation. It is the vertical and horizontal construction which is imposed
on us all by balance and gravity.
Dennis Duerden, The Space Within, from Victor Pasmore: Paintings and Constructions
1960-1967, Graphics 1965-1967, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1968
27
COLIN SELF
b.1941
American Indian, 1970/71
Ballpoint pen on paper
Signed and inscribed Colin Self June 1970 - finished 24th Oct 1971 verso
25.4 x 34.3 cm
Ref:
Simon Martin/Marco Livingstone, Art in the Nuclear Age, Pallant House Gallery,
Chichester, 2008, pp. 12 & 64
The Mortal Combat series of drawings deal with the theme of what Self has called,
‘moment of death’ violence. The subjects of this series of over 12 ballpoint pen drawings
include aggressive encounters between wrestlers, snakes and eagles, elephants and
tigers, lions and zebras, and the priest Laocoön struggling with the serpent from Homer’s
Iliad. Self has written of how he was interested in ‘Mannerism and its virtues’ and that he
saw the Laocoön as, ‘the Mannerists’ symbol of earthly struggle and torment’. Above all,
the subjects of these drawings are metaphors for the aggression and mutually
destructive energies of humanity, and his childhood memories of World War II.
The animals were inspired by photographs in a series of magazines entitled Hutchinson’s
Animals of All Countries (c.1923-5), which were given to the artist by the maternal
grandmother of Self’s wife Margaret. Self based the figure of Laocoön upon Reg Park, the
first British contender to win the title Mr Universe, who starred in five films in the Italian
cycle of ‘sword and sandal’ epics in the early 1960s including Hercules Conquers Atlantis
(1961),and the Indian body-builder Monotosh Roy. The series also included various
symbols, including the Swastika and Imperial Eagle, which expressed Self’s interest in
‘the function of symbols and slogans’.
In 1968 he wrote of the Moral Combat series in relation to the: ‘lowest common
denominator areas of our culture’. The melodramatic subjects and colour of the ink
tattoos, and in using ballpoint pen for drawing Self was consciously using a non-fine art
medium available to anyone. The ballpoint pen, or Biro, was inexpensive and reliable. The
Biro was named after the Hungarian inventor Lázló Bíró, who used quick-drying
newspaper printing ink, and it had been licensed by the British during World War II for
use by the R.A.F. as the pens worked much better at high altitude. Drawing with ballpoint
pen is a highly laborious process as the nib of the pen has to be wiped after every few
strokes. Each drawing would take Self several weeks and as a result he did not finish his
ambitious plans for the backgrounds. However, when it became know that Self was using
ballpoint pens to create artworks, he was provided with a thousand complimentary pens
by the Biro company.
Simon Martin/Marco Livingstone, Colin Self: Art in the Nuclear Age, Pallant House
Gallery, Chichester, 2008
28
IAN STEPHENSON
1938-2000
Sandsend Series from Beyond the World’s End: Understudy, 1972
Oil, enamel and collage
Signed lower right
37.5 x 27.9 cm
Stephenson’s drawings extend his ideas and renew his preoccupations. They work best
in series, elements shifting from one to the next…Recently the palette has returned as a
motif. But the relationship between his work on paper and on canvas is best
demonstrated in the Sandsend Series from beyond the World’s End (his teaching studio is in
the Chelsea School of Art Annexe, the far side of World’s End SW10). The ‘Understudies’
for the paintings’ Chelsea Reach’, ‘Flaxman’, ‘Thames’ and ‘Manresa’ are horizontal,
decidedly so because of the way they are mounted and captioned. The colour schemes
are intense, concentrated within the rectangle with no overspill. The paintings are
vertical, the painted expanses bordered by raw canvas where masking tape has been
removed. So the weight of paint, the heavens in grains of sand, is shown up (though we
knew it all along) as only skin deep. So the drawings present a recipe fully worked out
whereas the paintings tower, aspire and challenge the eyesight.
‘One’s mind may change from instant to instant. Not from day to day or from year to
year, but from instant to instant. For most of us it’s just very convenient to make a
decision and abide by it. I think a more natural way with paint is to allow one’s opinion to
fluctuate all the time like the alternating currents in the brain.’
Most days Stephenson walks across Battersea Bridge just downstream from the World’s
End and Lindsey Row where Turner used to enjoy the sunsets and contemplate his
‘pictures of nothing’; where John Martin painted ‘the Plains of Heaven’ and ‘The Great
Day of His Wrath’; where Whistler brewed Nocturnes: ‘Flinging a pot of paint in the
public’s face’, Ruskin said.
William Feaver, Ian Stephenson: Paintings 1955-66 and 1966-77, Hayward Gallery, 1977
29
STEPHEN BUCKLEY
b.1944
Boom, 1972
Canvas, reptile skin, oil paint and resin
Signed, titled and dated verso
91.5 x 122.5 cm
Exh: Galleria dell Ariete, Milan, 1973
Garage Art, London, 1974
Kettle's Yard, Four Figures, Eastern Arts Association, Cambridge (and touring),
May 1974
New Delhi, Third Triennale, India, 1975
The evolution in Buckley’s work attests to a decision which he made early on to create
for himself an area of enquiry that was sufficiently flexible and open-ended to sustain
him indefinitely. ‘Certainly,’ he acknowledges, ‘I was very conscious of looking for a way
of working which didn’t exclude anything.’ He has continued to devise new ways to
examine the standard elements of painting: different types of paint, mark, format and
support; the varying relation of canvas to stretcher and of the picture surface to the wall;
the emotive properties of colour and pattern; the interdependence of structure and
decoration; and the fusion of subject into form by means of succinct allusions and more
descriptive images alike.
Marco Livingstone, Stephen Buckley, from Many Angles, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford,
1985
30
TOM PHILLIPS
b.1937
PARC CEFN ON. LLANISHEN and PARC CEFN ON. REFLECTED, c.1972
Acrylic on canvas
45.6 x 36.2 cm (each canvas)
Prov: Waddington Galleries
[on the theme of the park bench as an emblem of mortality]…it occurred to me why the
association of benches with mortality was strong in my mind: my brother had told me
(when I was about twelve) that the bench in front of Ashton’s the S.E. London
undertakers had been put there in order that old people might sit down to rest on it, and,
dying there provide rate. It was also on a park bench on Clapham Common that I spent
much of the dismal day on which my father died…From these notes it may seem that the
painting has a pessimistic intention: the opposite is the case. It is a plea against dying,
especially that premature death of the spirit that can afflict those who were never invited
to have a life of the imagination. There is no cynicism present. It hopes to invoke a
summoning of the will in the spirit of Dylan Thomas’s;
Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
Tom Phillips, Tom Phillips: Words, Texts, to 1974, Edition Hanjörg, Stuttgart/London, 1975
31
JOHN WALKER
b.1939
Untitled, 1972 *
Acrylic and collage on canvas
244 x 305 cm
Prov: Nigel Greenwood Gallery, London
Exh: Venice, Venice Biennale, 1972, No.259, illustrated
The more you get into painting the more you – I don’t know, I just enjoy painting. I enjoy
looking at paintings. The more I paint, the more I tend to want them round me – good art
to look at. In other words there aren’t any good reproductions…I need to look at it, to feed
off it. You see, I enjoy the sort of monastic clarity paintings give me. They are looking
inward, and I enjoy looking inward. I’m going into painting, and they are going out of it…If
you’re going to get into painting then you’re going to get into El Greco, and you’re going
to get into Matisse, and you’re going to get into – you name them. They’re just there, and
you just need them sometime. You really do.”
I want to paint a very honest painting. Something that’s direct, that’s a piece of me,
whatever I’m into at that time. My understanding about what is and all the other things
besides. I mean, what screws me at the particular moment. I’m very interested in
painting something like a bloody bullet out of the blue, so it comes direct. I’m very
interested in that. I don’t want to fuck it up by painting shit, something that produces
good handsome paintings, or can do. The more you get screwed by this idea of painting
the more you realize that what you’ve got or what’s there for you, its just for you and
what’s there for anybody else is them. The idea of teaching painting – someone to paint –
is irrelevant really. All you can possibly do is to tell them that they’re okay. It’s what
they’ve got, that is important. You may not agree with that.
Towards Another Picture, Midland Group Nottingham, 1977; John Walker on his paintings,
a conversation with Tim Hilton, Studio International, June 1972
* special arrangements must be made to view this work, please contact the gallery.
32
HARRY HOLLAND
b.1941
BEA, c.1974
Oil on canvas
Signed verso
115 x 180 cm
Harry Holland was born in Glasgow in 1941. He studied at St. Martin’s School of Art,
London from 1965 to 1969 before settling in Cardiff in 1973. Holland has been exhibiting
since the 1970s. His strongly figurative paintings are now represented in a number of
public collections including, Tate Gallery, London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York and the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.
33
HENRY MOORE
1898–1986
Reclining Figure: Flint, 1977
Bronze with dark brown patina, on a bronze plinth
Signed and numbered 2/9, stamped
12.4 x 17.3 x 9.2 cm
Lit:
Alan Bowness (ed), Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture Volume 5, No. 739, p.38,
Lund Humphries, 1986
One of the things I would like to think my sculpture has is a force, is a strength, is a life, a
vitality from inside out, so that you have a sense that the form is pressing from inside
trying to burst or trying to give off the strength from inside itself, rather than having
something which is just shaped from outside and stopped. It’s as though you have
something trying to make itself come to a shape from inside itself. This is, perhaps, what
makes me interested in bones as much as in flesh because the bone is the inner structure
of all living form. It’s the bone that pushes out from inside; as you bend your leg the knee
gets tautness over it, and it’s there that the movement and the energy come from. If you
clench a knuckle, you clench a fist, you get in that sense the bones, the knuckles pushing
through, giving a force that if you open your hand and just have it relaxed you don’t feel.
And so the knee, the shoulder, the skull, the forehead, the part where from inside you get
a sense of pressure of the bone outwards – these for me are the key points. You can then,
as it were, between those key points have a slack part, as you might between the bridge
of a drapery and the hollow of it, so that in this way you get a feeling that the form is all
inside it, and this is what also makes me think that I prefer hard form to soft form.
Warren Forma (ed), Five British Sculptors: Work and Talk, Grossman, New York, 1964
34
NIGEL HALL
b.1943
Night Sky IV, 1986
Patinated brass (unique)
44 x 18 x 20 cm
Exh. Galerie Zeigler, Zurich
Nigel Hall, born in Bristol in 1943, was brought up in a visually stimulating environment.
His mother had been to art school and his father worked as a stonemason, restoring
buildings in the West Country, “in that atmosphere, it was inevitable that I would be
drawn to the visual arts. I never had much doubt it would be sculpture.” He studied at the
West of England College of Art, Bristol from 1960 to 1964 and at then subsequently at
The Royal College of Art, London, graduating in 1967.
His first one-man show was at Galerie Givaudan, Paris in 1967, in the same year he left
for the United States on a Harkness Fellowship returning in 1969. It was also in 1967 that
Hall was to visit the Mojave Desert which had a significant impact, his work becoming
increasingly abstract as a result, “The scale was vast and the place had sparse features,
so sparse that they only served as minimal markers, an occasional rock, plant or
telegraph pole in an otherwise empty landscape.” In 1970, Hall made his first tubular
aluminium sculpture which demonstrated, what would be a lifelong preoccupation with
both spatial construction and how sculptural objects define the space they occupy. From
the mid 1980s Hall’s works have a greater solidity and are less minimal in feel.
35
PATRICK CAULFIELD
1936-2005
Magenta Vase, 1999
Acrylic on paper
Signed and titled below the image
89.5 x 82.5 cm
There were other highly trained artists making their presence felt in London at the same
time, but it is remarkable how sure of his personal identity Caulfield seemed, developing
within a matter of a year or two a mature style. Others – and this, of course, does not in
any way reflect upon their ultimate achievement – seemed to move by a process of trial
and error: they appeared to take longer to sort the central concerns of their art from the
incidentals. This should not be too surprising since the origins of the new painting in
England were rather divergent. There was the admiration for some of the achievements
of early European modernism – Léger, Delaunay and the Surrealists were favourites of
the period. At the same time there was the feeling that New York painting offered an
alternative to the École de Paris. What also emerged as an important factor was the
involvement with popular culture and the side products of technology. In the early sixties
most people were attempting to resolve the differences that seemed to exist between
different possibilities; they were content to explore their options. The English art scene
developed by an elaborate process of synthesis (a factor which made it a fascinating field
of study for the critic but which may, in the long run, prove to be its undoing. One or two
artists have, undoubtedly, managed to resolve the difficulties involved in a synthesis of
this sort but for others the contradictory motions of the influences at work may have
been too powerful to allow any personal resolution). Caulfield seems to have had, from a
very early stage, the confidence to sidestep many of these problems; he chose his
options rather than explored them. Although he learned from American art – and must
always have remained aware of it – he was not, from 1961 onward, ever tempted to
experiment with its idioms.
It is perhaps worth remarking that by being consciously a European – by ignoring the
exoticism of transatlantic imagery – he probably came nearer than any of the other
London based figurative artists to the spirit of his American contemporaries. He was not
forced to adopt the analytical perspective – the interpretation of media images – that is
so typical of English Pop Art and so conspicuously absent in New York Pop. At the same
time it must be admitted that he was not able to take as much for granted as did the
American artists, simply because he was in such an isolated position. While he may have
been sure of his own identity and intentions, he was obliged to almost spell them out in
his paintings; hence the paintings about Cubism.
Christopher Finch, Patrick Caulfield (Penguin New Art 2), Penguin, 1971
Aspects of Modern British and Irish Art
20th November – 22nd December 2009
Mon-Fri 10.30 – 5.30pm
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Austin/Desmond Fine Art
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ISBN 978-1-872926-30-8
Catalogue compiled by David Archer
Printed by ArtQuarters Press, London
Photography by Colin Mills