Born in Austria to a Jewish father and Protestant German mother, Kinley was sent for safety to England in 1938, not seeing his parents again until 1946. He studied at Düsseldorf Academy (1948–9), then St Martin’s School of Art (1949–53), in 1951 receiving special mention in the annual exhibition of ‘Young Contemporaries’. The following February, at the Matthiesen Gallery, Kinley saw the first exhibition in Britain of paintings by Nicolas de Staël (1914–1955). Like so many British painters, Kinley was profoundly affected by de Staël’s work, neatly summarised by Basil Taylor as ‘mosaic-like pictures built from roughly shaped rectangles of pigment applied with an extraordinarily rich and varied impasto’. ₁ Just two years later, Gimpel Fils – one of London’s most prestigious venues for contemporary art – gave Kinley, still in his twenties, his first solo exhibition. ²

The New Year had barely begun, in 1957, when ‘Statements’ opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Aiming both to review the condition of British abstract art and to demonstrate the impact of the previous year’s ‘Modern Art in the United States’, at the Tate, the result was an almost defiant diversity. Twenty-one artists submitted a single work with a statement. Alan Davie wrote on Zen Buddhism, Kenneth and Mary Martin on the significance of mathematics, Barbara Hepworth wrote a poem. Kinley’s work, praised as among the best, was ‘luxuriously painted … containing a dilatorily conceived nude which had less “presence” than the paint’. ₃ His statement, meanwhile, assessed and dismissed the various stylistic options available: Action Painting as philosophically inadequate, and constructivist art as ‘only of academic interest’. ₄

Landscape (1957) shows Kinley at precisely this moment, retaining his commitment to the spirit of de Staël, and to art’s ‘subject’, however freely considered. He had submitted a seascape to the Contemporary Arts Society’s 1956 themed exhibition ‘The Seasons’, and would continue to explore the implications of placing a figure within an interior setting. In Landscape (1957), he depicts a coastal subject broadly in planes of blue-grey, pale gold, gunmetal and green. The structure and texture of the lowest elements – water, rock, hillside – are related with tactile exigency, the occasional drip drawing attention to their material surface. It is only with the sky that Kinley loosens his control of structure, paralleling the sweep of the landscape with strokes that materialise air’s movement and the glint, behind cloud, of light.

In the Arts Council’s collection is an earlier Seascape (1954), comparable in scale, and similarly juxtaposing blocks of blue, black and gold, but which suggests a more rigid approach to landscape. The slabs of colour are edged by black or white, thus hemming and confining their intensity. By contrast, Landscape (1957) has an exhilarating immediacy: undeniably structured, it uses paint to express the mass of landscape, the weight of the sea and lightness of air.

₁ Basil Taylor, ‘Limited Gift’, The Spectator, Vol. 196, Issue 6672 (11 May 1956), p. 655.

²  ,‘Paintings by Peter Kinley, Recent Paintings by Sandra Blow’, Gimpel Fils, London (May 1954).

₃ Robert Melville, ‘Exhibitions’, The Architectural Review, Vol. 121, No. 723 (April 1957), p. 269.

₄ Kinley, quoted in Margaret Garlake, New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, The Paul Mellow Centre for Studies in British Art, 1998), p. 59.

Estate of the Artist

Osborne Samuel, London

Private Collection, UK

Catherine Kinley & Marco Livingstone ‘Peter Kinley’, 2010, illustrated page 15, no 11