STEPHEN BUCKLEY

REG BUTLER

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

Austin/Desmond Fine Art

Aspects of Modern British and Irish Art

1

MARY JEWELS1886-1977

Still Life, c.1920Oil on canvasSigned and dated lower right51 x 36 cm

Mary began painting in her mid-thirties after being given a canvas, a brush, and fourtubes of paint by Cedric Morris in 1919 and told to complete a painting by the end of theday. Morris came to Cornwall from London in 1916 and lived in Zennor, from where hepaid 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 interviewwith fellow Cornishman, Frank Ruhrmund, the year before she died, ‘I am influenced bynobody and entirely self-taught. A true Celt, loving my Cornwall, with its lovely stonehedges, 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 madeher 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 herwork 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 andCo. 1999

2

RICHARD WYNDHAM1896-1948

The Goddess in the Bar, c.1926Tempera on canvas on board, with exhibition review pasted versoSigned in the image23 x 18 cmExh: Leicester Galleries, Paintings and Drawings by Richard Wyndham, June 1926Lit: P G Konody, Two Kinds of Art, Daily Mail (?), 1926, illustrated

The wide range embraced by contemporary art practise is well exemplified by thecontrast between the work of two artists now holding “one-man” shows at the LeicesterGalleries.

Both are essentially modern, but whereas Mrs Laura Knight’s etchings and aquatints area forceful expression on a healthy, normal, robust outlook upon life, Mr. RichardWyndham’s drawings and tempera paintings betray an essentially modern super-sensativeness which cannot be satisfied with normal, realistic representation and has toresort to more or less arbitrary rearrangements of the visual facts in obedience to theartist’s sense of rhythm and fitness.

In other words, Mrs Knight relies upon her eye, and Mr Wyndham upon his feelings…MrWyndham’s drawings and paintings have none of that straightforward truth ofstatement, but rather interpret his own peculiar reactions to the abstract rhythm he findsin nature.P G Konody, Two Kinds of Art, Daily Mail (?), 1926

3

C R W NEVINSON1889-1946

High Tide West, Bay, c.1930Oil on panelSigned lower left; signed and titled on artist’s studio labels verso30.3 x 40.6 cmProv: J GoodendayExh: 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 hehad a motor caravan ‘built to his own design for privacy and freedom’ (The TimesWeekly, April 1922). It was equipped as a mobile studio for sketching expeditions so thathe could avoid the public notice he attracted by staying in hotels (though the amount ofpress coverage the van attracted seems to counter this stated aim: it includesphotographs of Nevinson besides the vehicle and accounts of celebrities’ visits while itwas parked in Leicester Square). Nevinson is quoted as saying ‘I intend painting throughclosed windows which is a great help in getting the correct proportions of the scene to bedepicted’. He worked in Dorset, Cornwall, Kent and Sussex, producing contemplative andoften sombre landscapes in oil, watercolour and etching. He had evidently turned awayfrom the work for which he is now best known, as is demonstrated by his letter to theTrustees of the Tate Gallery in 1925, asking them to withdraw La Mitrailleuse fromexhibition 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 COLLINS1908-1989

Poem (Nature Forms), 1938Oil on canvas boardSigned and dated upper right; signed, titled and dated verso24 x 34.5 cmProv: Alex, Reid & Lefevre

Norman Notley and David Brynley CollectionGalerie 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 employedto create and set up alters to the mysterious gods of life within their temples. Now all wehave left to us is to paint for the art trade. Some artists may well feel that this is a bit of acome down. For deep inside us we have never forgotten the standing we once had, andthe service we were once able to give humanity, and to man’s deepest experience ofreality, and that memory is still within us, and we feel exiles.

Beneath the tyranny and captivity of the mediocre culture of political dictatorships andtheir mechanical systems, and beneath our own commercial traveller’s civilization, therestill flows the living river of human consciousness, within which is concentrated incontinuity, the life of the kingdom of life, animals, plants, stars, the earth and the sea, andthe life of our ancestors, the flowing generations of men and women, as they flower intheir brief and tragic beauty. And the artist is the vehicle of the continuity of that life, andit’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 COLLINS1908-1989

Pastoral, 1944Ink on paperSigned and dated upper left; signed, titled and dated verso28 x 38 cm

Collins, carrying a large suitcase full of paintings and drawings, trudged round theLondon galleries. No one was interested. At the Lefevre Gallery, McNeill Reid said, aftergiving 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, butstill had not looked at its contents when Cecil returned two days later. He asked to leaveit for yet another day…A partner in the gallery, Duncan Macdonald, had returned fromNew York and had seen the pictures. He greeted Cecil with these words: ‘The work youhave 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 fornine years, in February 1944.

Many pictures were sold and the exhibition attracted much interest…while the pictureswere hanging in the Lefevre Gallery, then in King Street, St Jame’s, a flying bomb hit thegallery. Macdonald, who was a few streets away at the time of the blast, knewinstinctively that it was his gallery that had been hit. He hurried round to find the front ofthe gallery destroyed together with all the paintings there. He managed to stop thefiremen 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 TUNNARD1900-1971

Golgotha, 1944 (July)Mixed media on paper laid on cardSigned and dated lower left36.9 x 54.5 cmExh: Redfern Gallery, 1944

McRoberts and Tunnard Ltd, LondonRef: 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 intoroughly two overlapping categories. Firstly there are drawings and paintings of, orincorporating the human form. They show for the first time in a study of the humanfigure which is literally drawn in black and white line with beautiful precision onto or intothe painted surface. There is an investigation both of anatomy and it seems of themysterious relationship between man and woman…The influence of Henry Moore isdiscernable and may be partly responsible for this humanistic phase. Possibly also it wasthe fruit of introspection caused by the recurrence of the war…By the end of 1942 thefigures have disappeared or have been replaced by symbols and Tunnard’s inventionswhich relate to the world of technology have taken over. Semi-transparent forms andplanes, reminiscent of Gabo, gather and intersect. Clearly too the experience of gazing atsea and sky as a coastguard has had a profound effect. The surrealists believed inforesight as well as in searching the past and Tunnard believed that he had the gift toforesee 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 CLOUGH1919-1999

Sheds, 1946Oil on canvasSigned lower right50 x 61 cm

The overlooked, the ubiquitous or the unconsidered have inspired Clough for most of herworking life. Soon after the war it made sense to explore the landscape of work as afterall it was the environment that most people knew. Clough knew it: a Londoner who hasseldom strayed far from her native city, she left Chelsea School of Art before completingher diploma for war work as a mapping and engineering draughtsman. But the appeal ofthe work place as a subject for an artist looking for her own language was that ‘…itseemed then that there were innumerable situations in which one saw people in waysthat had never been realised pictorially’. It brought to the mind early Renaissance Italianpainters with a liking for their immediate townscape, and it seemed to her to be atradition 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 andlargely 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 enteringBoilerhouse and Industrial Plant. As she admits, she has always needed sense of place, andthe rural scene could not deliver that in her. Visiting Cornwall in the 1940s, her attentionwas not taken by the natural phenomena but by man-made intrusions like the workingand abandoned mines that littered the area.Martin Holman, Prunella Clough, London Magazine, February/March 1997

8

BEN NICHOLSON1894-1982

Feb. 11th - 1952 (Green Ballet), 1952Oil and pencil on boardSigned and titled on the reverse30 x 38.1 cmProv: Lefevre Gallery, London (acquired in 1952)

Durlacher Gallery, New York Edward Wales Root, New York Waddington Galleries, LondonPrivate Collection, Paris (acquired from the above in 1981)

Exh: Lefevre Gallery, Ben Nicholson, London, 1952, No.49Durlacher 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 SCOTT1913-1989

Untitled, 1952Gouache, collage and pencil on cardSigned lower right14.4 x 20.5 cmProv: The Hanover Gallery, London

Annely Juda, LondonAchim 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 ofeliminating recognizable imagery. A number of other British artists were turning toabstract 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 leaveout colour altogether and to paint only in black and white, or with black and white and asingle colour, thereby placing colour and its problems temporarily on one side, as Picassoand Braque had done during the period of analytical cubism. His pictures were stillstarted with some idea of the human figure or still life in mind, but the forms wereflattened and stretched out like a grid so as to preserve the picture plane as a continuoussurface; just enough reference to them remained to give the works an ominous livingquality. 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 picturewould change unpredictably in the course of painting into something else, a figure into alandscape, or still life into a figure – in this way undergoing a strange, imaginativetransformation. It was during these moments of transition that he felt he realized hisintentions most completely. He aimed to make his pictures as direct and seeminglyuncontrived as possible and he wanted them to have immediacy akin to that of children’sart or primitive art. Though the elimination of so much from painting might easily haveled to aridity, the pictures were almost always saved by the mysterious sensualanimation of their forms and by the rugged application of paint, including extensive useof 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 Britishpainting’.Ronald Alley, William Scott – Art in Progress Series, Methuen, 1963

10 | 11

MARGARET MELLIS1914-2009

Boats (Aldeburgh), 1952-4Oil on canvas55.8 x 71 cmExh: Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Margaret Mellis: A Life in Colour, Norwich,

2008, illustrated p.29

Empty Tins, 1957-58Oil on Essex boardSigned and dated verso45 x 60 cm

12

REG BUTLER1913-1981

Circe Head, 1953BronzeStamped with artist's monogram and dated, edition No.1/8 (archive No. RB 980)47.5 cm (Height)Prov: Private Collection, UKExh: 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 KNEALEb.1930

Panic, 1954Oil on canvasSigned and dated lower left102.5 x 76 cmProv: The Eugene Rosenberg CollectionExh: The Redfern Gallery, Brian Kneale, 1954

The way I approach painting and sculpture is conditioned by the fact that I am basicallysome kind of Manx peasant. I grew up on a small island. I can only work within limits thatI completely understand. If I experiment it is only because this is a means of realizingthat I have at least understood something: it has become intelligible to me. I cannot addan aesthetic experience from the outside: it must work its way through me and presentitself as an aesthetic decision which is forced out of me at a certain stage in theproceedings. Everything has to come from inside me. If nostalgia is against the modernspirit that would be too bad if nostalgia was an important element in my work: I wouldnot be capable of cutting a part of my personality.Bryan Kneale, Bryan Kneale: Sculpture 1959-1966, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1966

14

BRYAN KNEALEb.1930

Tripod Form, c.1962Forged iron95 x 50 x 38 cmProv: The Eugene Rosenberg Collection

The Redfern Gallery

I don’t think of the sculpture I make as images, as representing any type of persona. Ifimagery is present, it’s evolved accidentally. But I think that undoubtedly there is a rangeof personality from a general idea imposed over the flow of working events. If there isanything recurrent it probably has to do with a certain kind of sexual concern, thoughI’am not really aware of it until it confronts me in my work. And this is hindsight I thinkthis sexual quality has as much to do with my background and sense of growing up on asmall island – a feeling of separation – as anything else. One of the things about theisland is that whatever I saw seemed to assume a daguerreotype-like kind of realityowing to the extreme clarity of the light and bareness of the landscape. Objects wereinvested 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 similarway. This is one reason why I particularly like scrap-yards: they are the equivalents toislands in London and I find in them the same range of feelings in sharp isolation that hasalways concerned me. They are divorced from reality and I am, myself, clamberingaround on a mountain of metal. I am free to see these things almost as if no-one andnothing was between me and the object.Bryan Kneale, Bryan Kneale: Sculpture 1959-1966, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1966

15

CLIFFORD FISHWICK1923-1997

Newlyn Jetty, 1955Oil on boardSigned and dated lower right61 x 122 cmExh: 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 thecontrasting artist’s from whom he draws strength; Cézanne and Turner. Cézannestimulated the structured framework, the leaning towards cubism which occasionallyvies in the same picture, or more frequently in irregularly alternating sequences ofpaintings over the years, with the colour-sensuousness and creamy impasto-work whichis 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 artistsWilliam Scott and Kenneth Armitage, with their angular, starkly outlined, flattenedfigures and objects. As heads of painting and sculpture, respectively, at Bath Academy ofArt at Corsham, these two artists exerted a wide influence on younger artists in the WestCountry, as they brought together at Corsham leading talents from Cornwall, whosework Fishwick knew, with others from London.

While recognising their stature and the power of their work, Fishwick developed his ownpanoramic format for his views of cliffs, sea, beached boats and shore, which reachedmaturity in the series he painted of the Gorad sands in 1956. This impressive stretch ofsands, revealed at low tide, between Anglesey and Holy Island, near to the family homeof his wife Patricia, herself also a painter, inspired his most ambitious essays in marryingabstractions of matiére and paint with visual narratives of taut figures and boats broughtto rest. These paintings also demonstrate a certain familiarity with the work of theinfluential, abstract, second École de Paris painters Nicolas de Staël and Serge Poliakoff,with the starkly outlined, almost monochrome work of the young Bernard Buffet, andlater with the bolder, freer, semi-abstract and abstract painting of the New York Schoolwhich, though first shown in 1956 at the Tate Gallery, did not make its full impact untilthe second, more focussed showing at the Tate in 1959, the year after Bryan Robertsonhad inaugurated with Whitechapel Art Gallery’s famous series of major retrospectives ofthe Abstract Expressionists with an exhibition devoted to Jackson Pollock. Beginningwith 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 SMITHb.1928

Snowscape From a Train I, 1956Oil on boardSigned and dated lower right75 x 60 cmProv: A F C Turner

The Arthur Anderson CollectionExh: Whitechapel Art Gallery, Jack Smith, 1959, No.17

From the autumn of 1953 on Jack Smith taught painting and drawing at the BathAcademy of Art located in Corsham Court. Corsham (as the art world called it) was thena strange, unique art school, run by the impressive, dictatorial painter Clifford Ellis. Smithencountered there a different range of fellow artists. William Scott was head of thepainting school; Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter and Terry Frost taught in it, all associatedwith St Ives, as did the forceful Polish painter Peter Potworowski; Adrian Heath joinedthem in 1955, Martin Froy in 1956.

He went to Venice in 1955 and found himself interested, like many another painter; in theinteraction of light, water and buildings. He could not afford to go there in 1956 for theBiennale, nor could the other three [the Beaux Arts quartet of Smith, Bratby, Middleditchand 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 bethere during the first days of the Biennales. In 1955 their presence might have helpedtheir paintings to meet with better attention, especially in view of their diversity asindividuals as well as artists.

Jack Smith’s major exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1959 would be of workdone 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, drawingattention to other kinds of subject matter, pursued during the Beaux Arts years, and thenemphasising the new range of object-based but in effect semi-abstract paintings he haddeveloped since 1957. He was doing what he could to distance himself from the sort ofcommentary the label had attracted at several levels.Norbert Lynton, Jack Smith: A Painter in Pursuit of Marvels, Momentum, 2000

17

WILLIAM SCOTT1913-1989

Still Life on Black Table, 1956Oil on canvasSigned, titled and dated on stretcher verso51 x 102.5 cmProv: Hanover Gallery, LondonExh: Jordan Gallery, Toronto

In 1953 Scott went for the first time to Canada and the U.S.A. While there, he heard ofthe 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-handknowledge of the American movements. That movement had, in the event, a two-foldimpact upon Scott’s work. On the one hand it set his brush free from Old-Masterlytechniques, showed that an art of complete directness was within his grasp, anddisabused him for ever of the idea that abstract painting and easel-painting werenecessarily related. On the other, it convinced him that his own allegiances were to atradition quite different from that which predominated in the New York School. Fauvepainting, Kandinsky, Klee, Hans Hofmann, oriental art, elements from Dada andSurrealism - 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 plainand 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 DENNYb.1930Painting (June), 1957Oil, stencil, collage and monotypeSigned and dated in orange printer’s ink. 48 x 35 cmExh: The Tate Gallery, Robyn Denny, 1973, No.3

Besides the two main themes – faces and letters – there appears in the early works asubsidiary theme which was eventually to take up a central position in Denny’s work. Itwas 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, andso are we. And yet there is always one or other form of realism, such as recentphotographic 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 apictorial language which is truer than any objective reproduction of reality, because it iscapable of evoking the unofficial history of human longings: the world of graffiti. Henoted in his thesis: ‘Some walls have been decorated in this way so frequently that themessage has been obliterated, layer upon layer carrying the conflicting symbols ofpassing generations, and finally expressing defiance by saying nothing.’

Often, of course, it was not far from the denotation of time to the demonstration ofcontemporaneity. During his time at the RCA Denny enjoyed playing with fire, in everysense of the term. Painting (June) 1957 set out to prove that the destructive flame, in flatcontradiction 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, Dennystarted a conflagration of his own at the RCA by showing his teachers and fellowstudents 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 attackon the black monster, culminating in the cry: ‘You could call it anything! Why don’t youcall it “Eden come home?”’ Why not? The painting bears the title to this day, togetherwith the signature ‘Denny’57’ – added by Richard Smith, who had a lighter touch for thissort of thing. The old titles and signatures no longer fitted the bill. Robyn Denny and hisfriends were in the process of forging a new language, a language without titles andsignatures.Robert Kudielka, Robyn Denny from Robyn Denny, Tate Gallery, 1973

19

GERARD DILLON1916-1971

Painting No.1, 1958Oil and sand on canvasSigned lower right; signed and inscribed Painting No.1 verso76.5 x 102.5 cmProv: Mayor Gallery, London

Peter Bissell, New YorkExh: 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 onearea, that concerned with the artist and his approach to his work, he was totally seriousand uncompromising. I was staying with him in his London flat during the period he wasmaking pictures from leather objects which he had found. He was infuriated when Imocked at him for taking apart ladies handbags or gloves in order in order to re-use theunravelled pieces. His eyes blazed at the suggestion that the artist might in any way belimited in his use of materials or in the researches which could lead to the discovery ofnew subject matter. He was thrilled to be able to unfold a crocodile handbag and use it asthe basis for a painting which had some of the mystery of the reptile from which the skinhad come. In the same way he used cloth sacking, sand, stones, pieces of bone and anyobject which suggested itself to him. He also learnt how to use a sewing machine and tohand-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 carriedout elaborate tests to ensure that his pictures would not eventually crack or chip afterhaving been fired in his gas oven.James White, Gerard Dillon 1916-1971: A Retrospective Exhibition, Ulster Museum, Belfast,1972

20

LYNN CHADWICK1914-2003

Encounter X, 1959Iron and compositionThis work is unique; there was an edition of 3 cast in bronze44 cm (Height)Exh: Galerie Charles Leinhard, Zurich, July 1959Ref: 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 abstractshape is the reverse of more traditional processes, where a sculptor may start with anaturalistic subject, perhaps in the form of a model which he then enlarges, only tosimplify and purge it of its more overtly representational elements. Chadwick likesabstract shape, and he says, like Victor Pasmore, that he can’t resist thinking in terms ofpure forms, pure shapes; yet at the same time, he also admits that he ‘can’t resist addingsomething’. Abstract shapes supported on legs begin to acquire movement, and hence tosuggest birds, animals, or human figures. His early figure pieces…gain their freneticexpressiveness by the set of their bodies on their legs, but arms are truncated and anattitude suggested by the angle at which the shoulders are set. The heads are eitherreduced to pterodactyl-like beaks, or two vestigial spikes which indicate the angle atwhich the neck and, by implication, the head, might be poised. Thus, while thinkingalways in sculptural terms of mass, weight, and movement, Chadwick invests hisabstract with allusive vitality. References to natural forms have to be conveyed andunderstood in the three-dimensional language of sculpture. Although music is notimportant to him for his work, he likes to listen to it for relaxation; in the 1950s visitorsnoticed 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 oftaste which seems to coincide with a more sober precision and structural clarity in hissculpture.Dennis Farr/Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, Lund Humphries, 2006

21

MICHAEL SANDLEb.1936

Painting, 1960Oil on canvasSigned and dated verso64.5 x 50 cmExh: Drian Galleries, London

City of Bradford Art Gallery, 1965

For Sandle, artistic traditions are a shared cultural frame of reference. In his view, any artcan 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 weas 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 Warsand the war in Vietnam or within a much larger cultural framework stretching back as faras Greco-Roman civilization… Sandle studied at the Slade from 1956 to 1959, arrivingthere with what he terms a naïve, old-fashioned and romantic idea about art. Hedescribes 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 outcastwhich he has never completely shaken off, or wanted to shake off. ‘There are a lot ofthings in my personality that have caused me a lot of trouble’, he recalls today, ‘atremendous amount of conflict. I’ve always seen this as the raw material that I’m workingwith. Perhaps it’s a form of therapy’. What seems to him certain is that while he was atthe Slade his urge to paint Expressionist pictures was linked in his mind to a need to bealoof and detached both socially and intellectually, a sort of ‘wild man’ uninfluenced byother people.Marco Livingstone, Michael Sandle: Sculpture & Drawings 1957-88, Whitechapel ArtGallery, 1988

22

ANTHONY HILLb.1960

Relief with Five Regions, 1960-62Aluminium and plastic58.5 x 53.5 cm

Though Hill’s work evolves logically, step by step, each phase is not distinct but overlapswith the next. Important changes in style occur in 1958-59 and 1961-2 but he continuedto make orthogonal reliefs, of the type established in 1956, until 1963 and indeed, someversions of reliefs designed in the second half of the ‘fifties were executed a decade ormore later. At the end of the ‘fifties he becomes more interested in using mathematicalideas as starting points for art works, the space in his reliefs becomes more restrictedand less varied, he makes more use of identical units in his compositions and works morethan 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 theReliefs with five regions, six of which were made between 1960 and 1962. The sequence ofpositive/negative spaces in Prime Rhythms was derived from the distribution of primenumbers between 1 and 100 while the areas of the white planes in the Reliefs with fiveregions were formed by “a partition of a square or rectangle into either equal but notcongruent area or areas using the same congruent bits but expanding”. The artistpublished detailed explanations of both types of relief in 1966.

Another, and more dramatic, change which occurs in the ‘sixties is the introduction ofplanes set at other than 90˚ to each other. Although horizontal/vertical orientationcontinued to be crucial, Hill started to use 90˚ aluminium angle set at 45˚ to the baseplane in 1961 and in 1962-3 he introduced pieces set at 60˚ or 120˚. He first used anglesset at 45˚ to the base plane in an enormous mural/relief commissioned for thetemporary headquarters building of the Sixth Congress of the International Union ofArchitects held on the South Bank in July 1961. The theme of the Congress was theinfluence of new technology and industrial materials on architecture with a sub-theme ofthe ‘Synthesis of the Arts”.Alastair Grieve, The Development of Anthony Hill’s Art from 1950 to the Present, fromAnthony Hill: A Retrospective Exhibition, Hayward Gallery, 1983

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JOHN WELLS1907-2000

Untitled, 1961/2Oil on boardSigned, inscribed and dated 62/6/John Wells/1961-2/AnchorStudio/Trewarveneth/Newlyn/Cornwall verso25 x 28.5 cm

So it is without any sense of apology that I acclaim the supreme taste with which JohnWells’ work is instinct as a major gift. No fine painter (and no great master) but haspossessed and used an abundance of exquisite taste. It is simply an indispensable part ofhis equipment. In the case of Wells, the sense of refinement-not only of image anddesign but of the actual means of painting - is so heightened as to make us conscious ofcommunication raised to the level of a passionate intensity. And I mean ‘passionateintensity’: not ’intense passion’, which suggests the expressionist’s excesses. But Wellsforces 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, thenpartially 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 ofprecision 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 ofdusk. His passion is a passion for perfection; for the precise image sharpened into itsbarest, 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 theeventual abstract form. The intensity is a sharpness of vision, a purity of emotion, anuncompromising insistence upon finding the one elusive yet finally inescapable design-adesign which shall unburden him, temporarily, of the intolerable strain which meresensate existence imposes upon the artist.Patrick Heron, The Changing Forms of Art, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955

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PETER KINLEY1926-1988

Standing Figure, 1962-3Oil on canvas198 x 137 cmProv: Grosvenor Gallery, LondonExh: Museum of Modern Art, Peter Kinley: Paintings 1956-1982, Oxford, 1982, No. 4

Kinley says he spent 1965 working between figuration and abstraction. Retrospectivelywe could say he was looking for a viable means of figuration, but the point is that he hadbeen painting figures and other figurative motifs and had enjoyed success with them. His1961 show at Gimpels, for instance, was dominated by figures and interiors – summaryaccounts of the nude, in more or less straight lines and broad strokes of colour, almostflat and with enough detail to characterize the figure without identifying it, usually inrelation to another major element such as a mirror or a canvas on an easel, and to aspace constructed of flat planes. In the 1964 show these had become almostgeometrical: the figure was now little more than a long rectangle of paint, the easel aforked vertical space, a slightly tilted pairing of two bands of colour, one for floor, one forwall. As design these works could scarcely have been more minimal; as surfaces theywere 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

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MARY MARTIN1907-1967

Permutation in Black and White, 1965Stainless steel and painted wood on Perspex and woodSigned and dated verso35.5 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, anunderstanding of the relationship between artist’s practises remains a valuable aid inunderstanding at least some of the changing forces which inform the production of art. Acase in point is the importance of Mary Martin’s work following her death in 1969 toBritish constructivists of the next decade. Strikingly, whilst major shows such as the ArtsCouncil’s Systems exhibition of 1972-73 sought to promote new constructivistformations, what often endures is as much a sense of indebtedness to the work of artistslike Martin as any radical reappraisal or rupture.

Central to an understanding of the impact of Martin’s work must be the social channelsthrough which British post-war constructivism was disseminated. Amongst the‘constructionists’ who had been producing and exhibiting abstract work from the late1940s onwards, Mary and Kenneth Martin, Anthony Hill and John Ernest surely sit at thecentre of a London-based network of acquaintances built on personal commitment tohard-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 ofconvergence between the work of Mary Martin, Hill and Ernest can be identified, such asthe 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 werealways tempered by the individual artistic project at hand, it is tempting to considerMary Martin’s use of these motifs from the early 1960s onwards as a prompt for herpeers.Jonathon Hughes, An Ongoing Legacy from Mary Martin: The end is always to achievesimplicity, Huddersfield Art Gallery, 2004

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VICTOR PASMORE1908-1998

Linear Construction in 2 Movements, Linear Symmetry, 1969Oil on panelSigned, titled and dated verso41 x 41 cmExh: Galleria Lorenzelli, Bergamo, 1970, No.29Ref: 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 ofa black line is an invitation to us to compose the whole plane, but the other side of theperimeter may be several yards away to the left or right of us. Straight line may end atthe top and bottom of the picture frame, but we must consider it as an indication of adirection, and it has no limits. It is scratched or drawn very thinly because it must beconceived without thickness. A curving wooden projection is cut off at an angle and thesection carefully painted, the plane indicated by the section must all be continued outinto space and conceived without its actual limits in the construction. The sides and theunderneath surfaces of such projections are painted different colours or the wood leftbare in section to show selected portions of other planes. Areas covered with discreetdots which sometimes fade or get small or become thinned-out are an indication ofshapes which behave like gases. Their outer limits are fluid and it doesn’t matter exactlywhere we imagine those limits to be. Yet other forms are like rubber sheets which can bepulled and stretched out and the directions in which they are to be pulled in ourimaginations are indicated by a thinning of the paint. The indications of these planes andshapes are deliberately casual. Sometimes the surface of the wood or board is scratchedaway; sometimes the paint is a brief smudge. This casualness is to show us that the lineor 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 arethere to indicate planes and shapes, not to have an emotional quality. Pasmore retainsthe 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 thespectator and to create an experience for him when he is looking at them. The frame isthe spectator’s orientation. It is the vertical and horizontal construction which is imposedon us all by balance and gravity.Dennis Duerden, The Space Within, from Victor Pasmore: Paintings and Constructions1960-1967, Graphics 1965-1967, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1968

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COLIN SELFb.1941

American Indian, 1970/71Ballpoint pen on paperSigned and inscribed Colin Self June 1970 - finished 24th Oct 1971 verso25.4 x 34.3 cmRef: 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 drawingsinclude aggressive encounters between wrestlers, snakes and eagles, elephants andtigers, lions and zebras, and the priest Laocoön struggling with the serpent from Homer’sIliad. Self has written of how he was interested in ‘Mannerism and its virtues’ and that hesaw the Laocoön as, ‘the Mannerists’ symbol of earthly struggle and torment’. Above all,the subjects of these drawings are metaphors for the aggression and mutuallydestructive energies of humanity, and his childhood memories of World War II.

The animals were inspired by photographs in a series of magazines entitled Hutchinson’sAnimals of All Countries (c.1923-5), which were given to the artist by the maternalgrandmother of Self’s wife Margaret. Self based the figure of Laocoön upon Reg Park, thefirst British contender to win the title Mr Universe, who starred in five films in the Italiancycle 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 varioussymbols, 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 commondenominator areas of our culture’. The melodramatic subjects and colour of the inktattoos, and in using ballpoint pen for drawing Self was consciously using a non-fine artmedium available to anyone. The ballpoint pen, or Biro, was inexpensive and reliable. TheBiro was named after the Hungarian inventor Lázló Bíró, who used quick-dryingnewspaper printing ink, and it had been licensed by the British during World War II foruse by the R.A.F. as the pens worked much better at high altitude. Drawing with ballpointpen is a highly laborious process as the nib of the pen has to be wiped after every fewstrokes. Each drawing would take Self several weeks and as a result he did not finish hisambitious plans for the backgrounds. However, when it became know that Self was usingballpoint pens to create artworks, he was provided with a thousand complimentary pensby the Biro company. Simon Martin/Marco Livingstone, Colin Self: Art in the Nuclear Age, Pallant HouseGallery, Chichester, 2008

28

IAN STEPHENSON 1938-2000

Sandsend Series from Beyond the World’s End: Understudy, 1972Oil, enamel and collageSigned lower right37.5 x 27.9 cm

Stephenson’s drawings extend his ideas and renew his preoccupations. They work bestin series, elements shifting from one to the next…Recently the palette has returned as amotif. But the relationship between his work on paper and on canvas is bestdemonstrated in the Sandsend Series from beyond the World’s End (his teaching studio is inthe 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 schemesare intense, concentrated within the rectangle with no overspill. The paintings arevertical, the painted expanses bordered by raw canvas where masking tape has beenremoved. So the weight of paint, the heavens in grains of sand, is shown up (though weknew it all along) as only skin deep. So the drawings present a recipe fully worked outwhereas 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 toyear, but from instant to instant. For most of us it’s just very convenient to make adecision and abide by it. I think a more natural way with paint is to allow one’s opinion tofluctuate all the time like the alternating currents in the brain.’

Most days Stephenson walks across Battersea Bridge just downstream from the World’sEnd 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 GreatDay of His Wrath’; where Whistler brewed Nocturnes: ‘Flinging a pot of paint in thepublic’s face’, Ruskin said.William Feaver, Ian Stephenson: Paintings 1955-66 and 1966-77, Hayward Gallery, 1977

29

STEPHEN BUCKLEYb.1944

Boom, 1972Canvas, reptile skin, oil paint and resinSigned, titled and dated verso91.5 x 122.5 cmExh: Galleria dell Ariete, Milan, 1973

Garage Art, London, 1974Kettle's Yard, Four Figures, Eastern Arts Association, Cambridge (and touring), May 1974New Delhi, Third Triennale, India, 1975

The evolution in Buckley’s work attests to a decision which he made early on to createfor himself an area of enquiry that was sufficiently flexible and open-ended to sustainhim indefinitely. ‘Certainly,’ he acknowledges, ‘I was very conscious of looking for a wayof working which didn’t exclude anything.’ He has continued to devise new ways toexamine the standard elements of painting: different types of paint, mark, format andsupport; 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 anddecoration; and the fusion of subject into form by means of succinct allusions and moredescriptive images alike.Marco Livingstone, Stephen Buckley, from Many Angles, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford,1985

30

TOM PHILLIPSb.1937

PARC CEFN ON. LLANISHEN and PARC CEFN ON. REFLECTED, c.1972Acrylic 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 theassociation 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. Londonundertakers 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 spentmuch of the dismal day on which my father died…From these notes it may seem that thepainting 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 invitedto have a life of the imagination. There is no cynicism present. It hopes to invoke asummoning of the will in the spirit of Dylan Thomas’s;

Do not go gentle into that good nightRage, rage against the dying of the light

Tom Phillips, Tom Phillips: Words, Texts, to 1974, Edition Hanjörg, Stuttgart/London, 1975

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JOHN WALKERb.1939

Untitled, 1972 *Acrylic and collage on canvas244 x 305 cmProv: Nigel Greenwood Gallery, LondonExh: 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 enjoylooking at paintings. The more I paint, the more I tend to want them round me – good artto look at. In other words there aren’t any good reproductions…I need to look at it, to feedoff it. You see, I enjoy the sort of monastic clarity paintings give me. They are lookinginward, and I enjoy looking inward. I’m going into painting, and they are going out of it…Ifyou’re going to get into painting then you’re going to get into El Greco, and you’re goingto get into Matisse, and you’re going to get into – you name them. They’re just there, andyou 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 thingsbesides. I mean, what screws me at the particular moment. I’m very interested inpainting something like a bloody bullet out of the blue, so it comes direct. I’m veryinterested in that. I don’t want to fuck it up by painting shit, something that producesgood handsome paintings, or can do. The more you get screwed by this idea of paintingthe more you realize that what you’ve got or what’s there for you, its just for you andwhat’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 whatthey’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 HOLLANDb.1941

BEA, c.1974Oil on canvasSigned verso115 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 exhibitingsince the 1970s. His strongly figurative paintings are now represented in a number ofpublic collections including, Tate Gallery, London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NewYork and the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.

33

HENRY MOORE1898–1986

Reclining Figure: Flint, 1977Bronze with dark brown patina, on a bronze plinthSigned and numbered 2/9, stamped12.4 x 17.3 x 9.2 cmLit: 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, avitality from inside out, so that you have a sense that the form is pressing from insidetrying to burst or trying to give off the strength from inside itself, rather than havingsomething which is just shaped from outside and stopped. It’s as though you havesomething trying to make itself come to a shape from inside itself. This is, perhaps, whatmakes me interested in bones as much as in flesh because the bone is the inner structureof all living form. It’s the bone that pushes out from inside; as you bend your leg the kneegets tautness over it, and it’s there that the movement and the energy come from. If youclench a knuckle, you clench a fist, you get in that sense the bones, the knuckles pushingthrough, 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 geta 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 bridgeof a drapery and the hollow of it, so that in this way you get a feeling that the form is allinside 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 HALLb.1943

Night Sky IV, 1986Patinated 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, restoringbuildings in the West Country, “in that atmosphere, it was inevitable that I would bedrawn to the visual arts. I never had much doubt it would be sculpture.” He studied at theWest of England College of Art, Bristol from 1960 to 1964 and at then subsequently atThe 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 leftfor the United States on a Harkness Fellowship returning in 1969. It was also in 1967 thatHall was to visit the Mojave Desert which had a significant impact, his work becomingincreasingly 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 ortelegraph pole in an otherwise empty landscape.” In 1970, Hall made his first tubularaluminium sculpture which demonstrated, what would be a lifelong preoccupation withboth spatial construction and how sculptural objects define the space they occupy. Fromthe mid 1980s Hall’s works have a greater solidity and are less minimal in feel.

35

PATRICK CAULFIELD1936-2005

Magenta Vase, 1999 Acrylic on paper Signed and titled below the image89.5 x 82.5 cm

There were other highly trained artists making their presence felt in London at the sametime, but it is remarkable how sure of his personal identity Caulfield seemed, developingwithin a matter of a year or two a mature style. Others – and this, of course, does not inany way reflect upon their ultimate achievement – seemed to move by a process of trialand error: they appeared to take longer to sort the central concerns of their art from theincidentals. This should not be too surprising since the origins of the new painting inEngland were rather divergent. There was the admiration for some of the achievementsof early European modernism – Léger, Delaunay and the Surrealists were favourites ofthe period. At the same time there was the feeling that New York painting offered analternative to the École de Paris. What also emerged as an important factor was theinvolvement with popular culture and the side products of technology. In the early sixtiesmost people were attempting to resolve the differences that seemed to exist betweendifferent possibilities; they were content to explore their options. The English art scenedeveloped by an elaborate process of synthesis (a factor which made it a fascinating fieldof study for the critic but which may, in the long run, prove to be its undoing. One or twoartists have, undoubtedly, managed to resolve the difficulties involved in a synthesis ofthis sort but for others the contradictory motions of the influences at work may havebeen too powerful to allow any personal resolution). Caulfield seems to have had, from avery early stage, the confidence to sidestep many of these problems; he chose hisoptions rather than explored them. Although he learned from American art – and mustalways have remained aware of it – he was not, from 1961 onward, ever tempted toexperiment with its idioms.

It is perhaps worth remarking that by being consciously a European – by ignoring theexoticism of transatlantic imagery – he probably came nearer than any of the otherLondon based figurative artists to the spirit of his American contemporaries. He was notforced to adopt the analytical perspective – the interpretation of media images – that isso typical of English Pop Art and so conspicuously absent in New York Pop. At the sametime it must be admitted that he was not able to take as much for granted as did theAmerican artists, simply because he was in such an isolated position. While he may havebeen sure of his own identity and intentions, he was obliged to almost spell them out inhis 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

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