A CRITIC’S CHOICE Selected by Andrew Lambirth
A CRITIC’S CHOICE 1950 - 2000
Courtesy of Derrick Santini
A CRITIC’S CHOICE 1950 - 2000
Selected by Andrew Lambirth
20 March - 19 April 2013
Monday - Friday 10 - 5.30 Saturday 11 - 2.00
Browse & Darby 19 Cork Street London W1S 3LP Tel: 020 7734 7984 Fax: 0207851 6650 email: art@browseanddarby.co.uk www. browseanddarby.co.uk
Introduction This is the third in a trilogy of exhibitions I have selected for Browse & Darby, and I thank them once again for so generously extending their hospitality to my passions and prejudices, and allowing me the run of the gallery. The first show was a mixed Critic’s Choice of living and dead artists, but the subsequent two have been confined to the historical rather than the contemporary. The second show dealt with the period 1900 – 1950, and this one deals with 1950 – 2000. Although these are the broad time limits, I have permitted myself certain exceptions: late works by artists always interest me (they often allow themselves greater freedoms) and I have included several paintings from a year or two beyond the 2000 cut-off. I hope the unusualness of these works justifies their inclusion. The exhibition is very much a personal choice. Besides representing the variety of art I enjoy, it celebrates a closer association: I knew and worked with more than half of the artists in the show, some of whom became friends. I have written monographs about four of them (Herman, Hoyland, Kitaj and Mellis), and substantial texts about most of the others. There are only eight artists here I never met, but all are painters I much admire. My own engagement with Modern British art began when I was a teenager. My school was fortunate in having a brilliant art teacher who gave informal talks about painters (one of the most colourful I remember was about John Bratby), and aged 16 I began visiting the commercial galleries of Bond Street and Cork Street, as well as the museums. You may say that I started as I meant to go on... As a writer as well as a curator, I am more interested in rehabilitating reputations, or showing work by artists I feel have been unfairly neglected, than in lauding once again the already over-familiar. Of course, if paintings of rare brilliance by well-known artists had come within my grasp (and one or two nearly did), I would have been happy to include them. As it is, this exhibition is distinguished by its paucity of obvious names: we have no Piper, Sutherland or Vaughan, for instance. I am less happy about the lack of Raymond Coxon and Karl Weschke, both of whom figured on my original list, but there simply wasn’t the material available. I would like to have featured some really good paintings by Ruskin Spear, an artist of splendid satiric properties and solid post-Sickertian genre values. Plenty of small things by Spear come through the auction rooms, but they are mostly minor works. I wanted to find a couple of pictures that would really do him justice: the sort of thing that made Ezra Pound define literature, and by extension art, as news that STAYS news. But once again the right paintings proved elusive. On the other hand, it gives me considerable pleasure to be able to include work by artists who are in danger of being forgotten – Norman Blamey and John Edwards, to name but two very different painters. There are several among my chosen 27 whose work deserves closer and more serious attention, and I hope that enquiring and openminded visitors will find plenty to beguile them. Mention of John Edwards reminds me that this selection includes no sculpture, though one or two of our contingent occasionally practised as sculptors, as Edwards himself did. To exclude sculpture was not a conscious decision, but reflects the way the exhibition evolved. I didn’t want to feature a token sculptor when there are so many in this period I admire, and considerations of space rather precluded the presence of more than a couple of pieces. Perhaps I’ll have the chance one day to select a sculpture exhibition – but not yet, I hope. Selecting this sort of mixed show is hard work, however enjoyable. A number of these artists showed in the past with that previous incarnation of Browse & Darby, the dealership known as Roland, Browse and Delbanco. Josef Herman is the most closely associated with that gallery. He began to show with R, B & D in 1946 and had 10 further one-man exhibitions with them. Norman Adams likewise began to have solo shows at R, B & D in 1956, and continued exhibiting there every two or three years until Browse & Darby became his dealers. Prunella Clough exhibited with R, B & D in 1949 and 1950, and others made occasional appearances. For instance, Norbert Lynton reviewed Edward Middleditch’s 1966 R, B & D exhibition,
describing his East Anglian landscape drawings as ‘strong and passionate’, concluding that: ‘but for the impression they give of stormy skies and beaten earth one might be tempted to call them classical, so well employed and weighed up does every mark and every change of tone seem to be.’ (Well worth pondering in relation to the Middleditchs in this show.) Of course, we only have the space – even with the three floors of Browse & Darby’s elegant townhouse gallery – for a very restricted representation of each artist. Three exhibits per person is the average, but when the works are small or I have discovered a cache of exciting material, I have sometimes exceeded this limitation. However, you are still only being offered a taste of the work of these artists, and this selection cannot begin to justify some of the large claims I make for them. It is intended to arouse the interest, to pique the curiosity and to encourage visitors to pursue the trail further. If you’re intrigued by the Hoyland paintings here, for instance, and want to see more, to establish or revise your opinions, then I shall feel that this exhibition has served a wider purpose. In this centenary year of William Scott, when there are major shows of his work at Tate St Ives, the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings and the Enniskillen Castle Museum, amongst others, we are very fortunate to have secured a couple of his paintings for this show. It is a considerable pleasure for me to be able to select work by such great abstract painters as Scott, Hoyland, Blow and Heron (all of whom actually derive, at least in some measure, inspiration from the world around us), and to hang them with figurative masters such as Blamey, Coker, Eurich and Kitaj (who in turn employ abstract devices in their representational designs). And which is Crozier – abstract or figurative? Effectively both when you start to analyse it. So part of the point of this exhibition is to re-examine our prejudices and preconceptions in the light of contrasting modes and methods. I enjoy also the various connections between the artists, of friendship or rivalry, as colleagues (Robert Medley gave Kitaj his first teaching job, for instance) or even husband and wife (Francis Davison and Margaret Mellis). John Hoyland is a central figure here: friend of Brian Fielding and Terry Frost; sparring partner of Adrian Berg (they were wonderfully rude about each other, but each continued to admire the other’s paintings); admired colleague of William Crozier; outspoken critic and champion of abstract art. I don’t suppose Hoyland would have entirely approved of my selection, especially as I have tried to maintain a fruitful dialogue between abstraction and figuration. He, like most artists, was biased. (It’s an occupational hazard.) I still like his characteristically assertive comment: ‘no painting of reality can move one quite like the revelation of its underlying structure.’ Often I agree with this, but not always, as I trust will be borne out by the exhibits gathered here. And since I have attempted to suggest the diversity of styles that dominated the period 1950-2000, I hope you will enjoy at least some of the range of work on show.
Andrew Lambirth
February 2013
Andrew Lambirth is a writer, critic and curator. Currently the Art Critic of The Spectator, he has written for a wide range of publications including The Sunday Times and The Independent. From 1990 to 2002 he was Contributing Editor of RA, the Royal Academy of Arts magazine. A volume of his reviews entitled A is a Critic: Writings from The Spectator is newly published by Unicorn Press (£12.99), and he is currently working on a monograph about the artist Francis Davison.
Norman Adams (1927-2005)
2.
After an artist’s death there can be a period of low visibility before a reputation is properly assessed, and Norman Adams is currently suffering that neglect. What he needs is a museum retrospective to demonstrate the breadth of his achievement, but few museums devote themselves to the care of the half-forgotten, being more concerned to show the fashionable exploits of the living and persuasive. There are a number of public collections around the country which own substantial paintings by Adams, but these are rarely exhibited and his name is fading from the public memory. This is unfair, for Adams was a landscape painter of considerable invention and a watercolourist of real distinction. His early oil paintings are largely unfamiliar to today’s gallery audiences, so it is an especial pleasure to offer two of them here: Light after a Storm and The Road to Damascus. Both of them indicate the essential Romanticism of Adams’s approach and the combination of tradition and experiment which distinguished his work. In both a firm grounding in Courbet may be discerned, reinterpreted through a modern sensibility, and with a glance to such European contemporaries as Constant Permeke. Adams’s large late watercolours, many on religious themes, are more familiar – his Blakean vision of our world lit with rainbow hues and mosaic fracturing. In the 1950s paintings shown here, the landscape is dominant, though the moody textures of the oils are varied by the dancing musical harmonies of the watercolour, with its memories of Nolde and Klee. Adams, undoubtedly a fine painter, is ripe for reassessment.
Adrian Berg (1929-2011)
4. The artist’s life usually involves long periods of solitary work, in front of the motif or in the studio, or both, and for this reason (if no other) artists seem to relish those contrasting moments of sociability at private views and other art world functions. Adrian Berg was a particularly convivial character who enjoyed entertaining in his London flat at Gloucester Gate, and later in Hove when he moved to the South Coast. His art has a similar celebratory and spirited feel, being essentially concerned with the meeting and interaction of patterns and colours. Berg loved the natural world, the visual interlacing of earth and sky, rocks and foliage, and was especially fascinated by the intersection of man and nature to be found in parks. Living above Regent’s Park gave him ample opportunity to observe the cycle of the seasons in the trees and shrubs below, and Gloucester Lodge, Regent’s Park, March, April, May and June is a kind of visual diary of a four-month period of foliage development and colouristic change. This vertical quartet of views, stacked like a layer cake, offers a monthly progress report on appearances. The essence of the picture is comparison (what has changed), yet all four views must finally come together and be unified in one image. The subtle ways in which Berg harmonizes the colours and linear emphases offer endless opportunities for visual delight. Those who understand tapestries and carpets will particularly appreciate Berg’s innovative designs. After the move to Sussex, nearby Beachy Head became a focus, both for the play of pattern and for a more straightforwardly descriptive but no less masterly evocation.
Norman Blamey (1914-2000)
9. An Anglo-Catholic Londoner, Norman Blamey was an artist intimately involved with traditional notions of good craftsmanship, who made extraordinary paintings of an almost sacramental realism. His work belongs to the lineage of Van Eyck: a potent re-structuring of appearances to produce an almost hypnotic or hallucinatory effect. Blamey placed great emphasis on life drawing (which he taught sympathetically rather than in zealous or doctrinaire style), and worked very slowly from direct observation, rarely completing more than two large pictures a year. He painted the rituals of the AngloCatholic church, in its aesthetic, religious and historic identities, and he also painted portraits. In essence, he painted people and objects, most often making use of those individuals closest to him – to wit, his wife and son. His son, Stephen Blamey, a philosopher and logician who teaches at Oxford, recalls that posing for a painting was simply part of his home life, though it could be stressful. He features in both of the paintings here: reflected in miniature in the Cushion Mirror, and playing a leading role in The Painter’s Wife and Son. The drawing, Study for ‘The Model Makers’, is from a much earlier date, and shows the care that Blamey took in his researches for a painting. He intended to convey a feeling of stillness and permanence, and based his approach on what he called ‘intelligent precision rather than emotional swagger.’ His meticulous realism conjures up an awesome clarity that is essentially spiritual and transcendent rather than physical, though inevitably fashioned from material facts. Perhaps his religious belief enabled him to make these unusual and potent images that stand comparison, at their best, with Stanley Spencer.
Sandra Blow (1925-2006)
10. The Italian painter Alberto Burri (1915-95) was the formative influence on Sandra Blow’s early work, and the inspiration she derived from her close relationship with him (at its height in the late 1940s), can be seen in her choice of materials and her approach to using them. Burri pioneered the use of sacking, along with ripped and stitched bandages, red paint and charred wood to express the horrors of war. (In the Second World War, he had served as a doctor in the Italian army.) Blow adopted this freedom towards materials and handled them in a similarly anti-decorative way, making tough images with gritty surfaces, such as Untitled (1962). In her later work, she was wonderfully un-precious in her application of coloured collage and hessian, making bold statements with thrown paint and ripped or cut paper and unusual materials such as cellophane. Earth colours gave way to ethereal and dematerializing hues, orchestrated with insouciant aplomb. As fellow abstractionist John McLean wrote in her Guardian obituary: ‘Sandra Blow was the most amazing colourist and the most original composer of a painting we have had in recent years.... True colourists are rarer than we think. Sandra could make her hues resonate just as much as, say, Matisse and Miro.’ How true this is can be assessed not only from the delicious tiny mixed media study on paper from circa 1970, but also from the more ambitious oil painting from 1962 – an awkward and powerful image that makes no compromises. Her skills as a colourist can even be seen in the less obviously colourful Expanse of 2006. Notice the vivid blue against the white ground and raw hessian collage, with just the tiniest touch of yellow (another triangle) at the bottom left corner to enliven and articulate the spread of sacking. Roger Hilton, another of her mentors, called Blow ‘an heroic painter’, and even in these few disparate examples one can sense the breadth of her imagination and painterly vision.
Prunella Clough (1919-1999)
14.
Prunella Clough’s artist friends and contemporaries occasionally expressed disquiet that her prices were so modest for work of such various and startling originality. In fact Clough enjoyed a substantial private income and deliberately kept her prices low so that less affluent people could afford to buy her work. Her own fortune (much of it from the Estate of her aunt, the designer Eileen Gray) was disposed of quietly and often anonymously in gifts and donations – to institutions as well as private individuals. Clough was phenomenally generous with her time as well as her money, and a loyal friend. This generosity comes over in her art, linked inextricably with an unquenchable curiosity about the visual world – and particularly the seedier and more unexamined aspects of it. Nothing was too unimportant to warrant her scrutiny. She made a monotype of a pair of kippers (on a press owned by John Craxton, she told the present owner), and a decade or so later drew a couple of leeks with a cool green precision that makes this ink drawing quite exceptional. Another pen and watercolour study, from the 1970s, is entitled simply Earth Drawing, and is of an unpretentiousness only equalled by its subtlety; it has all the authority of a fragment of prehistoric cave painting. A much later work, an oil from 1997, has a witty and refreshing minimalism, and yet again an unexpected focus. The earliest work here, Man in Yard (circa 1953), is a very fine neo-romantic/social realist work of the Fifties which has much in common with her lorry driver and printing press paintings of those years. Humanity in an urban context is Clough’s favourite stamping ground. She was a poet of the unregarded: of odd corners and the detritus that blew into them; she identified the unexpected structures in the ordinary and everyday, noticed the overlooked and unacknowledged. In turn, she deserves the courtesy of our attention now.
Peter Coker (1926-2004)
21.
Although a realist painter, Peter Coker was not the kind of artist who could paint whatever was in front of him. For example, he lived for many years in Essex at Mistley on the Stour, but only painted the river once or twice, and had to travel considerable distances in search of subjects which inspired him. His widow Vera tells of summer expeditions to France in which the Cokers were forever on the move, in pursuit of the elusive motif, and this became a pattern of their life together. After a stroke in 1990, Coker painted very little until a late burst of pent-up creativity in 2002, triggered by the rediscovery of a series of drawings made in Paris in the 1970s. The resulting body of work – oil paintings, crayon and oil pastel drawings, etchings and lithographs – was a marvellous outpouring, a celebration of light and colour and movement. The rich sumptuous colours and energetic brushwork in Paris at Night from the Hotel Chatelet and The Pont au Change at Night are a wonderful affirmation of life in a great city. Red Bridge at Leadgate No 2 is also a return to earlier times, to the 1960s and 70s when the Cokers travelled in the north of England and regularly stayed in the hamlet of Leadgate near Alston in Cumbria. This was a productive period for Coker, who made many drawings of the landscape which served as the basis later not only for paintings but for a series of powerful etchings. The Cumbrian landscape had evidently made a sufficiently lasting impression to re-surface some 40 years later along with the Parisian series. In this late work, Coker was able to renounce all rules and restrictions and concentrate on the pleasure of pure painting. The results are remarkable.
Cecil Collins (1908-1989)
22. For a number of years at the beginning of my career as a writer I conducted monthly interviews with artists for the very popular Artist’s and Illustrator’s Magazine. Some of the older artists were surprisingly reticent (perhaps not as used to selfpromotion as today’s professionals), but not so Cecil Collins, who was a skilled communicator and had long since refined the story of his life and work. For a visionary artist he was remarkably worldly, and when he saw that I had a copy of a recent book about him, insisted on signing it for me, ‘because a signed copy will be more valuable’. It was a generous gesture, but it also indicated the complexity of the man: a charismatic teacher (reputed to have a fondness for rich lady students of a certain age), he spent much of his time psyching himself up to the peak at which he could work, usually towards the end of the day. Focusing on archetypes such as the angel, the fool and the Sibyl, Collins made icon-like paintings for our contemplation. His aim was to understand and elucidate the inner life, to enable people to perceive some sort of significance in their daily existence. He said: ‘The function of the artist is to transmit harmony.’ For Collins, technology had created a great emptiness in us which needed to be filled. From that interview: ‘Creativity is something given, not something due to you. It’s something revealed to you, but you’ve got to be open to it in the right way. Today, with our utilitarian education, we’re educated to manipulate and exploit experience on every level. That kills the sensitivity in which creativity reveals itself.’ And again: ‘All vision is a form of knowing, gnosis, and this is the function of art, to renew a gnosis of reality.’ Collins wanted to reconnect us with the world of the heart – a wisdom from which so many of us remain cut off.
Jean Cooke (1927-2008)
27.
There are many observers of Modern British painting who believe that Jean Cooke was a far better painter than John Bratby, to whom she was married in the heady 1950s, and from whom she was acrimoniously divorced in 1977. Bratby is the more famous, with his trademark Kitchen Sink brashness and his heavily impasted portraits and interiors. A painter and sculptor from an early age, Cooke was a potter when she met him, but gradually returned to painting, with considerable success. When they married, Bratby wanted her to take his name, but as she became more visible as an artist, he insisted she reverted to signing her paintings Jean Cooke; he simply didn’t want the competition. Bratby’s crude vigour could never be mistaken for Cooke’s gentle but witty musings on life’s idiosyncrasies. She painted what she saw, with a strong emphasis on good drawing and firm pictorial construction, but she allowed her very individual interpretation free rein. Describing painting in a 1993 interview she said: ‘It’s limitless in that you can do what you like. People make rules like they make rules about God, but there are no rules. You can be as brave as you want to, or limit yourself as much as you like.’ Cooke had a poetic grasp of the unexpected, and the ability to give it pictorial expression. Her pictures are never ordinary. Look at her early 1950s still-life painted on old Army canvas – as usual with her, what’s left out is almost more important than what’s put in. Or the decorative blue still-life of fruit and flowers. Or Cave Painting, a picture about the experience of sitting in a cave under the cliffs at Birling Gap in Sussex, watching the waves break beyond the entrance. As she said: ‘If your mind is attuned to beauty, you find beauty in everything.’
William Crozier (1930-2011)
30.
Not all artists choose the company of their fellow-practitioners, some preferring to spend their free time with writers and musicians. William Crozier was one such, who particularly relished the company of poets. Although the reverse of literary, his vigorous expressionist painting was heavily influenced by French literary thought, especially by the philosophy of existentialism, a belief in the individual as a free but responsible agent in a hidebound society. Crozier’s starting point was in observed nature, and he admitted that ‘for convenience I describe myself as a painter of landscapes.’ Drawing on the legacy of the Scottish Colourists, and absorbing Picasso’s lessons in destruction, this Scots-Irish artist (born in Glasgow, he always said he felt more at home in Ireland) began in the late 1950s to make his first really exciting painterly statements in response to the Essex landscape. Dark, intensely wrought and dramatically coloured, these paintings (he wrote) ‘should convey a sense of austerity and isolation, of emotional unease and perhaps a suggestion of tragedy.’ He added rather grandly: ‘They may also be beautiful but this is not a matter which concerns me.’ Indeed that wasn’t his province; his job was to work at getting it right. As he said: ‘inspiration I believe in but diligence is more rewarding.’ We are very fortunate to be able to show here three oil paintings on paper from the early 1960s, never previously exhibited – superb examples of Crozier’s finely-honed sensitivity to the moods and rhythms of nature underlying appearances. Printed in the catalogue from Crozier’s 1960 Drian Gallery exhibition is Dannie Abse’s poem The Uninvited. In it the poet tells us: ‘So we have been changed / and our vision no longer what it was.’ For such reasons we look to art to learn about ourselves.
Francis Davison (1919-1984)
33.
Francis Davison came to the visual arts relatively late after an initial vocation as a poet. Marriage in 1948 to the painter and sculptor Margaret Mellis gave him new access to the visual world and he began to paint and draw the isolated farms of the Suffolk countryside where he was living. Then, in 1952, he made his first collage. Initially collage was an extension of his painting, focusing on the same subject matter, but subsequently Davison moved towards more self-contained abstract works. These collages were made exclusively of found paper, in their original found colours (never painted or treated in any way), torn and assembled into networks of pulsing energy and beguiling, almost painterly, subtlety. Davison often worked on a large scale, so this group of small collages – among the last things that he did – reflects a greater intimacy and vulnerability. Davison claimed he was the only true collagist and the only artist who added nothing extraneous to his found papers. The formal interplay of stuttering line and void, of colour and tone, of fast and slow impulses, on a small and intensely focused scale, make this series a distillation of everything he was trying to do. Collage has always seemed a playful and light-hearted medium, and very often a shortcut for the artist seeking solutions to painting problems. Davison brought to it a high seriousness and passion which extended its territory, and particularly its formal and emotional freight.
John Edwards (1938-2009)
39.
I first met John Edwards in the late 1980s when I was just starting out on a career of freelance art writing. We got on well and he commissioned me to write the essay for the catalogue of his latest exhibition, a new departure for him, a venture into the realm of painted sculpture. At that time Edwards was approaching 50 and was busy reinventing his career. He’d already enjoyed considerable success as an abstract painter, aligned with the recent American tradition of large emblematic gestural paintings, with 10 one-man shows at the Rowan Gallery in London, and some good exposure in America and Japan. He had also run the painting department at St Martin’s School of Art throughout the 80s, retiring from teaching in 1988 to concentrate on his own work. The sculptural forms he was working with owed much to the New British Sculpture of Caro, King, Witkin and Bolus, with whom he had long been familiar, but given by him a more painterly twist. His work after this continued to explore the dialogue between the flat and the volumetric, and he proceeded to make paintings and sculptures until his early death, travelling widely and spending much time in India. His artistic reputation was always on the point of being consolidated, but in later years he lacked proper gallery representation. Since his death his work has been in real danger of being forgotten, so I include here a small group of his late works to remind us of another unfairly neglected 20th century British artist. Both paintings and drawing have a sculptural quality to them, suggesting the shapes of sails, fishing boats and beach furniture he long favoured, and combining an analytical approach with an instinctual vitality that is very beguiling.
Richard Eurich (1903-1992)
43.
‘Paint what you love, and damn all the fashions which come and go’, Christopher Wood told Richard Eurich, and it was advice which the younger artist heeded all his life. Eurich’s diversity has made him difficult to categorize, and it is perhaps because of this that he is not as well-known today as he deserves to be. In this selection of his works I have concentrated on his landscape paintings, leaving for another time his fresh and idiosyncratic paintings of people (whether from life or fantasy), and his superb portraits of boats. This Bradford-born and Slade-trained painter settled in Dibden Purlieu in Hampshire in 1934, on the edge of the New Forest and hard by the Solent, and stayed there for the rest of his life. He loved to watch the shipping and the antics of walkers and holiday-makers on the beach. He loved the sea in all its moods. Here we have two beach paintings: Old Cemetery, Portland and Breakwaters, Lepe. Notice the marvellous shapes Eurich finds in the lie of the land, and his relish for unusual compositions. Every summer he returned to Yorkshire for a holiday, and painted there. From these trips comes the evocative Blackstone Beck, with its splendidly twisted embracing trees. This painting bears close comparison with Mark Gertler’s landscapes, and specifically with Near Swanage (1916) in Pallant House Gallery. Seldom, however, did Eurich depict his own garden, so his 1959 painting of it is especially to be valued. The delicate feathery touch is masterly: the trees are perhaps most typical of his style, but the pure lyricism of the broad band of flowers across the middle of the picture is a joy to behold. Light floods these landscapes with a pearly clarity: enjoy its luminescence.
Brian Fielding (1933-1986)
46. Although Brian Fielding was a friend and contemporary of John Hoyland (both hailed from Sheffield), and enjoyed far greater initial success than Hoyland, his early death from cancer robbed him of a full term of painting. Since then, his work has been exhibited only rarely, and it doesn’t yet have the widespread appreciation it most certainly deserves. I distinctly remember the first time I saw a Fielding painting, at the home of a private collector in the early 1990s. It made a real and lasting impression on me, and though I can’t describe the disposition of forms or colours, I recall the emotional punch it packed. Inspired by the revolutionary achievements of the New York School, Fielding espoused abstraction after a period of early expressionist realism, and was soon in thrall to Oriental modes and philosophies. For a while he embraced a tachiste calligraphic approach, before moving further towards a pictorial purity. Fielding is an exciting painter to look at, even when reducing his imagery to a triangle floating like a mandala in a field of colour: if the painterly action is deliberately restricted, the colours still sing against one another. Temperamentally unsuited to playing the gallery game, Fielding retreated into teaching, allowing his public visibility as a painter to decline. Although in theory he remained totally committed to abstraction, he began to relax his guard and to employ semi-figurative, quasi-organic forms, which permeated his imagery in his last years. The paintings became richer and more layered with resonance as a result, full of spice and sexuality, and we show three of these witty life-affirming late works to indicate the reach of this new formal experimentation. As John Hoyland said, Fielding was ‘one of the leading painters of his generation’, but this still needs to be widely recognized and accepted.
Terry Frost (1915-2003)
49.
Terry Frost served as a Commando in the Second World War until captured in Crete in 1941 and interned in Stalag 383 in Bavaria. Prison camp was his university, and it was there that he began to draw and paint, with the encouragement of fellow-prisoner Adrian Heath, who arranged for Frost to go to art school after the war. He soon became attracted to abstraction, inspired by Ben Nicholson and Victor Pasmore, an initial impetus which was furthered and enhanced by working as an assistant to Barbara Hepworth in 1951. Some of Frost’s best early abstractions are based on the swinging rhythms of boats at anchor in the Cornish fishing ports of St Ives and Newlyn, and the tiny but exquisite gouache here from 1957 is inspired by the layout of Newlyn harbour. The 1950s was one of Frost’s most productive periods, in which his formal experimentation (encouraged by a fruitful rivalry with his friend Roger Hilton) was at its most daring, and a repertoire of forms and gestures began to emerge. Energy, colour, rhythm are the chief characteristics of Frost’s mature style. He was a man of irrepressible high spirits and much of his later work is a joyous celebration of his somewhat hedonistic approach to life. John Hoyland, a close friend, wrote: ‘Terry delighted in life. His sense of fun and wonder belied the subtlety of his mind and eye, the poetry and love captured in his distinctive vocabulary of universal signs where space, time, construction and colour capture what he had experienced through nature and, more importantly, in reverie. His perceptions flowed from him like an ever-running river.’
William Gear (1915-1997)
53.
The current buoyancy of the art market for a gilded few contemporaries sometimes blinds us to the fact that artistic reputations can fluctuate alarmingly. William Gear was the only British member of the international COBRA Group who, with fellow painters Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, Corneille and Pierre Alechinsky, worked in an expressive idiom related to Art informel, the European version of Abstract Expressionism. Gear, who was Scottish, had lived in Paris before and after World War II, and travelled widely, visiting America in 1957 and 1959. He exhibited with Jackson Pollock and knew Marcarelli and Rothko, so when he settled in England his artistic character was decidedly more cosmopolitan than many of his fellow artists. Nevertheless he found it difficult to make a living from his painting, and worked for some years as Curator of the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, building up their permanent collection with unusual skill and prescience. After that he taught for a decade in Birmingham, but he never ceased to paint and draw prolifically. His work often employs a bold armature of dark lines (similar to some of the English sculptors of the 1950s when he first evolved this formulation) linking areas of bright colour, a little like stained glass. His imagery evokes landscape, and the seasonal fall of light, but remains firmly Modernist and wedded to the autonomy of the painting as paint – colour, line and depth. His vivid patternmaking sometimes seems to echo the visual trickery of camouflage, while his dynamic rhythms suggest the pulse of life underlying all of nature. Perhaps the black outlines represent man and his desire to control or channel nature; certainly the two pictorial components (line and colour) are mutually dependent and make little sense when deprived of the other. Gear offers us meditations on our environment and our relationship with it: hedgerow or sea-strand, his abstract pastorals reveal a welcome new aspect of British Romantic art.
Adrian Heath (1920-1992)
58.
‘The vital problems for me arise in the studio or workshop and are inseparable from my materials and their existence as form and colour’, wrote Adrian Heath in 1954. ‘As problems, they cannot be dismissed as being merely technical ones – ideas and emotions are largely generated from this direct and continuous contact with the medium itself. ... The thing of interest is the actual life of the work: its growth from a particular white canvas or board.’ Heath concluded his statement (in Nine Abstract Artists) by saying that the most satisfactory form would be ‘the one that gives us the clearest insight into the structural process that has been involved, and is the emotional recognition of a truth outside oneself, yet created by oneself.’ If all this sounds a trifle dry and theoretical, Heath’s actual paintings are very far from that. A sensualist and dedicated philanderer, Heath sought in his art to reconcile the two contradictory impulses of his life: the intellectual and the sensual, the classical and the romantic. He used the structures of abstraction to inhibit self-expression, yet his later work is very often based around an erotic interpretation of the female body. His greatest period as a painter was the 1950s, when he made his purest abstract paintings, with a restricted palette, a tendency towards the rigours of geometric abstraction and extreme intellectual refinement. However, the play of paint (texture and mark) and the interlocking of shapes carry their own satisfactions: we show here three paintings which although resolutely abstract are in no way arid or joyless. Life is very definitely present and potential in these works.
Josef Herman (1911-2000)
60.
I have always learnt a lot from artists. I enjoy their company and visiting their studios, and from their conversation I have gained much of the small stock of wisdom to which I can lay claim. Josef Herman had one of the most inspiring studios I’ve ever discovered – which is to say that his presence, which filled it to overflowing, was the source of great warmth and magnetism. Not only was it well-stocked with Josef’s past and latest efforts (‘another couple of masterpieces this morning, my dear’, he would chuckle in that heavy Eastern European accent), but also with a remarkable array of African miniature carvings on shelves around the walls. Herman owned the finest collection of African miniatures in private hands and knew a great deal about them. Sometimes I am intimidated by primitive carvings, but never by Josef’s collection. It was as if they had become part of the fabric of his working life and their energy was wholly directed to benign ends. Josef, attired in a grubby white lab coat, would seat himself in a deep armchair and hold forth on all manner of subjects, from fairy stories to psychology, via all the artists he had known and loved. I would come away inspired and invigorated, not just refreshed for the business of life, but more convinced of its value. As an artist, one of Herman’s chief subjects was the dignity of human labour, and he is best known for drawings (mostly in ink and wash) of Welsh miners and European peasants. His oil paintings are much rarer, and it a privilege to present three here. When he fled his native Poland, he lived for a while in Glasgow and then London, before settling in 1944 for eleven years in the Welsh mining community of Ystradgynlais. To begin with he lived in the Pen-Y-Bont Inn, pictured here in a splendidly atmospheric painting of 1949, at twilight under what Herman liked to call ‘a copper-coloured sky’. His great ambition was ‘to realize the true proportion of feeling’ in an image and this he seems to achieve in all three of the paintings here, and particularly in the striking Buggy on the Road. The richness is always subdued and never overstated.
Patrick Heron (1920-1999)
63.
I first met Patrick Heron at the Tate’s Late Picasso exhibition in 1988, when I attended the Private View with the veteran surrealist Eileen Agar. They had known each other for more than 25 years, and Patrick was courteous and attentive. Although he couldn’t have been more charming, I was rather in awe of him, both as a painter and as a writer. His combative writings about English abstraction had put the case most persuasively for the independent development of Abstract Expressionism in this country quite separate from the American variety, and he wrote with great skill and enlightenment about whatever he turned his pen to. I remember asking if he would ever publish his collected writings (which actually came out that year in book form) but he played down their importance, suggesting that writing for him was a thing of the past. This while being full of forthright and fascinating opinions about the likes of Picasso and Braque, and actually contributing articles to Peter Fuller’s magazine Modern Painters. Of course, like all artists, what he was most interested in was his own recent paintings, and I wished I had asked him more about them, because I find that the paintings he made at this time (three of which I’ve been lucky enough to borrow for this exhibition) are particularly ravishing and radical. Colour had always been Heron’s language, but in these late works he began to use the white of the canvas in a positive and open way, making the works lighter and more celebratory. He also took greater risks with colour combinations and with the kind of marks he made. He talked of ‘the interaction of colours, the meeting lines or frontiers between colours which are crucial’. These late paintings are much more about line, about drawing, than his earlier fields of colour and cut-out shapes. But the colour is more extraordinary and unusual than ever. And Heron’s heartfelt comment: ‘Looking is more interesting than doing anything else, ever’, could stand as this exhibition’s epigraph.
John Hoyland (1934-2011)
67. As was first pointed out to me many years ago by an artist, public taste tends to be retrospective, while artistic taste is prospective. In other words, the artist moves forward, questing, into new territories, while the public is – often as not – only just about getting used to the work he did at the beginning of his career. This is very much the case with the maverick genius John Hoyland, who first came to wide recognition in the 1960s with a marvellous group of Colour Field paintings of great resonance and beauty. Most artists establish themselves by making variations on a theme they have discovered early in their career. (I do not say they repeat themselves, though this is of course sometimes the case.) Hoyland was a restless spirit with a probing intelligence and unyielding curiosity. He tended to re-invent himself every decade and produce a new body of work which, although it was related to his earlier achievements, would break decidedly new ground. This makes him difficult to categorize, and consequently has worked against him with those who love to pigeonhole their artists. Hoyland’s late work – a magisterial outpouring of formal pyrotechnics and unquenchable energy – is too bold and innovative for many people. He was ahead of his time in this work, and it’s revealing to note that the most sought-after period of his entire production remains the 1960s. We show here a gouache from the 1960s, to indicate the Colour Field territory Hoyland early made his own, two paintings from the 1970s – extraordinary colour inventions that delight the eye and gladden the heart – and a beguiling small late work from 2001. To the end, Hoyland’s imagination never faltered.
Peter Kinley (1926-1988)
70.
Born in Vienna, Peter Kinley fled to England in 1938, served in the army (in France, Holland and Germany) and then made his home in this country. He studied briefly in Dusseldorf before attending St Martin’s and soon began to exhibit his work, becoming known for Nicolas de Stael influenced nudes in the studio. These broadly brushed and palette-knifed domestic totem figures ignored any obvious approach to realism and evolved a more emblematic approach that was to characterize Kinley’s work for the rest of his career, though to different degrees. But however abstracted his images might look, his art remained based on observation. ‘Anything you get out of nature’, he said, ‘is better than anything you can invent. Even if the form’s origin is ultimately unrecognizable it will still be better than an abstraction out of the head.’ The inspiration of de Stael was gradually replaced by the radical simplifications of Matisse, irradiated by a succinct visual wit. Note the delicacy and formality of Pink Wall. The eloquent ground colour is gently brushed on to the canvas, and the two flickering green ovals at the bottom (miniature trees in pots out of view?) are like flames guarding a sacred place. The grey and white horizontals at the top edge provide some sense of space, but the real enjoyment is the field of apricot pink colour, subtly modulated and equipped with the figurative details to stop it slipping into pure abstraction. We have come a long way from the analytical studio interiors of the early 1960s, but the guiding spirit of enquiry is the same, and the ability to recognize epiphanies in the daily round.
RB Kitaj (1932-2007)
74. The controversies which raged over Kitaj in his lifetime take on a different perspective now, even a handful of years after he took his own life. The intense vilification he suffered at the time of his Tate Retrospective in 1994, which he blamed for the death of his second wife and which drove him from England after nearly 40 years residence in London, may have receded but has it been forgotten? As I write, a new Kitaj retrospective which has received plaudits in Berlin is about to open in England (at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester and the Jewish Museum in London, until 16 June), and I shall be most interested to see what tone the reviewers take. Will they try to ignore the show or attempt a more even-handed evaluation of Kitaj’s career? Certainly such a serious and brilliantly talented artist deserves proper assessment, but it is perhaps revealing of his current status in England that this major exhibition has had to be divided between two venues many miles apart rather than mounted in a central London venue such as the Royal Academy. Be that as it may, I remain a staunch supporter of Kitaj (I’m proud that I gave him a chance to answer his critics when I interviewed him for The Independent in 1997), and am delighted that we have managed to source one or two examples of his work when so much has been promised for exhibitions elsewhere. Kitaj was a superb draughtsman, so it’s a pleasure to show one of his powerful charcoal life drawings. I always hoped that he would paint some pure landscapes, as the background passages of landscape in his figure and history paintings have a presence and poignancy that is utterly beguiling, but Kitaj was essentially an urban man. Instead, we have to be content with The Left Bank, his refulgent evocation of Paris, but what an evocation! If all cityscapes left one with such an appreciative appetite for life, urban living would be altogether less sordid and brutal than it so often is.
Robert Medley (1905-1994)
75.
Some artists are remembered more as teachers than practitioners, and Robert Medley is of this party. He had a strong sense of public service, of the necessity to give back to society, and he enacted this mostly through his work as an educationalist – teaching at Chelsea and the Slade, and running the Painting and Sculpture Department at Camberwell (1958-65). Among his more illustrious students were John Berger, Maggi Hambling, Derek Jarman and Elisabeth Frink. But he always painted, when not working on designs for the theatre, and was a draughtsman of considerable versatility, though he exhibited his work relatively infrequently. He was perhaps too modest and self-doubting to achieve a high level of worldly success, and yet any prolonged study of his work reveals a subtlety of thought and action and an unexpected richness of paint-handling. John Berger emphasized Medley’s ‘dexterity’, his quality of gesture as a painter. ‘One can think of the cast of a master flyfisherman’, wrote Berger. ‘The stance of a prodigious violinist. The aim from the shoulder of a champion billiard player. Medley’s paintings have the concentration and elegance of such performances. Yet their gestures are never self-regarding or manoeuvred. They interact with the world; they do not withdraw from it. They have the modesty to forget themselves. Which is precisely what allows them to possess true elegance.’ The range of work shown here encompasses a lively street painting and complex charcoal mythical study from the 1950s, and a couple of much later paintings – one of figures, one a still-life. In all, the qualities of touch, of intelligent thought and sensitive formal exploration are manifestly evident. Medley the artist needs to be looked at again.
Margaret Mellis (1914-2001)
79.
Margaret Mellis was a great enabler, encouraging both her husbands to be artists (first Adrian Stokes, writer turned painter, and second Francis Davison, poet turned collagist), but retaining enough energy to pursue a career of her own as a painter and sculptor of great distinction. She is best-known today for her late driftwood reliefs, marvellously succinct arrangements of form and colour, most of the wood beach-combed from the Suffolk shores around Southwold where she lived in later years. Her achievements as a painter are less familiar, though her early 1940s collages made under the influence of Naum Gabo and Ben Nicholson (one is currently hanging in the Tate’s Kurt Schwitters exhibition) have, like her later work, attracted considerable interest. Sandwiched between the collages and the driftwood constructions was a long period of experiment in painting, involving a densely creative dialogue between figuration and abstraction, which oscillated frequently between those two poles. I have selected a couple of early-ish paintings in which Mellis was experimenting with abstracting from the perceived world (a boat and quay, and a vase of flowers still-life), as well as simplifying her palette and materials. (It was only partly out of poverty that she used house paint and essex board. She liked the effects she was able to produce.) Also included here is a later painting in which bright quasi-geometric shapes make satisfying patterns on a white ground. What links these different approaches? An overriding concern with form and surface, an instinctive understanding of colour relationships, great skill in the manipulation of near-geometries: qualities much rarer than one might think. Mellis had all in abundance.
Edward Middleditch (1923-1987)
84.
As a member of the Beaux Arts Quartet (all artists who showed at Helen Lessore’s famous gallery) and of the Kitchen Sink movement, Edward Middleditch was early on associated with John Bratby, Derrick Greaves and Jack Smith, and with them represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale of 1956. Some of his early paintings and drawings featured rivers purling over weirs, and the movement of water was to become an obsession in later years, along with the patterns of wind in the corn, and the reflections of light and foliage. Landscape was his principal subject, and he drew it with sureness and sensitivity, in charcoal and chalks. The tough-minded realism of the 50s and 60s gradually developed into a fascination for the underlying abstract patterns in nature, and this development in style and content can be charted by comparing the drawing of The Pool, Langford Grove (1956) with the oil of The River (c1975). The movement is towards a classical interpretation, though inescapably tinged with Romanticism, to be discerned in a hint of melancholy masked by the pervading lyricism. The increasing formality and stylization of the image does not preclude the sensuous response of the artist to his subject, or the viewer to the finished statement. James Hyman has written of Middleditch’s bold large-scale late drawings that they ‘resonate with a contemporary sensibility that makes them as fresh today as when they were first created.’ The artist’s investigation of the beauties of nature explores ‘the relationship between symmetry and asymmetry, regularity and irregularity, harmony and disorder.’ It was an original vision of great seriousness; as Helen Lessore pointed out, Middleditch was ‘a maker of memorable images’.
Mary Newcomb (1922-2008)
87.
The first thing to strike the viewer of a Mary Newcomb painting or drawing is the individual character of her viewpoint; or, not to put too fine a point on it, the oddness either of what she sees or how she transcribes it. Nothing could be further from the jolly snapshot of the benign English countryside: in Newcomb’s pictures there’s often a suggestion of something distinctly unusual in the woodshed. Not nasty exactly, but certainly not anodyne. Here is an artist who captures with wonderful freshness the reality of life in the country: the escaped bees, the ponds in winter, the bullfinch in a thorn bush, the tethered goats glimpsed by the arch of a bridge, and who cannot be faulted for a more than superficially truthful record of the rhythms of nature and the rituals of rural life. But something is nearly always slightly off-key or out-of-kilter: the rooks gathering outside the round-towered church are as threatening as Hitchcock’s birds. Why are the poppies angered by a passing cloud? The rower and his dog look like some rural Charon ferrying a black-cowled soul across the Styx. Newcomb evidently had a great relish for the unorthodox and exceptional, but that may be no more than to say she enjoyed daily life in East Anglia. The eminent Suffolk writer Ronald Blythe, an old friend of the artist, who has used Newcomb’s work to illustrate his books, comments on ‘the light-drenched buildings, the glimpses of the locals in the lanes and the busy-ness of nature’ in her paintings. It all sounds innocent enough: perhaps the strangeness is in my imagination. And yet it was Newcomb who stirred up my imaginings in the first place...
Ceri Richards (1903-1971)
91. Artists are very often defined by a particular period of their work, and the Cubist-Surrealist paintings and constructions of the 1930s and 40s have come to represent, for many, the quintessential Ceri Richards. An enormously versatile artist, Richards explored various themes throughout his life, which include pianists, the Rape of the Sabines, Debussy’s Cathédrale Engloutie, the cycle of nature, the poetry of Dylan Thomas and the Lion Hunt by Delacroix. Richards is the pre-eminent Welsh Modernist, but he lived in London and became a leading light in the English art world, representing Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1962. His later work, much of which was a form of experimental abstraction related to the experience of listening to classical music, is far less well-known than it should be for so major a figure. Thus it was a deliberate decision to show a group of work from the 1960s, and to concentrate on a series from 1962-3 entitled Poissons d’Or. In different sized canvases Richards hunts the elusive goldfish through the stylized ripple patterns of the pond, but always the bright orange tail is flicking out of sight or the swirl of water camouflages the direction the carp is about to take. Poisson d’Or is also the title of a 1907 solo piano composition by Debussy, linking this series directly to Richards’ Cathédrale Engloutie obsession. As Mel Gooding, the artist’s biographer writes: ‘Richards was, as always, interested in the possibilities of mythic and symbolic resonance, and his decorative elaborations were intended to induce in the viewer a pleasure in nature and in the sister arts of music and painting that matched his own.’ Gooding notes the exuberant arabesques of the Poissons d’Or paintings, pitched against the dark stillness of the pool. ‘In each painting’, he writes, ‘there is the concise Matissean “sign” (a subtle tribute to the master) for the fish itself, a quick stroke of bright red. These are images of brief vitality, intimations of the brilliance of life as a flourish in time.’
William Scott (1913-1989)
92. By 1972, when he was honoured with a major retrospective at the Tate, William Scott had achieved a solid international reputation, with work in museums all over America and Europe. Beginning in the English realist and neo-romantic styles, Scott was much influenced post-war by French painting, in particular Picasso and Matisse, Braque and Rouault, Bonnard and de Stael. An early preoccupation with still-life (frying pans and pots on table tops) was matched by an interest in landscape (ocean and harbour) and the female nude. But still-life was his over-riding passion, and when he moved further into abstraction in the 1960s, it was from still-life set-ups that his forms were generally abstracted. Later these forms became more declarative and clearly outlined, evoking ever more closely the pots and pans of his favourite subject. Large emblematic still-life paintings were then followed by a series of smaller canvases treating a single theme such as Orchard of Pears or Poem for a Jug. Here we show two paintings from the Poem for a Jug series, distinctly influenced by his enthusiasm for Japanese art. These archetypal forms, mostly outline and silhouette, set against a single-coloured but painterly ground, are distillations of a lifetime’s experience of the still-life theme. ‘With so few items to look at’, observed Norbert Lynton, the Scott expert, ‘almost all communication is carried by placing and visual weight.’ Although these images represent an extreme of minimalism in his oeuvre, their economy of means evidently fascinated Scott, who made a total of 26 variations on the theme. With their strict profiles and economical design, paradoxically they achieve richness out of austerity.
Catalogue Norman Adams 1. 1. 2.
Light after a Storm, 1957, oil on canvas, 14 x 20 inches The Road to Damascus, 1959, oil on canvas, 11 x 16 inches Landscape (Provence), 1959, watercolour, 10 1/2 x 12 inches
Adrian Berg 4. 5. 6.
Gloucester Lodge, Regent’s Park, March, April, May and June, 1976, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches Beachy Head, 8th September 1994, oil on canvas, 25 x 35 inches Beachy Head, 28th September 1995, oil on canvas, 30 x 48 inches
Norman Blamey 7. 8. 9.
Study for ‘The Model Makers’, 1958, pencil and wash, 11 x 22 inches The Painter’s Wife and Son, 1985, oil on board, 48 x 48 inches Cushion Mirror, 1994, oil on board, 48 x 36 inches
Sandra Blow 10. 11. 12. 13.
Untitled, 1962, mixed media on canvas, 44 x 55 inches Drawing No 24, 1967, mixed media on paper and cellophane, 7 x 5 1/2 inches Untitled, circa 1970, mixed media on paper, 6 1/4 x 6 1/4 inches Expanse, 2006, mixed media on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
Prunella Clough
14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
Man in a Yard, circa 1953, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 inches Two Kippers, 1954, monotype, 6 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches Two Leeks, 1960s, ink and gouache, 7 1/2 x 10 inches Earth Drawing, 1970s, pen and watercolour, 8 1/4 x 6 1/2 inches Seeds, 1997, oil on canvas, 14 x 16 inches
Peter Coker 19. 20. 21.
Paris at Night from the Hotel Chatelet, 2002, oil on canvas, 48 x 42 inches The Pont au Change at Night, 2002, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches Red Bridge at Leadgate No 2, 2002, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches
Cecil Collins 22. 23. 24.
Pastoral, 1952, gouache on paper, 21 x 15 inches The Sibyl, 1976, gouache on card, 8 x 5 inches Landscape, 1977, gouache on paper, 5 3/8 x 7 1/4 inches
Jean Cooke 25. 26. 27.
Fruit and Tin, circa 1950, oil on army canvas, 18 x 14 inches Apples and Pears and Blue Roses, circa 1960, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches Cave Painting, 1965, oil on panel, 11 1/4 x 11 inches
William Crozier 28. 29. 30.
Untitled (Landscape), 1960, oil on paper, 20 1/2 x 25 inches Untitled (Landscape), 1960-1, oil on paper, 20 x 16 inches Edge Hill, 1961, oil on paper, 24 x 19 1/2 inches
Francis Davison
31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.
Red, White, Ochre, 1983, paper collage, 7 1/4 x 8 inches Green & White, 1983, paper collage, 8 x 9 1/4 inches Pale Violet, Blue, Ochre & White, 1983, paper collage, 7 1/2 x 9 3/4 inches White, Grey & Ochre, 1983, paper collage, 8 x 8 1/2 inches Two Ochres, Grey & White, 1983, paper collage, 9 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches Sat 25, 11am, 1983, paper collage, 6 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches
John Edwards
37. 38. 39. 40. 41.
Studies for Sculpture, 1990, pencil and pastel, 22 1/2 x 15 inches Tamara no.3, 2003, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 inches Tamara no.5, 2003, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 inches Tamara no.8, 2003, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 inches Garhi Loop, 2007-9, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 inches
Richard Eurich 42. 43. 44. 45.
The Garden, 1959, oil on canvas, 30 3/4 x 43 inches Blackstone Beck, 1972-3, oil on board, 15 3/4 x 12 1/2 inches Old Cemetery, Portland, 1983, oil on board, 14 1/2 x 24 inches Breakwaters, Lepe, 1989, oil on board, 16 1/2 x 29 1/2 inches
Brian Fielding 46. 47. 48.
Crow Rattle, 1983, acrylic on paper, 41 x 30 inches Neon Strip, 1985, oil on canvas, 38 x 27 inches Rhino Hunt, 1985, oil on paper, 32 x 22 inches
Terry Frost
49. 50. 51.
Untitled (Newlyn Harbour), circa 1957, gouache and watercolour on card, 4 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches Mars Red and Grey, April 1958, oil on canvas, 14 x 26 1/2 inches Untitled (Upright Brown and Blue), 1958, pastel on paper, 17 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches
William Gear
52. 53. 54. 55.
Hedgerow Trunks No 1, 1952, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 1/2 inches Autumn Study, 1953, oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 21 1/3 inches Marine Structure, 1955, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches Abstract in yellow, green and black, 1994, watercolour and oil stick, 4 x 5 1/4 inches
Adrian Heath
56. 57. 58.
Curved Forms – Yellow and Black, 1952, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 inches Oval Theme III – Black and Ochre with Red, 1956, oil on board, 31 1/2 x 26 inches Composition – Black, Pink, Yellow and Grey, circa 1957, oil on canvas, 22 1/2 x 34 1/4 inches
Josef Herman 59. 60. 61.
Pen-Y-Bont Inn, Ystradgynlais, 1949, oil on canvas, 26 x 30 inches Buggy on the Road, circa 1954-5, oil on canvas, 24 x 28 inches Mexican Donkey Cart, 1964, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 inches
Patrick Heron
62. 63. 64.
September 28: 1988, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches RCA: 2 November: 1989, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches 29 July: 1990, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches
John Hoyland 65. 66. 67. 68.
Untitled, 1965, gouache on paper, 13 x 28 1/4 inches Untitled, 8.11.72, acrylic on cotton duck, 28 x 28 inches Untitled, 10.8.76, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 30 inches From the Ocean, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 23 1 /2 x 31 1/2 inches
Peter Kinley 69. 70. 71. 72.
Three Studies for Figures with Mirror and Easel, 1960, oil on board, 7 x 4 1/8 inches (each) Untitled, 1962, oil on board, 12 x 10 inches Study for Trees and Clouds II, 1969, oil on paper, 10 1/2 x 17 inches Pink Wall, circa 1980, oil on canvas, 34 x 42 inches
RB Kitaj 73. 74.
Untitled, 1988, charcoal on paper, signed, 30 7/8 x 22 3/4 inches
The Left Bank, 1992, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches
Robert Medley 75. 76. 77. 78.
Catching the Bus, 1954, oil on canvas, 18 x 16 inches Study for the Drowning of Orpheus, 1959, charcoal on paper, 21 x 28 1/2 inches Hydrangeas, 1985, oil on canvas, 15 x 19 inches Bathers, Serpentine, 1986, oil on canvas, 43 x 40 inches
Margaret Mellis 79. 80. 81.
Boat and Quay at Night, 1952-1954, oil on canvas, 20 3/4 x 21 1/4 inches Flowers: Black and White, 1958, household paint on essex board, 16 x 22 inches Small White Structure (Red, Blue, Violet and Ochre), acrylic on canvas board, 27 3/4 x 35 3/4 inches
Edward Middleditch 82. 83. 84.
The Pool, Langford Grove, 1956, black and green chalk, 33 x 19 1/4 inches Flower and Snow, circa 1970-1, charcoal on paper, 30 x 40 inches The River, circa 1975, oil on canvas, 41 x 49 inches
Mary Newcomb 85. 86. 87.
The Balloon Race, 1968, oil on board, 28 x 32 inches View from a Hill, circa 1970, watercolour, pencil and crayon on paper, 12 x 8 inches Silver Birch in Front of the Chapel, 1980, oil on canvas, 30 x 28 inches
Ceri Richards 88. 89. 90. 91.
Quick Trace, 1962, oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches Poissons d’Or: Intervals, 1962, oil on canvas, 20 x 20 inches Poissons d’Or, oil on canvas, 50 x 50 inches Poissons d’Or: Movement in Shadow, 1963, oil on canvas, 50 x 50 inches Illustration Courtesy of Cameron & Hollis from Ceri Richards by Mel Gooding, 2002
William Scott 92. 93.
Poem for a Jug No 21, 1980, oil on canvas, 32 x 36 inches Poem for a Jug No 25, 1980, oil on canvas, 32 x 36 inches
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