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Home , Ben Nicholson, Bryan Wynter, David Bomberg, Gillian Ayres, Ian Jeffrey, Margaret Mellis

Austin/Desmond Fine Art GILLIAN AYRES JOHN BANTING WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM DAVID BLACKBURN SANDRA BLOW Aspects of REG BUTLER Modern ANTHONY CARO PATRICK CAULFIELD British Art PRUNELLA CLOUGH ALAN DAVIE FRANCIS DAVISON SAM HAILE RICHARD HAMILTON ANTHONY HILL ROGER HILTON IVON HITCHENS ANISH KAPOOR RICHARD LIN MARY MARTIN ALLAN MILNER MARLOW MOSS JOHN PIPER MARY POTTER ALAN REYNOLDS BRIDGET RILEY WILLIAM SCOTT JACK SMITH HUMPHREY SPENDER

DAVID BOMBERG (1890-1957) 1

Monastery of Mar Saba, Wadi Kelt, near Jericho, 1926 Coloured chalks Signed and dated lower right, Inscribed verso Monastery of Mar Saba, Wadi Kelt, near Jericho, 1926 by David Bomberg – Authenticated by Lillian Bomberg. 54.6 x 38.1cm Prov: The Artist’s estate Bernard Jacobson Gallery,

‘David Bomberg once remarked when asked for a definition of painting that it is ‘A tone of day or night and the monument to a memorable hour. It is structure in textures of colour.’ His ‘monuments’, whether oil paintings, pen and wash drawings, or oil sketches on paper, have varied essentially between two kinds of structure. There is the structure built up of clearly defined, tightly bounded forms of the early geometrical-constructivist work; and there is, in contrast, the flowing, richly textured forms of his later period, so characteristic of Bomberg’s landscape painting. These distinctions seem to exist even in the palette: primary colours and heavily saturated hues in the early works, while the later paintings are more subtle, tonally conceived surfaces. How Bomberg’s work changed from geometric forms to ‘structure in textures of colour’ can be studied in his works of the period between 1919 and the late ‘thirties; that is, the period which saw the last statements of Bomberg’s geometric-constructivist vocabulary in the magnificently conceived lithographs and the transition to the more freely composed landscapes of Spain. The work of this period is one of the most exciting phases of his career.’ William C. Lipke, Structure in Textures of Colour from David Bomberg: 1890-1957, The Arts Council, 1967

The Greek Orthodox Mar Saba Monastery is one of the oldest monasteries in the world. It lies about 9 miles east of Bethlehem. Sabas was born in Cappadocia in the year 439. When he was 18 he left for Palestine and joined the monks Euthymius and Theoctistus. After journeying into the desert area south of to fast each lent, nourishing himself only with the bread and wine of the Eucharist, he chose in 478 A.D. to take up the life of a hermit in an isolated cave in the Wadi Kidron. Within five years, 70 others had joined him in neighbouring caves among the cliffs. Sabas structured their daily lives around solitary prayer; seven times a day, and work, such as basket weaving. Sabas established the Great Laura where monks came from their isolated cells once a week to join the community for the Eucharist and to obtain supplies necessary for the coming week. Sabas died in 532 A.D. at the age of 93. He was buried in his monastery and in the twelfth century his body was carried off to Venice by the Crusaders. The corpse was returned to Mar Saba Monastery as a result of an agreement between Pope Paul VI and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Athinagorus during the Papal visit to the Holy Land in 1965. Sabas was given the Aramaic name of Mar, which means Saint. Women are not allowed to enter the Monastery, but can view the monastery from the Women’s Tower at the right entrance. http://www.geocities.com/bethlehem74/marsaba.htm WINIFRED NICHOLSON (1893-1981) 2

White Flowers on a Table, c.1934 Oil on panel There is a geometric composition verso 52 x 56cm Prov: Lefevre Gallery Sir Lawrence Jones Ivor Chance

‘She became well known as a talented painter of flowers in British art circles at the end of the 1920s, even gaining the nickname ‘the female Van Gogh.’ She exhibited regularly, sold in depth and was reviewed widely and sympathetically. Many reviews (stressed) that she was more than a mere painter of flowers, recognising the spiritual side of what she was trying to express in paint; a review in The Times (6 july 1928) covering a joint show of Winifred and Ben Nicholson with the potter William Staite Murray at the Lefevre Gallery declared: ‘Genius is not a word to be used lightly, but – on the understanding that it applies to aptitude rather than to actual performance – it is the only word for Mrs Nicholson as a flower painter. She has an uncanny sense of flowers, of what they are behind their shapes and colours, as emanations of earth, and her technical methods are right in principle for what she has to say.’’ Judith Collins, Winifred Nicholson, Gallery, London, 1987

HENRY MOORE (1898-1986) 3

Ideas for Sculpture, 1936 Pencil on paper 28.5 x 22.5cm Exh: Galerie Beyeler, Henry Moore: Drawings and Sculptures, Basel, 1970, No. 34 Ref: Archive HMF 1269

‘Every few months I stop carving for two or three weeks and draw from life. At one time I used to mix the two, perhaps carving during the day and drawing from a model during the evening. But I found this unsatisfactory – the two activities interfered with each other, for the mental approach to each is different, one being objective and the other subjective. Stone is so different from flesh and blood that one cannot carve directly from life without almost the certainty of ill-treating the material. Drawing and carving are so different a shape or size or conception which is satisfying as a drawing might be totally wrong realised in stone. Nevertheless, there is a connection between my drawings and my sculpture. Drawing from life keeps one visually fit – perhaps acts like water to a plant – and it lessens the danger of repeating oneself and getting into a formula. It enlarges one’s form repertoire, one’s form experience. But in my sculpture I do not use my memory or observations of a particular object, but rather whatever comes up from my general fund of knowledge of natural forms.’ , Henry Moore: Sculptor, A. Zwemmer, London, 1934 DAVID BOMBERG (1890-1957) 4

Self Portrait with Green Jacket, 1937 Oil on canvas Signed and dated lower right; signed, titled and dated on stretcher 52 x 42cm Exh: Fisher Fine Art, London, A Tribute to Lillian Bomberg, 1985, No. 67

Speaking generally Art endeavours to reveal what is true and needs to be free. All things said regarding Art are subject to contradiction. An artist whose integrity sustains his strength to make no compromise with expediency is never degraded. His life work will resemble the integrating character of the primaries in the Spectrum. At the beginning, of the middle period, and at the end… …I approach drawing solely for structure. I am perhaps the most unpopular artist in England – and only because I am draughtsman first and painter second. Drawing demands a theory of approach, until good drawing becomes a habit – it denies all rules. It requires high discipline… Drawing demands freedom, freedom demands liberty to expand in space – this is progress. By the extension of democracy – good draughtsmanship is – Democracy’s visual sign. To draw with integrity replaces bad habits with good, youth preserved from corruption. The hand works at high tension and organises as it simplifies, reducing to barest essentials, stripping all irrelevant matter obstructing the rapidly forming organisation which reveals the design. This is the drawing.’ David Bomberg, To Reveal What is True from The Bomberg Papers X, Vol. 1, 1959

JOHN BANTING (1902-1972) 5

Mutual Congratulations, c.1937 Oil on Canvas 101 x 76.2cm Exh: Palazzo Reale, I Surrealisti, Milan, 1989 Schirn Kunsthalle, Die Surrealisten, Frankfurt, 1989 University of California Art Museum, Anxious Visions – Surrealist Art, Berkeley, 1990 Ref: London Bulletin, The Surrealist Group, October 1938, illustrated Palazzo Reale, I Surrealisti exhibition catalogue, Milan, 1989, p. 456, illustrated University of California Art Museum, Anxious Visions – Surrealist Art exhibition catalogue, Berkeley, 1990, p. 77, pl. 92, illustrated

‘John Banting was a wild creature at this time, dancing in night-clubs all night and creeping home to his mother’s little at Roehampton by the first underground. He once sent round a postcard commending himself for work in these terms:

Livid cosmoramas sooty purple henna-snaggea Dizzy in hairy skies: icy courtyards: roast Gourds: turkeycock spools:piepaldleaves’ Pungent veins coiling: clumsy slabs Of rancid saffron rife in blown faded wastes: Passportraitposters Va r i e d Downy Milky Purely glazed Brush smoothed Scrumbled etched modelled Clear advancing speaking warm Velvet mouths phosphorescent cheekbones: Interiors flooded with lambent consoling colours Glossy plastered gnarled climatically rounded habitual. John Banting General Artist’ Julian Trevelyan, Indigo Days, MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1957 HUMPHREY SPENDER (1910-2005) 6

Industrial Landscape with Pylons, 1938 Oil on canvas Signed and dated lower left 61.6 x 40.7cm Exh: Bishop’s Palace, Urban Images (Festival Exhibition), , 1995 Yale Centre of British Art, Humphrey Spender’s Humanist Landscapes: Photo-documents, 1932-1942, New Haven, Connecticut, 1997, No. 48 Peter Pears Gallery, Festival Exhibition, Aldeburgh, 2006, No. 15

SAM HAILE (1909-1948) 7

Untitled, 5.1.39 Oil on board Signed and dated lower left 51 x 41cm

‘Their mood is one obsessed by consciousness of pain and suffering, deeply pessimistic. Except for the occasional positive notes of sexuality or of the physical activity of dancers. The images of pain are often acutely and disturbingly vivid – heads are distorted, invaded by parasitic plants, decaying or buried; eyes protrude on long stalks; nerves are exposed in vegetable systems; feet are suspended from trees or form fragments of parched and fractured earth. Even sexuality, for all its central position in his philosophy, reveals negative and terrifying aspects, as for example in the aggressive and violent sadism of The Woodman or in the saturnine overtones of Woman and Puppy. Yet there is in many of the best examples a poetic sense of wonder and mystery, a sense of revelation of ‘deep-guarded secrets’, which hint at least at the forces by which man can sustain his agonies and survive them…The execution is often of the greatest delicacy and elegance of line; the contour often beautiful; the colour even gay and flowerlike. This is not a contradiction of the violence of the imagery, but an expression of the artist’s attitude to it.’ A.C. Sewter, T.S. Haile: Memorial Exhibition, Crafts Centre, London, 1951 MARGARET MELLIS (b.1914) 8

Collage with Dark Red Oval, 1942 Mixed media Signed, dated and titled verso 13 x 19cm Prov: The artist

‘Circumstances, in the shape of the war, became extreme in 1939. In April of that year Stokes and Mellis moved to Little Parc Owles at Carbis Bay near to St. Ives. They had seen the house during a holiday at St. Ives in 1938. Stokes worked as a market gardener during the war years. Little Parc Owles also became something of a centre for artists and their associates driven out of London by the bombing. Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, along with their children, arrived in August 1939 and stayed until spring of the following year. In September 1939 Stokes and Mellis helped to find a bungalow (Faerystones) at Carbis Bay for Naum Gabo and his wife Miriam. Other visitors included , , Graham Sutherland, Julian Trevelyan, Thelma Hulbert and Peter Lanyon, whom Stokes had known since 1937.

Encouraged by Ben Nicholson, Mellis started to make small abstract compositions. She had already experimented with collage. Gabo too must have been an influence, because he was nearby at Faerystones when not at Peter Lanyon’s attic studio in St. Ives. From 1940 until around 1945 she worked as a constructivist. The term has a wealth and a literature of artist’s statements behind it but always entailed the scrupulous management of delimited spaces defined by a repertoire of refined geometric elements. In 1945, however, she returned to painting, almost as she was putting aside the many powerful influences of the war years. In 1946, on the breakup of her marriage to , she left Carbis Bay. In 1948 she married Francis Davison, and in that same year they settled at Cap d’Antibes in a tumbledown château, only returning to England in 1950, to Syleham in Suffolk.’ Ian Jeffrey, Day by Day: the Art of Margaret Mellis from Margaret Mellis, Austin/Desmond Fine Art & Newlyn Art Gallery, 2001

ALLAN MILNER (1910-1984) 9

Composition 6, 1949 Oil on board 31.5 x 44.5cm Prov: E.L.T. Mesens Exh: The London Gallery, Allan Milner, London, 1949

He was born in Castleford, Yorkshire and studied at Leeds College of Art and the . Milner exhibited at The in 1932 and sold an early work, a portrait, to the artist . After serving in the Royal Navy during World War II he was included in mixed exhibitions at both the Redfern Gallery and Gimpel Fils. Milner had one-man shows at the London Gallery in 1949 at the Woodstock Gallery in 1967, he settled in the Isle of Man and was a founder member of the Mannin Art Group. IVON HITCHENS (1893-1979) 10

Landscape in Autumn, c.1949 Oil on canvas Signed lower left, and with the artist’s hand-written label verso 51.5 x 103cm Prov: Helen O’Malley Hooker Roeloff

‘In my own case I think that after the first impact, which is very vital because you have got to strike your contact with life, I’ve got to think to myself how it is going to be best to represent that on canvas – this complex subject that I see in nature. Nature contains everything really – it is only limited by our own con- sciousness looking at it, and a degree of my own consciousness, the shaping of my thoughts at this time, fil- ters out the ideas that are in my head; filters out, really, what my eye is capable of seeing. And so, given this particular landscape, which is trees and houses and hills behind, a stream of water…the good old traditional way sorts them out into some means of converting them onto canvas and you stick them down on canvas and they make some sort of sense…I find myself faced with a different problem. I tend to like not one but two views because it becomes much more interesting. One says A or B, of these two component parts. Both have got to be united to make the whole but at the same time A is more intricate, sharply crystalline, de- tailed. B is softer in a way, perhaps, full of rounder shapes. Yet both are the same landscape. What am I going to do about that? Ivon Hitchens, Statement on painting

NAUM GABO (1890-1974) 11

Linear Construction in Space, c.1950 Perspex with nylon monofilament, incised ‘GABO’, on black Perspex base 5.7 x 21 x 21cm Prov: Mr and Mrs Patrick Morgan, Cambridge, Mass., USA Exh: Margaret Brown Gallery, Boston, Oct-Nov 1951 Ref: Steven Nash/Jörn Merket (Ed.s), Naum Gabo: Sixty Years of , Dallas Museum of Art, 1985, No. 48.12 MARLOW MOSS (1890-1958) 12

Red, White and Black, 1950 Oil on canvas Signed and dated lower left on the frame 91 x 61cm Ref: Florette Dijkstra, Marlow Moss: Constructivist + the Reconstruction Project, De Kleine Kapaciteit/Patten Press, 1995, No. S39

‘The St. Ives artists barely knew of Marlow Moss’s existence. Michael Canney finds it hard to believe that Moss lived and worked for so many years in an artists colony and yet remained so aloof. She deliberately lived the withdrawn life of a hermit, yet made frequent trips to the Continent. At that time, no one in knew that her work was respected by constructivists such as Léger, Ozenfant, Max Bill, Vantongerloo and Mondriaan. Probably concrete art was simply too unromantic for the Naturalism of the St. Ives School.

Despite her isolation, Marlow Moss still managed to participate fairly regularly in group exhibitions. In 1942 she was included in American-British Art in New York. In 1944 Château d’Evreux was bombed by German troops and was completely destroyed. Nothing was left of Moss’s early oeuvre apart from a few works which by coincidence had been housed elsewhere. After the war it was again possible to participate in Paris. The fact that Marlow Moss’s work was occasionally shown in public was mainly due to Netty Nijhoff, who had resumed contact with Marlow Moss after the war.

The next few years were spent travelling between Lamorna [Cornwall], Paris and Holland. After the war Marlow Moss spent several months of each year in Paris and regularly submitted to the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. She also participated in the exhibitions of the Parisian group Espace which was later based in London.’ Florette Dijkstra, Marlow Moss: Constructivist + the Reconstruction Project, De Kleine Kapaciteit/Patten Press, 1995

ROGER HILTON (1911-1975) 13

Painting (Composition in Blue), 1951 Oil on board Signed and dated, lower right 23.8 x 61cm Prov: John R. Hilton Exh: Arts Council, Roger Hilton, Serpentine Gallery, 1974, No. 10

‘It was at this point that Hilton began the paintings which he later acknowledged were much in the style of Alfred Manessier and . Hilton’s versions, however, were always more painterly and fluid in approach. He had first met the Scottish painter Gear in 1948, and had subsequently visited him in Paris, where he was living. Gear’s distinctive brand of tachism was a potent example to Hilton, while Manessier’s abstraction was a direct product of Bissière’s teaching. (Apart from Hilton, Manessier was Bissière’s most famous pupil.) Gear referred to the ‘abstraction lyrique’ of Klee and Kandinsky, as being the path to pursue, as opposed to the Mondrian tradition of ‘abstraction hygiénique’. Tachisme, as the name implies, was invented in France as an effective amalgam of Impressionism, and abstraction. It was a progressive movement concerned with pictorial order, spiritual aspirations, movement and structure. It was launched in Paris in 1949, in response to American Abstract , bearing a softer and more sensual imprint than its American counterpart. Tachism later tended to be used interchangeably with Art Autre, Art Informel and Abstraction Lyrique to denominate expressive .

From December 1949 French tachism could be seen in London – variously shown at the Leicester Galleries, the ICA and the Royal Academy. Hilton was in tune with it before its public exposure, aware of it from its Paris roots. This period of Hilton’s work lasted for about two years and was his first foray into an entirely abstract language – though he had, of course, been experimenting with abstraction in a tentative way for some years, going back to pre-war School of Paris try-outs and enquiries. Some commentators have maintained that Hilton was influenced in his decision to go abstract by Victor Pasmore’s highly publicised conversion to abstraction in 1947-8. Certainly, there was a new urgency in the air, as if territory had to be quickly claimed, or reclaimed, after the largely fallow period of the war. This new work demanded – and received – a different depth of determination and commitment.’ Andrew Lambirth, Roger Hilton: The Figured Language of Thought, Thames and Hudson, 2007 ALAN DAVIE (b.1920) 14

Signs for Virility (Opus O86), 1952 Oil on board Signed, titled and dated verso 102 x 122cm Prov: Gimpel Fils Gallery, London

‘The problems of the artist today are the outcome of his possessing too much knowledge. Knowing as we do that creation is basically intuitive and that intuition is not born of knowing (there is no”know how”), we have to come to certain conclusions as to the kind of mental attitude to adopt whilst actually painting. It has been clear to us that one must concern oneself with the activity of painting, be it a physical one (like a dance) or as an improvisation with ideas or concepts, and we must contrive to pay as little attention as possible to the end towards which we are moving – allowing the end to come when it comes, that is, at the end, when the right moment arrives. And at that moment I must say one has no aim, striving, or expectation. “We are concerned with the activity of painting” – that is what we try to say to ourselves. And the phrase “Action Painting” has been taken and distorted without proper understanding. Our painting does not convey the drama of the moment of creation. Perhaps a better term for our purpose would be “Non Act Painting” implying more accurately that the true artist is basically against acting and that he accepts the relative quality of existence and therefore is not infatuated by the image of himself as above it.’ Alan Davie, Notes by the Artist from Alan Davie: Paintings and Drawings 1936-1958, Art Gallery, London, 1958

ALAN REYNOLDS (b. 1926) 15

Small Fenscape, 1953 Oil on board Signed and dated upper right 50 x 60cm Prov: Redfern Gallery, London Hugh Wheeler Esq.

‘Instinct with poetry, his painting transforms and transposes the world of nature into a new image. In the fusion of his botanical observation, awareness of geometrical construction and sensitivity of colour he has found a compelling and entirely personal idiom.

For himself he writes: ‘Painting a picture involves, apart from other things, the ‘Relativity of All – to the Rectangle.’ It is for me, in other words, a problem of solving equations; tonal, linear and so on. The subject or motif must be transformed and become an organic whole. Poetry is never far from Nature, but alone it cannot constitute a work of art. It must be reconciled with the elements of design and composition. Laying emphasis on the formal values in a work will therefore result in a degree of abstraction. This is, to me, the logical development into a picture.” Introduction, Alan Reynolds, Redfern Gallery, London, 1953 REG BUTLER (1913-1981) 16

Figure Diving, c.1953 Cast bronze in an edition of 8 Stamped with artist initials and numbered 3/8 51(w) x 36(d) x 38 (h)cm Prov: Pierre Matisse, New York Private Collection, USA

‘In 1950, Butler, Bacon and the French sculptor Germaine Richier showed together in ‘London-Paris’ at the ICA. When, a few years later, he made the Figure in Space (1957/8) he combined Richier’s image of a body tensed against strings with Bacon’s pictorial use of a frame to emphasize physical and psychological extremity, as it does in Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950). Two of Richier’s Diabolo sculptures, where human figures strain, painfully taut, against the strings to which they are attached, were reproduced in Cahiers d’Art in 1953, along with L’Ouragane (1948-9), a dramatic bronze figure with a heavily pitted, expressive surface which displayed the same disregard for finish as the Oracle. At the same time, there was a wide thematic divergence between the two artists: whereas Richier, like Bacon, explored the boundaries of human identity under stress, Butler’s sculptures proclaim a strong sado-masochistic content.

They show female bodies manipulated, attached to wire frames, to be stretched, pulled and flayed. Their shape and their actions are determined by a technological device though, as Richard Calvocoressi suggests, these are primarily psychological portrayals. Like Bacon, Butler was concerned less with the retention of humanity than with its loss, through degradation and cruelty, to mindlessness. His dismemberment of the body and his denial of intellect and gender recall the inevitable concomitant of human existence that Sartre called ‘nausea’, since ‘All our contact with the world, whether in perception, emotion or action, is contact through the medium of our own awareness of our bodies.’’ Margaret Garlake, New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society, Yale University Press, 1998

PETER LANYON (1918-1964) 17

Bodmin Moor, 1953 Oil on board Signed lower left, inscribed verso Bodmin Moor, Peter Lanyon, Attic Studio, St Ives, Cornwall, 18 June ‘53. With forwarding label to the artist’s London gallery verso. 67 x 22cm Prov: Gimpel Fils Gallery, London

‘Perhaps the most exciting exhibition of a younger painter in 1950 was Alan Davie’s at Gimpel in October. Built up in layers of rich, dense paint, his paintings were influenced by Jackson Pollock, whose work he had seen in Peggy Guggenheim’s collection in Venice in 1948, and were like nothing else painted in England at this time. Though in detail of construction and colour Lanyon’s work of 1950-3 is very different, Davie’s boldness was certainly an inspiration

Around 1950 several of the younger painters began to find their artistic identity. For Lanyon at least, this happened with very little help from abroad: he found little to admire in French painting – an influence of Dubuffet is possible on St Just (1952-3) – and he very much admired de Staël’s paintings when they were shown in London in 1952, for the impression of light that emerged from the richly textured abstract forms. But the early 50s was a hermetic period for Lanyon, and the large number of drawings for Porthleven (1951) and St Just show that images in his paintings had to be explored and developed one by one and welded gradually into a whole. 1950-3 was a period of immense advance, but the individual pictures were worked up slowly, and the sense of confidence and finality presented by St Just, for instance, is no indication of the labour that went into its making.’ Andrew Causey, Peter Lanyon: Paintings, Drawings and Constructions 1937-64, , Manchester, 1978 ANTHONY HILL (b. 1930) 18

Black Polygons, 1954/5 Ripolin on board 152.5 x 126.8cm Exh: , Anthony Hill: Retrospective, 1983, No. 23i

‘Hill continued to produce paintings until early in 1956 while experimenting with further reliefs. We find the same concerns in both, the use of simple geometric forms and clear-cut divisions of black and white areas composed to achieve an overall balance. More crucial than before seems the idea of a central axis with simple forms balanced asymmetrically around it and Herman Weyl’s famous book Symmetry, which appeared in 1952, may be an influence here. Hill continues to exploit his early interest in contrasting textural effects with varying degrees of light absorption, and juxtaposes shiny, matt, smooth and rough surfaces in both paintings and reliefs.

The concern with balance around a central vertical axis is very evident in Orthogonal Composition, painted in the summer of 1954, which is the first of a series of tall, narrow canvases continuing into the New Year of 1956. Simple positive/negative elements are counterbalanced with extreme clarity. The large black rectangles which are all of the same size. Lawrence Alloway suggested in Nine Abstract Artists, where the picture was the most recent to be reproduced, that the composition had ‘a mathematical basis’ but this does not seem to be so. Hill himself was curious about it and in December 1955, over a year after it was finished, made a smaller ‘standardised version’ in shallow relief using root rectangles. He found he preferred the first version which he had designed without calculation.

Hill does use geometric calculation in other works of 1954-5. Black Polygons, two versions of which were made at this time, is an example. It is a large work painted in Ripolin on plywood and was originally planned for a screen which Hill hoped to have made of enamel. Each polygon has ten sides of regularly decreasing lengths and each has one right-angle. The sides of the larger polygon are twice the length of the sides of the smaller. (Top polygon 2”, 4”, 6”, 8”, 10”, 12”, etc. Bottom polygon 1”, 2”, 3”, 4”, 5”, 6”, etc) The low relief of black and white plastic sheet called Cut in a Continuum is another example. It was inspired initially by the net of a cuboctohedron but the composition underwent many variations before Hill was satisfied with the balance of squares and equal sided triangles.’ Alastair Grieve, The Development of Anthony Hill’s Art from 1950 to the Present from Anthony Hill – A Retrospective Exhibition, Arts Council, 1983

MARY POTTER (1900-1981) 19

A Rose on a Wall, 1955 Oil on canvas laid on board Signed and dated verso 35.5 x 28.5cm Prov: The Artist’s family

‘The impact of a Mary Potter is not immediate. Her paintings are best appreciated when lived with and looked at over a long period. They repay close observation, particularly of the contrasts of allied but subtly distinct tone and colours. This is especially so of her later, more abstract paintings.

Critics have referred to Mary Potter’s restrained and unemphatic palette as ‘English’. This leaves open the question of whether our grey and misty climate was responsible for her muted colours, or whether she would have painted in the same way on the Isle of Capri. My view is that she would have found the strong sunlight and colours uncongenial, and would not have stayed there long. Her pictures were not only muted, but matt. The admixture of Parris’ Marble Medium took the shine out of the oil paint and the instruction to buyers never to varnish or glaze the paintings made sure that they never shone. They were recessive, and viewers had to find their own way into them.’ Julian Potter, Mary Potter: A Life of Painting, Scolar Press, 1998 MARGARET MELLIS (b.1914) 20

Blue Boat, 1956 Oil on canvas Signed, titled and dated verso 51 x 61cm Prov: The Artist

‘Margret Mellis determined to be an artist when she was very young and has not wavered since, knowing somehow, what it meant and what to do. She studied at , then on scholarship in Paris and Italy, married Adrian Stokes, studied at the Euston Road School, hosted Nicholson and Hepworth and the triplets in Cornwall as refugees from the London blitz, began to make constructions, married the collagist Francis Davison, knew Pasmore, Hilton and Patrick Heron, exhibited at Waddington’s in the ‘sixties, then with Davison sank into an obscurity during the ‘seventies and ‘eighties, from which she (and he) are only beginning to emerge. Throughout this wavering fortune, one feels Mellis is anchored by her conviction that she knows what makes a work of art. The instinct helped Stokes and later Davison to their very different achievements; it led her, too, to discover an art that could convey her most intimate feelings without any weakening of that steadfast, no-nonsense, practical business of putting shapes and colours down on canvas.’ Julian Spalding, Margaret Mellis, Redfern Gallery, London 1987

MARY MARTIN (1907-1967) 21

Painted Relief, 1957 Plywood and plastic emulsion Signed, titled and dated verso 56 x 32.4 x 8.2cm Exh: Tate Gallery, Mary Martin, 1984, No. 5 Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Kenneth and Mary Martin, 1989, No. 39 Huddersfield Art Gallery, Mary Martin: The End is Always to Achieve Simplicity, 2004, illustrated p. 53

‘Mary Martin was an important member of the group of artists making constructed abstract art that formed around Victor Pasmore in London in 1951. Besides Pasmore, who had converted to abstract art in 1948, and Mary Martin, who showed her first abstract work in 1950, the group included Mary’s husband Kenneth, the sculptor Robert Adams, and Anthony Hill. They were joined in 1954 by John Ernest and in 1958 by . With the exception of Adams, all began as painters but their break into abstract art led them into real space, to the constructed relief in the case of Pasmore, Mary Martin, Hill, Ernest and Wise and in Kenneth Martin’s case, the mobile.

Mary Martin showed in all the major exhibitions of the group – firstly at the Artists International Association in 1951, in the studio exhibitions organised by Adrian Heath in 1952-3, at Nine Abstract Artists in 1955, This is Tomorrow in 1956, Statements and Dimensions in 1957, and the Arts Council’s Construction England in 1963. She also contributed to international exhibitions such as Konkrete Kunst organised by Max Bill in Zurich in 1960 and Experiment in Constructie organised by Joost Baljeu in Amsterdam in 1962. And she shared exhibitions with her husband, in 1954 at the Heffer Gallery, Cambridge and in 1960 at the I.C.A. She also published essays in defining publications such as the book Nine Abstract Artists in 1954, the journal Structure launched by Baljeu in 1958 and the anthology DATA edited by Anthony Hill in 1968.

The constructed abstract art made by the group was different from pre-war examples, though they acknowledged debts to the Continental pioneers and to their own contemporaries developing these traditions, such as the American Charles Biederman. But they stood far apart from post-war movements in England such as the landscape abstraction practised in St. Ives. Their art was not abstracted from nature but invented and built up systematically, as nature herself builds.’ Alastair Grieve, Mary Martin: The End is Always to Achieve Simplicity, Huddersfield Art Gallery, 2004 WILLIAM SCOTT (1913-1989) 22

Blue Form, 1959 Oil on canvas Signed lower right 41 x 51cm Prov: Private collection, Italy

‘The paintings William Scott did during his 1958 stay in Venice are mostly quite small. He was lent a studio in the Accademia where he started on a series of 16 x 20 inch (41 x 51cm) pictures that continued into the next year. It may be that they served as a diversion, a holiday from the kind of work that was dominating his Biennale show. The new paintings are still lifes consisting of just a few bowls and pans on a tabletop, with or without the horizon line that marks the far edge of the table, but with the table itself brought right forward. The objects tend to be clustered, touching or almost touching each other as in certain Cézannes, sometimes grouped more formally as in Morandi’s characteristic paintings of the 1950s. The table becomes a stage, the objects become performers, dramatis personae, ready to regroup and perform again the next day. There is a quiet concentration about these paintings that distinguishes them from larger canvases then glowing and flowing on the walls of the British Pavilion, even though William Scott’s means are essentially the same. It may be that he was reconsidering his essential purposes.’ Norbert Lynton, William Scott, Thames & Hudson, 2004

DAVID HOCKNEY (b.1937) 23

Sadhyas, 1960 Oil on board Signed, titled and dated verso 91.5 x 61cm Prov: Galerie Bruckstedt, Hamburg

‘In November 1958 David had seen the retrospective exhibition of Jackson Pollock paintings held at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, and he had also heard people discussing the Tate Gallery’s 1959 show entitled ‘ The New American Painting’, which he had missed. He found that there were two groups of painting students at the [RCA] college, a ‘traditional’ group who continued the work they had been doing on their National Diploma courses, and a ‘modern’ group who were much more concerned with the art of their own time. These seemed to be the brightest, most adventurous ones. They were all busily at work producing Abstract Expressionist paintings on the three-foot by four-foot sheets of hardboard provided by the college. They were interested only in what was happening in America. Hockney found it difficult to be inspired by Jackson Pollock, whose enormous paintings seemed to him totally lacking in any human content whatsoever. And yet he felt a real need to pay attention to concepts of modern art. In 1958 he had been impressed by an exhibition of work by the British Abstract Expressionist Alan Davie at Wakefield Art Gallery. He had met the artist and talked to him about the paintings on show. Though influenced by Pollock, Davie worked on a much smaller scale, and used his imagination to create symbolic images which contained references to the visible world, and to which he gave titles such as Entrance to a Paradise, Witches’ Sabbath, Sacrifice. Hockney felt much more drawn to Davie’s , and spent the second half of his first term working in a similar manner. The resulting paintings on hardboard were mostly destroyed or painted over, but they represented a conscious attempt to communicate the sensation of painting rather than the appearance of the visible world.’ Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, Chatto & Windus, London, 1988 FRANCIS DAVISON (1919-1984) 24

Fence and Barns, c.1960-63 Collage on Essex board 63.5 x 76cm

‘Most of the collages up to the mid 1960s are typified by two things. The colours of the papers used are much more subdued than they later became, largely because there was less coloured paper in circulation. The results have an austere grandeur, more architectural perhaps, but also quite domestic and intimate. The range of browns suggests Vuillard, or some of the posters by Ben Nicholson’s father [William], working with James Pryde as the Beggarstaff Brothers in the 1890s. These posters were composed at full size on the floor using cut paper, so the resemblance is not surprising. They were the most avant-garde event in during the decade, but being graphics rather than paintings, are not part of the syllabus. Secondly, these early collages are ‘filled in’ to the edge, even though the ‘Essex board’ on which they are made is sometimes exposed. Like Ben Nicholson, Davison uses the edge as an active element, but later he was to break free and use a ragged edge to a more complex assembly of collage elements as a way of projecting energy outwards from the work.’ Alan Powers, Francis Davison: Paintings and Collages 1948-83, Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London, 2003

BRIDGET RILEY (b.1931) 25

Displaced Parallels, 1962 Emulsion on board Signed and dated on left-hand side batten; signed, titled and dated verso 50.8 x 114.3cm Exh: Juda Rowan Gallery, London New Art Centre, London Gallery One, Bridget Riley, London, April-May 1962 Nottingham University, Bridget Riley, Nottingham, 1963 JACK SMITH (b.1928) 26

Painted Relief, 1962 Oil on board Signed, titled and dated verso 48 x 54cm Exh: Matthiesen Gallery, Jack Smith, London, 1963 Ref: Sunderland Arts Centre, Jack Smith: Paintings and Drawings 1949-1976, Ceolfrith Press, 1977, p. 72, illustrated

‘In a comment on one of his paintings, Jack Smith had stated that “it is a mistake to try and read any passage as they only work visually; the vocabulary is one of line, mass, colour, activities and stillness; there is no word content. They can be thought of as visual poetry, but they are not to be confused with concrete poetry. It is essential that my paintings are only visually understood. A written page can be remade in the same way that an artist remakes an object WORDS BECOME OBJECTS.”

Despite this warning, many of his paintings can be read, in the sense that they can be scanned, following the sequence of juxtaposed signs of which they are composed, like a poem or a musical score. The artist says as much himself in the comment already quoted from above: “The painting (i.e. Various activities, No.5, 1966) is to be read from side to side. The marks are a kind of colour shorthand, a visual equivalent of sound and speech, speed and interval; in this way they have something in common with a musical score (a musician once remarked that he thought he could conduct a whole exhibition)”. Yet a musician could no more conduct a Jack Smith painting than an actor could recite it, however much each might understandably think he could. But it is in its apparent equivalence to a discourse translatable as sound or speech that the philosophical significance of a Jack Smith painting/script may reside.’ Helder Macedo, Jack Smith’s Word Objects and the Language of Signs, from: Jack Smith: Paintings and Drawings 1949-1976, Ceolfrith Press, 1977

TERRY FROST (1915-2003) 27

White Painting (Bollard), June 1962 Oil, charcoal and collage on canvas Signed, titled and dated verso 152.5 x 152.5cm

‘After the bracing stimulus of Leeds – where incidentally the benefits were by no means one-sided because many people, myself included, owed their awakening of interest in abstract art to Terry’s example – he returned to St. Ives and embarked on perhaps the most productive period of his career. Already he was a leading figure in non-figurative painting but now his work took on a new spareness and tautness, especially when he used collage in the form of applied and sometimes stitched linen patches. He was also free from the bondage of teaching, being now on the books of the Waddington Galleries. But above all, he found St. Ives was then in the ferment of fizzing creativity, with Hilton, Wynter, Lanyon and Heron all working at full stretch. For a span of this fruitful period Frosts’s work became a kind of dialogue with that of the greatest of his contemporaries, Roger primary and used at full strength. It represented an extreme of non-figuration.’ Ronnie Duncan, Terry Frost: Paintings 1948-89, Mayor Gallery, London, 1990 SANDRA BLOW (1925-2006) 28

Elemental Abstract, 1962 Mixed media on canvas Signed and dated lower left, signed verso 25.5 x 35.5cm Exh: Artists International Association, London

‘Reviewers of her 1962 show at Gimpel’s were almost unanimous in their view that Blow was ‘one of the best abstract painters we have’ and in their enjoyment of such qualities as the ‘sensuous suavity’ of her handling of paint. Beneath these appreciative phrases can be read a subtext, revealed by the frequency with which terms like ‘sensibility’, ‘intuitive’ and ‘instinct’ crop up. It is implied that Blow’s achievements is on one level essentially feminine, that it smoothes out some of the obstinate unintelligibility many people expected to encounter in abstract art. Keith Sutton in The Listener stopped to admire Blow’s ‘seductive appreciation of translucent colour’ before proceeding to rebuke Hilton, who was showing at Waddington’s at the same time: ‘For me, her work has much more density and conviction than the majority of much older artists who practise the lyrical-abstract-landscape style that we associate nowadays with the West Country, as exemplified at the the present time by the recent paintings of Roger Hilton.’ Was it the case here that abstract art was itself being seen as inherently feminine, allowing Blow’s work to be praised for its ‘seductive’ pleasures while Hilton’s, from which she had clearly learned to much, was taken to task for its (supposed) lack of the greater ‘density and conviction’ a male artist might be expected to bring to the job? Hilton, by 1962, could hardly be classed as a landscape-abstract artist. But the mainstream British press was still more at ease with an abstract art that didn’t object to being read as landscape than with any other kind. Blow, it has to be said, did little to persuade them otherwise, telling one reporter that ‘farming echoes often appear in my work’. Michael Bird, Sandra Blow, Lund Humphries, 2005

BARBARA HEPWORTH (1903-1975) 29

Square Forms (Two Segments), 1963 Bronze with green patina signed on the base, ed. 1/7 132 x 46 x 36 cm Exh: Tate Gallery, London, Barbara Hepworth, London, 1968, illustrated No. 131 (another cast) , Barbara Hepworth: Recent Work: Sculpture, Paintings, Prints, London, 1970, No. 3 Marlborough Gallery Inc., Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Bronzes, New York, 1979, No. 23 Tate Gallery, Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective, London, 1994. Touring to Yale Center for British Art, New Haven and , Toronto Prov: Marlborough Gallery Inc., New York Private Collection, CA (aquired from above April 1987) Lit: (ed.), The Complete Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth 1960-69, Lund Humphries, 1971, No. 1 W J Strachan, Open Air Sculpture in Britain, 1984, Zwemmer, No. 384 JOHN PIPER (1903-1992) 30

Fawley Bottom, c1960 Watercolour and gouache on paper Signed lower right 56 x 76cm

‘The titles are the names of places, meaning that there was an involvement there, at a special time: an experience affected by the weather, the season and the country, but above all concerned with the exact location and its spirit for me. The spread of moss on a wall, a pattern of vineyards or a perspective of hop- poles may be the peg, but it is not hop-poles or vineyards or church towers that these pictures are meant to be about, but the emotion generated by them at one moment in one special place. They are about what Paul Nash liked to call the genius loci. Romantic painting, is about the particular, not the general.’ John Piper, John Piper, Marlborough New Gallery, London, 1969

RICHARD HAMILTON (b.1922) 31

Guggenheim (Dyptich), 1966 Offset lithograph on two sheets of paper Signed bottom right. Published by the Robert Fraser Gallery on two sheets, with typography verso printed in grey and announcing an exhibition of the artist’s Guggenheim Reliefs to be held at the Robert Fraser Gallery. 90 x 89cm (overall size)

‘Hamilton had begun to consider ‘buildings’ as a possible class of subject-matter. Lichtenstein’s paintings of classical temples and Artschwager’s of skyscrapers stimulated him to tackle one which, being largely curved, would be their structural antithesis. He was also interested to know if a successful work could be based on a new building and one which, like the supremely elegant Braun appliances in relation to florid car-styling for a mass market, was conceived as a work of high art in itself.

The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue, New York, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943-46 and built in 1956-59. The final form of Hamilton’s interpretation of it was a set of reliefs in false perspective. His choice of this subject and treatment was a curious concentration of his earlier interests. The spiral form of the museum – a building assertively organic by contrast with its classical opposites – seemed to look back to Growth & Form, as well as encouraging, (as had the spiral structure of the Exquisite Form bra), a false illusionistic reading as concentric circles (here stacked). The spiral form and the regular recessions in the elevation facilitated a diagrammatic treatment. The perspective problem was one of exceptional difficulty in which the spectator was again made very conscious of shifting viewpoints, while the use of heavy relief was a culmination of an obsession which could be traced back through Hamilton’s work to 1951. Finally, the eccentric appearance of the Guggenheim Museum was almost as familiar an image in popular culture as those of John Glenn or the latest Frigidaire.’ Richard Morphet, Richard Hamilton, Tate Gallery, London, 1970 PATRICK HERON (1920-1999) 32

Sharp Violet and Blue in Orange andYellow, May 1968 Gouache on paper Signed and titled verso 57.1 x 79.4cm Prov: Waddington Galleries

‘In July 1965, at the ICA in London, Heron made a short speech in which for the first time in public he criticized American artistic chauvinism in general and the role played by Clement Greenberg in the critical promotion of American painting in particular. The event caused something of a stir: here was one of the earliest and most eloquent of champions of post-war American abstraction apparently changing his tune with a vengeance. It was in fact the first of a series of vehement attacks on the critical orthodoxy perfectly encapsulated in the opening sentence of Michael Fried’s 1965 study of Noland, Olitski and Stella, Three American Painters: ‘For twenty years or more almost all the best new painting and sculpture has been done in America…’. Heron’s campaign against what he perceived as ‘a kind of cultural imperialism’ began in earnest with an article in Studio International, December 1966, entitled ‘The ascendancy of London in the sixties’ in which he also attacked ‘the sheer gutless obsequiousness to the Americans which prevails amongst so many British critics and art pundits’, and asserted the living presence in British painting of ‘not one, but three generations of painters whose vitality, persistent energy, inventiveness and sheer sensibility is not equaled anywhere else in the world.’ Heron was referring to an older generation of established painters that included Ben Nicholson, Ivon Hitchens, Ceri Richards and Victor Pasmore; to that ‘middle generation’ to which he himself belonged, and of whose work he had written so passionately and persuasively through the mid-1950s; and to the host of brilliant younger painters, figurative and non-figurative, on the contemporary British scene, including , Patrick Caulfield, Harold and Bernard Cohen, and David Hockney.’ Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, Phaidon, 1994

PATRICK CAULFIELD (1936-2005) 33

Café, 1968 Emulsion on board Signed lower front, dated ‘7/68’ on the reverse 76.2 x 99cm Prov: Waddington Galleries, London

‘How is it, then, that when the artist has confessed in no uncertain terms to the fact that he has produced nothing more than an elaborate fiction, one which presses all the right buttons and relies for its success on the viewer’s willingness to play along, it is possible still to respond to the picture with the same delight one might feel if one really were in the open air, under a clear blue sky, enjoying the vista and the atmosphere of dolce far niente? The answer, of course, is that the artist and his audience conspire with each other just long enough to escape the mundane reality of daily life. The painter has whiled away hours picturing himself far from his studio and freed of the pressures of creating the work. It is in fact that very quality of giving free rein to the imagination that has made the stress of art-making bearable. So it is that the viewer in turn, with a knowing wink, is allowed to luxuriate in the thought of things far away.’ Marco Livingstone, Perspectives on Paintings: Seven Essays on the Art of Patrick Caulfield, from Patrick Caulfield, Hayward Gallery, London, 1999 RICHARD LIN (b.1933) 34

Heatwave, 1971 Oil and collage on canvas Signed and dated verso 63.5 x 63.5cm Prov: Marlborough Fine Art, London

‘While the construction of Lin’s earlier works in Perspex and aluminium on canvas owed certain debts to the Suprematism of Malevich and the geometric derivations in Constructivism, he achieved a certain minimal personality of his own by a subtle balance of tone in the relative weighting of square and rectangular motives. At the extreme was the situation where a dominant area was placed in aggressive relationship to other smaller ones setting up tensions not only of scale but also of colour. About 1962 the reliance on volume to exert superiority of form when opposed to dispersed smaller motives was abandoned in favour of stronger colours within lengthened oblongs which divided the picture plane as accents, their intervals and placings effecting considerably greater harmonic and distanced interplay. Shadows actually shed by the reliefs superimposed on the light ground increased the delicate gravity of impending movement. This gradual refinement of spatial counterpoints came to be charged with more intricate systems of proportion whereby opposing and complimentary shapes were no longer equivalents of enclosures bounded by straight edges but assumed autonomous bodies relating in space to adjoining bodies of equal weight and volume their contacts merging in a nimbus as the colours meet in the spectrum of a rainbow.’ G.S. Whittet, Contemporary Artists, St James Press/St Martin’s Press, London/New York, 1977

BRYAN WYNTER (1915-1975) 35

Imoos (for Jake), 1972 Acrylic on plastic, twine, reflector and light set within a painted wood box Prov: Jake Wynter Susan Murray

‘For some years Bryan Wynter had the parabolic reflector from a Second World War searchlight in the corner of his studio. In 1960, in a symbolic negation of its violent associations, he incorporated it into a work of art, suspending painted pieces of card in front of it and setting the whole ensemble within a with one open face. The cards hung on wires on which a rotating magnet, located above the box, exerted a force, making the suspended elements turn in an almost random pattern. A light hidden in the black-painted interior of the box illuminated the pieces and later its heat was used to provide a quieter impetus to the mobile’s movement than the original motor. As they spun, the pattern of the cards was reflected by the concave mirror, so that the inverted coloured forms interpenetrated, multiplied, distorted, disappeared and seemed to loom from the box into the room. Occasionally, the cards would separate to reveal the viewer’s own image, establishing a dialogue.

Wynter produced six such works in the following five years and they were exhibited at the Waddington Galleries in July 1965. At the last minute he named them IMOOS – an acronym for Images Moving Out Onto Space – ‘in default of any other more ordinary satisfactory names’. He explained that he had made each district from the others in order to ‘explore different approaches’ and gave a brief account of his working methods:

The elements were planned, cut out, painted, reversed & juxtaposed all together on the drawing board. They were then set free to move before the reflector. However carefully each work was planned there were always unexpected ‘free’ developments.

The notion of the liberation of the cardboard elements gives an indication of how he viewed the role of chance in his works.’ Chris Stephens, Bryan Wynter, St. Ives Artists series, Tate Gallery, 1999 ROGER HILTON (1911-1975) 36

Untitled (Two Animals), 1974 Gouache and crayon Initialled and dated lower right 41 x 35cm

‘Hilton managed to inject such anthropomorphic qualities into the many animals that appear in hundreds of late gouaches. This group of paintings on paper were prompted, apparently by the gift of poster colours to his son for Christmas 1972. Their nature was determined to some extent by the conditions of their making: they were produced after Hilton had become bed-ridden through illness due to excessive alcohol consumption. A skin complaint forced him to rest on his left elbow and to paint with his right (wrong) hand, giving the paintings a certain cack-handedness. As before, he made both figurative and abstract works. Now, however, the nature of the representational pieces was more varied and one can identify a symbolic, if not almost narrative, quality to some.

Animals are common – dogs, cats, birds, elephants in particular, crocodiles, camels, fish and even a caterpillar – and these seem to take on some of the characteristics of human beings. It has argued that the decorative spotty appearance of some referred to Hilton’s own skin condition, though he said he employed such pointillist techniques in the earlier works to energise the otherwise inert poster paint. Chris Stephens, Roger Hilton: Towards a New Figuration from Into Seeing New: The Art of Roger Hilton, Tate St. Ives, 2007

ANTHONY CARO (b. 1924) 37

Writing Piece, ‘Hand’, 1978 Wood and steel, varnished 34.3(h) x 61(l) x 12.7(w)cm Ref: D. Blume, Anthony Caro Catalogue Raisonné Volume 1, Cologne, 1981, p 248, No. 465, illustrated

‘Caro’s process is essentially intuitive and inclusive. In his view, “art, music and poetry are about what it is like to be alive… the value of an art work lies in its depth of introspective and emotional content.” But also: “to the spectator a sculpture or painting for that matter is essentially a surrogate for another person.” Thus a Caro sculpture is both an abstract composition, (can be studied as such), and confronts us as a human communication because it is the product of human decisions. Clearly sculpture like Caro’s embodies responses to many sorts of impulses.

The starting point for many of Caro’s works lies in the material itself. Just as Moore and other sculptors have derived their ideas from the forms of stone and wood, so Caro responds to the raw materials of many different shapes and sizes with which he stocks his workshop. A formal idea, possibly one suggested by land- or townscape, can also provide a first idea, but the moment this is turned into materials arranged, perhaps clamped together, in the workshop, the material itself, its physical character and its technical demands, takes partial charge of the further development of the piece. Caro enters into a kind of collaboration with the material not wholly unlike that of a Moore or a Hepworth following, and sometimes also countering, the physical structure inherent in the wood or stone they are carving. But the physical structures proposed by steel and other metals are of course much more diverse – in some ways more permissive, in others more restricting – than those of natural materials.’ Norbert Lynton, Anthony Caro from Five Sculptures by Anthony Caro, Arts Council, 1982 BEN NICHOLSON (1894-1982) 38

1979, March (still life, Maggiore) Oil wash and ink on paper, on artist’s prepared backboard Signed and titled verso, initialed and titled on reverse of backing board 62.9 x 76.2cm (irregular) Prov: Waddington Galleries, London New Art Centre, London Commodity Finance Inc. Ref: Norbert Lynton, Ben Nicholson, Phaidon, 1993, No. 410, illustrated

‘Other works restate BN’s confidence in his world and remind us again of his extraordinary sureness of touch. In 1979, March (still life, Maggiore) we see a group of objects on a round table in front of a vast space made by an almost horizontal bar of black on the right and the warm-and-cool tinting of the paper. A curved patch of black-over-brown is in the middle as part of the group; otherwise the objects are in line only and that line assures us of BN’s high spirits. In fact, we sense an unusual solidity in those objects and notice that those on the left, a mug and a stoppered jar or decanter, are drawn almost entirely as though they were solid, not given the transparency and the intimate inter-dependence found in most of BN’s linear images. Soft dabs of black paint add another element of life and visual interest; coarser versions of these touches in a much smaller drawing are named ‘cat’s paws’ in its title.’ Norbert Lynton, Ben Nicholson, Phaidon, London, 1993

WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM (1912-2003) 39

Linear Movement (Green), 1981 Oil and graphite on hardboard Signed and dated lower right; signed, titled and dated verso 25.5 x 35cm Ref: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust 1289

‘In the late summer of 1948, a month or two after I began visiting Chy-an-Kerris to see Ben [Nicholson] and play ping-pong I met Willie Barns-Graham. At the time she was painting a series of street scenes with steps and balustrades, and she was known as W. Balustrade Graham. I was surprised to find that ‘Balustrade’ was not a man but a woman, and a beautiful woman at that, with blue eyes that flashed like knives. She would sometimes come to see me at Higher Tregerthen or I would visit her on my now more frequent walks along the cliffs to St. Ives. I loved the huge windows of her studio overlooking Porthmeor Beach. On the hot calm days, even though it was the end of the season, the sands were covered with holiday-makers, and the studio was filled with the shrieks of children and seagulls. Then came the majestic storms of autumn and winter when the wind moaned across the roofs and waves pounded up the beach to the granite base of the building, encrusting the studio windows with crystalline spray. It has always seemed to me that Willie’s Swiss glacier series of paintings that followed the balustrades, majestic and sensuous experiences of whites, blues and greys, transparencies and opacities, were more paintings of that window than they were of ice and snow at Grindelwald.’ David Lewis, St. Ives – A Personal Memoir, 1947-55 from St. Ives 1939-64, Tate Gallery, London, 1985 GILLIAN AYRES (b.1930) 40

Mereus & Doris, 1983 Oil on canvas Signed and dated lower right, signed and dated verso 106 x 80.5cm Prov: Knoedler Gallery, London

‘A shape – relationship – a body – oddness – shock – mood – cramped – isolated – and – sweet – encroaching – pivoting – fading – bruised. Painting’s own nature – a mark making it’s own image in its own space – the canvas viewed as a whole image and space – an essence – perhaps like a space a sailor of Magellan’s world would have felt when the world was flat and he had sailed to the edge.’ Gillian Ayres, Painting’s Own Nature from Situation, Arts Council, 1962

PRUNELLA CLOUGH (1919-1999) 41

Black Flower, 1993 Oil on canvas Signed verso 112 x 124.5cm Prov: Annely Juda Fine Art, London Private Collection, USA

‘Despite her status as an ‘artist’s artist’, Clough was undoubtedly one of the most interesting and important British painters of the post-war period, a distinctive artist whose work, while paying no heed to fashion, does nonetheless maintain a dialogue with a series of contemporary positions in painting, from Neo- Romanticism in the 1940s, realism in the 1950s, Pop and formalist abstraction in the 1960s, to the resurgence of abstract and process painting in the early 1990s. These are the historic contexts against which her work can be situated but, as an artist she remained defiantly individualistic, a member of no school. Ultimately the labels that attach themselves to the art of different periods offer us only limited help in understanding the concerns of the individual. Indeed they can mislead, as the persistent identification of Clough’s work with Neo-Romanticism does.’ Ben Tufnell, Prunella Clough, Tate Gallery, 2007 DAVID BLACKBURN (b.1939) 42

High Beach, 1995 Pastel on paper Signed and dated 61 x 51cm

‘David Blackburn has spent the nineties living and working almost exclusively in Huddersfield. It has been a period of consolidation, with the expressed desire to concentrate on the making of ‘beautiful objects’. His large panels…have the quality of peace and lyricism, a sense of hidden poetry that one could associate with a Sung bowl or classical Chinese calligraphy. Despite the sophistication in the structure of his drawings of the nineties, there is an enormous ease and assuredness in the control of his medium as the nuances of white on white can bring to mind parallels with Malevich and Ryman. His drawings, with their endlessly ambiguous marks, strike within us certain chords which have a depth of resonance, as rich or as poor as the experiences which have informed our spiritual and artistic lives. Blackburn’s unwillingness to compromise and hostility to easy eye-catching gimmicks have always guaranteed his work a well-informed and dedicated audience.’ Sasha Grishin, David Blackburn and the Visionary Landscape Tradition, Hart Gallery, London, 1994

ANISH KAPOOR (b.1954) 43

Blue Square, 1996 Pigment on paper Signed lower right 38 x 28.5cm

‘The location of the principle motifs in Kapoor’s work is particularly significant and parallels metaphorically the importance he attaches to the notion of place. Position is determined by discipline, control and instinct. The images are poised within a field and even the smallest motifs have great presence. Some are slow to reveal themselves as though replicating the act of creation itself, while others have the immediacy of life.

Each drawing is usually begun near the centre of the sheet and while it develops relatively spontaneously Kapoor knows from the outset what kind of motif he is dealing with. The drawings are quickly achieved and are direct expressions when compared with the sculptures, which require greater planning and considerable time to create. Furthermore, while in his sculptures Kapoor generally eschews autographic marks and employs assistants to help him carve into stone, the drawings stress the primacy of the mark and the hand of the artist. Many of these marks are made instinctively, the artist acting as transmitter of forces and thoughts beyond the conscious.’ Jeremy Lewison, Anish Kapoor: A Place Out of Time, Tate Gallery, 1991 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gillian Ayres, Painting’s Own Nature from Situation, Arts Council, 1962 Michael Bird, Sandra Blow, Lund Humphries, 2005 David Bomberg, To Reveal What is True from The Bomberg Papers X, Vol. 1, 1959 Andrew Causey, Peter Lanyon: Paintings, Drawings and Constructions 1937-64, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 1978 Judith Collins, Winifred Nicholson, Tate Gallery, London, 1987 Alan Davie, Notes by the Artist from Alan Davie: Paintings and Drawings 1936-1958, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1958 Florette Dijkstra, Marlow Moss: Constructivist + the Reconstruction Project, De Kleine Kapaciteit/Patten Press, 1995 Ronnie Duncan, Terry Frost: Paintings 1948-89, Mayor Gallery, London, 1990 Margaret Garlake, New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society, Yale University Press, 1998 Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, Phaidon, 1994 Alastair Grieve, The Development of Anthony Hill’s Art from 1950 to the Present from Anthony Hill – A Retrospective Exhibition, Arts Council, 1983 Alastair Grieve, Mary Martin: The End is Always to Achieve Simplicity, Huddersfield Art Gallery, 2004 Sasha Grishin, David Blackburn and the Visionary Landscape Tradition, Hart Gallery, London, 1994 Ian Jeffrey, Day by Day: the Art of Margaret Mellis from Margaret Mellis, Austin/Desmond Fine Art & Newlyn Art Gallery, 2001 Andrew Lambirth, Roger Hilton: The Figured Language of Thought, Thames and Hudson, 2007 David Lewis, St. Ives – A Personal Memoir, 1947-55 from St. Ives 1939-64, Tate Gallery, London, 1985 Jeremy Lewison, Anish Kapoor: A Place Out of Time, Tate Gallery, 1991 Norbert Lynton, Anthony Caro from Five Sculptures by Anthony Caro, Arts Council, 1982 Norbert Lynton, Ben Nicholson, Phaidon, London, 1993 Norbert Lynton, William Scott, Thames & Hudson, 2004 William C. Lipke, Structure in Textures of Colour from David Bomberg: 1890-1957, The Arts Council, 1967 Marco Livingstone, Perspectives on Paintings: Seven Essays on the Art of Patrick Caulfield, from Patrick Caulfield, Hayward Gallery, London, 1999 Helder Macedo, Jack Smith’s Word Objects and the Language of Signs, from: Jack Smith: Paintings and Drawings 1949-1976, Ceolfrith Press, 1977 Richard Morphet, Richard Hamilton, Tate Gallery, London, 1970 Colin Naylor/Genesis P-Orridge (eds), Contemporary Artists, St James Press/St Martin’s Press, London/New York, 1977 John Piper, John Piper, Marlborough New Gallery, London, 1969 Julian Potter, Mary Potter: A Life of Painting, Scolar Press, 1998 Alan Powers, Francis Davison: Paintings and Collages 1948-83, Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London, 2003 Herbert Read, Henry Moore: Sculptor, A. Zwemmer, London, 1934 Alan Reynolds, Alan Reynolds, Redfern Gallery, London, 1953 A.C. Sewter, T.S. Haile: Memorial Exhibition, Crafts Centre, London, 1951 Julian Spalding, Margaret Mellis, Redfern Gallery, London 1987 Chris Stephens, Roger Hilton: Towards a New Figuration from Into Seeing New: The Art of Roger Hilton, Tate St. Ives, 2007 Chris Stephens, Bryan Wynter, St. Ives Artists series, Tate Gallery, 1999 Julian Trevelyan, Indigo Days, MacGibbon & Kee, London, London, 1957 Ben Tufnell, Prunella Clough, Tate Gallery, 2007 Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, Chatto & Windus, London, 1988 Aspects of Modern British Art

23 November – 20 December 2007

Mon-Fri 10.30 – 5.30pm Sat 11.00 – 2.30pm (during exhibitions only)

Catalogue compiled by David Archer Printed by Creative Press London Photography by Colin Mills

Austin/Desmond Fine Art Pied Bull Yard 68/69 Great Russell Street London WC1B 3BN Tel: +44 (0) 20 7242 4443 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7404 4480 e-mail [email protected] Website www.austindesmond.com www.austindesmond.com