Offer Waterman 25 Years: Modern and Contemporary British Art

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25 years

Modern & Contemporary British Art

17 St George Street London W1s 1fj t +44 (0)20 7042 3233 w waterman.co.uk

Contents

Foreword

Artworks Cat nos.1 – 41

Gallery information

Additional cataloguing

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6 – 97 99 100 – 101

Index

103

Colophon

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Foreword

I find it hard to believe that 25 years have passed since I started my business in the basement of a friend’s gallery, in Park Walk, Chelsea.

My part-time assistant and I had only a Compaq 386, dial-up internet, and a fax machine to receive regional auction catalogues. How times have changed…

Within four years, I had expanded my team and moved a few roads over to a larger gallery on Langton Street. Now, the gallery is in its third incarnation on St George Street, Mayfair. Over the past quarter-century, I have watched my gallery grow as the art world has evolved. In this increasingly digital world, when collectors buy on a whim online, I still believe there is no substitute for first-hand inspection, thorough research and connoisseurship.

The art world is exciting because it is an inexhaustible source of innovation, inspiration, and learning. When I started out, I never could have imagined the degree to which I would handle the finest examples of Modern and Contemporary British painting and sculpture. Even today, each new acquisition thrills me just as much as the first.

The relationships I have established over the years with artists, collectors, curators and museum directors have informed and broadened my taste and knowledge. This anniversary catalogue, containing a selection of our latest acquisitions and notable highlights, is not only a tribute to the growth and development of the gallery, but also to each person who has shaped and added colour to the last 25 years.

A business can only flourish as a result of collaborative effort. For this reason, I feel truly fortunate to have worked with a professional and long-standing team, consisting of Rebecca Beach, Emily Drablow, Stella Vasileiadou, and Grima Quintana. My gratitude to each one of them is immense.

– offer waterman

october 2021

Opposite: Installation photograph of Pegasus, 1954 by William Turnbull and Seated Figure, 1954 by William Scott in the gallery.

Photography: Mark Dalton, April 2021.

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1 Duncan Grant 1885–1978 Vanessa Bell in Profile c.1911 pencil and oil on newspaper 12 1/4 by 11 1/8 inches / 31.1 by 28.3 cm initialled ‘D.G.’ and inscribed ‘V.B.’ collections Anthony d’Offay, London Davis & Langdale Company, New York Mark Lancaster, USA exhibitions New York, Davis & Langdale Company in association with Anthony d’Offay, British Drawings and Watercolours 1889 – 1947, 2 November – 1 December 1984, cat no.12, not illus London, Tate Gallery, The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, 4 November 1999 – 30 January 2000, cat no.158 touring to: San Marino, The Huntington, 4 March – 30 April 2000 New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, 20 May – 2 September 2000

Duncan Grant was introduced to Vanessa Bell in the autumn of 1905 at ‘The Friday Club’ 1 by his cousin, Pippa Strachey. The connection between the two artists was instant and Grant quickly entered Bell’s close circle of family and friends, who would later come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. Their creative partnership was to last for more than 50 years and at one point their relationship developed into a brief romantic affair. Over this long period, Grant produced numerous drawings and paintings of Bell, beginning with this work from 1911, the earliest surviving image of her, and ending in an image of her on her deathbed, in 1961.

By 1911, Grant had already become one of the key figures of Bloomsbury: he had exhibited at ‘The Friday Club’ in February, over the summer was invited by Roger Fry to create murals to decorate the dining room of Borough Polytechnic, and by November had moved close to Bell, at 38 Brunswick Square, where he lived with John Maynard Keynes, and Bell’s siblings, Adrian and Virginia Stephen (later Woolf).

Although it was not uncommon for the artist to create drawings on newspaper, it appears that this was his only portrait on this support.

Here he has used a torn, creased page from The Times newspaper, dated 7 August 1911, with the headline ‘The Franco-German Negotiations’, to execute this closely cropped view of Bell’s head. The sitter is depicted in profile, the artist’s strong pencil line tracing the outline of her distinctive nose, full lips, large chin, thick neck and elegant Edwardian hairstyle. Detail is centred around the sitter’s face, her skin brought to life by ochre and green tones and features framed by maroon rhythmical brushstrokes.

The present work is a testimony to Grant’s extraordinarily wide knowledge of European art obtained through his early travels to Italy and France. Most obviously, it is a direct reference to one of the most celebrated Renaissance works of Piero della Francesca, the portrait of Federico da Montefeltro, of which Grant produced a faithful copy during one of his many visits to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.2 Meanwhile, Grant’s colour palette reveals the strong French Post-Impressionist and Fauvist influences of Cézanne and Matisse, whose work the artist was first introduced to while studying in Paris, between 1906 – 07.

1 The Friday Club, founded by Vanessa Bell, held its first meeting and exhibition in 1905.

After 1912 the Club was replaced by the Grafton Group, organised by Roger Fry. 2 Grant’s copy of the Federico da Montefeltro portrait is now housed in the collection of Charleston Trust, Sussex

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2 Ben Nicholson 1894–1982 Vineyard in Winter, Cortivallo 1923 oil on canvas 22 1/4 by 24 3/8 inches / 56.5 by 62 cm indistinctly signed, dated and inscribed ‘vine…’ on the canvas overlap collections Lady Aurea MacLeod Lord Carlisle Crane Kalman Gallery, London Dr Frank Rentsch, acquired from the above in November 1996 Thence by descent exhibitions London, Paterson Gallery, 4th Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, 26 November – 22 December 1923, cat no.10, as Vineyard in Winter London, Crane Kalman Gallery, Ben Nicholson and Two Wives – Winifred Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, 21 March – 4 May 1996, as Cortivallo

This remarkable early work by Ben Nicholson depicts a view of Cortivallo, a village in Switzerland nearby to Villa Capriccio, the artist’s home overlooking Lake Lugano, where he and his wife Winifred spent their winters from 1920 to 1923.1 While at this time Nicholson was averaging one or two paintings a day, only the present work and another wintery landscape of Cortivallo in the Tate collection have survived. That the artist destroyed or painted over a great number of works that he was dissatisfied with suggests that he was particularly happy with the outcome of this painting.

In this period, Nicholson travelled a lot, back and forth between Cumberland, London and passing through Paris on his way to and from Switzerland. In Paris, he encountered firsthand works by Cézanne, Derain, Picasso, Braque and Matisse that he had previously only seen in reproduction. Inspired, Nicholson assembled a scrapbook of photographs of their work, and pinned Derain’s paintings to the wall of his Lugano studio. The faceted brushstrokes and rough modelling of forms that characterise Vineyard in Winter, Cortivallo recall Cézanne’s paintings of the 1880s and 1890s, especially those of Mont Sainte-Victoire, while the top left-hand mountain form exhibits a Matisse-esque use of colour. Another artist whose impact is felt here is British artist David Bomberg, who, having abandoned the hard-edged, fragmented Vorticist aesthetic, was at this moment beginning to develop a gestural painterly language centred around the landscape. Indeed, Nicholson had invited Bomberg to Lugano the year prior to executing the present work, and, while in Switzerland, the pair embarked on painting expeditions, exchanging ideas and working en plein air.

In this painting, there is a real impression of quiet. Devoid of figures, human presence is suggested by the houses in the foreground, the small, isolated white house at the foothill of the mountain and the cultivated vineyard in the centre of the composition. While the grey clouds, silvery lake, snowcapped mountains and barren landscape conveys a wintery state of hibernation, the image is pregnant with expectation, for the clouds to part, the sun to come out and the leaves on the trees and the grapes on the vines to flourish.

1 The artist in a letter to John Summerson dated 4 January 1944, cited in Jeremy Lewison, Ben Nicholson, Phaidon, Oxford, 1991, p8

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3 Alfred Wallis 1855–1942 The White House c.1925–35 oil on cardboard 9 1/4 by 12 1/4 inches / 23.5 by 31.1 cm collections Dr William Burton Dallas Doxford Thence by descent to Doris Doxford (sister of the above) Crane Kalman Gallery, London, acquired from the above in March 1999 Charles Wood II, USA, acquired from the above in 2001 exhibitions Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Two Painters: Works by Alfred Wallis and James Dixon, 1 September – 21 November 1999, ex cat

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The White House shows a distinctive house in Porthmeor Square, St Ives, which today is called ‘Norway House’, but is also cited in Alfred Wallis’ titles and correspondence as the ‘Old House’ and ‘Hold House’. The building remains largely unchanged and is easily found in the old part of the town known as The Downalong, a peninsula with Porthmeor Beach to the north and the harbour to the south. While Wallis is widely understood to have painted from memory, in fact, this house was clearly visible from the doorway of his cottage at No.3, Back Road West, where he lived from 1912 until a year before he died. The unusual features of the building – the high steps leading to the front door, which sit oddly between ground and first floors; the second door to the left and angled wall of the adjoining building – make it easy to spot in Wallis’ paintings; see, for example, the Tate’s St Ives, c.1928, and White House and Cottages, the Old House, Porthmeor Square, St Ives, 1930 – 32, from the Kettle’s Yard collection in Cambridge.

While several pictures of this house assume an aerial perspective and include details of the wider town, here Wallis adopts a side-on view, the picture very much a portrait of this particular building. The houses are arranged along a baseline, as one might find in drawings by young children, where the ground is represented by a line along the bottom of the page and the sky by a strip of colour along the top. Wallis had a strong aversion to the elements in his pictures overlapping. He would rather tilt or flip the perspective in multiple directions than have things touching or covering one another, to the point, as we see in The White House, that the sky does not meet the ground. As such, each object within a picture – boat, house, tree, fish – occupies its own, selfcontained space and carries a strong symbolic charge.

Wallis painted on anything he could find, usually flattened cardboard boxes and other packaging, sometimes wooden boxes or occasionally domestic objects like a pair of bellows. Only rarely would he work on an artist’s canvas and even these usually came to him second-hand. Wallis’ recycling of materials reflected the many years he spent as a rag and bone man, finding intrinsic value in objects others had discarded. It is important to note that while his supports were made from scraps, Wallis consciously crafted each one himself, deliberately making unusual shapes (see the Tate’s diamond-shaped Schooner under the Moon, 1934 – 35) and habitually rounding off the corners of rectangular pieces of card as he has done here.

4 Cedric Morris 1889–1982 Matinée des Canards 1927 oil on board 32 3/4 by 47 1/2 inches / 83.2 by 120.7 cm signed and dated collections Lady Cecilia McKenna Blond Fine Art, London Mark Lancaster, USA exhibitions London, Royal Society of British Artists, Daily Express Young Artists’ Exhibition, June 1927, cat no.128

In 1927, Cedric Morris and his partner Lett Haines moved to London, having spent much of early 1920s in Paris. As such, Matinée des Canards will have been painted at their new home and studio at 32 Great Ormond Street, Bloomsbury. By this point, Morris’ career was in the ascendancy and he soon found himself invited to participate in many of the most influential group exhibitions of the period.

Bird paintings are one of the most important subjects in Morris’ oeuvre. He completed over 50 oils of birds over the course of his career, more than 30 of which were painted in the 1920s. In the early 1920s, Morris’ fascination with this subject was enriched by his friendship with ornithologist and plantsman Collingwood Ingram, who he joined on numerous plant-finding excursions to Europe. On one particular trip to Gibraltar, they secured a rare Bonelli’s eagle for London Zoo, to whom Morris paid regular visits. Guests at 32 Great Ormond Street remember it being filled with plants, animals and birds. After the couple moved to Pound Farm in Dedham, Essex, in 1930, their menagerie grew to include Ptolemy the peacock, Cockey the yellow-crested cockatoo and Rubio the scarlet macaw. In addition to tree frogs, dogs and cats, they kept mallard and muscovy ducks and parakeets which flew freely around the garden.

Just as he would assemble flowers for a painting, in Matinée des Canards, Morris presents five different breeds of duck. The birds flying in the distance are commonly-seen mallards, three male and one female, while the diving bird is a distinctive, now rare to Britain, male pintail. To the left, in the foreground, is a male shoveler and to the right, a female shelduck, behind which stands a handsome male eider.

Across the decades, Morris’ bird paintings take various forms. The 1920s pictures are often detailed portraits of one or two birds, usually large birds, such as sea birds and birds of prey. Their backgrounds are typically dramatic, but simplified and largely invented – as we see in the present work, Greenland Falcon, 1928, and later pictures such as the Tate’s Peregrine Falcons, 1942. Here, Morris is primarily concerned with capturing the intrinsic animal presence of the ducks, rather than with achieving an accurate likeness – they are expressive and yet highly individualised portraits. In a 1936 interview, he explained how his intention in such pictures was ‘to provoke a lively sympathy with the mood of the birds which ornithological exactitude may tend to destroy.’ 1 1 The artist cited in Cedric Morris, Tate Gallery, London, 1984, exh cat, p86

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5 Christopher Wood 1901–1930 Self-Portrait c.1926–27 oil on canvas 16 by 12 inches / 40.6 by 30.5 cm collections Lucy Wertheim, London (probably) The Redfern Gallery, London Private Collection, UK, acquired in September 1954 Private Collection, UK, acquired in 1991 exhibitions London, The Redfern Gallery, Christopher Wood, Paul Feiler, 3 September – 2 October 1954, cat no.59, not illus, either the present work, or the Kettle’s Yard self-portrait exhibited

Christopher Wood, Self Portrait, 1927 oil on canvas, 129.5 by 96 cm coll. Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge, UK © Kettle’s Yard / Bridgeman Images

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In 1925, a then 24-year-old Christopher Wood resolved that his paintings should aim to be less derivative of the French modern masters: ‘I am going through a very difficult period at the moment as I must decide really what I am going to do in the future. All the pictures that I paint now will be fatal, one way or another, to my career. They must be personal, quite different to everyone else’s and full of English character.’ 1 Wood’s renewed interest in making more personal work seems to have led to an interest in self-portraiture and, while he made numerous self-portrait drawings from at least as early as 1924, the present work is one of only two self-portraits he is known to have painted in oil.

Wood spent the first half of 1926 in Paris, dividing the latter part of the year between London and Cornwall. On the recommendation of Picasso, Wood was commissioned to create costume and set designs for Sergei Diaghilev's ballet Romeo and Juliet. When his designs were rejected at the last minute, Wood instead concentrated on making a name for himself in England, becoming a member of both the London Group (1926) and the Seven and Five Society (1926 – 30). Former Kettle’s Yard curator Hilary Gresty notes that Wood’s ‘career began to take shape in 1926’ and that, ‘by the end of the year, his painting was beginning to assume individuality.’ 2 Wood’s other, almost life-size self-portrait from 1927, was acquired from the artist’s estate by the collector Jim Ede in 1930 and is part of the collection of the Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. Buoyed by the recent endorsement of Picasso, Wood exudes an easy confidence in both works, presenting himself as a handsome and successful young man. The paintings therefore act as a kind of self-promotion, despite being painted at a time when the artist was only just beginning to establish a personal style and reputation. While art historian Katy Norris has described the larger self-portrait as Wood’s ‘strongest affirmation of his personal identification with Picasso’, there are a number of artists whose influences are felt in this smaller self-portrait. The large decorative flowers in the background of the picture recall the backdrops of Matisse’s Odalisque with Red Trousers, c.1924 – 25 and Gauguin’s Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard (Les misérables), 1888. Wood also seems to pay direct homage here to Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait, 1889, the figure with whom he most strongly identified, having read Van Gogh’s collected letters while travelling through Europe some years before. Like Van Gogh, Wood was partly self-taught and, more forebodingly, Wood endured similar psychological torment that ultimately led to his suicide aged 29.

1 Richard Ingleby, Christopher Wood: An English Painter, Allison & Busby, London, 1st edition, 1995, p109 2 Hilary Gresty, Christopher Wood: The Last Years 1928 – 1930, Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, 1989, exh cat, p7

6 Matthew Smith 1879–1959 Peonies and Pears c.1934 oil on canvas 17 1/2 by 25 inches / 44.5 by 63.5 cm signed collections Arthur Tooth & Sons, London Mr D. A. West, acquired 4 November 1936 Private Collection, UK, until 1982 Browse & Darby, London, 1983 exhibitions London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, Recent Paintings by Matthew Smith, 5 – 28 November 1936, cat no.30 Venice, Biennale XXI, British Pavilion, Paul Nash, Matthew Smith, Stanley Spencer, Christopher Wood, Jacob Epstein, Stanley Anderson, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Summer 1938, cat no.45 London, Tate Gallery, 1976 – 1982, on long term loan London, Browse & Darby, Sir Matthew Smith cbe 1879 – 1959, 21 September – 22 October 1983, cat no.22, illus b/w literature John Gledhill, Matthew Smith, Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2009, cat no.490, illus b/w p194

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By the 1930s, Matthew Smith had established a reputation as one of the foremost British painters of his day. Arthur Tooth & Sons, then arguably London’s most prominent dealer, had recently taken him on for representation, and in 1929 mounted an exhibition of his work. Smith’s success in this period culminated in 1938, when he was selected as one of just six artists to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. Importantly, the present work featured in this exhibition, where it was showcased on the international stage.

Encouraged by his new dealer, during the 1930s, Smith produced a plethora of flower paintings and still lifes, as they had proven to sell particularly well compared to his nudes and, over the course of this decade, he made more than 100 paintings in this genre, including Peonies and Pears. The practice of still life painting suited Smith, as it enabled him to be in full control of his subject within the static environment of his studio. He was then able to focus his attention on creating paintings with expressive, exuberant abandon.

Smith favoured painting alla prima, a wet-on-wet technique that allowed him to produce works rapidly, completing one in a single session. This approach, which requires a profound confidence on behalf of the artist, as well as a deep understanding about how to control and manipulate paint, leaves little margin for error, with the first attempt being the final and only attempt. Painted when Smith was 55 years old, the present work wonderfully illustrates how, after a great many years of experiment, the artist had reached the pinnacle of true technical deftness.

Peonies and Pears has a freshness and vibrance that can be attributed to the its high key colour palette and the spontaneous manner in which it was executed. Smith’s lively brushmarks dance across the canvas, appearing fluid and effortless. With a Cézanne-esque modelling of form, hot fuchsias and pale pinks interspersed with blue define the ruffled heads of the peonies, while the yellows and greens of the pears form cool accents that counterbalance the overall warm tonality of the image. Using the same burnt sienna as the tabletop, Smith has outlined the individual still-life objects, grounding them in space. Smith tended to avoid painting perfectly straight lines parallel to the edge of the canvas and here, the tabletop is delineated with a long, undulating diagonal brushstroke, creating a rectilinear framework that contrasts with the organic shapes of the flowers and fruit. Echoing this diagonal format, the still life cascades romantically, from the peony on the left through to the delicate flower stem leaves fanning out at the right edge like fingertips.

7 Stanley Spencer 1891–1959 The Resurrection: Waking Up 1945 oil on canvas, triptych centre panel: 30 by 20 inches / 76.2 by 50.8 cm side panels: 20 by 30 inches / 50.8 by 76.2 cm collections Mrs M. Corble, 1950 Thence by descent to Mrs Ann Neville in 1954 (daughter of the above) Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London Private Collection, UK exhibitions London, Royal Academy of Arts, 182nd Summer Exhibition, 29 April – 7 August 1950, cat no.566 London, Institute of Contemporary Art, Ten Decades: A Review of British Taste 1851 – 1951, Arts Council of Great Britain, 10 August – 27 September 1951, cat no.250 London, Tate Gallery, Stanley Spencer: A Retrospective Exhibition, 3 November – 18 December 1955, cat no.69 Cardiff, Llandaff Cathedral, Stanley Spencer: Religious Paintings, Welsh Arts Council, 15 – 25 June 1965, cat no.22, touring to: Bangor, Haverfordwest and Swansea, until September 1965 London, Royal Academy of Arts, Stanley Spencer RA, 20 September – 14 December 1980, cat no.237, illus b/w p198 London, Barbican Art Gallery, Stanley Spencer: The Apotheosis of Love, 24 January – 1 April 1991, cat no.54, illus colour pp80 – 81 London, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, Stanley Spencer, October 1992, cat no.17, illus colour across a two page throw out, detail of left panel illus colour full page front cover London, Christie's, Sacred Noise, 25 June – 21 July 2018, illus colour unpaginated literature Britain To-Day, July 1950, pp36 – 37 The Faber Gallery, Stanley Spencer Resurrection Pictures (1945 – 1950), Faber and Faber, 1951, Spencer’s description of the work p16, illus colour pl.7 Maurice Collins, Stanley Spencer: A Biography, Harvill Press, London, 1962, pp190 – 200 John Rothenstein, Stanley Spencer: The Man, Correspondence and Reminiscences, Paul Elek, London, 1979, pp10, 85, 112, 125, 130, 134 – 5 [continued p100]

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In March 1940, Stanley Spencer travelled to Glasgow to begin work on a commission from the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. For the next five years, he made numerous trips to the city while developing a series of panoramic paintings of shipbuilders working on the Clyde. Despite Spencer’s initial enthusiasm for the project, he was troubled that there was some further, spiritual aspect of the city and its inhabitants he had yet to express. One night when out walking, he found a new source of inspiration. ‘I walked up along the road past the gasworks to where I saw a cemetery on a gently rising slope…I seemed then to see that it rose in the midst of a great plain and that all in the plain were resurrecting and moving towards it…I knew then that the resurrection would be directed from this hill.’ 1 Just as the Holy Trinity Church in Cookham had provided the location for his career-making The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924 – 27, the Port Glasgow cemetery became the setting for a spectacular new body of work on the theme of the resurrection. Spencer’s initial plan for one 40-foot-long painting and five further pictures was scaled back at the request of his dealer Dudley Tooth, eventually becoming nine works, four of them triptychs. He painted the first two, The Resurrection: Reunion and The Resurrection: Waking Up, in Glasgow in 1945, completing the series back in Cookham.

Here we see the dead at the point of waking, stretching and yawning, as if this were an everyday occurrence. In 1950, Spencer explained, ‘In the central panel, there are two mourners on a castiron seat (…) I wanted to stress the idea of the seat being somewhere in the cemetery made especially for the living and now used at the resurrection by these visitors, just as they have used it time and again when they came to sit there and think peacefully and hopefully about those lying near them. They are not disturbed by the resurrection but, because of the joy they feel at the peace of it, remain where they are.’ 2 In Waking Up, we find a conflation of the seasons – an elderly gravedigger scoops up autumn leaves while, as the dead rejoin the living, spring-flowering primroses and summer convolvulus burst into life. Spencer has painted every inch of the canvas with an obsessive detail reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites, the side panels a tangle of arms and legs, in which the women’s patterned dresses merge with the ground where they were just sleeping.

1 The artist cited in Duncan Robinson, Stanley Spencer, Visions from a Berkshire Village, Phaidon, Oxford, 1979, p69 2 The artist cited in The Faber Gallery, Stanley Spencer Resurrection Pictures (1945 – 1950), Faber and Faber, 1951, p15

8 Henry Moore 1898–1986 Family Group 1944 bronze 6 1/8 by 5 3/4 by 2 7/8 inches / 15.6 by 14.6 by 7.3 cm unnumbered from an edition of 11 plus 1 AC, cast by Fiorini, 1956 lh 232 collections Private Collection, London, by the 1970s Thence by descent exhibitions Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Henry Moore in Southern California, 2 October – 18 November 1973, cat no.16, another cast New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Henry Moore, 60 Years of His Art, 4 May – 25 September 1983, unnumbered, listed p122, not illus, terracotta version exhibited literature Ionel Jianou, Henry Moore, Tudor Publishing Co., New York in association with Arted, Editions d’Art, Paris, 1968, cat no.220, p73, not illus Robert Melville, Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings 1921 – 1969, Harry A. Abrams, New York, 1970, illus b/w pl.321, another cast David Sylvester (ed.), Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture: 1921 – 48, Vol 1, Lund Humphries, London, 1990, cat no.232, illus b/w pp14 & 145, another cast Claude Allemand-Cosneau, Manfred Fath and David Mitchinson (eds.), Henry Moore: From the Inside Out, Plasters, Carvings and Drawings, Prestel, Munich/ New York, 1996, illus b/w fig.50, terracotta version Alan Bowness, David Mitchinson (intro), Celebrating Moore, Works from the Collection of the Henry Moore Foundation, Lund Humphries, Aldershot/ Burlington, 2006, cat no.144, pp210 – 211, illus colour, terracotta version

Back view

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This bronze belongs to a series of maquettes that Henry Moore produced between 1944 – 47 on the theme of the family group. The artist’s ideas for this series were first set in motion in 1934 when the German architect Walter Gropius invited him to create an outdoor sculpture for Impington Village College, near Cambridge. Although work on this project did not begin until 1944, and the commission was cancelled nine months later due to lack of funding, Moore continued to explore the theme on his own terms.

After the artist’s mother passed away in the spring of 1944, his own family was brought closer together by grief and the subject of the family group took on a new resonance. Two years later, Moore and his wife Irina became parents to their first and only child. As he recalled, ‘the whole family group idea was so close to one as a person; we were just going to have our first child, Mary, and it was an obsession.’ 1 In 1949, when Moore was approached to make a sculpture for the Barclay Secondary School in Stevenage, he used the opportunity to realise his image on a large scale, producing a five-foot-high bronze in 1950 –5 1.

Moore described drawing as a useful tool not only for generating ideas, but for ‘sorting them out’ and the family group series appears to be the last sculptures the artist made that originated from drawings.² He filled two sketchbooks with dozens of drawings of families in different poses and configurations, including a highly finished drawing (hmf 2234) that relates directly to this bronze. The figures from the drawing are accurately replicated here in the final sculpture, demonstrating how, at this time, Moore fully conceived an idea before translating it into three dimensions. Moore made around 14 clay models of different family groups from drawings, which he baked to become terracottas. Only ten of these (including the present work) were cast into bronze editions.

This series is also closely linked to the ‘Shelter’ drawings Moore made as an official war artist between 1940 – 41, which depict families sheltering in London’s underground stations, huddled together and draped in blankets for comfort and protection. As in the ‘Shelter’ drawings, here in the present work, there is a real sense of tenderness and accord between the figures, the mother affectionately supports the child standing on her lap, while the father holds a book for the older child to read. Seated close together and facing towards one another, the parents are connected by their arms, which join together at the back of the sculpture, giving the impression of an intimate family unit.

1 The artist cited in Henry Moore, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 2004, exh cat, p57 2 The artist in ‘Henry Moore Talking to David Sylvester’, 7 June 1963, transcript of Third Programme, broadcast BBC Radio, 14 July 1963, Tate Archive TGA 200816, p13

9 Barbara Hepworth 1903 – 1975 Conoid, Sphere & Hollow II 1937 serravezza marble 12 1/8 by 18 1/8 by 12 1/8 inches / 30.6 by 45.8 by 30.6 cm unique bh 100 collections The Artist Mr and Mrs Eric Fletcher, acquired from the artist in the mid 1950s Thence by descent Jonathan Clark, London Private Collection, UK exhibitions Wakefield, City Art Gallery, Barbara Hepworth Retrospective, 12 February – 11 March 1944, cat no.20, touring to: Halifax, Bankfield Museum London, Lefevre Gallery, Barbara Hepworth, Sculpture and Drawings, October 1946, unclear which version exhibited, cat no.3 Wakefield, City Art Gallery, Festival of Britain, Barbara Hepworth Retrospective, 19 May – 7 July 1951, unclear which version exhibited, cat no.18, not illus, touring to: Leeds City Art Gallery, 14 July – 12 August 1951 Manchester City Art Gallery, 24 September – 21 October 1951 London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Barbara Hepworth 1927 – 1954, Retrospective, 8 April – 6 June 1954, cat no.29 London, Marlborough, Art in Britain 1930 – 40, Centred around Axis, Circle, Unit One, March – April 1965, cat no.42, not illus, version III exhibited London, Tate Gallery, Barbara Hepworth, Retrospective Exhibition, 3 April – 19 May 1968, cat no.31, version III exhibited Edinburgh, Scottish Arts Council, Art Then, Eight English Artists, 1924 – 40, 17 August – 15 September 1974, cat no.9, illus b/w pl.3, version III exhibited Liverpool, Tate Gallery, Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective, 14 September – 4 December 1994, cat no.28, illus colour p58, version III exhibited, touring to: New Haven, Yale Center for British Arts, 4 February – 9 April 1995; Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, 19 May – 7 August 1995 [continued p100]

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‘Do you know that I love marble specially because of its radiance in the light, its hardness, precision and response to the sun?’ 1 – barbara hepworth During Barbara Hepworth’s lifetime, she produced more than 600 sculptures, more than 100 of which were carved in different varieties of marble. According to Hodin’s catalogue raisonné, the present work is one of around 15 carvings Hepworth made in Seravezza marble in the 1930s. More specifically, it is one of a group of three virtually identical sculptures entitled Conoid, Sphere & Hollow that Hepworth carved in this material in 1937.2 This is the second and largest version of the sculpture, and the first and third carvings reside in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York, and the Government Art Collection, UK, respectively.3 Carving was Hepworth’s predominant mode of expression, through which she produced some of her most celebrated works. Taught the traditional technique of marble carving over a nine-month period by Italian master-carver Giovanni Ardini in Florence in 1925, Hepworth became, alongside Henry Moore, one of Britain’s leading exponents of ‘direct carving’ in the 1920s. Ardini’s assertions that ‘marble can only be carved with tenderness’ 4 and that ‘marble changes colour under different people’s hands’, encouraged a deeper appreciation within Hepworth for the unique properties of the material. The artist’s time in Italy had a profound impact on the direction her work was to take.

It was here that she was first introduced to Seravezza marble, which she later used to carve this sculpture and would continue to work with throughout the rest of her career.5 Some 40 years later she declared, ‘I am one of the few people in the world who know how to speak through marble'.6 In 1933, Hepworth abandoned the traditional notion of sculpture as a single, integral mass and began to create two-part sculptural juxtapositions in order to explore relationships between forms. Then, after the birth of Hepworth and Ben Nicholson’s triplets in 1934, the artist introduced a third form into her work, as she recalls: ‘When I started carving again in November 1934, my work seemed to have changed direction, although the only fresh influence had been the arrival of my children. The work was more formal and all traces of naturalism had disappeared, and for some years I was absorbed in the relationships in space, size and texture and weight, as well as the tensions between the forms.’ 7 In this carving, Hepworth establishes a complex dialogue between the three geometric forms. At roughly double the height of the sphere, the conoid towers above the marble base, into which Hepworth has

carved a circular hollow. While the conoid is the weightiest form of the group, the hollow is weightless, existing as negative space. The sharply cut top and flat sides of the angular conoid contrast with the perfect curves of the sphere and the delicate hollow. Yet, despite these tensions, there is a sense of balance and harmony within the sculpture.

This is the result of a number of careful artistic considerations and demonstrates Hepworth’s mastery as a sculptor even at this early stage in her career. Carved to be roughly the same circumference, one can picture the sphere fitting perfectly inside the hollow. By echoing the circular motif in these two carved elements, Hepworth creates a unifying aspect to the composition. In her multi-part carvings, Hepworth uses the base to define the relationships between the forms, and here she positions them very close together, with the frontal plane of the conoid leaning inwards towards the sphere and hollow, evoking a sense of intimacy.

For Hepworth, ‘the understanding of the material and the meaning of the form being carved must be in perfect equilibrium’.8 The artist’s association of marble with hardness, precision and radiance relates directly to her execution of Conoid, Sphere & Hollow II. Despite carving this sculpture using the very physical traditional method of chisel and hammer, Hepworth has eliminated all trace of her hand, achieving a crisp, smooth finish that enhances the play of light across the surfaces.

Between 1934 and 1944, Hepworth photographed her own sculptures, staging them in what she envisaged as their ideal settings.

The present work features in the British Film Institute’s 1953 Figures in a Landscape, Cornwall and the Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth, which was shown at the Edinburgh and Venice Film Festivals the same year.

Production still from Figures in a Landscape, 1953 directed by Dudley Shaw Ashton, featuring one of the versions of this carving © Bowness/ Tate

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In this short film, Conoid, Sphere & Hollow II is seen positioned on the rocky shore of St Ives, with Godrevy Lighthouse visible in the distance.9 By staging the work in this way, Hepworth makes connections between the sculpture and the landscape and architecture, the tall, upright form of the conoid closely echoing the lighthouse behind.

It is interesting to consider this sculpture in relation to the work of other artists at this time. During this period, Hepworth and her partner Ben Nicholson were producing works united by a similar formal vocabulary and the predominance of white; while she was carving in white marble, from 1934 he began experimenting with making entirely white reliefs from white card or painted wood. The two artists’ converging concerns were a function of their shared interests, contacts and workspaces in Mall Studios. White had achieved an ideological significance among modernists, signifying the ‘perfection, purity and certitude’ of the era.10 In particular, a preference for white was associated with the clarity and proportional harmony of contemporary architecture, and especially that of Le Corbusier. Hepworth’s attraction to white may have stemmed from her recent visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio, which, she remembered, ‘made me gasp with surprise at its beauty … everything gleamed with whiteness’.11 Art historian Alan G. Wilkinson has also made a direct link between this sculpture and Alberto Giacometti’s platform sculptures of the early 1930s, and indeed, in 1936 a year prior to carving the present work, Hepworth had featured alongside the artist in the infamous Abstract and Concrete exhibition which toured Britain.

1 J.P. Hodin, ‘Barbara Hepworth and the Mediterranean Spirit’, Marmo, no.3, December 1964, p59 2 In version I and II of the sculpture, the sphere is to the right of the conoid, while in version III, it is to the left.

3 Version I (bh 98) entered the collection of MoMA, New York, through the bequest of Virginia C. Field, in 2004. Version III (bh 100a), which does not feature in J.P. Hodin’s catalogue raisonné, or in the artist’s sculpture records, has been part of the Government Art Collection, UK, since 1966.

4 J.P. Hodin, Barbara Hepworth, David McKay Company Inc. New York/ Switzerland, 1961, p13 5 Extracted from the mountains of Seravezza, Tuscany 6 The artist in a letter to Norman Reid, dated 7 November 1964, Tate Gallery Acquisitions 7 The artist in ‘Note 3: Constructive forms and poetic structure 1934 – 1939’, Herbert Read, Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, Lund Humphries, London, 1952 8 The artist cited in Barbara Hepworth Retrospective Exhibition 1927 – 1954, Whitechapel Gallery, London,1954, exh cat, p10 9 Hepworth had moved to St Ives in 1934, three years prior to making the present sculpture 10 Theo van Doesburg ‘Versa la Peinture’, Art Concret, April 1930, translated in Joost Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, Macmillan, New York, 1974, p183 11 The artist in ‘Note 3: Constructive forms and poetic structure 1934 – 1939’, Herbert Read, Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, Lund Humphries, London, 1952

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10 Ben Nicholson 1894–1982 1942 (H.S.) 1942 oil on canvas stretched over panel 19 1/4 by 24 1/8 inches / 48.9 by 61 cm signed and dated on the reverse collections Lefevre Gallery, London Gimpel Fils, London, April 1958 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, until 1974 Private Collection, New York, until 2018 exhibitions Brussels, Galerie Apollo, Ben Nicholson, May – June 1954, cat no.9, as Peinture Atlanta, Georgia, High Museum of Art, on loan

Ben Nicholson painted 1942 (H.S.) in the midst of the World War II, three years after he had left London with Barbara Hepworth and their three children for the safety of Carbis Bay. In Cornwall, far from the vibrant avant-garde artistic hub of Hampstead, Nicholson continued to produce work and promote his Constructivist ideas with ardent enthusiasm.

In 1942 (H.S.), one large rectangular form, roughly in the centre of the composition, floats with a precise and emphatic flatness against two horizontal bands that gradate upwards from silvery grey to pale blue.

On closer inspection, this central rectangle reveals itself to be composed of two forms in slightly different tones of a muted brownish grey. Within these, five smaller geometric forms exist – a grey and a white form, divided up further by black lines, and a section of three overlapping rectangles in red, blue and black.

With its interlocking planes, bold use of line and geometric facets of unmodulated intense colour, 1942 (H.S.) harks to the work of Piet Mondrian, who Nicholson had met in Paris in 1934 and forged a close friendship with. It was Nicholson that aided the artist’s move from Paris to Hampstead, in 1938, setting him up in a flat on Parkhill Road that backed onto Mall Studios, where he and Hepworth lived and worked.

Working in close proximity from 1938 – 1939, there was a passionate exchange of ideas between the artists, the result of which is borne out in the present work. However, while there are strong affinities between Nicholson and Mondrian’s approach to abstraction in this period, in comparison to Mondrian, who, up until 1940 1 worked strictly within the parameters of primary-coloured geometric forms within a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines on a white ground, Nicholson experimented more freely with his abstract designs, employing a wider array of colours and subtler tones, which often refer obliquely to the landscape.

Aside from the small, coloured element, 1942 (H.S.) is dominated by soft hues akin to the sea and sand of St Ives and Carbis Bay and the grey slate and granite landscape of the Penwith peninsula. In juxtaposition with the opaque, flatly applied planes of colour that make up the majority of the painting, Nicholson has rubbed back the oil in two areas to reveal the canvas texture, imbuing what otherwise appears to be a precise abstract design with an organic feel. The overall effect is one of radiant luminosity, evoking the pervading light of the Cornish coast.

1 In 1940, having declined Nicholson’s invite to join him in St Ives, Mondrian moved to New York

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11 Ben Nicholson 1894–1982 1945 (St Ives) 1945 oil, pencil and gouache on board 11 1/2 by 18 3/8 inches / 29.2 by 46.7 cm signed, dated, titled and inscribed ‘Nicholson/3 Mall Studios/Parkhill Rd/ London NW3’ on the reverse collections Lefevre Gallery, London Private Collection, London Private Collection, Los Angeles Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London Private Collection, London, acquired from the above in 2006 exhibitions London, Lefevre Gallery, Ben Nicholson: Paintings & Reliefs 1939 – 1945, October 1945, cat no.70, as St Ives, Cornwall

Painted at ‘Chy-an-Kerris’, the house in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, where Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth had lived since September 1942, 1945 (St Ives) belongs to a small group of paintings by the artist which depict a Union Jack (often only partially painted) nestled amidst a still life in front of an open window, with a view out to the landscape beyond.1 Alive with activity and progress, the present work depicts a view across the harbour, which, at this time, was very much a working port.

In the middle ground, there are numerous fishing boats and, in the far distance, we see a schooner heading out to sea in full sail. A statement of British identity and pride, the Union Jack was a new motif that Nicholson adopted within his work to mark 8 May 1945 (VE Day), the official end date of World War II. Although the fallout of the war was to continue, ‘life was coming back to normal; fresh air was again blowing through the land after years of enclosure. It was no longer necessary to have blackout on one’s windows in order to hide from the enemy in the sky.’ 2 Indeed, the hope and optimism of this particular moment is reflected here in this cheerful scene of normality re-emerging in Britain and life carrying on without threat.

To make 1945 (St Ives), Nicholson first prepared the board with gesso, which he then scraped into (with the assistance of a tool), to create a textured ground. Next, he applied muted tones of brown and grey oil paint, before rubbing this back, resulting in a wonderfully varied surface, with an organic, weathered appearance not dissimilar to stone.

Upon this, Nicholson has drawn the composition in pencil, in a naïve manner reminiscent of Alfred Wallis, erased some of these lines and introduced colour using gouache and oil.3 Executed three years after 1942 (H.S.) (cat.10), the present work marks a departure from Nicholson’s overtly abstract paintings, a shift encouraged by the artist’s dealer, Alex Reid & Lefevre, for commercial reasons. However, while this is a figurative work by definition, the painting’s distorted sense of perspective, flatness and interlocking planes harks to Cubism, and, as with the artist’s abstract works, which often incorporate a small area of intense colour, the present work features only a few carefully selected coloured elements, which similarly has the effect of drawing the viewer’s eye to certain aspects of the composition.

1 Other examples from this series reside in the permanent collections of the Tate, London, and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

2 Norbert Lynton, Ben Nicholson, Phaidon, London, 1993, p195 3 Nicholson first met Wallis in St Ives in 1928

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12 Jack B. Yeats 1871–1957 The Tide Receding 1946 oil on canvas 14 1/8 by 21 1/8 inches / 36 by 53.5 cm signed and titled on the stretcher bar collections The Artist Reeves Levanthal, USA, 1946, acquired directly from the above Private Collection, New York Private Collection, UK, 1991 Estate of Patrick Kelly exhibitions New York, Coe Kerr Gallery, Centennial Exhibition, November 1971, cat no.25 literature Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Vol. II., André Deutsch, London, 1992, cat no.767, illus b/w p691

It was only when in his 70s that Jack B. Yeats achieved the eminence he had long deserved. Two years after being elected as a member of the ‘London Group,’ in 1942, a joint exhibition of work by Yeats and William Nicholson (organised by Kenneth Clark) opened at the National Gallery, which served to raise the artist’s profile dramatically not only at home, but abroad. Consequently, Yeats gained the attention of important figures such as the well-respected art critic Herbert Read, John Rothenstein – then director of the Tate Gallery, and gallerist Victor Waddington, marking the beginnings of an artist-dealer relationship that was to become central to Yeats’ rising career and reputation after his death. 1 2 Later, in 1945, the artist received a major retrospective at the National College of Art, Dublin, and, in 1946, the year the present work was painted, he received an Honorary Doctorate from Dublin University.

For an artist fascinated by life’s transience, it is unsurprising that the tide held great appeal. Here, in this highly romantic scene, a man in a suit reclining languidly on a beach wistfully watches the tide recede, apparently unaffected by the turbulent storm that looms threateningly on the horizon. Caught in a moment of introspection, this central, solitary figure might symbolise Yeats, or the viewer, and evokes universal, existential ideas about the very human desire to search for meaning and purpose in life. As Samuel Beckett has observed, ‘Yeats is with the great of our time… because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence.’ 3 Alive with expressive, almost impressionistic mark making, The Tide Receding exhibits a wonderfully varied surface. While the majority of the composition is made up of paint layered impasto with a palette knife, in other areas paint has been applied dry and sparsely so that the canvas is still visible. The artist also appears to have used the handle of his brush or the edge of his palette knife to carve certain details, such as the man’s facial features and the flagpole, into the paint.

Yeats’ late works have been described as ‘a marvellous finale to an already rich artistic life’,4 and, demonstrating a masterful and elaborate interplay of techniques, The Tide Receding articulates this assertion beautifully.

1 Yeats had no official gallery representation before Waddington took him on in 1943 2 Victor Waddington (1907 – 1981) founded the Victor Waddington Galleries in Dublin in 1927 and went on to establish the Waddington Galleries in Cork Street, London in 1958, with his son Leslie 3 Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, Harper, 1997 4 T.G. Rosenthal, The Art of Jack B. Yeats, Andre Deutsch, London, 1993, p41

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13 Edward Burra 1905–1976 Landscape with Figures (Birdman Piper and Fisherwoman) 1946 watercolour on paper 26 by 40 inches / 66 by 101.6 cm signed collections The Leicester Galleries, London Private Collection, UK exhibitions London, The Leicester Galleries, Pictures

by Edward Burra/ Recent Paintings by Claude Rogers/ Modern Etchings and Lithographs by French and Foreign Artists, June 1947, cat no.36, not illus literature Andrew Causey, Edward Burra: Complete Catalogue, Phaidon, Oxford, 1985, cat no.171, illus b/w

Due to long periods of ill health, Edward Burra spent much of his adult life living with his family in Rye in East Sussex. However, between 1925 and 1939, he was able to travel extensively, to Paris, the South of France, Italy, Spain, Morocco, New York (particularly Harlem), Boston and Mexico.

Burra found inspiration in the people he saw in each location, and his distinctive street scenes brimmed with larger-than-life characters, real and invented.

The figure of ‘the birdman’ appears early on in Bird Women, Duennas, 1932, and again, nearly a decade later, in the Tate’s magnificent wartime picture Soldiers at Rye, 1941, in which soldiers wear bird-like Venetian masks in place of gas masks. Andrew Causey suggests that these birdheaded figures were informed by the work of several other artists, including Max Ernst, the Commedia dell’Arte characters of Gino Severini, George Grosz’s pig-head men and the ‘beaked Indians’ in Diego Rivera’s Mexican murals, which Burra saw first-hand in 1938. 1 The present work is inspired by a holiday Burra took in the summer of 1946 to Grasmere in the Lake District. The war and his own poor health had taken its toll on the artist and he was becoming increasingly withdrawn and melancholic. The trip away proved restorative, and he enjoyed the dramatic scenery which, even in summertime, must be appreciated between bursts of heavy rain.

Burra made this watercolour back in Sussex. As Simon Martin explains, ‘By all accounts, Burra never drew on the spot or took photographs, but simply looked and committed what he saw (or as much of it as he wanted) to memory for reference later in the studio. There was thus a significant interval between the initial experience and the actual picturemaking. The process of recollection simplifies, condenses and abstracts.

Certain features that had caught his interest would be accentuated, others diminished, but all of them organised ultimately according to the formal demands of the picture itself.’ 2 Here, Burra shows the sun breaking through rapidly moving clouds, while the landscape is described in a limited palette of oranges and greens.

Lurking in the shadows is a birdman, in carnivalesque garb, playing a medieval gourd instrument. Walking just ahead, lured along by the music, is a fisherwoman, replete with delicately rendered scales, who is apparently blind, with leaves covering her eyes. Burra’s eerie vision of a post-war English landscape feels entirely appropriate for the historic moment, but also reflects his macabre imagination. As he explained, ‘Everything looks menacing; I’m always expecting something calamitous to happen.’ 3 1 Andrew Causey, Edward Burra Complete Catalogue, Phaidon, London, 1985, p66 2 Andrew Lambirth, ‘Burra: The Landscape Option,’ in Simon Martin, Edward Burra, Lund Humphries/ Pallant House Gallery, London, 2011, exh cat, p151 3 Ibid, p35

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14 Lucian Freud 1922–2011 Pigeon 1946 oil on board 9 1/2 by 12 1/4 inches / 24 by 31 cm signed and inscribed 'To the family Mastropetrou from Lucian Freud' collections The Artist Mastropetrou family, Greece, gifted directly by the artist in 1946 Thence by descent

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Immediately after World War II, Lucian Freud was keen to leave England, but found himself hindered by travel restrictions. However, by the summer of 1946, travel was somewhat easier and, with a weekly advance from Peter Watson of the London Gallery, Freud made it to Paris, where he stayed for two months before being enticed by his friend, the painter John Craxton, to join him on the Greek island of Poros. Craxton, who had shared a studio with Freud in St John’s Wood from 1942 to 1944, had painted a rather romantic image of Poros, and so an excited Freud embarked on the lengthy journey to the island, travelling from Paris to Marseilles by train, to Piraeus onboard the Corinthia, and finally, by ferry to Poros.

Freud spent a total of five months on Poros lodging with an Abyssinian Greek family named Mastropetros, and he gave them the present work as a token of thanks for their hospitality. The painting has remained in the family’s collection ever since. The Mastropetros’ home was lined by tangerine trees and surrounded by chickens and Freud and Craxton’s living quarters were two rooms upstairs, which could be accessed directly by an outside flight of steps. The artists led a simple existence on Poros at a time of near famine and civil war.

Despite these circumstances, the drawings and paintings they made there give no indication of the banditry and police raids that were taking place.

On Poros, while Freud filled a sketchbook with doodles, he produced only a handful of oils, including Pigeon, and still-lifes of tangerines, horns and sea-thistles, a portrait of his landlady’s son Petros (which he later swapped with Craxton for one of his drawings), two self-portraits and a portrait of Craxton; while Craxton himself made a remarkable drawing of Freud and also painted Petros, in the guise of a sleeping fisherman. Reflecting on the work that Freud made during their time on the island, Craxton said, ‘It was a period when L[ucian] made some of his most limpid and luminous paintings; the lemons, the portrait I have, and his own self-portrait in the Tate all belong to this time. It was also the end of us working in close proximity.’ 1 Many of the works Freud and Craxton made in Greece went on show in a joint exhibition held at the London Gallery the following year.

With its palette of fresh hues, Pigeon transports the viewer to the island of Poros. A strong sense of Mediterranean light pervades the picture, while the greenish-blue of the background recalls the Aegean Sea, and the greyish-brown beneath the pigeon’s feet evokes the dusty, sandy ground on the island. Careful brushmarks faithfully memorialise the creature's form, varied grey and white feathers, and scaly pink legs. Subtly modulated tones make the bird appear soft, friendly, plump and well-fed.

Lucian Freud, Head of a Greek Man, 1946, oil on panel, 28.4 by 24.8 cm Private Collection © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images

Curator and historian Richard Calvocoressi has explained how, in this early period, the young Freud experimented with an array of materials, including oil, charcoal, ink, watercolour, conté crayon, pencil, chalk and varnish, and would work on ‘any support that came to hand’. 2 At this time, Greece was in a state of Civil War and its inhabitants were living hand to mouth. Freud was paying the Mastropetros family two or three pounds a week board and lodging, and when he didn’t have the money, he and his hosts went hungry.

As such, Freud resorted to stealing materials for his paintings. As he remembers, ‘All Greek houses have religious books and I did some paintings on the covers of books I stole.’ 3 Pigeon is one of the works that Freud made on the cover of a religious book, the texture of the support and its slightly worn edges imbuing the thinly painted composition with a raw, organic beauty, much like the landscape of the island itself.

A fanatical animal lover, Freud had a particular passion for birds, and had drawn ‘bird people‘ since childhood. ‘I was always excited by birds. If you touch wild birds, it‘s a marvellous feeling.’ 4 Throughout much of Freud’s early work, birds are a recurring theme, from the dreamlike Landscape with Birds, 1940, to more observational drawings, such as Dead Bird, 1943, and the highly accomplished Boy with a Pigeon, 1944.

Over the years, Freud made a habit of keeping birds as pets, buying pigeons from the Club Row live animal market in London’s 36

East End, and at one stage bringing a buzzard home – his wife Kitty drew the line at this, so it had to be returned to the shop. Freud even kept a pair of sparrowhawks in his studio in Paddington, one of which can be seen perched on his gloved hand in a series of portraits taken by fashion photographer Clifford Coffin for Vogue in 1948. Having only recently returned from Poros, in a number of these photographs Freud’s painting of Petros Mastropetros, Head of a Greek Man, 1946, is visible beside him on the easel.

According to John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer and Freud’s confidant and subject, the artist’s passion for animals came from his grandfather Sigmund. ‘Lucian was tremendously proud of his grandfather, not for having invented psychoanalysis, but for having been an extremely distinguished zoologist. That is what he took from his grandfather, not the psychoanalysis at all.’ 5 Suggesting that there was a shamanic side to Freud, Richardson enthused, ’I don’t know if he could break a horse, but if anyone could, it was him. It was like some psychic power. Just as Picasso could put his hand into a cage of wild birds and one would quietly allow itself to be taken, so too did Lucian have a gift.’ 6 Freud not only used live animals as subjects, he also frequently worked from dead ones. Initially he acquired these from a vet and later from Palmers Pet Stores in Camden. Tellingly, his prize possession was a stuffed zebra head he acquired from Rowland Ward’s taxidermy in Piccadilly. Many of the decaying and rotting animals that feature in Freud’s paintings are different types of bird; namely, a heron, chicken, puffin, and a cock. Freud’s images of dead birds are far more macabre and surreal in tone than the present work, which conveys a quiet respect for this small, living, breathing creature.

1 2 3 4 5

Craxton in a postcard to Elena Guena Martin Gayford, Lucian Freud, Volume 1, Phaidon, London, 2018, p45 Ibid The artist cited in William Feaver, Lucian Freud, London, 2002, p23 Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian, A Portrait of the Artist, Jonathan Cape, London, 2013, p47 6 Ibid, p147

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15 Barbara Hepworth 1903–1975 Three Groups on a White and Yellow Ground 1949 oil and pencil on masonite 18 by 22 inches / 45.7 by 55.9 cm signed and dated and signed again on the reverse COLLECTIONS Maurice Goldman, London The Piccadilly Gallery, London Cecil 'Titi' Blaffer von Fürstenberg, Houston, acquired from the above in May 1985 Thence by descent EXHIBITIONS London, Lefevre Gallery, New Sculpture and Drawings by Barbara Hepworth, February 1950, cat no.38 Venice, XXV Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, June–October 1950, cat no.116 Wakefield, City Art Gallery, Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture and Drawings, 1951 Festival of Britain, 19 May–7 July 1951, cat no.88, touring to: York, City Art Gallery, 14 July–12 August 1951 [continued p100]

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), Cambodian Dancer, 1906, pencil, stumping, watercolour and gouache on paper, 34.8 by 26.7 cm. coll. Musée Rodin, Paris © Musée Rodin, Paris

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In the early years of World War II, restrictions on Barbara Hepworth's time, materials and studio space lead her to take up drawing as both a practical creative outlet and a means to generate a source of income. Even as the privations of war began to lift, her drawing practice gained further momentum. Although initially Hepworth concentrated on producing abstract geometric compositions, in 1947 she returned to the subject of the human body, beginning work on two important series of figurative drawings concurrently; her ‘hospital drawings’ (1947–49) and a series (to which the present work belongs) of models and dancers in the nude (1947–51).

While it was not unusual for Hepworth to work from a single model, she was fascinated by relationships between figures, as we bear witness to here, where three different poses adopted by a male and a female model in close relation to each other, have been recorded side by side across the board. As opposed to the fixed, premeditated poses that Hepworth had asked her models to assume for her life drawings in the 1920s, at this time she would ‘usually get dancers as models and ask them to move about, to limber up, to relax, and to move and move until I know them all the way round.’ 1 Reminiscent of Rodin’s Cambodian dancers and the ‘Three Graces’ of Botticelli’s Primavera, c.1480, the present work conveys a sense of fluid movement and intimacy between the figures. The rhythm of the figures’ movements are echoed in the rhythmic line of Hepworth's drawing style. Not only do the outlines of the two figures overlap in areas such as the legs and feet, but there is also a doubling or blurring of these lines, suggesting the trace of the figure’s actions.

Though Hepworth herself often referred to these works on board as drawings, they may more accurately be described as paintings, albeit of a unique kind. Hepworth was in the habit of preparing her boards with gesso, which she would apply using a brush and then scrape back, possibly with a razor blade, before scumbling with oil or gouache in muted colours (here, white, yellow and blue).

This method, which was altogether more sculptural than painterly, created a textured, organic-feeling surface with ‘a particular kind of ‘bite’’ upon which Hepworth would draw in pencil, something she likened to ‘incising on slate’ and the painted surface would often be scraped or rubbed back as the drawing proceeded.2 3 1 The artist cited in Alan Wilkinson, The Drawings of Barbara Hepworth, Lund Humphries, Surrey & USA, 2015, p90 2 The artist cited in A. Wilkinson, 2015, ibid, p65 3 Ibid

16 William Turnbull 1922–2012 Untitled (Walking Figures) 1952 oil on canvas 30 by 40 inches / 76.2 by 101.6 cm signed and dated on the reverse collections Estate of the Artist Private Collection, USA, acquired in 2015

William Turnbull, Walking Figure, 1953 bronze, 48.3 by 59.7 cm, unique © William Turnbull Estate

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In William Turnbull’s Walking Figures, two pairs of figures walk towards each other, from left to right and right to left, their motion described in multiple dashed lines in red and grey. Turnbull’s limited palette focuses our attention on the graphic nature of the painted marks, which feel closer to drawing than painting, while his choice of red, a colour he often used in his figure drawings and head studies, suggests a human warmth and energy. The figures fill and animate the space, but there is no attempt to realistically model their bodies, or to describe the wider scene; rather Turnbull is concerned with capturing the sensation of motion, and the passing of time, in concrete form.

In this formative period, Turnbull was also exploring the subject of movement in his sculpture. The small bronze Walking Figure, 1953, made a year after this painting, seems to be a direct attempt to translate the ideas in this painting into three dimensions. The single walking figure appears to have four arms and four legs and is shown walking across a flat plane. However, this rather literal translation of image to sculpture appears to be something of a conceptual dead end and Turnbull does not return to it. Turnbull is also known to have made a large-scale plaster of a ‘walking figure’ sometime before 1951.

It was never cast into bronze, but it did feature in an experimental film he made with Allan Forbes, called 83B, in which they filmed the shadows cast by the sculpture onto the walls and ceiling of a Hampstead house.

Turnbull’s walking figure motif has connections to several European artists, his preoccupation with linear forms and dynamic movement most obviously referencing the work of Giacometti. Indeed, Turnbull lived in Paris for two years, from 1948 – 1950, and while there he came to know many of the leading Modernists of the day, including Léger, Braque, Brâncuşi and Giacometti. The artist recalled how he introduced himself to Giacometti simply by knocking on his studio door one day, after which he became a regular visitor to the studio.

21 years Turnbull’s senior, Giacometti became an early mentor to the young British artist. The present painting is also reminiscent of Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2, 1912, as well as the chronophotographs of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, whose work was widely circulated within British art schools.

17 William Scott 1913–1989 Seated Figure 1954 oil on canvas 60 by 29 7/8 inches / 152.3 by 75.8 cm signed collections Mary Scott (the artist’s wife) Private Collection, UK exhibitions Tokyo, Metropolitan Art Gallery, 3rd International Art Exhibition, 20 May – 5 June 1955, cat no.142, illus b/w, as Figure, touring to: Osaka, Sogo Gallery, 24 June – 6 July 1955 Nagoya Culture Hall, 13 July – 26 July 1955 Fukuoka, Iwataya Gallery, 16 August – 24 August 1955 Saseho, Public Hall Gallery, 8 September – 25 September 1955 Ube, Watamabe Memorial Hall, 1 October – 15 October 1955 Takamatsu, Modern Art Museum, 23 October – 13 November 1955 Hiroshima, The Fukuya Tenmaya, 22 November – 4 December 1955 Hanover, Kestner-Gesellschaft, William Scott, 2 June – 17 July 1960, cat no.16, touring to: Freiburg, Kunstverein, dates untraced Dortmund, Museum Ostwall, [continued p100 – 101]

William Scott by Ida Kar, 1954 2 ¼ inch square film negative coll. National Portrait Gallery, London © National Portrait Gallery, London

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William Scott painted the present work around the same time as Seated Figure No.1. Aside from the figure’s ‘legs’, which in this version have been further simplified, the two paintings are virtually identical in both size and composition. It was not unusual for Scott to make another rendition of a work he was particularly pleased with, so that he could show the work more widely. The first version of the painting was exhibited three times in New York between 1954 and 1956, before it was sold to New York-based collector Guy A. Weill in 1957; meanwhile, this version featured in the 3rd International Art Exhibition that toured Japan in 1955.

Seated Figure typifies Scott’s distinct painterly language in the period from 1951 to 1954, when he turned his attention from painting still lifes, landscape and figures to making ambiguous abstract works with rich, textural surfaces. Here, the painting’s image invites two readings – an abstract composition, and a seated figure with distorted, stick-like limbs, as alluded to by the work’s title. John Russell observed, ‘Nothing about it says: ‘’This is a human body.’’ Yet it spells out, irresistibly, the idea of a human body, and before long we cannot see it as anything else.’ 1 An invitation from the Arts Council to exhibit at the Festival of Britain in 1951 gave impetus to this change in direction in Scott’s work. As he explained, ‘I found that the forms I had been using would not easily expand, and I realised that another step towards simplification had to be made. This I did, not only in shape but in reducing my colour key.

From then on, for three years, I made a series of paintings that contained practically no colour and a further reduction of multiple shapes. Pictures became more linear.’ 2 This trend towards abstraction united Scott with artists such as Roger Hilton, Victor Pasmore and Adrian Heath, and indeed the present work is remarkably comparable to a painting Hilton made the same year entitled Black on White, that Patrick Heron once described as ‘a Mondrian that is melting.’ 3 Upon inspection of the canvas surface, it appears that Scott created the present painting by first laying down an ochre and orange ground.

When this had dried, he would have crudely delineated the figure in black paint, before applying white paint thickly, with loose, broad strokes, up to the edges of the black lines. Around these lines, hints of the coloured ground are still visible, imbuing what is otherwise a monochromatic painting with a subtle warmth. The expressive, unrefined manner in which Scott has executed this formal linear design emphasises the tactile, object-like quality of the painting.

1 Sarah Whitfield, William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings 1952 – 1959, Volume 2, Thames & Hudson, London, 2013, p100 2 Alan Bowness, William Scott: Paintings, Drawings and Gouaches, 1938 – 71, Tate Gallery, 1972, exh cat, pp69 – 70 3 S. Whitfield, 2013, Ibid, p100

18 William Turnbull 1922–2012 Pegasus 1954 bronze 35 by 17 1/2 by 29 1/4 inches / 88.9 by 44.5 by 74.3 cm stamped with the artist’s monogram, dated and numbered 2/4 from an edition of 4 plus 1 AC collections Estate of the Artist Private Collection, UK exhibitions London, Tate Gallery, William Turnbull Sculpture and Painting, 15 August – 7 October 1973, cat no.15, illus b/w p28, AC London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull: Sculptures 1946 – 62, 1985 – 87, 28 October – 21 November 1987, cat no.3, illus colour p17, AC Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Scottish Art Since 1900, 17 June – 24 September 1989, cat no.334, pp79 & 167, illus colour, cast 1/4 London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull: Horses – Development of a Theme, Other Sculptures and Paintings, 22 June – 20 July 2001, p49, cat no.3, illus colour p9, cast 1/4 London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull Paintings 1959 – 1963, Bronze Sculpture 1954 – 1958, 24 November – 22 December 2004, cat no.14, illus colour unpaginated, cast 2/4 [continued p101]

Eugène-Louis Lequesne (1815 – 1887) Renown holding back Pegasus, late 19th century, bronze, Palais Garnier, Paris © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

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The origins of Pegasus date back to William Turnbull’s second recorded sculpture, Horse, 1946, which he made while still a student at the Slade.

Amanda Davidson describes how ‘this piece forms a horse's head from a series of interlocking planes, both three-dimensional, flattened and frontal, exploring Cubist ideas of simplifying subjects to elemental shapes in a sculptural form.’ 1 At the time, Turnbull was a regular visitor to the British Museum, which was only a short walk from the art school.

The strong profile and arched neck of Horse, 1946, is typical of classical Greek sculptures in the museum’s collection, such as The Horse of Selene, c.438 – 432 bc, a fragment from the Parthenon where only the horse’s head and neck have survived.

Turnbull made three further works on this subject in the early 1950s: Horse, 1950 (coll. Tate Gallery), which was made in Paris and presents a standing horse, its thin, splayed legs reminiscent of a child’s toy; Horse, 1954 (coll. Tate Gallery), which again focuses on the horse's head and neck, reviving elements of his first ‘Cubist’ horse; and Pegasus, made in the same year. Pegasus continues the feeling of movement in Horse, 1950, its form built up in much the same way, with Turnbull constructing a branch-like metal armature, but this time ‘filling in’ some of the shapes to arrive at a more solid form ‘thrust into space in several directions, from a long spine.’ 2 Its open, twisting form suggests, without explicitly describing, the dynamic movement of a rearing horse and, indeed, Richard Morphet has compared this sculpture to Eugène-Louis Lequesne‘s spectacular Renown holding back Pegasus on the roof of the Opéra National de Paris. As such, it demands to be viewed in the round, unlike many of Turnbull’s later sculptures, which present flat figures with an obvious front and back view.

Turnbull created this bronze’s distinctive ribbed texture by pressing corrugated paper into his still wet plaster model – an effect we see repeated across other works. Art curator Toby Treves notes that ‘while he determined where to apply the paper, the precise details of the marks were not foreseeable. The immediacy and unpredictability of this method greatly appealed to Turnbull.’ 3 Writing in 1960, Turnbull stated ‘I used texture to invoke chance, to create random discoveries, not to elaborate the surface, but to accentuate that it was a skin of bronze.’ 4 1 Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, London, 2005, p12 2 The artist in conversation with Tate curators published in The Tate Gallery Report 1970 – 1972, London, 1972 3 Toby Treves, Tate Gallery website: www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turnbull-horse-t01381 4 The artist cited Tate Gallery website, Ibid

19 Euan Uglow 1932–2000 Beautiful Girl Lying Down 1958–59 oil on canvas 24 1/8 by 36 3/4 inches / 61 by 93.5 cm collections Sir Ninian Buchan Archibald John Buchan-Hepburn Bt., East Lothian, 1974 Browse & Darby, London Mrs Cherry Paulette Brown Browse & Darby, London Private Collection, USA, acquired in 1994 exhibitions London, Beaux Arts Gallery, Euan Uglow: Paintings and Drawings, 1 – 28 June 1961, cat no.5 London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Euan Uglow, Arts Council of Great Britain, 18 April – 19 May 1974, cat no.15 Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Euan Uglow, Controlled Passion: Fifty Years of Painting, 7 July – 11 October 2003, cat no.5 London, Browse & Darby, Euan Uglow: Drawings and Paintings, 18 March – 17 April 2009, cat no.49 literature Catherine Lampert, Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007, cat no.101, illus colour p39, related drawing cat no.100, illus colour p38

Pierre Subleyras (1699 – 1749) The Back of a Naked Lady, 1740, oil on canvas, 74 by 136 cm coll. Palazzo Barberini, Rome © Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, MIC – Bibliotheca Hertziana, Istituto Max Planck for the History of Art / Enrico Fontolan

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Painted by Euan Uglow when he was just 26, four years after he had graduated from the Slade, Beautiful Girl Lying Down is one of the artist’s earliest, yet most accomplished female nudes.

The subject of this painting is the abstract painter Natalie (Tilly) Dower, who was Uglow’s girlfriend at the time.1 Although Paula Rego recently described Dower as: ‘the most underrated’ cultural figure, ‘practically unknown after a lifetime’s work’, 2 examples of her work reside in both the Arts Council Collection and the Government Art Collection. Painted in Dower’s bedroom in Kent, the present work portrays her reclining in the nude on her side, facing away from the viewer, a pose Uglow instructed her to adopt so that she would not be too exposed. Indeed, the artist’s affection for his girlfriend is further reflected not only in the title he assigned the painting, but in his compassionate and tender rendering of her naked body, which calls to mind Pierre Subleyras’ The Back of a Naked Lady, 1740 (coll. Barberini, Rome), a painting of his wife Maria Felice Tibaldi, and Victor Pasmore’s Reclining Nude, 1942, of his wife Wendy (coll. Tate, London).

For an artist who said, ‘I don’t see how anyone can be overperfectionist’, 3 painting was an intense and incredibly lengthy process that required a great commitment from both the painter and the model, who would typically be required to sit for three hours or more, with a single portrait taking many months or even years to complete. In this case, as the painting’s date reveals, Uglow worked on Beautiful Girl Lying Down over a two year period, and we know from the artist’s accounts that Dower posed for him every weekend morning.

Uglow said, ‘Nobody has ever looked at you as intensively as I have’ 4, and indeed, in Beautiful Girl Lying Down, one gets a real sense of the penetrating analysis with which the artist approached the subject. Through innumerable, subtly-modulated fleshly tones, Uglow has ‘sculpted’ Dower’s body, conveying a real impression of the weight of her figure in space. The artist’s painstaking method of observation is evidenced by the visual remnants of numerous small marks throughout the composition that were made to determine the relationship of the subject to the proportions of the canvas and to establish the depth of the field. This was a technique inherited by Uglow from William Coldstream, who he studied under first at Camberwell School of Art from 1947 to 1950, and then at the Slade from 1951 and 1954.

1 2 3 4

The painting was completed shortly before Uglow and Dower broke up in 1959 Rego in The Art Newspaper, December 2019 The artist cited in Browse & Darby, Euan Uglow, 1997, exh cat The artist, unpublished interview, 1989, cited in Richard Kendall, ‘Uglow at Work: the Formative Years’, in Catherine Lampert, Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007, ix

20 Barbara Hepworth 1903 – 1975 Curved Form with Line and Hollow 1959 white alabaster 10 1/4 by 14 1/2 by 9 1/4 inches / 26 by 36.8 by 23.5 cm unique bh 254 collections Gimpel Fils James Goodman, acquired from the above in 1960 Private Collection, Canada exhibitions Toronto, Laing Art Gallery, Sculpture: Ten Modern Masters, November 1959, cat no.3 literature J.P. Hodin, Barbara Hepworth, David McKay, New York/Switzerland, 1961, cat no.254, illus b/w unpaginated

By the late 1950s, Barbara Hepworth had achieved international acclaim. In 1958, she was awarded a CBE and received a major commission for State House in High Holborn, London, and in 1959, she won the Grand Prix at the fifth Bienal de São Paulo, organised by the British Council. Throughout the decade, Hepworth was highly productive, making 109 sculptures in total – comprising carvings, in a variety of woods and stones and, after 1956, editions in bronze. Of these 1950s carvings, 15 were made in different types of alabaster and Curved Form with Line and Hollow is one of a group of seven white alabaster carvings that Hepworth made in 1959 alone. Two of these seven carvings were exhibited at the Galerie Chalette, New York, that October, while another two (including the present work) were exhibited at the Laing Galleries in Toronto the following month.1 Hepworth had learnt to carve from a marmista (master-carver), named Giovanni Ardini, as a student in Rome, and she remained committed to this classical practice throughout her career. As early as 1932, she declared her passion for carving.

‘The sculptor carves because he must. He needs the concrete form of stone and wood for the expression of his idea and experience, and when the idea forms, the material is found at once. […] I have always preferred direct carving to modelling because I like the resistance of the hard material and feel happier working that way.’ 2 Hepworth favoured alabaster for both its luminosity, and its softness, a characteristic which enabled her to experiment freely with more abstract and complicated forms. Over the course of her career, she made as many as 70 carvings in the material, her first experiments dating from 1928 – 29 (bh 16 and bh 19). By the time she came to carve Curved Form with Line and Hollow, Hepworth had been working with alabaster for some 30 years and, as such, would have approached the block with a clear understanding of the unique properties of the stone. Her confidence and familiarity with the material is reflected in her masterful execution of this highly unusual asymmetrical form.

This sequence of alabaster carvings would have been made in Hepworth’s Trewyn studio in St Ives, where she had worked since 1949 – a complex of buildings that included a stone-carving workshop and a carving yard beside it. On receiving stone blocks in the yard, Hepworth would ‘stalk around them as though they are a flock of sheep,’ 3 in order to get to ‘know every one of them: what’s inside the block.’ 4 In a letter dated 20 May 1960, to the then owner of Curved Form with Line and Hollow, Hepworth stated:

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Other views

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‘The original piece of alabaster was quite simply four square and not at all like the finished shape.’ Not only could she clearly envisage the form of a new sculpture just by looking at an uncut block, but, once imagined, she would not deviate from her initial idea during the carving process, saying ‘the idea of changing is terrible to me.’ 5 Carving was an intensely physical process for Hepworth, who insisted on working gradually, rhythmically and laboriously without the use of mechanical tools. By 1959, she was no longer able to stand carving all day and needed to use assistants to rough out the initial form of sculptures for her, but she would always carry out the crucial and delicate stages of the carving herself and usually entirely alone.

Although Curved Form with Line and Hollow is undoubtedly abstract, there are clear references to found natural objects and the Cornish landscape, Hepworth’s immediate surroundings inevitably informing much of her work. The sculpture’s organic shape, a variation on an ovoid, can be likened to a mound, an egg, a large pebble or stone, and its smooth surface, gently rounded contours and shallow recesses give the impression that the form has been shaped by nature over time.

1 According to J.P. Hodin’s 1961 Catalogue Raisonné, in the 1950s Hepworth made the following carvings in varieties of alabaster: ‘alabaster’ (6 carvings), ‘pink alabaster’ (1 carving), ‘Derbyshire alabaster’ (1 carving) and ‘white alabaster’ (7 carvings, including the present work) 2 Barbara Hepworth, ‘The Sculptor carves because he must’ The Studio, London, vol. 104, December 1932, p332 3 The artist in conversation with Alan Bowness, Alan Bowness (ed.), The Complete Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth 1960 – 69, Lund Humphries, London, 1971, p8 4 Ibid, p8 5 Ibid, p7

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21 David Hockney b.1937 Heaven Perpendicular c.1960–61 oil and sand on canvas 15 1/4 by 11 1/4 inches / 38.9 by 28.7 cm collections Eduardo Arroyo Grazia Eminente exhibitions Wakefield, The Hepworth, Alan Davie & David Hockney: Early Works, 19 October 2019 – 19 January 2020, ex cat

Heaven Perpendicular is one of an important series of highly imaginative and personal compositions that David Hockney painted while he was a student at the Royal College of Art. Initially, when he enrolled on the painting course, Hockney had focused his attention on making large, purely abstract paintings on 3 by 4 foot hardboard, inspired by Abstract Expressionist painting, which had recently travelled over from America by way of the influential exhibitions Modern Art in the United States (1956) and New American Painting (1959) at the Tate, and the Jackson Pollock retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery (1958). However, prompted by fellow student R.B. Kitaj, it was not long before Hockney moved away from pure abstraction and began to explore more personal themes within his work. Executed on a more intimate scale than the artist’s previous abstract experiments, Heaven Perpendicular reflects this transition, its small size enticing the viewer closer to the canvas surface, which on inspection reveals itself to be a thick, dry mixture of oil paint and sand.

Largely due to the encouragement of American student at the college, Mark Berger, Hockney opened up about his homosexuality, which was still illegal in Britain at this time.1 He went on to explore what was then a ‘taboo’ subject in a series of paintings which celebrated his sexuality in a veiled way, through a series of coded signs and abbreviations. Paintings such as the present work, Going to be a Queen for Tonight, 1960 (Royal College of Art, London), Study for Doll Boy, 1960 (Tate, London), The Third Love Painting, 1960 (Tate, London) and We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961 (Arts Council, England) are now considered Hockney’s ‘coming out’ statements.

In this painting, there are a number of sexual metaphors; the red form of the figure’s body rising up from the bottom edge of the canvas that unmistakably resembles a phallus, the keyhole placed close to the figure’s behind, and the scrawled words ‘Heaven’ and ‘Perpendicular’, a poetic reference to an erection (the subject and title of another painting from 1959 – 60). As in numerous other works from this period, Peter Crutch, Hockney’s unrequited crush at the time, appears to be the subject of this painting, his name referenced here by way of a letter ‘P’ floating next to the figure’s head.

The imagery, gestural brushwork and dry paint surface of the present work all strongly correspond to the formal vocabulary of Alan Davie’s Discovery of the Staff from 1957, a painting Hockney had seen in 1958.

Stylistically, the painting also reflects the artist’s interest in the work of Jean Dubuffet, who was himself inspired by children’s art. The ‘ladder’ could also be interpreted as a spine, recalling the skeleton drawings that Hockney made in his first term as a student, or as a guitar, reminiscent of those in the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque.

1 Homosexuality was not decriminalised in Britain until as recently as 1967

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22 Allen Jones b.1937 The General and his Girl 1961 oil on four canvases, joined 48 by 36 inches / 121.9 by 91.4 cm collections Sir Duncan Oppenheim, London Richard Green Gallery, London Private Collection, UK, acquired from the above in October 2003 exhibitions London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Two Young Figurative Artists: Allen Jones and Howard Hodgkin, 15 February – 24 March 1962, cat no.4 Dortmund, Museum am Ostwall, Marks on a Canvas, 18 May – 13 July 1969, cat no.1. p61, touring to: Vienna, Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, 27 September – 9 November 1969 Hamburg, Kunstverein, Pop Art in England: Beginnings of a New Figuration 1947 – 63, Arts Council of Great Britain & British Council, 7 February – 21 March 1976, pp71 & 132, cat no.37, illus, touring to: Munich, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 3 April – 16 May 1976 York, City Art Gallery, 29 May – 11 July 1976

Allen Jones had just turned 22 when he arrived on the MA course of the Royal College of Art in autumn 1959 as one of a prodigiously talented group of young students soon associated with the nascent Pop Art movement. The General and his Girl was painted following his expulsion for insubordination after a single year at the RCA, but it shares key aspects of the ‘Royal College style’. These include a swaggering confidence in quoting the work of other artists, combining notionally unrelated styles of depiction within a single picture; a fascination with pictorial signs drawn from areas outside of a conventional fine art framework, such as comic strips, graffiti, heraldry and maps; and an ability to strip a motif to its essence to produce a confrontational and memorable image. Immersed at the time in Cubism, in Robert Delaunay’s Orphism, in the poetic inventions of Paul Klee, and in the first abstract improvisations of Wassily Kandinsky half a century earlier, Jones made no secret of his orientation towards Europe at a time when American art was in the ascendancy. Images were often ‘discovered’ through a process of sketching indebted to the Surrealist practice of automatic drawing, which sought to tap into the conscious. Immersed in colour theory, Jones displayed a natural intuition for the emotive power of particular hues, as attested by the passionate red that floods almost the entire surface of this picture’s four conjoined canvases.

There is great wit and humour in the ambiguity with which a shape can at once act as a representation, a formal device and an in-joke or oblique reference to the work of other painters. The constellation of stars placed against the girl’s head – representing the plough as it appears from London on the artist’s birthday – can be read, if one wishes, as a fashionable decoration or piece of jewellery, but also as a homage to the Constellations series of small paintings on paper made by Joan Miró, an artist he greatly admired, between 1939 and 1941. The shapes inscribed on the general’s medals evoke the timeless designs of mazes and labyrinths; they are suggestive also of badges worn by teenagers to mark their affiliations. Around the general’s head is an irregular curved shape in a different red, suggestive of the comic strip ‘thinks’ balloon that Jones had incorporated in a key earlier work, The Artist Thinks (1960). Interacting both with erudite artistic references and popular culture, in the very year in which American Pop artists such as Warhol and Lichtenstein were making their first comic-book paintings, Jones displays the chutzpah that was to become a prime characteristic of the art with which he established his international reputation.

Text by Marco Livingstone

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23 Allen Jones b.1937 One Step Back 1966 oil on canvas with melamine tiles mounted to an attached wooden shelf 37 3/8 by 37 1/8 inches / 95 by 94 cm signed, dated and titled on the canvas overlap collections Arthur Tooth & Sons, London Private Collection, France, acquired from the above in 1967 Private Collection, Italy exhibitions Valdagno, Marzotto Institution, European Community Contemporary Painting Exhibition, Marzotto Prize, 1966 – 1967: Metropolitan Scene: Images and Objects, September 1966 – August 1967, cat no.66, touring to: Baden Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle Copenhagen, Louisiana Museum Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum London, Tate Gallery Paris, Musée Galliéra

Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue, c.1960s © Retro AdArchives / Alamy Stock Photo

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The 1960s were pivotal for Allen Jones. Despite being expelled from the Royal College of Art in 1960 after just one year, in 1961 he featured alongside David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips and Patrick Caulfield in the seminal ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibition, which was seen as a manifestation of British Pop art. Two years later he received the ‘Prix des Jeunes Artistes’ at the Paris Biennale, cementing his international reputation and in 1964 he travelled to New York, to experience first-hand America’s burgeoning Pop movement.

On his travels throughout the USA in 1965, Jones discovered the work of American fetish illustrators Eric Stanton (1926 – 1999) and Eugene Bilbrew (1923 – 1974), and the mail order catalogue Frederick’s of Hollywood, teeming with highly stylised illustrations of women, lingerie and stilettos. For Jones, Pop offered new possibilities of representing the figure and he consciously appropriated the slick, sexualised visual language of commercial advertising. Back in London, he produced a series of paintings of legs and feet in stilettos, on three-foot-square canvases, to which he attached a wooden shelf (or shelves), covered with melamine tiles. The artist derived the titles of these paintings, including One Step Back, from the names of shoes that appeared in Frederick’s.

In his ‘leg paintings’ Jones depicts the legs roughly lifesize, which, as Marco Livingstone has noted, ’establishes a physical relationship with the viewer’ and ’provides the sensation of human presence’.¹ While the shiny black stiletto can be understood as shorthand for domination and sadomasochistic sex, ’the leg (…) is a potent symbol for the erotically desirable woman, and thus conveys a distinct emotional charge’.2 Here, the figure’s sexual appeal is emphasised by the slenderness of the legs; the curvature of the calves; exaggerated height of the heels; exuberant colour of the tights; and the taut creases at the ankle and knee, which encourage a fetishistic reading of fabric clinging to skin.

For Jones, there was a fundamental distinction between the work being made by London Pop artists and their New York counterparts, ‘It seemed plain to me that it came down to the fact that the British artists refused to abandon illusionism.’ 3 Here, Jones’ inclusion of the shelf effectively breaks down the psychological barrier between the viewer and the image, by suggesting a continuity from imagined space to real space, while simultaneously underlining the flatness of the canvas. He experimented with this idea in other ways by using shaped canvases and fold-out panels and incorporating relief into his paintings. This idea culminated in number of paintings in which steps extended out and down to the gallery floor, implying that we might ourselves walk into the scene.

1 Marco Livingstone, Allen Jones: Sheer Magic, Congreve Publishing Company, New York, 1979, p78 2 Ibid 3 Jones cited in Martin Gayford, ‘Allen Jones on reinventing art’, RA Magazine, Winter 2014

24 William Turnbull 1922–2012 Untitled (Yellow Violet Arc) 1962 oil on canvas 79 7/8 by 59 7/8 inches / 203 by 152 cm dated on the stretcher bar collections Estate of the Artist

William Turnbull, 15-1959 (Red Saturation), 1959, oil on canvas, 178 by 178 cm coll. National Galleries of Scotland © Estate of William Turnbull. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage

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While notionally abstract, the circle motif in Untitled (Yellow Violet Arc), looks back to the paintings of human heads that William Turnbull was making in the mid-1950s. Over time, this head image evolves and reconfigures, beginning as a loose gathering of marks, then flatly drawn circles. Later, these circles increase in scale, becoming various sections of a curve. Here we are presented with an incomplete motif – the circle is cut off at the sides – suggesting it has expanded outwards from the centre point. The character of the circle is quite different to the images that precede it – the line is thin and sharp and its shape particularly perfect and symmetrical when compared with the softer, filled-in circle of 15-1959. The precision of this line and its symmetry effect an inward focus to the image, which is intensified by the small circle of yellow within the larger violet arcs. This centre point within the circle suggests the image of a navel – a figurative association that might be overlooked were it not for its earlier appearance, inscribed on the torso of Idol 4, 1956, and its later recurrence on the bronze Female Figure, 1989.

The navel appears in many cultures as a symbol of life cycle and rebirth – it is particularly significant within the Hindu faith as the sacral chakra (the word chakra itself means ‘wheel’ or ‘circle of energy’) and the source of the god Brahma, who is said to have emerged from a lotus flower that grew from the navel of Vishnu.

The image of the circle (ensō in Japanese) is one of the most important symbols in Zen Buddhism, presenting a number of dualities – fullness and emptiness, perfection and imperfection, movement and stillness.

The practice of making ensō ink drawings has been used for centuries as part of a daily meditative routine. An incomplete circle may express various ideas – for example, that the ensō is not separate but is part of something greater, or that imperfection is an essential and inherent aspect of existence.

In a 1973 review in the journal Kunstforum, Frank Whitford highlighted Turnbull’s affinity with East Asian art and the meditative nature of his paintings: ‘Turnbull wants to create objects – like the navel for the holy Hindu – which serve as an outward focus for an inward spiritual contemplation.

The viewer should give much of himself to the artwork in order to sink deeper into his own personality and to understand himself better.

The simpler the form, the richer the discovery of self. Turnbull’s works indicate the strict and dry understatement of Scottish Christianity, and possess the inner silence of a Japanese temple garden.’ 1 1 Frank Whitford, ‘Zen of the Presbyterians’, Kunstforum, October 1973, pp205 – 210

25 Frank Auerbach b.1931 E.O.W. on her Blue Eiderdown, VI 1963

‘Paint laid on with quite outrageous prodigality can be not only seductive but most subtly and mysteriously alive.’ 1

17 1/4 by 20 inches / 43.8 by 50.8 cm collections Beaux Arts Gallery, London Dr S. Charles Lewsen David Roemer Marlborough Fine Art, London Private Collection, London, acquired from the above in September 1999 Thence by descent in October 2009 Private Collection, UK exhibitions London, Beaux Arts Gallery, Frank Auerbach, 5 September – 12 October 1963, cat no.8, illus b/w unpaginated London, Hayward Gallery, Frank Auerbach, Arts Council of Great Britain, 4 May – 2 July 1978, cat no.53, illus b/w p86, touring to: Edinburgh, Fruit Market Gallery, 15 July – 12 August 1978 London, Offer Waterman, Frank Auerbach, Early Works 1954 – 1978, 2 November – 1 December 2012, cat no.6, illus colour p29 literature Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, illus colour p53 pl.20 William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, cat no.155, illus colour p254

Estella Olive West (1916 – 2014), or Stella as she was affectionately known, first met Frank Auerbach in 1948, when he was just 17 years old and she was 32. Their paths crossed at the Unity Theatre, where they performed together in a production of Peter Ustinov’s House of Regrets. It was not long before Auerbach moved into a basement room in E.O.W.’s house in Earls Court as a lodger and their relationship intensified. She was to become one of the most important figures in Auerbach’s life, romantically and artistically, for the next 25 years.

The second most painted subject after J.Y.M., E.O.W. sat for Auerbach for two hours, three times a week, from 1952 to 1973, resulting in a total of 11 drawings and 86 oils, including this electrifying composition, from Auerbach’s most celebrated period, which depicts her reclining in the nude.2 Auerbach’s images of E.O.W. are widely considered some of his greatest masterpieces, and it is no coincidence that a total of nine portraits of her were included in the artist’s 2015 retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain – more than of any other sitter. Auerbach’s central role in selecting the works that featured in the show serves to highlight both her significance as a model and the enduring importance of those pictures to the artist.

Characterised by a remarkably dense impasto, and holding incredible tactile appeal, the present work is sculptural in quality. Swathes of oil are not only encrusted on the surface but extend off the canvas edges. At the outermost corners, Auerbach’s painterly process of scraping back becomes evident, and we bear witness to the remnants of previous layers of different coloured pigment, inches below the surface.

The 1960s were a period of transition in Auerbach’s work. A recent contract with the Beaux Arts Gallery in London enabled him to buy expensive coloured pigments for the first time, resulting in a move away from his usual combination of ochres, black and white. Executed in sky blue, verdant green, white, blood red and yellow ochre, this painting’s palette is indicative of the time in which it was made. These bright hues lend the image a sense of energy and vigour, which is paralleled by the strong sense of line that Auerbach has employed to pin down the structure of E.O.W.’s figure.

1 David Sylvester cited in William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, p11 2 Juliet Yardley Mills (J.Y.M.) was the subject of 27 drawings and 189 paintings from 1956 – 1997

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26 Frank Auerbach b.1931 E.O.W. on her Bed 1969 oil on board 5 by 8 inches / 12.7 by 20.3 cm collections Private Collection, UK Bernard Jacobson, London Private Collection, UK exhibitions London, Marlborough Fine Art, Frank Auerbach, January 1971, cat no.24, not illus literature William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, cat no.260, illus colour p267

This small, jewel-like painting is one of a sequence of eight oils that Frank Auerbach produced in 1969 depicting E.O.W. in profile, reclining on the bed, her hair spreading up the pillow above her head, a composition he returned to in a later painting in 1982 using his cousin Gerda Boehm as the subject.1 Measuring just 5 by 8 inches, this painting is the smallest in the series and the closest crop, with the sitter’s nose pushing against the top edge of the board. Although, to varying degrees, all of Auerbach’s depictions of E.O.W. reveal a sense of familiarity, the small scale of the present work, and the view it offers of the subject, exudes a particularly charged intimacy. Unlike the seven other paintings in the sequence, which are on square supports, the present work is distinguished by its horizontal format. Importantly, a painting from this series (wf 257) was at one time in the collection of the artist’s close friend Lucian Freud, who amassed what is now regarded as one of the greatest private collections of Auerbach’s works.

For Auerbach, a single portrait may take many weeks or months to complete. This is due to his laborious technique of painting the entire surface and then, if he is dissatisfied, scraping off the whole day’s work, to allow him to start from scratch at the next session. Of his approach Auerbach has said, ‘I don’t think one produces a great picture unless one destroys a good one in the process.’ 2 While another small painting of the sitter, Head of E.O.W., 1955 (8 ½ by 6 inches), took Auerbach a remarkable two years and 300 sittings to complete, we know that in 1969 alone the artist managed to paint six of the eight oils of E.O.W.’s reclining head, including the present work. Auerbach has spoken of his sense of urgency when working from the model and this is felt acutely in this painting. Unlike earlier works, such as E.O.W. on her Blue Eiderdown, VI, 1963 (cat.25), in which the paint appears dry and encrusted, here there is a real sense of the liquidity of the paint. Pools of bright yellow oil stream across the picture surface, interrupted by glossy black brush marks and delicate tendrils of criss-crossing paint.

1 The series of eight portraits of E.O.W. in profile have the following cat nos. in Feaver’s 2009 catalogue raisonné: 256 – 263 2 The artist in conversation with William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, p230

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27 Lucian Freud 1922–2011 Man with Glasses c.1963–64 oil on canvas 24 1/8 by 24 1/8 inches / 61 by 61 cm collections The Artist Private Collection, gifted from the above Lefevre Gallery, London Private Collection, Europe exhibitions London, Thomas Gibson Fine Art, British Art: A Post War Selection, 24 April – 22 May 2006, illus colour pp2 & 15 literature William Feaver, Lucian Freud, Rizzoli, New York, 2007, illus colour p122

When Lucian Freud first met Harry Diamond (1924 – 2009) in 1944, he was ‘eking out a living on the margins of Soho,’ working as a stagehand at various London theatres and juggling a number of other odd jobs – at one point, he was a bookseller, at another, a cleaner for Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, later achieving relative success as a photographer.1 Ever present on the bohemian Soho scene, Diamond was well acquainted with other School of London painters such as Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon and Michael Andrews, and, after taking up photography full-time in the late 1960s, was known to exchange photographs he had taken of these artists and their work for a drink or a meal.2 Man with Glasses is the third in a series of four portraits that Freud made of Diamond over an almost 20-year period (1951 – 1970). While of the four paintings Interior at Paddington, 1951, which won Freud the Arts Council prize at the Festival of Britain, is undoubtedly the most renowned, Diamond identified the present work and the highly similar earlier composition Man in a Mackintosh, 1957 – 58 as his preferred portraits – perhaps he felt they best reflected his character.3 Modelling for Freud was an intense and sustained process, each sitting would last for several hours and occurred over many months, sometimes years, and even if Freud was painting the background of a portrait, he would require his sitter, as he believed a successful work would only result from the ‘living presence’ of his subject, as he explained: ‘The subject must be kept under closest observation: if this is done, day and night, the subject – he, she, or it – will eventually reveal the all, without which selection itself is not possible; they will reveal it, through some and every facet of their lives, or lack of life, through movements and attitudes, through every variation from one to another.’ 4 Michael Wishart, who posed for Boy with a Pigeon, 1944, likened his experience of sitting for Freud to undergoing ‘delicate eye surgery’, while Diamond himself recalled, ‘The sittings went on for some six months (…) another time it took a year – which was very demanding. We talked quite a lot, except at those times when he said, “Now don't talk, I'm concentrating”, which was fair enough. It was quite an ordeal. If someone is interested in getting your essence down on canvas, they are also drawing your essence out of you. Afterwards one felt depleted, but also invigorated.’ 5 By the time Freud came to make this third portrait of Diamond, the pair had been friends for two decades and accrued countless hours of studio time together. In this powerful, yet tender image there is a real sense of rawness and honesty, a result of the bond they had undoubtedly formed at this point and the artist’s sustained enquiry into both the

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Harry Diamond, Harry Diamond, Brick Lane, 1973 gelatin silver print, 29.2 by 22 cm coll. National Portrait Gallery, London, bequeathed by Harry Diamond, 2012 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Lucian Freud, Interior at Paddington, 1951 oil on canvas, 152.4 by 114.3 cm coll. Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool © The Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgeman Images

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physical appearance and emotional character of his sitter. While in Freud’s first and last portraits of Diamond his entire figure is portrayed within a setting, here the artist removes all extraneous detail from the composition, focusing solely on his sitter’s head and shoulders, which span the width of the canvas. Arguably the most visually compelling of the four portraits of Diamond, here he is seen emerging from the darkness, the cool, grey-black tones of the background heightening the luminosity of his skin, which is made up of an innumerable array of fleshy tones. Diamond’s head is tilted downwards and his eyes are averted, allowing us to scrutinise and explore the mutable, plastic qualities that make up his physiognomy and to contemplate his brooding expression, which wonderfully reflects Bruce Bernard’s description of him as a ‘complex and sensitive man’.6 Tired of being referred to as ‘The Ingres of Existentialism’ (as dubbed

by Herbert Read) and buoyed by his close friend, Francis Bacon’s approach to painting, in the 1960s Freud embarked on a new, more expressive visual language for his art; ‘When people went on about my technique and how it related to the German old masters I have to say it was sickening. Especially when they went on about technique. I think that Francis’ way of painting freely helped me feel more daring.’ 7 Freud moved away from the meticulous, sable brush technique he’d perfected in the previous decade, adopting a looser, more emphatic application of paint. Here he has used hog hair brushes to apply oil in thick, broad strokes, effectively carving out the contours of Diamond’s strong jawline, prominent nose, large lips, dimpled chin and almond-shaped eyes.

Diamond’s photographs feature in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Arts Council and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Following Diamond’s death, his photographic archive was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.

1 Martin Gayford, Mark Holborn (Ed.), Lucian Freud, Volume 1, Phaidon Press, London, 2018, p19 2 Diamond featured in a black and white photograph on the cover of Frank Norman's 1959 book about Soho, entitled Stand on Me 3 Interior at Paddington was also the artist’s first large-scale painting and public commission 4 Lucian Freud, ‘Some Thoughts on Painting’, Encounter, London, July 1954 5 Harry Diamond, 1970, cited in Martin Gayford, ‘Arts: I was framed by Freud’, Independent, 24 February 1999: www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/arts-i-was-framed-by-freud-1072877.html 6 Harry Diamond obituary, The Guardian, 27 January 2010: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/jan/27/harry-diamond-obituary 7 The artist quoted in ‘A Late-Night conversation with Lucian Freud’, Sebastian Smee, Freud at Work, London 2006, p18

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28 Hans Coper 1920–1981 Spade Form 1972 stoneware, layered white porcelain slips and engobes over a body with textured and incised linear designs, with a manganese glaze to the interior 8 1/4 by 6 1/4 by 2 1/8 inches / 21 by 16 by 5.1 cm unique impressed with the artist’s seal on the base collections Fischer Fine Art, London Private Collection, UK, acquired from the above in 1972 literature Tony Birks, Hans Coper, Stenlake Publishing, Yeovil, 2013, p172, closely similar examples illus colour

Hans Coper’s work was, among other things, about a studied honing down of form, what he called ‘concentrating on continuous variations of simple themes’, making shapes that were thrown, altered and assembled. They were objects that reinvented the wheel, or more precisely, they helped to reinvent the modern language of the potter’s wheel, developing the idea that throwing was just one part of the making process. He admired artists like Brâncuşi and Giacometti in part because of their ability to express a sculptural essence. Their approaches to the pared-down figure were attractive to a potter drawn to concentration.

Coper’s principal tool would always be the wheel, but this superb piece demonstrates how he was able to broaden the vocabulary of throwing through post-wheel manipulation, of cutting and joining thrown sections.

The ‘Spade Form‘ – this example is from 1972 – was developed in the mid-1960s when Coper was living and working in Hammersmith.

This shape was first exhibited in his important show with Lucie Rie at Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam in 1967. With its narrow cylindrical base opening out into a broader, flattened cylinder, tapering slightly towards the rim, it was suggestive of a very abstracted and summarised head and neck. There were references to the frontality and simplicity of Cycladic figures and Egyptian sculpture, but the fact that they were still pots, having risen first as vessels on the turning wheel, was important.

Douglas Hill wrote perceptively (and with Coper’s approval) in the catalogue for the Boijmans exhibition, ‘In Coper’s work, one can see not so much a quality of serenity as a kind of balanced tension. Coper seems to be exploring the outward limits of pottery, and to be pushing those limits back with each motif.’ The ‘Spade Forms‘ showed Coper’s continuing preoccupation with symmetry and balance, the sense of a piece having perfectly integrated parts. In examining earlier and later variations of his pots, we realise how closely related each development is, how the ‘Spade’ grew out of earlier stem pieces and cups, part of the same family of contemporaneous disc forms, hourglass shapes and the narrow forms on drum bases. This ‘Spade‘ piece is a striking example of how Coper distilled from history, epitomising his process of, as he put it, ‘extracting essences’. On one level, it has that hard-achieved simplicity, but it also has a votive presence, an almost hieratic quality, one that gives Coper’s best work that all-pervasive mystery.

Text by David Whiting

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29 David Hockney b.1937 Christopher Isherwood, Santa Monica 1968 ink on paper 17 1/8 by 13 7/8 inches / 43.2 by 35.2 cm initialled, dated and inscribed ‘DH. Christopher Isherwood 1968’ collections Private Collection Patricia McCallum and Michael York, acquired from the above in c.1971 exhibitions Paris, Palais du Louvre, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, David Hockney: Paintings and Drawings, 11 October – 9 December 1974, cat no.55, p5, not illus

David Hockney met Christopher Isherwood (1904 – 1986) in 1964, soon after moving to California, and he struck up a close friendship with Isherwood and his partner, the artist Don Bachardy (b.1934), becoming a regular among the couple’s circle of friends, as his biographer, Christopher Sykes notes, ‘Isherwood’s diaries from this time show that Hockney led a social life that was every bit as relentless as his working life. At its centre was Isherwood and Don Bachardy’s house at 145 Adelaide Drive, Santa Monica, where they presided over a southern Californian salon for philosophers, writers and artists. At regular dinners held around their circular dining table, which came from a sale at the props department at Warner Bros, Hockney mixed with Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, the Stravinskys, Wystan Auden, Lauren Bacall and Tony Richardson.’ 1 Isherwood’s best-known novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains, 1935, and Goodbye to Berlin, 1939, were based on his experiences of pre-war Germany. He emigrated to California to work as a Hollywood scriptwriter in 1939 and became a US citizen in 1946. Around the time he met Hockney, Isherwood was writing his last novel, A Meeting by the River, 1967, after which his writing focused on autobiography. In early 1968, Hockney found a place to rent close to Isherwood’s home.

During the first half of the year, he worked on two double portraits: one of Isherwood and Bachardy sitting in their living room; the other of collectors Fred and Marcia Weisman standing outside by their pool. In preparation for his portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy, Hockney took photographs and made numerous drawings of the couple, including the present work.

Hockney’s portrait of Isherwood revels in the details of his buzz cut hair and bushy eyebrows, these areas of high detail contrasting with the more fluid lines of the sitter’s shirt. Hockney spoke of the difficulty of getting this kind of drawing right – he wouldn’t allow himself to sketch out the image in pencil first, but would launch straight in with ink, the unforgiving nature of the medium providing the ideal discipline to attune one’s eye and hand.

In 1976, Hockney revisited his double portrait of Isherwood and Bacardy, making a lithograph of the couple, with their original poses reversed, for his suite of prints titled Friends. In the early 1980s, the couple appear together again in a new series of photocollages.

1 Christopher Sykes, Hockney: The Biography, A Pilgrim’s Progress, Century, London, 2014, p27

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30 David Hockney b.1937 Artist’s Father Reading at Table 1972 ink on paper 16 7/8 by 13 3/4 inches / 43 by 35 cm initialled, dated and inscribed ‘DH Bradford.

Aug 2nd 1972’ collections Deweer Art Gallery, Zwevegem, Belgium Private Collection, Belgium, acquired from the above in 1980 Thence by descent exhibitions Zwevegem, Deweer Art Gallery, David Hockney: Drawings and Prints, 20 September – 28 October 1980, illus b/w unpaginated literature Nikos Stangos (ed.), David Hockney by David Hockney, Thames & Hudson, London, 1988, p258, illus b/w pl.358

David Hockney, My Parents, 1977 oil on canvas, 182.9 by 182.9 cm coll. Tate Gallery, London © David Hockney

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‘Portraits aren’t just made up of drawing, they are made up of other insights as well.’ – david hockney The subject of this drawing is David Hockney’s father Kenneth (1904 – 1978). Renowned as an eccentric in his hometown of Bradford, West Yorkshire, Kenneth held strong political views and supported social causes with real passion. As a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Kenneth wrote numerous letters of appeal to world leaders and was known to leave copies of Peace News in public spaces locally. He was also highly particular about his appearance and would often wear a bow tie, to which he would apply paper spots; kept an array of false teeth and spectacles, labelled ‘best’, ‘next best’ etc, which he would select according to the importance of the occasion; and had a curious habit of wearing two watches, in case one happened to be wrong. Both of Hockney’s parents were extremely supportive of their son and had a profound impact on his development, particularly in his formative years. It is clear that Hockney inherited Kenneth’s flamboyant sense of style, individualism, fantastic sense of humour, and love of art, music, opera and theatre. When asked what he had most valued in his father, Hockney replied, ‘He taught me not to care what the neighbours think.’ 1 After leaving Bradford for London in 1959 to attend the Royal College of Art, Hockney maintained a close relationship with his parents. As such, it is no surprise that they have been the subject of numerous works by the artist, ranging from drawings in coloured crayon and ink, to prints, photographs, photocollages and paintings. Kenneth appears in one of Hockney’s earliest known paintings, Portrait of My Father, 1955, and later, alongside his wife Laura, in Tate’s famous double-portrait My Parents, 1977. In fact, the present work belongs to a series of preparatory drawings that Hockney made ahead of the double-portrait that he finally completed in 1977 (after two failed attempts).

In 1966, Hockney became preoccupied specifically with line drawing and, by the time he came to make the present work, he had become highly skilled at drawing in both pencil and ink. Artist’s Father Reading at Table is a superlative example from this period, which showcases both Hockney’s technical deftness and the distinctive, easy charm he brought to the medium.

1 The artist cited in Portrait of David Hockney, Peter Webb, Chatto & Windus, London, 1988, p3

31 Frank Auerbach b.1931 Primrose Hill, Hot Summer Evening 1974–75 oil on board 48 by 48 inches / 121.9 by 121.9 cm collections Marlborough Fine Art, London Private Collection, Switzerland, acquired from the above January 1976 Private Collection, UK literature Frank Auerbach, Hayward Gallery, London, 1978, exh cat, cat no.122, illus colour p37, not included in the exhibition William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, cat no.358, illus colour p278

Rendered with a wealth of expressive strokes, Frank Auerbach's Primrose Hill, Hot Summer Evening is a highly tactile, near sculptural painting, depicting one of the most important subjects in the artist's œuvre. Auerbach first painted Primrose Hill in 1954, after taking over a studio in Mornington Crescent from his friend Leon Kossoff. Living and working in the same space ever since, the streets, buildings and parks surrounding the artist’s studio have formed the core of his landscape painting. Between 1954 and 2009, Auerbach made a total of 42 oils of Primrose Hill, including the present work, which, in 1977, he described as, ‘one of my best landscapes, and unique in its series’.1 Although Auerbach painted Primrose Hill dozens of times, when it came to selecting works for his retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1978, Auerbach was highly insistent that this particular painting be included. However, despite the fact that the painting was not lent, Auerbach chose to highlight its importance to him by illustrating it in colour in the exhibition catalogue.

While Auerbach paints his landscapes in his studio, each is derived from numerous rapid sketches that he produces directly from the subject each morning. A large landscape such as this one might be informed by as many as 200 drawings and could take the artist up to a year to complete. This is due to Auerbach’s exceptionally laborious process of painting the entire surface in a single session and then scraping it back while the oil is still wet to make way for a fresh image to be painted the following day, according to new information and ideas derived from his sketches. During this process, the appearance of the painting can alter radically from one day to the next.

Resting the board or canvas on each of its four edges, Auerbach works on his landscapes from all angles to ensure the marks relate to each other in every direction, a practice he likened to carving sculpture. This process of painting, rotating and scraping back continues until the artist instinctively deems the work complete. As he explains, ‘The picture has its own laws, and when the thing suddenly stands up and you feel, well, there’s this strange thing and I don’t know what I can do about it, I can’t do anything to it, it seems to have a life of its own…if you’ve painted yourself out of the picture then you leave it because it’s an independent object and there’s nothing you can do with it.’ 2 1 Auerbach, in a letter to the then owner of the painting, dated 16 December 1977 2 Auerbach in conversation with William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, p230

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32 Victor Willing 1928–1988 Knot 1984 acrylic on canvas 78 3/4 by 86 5/8 inches / 200 by 220 cm collections Saatchi Collection, London exhibitions London, Whitechapel Gallery, Victor Willing: A Retrospective Exhibition 1952 – 1985, 6 June – 20 July 1986, illus colour unpaginated Cascais, Portugal, Casa das Historias Paula Rego, Victor Willing: Uma Retrospectiva, 9 September – 2 January 2011, illus colour p133 literature Alastair Hicks, New British Art in the Saatchi Collection, Thames & Hudson, London, 1989, cat no.130, illus colour p118 John McEwen, Victor Willing, Selected Writings and Two Conversations with John McEwen, Karsten Schubert, London, 1993, p67 Fiona Bradley (ed.), Lynne Cooke, John McEwen, John Mills, Paula Rego, Nicholas Serota, Victor Willing, August Media, London, 2010, p43, illus colour p98, related study illus colour p100

Victor Willing was first diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1966. As part of his treatment, in 1974 he was prescribed the drug ACTH. He recalls, ‘On high doses, I only slept four hours in 24. I was hyperactive. I would feel very tired but not sleepy, very calm but alert. In this state, I would sit down in a comfortable upright chair, relax and stare at the wall. After a time, I could see through the wall – a scene, brightly lit, clearly defined on the other side, like a stage, spotlit. No figures. No action, therefore, just a scene. The “lifesize” objects would appear in three dimensions, but as though already drawn in charcoal and pastel (…) I would remain in my chair and, taking paper and charcoal, simply copy down the scene (…) Subsequently, “meanings” might occur to me, but in advance there was nothing.’ 1 It was this kind of visionary drawing that formed the basis for Knot.

In an interview with John McEwen for his 1986 retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, Willing describes this picture as ‘a snakelike form grips a bunch of sticks’. Other paintings from the early 1980s contain similarly Freudian motifs. In the Tate Gallery’s Rien, 1980, an abandoned leather belt lies coiled like a snake – Willing explained that the painting was about the unwelcome intrusion of business affairs into a day spent on the beach. The suit and belt are a stand-in for Willing himself, or at least for Willing in his role as ‘business man’. Ropes, belts and swathes of fabric recur in numerous paintings, weaving menacingly around other objects, ready to move in, as it has here. Here the image might be a metaphor for a controlling romantic relationship, or perhaps the grip of illness.

Here, the scale of the central motif necessitates that Willing’s marks are large and loose. Like a pastel drawing, he colours in the forms in rudimentary fashion, establishing the image apparently more urgent than any deep preoccupation with technique. Willing’s crude application of paint is comparable to his Canadian-American contemporary Philip Guston, who abandoned Abstract Expressionism in favour of more autobiographical subjects. Willing’s placement of figures and objects on a coloured ’island’ or ’stage’ is a device that recurs throughout his career. Just as Bacon portrayed his subjects within brightly coloured arenas, Willing uses a similar strategy to isolate his subjects, intensifying the psychological atmosphere.

1 The artist in a letter to the Tate Gallery, 7 October 1982, upon Tate’s acquisition of Place with a Red Thing, 1980

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33 William Turnbull 1922–2012 Leaf Venus 2 1986 bronze 46 by 16 1/2 by 3 inches / 116.8 by 41.9 by 7.6 cm stamped with the artist’s monogram, dated and numbered AC from an edition of 6 plus 1 AC collections Estate of the Artist exhibitions London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull: Sculptures 1946 – 62, 1985 – 87, 28 October – 21 November 1987, cat no.20, illus colour p53, another cast London, Serpentine Gallery, William Turnbull: Sculpture and Paintings, 15 November 1995 – 7 January 1996, illus colour pl.45, p65, another cast literature Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, pp52, 68 & 168 cat no.240, illus b/w p51 fig.23, cast unknown

Back view

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In 1973, William Turnbull was awarded a major retrospective at the Tate Gallery. After months of preparation, such an in-depth re-evaluation of his work provoked a crisis in direction in Turnbull, who was still only 51 years old. His solution was to work figuratively again, having spent most of the previous decade making sequential, minimalist sculptures using industrial materials. He began by modelling with air-drying clay on a tiny scale, making hundreds of little figures, some resembling ‘fertility figurines’, others like ‘pre-historic tools’.1 From 1979 – 80, Turnbull cast a small group of these figures into bronze, their distinctive forms becoming the blueprint for a whole new body of work. The full-sized idols that followed had simple silhouettes, with clear front and back aspects, and were, typically, very thin when viewed from the side. Their smooth surfaces allowed Turnbull to add delicate surface decoration in the form of puncture holes and fine incised lines, and he paid close attention to the patination of each bronze, working closely with the foundry to achieve a range of colours across any one edition.

Of the little maquettes, the tapered form of Leaf Venus 2, 1986, most closely resembles Small Venus, 1979 (h. 22 cm), but also harks back to roughly textured early bronzes, such as Female Figure, 1955, and the Idol series, 1956 – 57. From Turnbull’s ‘third period’, it is connected to the Metamorphic Venus series, 1982 – 83; Venus, 1984; the Paddle Venus sculptures, 1985 – 1988; and Queen 2, 1988. In Leaf Venus 1, 1986, the figure seems to almost float in space, apparently teetering on a narrow point – which, in fact, is held firmly in place by a thin rod – while here, the form is far more weighty and low slung, as if pregnant.

Turnbull’s interest in leaf motifs dates to the early years of his marriage to printmaker and sculptor Kim Lim. As Amanda Davidson observes, ‘In 1962, they made their first trip to Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore together… During the trip to Singapore, Turnbull became interested in the luxuriant plant life of the region. He produced studies in sketchbooks of natural forms, plants and leaves in watercolour or pencil.

Some of these images were explored further in a series of prints on the theme of leaves, and in later sculptures such as Leaf Venus 2, 1986.’ 2 Turnbull made four coloured lithographs of leaves in 1967, and nine drypoint etchings in 1971, several of which are now in the Tate Collection.

He continued to make plant studies on subsequent trips, as is evidenced by numerous sketchbooks in the artist’s estate. Both the rich green patina and strong silhouette of Leaf Venus 2 correspond closely to the graphic quality of these observational drawings.

1 Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, p62 2 Ibid, p52

34 Rachel Whiteread b.1963 Untitled (Torso) 1991 dental plaster 4 1/2 by 11 by 7 inches / 11.4 by 27.9 by 17.8 cm unique collections Karsten Schubert, London Private Collection, Belgium exhibitions New York, Luhring Augustine Gallery, Rachel Whiteread, Plaster Sculptures, 1993, illus b/w p45 literature David Batchelor, Rachel Whiteread: Plaster Sculptures, Luhring Augustine, New York & Karsten Schubert, London, 1993, p44, illus b/w p45

Another view

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This sculpture is one of a series of ‘Torsos’ that Rachel Whiteread cast directly from hot water bottles or similarly shaped enema bags, the earliest of which featured in the artist’s first solo exhibition, at the Carlisle Gallery in London, in 1988, a year after she graduated from the Slade.

Demonstrating Whiteread’s early interest in small domestic objects and furniture, the exhibition included plaster casts of a dressing table, a wardrobe and the underside of a bed, setting the stage for the artist's continuing preoccupation with experimenting with materials and the emotional power of unremarkable, everyday objects.

Whiteread returned to the ‘Torso’ form more consistently than any other in her work. The sculptures in this series were made over several years in a host of different materials, including plaster, dental plaster, wax, polyurethane resin, rubber, concrete, and plaster and silver leaf.

To make the casts, the artist would pour her chosen material into a hot water bottle or enema bag, then, after the material had hardened, would remove the rubber surrounding it, transforming the negative space of the interior into a solid object. Using this method Whiteread was able to ‘determine exactly what the work will look like by folding it, bending it or making a cast around it.’ 1 Each of the resulting sculptures has its own visual identity – some are fuller and firmer, others contorted, and they vary in opacity and colour, from yellow, to pink, orange, white, grey and silver, reading like a ‘sampler in a pattern book’.2 By keeping the object from which she casts constant, Whiteread places greater emphasis on the material quality of each individual sculpture, as was highlighted in the artist’s 2017 – 18 Tate retrospective, where nine ‘Torsos’ in different mediums were displayed lying down side-by-side, on a long, narrow rectangular plinth.

As suggested by their title, Whiteread’s ‘Torsos’ are highly anthropomorphic, and indeed the artist describes them as her ‘headless, limbless babies.’ 3 By titling them in this way, Whiteread stresses the independence of the finished sculptures from the objects from which they were originally cast; however as they still visually recall hot water bottles, they are inherently imbued with memory and association. Indeed, there is an uncanny tension between the hot water bottle, a symbol of domesticity, childhood, warmth, comfort and illness, designed to be held close, and Whiteread’s ‘Torsos’, which are cold, hard art objects created for quiet contemplation from afar.

1 Iwona Blazwick in conversation with Rachel Whiteread, cited in Linsey Young, ‘The Power of Things’, Rachel Whiteread, Tate, 2017, exh cat, p162 2 Briony Fer, ‘Eyes Cast,’ Rachel Whiteread, Tate, 2017, exh cat, p132 3 Rachel Whiteread interviewed by Andrea Rose, March 1997, Rachel Whiteread, Venice Biennale, 1997, exh cat, p33

35 Grayson Perry b.1960 Pseudo Spiritual Clap Trap 1998 glazed earthenware with sprig moulds 15 by 11 1/8 by 11 1/8 inches / 38.1 by 28.3 by 28.3 cm unique impressed with the artist’s seal and titled near the base collections Laurent Delaye Gallery, London Private Collection, UK, acquired from the above in October 2000

Pseudo Spiritual Clap Trap makes use of all Grayson Perry’s signature techniques – photo transfers, line drawings, typography, decorative glazes, sprig moulds – to explore the big themes of sex, art and God. The most prominent aspect of its design are three red-toned photo transfers, two of which show Perry himself. Under the word ’Sex’, he is dressed as a suburban housewife wearing a dated 1980s blouse. A larger version of this photo appears on the pot Contained Anger, 1999, where it becomes apparent that he is also wearing handcuffs. Perry’s transvestism, which began in his teens and is poignantly described in his 2006 autobiography, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, is a constant subject within his work. In his art, Perry presents this aspect of himself at one remove and, as such, one might misread his female persona Claire as part of an act. But as Jacky Klein explains, ‘The power, pathos and oddness of his transvestism lie not in its status as performance. This is no mere stunt: his is a publicly played out compulsion – one rooted in rejection, unhappiness and the need to be loved simply for being oneself.’ 1 The second image, ’God’, frames Perry’s head and naked torso in a Christlike or, possibly, autoerotic pose. Another photo from the same series appears on another 1998 pot, I Am My Own God, in which Perry stands on a stepladder between two large vases, posing, not as Christ, but rather as a classical Greek statue. In the earlier work, My Gods, 1994 (Tate Collection), Perry invents Gods to oversee different aspects of his own experience, including ‘the god of quiet machismo’ and the ‘god of imagination’. He later reflected that ‘when you’re a child, your gods are whoever you’re told they should be … An innocent child worships gods that have aspects of its parents in them: there’s a sort of projection of parent onto god’.2 The subject of God then has less to do with questions of religious faith, and more with his experience of psychotherapy and his troubled relationship with his parents.

The third transfer, labelled ’Art’, shows a young and gamine Sadie Coles. Coles, now one of Britain’s most successful contemporary art dealers, was then working for Anthony d’Offay, at whose gallery Perry showed in 1994 and 1996 –9 7. The skull and crossbones over her face don’t seem malicious in intent – perhaps she is an angel of the art world.

It is under her image that we find the text ‘pseudo spiritual clap trap’.

The theme of pseudo-spirituality is continued in the tiny images, sacred and profane, scattered over the surface, including flowers, hands, vaginas, coffins and crosses.

1 Jacky Klein, Grayson Perry, Thames & Hudson, London, 2009, p127 2 Tate Gallery website, the artist quoted in Jacky Klein, Grayson Perry, Thames & Hudson, London, 2009, p176

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Other views

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36 Michael Craig-Martin b.1941 Untitled 2000 acrylic on canvas 84 by 56 inches / 213.4 by 142.2 cm collections The Artist Waddington Galleries, London Sammlung Froehlich, Stuttgart exhibitions London, Waddington Galleries, Michael CraigMartin: Conference, 3 May – 3 June 2000, exh cat Bregenz, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Michael CraigMartin: Signs of Life, 10 June – 13 August 2006, illus colour p51

Rich with saturated colour, Untitled, is a striking example of Michael Craig-Martin’s iconic graphic style. Here, on a ground of flat, vivid lilac, six seemingly incongruous and arbitrarily coloured motifs are united in a playful composition that collapses reference points such as scale, time and space.

Craig-Martin first began making line drawings of ordinary objects in 1978 and has continued this practice ever since. Early drawings were made in pencil on an A4 drawing pad, which were traced out onto sheets of acetate, so they could be projected onto the wall. However, in the 1990s, after purchasing his first computer, Craig-Martin stopped producing physical drawings, and instead began making vector illustrations on screen using a less sophisticated version of AutoCAD. This new approach to drawing facilitated a greater degree of experimentation, enabling him to play around with the scale of an image, its orientation, and the colour and thickness of a line with one click of a button.

Working on the computer, Craig-Martin has an extensive collection of individual drawings, which he uses to digitally plan the composition and palette of his paintings, ‘making very small decisions and alterations (…) in order to find the one that’s right’.1 The bunch of bananas, hanging jacket, pencil sharpener, pills, cigarettes and Alvar Aalto ’Paimio’ chair (1931 – 32) that make up this painting would have originated as six separate digital drawings, which Craig-Martin manipulated on screen using Photoshop. The picture’s narrative is open-ended – the pencil sharpener, coat and chair suggest a day in the artist’s studio, while the presence of pills, cigarettes and bananas might allude to Damien Hirst (Craig-Martin’s former student) and Andy Warhol.

To make this painting, Craig-Martin would have pinned a sheet of canvas directly to the studio wall, giving him a firm surface to work on.

He would then have primed the canvas with gesso and painted the entire surface with black acrylic using a paint roller. After the black dried, Craig-Martin would have projected the predetermined composition onto the canvas and traced over it using thin, flexible tape, effectively masking the outline of each of object. Each area of colour would then have been filled in separately using four-inch paint rollers, to achieve the flat, pure hues we see in the finished work. Finally, after all the layers of colour have dried, Craig-Martin would have peeled off the underlying tape to reveal the crisp black outlines, which sit just behind the coloured surface as if ‘etched into the paint’.2 1 The artist in the videotaped interview Michael Craig-Martin: Drawings 1967 – 2002, Directed by Camilla Robinson, produced by Dapper Films for Alan Cristea Gallery: vimeo.com/39714679 2 The artist cited in Michael Craig-Martin, A is for Umbrella, Gagosian Gallery, London, 2007, exh cat, p8

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37 David Hockney b.1937 Yosemite 1, October 16th 2011 iPad drawing printed on four sheets of paper, mounted on four sheets of Dibond 77 1/2 by 69 3/4 inches / 197 by 177 cm signed, dated and numbered, from an edition of 12 collections The Artist Private Collection, Japan, acquired directly from the above Private Collection, UK exhibitions London, Royal Academy of Arts, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, 21 January – 9 April 2012, cat no.126, illus colour p254, another edition, touring to: Bilbao, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, 15 May – 30 September 2012 Cologne, Museum Ludwig, 27 October 2012 – 3 February 2013 San Francisco, de Young Museum, David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition, 26 October 2013 – 20 January 2014, another edition New York, Pace Gallery, The Yosemite Suite, 29 April – 18 June 2016, illus colour in the catalogue of postcards, unpaginated, another edition, touring to: London, Annely Juda Fine Art, 28 June – 19 August 2016 Los Angeles, LA Louver, 13 July 2016 – 1 October 2016 Paolo Alto, Pace Gallery, 30 March – 11 June 2017 Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, David Hockney: Current, 11 November 2016 – 13 March 2017, another edition

‘Yosemite is nearer to LA than the Grand Canyon and it has similar spaces. You can drive there in five hours; the Grand Canyon is a tenhour drive. To go to Yosemite from LA, you drive up to Fresno, then into the sierras. You keep going higher and higher. You are aware of that; signs keep telling you the height above sea level: 4,000 feet, 5,000 feet. Pine forests begin. As you approach Yosemite itself, you are conscious of a great valley down to your left. Then you go through a tunnel, and immediately there is a car park because, the moment you come out, it is so spectacular, you put your foot on the brakes.

Everybody does. You see this incredible valley, verdant at the base and with big waterfalls, vast canyon walls. It’s truly spectacular. People just stand and look at it. It’s the space that’s thrilling. It’s quite something.’ 1 – david hockney In 2010 and 2011, David Hockney captured the awesome majesty of Yosemite National Park in a series of iPad drawings that highlight his continuing fascination with the epic landscapes of the American West. Featuring El Capitan, Bridalveil Fall and Half Dome, the present work depicts one of the most iconic and sublime views of Yosemite as observed from the ‘Tunnel View’ vantage point. A romantic scene of untrampled wilderness, Hockney’s image is reminiscent of mid-19th century paintings of Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt (1830 – 1902) and the photographs of Carleton Watkins (1829 – 1916).

After Hockney’s first trip to Yosemite, new software was released, which meant that his drawings could now be printed out at a much larger scale without pixelating. When he returned in 2011, he made five new iPad drawings with this new possibility in mind. Initially, he printed some of these out at 60 inches tall, which lead him to discover that ‘they were very, very strong, as powerful as paintings actually’ and so he decided to enlarge them further. 2 For his 2012 exhibition A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Hockney printed four of the new Yosemite drawings at 144 ⅛ by 108 inches, and this drawing at 143 ½ by 128 ¼ inches. The present work belongs to a select group of drawings that he additionally printed on a more commercially accessible scale in editions of 12. To overcome technical limitations the artist devised a method of printing the image in four sections and mounting these together on sheets of Dibond.

Despite a scheduled run lasting less than three months, A Bigger Picture attracted more than 600,000 visitors, making it one of the most popular museum shows in British history.

1 Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message, Conversations with David Hockney, Thames & Hudson, London, 2016, pp138 – 9 2 Hockney in an interview with Anders Kold at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2011: www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8R3Wd2zh9s

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38 Howard Hodgkin 1932–2017 Through a Glass Darkly 2015–16 oil on wood 10 7/8 by 16 1/4 inches / 27.5 by 41.3 cm signed, dated and titled verso collections Estate of the Artist Gagosian Gallery, London exhibitions Hong Kong, Gagosian Gallery, Howard Hodgkin, In the Pink, 19 January – 4 March 2017, cat no.11, illus colour London, Gagosian Gallery, Howard Hodgkin, Last Paintings, 1 June – 28 July 2018, p10, cat no.19, illus colour

An early interest in collecting Mughal miniatures inspired Howard Hodgkin’s first trip to India in 1964. From then on, he visited India every year without fail, but it was only as he was turning 80 that he made the decision to actually work there. In 2012, he set up a studio in Mumbai, which offered views of the Indian Ocean on one side and the city's gothic architecture on the other. Feeling the pressure to keep painting, he worked concurrently, and with some urgency, on both small and large paintings, and typically finished them before returning to England, indicating a self-enforced acceleration of his usual, painfully slow, working method.

Here Hodgkin has painted a dozen spots in green, which are overlaid with a glorious Cadmium yellow and red ‘frame’, made from just four strokes. There is little sense of light and dark tones – the complementary red and green sing equally loudly. Areas of the wood panel are left bare, taking on, through optical contrast with the yellow, ‘a hint of smoky violet’.1 In the painting Now, 2015 – 16, the image is reduced even further to just a few emphatic, horizontal marks, with green now eliminated.

Here, Hodgkin’s colours are almost painfully clear and vivid, emitting a blast of colour far more powerful than the picture’s size would suggest.

The painting’s title is taken from 1 Corinthians, one of the most quoted passages in the Bible on the subject of love. The verse suggests that in life, we cannot see things as they truly are, but promises that, in death, we will see God and all things clearly. Other translations offer instead, ‘For now we see in a mirror dimly’. This notion of not being able to see is suggested by the title of another late painting, Dirty Window, 2014 – 2015.

While intended as a reflection on the mystery of faith, it is a particularly apt metaphor for an artist who made it his life’s work to make the intangible visible. Allusions to death and departure appear in the titles of other late paintings, such as Elegy, 2014 – 15, and Over to You (a line from a poem by Stevie Smith), 2015 – 17, and the paintings themselves are dominated by themes of light and shade.

1 Paul Hills (intro), Howard Hodgkin, Last Paintings, Gagosian Gallery, London, 2018, p10

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39 Richard Long b.1945 Untitled 2013 River Avon mud and paint on canvas 55 1/8 by 78 3/4 inches / 140 by 200 cm collections The Artist Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome literature Lucy Badrocke (ed.), Richard Long: Time and Space, Arnolfini and Koenig Books, London, 2015, illus colour p159

‘I grew up playing along the riverbanks, so the River Avon is a big influence, the huge tide and the mud banks.’ ¹ – richard long Richard Long created Untitled using mud taken directly from the River Avon in Bristol – the city where he was born and still lives to this day. The artist described this particular mud as ‘squidgy clay’ and the present work is a clear celebration of the tactile qualities of this untraditional medium.

Prior to executing this painting, the artist would have added mud to a large bucket partially filled with water, mixed the two together with his hand to create a liquid, and passed this through a sieve to remove debris. Next, he would have painted the entire canvas black and, once the paint had dried, likely with the help of a tape measure and ruler, divided the canvas into thirds using a red pencil. Only after masking off the perimeters of the canvas and positioning it vertically, would Long have begun the ‘painting’ process.

With the bucket in his left hand and a rubber glove on his right, Long would have smeared the liquid mud across one third of the canvas with his fingertips, in a series of rapid gestures, before rotating the canvas 180 degrees and repeating the process once more. Not only does Long use his fingertips effectively as paintbrushes, but he works across the whole of each section of the surface at once, using his entire body, leaning, reaching, crouching. The flicking motion of Long’s wrist, as it moved from the bucket across the canvas, has left a series of explosive marks which under gravity, have dripped down surface. These wiry thin lines and large blobs of paint that are most visible in the centre, in fact extend right the way through the composition, criss-crossing from left to right when the painting is hung in its intended horizontal position.

Finally, after the mud had dried, Long would have removed the paintencrusted masking tape, leaving behind the crisp, black border that effectively frames the composition in the finished work.

While Long claims to have a precise idea of the work in his mind before he begins, he creates the marks intuitively, the fluidity of the medium giving him the freedom to alter the appearance of the surface as he is working – although, like the action paintings of Jackson Pollock, gravity and chance mean he is never fully in control of the final outcome.

1 Long cited in Ben Tufnell (ed.), Richard Long: Selected Statements & Interviews, Haunch of Venison, London, 2007, p99

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40 Richard Learoyd b.1966 Olya in Yellow, Two 2010 Ilfochrome photograph, flush-mounted onto aluminium 48 by 48 inches / 121.9 by 121.9 cm unique signed in black felt tip pen on the reverse collections Private Collection, UK exhibitions Barcelona, Casa Garriga Nogués, Fundación Mapfre, Richard Learoyd, 5 June – 8 September 2019, touring to: The Hague, Fotomuseum Den Haag, 5 October 2019 – 5 January 2020 Madrid, Fundación Mapfre, 19 February – 24 May 2020

Richard Learoyd’s unique photographs need to be experienced firsthand to be fully understood. While numerous contemporary artists have shown large-scale photographic prints in galleries, Learoyd’s self-devised process achieves a new and captivating level of detail in which every eyelash, every freckle and mottled patch of skin is seen and felt. Consequently, the subjects of his photographs appear ‘more alive, more beautiful and more fallible – even more vulnerable – than the people we see in most pictures’.1 Learoyd first set up a large camera obscura within his commercial studio in 2003. To make a picture, his models sit in an adjoining space against a white wall and their image is projected through a huge, 750 mm lens into this darkened room. An exposure is made, using flash, onto a sheet of positive paper inside the room, which is then processed and dried in situ, a full-size negativeless image emerging 18 minutes later.

The extended length of a sitting, which might run over two days, is closer to the experience of sitting for a painted portrait than a typical studio session and, as such, his models sometimes fall into ‘a meditative and introspective state’ as the process continues.2 As in all photography, a wide aperture produces a shallow depth of field, so in these images, there is often no more than 5mm in sharp focus. Learoyd has reflected on what he feels this communicates: ‘For me, in my work, the implication or meaning of this shift between extreme sharpness and blur is an emerging and submerging of a person’s consciousness, and emphasis of their immediate presence.’ 3 Learoyd photographs acquaintances rather than friends, paying his sitters in recognition of the long time they are needed to make a single picture. Olya was introduced to the artist through another model and she features in several other photographs including the first Olya in Yellow, 2010; Olya Square Mirror, 2010, in which she is dressed all in black, and Olya and Annie, 2011, where she is shown clutching her baby.

Learoyd often picks up clothes for his models from street markets close to his studio. He selects purposely unspecific, slightly unfashionable clothes, and sheer textures, which photograph well against the skin.

The delicate yellow blouse that Olya wears in this picture crops up a few years later in Melanie, 2015, while the artist’s ongoing fascination with translucency is evident in his recent studies of paper-thin flowers.

1 Sandra S.Phillips (intro), Richard Learoyd, Fundación Mapfre, Madrid/Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, 2019, p9 2 Ibid, p17 3 Learoyd quoted in ‘Flesh and Bone: Unique Photographs by Richard Learoyd’, Aperture, no.199, Summer 2010

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41 Grayson Perry b.1960 The American Dream 2020 colour etching from three plates on one sheet 43 1/8 by 94 3/8 inches / 109.6 by 239.8 cm signed and numbered on the reverse, from an edition of 68 plus 12 APs collections The Artist exhibitions London, Victoria Miro, The MOST Specialist Relationship, 15 September – 18 December 2020, another edition London, Royal Academy of Arts, Summer/ Winter Exhibition, 6 October 2020 – 3 January 2021, cat no.622, another edition

This is a map of the US that I made last year in response to my experiences there when filming my Channel 4 series, Grayson Perry’s Big American Road Trip. I love maps. They have an air of authority, they show us where to go. This map toys with the common delusion that there is a clear and certain route out of our mess of feelings.

Geographically, this map could be of anywhere as it is a map of the culture war that rages mainly online, but the US has a particularly well defined and extreme version. Stylistically, I was thinking of Cold War propaganda maps showing the ’communist threat’ in the 1950s. The Big Brother-like figure at the top is Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook; I chose him because he is the best-known face of social media power.

Social media is mainly financed by advertising, so those in charge want users to stay online as long as possible. The algorithms make this happen by encouraging conflict and outrage. The red arrows represent this feeding of negative emotion that keeps people scrolling. The internet is perfectly designed to inveigle its way into our patterns of thinking and feeling. (…)

When we experience a background hum of unfocused emotion, be it anxiety, sadness, fear, anger, we unconsciously look for something to attach it to. Social media is brilliant at supplying us with issues to which we can attach our free-floating feelings. We often look for nice, preformed boxes into which we can dump our inchoate feelings, we crave certainty.

Social media constantly offers up neat solutions for our messy feelings, whether it be God, guns, Greta or gender identity.

In a battle-torn landscape governed by zeroes and ones, nuance, compromise and empathy are the first casualties. If I were to sum up the online culture war in one word it would be ’diaphobia’, a term coined by the psychiatrist RD Laing meaning ’fear of being influenced by other people’, the opposite of dialogue. Our ever-present underlying historical and enculturated emotions will nudge us to cherrypick and polish the nuggets of information that support a stance that may have been in our bodies from childhood. Once we have taken sides, the algorithms will supply us with a stream of content to entrench and confirm our beliefs.

All the ships, planes and other combatants are labelled with the issues, signifiers and buzzwords that swarm around this algorithmically polarised struggle. Please do not look at my map for clarity. Like the English Civil War, there is no clear geographical divide between ’them’ and ’us’; as with Brexit, opposing forces may reside in the same family. In the centre of the map is the presidential plane Air Force One colliding with a Russian bomber labelled ’Climate Change’. When I made this print, I thought that was the headline issue, but now I might have made the ’Racism’ and ’White Privilege’ helicopters and the ’Black Lives Matter’ jet fighter more prominent. Hurricane ’Woke’ off the east coast still seems very topical.

Grayson Perry for The Guardian, 14 September 2020, abridged

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Established in 1996, Offer Waterman handles the finest Modern & Contemporary British art. The gallery works closely with private, institutional and corporate collectors both from the UK and worldwide.

In addition to our specialist knowledge and wide inventory of 20th & 21st century British art, we have an in-depth understanding of the art market as a whole. Our expertise enables us to assist clients with the acquisition of American, European, Modern and Contemporary art.

We are always interested in acquiring or consigning important paintings, drawings and sculpture from collectors. All enquiries are treated in the strictest confidence.

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17 St George Street London W1s 1fj t +44 (0)20 7042 3233 e info@waterman.co.uk w waterman.co.uk The gallery is open Monday to Friday, 10am to 6pm, and Saturday by appointment

Opposite: Installation photograph of Family Group, 1944 by Henry Moore and 1945 (St Ives), 1945 by Ben Nicholson in the gallery. Photography: Mark Dalton, April 2021.

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Additional cataloguing

Cat.7, Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection: Waking Up, 1945, continued from p18 …

Duncan Robinson, Stanley Spencer: Visions from a Berkshire Village, Phaidon Press, Oxford, 1979, pp65 – 71 Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer RA, Royal Academy of Arts, 1980, pp196 – 199 Kenneth Pople, Stanley Spencer: A Biography, Collins, London, 1991, pp445, 450, 467 Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, Phaidon, London, 1992, cat no.358c, pp195 & 491, illus colour pp196 – 197

Cat.9, Barbara Hepworth, Conoid, Sphere & Hollow, 1937, continued from p22 …

London, Jonathan Clark, St Ives & British Modernism, 15 October – 14 November 1998, version II (the present work) exhibited, cat no.2, illus colour St Ives, Tate, Barbara Hepworth, Centenary, 24 May – 12 October 2003, touring to: Yorkshire, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 17 May – 14 September 2003, cat no.55, illus colour, version III exhibited London, Tate Britain, Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World, 24 June – 25 October 2015, version I exhibited, cat no.75 & version III exhibited, cat no.76, both illus colour, touring to: Otterlo, Kröller-Müller Museum, 28 November 2015 – 17 April 2016; Rolandseck, Arp Museum, 22 May – 28 August 2016 literature Herbert Read, Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, Lund Humphries, London, 1952, illus b/w pl.53 Architectural Review, May 1954, illus front cover J.P. Hodin, Barbara Hepworth, David McKay Company Inc. New York, Switzerland, 1961, cat no.100, not illus Barbara Hepworth, Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia, exh cat, 2004, version III illustrated, illus colour p44 A.M. Hammacher, Barbara Hepworth, Thames & Hudson, reprinted 2018 edition, illus b/w pl.51, version III

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films Version III seen 3 mins 2 sec into a film directed

by Bruce Beresford of Hepworth’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1968: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watchbarbara-hepworth-at-the-tate-1969-online

Cat.15, Barbara Hepworth, Three Groups on a White and Yellow Ground, 1949, continued from p38 …

Manchester, City Art Gallery, 24 September – 21 October 1951 London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Barbara Hepworth, Retrospective Exhibition 1927 – 1954, 8 April – 6 June 1954, cat no.135 Paris, Artcurial Centre d'Art Plastique Contemporain, English Contrasts: Peintres et Sculpteurs Anglais, 1950 – 1960, 27 September – 24 November 1984, p40 illus literature J.P. Hodin, Kroniek van Kunst en Kultuur, ‘Barbara Hepworth: Laatste Werk-stukken’, Volume 11, no.4, April 1950 Note: Three Groups on a White and Yellow Ground will be included in the forthcoming publication, Barbara Hepworth, Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and Drawings by Alan Bowness, Sophie Bowness, Jenna Lundin Aral

Cat.17, William Scott, Seated Figure, 1954, continued from p42 …

11 September – 2 October 1960 Munich, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 12 January – 5 February 1961 Bern, Kunsthalle, Victor Pasmore & William Scott, 12 July – 18 August 1963, ex cat Belfast, Ulster Museum, William Scott, 12 September – 5 October 1963, cat no.5 London, Tate Gallery, William Scott: Paintings, Drawings and Gouaches 1938 – 1971, 19 April – 29 May 1972, cat no.38, illus b/w, as Seated Figure No.1, 1953 Enniskillen, Fermanagh County Museum, William Scott: Still Life Paintings 1946 – 1978, 19 May – 14 July 1979, cat no.9, touring to: Londonderry and Belfast, closed 29 September 1979, (dated 1953) Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, William Scott: Paintings and Drawings,

22 July – 1 November 1998, cat no.23, illus colour (dated 1953) Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum, Blast to Freeze: British Art in the 20th Century, 14 September 2002 – 19 January 2003, one of three works listed on p325, touring to: Toulouse, Les Abattoirs, 24 February – 11 May 2003 New York, McCaffrey Fine Art, William Scott, 27 February – 17 April 2010, (dated 1953) St Ives, Tate Gallery, William Scott, 26 January – 6 May 2013, touring to: Wakefield, The Hepworth, 25 May – 29 September 2013 Belfast, Ulster Museum, 25 October 2013 – 2 February 2014

literature Richard Morphet (intro.), The Alistair McAlpine Gift, Tate Gallery, London, 1971, p106, not illus Patrick Elliott, ‘William Turnbull: A Consistent Way of Thinking’, in William Turnbull: Sculpture and Paintings, David Sylvester (intro.), Merrell Holberton in association with Serpentine Gallery, London, 1995, illus b/w p17 pl6, unknown cast Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, pp72 & 88 (cat no.37), illus b/w p29 (fig.13), unknown cast

literature British Council Lecture, 1972, slide 39 Margaret Garlake, New Art, New World, British Art in Postwar Society, Yale University Press, New Haven/London, 1988, pp203 – 204, illus b/w, as Seated Figure No.1, 1953 Michael Tooby and Simon Morley, William Scott: Paintings and Drawings, Merrell Holberton, London in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1998, pp26 & 57, illus colour Norbert Lynton, William Scott, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004, pp128 – 130, illus colour as Seated Figure No.2 Sarah Whitfield, William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings 1952 – 1959, Volume 2, 2013, Thames & Hudson, London, in association with the William Scott Foundation, cat no.249, p102, illus colour p103

Cat.18, William Turnbull, Pegasus, 1954, continued from p44 …

West Bretton, Wakefield, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, William Turnbull Retrospective 1946 – 2003, 14 May – 9 October 2005, p5, not illus, AC London, Waddington Galleries, Beyond Time, 9 June – 3 July 2010, cat no.9, illus colour p32, AC London, Offer Waterman, William Turnbull: New Worlds, Words, Signs, 29 September – 3 November 2017, illus colour p25, cast 1/4.

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Index

artist Auerbach, F

Burra, E Coper, H Craig-Martin, M Freud, L Grant, D Hepworth, B

Hockney, D

Hodgkin, H Jones, A Learoyd, R Long, R Moore, H Morris, C Nicholson, B

Perry, G Scott, W Smith, M Spencer, S Turnbull, W

Uglow, E Wallis, A Whiteread, R Willing, V Wood, C Yeats, J. B.

cat no.

25 26 31 13 28 36 14 27 1 9 15 20 21 29 30 37 38 22 23 40 39 8 4 2 10 11 35 41 17 6 7 16 18 24 33 19 3 34 32 5 12

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On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the gallery, 2021.

Contact Offer Waterman Managing Director Rebecca Beach Senior Director Emily Scarlett Drablow Director & Head of Research Robin Cawdron-Stewart Director Stella Vasileiadou Associate Director Grima Quintana Director of Operations Ioli Athanasopoulou Gallery Assistant

Design Richard Ardagh Studio Photography Prudence Cuming Associates (all Plates unless credited otherwise) Mark Dalton (cat.19) Richard Learoyd Studio (cat.40) Hockney Inc. (cat nos.21, 29, 30, 37) Research Emily Scarlett Drablow Rebecca Beach Stella Vasileiadou Special thanks Marco Livingstone Anne Soward David Whiting Alex Turnbull Johnny Turnbull Publisher Offer Waterman, London Pre-press Dawkins Colour Ltd Printing Park Communications Ltd isbn 978-1-9996598-2-0

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