Modern British Art

Offer Waterman & Co Modern British Art

Offer Waterman & Co

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30, 31 13, 14 28, 29 32 7 34 11, 18 15 9 20 4, 5 25, 33 23 24 17 27 10 8 19 26 1, 2, 3 12, 22 16 6 21

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Aitchison Armitage Auerbach Bevan Bomberg Boyle Family Butler Frost Gabo Hitchens Jones Kossoff Lanyon Law McWilliam Martin Moore Nash Nicholson Phillips Sickert Turnbull Vaughan Wood Wynter

Artists

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Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942 Nude Reclining, La Coiffure, 1905–6 oil on canvas 20 by 16 inches / 50.8 by 40.6 cm signed lower right Collections André Gide Leicester Galleries, London, 1952 Count Manassei F.B. Hart Jackson Thomas Agnew & Sons, London Mr Herbert, 1960 Private Collection, UK Exhibited Paris, Galerie Cardo, Walter R. Sickert, 15 November– 6 December 1930, cat no.56, exhibited as Nu London, Thomas Agnew & Sons, Sickert: Centenary Exhibition of Pictures from Private Collections, 14 March–14 April 1960, cat no.74 Literature François Fosca, Walter Richard Sickert, L’Amour de l’Art, November 1930, p443 illus b/w Wendy Baron, Sickert, Phaidon, London, 1973, cat no.210, fig 143 illus b/w Wendy Baron and Richard Shone, Sickert Paintings, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1992, p164, fig 126 illus b/w Wendy Baron, Sickert, Paintings and Drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, pp56, 308–309, cat no.245.1, illus b/w

Sickert first approached the subject of the nude within an interior in 1902, while working in Neuville and Venice. However, it was not until his return to London in 1905 that this subject became the central focus of his painting, remaining so for the next eight years. Sickert’s paintings from this period occupy an important place in the history of the female nude. His depiction of realistic women in dimly lit, un-romanticised domestic settings, was highly distinctive and challenged established modes of representation.

The details of this work indicate that it was painted at 8 Fitzroy Square, Camden Town. These were the first rooms Sickert had taken after his return from France and had previously been the home of Sickert’s teacher, James McNeill Whistler. Sickert’s sympathies with the artistic tradition of France are made explicit in his choice of subject and title. La Coiffure refers to a woman combing her hair, and is the subject of works by Picasso, Matisse and Degas. Sickert’s treatment of this subject, however, is wholly unique.

Paintings from this period see Sickert working with a new freedom. The surface of this painting exhibits a more expressive handling of the paint and reveals the process of layering and scraping away, which has left some areas of paint thick and solid, and others translucent, barely covering the surface of the canvas.

The wonderful sense of light that is created in this work reflects a marked development from Sickert’s earlier nudes. The deep red of the carpet, the highlighted bed cover and, in the background, the snatches of colour describing various objects on the table all lend themselves to a complete expression of depth and form.

The everyday detail of the scene takes prominence and the painting is firmly rooted within an honest realism that characterises all of Sickert’s work.

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Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942 La Rue du Mortier d’Or, Dieppe, c1906 oil on canvas 12 by 15 inches / 30.5 by 38.1 cm signed lower left Collections Jacques-Emile Blanche Roland Browse & Delbanco Mrs E.J. de Pass Private Collection, UK Exhibited London, Roland Browse and Delbanco, Sickert, 1860–1942, March–April 1960, cat no.8 Eastbourne, Towner Art Gallery, Sickert in Dieppe, 31 May– 6 July 1975, cat no.43 Guildford, Guildford House, 12 July–2 August 1975 Literature Wendy Baron, Sickert, Phaidon, London, 1973, pp99, 101, cat no.284, fig 201 illus b/w Wendy Baron, Sickert, Paintings and Drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, pp66, 257, cat no.302, illus colour p345

In the winter of 1898 Sickert went to Dieppe and did not return to live in London until 1905. Dieppe had been important to Sickert’s family. His mother had been brought up in the suburb of Neuville and his father, a painter, had experienced very productive periods of work there. By 1898 French and English artists had gathered in Dieppe and it was here that Sickert renewed his friendship with Degas. This friendship proved fundamental to Sickert’s development of a stronger, more considered sense of pattern in his work and it was in Dieppe that Sickert began to assert his stylistic independence from his teacher Whistler.

Almost all of the paintings Sickert made in Dieppe are topographical in nature. Several of the well-known landmarks of the town feature over and over again in the paintings. One of most frequent subjects was the Church of St. Jacques, as seen here. His continuous focus on the architectural make-up of the town led his friend, the painter and writer Jacques-Emile Blanche, to name him the ‘Canaletto of Dieppe’ stating: ‘No other artist has so perfectly felt and expressed the character of the town.’ 1 Towards the end of 1905, Sickert returned to live in London.

This charming work was painted while Sickert summered there the following year and illustrates his fresh-eyed enthusiasm for the subject after some time away.

The wonderfully light and varied palette presents a vivacity of colour rare in Sickert’s oeuvre. He may have been influenced by the company of the younger artist Spencer Gore who worked with him at his Neuville studio in 1904 and again in 1906. The bright tonality and loose brushstrokes of this painting suggest an exchange between the two artists and prompt consideration of Sickert as an ‘English Impressionist’.

Sickert’s interest in recording the same location at different times of day, and in different lights, was certainly shared with the Impressionists. The broken brushstrokes and fractured tonal values have the same sense of immediacy as an Impressionist painting. However, this apparent spontaneity belies the controlled nature of its creation. Sickert generally remained in his studio when completing a painting, preferring to work from secondhand material rather than en plein air, as one might expect from a bona fide Impressionist.

1 Wendy Baron, introduction to Sickert in Dieppe exhibition catalogue, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, 1975

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Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942 Shop, Islington, c1915 oil on panel 91/2 by 61/2 inches / 24.1 by 16.5 cm signed lower right Collections Redfern Gallery, London, where purchased by: Dr B. Solomons Private Collection, UK Literature Wendy Baron, Sickert, Paintings and Drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006, cat no.477, illus colour

Sickert had a profound appreciation of London, which grew, to some extent, from Whistler’s love of the city. However, by 1915, Sickert had moved away from Whistler’s romantic vision, towards a more robust, realistic portrayal of the urban landscape and its inhabitants. Writing to Alice Hobbs in 1913 Sickert mused: ‘London is spiffing! Such evil racy little faces and such comfortable feeling of the solid basis of beef and beer. O the whiff of leather and stout from the swing-doors of the pubs!’ 1 Islington had a personal significance for Sickert. His very first trip to London was at the age of five, when he was admitted to St Mark’s Hospital for an operation. On his return to London in 1905, he chose not to return to Chelsea, but to head north, moving frequently between Bloomsbury, Camden Town and Islington. Between 1925 and 1931 Sickert lived in Islington, which by this time had become an urbane, cultural centre attractive to artists.

Despite being painted just a year after the outbreak of war, this work conveys a positive mood. Ironically, the early war years were very successful ones for Sickert. By 1914, he had developed a sophisticated and systematic working process. Beginning in the studio, he would put down the groundwork for a painting, working from preliminary sketches and secondary sources. He would then return to his subject, in this case a shop, to ascertain further tonal values, which he would memorise and incorporate into his picture back in the studio. Such an approach, which breaks down the act of seeing into stages, allowed for the gradual and considered application of thin layers of undiluted paint that maintained their luminosity.

Shop, Islington is coloured with a wonderful warmth and vibrancy.

Flat areas of tone provide a foundation for the delicate layering of brilliant colour, creating charming pictorial details. The inclusion of lettering can be seen in other paintings such as Queens Road (Bayswater Station), c1915–16 and his paintings of the shops in Chagford.

1 Wendy Baron, Sickert, Paintings and Drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006, p105

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David Jones 1895–1974 Cows in a Landscape, 1925 pencil, watercolour and bodycolour on paper 15 by 22 inches / 38.1 by 55.9 cm signed and dated indistinctly, lower right Collections Private Collection, UK

In the 1920s David Jones established himself as a watercolour painter. The training in wood engraving that he had received under Eric Gill undoubtedly influenced his early approach to form, and the graphic quality of Cows in a Landscape can be traced back to his time with the older artist. However, by 1925, Jones’ style had become distinct from Gill’s academicism, with a more intuitive approach to representation.

Jones painted many landscapes at this time and many of them featured water in various forms. As a Roman Catholic, water held a spiritual significance and it was also an ideal subject for a handling of paint characterised by movement; as Jones himself remarks: ‘The sea has had quite a big influence, I believe, on my stuff, though it’s not been noted as an ingredient – whereas the hills and flowers etc. have.’ 1 Here, the swelling sea sets a rhythm that is echoed in the coastline’s dramatic, jagged cliffs. Unlike many of his works, the composition is not organised around the centre of the picture.

Rather, the wonderfully detailed cows are dotted amongst rolling hills with the high viewpoint giving a panoramic view of the land.

The muted palette is in harmony with the imagery and pictorial space is created by the use of hot and cold colours, rather than by any realistic representation of perspective.

It is likely that Jones painted this work during his first visit to Caldy Island in the spring of 1925. The island, which was then owned by the church, undoubtedly appealed to Jones, given its rich visual and spiritual associations, and he returned to stay there at several other points in his life. While the formal qualities in Cows in a Landscape – the controlled expression of form and the tendency towards flatness – are paramount, the imaginative feeling for representation by which they are conditioned is equally important.

1 Paul Hills, ‘The Art of David Jones’ from David Jones, Tate Gallery, London, exhibition catalogue, 1981, p32

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David Jones 1895–1974 Martyrdom, 1927 watercolour, pencil and black ink 6 by 8 inches / 15.2 by 20.3 cm signed with initials and dated DJ 27, lower left Collections Anthony D’Offay, London Private Collection, UK, purchased in 1983 Exhibited London, Anthony D’Offay, December Exhibition, 1983, cat no.4

In 1921 David Jones converted to Roman Catholicism, and the importance of his faith is reflected in his many religious works.

This scene can be found in numerous examples of Christian art illustrating the martyrdom of Saint Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch, Syria. In 107 A.D., during the reign of Emperor Trajan, the Bishop Ignatius, who refused to renounce the Christian faith, was sentenced to death. He was imprisoned in Rome, during which time he wrote seven epistles to the churches of Asia Minor offering instruction and guidance to Christian followers.

It was in these letters that the term ‘Catholic’, describing the whole of the church, was first used. On 17 October 108 A.D., Ignatius became a martyr when he was devoured by wild beasts in the Colosseum.

Jones first approached this subject, at his father’s suggestion, in a small watercolour dating from 1922. By 1927, his work had developed considerably, from a linear and primitive style to a more complex one. Martyrdom is a very complete and considered work in this sense; the entire image is filled with illustrative detail and colour. The approach to form is much freer and the lines are more fluid than in earlier works, creating a wealth of movement and action across the surface of this small picture. Jones challenges the traditional rules of perspective to create an alternative yet equally coherent understanding of space, which is conditioned by experience. In the foreground, for example, the metal fence appears incongruous against the back wall, yet it echoes the rhythm of the work perfectly, mimicking the movement of the lion as it goes in for the kill.

As Eric Gill mused: ‘We should miss the quality of his work if we did not see that it is a combination of two enthusiasms, that of the man who is enamoured of the spiritual world and at the same time as much enamoured of the material body in which he must clothe his vision.’ 1 1 Paul Hills, ‘The Art of David Jones’ from David Jones, Tate Gallery, London, exhibition catalogue, 1981, p19

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Christopher Wood 1901–1930 Dahlias in a White Pot, 1930 oil on board 15 by 18 inches / 38.1 by 45.7 cm Collections Captain Ernest Duveen Private Collection, UK Exhibited London, The New Burlington Galleries, Christopher Wood, Exhibition of Complete Works, March–April 1938, cat no.200 London, The Redfern Gallery, Christopher Wood, The First Retrospective Since 1938, April–May 1956, cat no.32 Literature Eric Newton, Christopher Wood 1901–1930, Redfern Gallery, London, 1938, cat no.441, illus colour p23

Dahlias in a White Pot reflects the fruitful friendship that developed between Christopher Wood, Winifred and Ben Nicholson in the late 1920s. This relationship was one of mutual admiration, with each artist deeply affecting the ideas of the others. Jeremy Lewison identifies Wood as the catalyst for Ben Nicholson embracing a naive style in 1927, after the Nicholsons first encountered his paintings in his flat in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, towards the end of 1926. Virginia Button also points to Wood’s technique of scraping, priming and re-priming his paintings with undercoat, creating a textured ground, a technique which both of the Nicholsons adopted.

In March 1928, Wood made his first visit to the Nicholsons’ house, Banks Head, in Cumbria, where the three artists would paint together in the farmhouse and outdoors. Wood delighted in their quiet, rural life which was a great contrast to the bohemian life he led in Paris. During the visit he found himself moved by the simplicity of their lives and deeply inspired by their painting.

‘Ben encouraged Kit to remove pictorial clutter from his composition, while Winifred’s sense of colour and its emotional and spiritual possibilities made a lasting impression.’ 1 Here there is a sense of movement and energy in the flowers that suggests the naive French artist Henri Rousseau’s Bouquet of Flowers c1909–10, (Tate Gallery Collection) and Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings. Wood had also by this time ‘discovered’ Alfred Wallis, admiring his rough, chalky application of paint and his child-like, flattened compositions. While Wood’s early work assimilated many influences, English and French, there is a huge confidence in this painting and its lyrical charm is very much his own. In 1930, the year of his untimely death, Wood also painted harbour scenes of Tréboul and St Ives, as well as some wonderfully imaginative surrealist images such as Zebra and Parachute, 1930 (Tate Gallery Collection).

1 Virginia Button, Christopher Wood, Tate Publishing, London, 2003, p45

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David Bomberg 1890–1957 Mountain Road, Asturias, 1935 oil on canvas 19 by 23 inches / 48.3 by 58.4 cm Collections The Artist Mrs Bomberg Lady Alexandra Trevor-Roper (Lady Dacre) Private Collection, UK Exhibited Coventry, Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, David Bomberg 1890–1957: Paintings and Drawings, 3–24 September 1960, cat no.57

After the First World War, David Bomberg all but abandoned the urban subject matter of his Vorticist years, adopting an approach to art based on the contemplation of nature. Landscape became the central focus of his work and, in this sense, he was distinct from many of his avant-garde contemporaries and much closer in sentiment to the English Romantic artist J.M.W. Turner.

For Bomberg, the importance of art lay in its ability to unite human experience with a metaphysical and spiritual understanding of the world. He believed the artist should work with his mind and not just his eyes and, as such, his painting is always an articulation of his experience of nature.

Bomberg travelled through Spain from 1934 until October 1935 and he would have remained there had the threat of civil war not forced a return to England. The valley of La Hermida in the mountains of Asturias was the last place that he and his family settled. This was the most isolated and austere area of Spain that Bomberg was to encounter, and the mountains, which were devoid of architecture or human activity, allowed Bomberg to become completely absorbed by the landscape.

Mountain Road, Asturias wonderfully illustrates the kind of primordial landscape which appealed to Bomberg in his search for the sublime. The canvas is coloured in vivid reds, pinks and oranges, reflecting the intense Spanish light and heat that penetrate the land. The dramatic zig-zagging brushwork energises the canvas, drawing the eye around the composition and emphasising the natural drama of the scene. This work is charged with a deep sense of awe, its formal components forming a motif for the intense and spiritual experience of nature that Bomberg chased throughout his career.

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Paul Nash 1889–1946 No.2 The Parade, 1935 pencil and watercolour 111/8 by 153/8 inches / 28 by 39 cm signed and variously inscribed with colour notes verso Collections Nash Trustees Hamet Gallery, London Alexander Postan Anthony D’Offay, London Exhibited London, Redfern Gallery, Paul Nash, April 1935, cat no.25 London, Hamet Gallery, Paul Nash 1889–1946, Drawings and Watercolours, May 1973, cat no.48 Literature Margot Eates, Paul Nash, Master of the Image, John Murray, London, 1973, p61 Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, cat no.845, pl 530 illus b/w

In February 1935 Paul and Margaret Nash moved from Whitecliff Farm, outside Swanage, to rooms in the town at No.2 The Parade. They spent most of the year there, while Paul Nash collected material for the Dorset Shell Guide, published in 1936, which he both compiled and edited. In the summer he consulted the architect F.R.S. Yorke with a view to having a house built at Swanage, but soon abandoned the idea. The Nashes left Dorset in March 1936 and only returned occasionally after this period. 1 1934–6 was a significant period for Nash, as he produced some of his most important surrealist works in the run up to the International Surrealist Exhibition, held in London in July 1936.

Watercolour was as important a medium for Nash as oils and many of his most notable paintings were works on paper – The Nest of the Wild Stones, 1937, (Arts Council Collection), Sea Wall, 1935 (Private Collection). In 1935 Nash completed less than a dozen oils and nearly sixty watercolours. He favoured pared-down compositions and made many paintings of the sea in differing weathers and tides.

This is a relatively tranquil scene, looking from the seafront to Ballard’s Point, although the odd flatness of the lamp post and railings adds an air of disquiet to the image. Nash was drawn to live by the sea and clearly took great inspiration from the unique geology of the Dorset coast – its chalky cliff faces, outcrops of rocks and fossil-dense beaches – whose natural drama inspired his imaginative works: ‘I began gradually to discover that Swanage was definitely, as the saying is, surrealist.’ 2 1 Extract taken from Paul Nash, Tate Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1975, p109 2 ‘Paul Nash, Swanage or Seaside Surrealism’, Architectural Review, vol 79, April 1936, p151

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Naum Gabo 1890–1977 Nocturne, 1943 oil on paper 8 by 93/4 inches / 20.3 by 24.8 cm signed Collections Miriam Gabo Private Collection, USA Exhibited New York, Museum of Modern Art, Constructivism: The Art of Naum Gabo & Antoine Pevsner, 10 February–25 April 1948, cat no.369 Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Naum Gabo, 23 April–8 June 1965, cat no.13, touring to: Mannheim, Kunsthalle, 23 June–8 August 1965 Duisburg, Wilherlm-Lehmbruck Museum, 21 August– 3 October 1965, cat no.37, illus colour Zurich, Kunsthaus, 30 October–1 December 1965, cat no.37, illus b/w Stockholm, Moderna Museet, January– February 1966 London, Tate Gallery, Naum Gabo, Constructions, Paintings and Drawings, Arts Council, 15 March–15 April 1966, cat no.45 Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox Gallery, Naum Gabo, 2 March–14 April 1968, cat no.41, p15 Literature Herbert Read and Leslie Martin, Gabo, Lund Humphries, London, 1957, p117, illus colour, dated 1940

Naum Gabo first came to Britain in 1936. At the outbreak of war three years later, he moved to the relative safety of St Ives, living there until 1946. As such, Nocturne is a classic example of Russian Contructivism, which has been influenced by Gabo’s first-hand experience of British art and culture.

Here the image is of two forms that appear to oscillate in a spiral motion around a central axis. This spiral motif was prevalent in much of Gabo’s sculpture from the late 1930s to early 1940s and can be seen in other Russian Constructivist art, see Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Non-Objective Painting No.80 (Black on Black), 1918 (MOMA, New York).

The two semi-circular forms could also be interpreted as the interior space of a shell. After Gabo arrived in St Ives, he and his wife Miriam would regularly collect seashells from the beaches. However, this interest in shell forms pre-dates their living at the coast; in 1936 they had acquired the classic scientific work, On Growth and Form by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson.

This book plotted the growth of organic forms using a mathematical model. Marrying the mysteries of biology to the laws of physics, it was filled with exquisite line drawings and graphs. Its themes resonated with Gabo’s own interests and its aesthetic is mirrored in Gabo’s work.

In the summer of 1941 Gabo became interested in mobile light patterns. By suspending reflective materials in his studio, he cast patterns onto the walls, which he could then study. He borrowed a camera to record them and in the resulting photographs, fine white lines spiral and loop in apparent motion against a dark background. Nocturne, painted in 1943, may be inspired by these experiments. Photographs documenting Gabo’s sculptures might also be a source – the painting is in fact painted on the back of a photograph. Gabo’s paintings from the 1940s often use a single colour, such as bright red, yellow or green. Here the dark viridian green creates the illusion of deep pictorial space, as one might experience looking into the void of the night sky.

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Henry Moore 1898–1986 Reclining Figure, 1945 bronze length 14 inches / 35.6 cm edition of seven, plus one artist’s proof Collections The Artist Jack Pritchard, received as a gift from Henry Moore Thence by descent Exhibited Hong Kong, Museum of Art and Arts Centre, The Art of Henry Moore, British Council, 1 February–12 March 1986, cat no.18, another cast touring to: Tokyo, Metropolitan Art Museum, show titled The Art of Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1921–1948 Fukuoka, Art Museum London, Royal Academy of the Arts, Henry Moore, 16 September–11 December 1988, cat no.106, illus b/w p84, another cast Literature William Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, Thames and Hudson, London, 1960, pl 35, illus b/w another cast Robert Melville, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1921–1969, Thames and Hudson, London, 1970, cat no.349, illus another cast

It seems difficult to grasp today that Moore was for most of his life the most controversial artist working in Britain. The human figure was at the centre of Moore’s work and the subjects of the Reclining Figure and Mother and Child remained two of his most important and major preoccupations.

Moore’s first portrayal of the Reclining Figure was in 1929, inspired by a cast he had seen in Paris four years earlier. The cast was of a Chacmool, a Toltec male warrior priest, from which Moore realised a female form whose body presented an analogy with organic forms.

Here, in Reclining Figure, 1945, Moore demonstrates the principals of form and rhythm that he observed from the study of natural objects and the angular skeletal framework which underlies all human figures.

‘I want to be quite free of having to find a ‘reason’ for doing the Reclining Figures, and freer still of having to find a ‘meaning’ for them. The vital thing for an artist is to have a subject that allows you to try out all kinds of formal ideas – things that he doesn’t yet know about for certain but wants to experiment with, as Cézanne did in his ‘Bathers’ series. In my case the reclining figure provides chances of that sort. The subject-matter is given.

It’s settled for you, and you know it and like it, so that within it, within the subject that you’ve done a dozen times before, you are free to invent a completely new form-idea.’ 1 1 Henry Moore quoted in John Russell, Henry Moore, Penguin Press, London, 1968, p28

Franco Russoli and David Mitchinson, Henry Moore Sculpture, Macmillan, London, 1981, cat no.179, p96, illus another cast David Sylvester ed., Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture 1921–1948, Vol. 1, Lund Humphries, London, 1988, cat no.256, p161 illus b/w another cast

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Reg Butler 1913–1981 Maquette for the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner, 1951–2 (The original prize-winning sculpture) bronze sheet and wire on plaster base 171/2 by 63/4 by 71/2 inches / 44.5 by 17.1 by 19.0 cm Collections The Artist Anthony Kloman Private Collection, USA Exhibited London, New Burlington Galleries, International Sculpture Competition: The Unknown Political Prisoner, British Preliminary Competition, January 1953, this cast London, Tate Gallery, International Sculpture Competition: The Unknown Political Prisoner, Institute of Contemporary Arts, March–April 1953, this cast Venice, The British Pavilion, The British Pavilion: exhibition of works by Nicholson, Bacon, Freud, Venice Biennale XXVII, 1954 New York, Curt Valentin Gallery, Reg Butler, 11 January– 5 February 1955, cat no.13, illus b/w, another cast Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 50 Ans d’Art Moderne, April–July 1958, cat no.43, p215, another cast Louisville, J.B. Speed Art Museum, Reg Butler: A Retrospective Exhibition, October–December 1963, cat no.45, Working Model for Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner,1955 exhibited London, Tate Gallery, Reg Butler,16 November 1983–15 January 1984, cat no.42, illus b/w, another cast Literature Jorge Romero Brest, Le Monument au Prisonnier Politique Inconnu Art Aujourd’hui, No.5, July 1953, pp6–11, this cast Alfred H. Barr Jr, Masters of Modern Art, New York, Doubleday Publishers, 1954, p159 Patrick Heron, The Changing Forms of Art, The Noonday Press, New York, 1955, pp227–9 Hans Egon Holthusen, Gutachten der Akademie der Kunste zum Entwurf eines Denkmals des unbekannten politischen Gefangen Berlin, 1956 Literature continues on back page

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This maquette is the original version of Reg Butler’s grand-prize winning entry to the international exhibition Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner. It was shown at the competition exhibitions held at the I.C.A. and the Tate Gallery in 1953 before being gifted to the exhibition’s organizer. Until now, it has remained in a private collection in the USA. The two replicas that Butler made in the same year are both currently on show in national museums. One belongs to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the other is on loan to the Tate Gallery, London. The larger and later, Working Model for the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner, is now in the Tate Gallery’s permanent collection.

The aim of this international competition was to find a work that would commemorate ‘all those men and women who in our times have given their lives or their liberty to the cause of human freedom’. 1 While the I.C.A. organised the exhibition, it was essentially headed by its American Director of PR, Anthony Kloman, a former U.S. Cultural Attaché in Stockholm.

It is now understood that through his governmental links, funding for the exhibition came from the C.I.A. As such, the motives of the competition are inextricably tied to a Western agenda within the politics of the Cold War. In 1951, when the competition was announced, the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites declined to enter and of the fifty-six international artists that did, the majority were from Britain. Despite the internationalism of the competition, which received huge publicity worldwide, the names of the successful entrants now reads as a Who’s Who of avant-garde modernist Western sculptors. Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner jointly won the second prize. F.E. McWilliam, Elisabeth Frink and Eduardo Paolozzi were all named runners up.

The controversies surrounding both the winning sculpture and the competition, within the rhetoric of Cold War politics, meant that plans for the final monument in West Berlin were never realised. Despite this, the importance of this work as, ‘the only truly public thing’ 2 that Butler conceived is paramount not only to the artist’s career but as a subject of debate within the political, historical and cultural discourse of post-war Europe.

As Margaret Garlake declares, ‘…had it been erected, Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner would have been the most significant work of public art made in Western Europe after the war.’ 3 1 Robert Burstow, ‘The Limits of Western Art as a ‘Weapon of the Cold War’: Reassessing the Unknown Patron of the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner’, Oxford Art Journal, vol 20, no.1, 1997, p70 2 Margaret Garlake, Reg Butler, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Hampshire, 2006, p.87 3 ibid. p89

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William Turnbull b.1922 Head, 1954 oil on paper 301/2 by 221/4 inches / 77.5 by 56.5 cm signed and dated Collections The Artist Private Collection, UK

The human head was a key subject for William Turnbull from 1950 to 1957. Here, the scratched lines, made using the wrong end of a brush, as one might draw texture in plaster, indicate that this is a sculptor’s drawing. Turnbull is unconcerned with capturing a specific likeness; instead he focuses on describing, through mark-making, the impression of a moving, threedimensional form.

This subject can also be found in the work of Turnbull’s contemporaries Eduardo Paolozzi (Shattered Head, 1956) and Nigel Henderson (Head of a Man, 1956, both Tate Gallery Collection). All three artists had visited Paris in the late 1940s, where they absorbed the influences of Surrealism and Art Brut.

Each used the head as a means to explore interiority, marking, collaging and inscribing things unseen – the damage of war, modernity, history, past and present – onto its surface.

This drawing owes a clear debt to Alberto Giacometti – an early influence Turnbull freely acknowledged. After the war, Turnbull had won a scholarship to France, staying there from 1948–1950.

In Paris he visited many well-known artists in their studios, including Brancusi and Léger. He tracked down Giacometti and visited his studio with Nigel Henderson several times. Giacometti was at this time making elongated figures on a life-size scale and also in miniature on horizontal slabs. Turnbull immediately responded to the work, making his own linear sculptures on bases, using fine wire armatures thinly covered in plaster. Soon after, both Turnbull and Giacometti were represented by the Hanover Gallery in London.

The linear nature of this drawing relates both to the sculptures Turnbull made in Paris and the more solid plaster masks he began in 1953. These masks were informed by African tribal and Greek masks, of which he stated, ‘The Mask is a marvellous example of the attempt to fix that which is maybe most continuously fleeting and mobile – the expression on a face.’ 1 1 Theo Crosby (ed.), Uppercase 4, Whitefriars, London, 1960, p8 quote from the artist

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Kenneth Armitage 1916–2002 Flat Standing Figure, 1952 bronze with green-black patina height 12 inches / 30.5 cm edition of six, cast by Galizia Collections with Gallery Moos, Toronto Private Collection, UK Exhibited Venice, The British Pavilion, Kenneth Armitage, S.W. Hayter and William Scott, XXIX Venice Biennale, 1958, cat no.63, another cast Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Kenneth Armitage & William Scott, 3 June–30 June, 1959, cat no.4, another cast London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Kenneth Armitage, July–August, 1959, cat no.9, another cast London, Jonathan Clark, Kenneth Armitage: 60 Years of Sculpture and Drawing, 21 March–12 April 2001, cat no.7, illus colour, another cast Literature Roland Penrose, Kenneth Armitage: Artists of our Time Vol. VII, Bodensee – Verlag, Amriswil, Switzerland, 1960, cat no.6, illus b/w pl 6, another cast Norbert Lynton, Kenneth Armitage, Methuen, London, 1962, illus b/w, p8 Charles Spencer, Kenneth Armitage, Academy Editions, London, 1973, illus p6

Flat Standing Figure was one of four sculptures Kenneth Armitage elected to exhibit at the 29th Venice Biennale in 1952. Armitage identified the Biennale as a key stage in his professional life – the exhibition was a sell-out and he was propelled from relative unknown to internationally recognised artist in a matter of weeks.

His purchasers included Peggy Guggenheim, the Italian fashion designer Madame Schiaparelli and the Museum of Modern Art in both New York and Rome.

Flat Standing Figure differs from other sculptures of the period, in that it evokes a sense of complete stillness. Like his contemporaries, Roger Hilton and William Scott, Armitage approached the figure with a distinctly Modernist aesthetic. At that time, all three artists were absorbed with the simplification and abstraction of the human figure. This concern with ‘simplified’ forms can also, in part, be attributed to Armitage’s wartime job as a teacher on an aircraft and technology identification course.

The reduction of complex machinery to clear line drawings encouraged his reconsideration of form, as is evident in his work from the 1950s.

The linear simplicity of Flat Standing Figure belies its formal complexity. Armitage plays with the traditional notion of sculpture as something voluminous or three dimensional.

When viewed from the front, its apparent bulk promises a substantial form, yet the incredibly thin profile encourages one to simultaneously read the form as a silhouette. Alan Bowness recognised this quality in the work, where ‘…one is not asked to take up a single view point but expected to move round them as one might move past a group of figures in the street’. 1 1 Alan Bowness, introduction to Kenneth Armitage, Whitechapel Retrospective exhibition catalogue, 1958, p8

Tamsyn Woollcombe (ed.) in association with the artist, Kenneth Armitage: Life and Work, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, London, 1997, p143

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Kenneth Armitage 1916–2002 Figure Lying on Its Side, 1957 bronze with green patina length 33 inches / 83.8 cm version 5 Collections Dr Edgar Berman Thence by descent Exhibited Venice, British Pavilion, Kenneth Armitage, S.W. Hayter & William Scott 1958, XXIX Venice Biennale, cat no.76, illus b/w, another cast London, Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd., Critic’s Choice 1958, David Sylvester, 1– 26 July 1958, cat no.29, illus, p23, another cast Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Kenneth Armitage & William Scott, 3–30 June 1959, cat no.20, illus, another cast London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Kenneth Armitage, July–August 1959, cat no.32, illus, pl xiv, another cast Hanover, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Kenneth Armitage, Lynn Chadwick, 12 April–15 May 1960, cat no.15, another cast, touring to: Ulm; Duisberg; Berlin; Nurnberg Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, Recent British Sculpture, 13 April 1961, cat no.8, illus, another cast, touring to: Montreal; Winnipeg; Regina; Toronto; London; Vancouver; Auckland; Wellington; Dunedin; Christchurch; Adelaide; Perth; Hobart; Launceston; Melbourne; Sydney; Brisbane; Newcastle; Canberra; Tokyo; Kyoto London, Tate Gallery, 54–64: Painting and Sculpture of a Decade, 22 April–28 June 1964, cat no.204, illus, artist’s cast

In 1955, Armitage rented a studio in Notting Hill and began working on larger sculptures, entering, in his own words, ‘the most creative period of my life’. 1 Alan Bowness recalls that his studio, rather than being filled with the usual natural objects, contained ‘objects of an entirely urban environment: books and magazines, chairs, a bed and a folding screen, a telephone, a pile of children’s toys, among them a large model army tank’. 2 It was in the forms of this man-made environment that Armitage found an aesthetic that he would apply to the human figure.

The simplified and flattened form of Figure Lying on Its Side, 1957, echoes the structure of the artist’s folding screen, yet the bulkiness of the figure, its sense of mass, mimics the solidity of his army tank. Like these objects, contemporary architecture provided Armitage with underlying patterns of tension and stress that, he believed, extended to human experience. He comments: ‘I became…interested in structure. Most of us spend our day vertically on our feet and at night we rest horizontally. We live in a world of verticals and horizontals…’ 3 Placing the figure on its side allowed Armitage to consciously develop a link between the sculpture and the ground and, by extension, sculpture and the human world. For Armitage, sculpture was the expression of human experience, and this lies at the centre of all of his work.

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2

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Tamsyn Woolcombe in association with the artist, Kenneth Armitage, Life and Work, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, London, 1997, p34 Alan Bowness, introduction to Kenneth Armitage, Whitechapel Retrospective exhibition catalogue, 1958, p8 Norbert Lynton, Kenneth Armitage, Methuen, London, 1962, p1

Norwich, Castle Museum, Kenneth Armitage, 16 December 1972–14 January 1973, cat no.11, illus b/w, p14, another cast, touring to: Bolton; Oldham; Kettering; Nottingham; Portsmouth; Plymouth; Llanelli; Leeds; Hull London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century, 11 September 1981–24 January 1982, illus, p133, another cast Leeds, City Art Galleries, Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art, 25 November 1993–5 February 1994, cat no.10, fig 153, illus b/w, another cast Exhibitions and literature continues on back page

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Sir Terry Frost 1915–2003 Black and White Sea Movement, 1951 oil on canvas 16 by 20 inches / 40.6 by 50.8 cm signed, dated and inscribed Black + White Sea/Movement/51 Terry Frost verso Collections The Artist Peter Lanyon Private Collection, UK

Black and White Sea Movement belongs to a body of work, that marked a fundamental shift in Terry Frost’s painting. In 1951, Frost did not fully embrace the gestural abstraction of his Cornish contemporaries and he tended to utilise a strong balance of geometrical divisions. In fact, Frost’s work was at the very centre of artistic debate between the experience-influenced abstract paintings of the St Ives artists and the rigorously constructivist work of the members of the Fitzroy group.

By 1951, Frost had already begun painting his Walk Along the Quay series. In these works and the Movement series, Frost refrained from simply imitating nature – he wanted to physically experience St Ives. Every day at first light and in the evening he would investigate around the harbour. He would observe the movements and the sensations of the sea, the stirring sea breeze, the hulls of the boats and the ropes, which held them tight and loose.

Frost’s paintings use extremely sophisticated geometrical relationships to suggest familiar forms and show his close links with Adrian Heath, Victor Pasmore and the Constructivist circle who were developing a much more abstract and geometric structure in their paintings.

Peter Lanyon exchanged this painting with Frost for a drawing he had made of Mullion Harbour in circa 1952. Black and White Sea Movement is a very rare example of Frost’s early fifties painting. During the years 1950–1952, Frost was an assistant to Barbara Hepworth and did not paint very often.

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Keith Vaughan 1912–1977 Broken Harbour at Port Allan, 1955 oil on board 23 by 25 inches / 58.4 by 63.5 cm signed and dated Collections Leicester Galleries, London Eric A. Alport Private Collection, UK Exhibited London, The Leicester Galleries, Keith Vaughan, June 1956, cat no.13 London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Keith Vaughan Retrospective Exhibition, March–April 1962, cat no.177

Around half of all Vaughan’s paintings in the 1950s were landscapes in gouache and oil. He travelled extensively in Britain and Europe and the sketches he made in his notebooks would often inform a painting many months later. In 1954 he visited Berwickshire and cycled through Kerry and Cork in Ireland.

In 1955 he went to France, the Richmond area of Yorkshire, Seaford in East Sussex and Cornwall. Travel was a great inspiration, as Malcolm Yorke describes: ‘Artists go on holiday for the same reason as other people: as a break from work, to find the sun, wine, new food, new vistas and perhaps romance. But as professionally trained lookers they observe how the light falls differently in Berwickshire from the way it does in Italy, or how local colour is modified and outlines sharpened or blunted by it.’ 1 Vaughan’s oils from the 1950s are characterised by their flat facets of colour and his palette is often limited to a close range of hues. In Broken Harbour at Port Allan, blue, grey, black and white predominate. It is clear that the artist has observed at first hand the effect of bright sunshine as it hits the wall of the harbour, creating shadows, confusing what is known to be there and what can be seen. He translates this visual effect into simple squares and triangles of colour, creating a delicate balance between abstraction and figuration and capturing the essence of the place on a specific day and in a particular light.

Cézanne was a major influence and Vaughan often mentions him in his diaries in glowing terms, describing how his paintings had affected him in a ‘total, almost physical way’. 2 In Vaughan’s paintings we see a continuation of Cézanne’s project to depict the underlying forms in nature. As here, his best paintings from the 1950s are highly successful in balancing a sense of deep pictorial space with flat design.

1 Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan, His Life and Work, Constable & Co., London, 1990, p180–1 2 Alan Ross (ed.), Keith Vaughan, Journals 1939–1977, John Murray, London, 1983, p147

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F.E. McWilliam 1909–1992 The Sisters, 1955 bronze 35 by 11 by 7 inches / 88.9 by 27.9 by 17.8 cm initialled and dated, numbered 2/3 on base, cast by Art Bronze, first conceived in iron cement, 1955 estate no. 55.23 Collections Private Collection, USA Exhibited London, Hanover Gallery, F.E. McWilliam: Sculpture, 1956, cat no.10 New York Silberman Galleries, Contemporary British Art, 1956–7, touring to: Washington São Paolo, Museu de Arte Moderna, IV Bienal, Ten Young British Sculptors, British Arts Council, 1957, cat no.29, illus b/w, another cast, touring to, Rio de Janeiro, Museu de Arte Modena, 1958 Buenos Aires, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1958 Montevideo, Museo de Arte Moderno, 1958 Santiago, Instituto de Artes Plásticas, 1958 Lima, Instituto de Artes Contemporaneas, 1958 Caracas, Musco de Bellas Artes, 1958 Literature Herbert Read, Ten Young British Sculptors, British Arts Council, London, 1957 Manchester Guardian, 9 February 1956, review of Hanover Gallery exhibition Roland Penrose, F. E. McWilliam, Alec Tiranti Ltd, London, 1964, the study for this work is cat no.41, illus b/w

Frederick McWilliam is widely credited as Northern Ireland’s pre-eminent sculptor. A fellow student of Henry Moore at the Slade, McWilliam was awarded the Robert Ross leaving scholarship. He and his future wife, Beth Crowther, travelled to France, where he met the celebrated Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi and the enigmatic Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Like Giacometti, McWilliam was to take the human figure as his pivotal theme, exploring this subject in a succession of variations.

In the 1930s, McWilliam’s capricious imagination attracted him to Surrealism. His smooth contoured wood carvings of the pre and post-war periods later gave way to more attenuated figures in metal. These figures, occasionally recalling those of Giacometti, were often depicted in violent action. However, it is his series of more static and metaphorical figures, where the surface detail of his bronzes are rough, smooth and indented (inspired by recollections of Celtic ornament), to which The Sisters belong.

McWilliam’s distorted representations of the human figure in the 1950s reflect the sense of anxiety and moral crisis that followed the Second World War, also suggesting the earlier religious and political violence that he witnessed during his childhood in Ireland.

In The Sisters, McWilliam translates these sensations and emotions through bronze, presenting a uniformity of material and increased solidity. The Sisters, perhaps representing McWilliam’s two daughters, entwine their hands, displaying a strong assurance of unity and solidarity, while at the same time declaring a protective and tentative mood. The eerie suggestion of a face in the left-hand sister’s leg gives weight to a reading of McWilliam’s visual vocabulary as loosely, if not consistently, surrealist.

F.E. McWilliam, Ulster Museum, Belfast, 1981, p31, The Sisters can been seen in the b/w photo of the artist’s Kensington studio, photographed in 1956

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Reg Butler 1913–1981 Study for Girl Tying Her Hair III, 1959 bronze height 183/4 inches / 47.6 cm stamped with monogram and inscribed 4/8 on base, with foundry mark Susse Fréres Paris on back of base archive no. RB 176 Collections C.T. Browring & Company Ltd The Nippon Fire & Marine Insurance Company Ltd Private Collection, Japan Exhibited London, Hanover Gallery, Reg Butler: Sculpture, June–July 1960, cat no.10, another cast New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Reg Butler: Recent Sculpture: 1959–1962, 30 October–17 November 1962, cat no.13, another cast Louisville, Kentucky, J.B. Speed Art Museum, Reg Butler: A Retrospective Exhibition, 22 October–1 December 1963, cat no.88, another cast Literature G.S. Whittet, London Commentary, The Studio, vol.160, no.809, pp116–117, p110 illus b/w, another cast Robert Melville, In Connection with the Sculpture of Reg Butler, Motif, No.6, 1961, Shenvall Press, London, p37, cat no.24 illus b/w another cast Margaret Garlake, The Sculpture of Reg Butler, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Hertfordshire, 2006, cat no.197, illus b/w, another cast

By 1959, Reg Butler was no longer making figures in welded iron. Instead, he had begun to produce highly expressive, totemic figures, which were modelled in plaster, before being cast in bronze. The move from iron to bronze inevitably brought a concern with mass to the fore. He explored this new quality by making his figures extremely top heavy or suspending them in space by the tiniest rods of iron.

Butler’s art reflects a synthesis of art historical references.

Margaret Garlake notes the influence of ‘…Freudian theory, Surrealism and Butler’s recurrent enthusiasm for African and pre-historic art’. 1 He closely followed the careers of his contemporary European artists and parallels can be drawn with the work of Marino Marini with whom he exchanged letters. Yet his work reaches further back to an older, Italian classical art. Many distinguishing features of Butler’s 1950s style – the twisting figure with arms raised and clothes pulled up, emerging directly from the base or block – echo motifs found in, for example, Michelangelo’s ‘unfinished’ slaves for the Tomb of Julius II. A one time neighbour of Butler, Henry Moore was an early mentor, and both centred their work around the subject of the female figure. Butler’s figures from the 1950s are invariably studies of the body in motion, under some kind of stress, or moving between poses such as here in Study for Girl Tying Her Hair III. Sculptures of contorted bodies, a style described collectively by Herbert Read as the ‘Geometry of Fear’, were prevalent in the period soon after the Second World War. After this collective trauma, many artists such as Paolozzi, Frink and Meadows, were drawn to images of damaged and distorted human and animal bodies.

Here the figure is in classical pose, her proportions only slightly exaggerated to emphasise her torso, head and arms. Bodily tension is manifest on the sculpture’s surface, where delicately incised lines criss-cross the body, marking out the breasts, torso and shoulder blades and defining her gently tapering legs.

1 Margaret Garlake, The Sculpture of Reg Butler, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Hertfordshire, 2006, p30

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Winifred Nicholson 1893–1981 Live Pewter, 1959 oil on board 231/2 by 30 inches / 59.7 by 76.2 cm another painting verso Collections Wilfred Roberts Thence by descent Exhibited London, Crane Kalman Gallery, Winifred Nicholson, March 1981, cat no.30, exhibited as Harmony in Pewter London, Tate Gallery, Winifred Nicholson, 3 June–2 August 1987, cat no.40, illus b/w, touring to: Newcastle, Laing Art Gallery. 15 August–20 September 1987 Bristol, City Art Gallery, 26 September–1 November, 1987 Stoke, City Art Gallery, 7 November–13 December 1987 Aberdeen, City Art Gallery, 9 January–31 January 1988 Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard, 13 February–20 March 1988 Literature Judith Collins, Winifred Nicholson, Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1987, cat no.40, illus b/w Christopher Andreae, Winifred Nicholson, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2009, cat no.155, illus colour p165 Andrew Nicholson, Unknown Colour, Paintings, Letters, Writings

by Winifred Nicholson, Faber and Faber, London, 1987, p177, illus colour p176

By the end of the 1920s Winifred Nicholson had established herself, first and foremost, as a flower painter, becoming known in artistic circles as the ‘female Van Gogh’. Ben Nicholson’s remark that the subject held ‘endless possibilities’ for her is confirmed by the number and quality of paintings she produced on this theme.

Live Pewter is one of Nicholson’s most lyrical paintings. The division of interior and exterior, implied in earlier works by the inclusion of a window-sill, has been completely dissolved. Instead the still life objects appear fully immersed and in tune with the landscape. It is likely that this work was painted at Boothby, in Nicholson’s native Cumberland. As an artist so acutely aware of the symbolism behind things, this particular combination of objects with place seems wholly intentional. The pewter dish and cups pictured were heirlooms purchased by Nicholson at an auction held by her uncle, the 11th Earl of Carlisle, at her family’s Naworth Castle estate in the 1940s. These items of ancestral importance, placed within the Cumberland landscape of the artist’s birth, create a poignant symbol of the artist’s identity.

The metaphysical and symbolic nature of objects was fundamental to Nicholsons’ perception of the world. Flowers were important to her not only for their beauty but as signifiers of some deeper truth. To her, they represented the ‘secret of the cosmos’ 1 completely in tune with the natural rhythm of the world.

Flowers also provided the perfect subject for Nicholson’s experiments in colour. In Live Pewter, the flowers appear as vital and luminous accents, uniting the composition. Green stems echo the hills behind and violet petals pick up on the hazy blue of the sky. For Nicholson, colour was something that existed beyond the limits of human perception and her understanding of it was an emotional rather than intellectual one. Her working process reflects her intuitive approach; her technique was fluid and immediate and canvases were most often painted in one sitting. Nicholson often worked en plein air, placing canvases on the floor and kneeling before them, responding wholly to the landscape with an acute perception.

1 Winifred Nicholson, ‘The Flowers Response,’ Unknown Colour, Paintings, Letters, Writings

by Winifred Nicholson, Faber and Faber, London, 1987, p216

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Ivon Hitchens 1893–1979 Summer Waters, 1957 oil on canvas 20 by 41 inches / 50.8 by 104.1cm signed lower right Collections Private Collection, UK

While a younger generation of artists turned their back on landscape painting during the 1950s and 1960s, Ivon Hitchens continued to redefine his approach to the genre. In fact, during this period, a dramatic advance and artistic maturity were to be witnessed in Hitchens’ paintings.

Summer Waters dates from the summer immediately after Hitchens’ successful solo exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, which took place in February 1957. It was painted at Greenleaves at Lavington Common, Sussex, where Hitchens had built a studio and home. Ponds, dense tree plantations, foliage and a lush atmosphere surrounded the studio. Ever since his move to Sussex during the Second World War, Hitchens was dedicated to the incessant exploration of his immediate surroundings, in all weathers and seasons. He was captivated by the tangled woodlands, dark pools and light reflected by water and he contemplated every subtle changing interaction between these natural wonders.

In this work, as in others he painted, Hitchens swells the proportions of the pond to the dimensions of a lake. His choice of a panoramic canvas, adopted increasingly after 1936, accommodates this dramatic manipulation of scale and allows the viewer a more complete understanding of the landscape.

In Summer Waters, Hitchens expresses a balance between things viewed, things known and things felt. Hitchens succinctly concludes, ‘A subject is a peg on which to hang a picture.’

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Bryan Wynter 1915–1975 Forest Frontier, 1957 oil on canvas 56 by 44 inches / 142.2 by 111.8 cm signed, titled and dated verso Collections Estate of the Artist Private Collection, UK Exhibited Worcester, City Art Gallery, Cornish & Contemporary: A selection by Peter Davies of Recent Painting and Sculpture in Cornwall, 9 November–7 December 1985, cat no.31, illus

In 1945 Bryan Wynter moved to a small cottage, Zennor Carn, on the Penwith Moors near St Ives. His first Cornish paintings were Neo-Romantic in style, but by the early 1950s they had become increasingly abstract. Wynter acknowledged that his paintings were no longer directly representational but maintained that they were still connected to nature: ‘I used to be a landscape painter. Am I still influenced by landscape? The landscape I live among is bare of houses, trees, people; is dominated by winds, by swift changes of weather, by moods of the sea...These elemental forces enter the painting and lend their qualities without becoming motifs.’ 1 Here, loose, calligraphic marks are overlaid, creating a highly complex surface. The combination of soft and hard-edged brush strokes and the layering of colours produce an image which appears constantly in flux. Wynter’s formal interest in space, structure and movement was shared with his friend Patrick Heron whose Garden Paintings from this period have a similar energy and scale.

Wynter’s abstract technique linked him both to French Tachisme and New York Abstract Expressionism, yet his poetic titles – Forest Frontier, Thicket, Deep Current – continued to reference the Cornish landscape. After 1955, Wynter almost entirely abandoned drawing outdoors and instead took up colour photography, prolifically recording far-off headland and closeup details of undergrowth, woods and streams. The sensation of running water and tangled undergrowth, if not its explicit depiction, can be felt in many of his paintings. Wynter was a keen canoeist and a diver; in fact, he made his own aqualung specifically to explore under water. Many of the mid 1950s paintings have a base colour of black with lighter colours laid on top, echoing the effect of light dancing on water or of the sky glimpsed above when viewed from under water.

Wynter’s adoption of photography reflected a desire to see things differently, a desire which led him to experiment with the hallucinogen mescaline. He made some drawings under its influence, but the effect this had on his work was more of a holistic one. This experimentation reflected Wynter’s unconventional and inquiring mind, and facilitated a marked development, as his work became larger and his artistic vision more fully his own.

1 Tate Gallery, display caption, September 2004

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William Turnbull b.1922 18–1963, 1963 oil on canvas 100 by 74 inches / 25.0 by 187.9 cm signed and titled on the overlap, also signed and titled on stretcher Collections The Artist Waddington Galleries Private Collection, UK Exhibited London, Tate Gallery, William Turnbull: Sculpture and Painting, 15 August–7 October 1973, cat no.102, illus b/w p59 London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull: Paintings 1959–1963, Bronze Sculpture 1954–1958, 24 November– 22 December 2004, cat no.5, illus colour Literature Richard Morphet, William Turnbull, Sculpture and Painting, Tate Gallery, London, 1973, p58, cat no.102, illus b/w p59

In 1962–3 William Turnbull travelled extensively in East Asia.

In Singapore, he was impressed by spectacular views of jungle seen from the air, where an expanse of trees would suddenly be interrupted by the meandering path of a river.

On his return, Turnbull made a series of paintings partly inspired by his travels. These were expansive canvases, made by applying very thin layers of pigment, which were then rubbed back with a cloth. A single streak of unpainted canvas was left, running from top to bottom. This acted as a visual shock, intensifying the impact of the field of colour, in red, blue, yellow, orange and green. These paintings closely relate to those of his American contemporaries Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, both of whom Turnbull had come to know during visits to New York.

In the 2011 film, Beyond Time, Turnbull states, ‘I am very much concerned in sculpture with an object. A painting was an object, the paintings I made were objects, they weren’t illusions and they didn’t refer to something else, they only refer to themselves.’ 1 Turnbull is rare in having produced a significant body of paintings alongside a prominent career as a sculptor. Before 1963, his sculptures had always retained a figurative aspect, albeit increasingly abstracted. In the early 1960s, he made a radical shift. His new painted bronzes were purely abstract and were primarily concerned with colour and the repetition of forms.

This change was echoed in his paintings. It is fascinating to compare the soft-edged, weightless quality of this painting with Turnbull’s heavily incised, stacked bronzes made just a few years earlier.

1 Beyond Time, William Turnbull, 2011, a film by Alex Turnbull and Pete Stern

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Peter Lanyon 1918–1964 Porthmeor Mural, 1962–3 oil on canvas 42 by 380 inches / 106.7 by 965.2 cm signed and dated ‘62, also signed and inscribed with title verso Collections Commissioned by Stanley Seeger, USA Private Collection, UK Exhibited Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery, Peter Lanyon – Paintings, Drawings and Constructions 1937–64, 25 January–4 March 1978, cat no.77, pp42–3 Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, Porthmeor, A Peter Lanyon Mural Rediscovered, 25 October 2008–4 January 2009, pp5–19, illus colour p15 and p36–7 Literature Peter Lanyon Talking, recorded by W.J. Weatherby, The Guardian, 17 May 1962 Art in the West: Peter Lanyon Exhibition–New Mural for USA, Cornishman, 10 January 1963 Andrew Causey, Naum Gabo (intro), Peter Lanyon, Aidan Ellis, Henley-on-Thames, 1971, p65 cat no.175, titled as Delaware River Mural, 1962 Andrew Lanyon, Peter Lanyon 1918–1964, Andrew Lanyon, Newlyn, 1990, p302–9, illus colour Margaret Garlake, Peter Lanyon, Tate Gallery, London, 1998, pp58–59, 63, 72, illus colour Chris Stephens, Peter Lanyon: At The Edge of Landscape, 21 Publishing, London, 2000, p162 Michael Bird, Porthmeor, A Peter Lanyon Mural Rediscovered, Victoria Art Gallery, 2008, p4–21, illus colour p15 and p36–7 Jon Benington, Porthmeor: A Peter Lanyon Mural Rediscovered, Art of England, December 2008, pp24–27, illus colour pp26–27 Illustrated overleaf

In January 1962, Peter Lanyon was commissioned by the American art collector Stanley J. Seeger to paint a mural for his home Bois d’Arc, in Frenchtown, New Jersey. The site, a music studio in a converted barn, required a work nearly ten times as wide as it was high and offered Lanyon the opportunity to paint on a grand scale. After viewing the space at Seeger’s estate at the beginning of 1962 Lanyon returned to St Ives, where he produced three life-size sketches in gouache and indian ink. These were Porthleven, based on his oil in the Tate Gallery collection, Delaware, inspired by the river near Seeger’s home, and Bois d’Art, ‘a lyrical and light design concerned with the surface rhythms which might appear in the final work’.

When Lanyon next visited Seeger in May, he continued work on the drawings and finally Porthleven was selected. At some later stage its title changed to Porthmeor – Cornish for ‘large cove’. Porthmeor Beach is St Ives’ most exposed, north facing beach, and the name also refers to the studio address, No.3 Porthmeor Studios, to which Lanyon had been forced to move to accommodate the mural. Lanyon worked from this drawing, either laid on the floor or pinned to the bottom of the wall, with the mural placed immediately above it. He first declared his work complete in late July and, after a long passage, the mural arrived in New Jersey in November 1962. Seeger requested some changes be made, requiring Lanyon to stay for a fortnight to work on the painting in situ, painting from scaffolding. He returned twice more to work on it, in February and April 1963.

The most notable changes made in America were a ‘warming up’ of the colours – Lanyon wrote to Catherine Viviano that ‘Whereas the light in St Ives is very blue, Stanley’s light is much redder, so I have tried to adjust to that’.1 The composition was also changed to better account for the barn’s existing architecture, its white rafters and tie beams.

The final mural is a vast panorama, which cannot be taken in all at once. As such, it refers directly to the unique geography of St Ives, where, standing on the farthest point of the peninsula, one can see an almost 360 degree view of the sea. Yet, its scope also connects it to the grander, ‘cinematic’ American landscape and the new wave of American painting which advocated art made on an environmental scale. Reading the work in sections, the individual passages of paint are as fluid and subtle as in any of Lanyon’s best oils. Seen as a whole, he has maintained a dazzling sense of rhythm across the picture surface. Aided by a harmonious palette of, very Cornish, blues and greens, highlighted with warmer ochres and brick reds, the eye of the viewer is drawn around the entire surface, out to the edges, back in and out again. Lanyon enjoyed listening to Debussy’s La Mer during his final painting sessions and these musical rhythms seem to have pervaded the final composition.

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In his notes, Lanyon writes that the mural ‘refers to many aspects of the sea, including associated myths. The main appearance of it {is} as a fast moving sea, with cross-shore drift and counter drift.’ 2 In Lanyon’s paintings, a landscape is invariably the compression of multiple perspectives, depicting land and sea from different viewpoints, in different weathers and at different times of day. He sought to portray not only the sensation of being in the landscape, but to create a complete portrait of a place, encompassing personal and collective history, culture and myth. It is clear that the subject of the mural, and its precise symbolic meaning for Lanyon, evolved as the project progressed. Lanyon associated the yellow area on the left with the Golden Fleece and he described the left-hand side of the painting as representing ‘ the past and events across the sea’. 3 He had previously described the presence of a human figure in the original Porthmeor, 1950–1 (Tate Gallery Collection) and suggested that, in the mural too, one could see a vast recumbent female nude. This erotic analogy between land and the female body is itself both ancient and modern and appealed to Lanyon, who was at the time reading Jungian theory.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the collaborative nature of its creation, the final mural is a multi-layered and highly subjective work. This unique project bears comparison with Stanley Spencer’s commission to paint the interior of the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere (1927–1932), an earlier example of private patronage, in which a chapel was conceived as a memorial to a lost brother. In both cases, the specifics of place and the almost self-indulgent nature of the commissions were, ironically, the catalysts for highly autobiographical works of art. The quality and completeness of these murals is such that they have outlived their patrons and transcended their original contexts to become masterpieces of 20th Century British art.

1 Letter to Catherine Viviano, 17 August 1962 2 Andrew Lanyon, Peter Lanyon 1918–1964, Newlyn, 1990 pp302–309 3 In handwritten notes by the artist for Stanley J. Seeger Jr entitled “Porthmeor”mural’

The music room at Bois d’Arc with Porthmeor mural installed image © Sheila Lanyon. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2011

Bob Law 1934–2004 Black Drawing 8.10.65, 1965 pencil on paper 221/4 by 30 inches / 56.5 by 76.2 cm signed and dated verso estate ref. BL1965053 Collections Estate of the Artist Literature David Batchelor, Anthony Bond, Anna Lovatt, Jo Melvin, Giuseppe Panza, Richard Cork, Bob Law A Retrospective, Ridinghouse, London, 2009, p81 illus colour Note This work was reproduced as a lithograph for the Tate Gallery’s poster for Seven Exhibitions, February 1972

In 1958, Bob Law was living in St Ives. While there, he began drawing up to fifty or sixty Field Drawings a day. These were simple, codified drawings, where a perimeter pencil line described both the bounds of the landscape and the outside edges of the paper. Much of the detail in these landscape drawings was shifted outwards, emptying out the centre of the image. These works had a connection to primitive images and children’s drawings, and perhaps also to the work of Alfred Wallis, all of which present aerial and side-on views simultaneously. They are also reminiscent of the works of Alan Davie, who had similarly developed his own private language of signs and symbols.

In 1960, Law made his first Impossible Drawing. Developing directly from his Field Drawings, Law now reduced the image solely to the boundary line, accompanied by the date on which it was made. Drawing continued to be a daily activity and these drawings, (influenced in part by American Colour Field painting), drew attention to their own making – by referring to the limits of the work and emphasising the date.

The logical counter-balance to these ‘open’ drawings was to then make a series of ‘closed’ drawings, such as Black Drawing 8.10.65.

Here, the bounded space is entirely filled in with marks. Law makes short work of covering the page, but does not venture into artful mark-making, doing just enough to complete the task.

We are invited to think of the repetitive, physical act of his hand as it crosses the paper, and consequently there is a certain anxious tension present in the final image. Law made many drawings at the time, but this work is a rare example of the few that now survive.

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Leon Kossoff b.1926 Untitled (Self Portrait), c1965 oil on board 11 by 9 inches / 27.9 by 22.9 cm Collections Marlborough Fine Art, London Private Collection, UK Exhibited possibly London, Marlbrough Fine Art, Leon Kossoff, April 1968, cat no.15

This early self-portrait dates from the mid 1960s, when Leon Kossoff was using not only brushes, but knives and even his fingers, to move paint around the picture surface. As historian Frances Spalding succinctly describes, ‘[The subject] is treated with restless attack, the paint dripped, dragged, flicked or coagulated, leaving the impression that the surface of the canvas is still moving, heaving and re-forming like boiling tar.’ 1 One is left with the sense of an image chased and pinned down, a perfect visual metaphor for the fleeting, slippery nature of appearances.

By foregrounding the materiality of the paint, Kossoff creates a work of art where the image is inseparable from the means and labour of its making. These works were as much like sculptures as paintings, and sculptures still forming, as the very thickness of the paint meant they could take up to a decade to dry. In his introduction to Kossoff’s Whitechapel Gallery exhibition in 1972, the playwright David Mercer highlights the artist’s ‘wilful use’ of oil painting, ‘a decaying tradition’ which adds to the sense of mournfulness he sees in the work. The tradition of painting certainly brings with it a wealth of art historical references. Kossoff, like Auerbach, has always made regular pilgrimages to the National Gallery and his self-portrait is heavy with the weight of earlier self-portraits by Cézanne and Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Bomberg (his teacher).

Kossoff’s highly subjective approach to painting could be misconstrued as inward looking. But he does not paint to showcase his own talent so much as to interrogate and engage with the world around him. The repetition of his motifs only underscores the sense of constant evolution and the necessity to continue painting: ‘…we are dealing not with a few flashes of insight, but with a whole view, a long-term, up-to-the-elbows relationship with reality, the reality of the paint, the reality of the image or subject…’ 2 1 Frances Spalding, British Art Since 1900, Thames and Hudson, London, 1986, p164 2 Anne Seymour, Leon Kossoff, Anthony D’Offay exhibition catalogue, 1988, p10

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Peter Phillips b.1939 3 x 9 Rotation, 1975 pencil on paper 16 by 35 inches / 40.6 by 88.9 cm signed and dated Collections Private Collection, UK

After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1962, Peter Phillips spent two years in the United States. Driving across the country with Allen Jones, he was exposed to both American consumer culture and folk art. Images of fun fairs, pin-ups, game boards and comic books all later appeared in his work. By the mid 1960s Phillips had begun to favour commercial painting techniques over traditional oils, at first using spray cans, then airbrushes on large-scale canvases. His work invariably featured a number of disparate compositional elements. In the catalogue for the 1964 New Generation exhibition, he states, ‘My paintings are multi-assemblages of spatial, iconographical and technical factors which combine to make one object….I’m basically interested in painting and not just a presentation of imagery.’

This multi-part drawing, dated 1974, is from the Mosaikbild series. Phillips’ adoption of such a precise pencil drawing technique was in direct response to the emergence of a new wave of Photorealist artists. Fragments and grid motifs had previously featured in his painting, but this was the first time that individual images were broken up across the picture surface, interpenetrating one another.

Here, Phillips clearly revels in the representation of wet and shiny surfaces. The aesthetic similarities between the images, the high contrast and photographic detail, are drawn out by their identical rendering in monochrome. Unlike in a painting, Phillips was able to rearrange the individually drawn squares before deciding on a final composition. The juxtaposition and equation of women’s bodies with shiny cars and magnified images of food mimics the experience of reading a magazine.

This is a classic Pop subject, reminiscent of earlier paintings by James Rosenquist such as I Love You with My Ford, 1961. The use of grids can be found in other art from the 1970s by, for example, Chuck Close and David Hockney.

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Kenneth Martin 1905–1984 Chance and Order 22 (Black), 1977–8 oil on canvas 48 by 48 inches / 121.9 by 121.9 cm Collections Waddington & Tooth Galleries, London Alex Bernstein Private Collection, UK Exhibited London, Waddington and Tooth Galleries, Kenneth Martin: Recent Works, 1–24 June 1978, cat no.4, illus b/w p11 and as cover image New Haven, Yale Centre for British Art, Kenneth Martin, 18 April–17 June 1979, cat no.70, illus b/w p87 Literature Kenneth Martin, Chance and Order, The Sixth William Townsend Lecture, Waddington Galleries, London, 1979, cat no.14, the preparatory drawing for this painting, illus b/w p12

Kenneth and Mary Martin were key figures in a new wave of British Constructivist art which began in the 1950s. Inspired by the theories of the American artist Charles Biederman, their art carried on from the abstract art made in Hampstead in the 1930s by Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Russian émigré Naum Gabo.

Naturally occuring proportional systems and rhythms underpin Kenneth Martin’s geometrical art. The composition of this painting, and others in the Chance and Order series, was entirely determined by a drawing prior to its execution on canvas. On paper, a square was marked out with a grid and numbered along all sides, and at each intersection. The same numbers were then written on pieces of paper and selected at random from a box or bag. Numbers were drawn in pairs – the first two numbers gave the coordinates for a single line, the second pair would decide a double line, the third pair a triple line and so on.

Further rules determine how lines behave as they cross (whether they cross under or over, or stop, or prompt the creation of another parallel line). The drawing associated with this painting shows that Martin selected 24 pairs of numbers, working from a single line up to a line of eight, three times.

Each painting in the series was governed by its own predetermined system of rules. By placing formal restrictions on his practice, Martin sought to create a ‘universal language’ which minimised the individual expression of the artist in favour of naturally derived patterns. In practice, the number of drawings Martin generated far exceeded the number of finished paintings.

Despite the conditions Martin created to limit his influence, the selection of which drawings to make into paintings was made on aesthetic grounds and the scale and manner of their making remained within his control. The formal beauty of these paintings depends then upon both Martin’s systematic approach and his refined aesthetic sensibility.

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Frank Auerbach b.1931 Portrait of Christopher Dark, 1977 chalk and charcoal on paper 29 by 22 inches / 73.7 by 55.9 cm signed and dated lower left and lower right Collections Miss Lloyd, London with Marlborough Fine Art, London Private Collection, UK Exhibited Venice, The British Pavilion, Frank Auerbach, Paintings and Drawings 1977–1985, XLII Venice Biennale, June–September 1986, The British Arts Council, cat no.1, illus b/w p18 Hamburg, Kunstverein Hamburg, Frank Auerbach, 18 October– 23 November 1986, cat no.38, illus b/w p73, touring to: Essen, Museum Folkwang Essen, 16 January–1 March 1987 London, Royal Academy of Arts, Frank Auerbach, Paintings and Drawings 1954–2001, 14 September–12 December 2001, cat no.60 Literature William Feaver, Frank Auerbach Catalogue Raisonné, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, p281, cat no.384, illus colour p281

Christopher Dark worked with Marlborough Galleries before moving to New York and changing career. Auerbach made four finished drawings of Dark; the present work is not only the first, but arguably the most successful. The second of the four drawings shows Dark from a similar angle, while in the third and fourth he is facing in the opposite direction.

In the early stages of Auerbach’s career his graphic work was distinct from his oil paintings. However, by the early 1970s his drawings and paintings were no longer separable. The multiple sittings that took place for this drawing reflect the continuous and repetitive process by which Auerbach has created all of his work. While drawing, he would frequently have books on the floor open at the portrait heads of Dürer, Hals or Rembrandt.

He seems to have regarded these artists as setting a standard, and his working process implies a desire to match up to them.

Auerbach might take weeks to finish one portrait drawing. If the drawing was not completed in a single day, he would scrub it back to a grey blur, to begin work again at the next sitting.

Often, he rubbed out and reworked the image so severely that the paper would begin to disintegrate. The finished image contains visible shadows left behind from earlier sittings and a final strong and decisive line drawing captured on a single day.

Catherine Lampert, Norman Rosenthal and Isabel Carlisle, Frank Auerbach, Paintings and Drawings 1954–2001, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2001, cat no.106, p137 illus b/w

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Frank Auerbach b.1931 Gerda Boehm (Leaning on her Hand), 1980 oil on board 18 by 22 inches / 45.7 by 55.9 cms Collections Marlborough Gallery Inc., New York Private Collection, Canada Private Collection, UK Exhibited New York, Marlborough Gallery Inc., Frank Auerbach, Recent Paintings and Drawings, 2–30 April 1982, cat no.10, illus b/w p21 Literature William Feaver, Frank Auerbach Catalogue Raisonné, Rizzoli, New York, cat no.442, illus colour p287

‘Viewed obliquely Boehm’s diamond-shaped cranium and handsome features invite trust, but if we look again, from another vantage point, we see a beseeching, pinched carapace, and then a subdued gamine, gently dozing.’ 1 Gerda Boehm is Auerbach’s older cousin, and his last living relative. He painted Gerda between the years 1961 and 1982.

These paintings were often painted in close proximity, and in silence, reflecting his intimate relationship with the sitter.

‘Like de Kooning’s women, Auerbach’s are almost unrecognisable to us as individuals and suggest that the intimate emotional involvement he had with his sitters somehow makes them less, rather than more, recognisable; private, even abstracted.

Perhaps they are only fully recognisable to the artist himself.

The senses they convey include everything but precise visual reality. It is not always possible to distinguish between Rembrandt’s Saskia and Hendrickje, for they are projections of his image of womanhood.’2 In Gerda Boehm (Leaning on her Hand), Auerbach has utilised an ossature of black lines to form a likeness of the sitter. They delineate the outer edges of Gerda’s face, tracing her eyes, nose, mouth, direction of arms and the tilt of her chin. These wet black lines are applied last of all, sinking into the underlying layers of wet colour, while simultaneously absorbing colours into them, or displanting pigment to either side. Auerbach’s relish in the expressionistic qualities of paint is showcased here. In contrast to his earlier paintings, in which the paint surface is built up to a thick accretion, this portrait demonstrates quite the opposite.

In his later works Auerbach has preferred to start each studio sitting by filing down the paint layers that had been applied the previous day.

1 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition catalogue, Frank Auerbach, September–December 2001, p27 2 ibid. p15

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Craigie Aitchison 1926–2009 Crucifixion IV, 1982 oil on canvas 20 by 24 inches / 50.8 by 61.0 cm Collections The Artist Private Collection, UK

Crucifixion scenes have a long and distinguished history in Western art, from the earliest Byzantine and Gothic works to late-Renaissance masterpieces by Michelangelo and El Greco.

Aitchison’s treatment of the Crucifixion is markedly unique, positioning him as one of the very few British artists of the 20th Century to paint convincing Christian paintings.

Unashamedly resistant to being tied down to a school or genre, Aitchison first tackled the subject of the Crucifixion while he was studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1958. The result, a tiny, jewel-like Crucifixion, was the artist’s interpretation of a work by Georges Rouault and was painted on a long piece of Essex board. One of Craigie’s art tutors at the time was to comment, ‘It’s a very serious subject and much too big a subject for you to tackle.’ 1 These words were all the impetus Aitchison needed to pursue a subject matter that would occupy him for the rest of his career.

The Crucifixions form an important and intensely personal part of Aitchison’s work. Their precise location is the view of Holy Island from the slope on Arran, the site where his parents’ ashes were scattered.

In the 1980s, Aitchison developed the motif with the introduction of animals or birds, enhancing the symbolic nature of the paintings. The presence of animals replaces that of saints in medieval interpretations of the subject.

Crucifixion IV depicts a ram-like creature looking up at the cross. The ram rests silently in the moonlight, contemplating the brutality of the event and inviting our stark sorrow.

1 The artist in conversation with Andrew Lambirth, Craigie Aitchison, Timothy Taylor Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1998, unpaginated

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Craigie Aitchison 1926–2009 Boy Seated and Crucifixion, 1985 oil on canvas 671/2 by 561/2 inches / 171.5 by 143.5 cm Collections The Artist Private Collection, London

During the 1980s, while continuing with his Crucifixion paintings, Aitchison also extended his repertoire to portraits.

In his portraiture, Aitchison was ‘at pains to stress the individuality of the sitter and he would demonstrate each sitter’s unique character by intensely focusing on their appearance, hairstyle, shape of face and colourful clothing’. 1 In Boy Seated and Crucifixion the artist presents an unconventional approach to the Crucifixion, combining a contemporary portrait with the traditional religious motif. In front of the Crucifixion, the boy is stripped down to a naked, serene and contemplative figure. His eyes are fixed on the crucifix as the colour bands in the foreground support his left hand.

‘Colours look much better against black skin,’ 2 Aitchison explains, and here we see the colours have been accordingly subtracted from the Crucifixion and transposed to the vicinity of the anonymous black model. It is interesting to compare this painting with Crucifixion IV (see previous page), which has an altogether different mood. Boy Seated and Crucifixion is painted on a dazzlingly yellow ground, which, unlike in other examples that use bands of colour, here saturates the entire picture plane. It is plausible that the yellow implies the Crucifixion is taking place during the day, as opposed to Aitchison’s more conventional setting of the Crucifixion at night.

1

2

Andrew Gibbon-Williams, Craigie – The Art of Craigie Aitchison, Canongate, Edinburgh, 1996, p118 Introduction to exhibition catalogue, Craigie Aitchison Paintings 1953–1981, Arts Council (touring), 1982

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Tony Bevan b.1951 Head and Neck, 1995 charcoal and acrylic on canvas 37 by 33 inches / 94.0 by 83.8 cm signed and dated verso Collections Private Collection, Italy Exhibited London, Theo Waddington Fine Art Ltd, Tony Bevan, Recent Paintings, 16 October–16 November, 1996, pl 12 illus colour Note A closely related oil, Head, 1995, is in the Tate Gallery Collection.

Tony Bevan’s fascination with portraiture can be traced back to his student days when he first came across Baroque sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s highly expressive ‘character heads’.

During the 1990s he pursued the subject obsessively. In Head and Neck, the monumental head exists within a void, reaching up into a dark expanse of deep violet. Bevan uses portraiture as a means to explore the isolation of human experience, and most of his paintings show a single figure (most often Bevan himself) with gaze averted, adding to a sense of emotional detachment.

Bevan’s self-portraits convey an individual subjective experience, as seen in the paintings of Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon, but they are also concerned with how to construct and perceive this experience. In Head and Neck, the red ‘flow lines’ that cut violently across the face expose the physiological functioning beneath the skin’s surface. These raw, broken lines emphasise the interior life of the subject, but at the same time present the viewer with an increasingly abstract conception of the portrait.

They are not fluid, but graphic, and significant for their formal value, providing reference points that structure the canvas.

Like Jackson Pollock, Bevan works horizontally, a decision which means that he must crawl over the surface of the canvas, leaving behind traces of his own presence, creating, in his own words, ‘body prints’. Yet these disruptions to the surface only serve to expose the materiality of the marked and textured canvas. The deeply inscribed charcoal lines and thickly applied paint, while describing form, simultaneously assert their own physicality, encouraging a deeply visceral experience of the painting.

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Leon Kossoff b.1926 King’s Cross, Spring II, 1998 oil on board 58 by 52 inches / 147.3 by 132.1 cm Collections Private Collection, Australia Exhibited New York, Mitchell-Innes and Nash, Leon Kossoff, 11 April– 20 May 2000, cat no.98, illus colour, touring to: London, Annely Juda Fine Art, 1 June–22 July 2000 Sydney, Annandale Galleries, Leon Kossoff, 21 March– 12 May 2001

‘London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my bloodstream.

It’s always moving, the skies, the streets, the buildings.’ 1 Leon Kossoff was born in Islington and, apart from evacuation during the war and four years’ military service in Europe, he has only ever lived and worked in the city. He has painted some areas (Shoreditch, Hackney, Kilburn) over and over again, focusing on places of intense human activity and flux – train stations, building and demolition sites, hospital wards and swimming pools. He began painting at King’s Cross in 1997 and this is one of a series of monumental paintings produced in a two-year period.

Kossoff makes extensive use of charcoal drawings during a project, working in situ at different times of the day and in all weathers. Some of these drawings show King’s Cross from further back, across the Euston Road, and these appear to revel in the flow of people and traffic moving around the station’s surrounding roads. The resulting large-scale oils focus on the station’s entrance, where commuters enter the train station at ground level, or descend steps into the underground.

Once back in the studio, Kossoff works directly from his drawings. Paintings are often scraped back, to be re-painted, (or abandoned), but invariably the final image is the result of a single sitting lasting several hours. His King’s Cross charcoals only vaguely suggest the human figures that appear in the final paintings. These are developed in the studio, and inevitably borrow characteristics from the portraits that are present there.

The figures in this painting echo those from a series made almost twenty years earlier at Kilburn Underground Station. Then, as here, two figures cross the canvas in one direction and two in the other. Kossoff uses the colour of the figures’ clothes to add rhythm to his composition and, as with a Lowry painting, there is almost always one figure dressed in red and one in blue.

Looking at the series as a whole, one can see that Kossoff’s palette has changed in response to the seasons. The paintings from October 1997 contain a range of browns and blues, while the paintings from spring, like this one, have more ochre and white, giving the impression of a golden light bathing the station building. By summer, the sun seems blinding as even more white paint is introduced, and in autumn 1998, one year later, the blues and browns have returned, completing the colour cycle.

It is his close observation of a place over long periods of time that gives Kossoff’s work such resonance, creating paintings that sing both of history and an insistent present.

1 Leon Kossoff, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, exhibition catalogue, 2009, p26

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Boyle Family Study of a Demolition Site, Docklands, London, 1990–91 mixed media, resin and fibreglass 80 by 60 inches / 203.2 x 152.4 cm signed and titled verso Collections Private Collection, UK Exhibited London, Runkel-Hue-Williams, Boyle Family, Docklands Series – London, 31 May–5 July 1991, p23, illus colour

Bomb and demolition sites hold a special significance for the Boyle Family. Ever since the two founding members, Joan and Mark, first met in 1957, the sites were a place of pilgrimage to facilitate and create an art ‘that does not exclude anything as a potential subject’. The arrival of the artists’ two children, Sebastian and Georgia, born in 1962 and 1963 respectively, completed the family (and artistic) group.

‘The old bomb sites were wild places where houses had been blasted away during the war. The surface of London was pockmarked with such sites and in the early sixties, when they started to rebuild, the first move was usually to knock down everything that still stood around them. To us it seemed like a kind of alternative London where people could be free; and in these places, in our rags and with no place else to work, like refugees we picked through the rubbish and made pictures and sculpture.’ 1 In the early 1990s, the Boyle Family returned to the subject of demolition sites, this time at Greenwich: ‘… the Dockland Series takes us all back to the bomb sites we spent most of our waking hours on in the late fifties and early sixties. Only this site is on a totally different scale. In the sixties near our house, it was a domestic demolition. Now we’re talking about an urban wasteland. A vast area of mud littered with major industrial debris, shattered blocks of concrete, rusting girders, half buried detritus, innumerable fire sites, charred timbers and vast sheets of rusting steel…’ 2 Unlike the earlier works of late 1950s and 1960s, which were constructed of junk and debris, the present work contains little found material – resins are used to make a unique threedimensional cast of the ground and this is later meticulously coloured with paint, using photographs for reference. The Boyle Family’s practice combines a powerful conceptual framework with the haunting physical and visual presence of the work itself.

By re-framing the surface of the earth, without intervention, they suggest new ways of seeing ourselves and our environment.

1 Mark Boyle stated in, London, Runkel-Hue-Williams, Boyle Family Dockland Series – London, May–July 1991, pp4–5 2 ibid. p8

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A

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Offer Waterman & Co Offer Waterman & Co was established in 1996. As dealers and agents in Modern British Art, we handle the finest paintings, drawings and sculpture from the 20th Century onwards. The gallery works closely with private, institutional and corporate collectors from across the UK and internationally.

Left Robyn Denny b.1930 Place 6, 1959 oil on canvas 84 by 72 inches / 213.4 by 182.9 cm Reg Butler 1913–1981 Study for Figure Bending II, 1959 bronze height 23 inches / 58.4 cm

In addition to our specialist knowledge of 20th Century British art, we have an in-depth understanding of the art market as a whole. Our expertise and experience enables us to assist clients with the acquisition of American and European Modern and Contemporary art.

Overleaf left Kenneth Armitage 1916–2002 Flat Standing Figure, 1952 bronze height 12 inches / 30.5 cm

We are always looking to acquire important paintings, drawings and sculpture and will purchase, or consign, directly from private and corporate collectors. We are interested to hear from current or future collectors and all enquiries are treated in the strictest confidence.

Overleaf right Ben Nicholson 1894–1982 May 1955 (Carved Forms and Indigo), 1955 oil and pencil on canvas 18 by 24 inches / 45.7 by 60.9 cm

In addition to maintaining a wide inventory of 20th Century British Art, our services to clients include: Discreet negotiation for purchase or sale on behalf of private, corporate and institutional collections.

Lucie Rie 1902–1995 Large Bowl, c1965 stoneware diameter 131/2 inches

Confidential advice on the purchase of art at auction.

Valuations for the purpose of sale, insurance, probate, estate and inheritance tax.

Page 78 Frank Auerbach b.1931 Portrait of Christopher Dark, 1977 chalk and charcoal on paper 29 by 22 inches / 74 by 56 cm

Advisory work for funding bodies.

Curatorial services including: research, cataloguing, conservation, framing, display and lighting advice.

Contact Offer Waterman James Gould Rebecca Beach Polly Checker Imogen Haines

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11 Langton Street London SW10 0JL +44 (0)20 7351 0068 info@waterman.co.uk www.waterman.co.uk

The gallery is open Monday to Friday, 10am to 6.30pm, and Saturday by appointment

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A

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Modern British Artists

Adams

Davie

Hoyland

Rego

Agar

Deacon

Jackson

Rie

Aitchison

Denny

John

Riley

Allen

Dobson

Jones

Roberts

Andrews

Doig

Kennington

Scott

Armitage

Feiler

Kitaj

Scully

Auerbach

Fell

Kossoff

Self

Ayres

Flanagan

Landy

Sickert

Bacon

Freud

Lanyon

Smith

Barns-Graham

Frink

Lin

Spencer

Bell

Frost

Lowry

Sutherland

Bevan

Gabo

McWilliam

Tilson

Blake

Gaudier-Brzeska

Martin

Tower

Blow

Gertler

Meadows

Trevelyan

Bomberg

Gill

Meninsky

Tucker

Boyle Family

Ginner

Milow

Tunnard

Bratby

Golding

Minton

Turnbull

Burra

Gore

Moore

Uglow

Butler

Grant

Moss

Underwood

Caro

Hamilton

Munnings

Vaughan

Caulfield

Hepworth

Nash

Wadsworth

Chadwick

Heron

Nevinson

Wallis

Clough

Hillier

Nicholson

Wilding

Cohen

Hilton

Paolozzi

Willing

Coker

Hitchens

Pasmore

Wood

Collins

Hockney

Piper

Wyndham-Lewis

Coper

Hodgkin

Potter

Wynter

Craxton

Hodgkins

Redpath

Yeats

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Reg Butler 1913–1981 Maquette for the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner, 1951–2

Kenneth Armitage 1916–2002 Figure Lying on Its Side, 1957

Literature continued Reg Butler, Zum Entwurf das Denkmal des Unbekannten Politischen Gefangenen, Das Kunstwerk, Heft 2/xi, August 1957, pp34–5

Exhibited continued London, Barbican Art Gallery, Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties, 31 January–14 April 2002, cat no.4, illus, p66, another cast

Peter Selz, New Images of Man, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959, pp41–4, illus b/w, p42 Robert Melville, In Connection with the Sculpture of Reg Butler, Motif 6, Spring 1961, p31 ppl12–13, Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner photomontage, 1953, illus b/w A.M. Hammacher, Modern English Sculpture, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, pp32–4, cat no.108, illus b/w, this cast Robert Goldwater, What is Modern Sculpture? Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1969, p127 Herbert Read, Modern Sculpture A Concise History, Thames and Hudson, London, 1984, cat no.215, illus b/w, this cast

Literature Roland Penrose, Kenneth Armitage: Artists of our Time Vol. VII, Bodensee-Verlag, Amriswil, Switzerland, 1960, cat no.19, illus b/w, pl19, another cast Charles Spencer, Kenneth Armitage, Academy Editions, London, 1973, illus b/w, p9, another cast Tamsyn Woollcombe (ed.) in association with the artist, Kenneth Armitage: Life and Work, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, London, 1997, p44, KA67, illus b/w, p47, another cast

Penelope Curtis, Modern British Sculpture from the Collection, Tate Gallery, Liverpool, p73, another cast Richard Calvocoressi, Public Sculpture in the 1950s, British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century, Whitechapel exhibition catalogue, pp134–153, Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner photomontage, 1953 illus Robert Burstow, Butler’s Competition Project for a Monument to The Unknown Political Prisoner abstraction and Cold War politics, Art History,Vol.12, No.4, December 1989, pp472–96, cat no.32,33, another cast Robert Burstow, The Geometry of Fear, Herbert Read and British Modern Sculpture after the Second World War, Herbert Read, A British Vision of World Art, ed. Benedict Read and David Thistlewood, Leeds City Art Galleries in association with The Henry Moore Foundation and Lund Humphries, London, 1993, pp121, cat no.137, p123, illus b/w, another cast Robert Burstow, The Limits of Modernist Art as a ‘Weapon of the Cold War’: Reassessing the Unknown Patron of the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 20, No.1, 1997, pp68–60 Axel Lapp, The Freedom of Sculpture: The Sculpture of Freedom, the International Competition for a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner, London 1951–3, Sculpture Journal, Vol.2, 1998, pp113–22 Margaret Garlake, The Sculpture of Reg Butler, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Hertfordshire, 2006, cat no.115, fig 80, illus b/w

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Research Rebecca Beach, Polly Checker and James Gould Design Anne Sørensen Photography Simon Bevan and Prudence Cuming Associates Printing Butler Tanner & Dennis Fine Art Services

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