Adrian Heath: A Retrospective by The Redfern Gallery Ltd

A RETROSPECTIVE

ADRIAN HE ATH

ADRIAN HEATH A RETROSPECTIVE

20 Cork Street London W1S 3H L +44 (0)20 7734 1732 info@redfern-gallery.com redfern-gallery.com

Nude 1949 Oil on board 32.5 × 24.5 cm Literature Study for this painting illustrated in Adrian Heath by Jane Rye, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl. 33, p. 53

Adrian Heath: A Centenary Tribute Andrew Lambirth

2020 was the centenary of Adrian Heath’s birth, and although this publication and the exhibition it accompanies were intended as a tribute on that occasion, they had to be postponed because of the logjam in programming experienced by most galleries after the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Nevertheless, however belated, both exhibition and catalogue are designed to honour an artist whose work is increasingly valued and appreciated, and who genuinely deserves our renewed attention. As will emerge, Heath’s career was intimately bound up with the post-war history of the Redfern Gallery, and it is thus highly appropriate that the Redfern should now be mounting a celebration of his work. Heath’s revealing little book on Abstraction (Abstract Painting: Its Origin and Meaning) was published to coincide with his first one-man exhibition at the Redfern in September 1953. This was also his first solo show in the UK, and although he moved to the Hanover Gallery for a trio of exhibitions (1959, 1960 and 1962), he returned to the Redfern in 1966, showing there sporadically until his death in 1992. No commercial gallery is better suited to commemorate such a special anniversary as Heath’s centenary. A man of real intelligence who enjoyed theory and scholarly research, he was also highly motivated in a physical sense and constantly had affairs with women. In his art he tried to find a reconciliation of these two sides of himself: the intellectual and the sensual. Thoughtful and introspective, his painting wasn’t light-hearted or jokey. But if his approach was essentially cerebral, he was also articulate and practical, and excellent company. He was

by nature something of an establishment figure (he went to public school and always wore a suit to go round the galleries), who nevertheless became a prominent and radical member of the avant-garde. With typically caustic wit, Roger Hilton complained that Heath couldn’t make up his mind whether he wanted to be a painter or an accountant. As an artist and as an individual, Heath was made up of a balance of opposites: order and conflict; classical and romantic; organised and random; instinct and intellect; structure and freedom. Goethe said we are rich at the price of our contradictions, and Heath was an exceptionally complex example of this syndrome. But it did make his art many-facetted. Although he had private means, he put in long hours at the studio and was able to call upon great reserves of energy. There is at times a sense of sobriety about his imagery and palette which has probably worked against his popular profile, which suffers in comparison with, for instance, the challenging and emphatic nature of Roger Hilton’s work. Perhaps Heath didn’t risk as much, but his paintings and drawings are rewarding in other ways. Ambiguity was important to him, and this of course contradicted his urge to clarity. If his work was marked by deliberation, it was never ponderous; lucidity was a guiding principle. The unexpected was also crucial to his art — the element beyond control, the chance occurrence. The hidden truth of his epilepsy which periodically threw his life into chaos was a fundamental enactment of this dialogue of opposites which fed his art and enriched his work. His best paintings are tough yet subtle, illuminated by an unexpected lyricism and serenity.

Study, Black and Brown 1953 Oil on board 17.5 × 12.5 cm

An early ambition was to be a portrait painter in the style of Sargent, dashing and sophisticated. Heath studied pleinair painting with Stanhope Forbes in Newlyn before briefly attending the Slade under Randolph Schwabe, prior to joining the RAF in May 1940. His plane crashed on active service and Heath was captured and imprisoned. Escaping from POW camp four times, he spent a year in solitary confinement. His close friend Terry Frost (to whom he acted as a sort of painting tutor when they met in Stalag 383 in Bavaria) called Heath ‘the bravest man I have ever known’. After the war, Heath returned to the Slade on a exserviceman’s grant, and was greatly tempted by Euston Road realism. In 1947, longing for a breath of foreign air, he spent the best part of a year in France at Carcassonne with a fellow prisoner of war. But it was not until he returned to England and fell under the influence of Victor

Pasmore and Kenneth Martin that he began seriously to question his direction as an artist. The Slade had instilled in Heath a belief in the importance of draughtsmanship which he kept until the end of his life, but the naturalistic approach was soon discarded. In a statement of 1979, he explained his early development. ‘I was able to escape from this tradition by the study of Cubism and in particular the paintings of Jacques Villon and Juan Gris. I did not like their work as much as that of Picasso and Braque but their use of geometry seemed to offer a more rational and impersonal means of development.’ (All his life, Heath was to look for ways of controlling his emotion in his paintings.) He continued: ‘Paradoxically, I did not think of geometry as a means of creating static structures of ideal proportions but rather as a tool to enable me to create and control movement. I thought of my paintings in organic terms: their forms had to evolve and grow.’

The Fifties were a crucial decade in British Abstraction. From 1948, Victor Pasmore was making his first ventures into an abstract language that was to have a compelling influence on Heath and others of his generation. Kenneth Martin closely followed Pasmore’s example in 1948-9, but with his own very personal interpretation. By the mid-1950s Roger Hilton, Terry Frost and William Gear were making innovative and potent abstract paintings of considerable originality; in fact, this was to be some of their finest work, and Heath was swift to join their ranks. Tentatively in 1949, but wholeheartedly from 1951, he embraced the abstract idiom and focused on the harmonic division of the canvas, building his images from a central starting point, very often in a circular or oval format, rotating rectangles in dynamic symmetry. His chief ambition

was to impart a sense of movement to his paintings, and create a ‘rectangle of [the] whirling squares’. The following statement comes from manuscript notes made by the artist in the 1950s: ‘I gradually became convinced that a starting point in nature was meaningless. My interest turned to the development of shape and colour and I decided to change my methods, starting to build up paintings from a series of simple shapes derived from an analysis of the picture’s format.’ This classical re-structuring of the picture was in line with the utopian aspect of Modernist abstraction, and its parallels with renewal and reconstruction in architecture, buoyed up on a post-Festival of Britain tide of optimism. It was an idealistic era, in which it seemed genuinely possible to

Study, Curved Forms 1953 Oil and pencil on canvas on board 17.5 × 12.5 cm

Curved Forms (Yellow and Black) 1954 Oil on canvas 91.5 × 61 cm Literature Adrian Heath by Jane Rye, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl. 84, p. 107

Colour Study with Red and Black 1954 Oil on canvas board 12.5 × 17.5 cm

make a new world. Heath became involved with the group of Constructed Abstract Artists led by Pasmore with Kenneth and Mary Martin, and including the sculptor Robert Adams and the painter and relief-maker Anthony Hill. This was to be his locus of operations until 1957. Heath was not a mathematician, and didn’t like the term ‘geometric art’, preferring ‘non-objective’. Nor did he want to build reliefs or mobiles, for he always liked paint and what it could do, backed up with a firm underpinning of drawing. He made preliminary drawings for a composition, but then was quite prepared to change and develop the painting while working on it. At one point he didn’t use green or blue so that his work would not suggest the natural world. But this was somewhat disingenuous, for ochre and brown are just as natural or organic as green and blue. And the spiral he favoured so much in his rotating rectangles was also a paradigm of organic growth, as he knew from reading D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s influential book On Growth and Form. By the end of the 1950s, he had to accept that for him there was no way of getting away from the visible world. His palette, though restricted, was capable of great tonal variety. One of the finest paintings in this exhibition is Curved Forms — Yellow & Black (1952) which, despite

its title, is as much about triangles as curved-edged quadrilaterals. The swinging forms hold a faint echo of Terry Frost’s series of paintings of boats at anchor on St Ives quay, one of which Heath owned, but the composition is altogether more deliberate, controlled and determinedly geometrical. It has the appearance of a painting in which the disposition of every form has been hard-won: struggled over, moved, re-painted, shifted again, until it has found exactly the right place to be. The result is a triumph, and buzzing with distilled energy, but it is far from being a spontaneous one. Yet this is no disadvantage: there is something deeply satisfying in the potent interaction of forms and colours. This was a painting that Heath himself rated: it was shown at his 1953 Redfern exhibition; again at the Nine Abstract Artists show that Redfern mounted in 1954-5 around the publication of Lawrence Alloway’s book, in which it was illustrated; also at the Hanover Gallery; and later in a couple of important retrospectives. Nine Abstract Artists celebrated the two sides of contemporary abstraction: the geometrically-aligned Constructed Abstract Artists group, and their more relaxed counterparts, Frost, Hilton and William Scott. Heath wrote in his statement for this momentous book: ‘It is the process, the method of development that is

Untitled 1954 Oil on canvas 91 × 61 cm

Untitled c.1955 Oil on board 10 × 15.5 cm

the life of the painting…’ As in Curved Forms — Yellow & Black he made the process visible, so that at least some of the history of the development of the forms and their relationships was evident to the viewer. In 1957 Heath had eight works in another exhibition at the Redfern, Metavisual Tachiste Abstract, a survey of ‘painting in England today’. This show, unlike Nine Abstract Artists, included the work of William Gear, whose Fifties’ paintings bear comparison with Heath’s, and not just in the weight and substance of paint. The strong areas of knifed and scumbled paint, the arcs and angles and overlapping or abutting forms of Heath’s constructed abstract paintings have much in common with what Gear was doing at the same time. Both made memorable work in the 1950s. Heath was a Constructed Abstract Artist until the later 1950s, leaving the group and going his own way after 1957. In September 1956, he began teaching at Corsham Court, the Wiltshire home of Bath Academy of Art. The school was a catalyst for him. With his students, he drew the nude and the landscape and initiated a far-reaching return to a figurative impulse in his paintings. But not only did his drawing start once again to incorporate the observed, but his fellow-teachers there — who included Peter Lanyon, Gillian Ayres and Howard Hodgkin — exercised a profound influence over him. In their company, Heath’s work loosened up considerably. Now it became a question of unpacking the geometry he had so carefully constructed.

In 1958 Heath bought a painting by Serge Poliakoff, and it is revealing that he was looking with such keen appraisal towards his European contemporaries such as Poliakoff and Nicolas de Staël. (De Staël was an immensely influential figure in the Fifties among both abstract and realist painters in the UK.) There is a similarity of surface in Heath and Poliakoff: both tended to scrape paint off while it was still wet, then immediately apply a new layer. (A characteristic they shared with William Gear’s paintings of the mid-50s.) This process of constant revision left its trace, and it was perhaps for the trace that the revisions were made. The evidence of revision, in terms of texture and quality of mark, was clearly important to Heath. The cycle of destruction and construction was like the seasonal one of growth and decay, fertility and barrenness. By 1959, the change in his paintings was apparent: abstraction as content was being qualified by the gradual introduction of figurative suggestions. Like Lanyon, he drew and painted the nude as landscape, admitting: ‘I don’t really differentiate between the two’. Until the end of his life, Heath employed abstraction as his vocabulary but his subject was the female nude. Elusive to begin with, references to physicality and then sexuality became increasingly overt. The later work is undoubtedly intended to be erotic, and he admitted to Francis Bacon that he was after ‘the smell of flesh’ in his paintings.

Untitled 1956 Charcoal, watercolour, pencil and collage on paper 56 × 51.5 cm

Untitled 1957 Oil on canvas 91.5 × 71 cm

Oval Theme 1958 Oil on canvas stretched over board 61 × 51 cm

Orange and Brown 1959 Oil on canvas 198 × 182 cm

Yellow Ochre 1959 Oil on canvas 198.1 × 182.9 cm

Painting – Black and White with Pink and Yellow 1959 Oil on canvas 182 × 198 cm

The Sixties and After If in some ways the Fifties were a defining decade for Heath, the Sixties brought new challenges and new impulses to incorporate into his art. Long aware of the dangers and seductions of self-expression, he had formulated a very disciplined approach to his art, using carefully prepared and thought-out structures to prevent too much personal material infiltrating his imagery. He did not paint his experiences. He wanted his work to be individual and independent without being self-indulgent, although the growing sensuality of his paint-handling seems to have conflicted with this. Did he over-compensate in his determination to curb self-expression? Was his work too disguised? He said in 1964: ‘I would like to feel that I work towards an experience rather than away from it…’ In a very real sense, the act of painting (rather than any overt or covert subject) was the experience. He now made a great many drawings from the figure and landscape. The paintings these fed into were never based on a single drawing, but would be loosely related to a series of images. The intention was to embed the points of reference taken from the observed world deep in the paint, so that they retained their potency but did not intrude their appearance. Heath wrote (again in 1979): ‘I feel that the successful paintings gained their own identity and lost any direct reference to figure or landscape.’ Perhaps direct references were hidden, but these subjects entirely inform the late paintings, which are often distinctly erotic and pastoral. From 1960 onwards, the paint handling was looser and more fluid in his pictures, and he worked on larger canvases. Drawings were still his medium of experimentation, his venue for trying out ideas, but Heath also developed a whole series of works on paper which were more like paintings than drawings. His work became deliberately more casual in appearance, and he often painted forms that were disintegrating, almost deliquescing, though there was still a strong awareness of structure in all he did. His work of this period has much in common with the Australian Brett Whiteley (not least the Bacon references), while the emphasis on structure recalls the American Richard Diebenkorn. Bryan Robertson in the book Private View (1965), that brilliant conspectus of the British art world in the Sixties, identified the keynote of Heath’s work as ‘intelligence and extreme refinement’. He

regularly compared him to Robert Motherwell and called Heath, in a Spectator review in 1966, ‘one of the best artists in England’. Heath thought his Seventies paintings were more considered in their composition and more tightly constructed. Aiming for something increasingly monumental and mysterious, he judged that he had left behind the speed, accident and gesture of direct painting in the many studies he continued to produce. Although that makes the paintings sound dangerously tranquil and potentially ineffective, thankfully they never became too static, and the trend towards control was regularly disrupted. The gestural density of the later work, and a higher pitch of sensuality than ever before — combined with the familiar passion for controlling design — gave rise to an unexpected serenity. And always with the hallmarks of integrity and generosity of spirit. Adrian Heath’s art is still relatively unknown, and it deserves a much wider audience. He died unexpectedly in 1992, at a point when his career, had he lived, would doubtless have been consolidated and his stature properly recognised. Although Heath was not a great self-promoter, unlike say (in their very different ways) Patrick Heron or Terry Frost, and his high seriousness as an artist and as an intellectual are not perhaps popular characteristics, his art speaks eloquently for itself. His centenary offers a perfect opportunity for reassessment and for a new push to celebrate and broadcast his considerable achievement. The time is ripe for a major museum retrospective of his work, particularly as abstraction is now being given the kind of public display usually reserved for figurative or conceptual art. With the intellectually rigorous painting of Bridget Riley being shown to acclaim at the National Gallery and the Hayward, the equally demanding (and rewarding) work of Adrian Heath deserves comparable visibility. Andrew Lambirth Andrew Lambirth is a writer, curator, poet and collagist. He was art critic of The Spectator (2002-2014), and his reviews have been collected in a paperback entitled A is a Critic. Among his many books are full-length monographs on Roger Hilton, RB Kitaj, Allen Jones, Maggi Hambling, John Hoyland, Margaret Mellis, David Inshaw, Francis Davison, William Gear and John Nash. He lives in Wiltshire surrounded by books and pictures.

Composition – Red and Orange 1960 Ink and gouache on paper 76 × 56 cm

White Forms 1960 Mixed media and collage on brown paper on canvas 90 × 102 cm

Composition with White 1960 Mixed media and collage on brown paper on canvas 90 × 102 cm

Black and White 1960 Mixed media and collage on paper on canvas 90 × 103 cm Literature Adrian Heath by Jane Rye, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl. 113, p. 142

Untitled Composition c.1960 Oil on canvas 183 × 153 cm

Untitled 1961 Mixed media on paper 56 × 76 cm

Painting 1961 Oil on canvas 173 × 183 cm

Untitled 1962 Oil, gouache, ink and collage on paper 56.1 × 76.5 cm

Untitled 1961 Oil on canvas 183 × 198 cm

Untitled 1961 Oil, gouache and collage on paper 63.5 × 50.7 cm

Blue and Black 1962 Oil on canvas 126 × 150 cm

Painting Blue and White 1962 Oil and collage on canvas 91.5 × 96.5 cm Literature Adrian Heath by Jane Rye, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl. 122, p. 152

Submerged 1962-64 Oil on canvas 174 × 182 cm

Untitled 1962 Ink, gouache and collage on paper 76 × 93 cm

Untitled (Los Boliches) 1965 Mixed media on paper 76 × 56 cm

Vakil 1967 Oil on canvas 51 × 61 cm

Untitled 1968 Mixed media on paper 76 × 56 cm

VM/C/L/11.68 1968 Mixed media on paper 76 × 56 cm

Untitled 1968 Mixed media on paper 76 × 56 cm

Untitled 1969 Mixed media on paper 56 × 76 cm

El Dorado 1969 Oil and pencil on paper 40 × 26.5 cm

Pompei 1969-70 Oil and pencil on paper 39.4 × 25.5 cm

Study for Craster 1972 Oil on paper 22 × 23 cm

Craster 1972-73 Oil on canvas 127 × 121.9 cm Literature Adrian Heath by Jane Rye, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl. 146, p. 179

Study for Picture Destroyed 1974 Mixed media on paper 27 × 25.5 cm Exhibited Adrian Heath, Camden Arts Centre, London, 1975

Warleigh No. 2 1977 Oil on canvas 183 × 174 cm

Study for Warleigh 1978 Oil and pencil on paper 27 × 25 cm

Untitled 1978-88 Mixed media on card 24 × 23 cm

Untitled 1980 Oil, watercolour and pencil on paper 19.8 × 16.7 cm

Cadoc 1980 Oil on canvas 183 × 172 cm

24/6/78 (d) 1979 Mixed media on paper 25.5 × 24.5 cm

Untitled 1980 Mixed media on paper 22.5 × 22 cm

Untitled 1980 Oil, watercolour and pencil on paper 27.1 × 25 cm

Untitled 1980 Oil, watercolour and pencil on card 27 × 25 cm

Shaston No. 2 1981-82 Oil on canvas 165.1 × 160 cm Literature Adrian Heath by Jane Rye, Lund Humphries, 2012, pl. 151, p. 185

Study for Cassien No. 1 1982 Oil and pencil on board 12.7 × 15.8 cm

Axis Points 1982 Mixed media on paper 23 × 22.5 cm

Untitled 1983 Oil, watercolour and pencil on paper 29.4 × 25.5 cm

Untitled 1983 Oil, watercolour and pencil on card 27 × 24.7 cm

Untitled 1983 Oil, watercolour and pencil on paper 27.3 × 25 cm

Untitled 1983 Oil, watercolour and pencil on paper 26.6 × 24.6 cm

Untitled 1983 Pastel and pencil on paper 22 × 16.8 cm

Untitled 1983 Mixed media on paper 18.5 × 15.5 cm

Untitled – Grey 1983 Oil, watercolour and pencil on paper 26.7 × 24.8 cm

Untitled – Grey 1983 Oil and pencil on card 26.7 × 20.3 cm

Untitled – Grey 1983 Oil, watercolour and pencil on paper 27 × 25 cm

Untitled – Grey 1983 Oil, watercolour and pencil on paper 29.5 × 25.5 cm

Untitled – Orange 1983 Oil and pencil on card 27.1 × 24.4 cm

Study for Bassae 1984 Oil, watercolour and pencil on paper 26.5 × 20 cm

Study Sharpestone 1984 Watercolour and pencil on paper 25.5 × 24.4 cm

Study for Iford 1984 Pencil and watercolour on paper 28 × 24 cm

Untitled T2 9 (a) 1985 Oil, watercolour and pencil on paper 24 × 23.2 cm

Drawing Hillhead 1985 Wash, pencil and pen on paper 75.5 × 56 cm

left

above

Untitled 1985-86

Untitled 1987

Oil on canvas 102 × 76 cm

Mixed media on paper 62 × 50 cm

Voss 1987 Gouache, watercolour and pencil on card 27 × 25.5 cm

Study, Buci No. 2 1987 Pencil, watercolour and acrylic on paper 31 × 25 cm

Percha No. 4 1988 Oil on canvas 152 × 147 cm

Landsberg 1989 Gouache, watercolour, oil and pencil on card 35 × 38 cm

Front cover

Curved Forms (Yellow and Black) 1954 Oil on canvas 91.5 × 61 cm illustrated fully on page 7

Inside front cover

Opposite

Back cover

Catalogue © The Redfern Gallery, 2022 Works © The Estate of Adrian Heath Essay © Andrew Lambirth Photography of Works: Alex Fox Design: Graham Rees Design Print: Gomer Press

Published by The Redfern Gallery, London 2022 ISBN: 978-0-948460-95-1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording or any other information storage or retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the gallery.

20 Cork Street London W1S 3H L +44 (0)20 7734 1732 info@redfern-gallery.com redfern-gallery.com