River Boat Blues, 1956 Oil on canvas 111.8 x 142.2 cm (44 x 56 in) dimensions with artist’s frame: 114 x 144 cm Signed 'Bryan Wynter', titled 'River Boat Blues' and dated '1956', verso
In January 1956, the year River Boat Blues was painted, London witnessed one of its most significant exhibitions of the decade at the Tate Gallery: Modern Art in the United States. The show introduced to a new audience, including domestic artists, a host of recent American painters, of which only Jackson Pollock had been exhibited in Britain before. Large canvases by Rothko, Clyfford Still, de Kooning and Mark Tobey, among others, hung in the final room titled Contemporary Abstract Art. Of these, Wynter’s paintings have most often been compared to the work of Mark Tobey, whom Wynter had met in St Ives the year before. The Tate Gallery exhibition exerted a profound influence on Wynter. ‘Bryan Wynter completely changed style in January 1956, working non-figuratively and on a larger scale, seeking to express a more elemental vision of the natural world’ (David Lewis, St Ives, 1939-64, Twenty-five years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery, Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1985, p. 199)
As well as Wynter’s acquaintance with the American abstract expressionists at the Tate Gallery, the year 1956 saw the artist’s personal circumstances change following an inheritance. This allowed him to stop teaching and buy The Carn, a granite-built miner’s cottage on Zennor Moor, Cornwall which he rented from 1945, thus injecting his work with a new sense of freedom. Chris Stephens describes Wynter’s oil paintings from this seminal period:
‘The works are made up of a matrix of interlocking and overlapping brushmarks, some short or calligraphically curled, others long and gestural. In a range of colours and tones, or sometimes monochrome, these coalesce into overlaid patterns to form a varying surface while also creating an illusion of depth. The pictures are in a constant state of assertion and denial: pictorial space is made and then blocked off; one’s eye moves across the surface only to be drawn into the picture, it has nowhere to rest.’ (Chris Stephens, Bryan Wynter, Tate Gallery Publishing, London, 1999, p. 42)
This interplay of shapes, colours and expressive brushstrokes are used to mesmerising effect in River Boat Blues. It is a painting which benefits from repeated viewings. The artist owned a glass-bottom boat on which he rowed himself on the rivers of Cornwall. He would then paint images, using his observations of being on and in the water, onto his canvas which lay flat on the ground, much like Jackson Pollock worked.
The title of the painting derives from the song River Boat Blues, which was recorded in 1956 by both Alton Guyon and Buddy Phillips, the same year Wynter painted this dynamic and powerful oil on canvas. It is known that Wynter often played new jazz releases while working.
River Boat Blues has always been considered a pioneering work by Bryan Wynter. This is evidenced in its extensive exhibition history across the world, from Latin America to Africa, Asia to Australia. It has often been the Wynter chosen by authorities to best broadcast the artist’s credentials to new audiences.
The painting was acquired for the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation in the mid-1960s, whose collection aimed to represent British artists at a formative point in their career. The parameters were that no painting should be earlier than 1951, and no artist younger than those included in the seminal Young Generation exhibition, sponsored by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1964. Just three years later, in 1967, the collection was shown in its entirety at the Tate as Recent British Painting, an exhibition that toured to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
There has been a marked upturn and re-appraisal in Bryan Wynter’s market recently, partly brought about by a major 1957 canvas, Meeting Place, de-accessioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2024, which measures the same size as River Boat Blues and went on to realise in excess of US$500,000 at auction.
The Redfern Gallery, 1957 The Waddington Galleries, 1965 Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Bonhams, 29 July 1989, lot 1 The Redfern Gallery, July 2002 Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above) Osborne Samuel, London
D. Lewis, St Ives 1939-1964, Twenty-five Years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery, Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1985, p. 207, cat. no. 187 M. Bird, Bryan Wynter, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2010, pp. 94-95 (ill. col.)
London, The Redfern Gallery, Metavisual Tachiste Abstract, April 1957 Tokyo, Metropolitan Art Museum, Fourth International Art Exhibition, 23 May – 15 June, 1957; this exhibition toured to Osaka, Ube, Fukuoka, Sasebo, Kumamoto, Hiroshima, Takamatsu and Nagoya, 28 June – 24 November, 1957 Australia, Recent Paintings by Seven British Artists, 1959 Mexico, The British Council touring exhibition, Six British Artists, 1960 – 1961, cat. no. 35; this exhibition toured to Kenya and Peru Bristol, Arnolfini, Exhibition of Paintings by Bryan Wynter, 1 – 26 February, 1963 London, Tate Gallery, Recent British Painting: Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Collection, 15 November – 22 December, 1967; this exhibition toured to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand Adelaide, The Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Festival of Arts, Recent British Painting, 6-28 March, 1970, cat. no. 18 London, Hayward Gallery, Bryan Wynter 1915-1975: Paintings, Kinetics and Works on Paper, August, 1976, cat. no. 26 (ill.) Paris, Artcurial, English Contrasts: peintres et sculpteurs anglais 1950-1960, September – November, 1984 London, Tate Gallery, St Ives 1939-1964, Twenty-five Years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery, 13 February – 14 April, 1985, cat. no. 187 London, The Redfern Gallery, Bryan Wynter, July 2002
The years 1956-1958 were among the most significant for Bryan Wynter’s career. Not only did he attend the Tate’s seminal exhibition, Modern Art in the United States, which opened in January 1956 and introduced the Abstract Expressionist work of Rothko, Clyfford Still, de Kooning and Mark Tobey to a British audience, at this time he also began to experiment with stereoscopic photography following the acquisition of his first camera in 1955. Wynter’s desire to convey a type of virtual reality, where the imagery appears to hover on his newly expanded canvases, was in part influenced by his use of mescalin, a psychedelic drug which the acclaimed British novelist Aldous Huxley had used in 1953.
The year before Altar was begun, in 1956, Cinerama was launched in London, a new kind of cinematic experience from the United States, which resonated with Wynter as much as Abstract Expressionism. This Is Cinerama, a 1952 American documentary feature, impressed Wynter with its complex technical processes that delivered dramatic illusions of spatial reality. It was during the mid-1950s that Wynter concentrated on integrating the effects of this new photographic technology in his paintings.
Of all the American Abstract Expressionists, Wynter’s paintings of the mid-to-late 1950s have the closest affinity with Mark Tobey’s work, who had a solo show at the ICA in London in May 1955 and met Wynter in St Ives the same year. The calligraphic mark making in Wynter’s work at this time, which is employed with dynamic effect in Altar, was likely inspired by Tobey’s paintings, who himself had studied the ancient art form in a Zen monastery in Japan in 1934.
The titles of many Wynter paintings from 1956-59 incorporate the natural world. In 1956 an inheritance allowed him to acquire The Carn, where he lived, a granite-built miner’s cottage on the coastal moor of Zennor. Exposure to the geography and elements of Cornwall was constant, resulting in paintings titled Sea Journey, Earth Tremor, Thicket, Forest Journey and Impenetrable Country to name a few. Altar, therefore, is a departure, but not unique in this sense. Much like his paintings within this time frame, individually distinct and handled with varying degrees of control and expressiveness, other titles guide our attention to interiors or events, such as The Interior, Carnival, Prison and indeed, Altar.
The palette of Altar with its deep red, rich green, ochre, white and black, certainly recalls a religious interior, perhaps using light refracted through a stained glass window. Interestingly, these works were titled after completion, in consultation with his wife Monica, depending on the imagery they evoked, and therefore an exact interpretation by the viewer is not necessarily required or helpful. Wynter remarked on this process:
I think of my paintings as a source of imagery, something that generates imagery rather than contains it. Obviously it is I who have put into them what they contain but I have done so with as little conscious interference as possible, allowing them at every stage in their growth to dictate their own necessities.1
Altar is a remarkably successful and desirable painting from arguably Wynter’s most significant and celebrated period. Its visual complexity and sense of depth created by multiple interlocking forms layered one on top of the other result in a work which merits extended and repeated viewing.
is appearing at Frieze Masters with Osborne Samuel completely fresh to the market
1. Quoted in M. Bird, Bryan Wynter, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2010, p. 84.
