Alan Reynolds 1926 - 2014

Dark Fir, Shoreham (1952) forms a compelling companion piece to the larger-scale Abstract Landscape (Dark Fir Shoreham II Morning), painted in the same year and now in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art. Both feature a central fir tree, simplified to a sequence of upturned branches, amid a landscape of trees and barns. One is night, the other day, while the smaller painting is more loosely, more immediately, executed.

Placed side by side, it is hard to resist envisaging the pair in terms of narrative. The central tree in Dark Fir, Shoreham, ragged against the sky, has the potency of a crucifixion: indeed, to its left, on a hill or barn apex, can be seen a small cross. By contrast, the tree in Shoreham II Morning, solid and symmetrical, cradles a weak sun above its branches. Crucifixion and resurrection? Both works are striking, yet it is the landscape of Dark Fir – with its cluster of trees, encircled as witnesses – which proves the more affecting.

The Earl Jeffrey John Archer Amherst, 5th Earl Amherst
Private Collection, UK (Gift from the above in 1985)

Osborne Samuel, London

London, Redfern Gallery, early 1950s

Redfern Gallery, London (where titled ‘Winter Trees’ on their label, verso)

The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection (purchased from the above, March 28th, 1983)

A gift from the artist to Robert and Lillian Melville.
Thomas Agnew & Sons, London
Private Collection, UK (acquired from the above in July 1987)

Osborne Samuel, London

London, Thomas Agnew & Sons, Modern British Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings, Sculpture and Prints from 1800 to the Present Day, March – April 1986, no. 84, as ‘Group of Compositions’
Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard, Alan Reynolds, August – September 2003, no. 14, as ‘Group of Compositions’

Reynolds’ intense study of nature led him to create sketchbooks filled with botanical studies, pressed leaves, grasses, seedpods and feathers – forms upon which he based abstract landscapes during the first, figurative stage of his career. Among the most significant sequence of paintings derived from these studies was ‘The Four Seasons’, showing landscape transformed across the cycle of the year.

Legend in December (1955) relates to this series, showing a winter landscape in which the moon hangs low over the horizon. Bushes cast pallid shadows, and whitened seed heads appear like fireworks against the sky. On the roof of a chapel, haloed, is a cross mirrored in a reflection below. This detail, coupled with the title Legend in December, suggests a memory of Christmas.

Robert Melville, writing in October 1955 about Reynolds’ forthcoming exhibition ‘The Four Seasons’ at the Redfern Gallery, acknowledged the artist’s debt to Samuel Palmer, but denied that he shared Palmer’s Christian outlook. Melville instead drew attention to a reading of landscape by the writer and naturalist Richard Jefferies, who described that being ‘aware of the sun overhead and the blue heaven, I feel that there is nothing between me and space. This is the verge of a gulf, and a tangent from my feet goes straight unchecked into the unknown. It is the edge of the abyss as much if the earth were cut away in a sheer fall of eight thousand miles to the sky beneath’.¹

This same sense of space permeates Legend in December, which places the horizon low within the composition to emphasise an immense sky.

¹ Richard Jefferies (1848–87), quoted in Robert Melville, ‘Alan Reynolds’, Apollo, Vl. 62 No. 368, (October 1955), p. 100–101.

The Redfern Gallery, London
The Earl Jeffrey John Archer Amherst, 5th Earl Amherst
Private collection, U.S.A. (gift from the above, 1985)

Osborne Samuel, London

The Nicolas and
Frances McDowall Collection, UK

The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection

The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection

This medium sized work belonged to a transitional series produced between 1962 and 1965 where Alan Reynolds borrowed from Braque, Picasso, and Mondrian the formal compositional device of the oval, employed as Michael Harrison states, as “a means of encapsulating and concentrating the image…of the integration of space and solid, and of not allowing it to dissipate towards the corners” 1. This was achieved by positing counter-poised horizontal and vertical yellow and blue ‘ bars’ against an infatic near-black oval ground which, in turn, was truncated by the four near square edges of the hardboard support. This obliquely reveals cream surrounds and, with it, spatial and planar layering.

The gently rounded circumference of this oval, blurred and softly painted, contrasts with the clinical symmetry of Mondrian-esque coloured planes and razor-like lines. The effect indeed recalls Mondrian’ s Pier and Ocean and later neo-plastic compositions, though the English palette still holds haunting residues of the nature-derived romanticism of the Suffolk-born artist’ s early work.

While extending across finished oils and preparatory works on paper alike, the ovoid format was subject to considerable variation during these years, the length or thickness of the lines and bars setting up shifting configurations in spatial intervals. Notwithstanding their position on the fully concretist brink, these abstract ovoid compositions retained autographic and ‘ organic’ paint handling and suggested reflection as if in still water, the soft colour bars above the horizontal medial line repeated in reverse formation below.

Immediately recognisable as the cover image of J P Hodin’ s 1962 book on Reynolds, Form on an Ovoid Ground is highly representative of a phase of work described recently by the artist as, “perhaps the best paintings I made” .2

1. Michael Harrison « Alan Reynolds, The Making of a Concretist Artist» p. 61 Lund Humphries 2011

2. Reynolds in conversation with Peter Davies 3/4/11

Redfern Gallery, London

Richard Attenborough

Galerie Haas, Berlin

Nick Holmes Fine Art, London

Robert Devereux Collection, London
Osborne Samuel, London

JP Hodin, Alan Reynolds, Redfern Artists Series, London, 1962, ill. p. 45

M. Harrison, Alan Reynolds, The Making of a Concretist Artist, Lund Humphries, 2011, p. 61

The episodic and dialectical nature of Reynolds’s ‘oeuvre’ reflects the workings of inner necessity, an aesthetic integrity and a creative imperative opposed to the superficialities of fashion. As a result Reynolds’s work has always been well received by an admiring and well-informed group of connoisseur , rather than simply investment, collectors. This small oil on paper is a late variation on the Ovoid theme that pre-occupied him during the first half of the 1960s. The paint handling offers the personal touch within an ordered and symmetrical composition that, with hindsight, is a sure step towards later concretist ends.

Both in terms of its nuanced paint handling, colour and poised compositional elements – reduced to the horizontal, the vertical or the diagonal – ‘Small Structure recalls the intimate bottle subjects of the reclusive Bologna-based Italian still life painter Morandi. The bottles are ciphers of contemplation and, shorn of any allusion to such familiar everyday objects, Reynolds’s thick ‘bars’ and thinner ‘sticks’ of white, black, caramel or siena paint similarly seduce the viewer , Michael Harrison explains the oval format as an effective means of concentrating our attention on the formal facts while allowing the artist a method of “exploring a more cosmic,gravity-free space.” 1

1.’Alan Reynolds:The Making of a Concretist Artist’ Michael Harrison p.61, Lund Humphries 2011.

Redfern Gallery, London
James Huntington Whiteley Fine Art, London
Private collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London