Make it New: Modern British Art

Private Collection, UK.
Private Collection, Canada.

Grieve, The Sculpture of Robert Adams , published by The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 1992, no. 302 (Opus 93), p.191

Gimpel Fils, 1960, no 4.

It was Reg Butler, not Robert Adams, who suggested that ‘there is no such thing as abstract art …. The question of abstraction was one of degree.   [Sculptors wished] to resolve their problems in a visual form, and this could not be called abstract art’ at a discussion at the I.C.A’s showing of ‘London – Paris: new trends in painting and sculpture’ in 1950.  It characterised the tone of a continuing debate in early post-war years around the validity and relevance of definitions, and artists’ desire to escape from dogmatic pigeon-holing in order to pursue their own explorations and creations, beyond critical judgments about belonging or not belonging to current movements and styles.

After art college training with interruptions, Adams had done his war service as an engineer, teaching himself to carve wood at the end of the war.  His first sculptures in wood, plaster and eventually also stone bore some resemblance to the anthropomorphic vertical forms of Moore, veering between hollowed out rounded, meshed forms and assemblies of stacked irregularly shaped blocks, demonstrating an a mastery of matters of weight and balance in his forms, inspite of the deliberate asymmetry of his figures.  In the spirit of Moore’s ‘truth to material’ credo, Adams’ showed particular sensitivity to the grain and structure of wood, just as he would in the way he exploited the natural properties of the metal forms he used in later works.

An interest in architecture and collaborating with architects would influence his direction towards ‘construction’, and in that sense, by 1952 he stood out in Read’s selection of sculptors for that Venice Biennale as the closest to ‘geometry’ but the furthest from ‘fear’.  For the ensuing five years, beginning with the series of exhibitions at the painter Adrian Heath’s flat at 22 Fitzroy Street in London in 1952, Adams would exhibit with the Constructivists in a group around Victor Pasmore, Mary and Kenneth Martin, and Anthony Hill, but his work remained closer to the lyrical abstraction of Heath’s painting rather than the strict geometric discipline being developed by the others.  Adams’ ‘Vertical Construction’ of 1951 still had superficial similarities with Butler’s contemporary work – its verticality of course, but also transparency and the appearance of drawing in space – but already the irregular stacking of shaped planes anticipated Adams’ spare, measured use of flat or curved linear forms.

While continuing to work in wood and stone in the early 1950’s he also leant to weld, and began to exploit iron in its basic form of rods and sheets in order to assemble architecturally frontal sculptures.  These would work as screens of reliefs rather than free-standing sculptures in the round.  With one of his largest works to date, a free-standing relief called ‘Monolithic Form’ which foreshadows several works in the 1960’s such as ‘Vertical Screen Form’ and indeed ‘Opus 145’, Adams explained: ‘Monolithic Form is an attempt to create outdoor sculpture using simple abstract forms in relationship, the forms themselves creating the ‘life’ by their opposition to each other, as well as giving directions to certain thrusts and movements within the main form.  These heavy angular forms were intended to contrast with and oppose the landscape rather than become one with it’.

Of the 1952 Venice sculptors, only Paolozzi and Adams would participate in the now famous exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’ at the I.C.A. in 1956.  Adams collaborated with Frank Newby, Peter Carter and the architect Colin St John Wilson on a convex entrance ‘tunnel’ incorporating geometric elements in relief to form a sculptured three-dimensional, architectural environment.  In 1957 Adams explained that as a consequence of this collaboration; ‘during the past year, forms in my work have changed from rectangular to curvilinear; solid mass and weight has given way to light linear forms and curved planes, and a fresh element – counterbalance – has appeared’.

This counterbalancing is seen in its fullest realization in the commission for a giant concrete relief screen  to run the length of the new theatre in Gelsenkirchen in Germany, completed in 1969.  In it Adams’ angled projecting and receding elements create a measured rhythm of light and shadow, and of movement and stasis on a truly monumental scale.

Phillip Wright

Private Collection, UK

Grieve, Alastaire, The Sculpture of Robert Adams, published by the Henry Moore Foundation / Lund Humphries, 1992, cat. 328 (Opus 118), p.194, ill. p.195

Robert Adams, Gimpel Fils, London, 1960, cat no.29

Retrospective Exhibition, City Art Gallery, Northampton, 1971, cat.no.30 (exhibition toured by the British Arts Council to Sheffield, Newcastle upon Tyne and Camden Arts Centre, London)

Gimpel Fils, London
Private Collection, UK, purchased from the above, 2006.
Osborne Samuel, London

Grieve, Alastair, The Sculpture of Robert Adams , published by The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 1992, no. 379 (Opus 145), illus.  p.203

Unique

This is the maquette for Two Circular Forms No. 2 , exhibited at the XXXI Biennale in Venice, 1962 when Adams represented Britain, now in the collection of the Galleria Nazionale d’ Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome.

It was Reg Butler, not Robert Adams, who suggested that ‘there is no such thing as abstract art …. The question of abstraction was one of degree.   [Sculptors wished] to resolve their problems in a visual form, and this could not be called abstract art’ at a discussion at the I.C.A’s showing of ‘London – Paris: new trends in painting and sculpture’ in 1950.  It characterised the tone of a continuing debate in early post-war years around the validity and relevance of definitions, and artists’ desire to escape from dogmatic pigeon-holing in order to pursue their own explorations and creations, beyond critical judgments about belonging or not belonging to current movements and styles.

After art college training with interruptions, Adams had done his war service as an engineer, teaching himself to carve wood at the end of the war.  His first sculptures in wood, plaster and eventually also stone bore some resemblance to the anthropomorphic vertical forms of Moore, veering between hollowed out rounded, meshed forms and assemblies of stacked irregularly shaped blocks, demonstrating an a mastery of matters of weight and balance in his forms, inspite of the deliberate asymmetry of his figures.  In the spirit of Moore’s ‘truth to material’ credo, Adams’ showed particular sensitivity to the grain and structure of wood, just as he would in the way he exploited the natural properties of the metal forms he used in later works.

An interest in architecture and collaborating with architects would influence his direction towards ‘construction’, and in that sense, by 1952 he stood out in Read’s selection of sculptors for that Venice Biennale as the closest to ‘geometry’ but the furthest from ‘fear’.  For the ensuing five years, beginning with the series of exhibitions at the painter Adrian Heath’s flat at 22 Fitzroy Street in London in 1952, Adams would exhibit with the Constructivists in a group around Victor Pasmore, Mary and Kenneth Martin, and Anthony Hill, but his work remained closer to the lyrical abstraction of Heath’s painting rather than the strict geometric discipline being developed by the others.  Adams’ ‘Vertical Construction’ of 1951 still had superficial similarities with Butler’s contemporary work – its verticality of course, but also transparency and the appearance of drawing in space – but already the irregular stacking of shaped planes anticipated Adams’ spare, measured use of flat or curved linear forms.

While continuing to work in wood and stone in the early 1950’s he also learnt to weld, and began to exploit iron in its basic form of rods and sheets in order to assemble architecturally frontal sculptures.  These would work as screens of reliefs rather than free-standing sculptures in the round.  With one of his largest works to date, a free-standing relief called ‘Monolithic Form’ which foreshadows several works in the 1960’s such as ‘Vertical Screen Form’ and indeed ‘Opus 145’, Adams explained: ‘Monolithic Form is an attempt to create outdoor sculpture using simple abstract forms in relationship, the forms themselves creating the ‘life’ by their opposition to each other, as well as giving directions to certain thrusts and movements within the main form.  These heavy angular forms were intended to contrast with and oppose the landscape rather than become one with it’.

Of the 1952 Venice sculptors, only Paolozzi and Adams would participate in the now famous exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’ at the I.C.A. in 1956.  Adams collaborated with Frank Newby, Peter Carter and the architect Colin St John Wilson on a convex entrance ‘tunnel’ incorporating geometric elements in relief to form a sculptured three-dimensional, architectural environment.  In 1957 Adams explained that as a consequence of this collaboration; ‘during the past year, forms in my work have changed from rectangular to curvilinear; solid mass and weight has given way to light linear forms and curved planes, and a fresh element – counterbalance – has appeared’.

This counterbalancing is seen in its fullest realization in the commission for a giant concrete relief screen  to run the length of the new theatre in Gelsenkirchen in Germany, completed in 1969.  In it Adams’ angled projecting and receding elements create a measured rhythm of light and shadow, and of movement and stasis on a truly monumental scale.

Phillip Wright

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Private collection (purchased from the above in 1959)

T. Woollcombe (ed.), Kenneth Armitage: Life and Work, London, 1997, p. 144, no. KA70.
J. Scott, The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage, London, 2016, p. 111, no. 71, plaster version illustrated.

London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Kenneth Armitage, July – August 1959, no. 33, another cast exhibited, catalogue not traced.
Hanover, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Kenneth Armitage/Lynn Chadwick, April – May 1960, no. 16, another cast exhibited, as ‘Two seated figures (small model)’, catalogue not traced.
Norwich, Arts Council of Great Britain, Castle Museum, Kenneth Armitage, December 1972 – January 1973, no. 9, another cast exhibited: this exhibition travelled to Bolton, Museum and Art Gallery, January – February 1973; Oldham, Art Gallery, February – March 1973; Kettering, Art Gallery, March – April 1973; Nottingham, Victoria Street Gallery, April – May 1973; Portsmouth, Museum and Art Gallery, May – June 1973; Plymouth, City Art Gallery, June – July 1973; Llanelli, Museum and Art Gallery, August – September 1973; Leeds, City Art Gallery, September 1973; and Hull, Ferens Art Gallery, October 1973.

From the edition of 6

Armitage moved from being represented by Gimpel fils to Marlborough Fine Art, London in the Autumn of 1959. This particular cast was bought from Marlborough that year and was unsigned and unnumbered. 

When, in December 1994, Armitage was elected a Royal Academician, he donated  ‘Reclining Figure (Relief)’ as a diploma work, and recorded that it had been shown in the Venice Biennale in 1958 and that ‘This cast which I have kept all these years is neither signed nor dated because I didn’t in those days.’

The Artist
Marlborough Fine Art, London
Private Collection (purchased from the above)

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, published by Rizzoli, no. 428

Frank Auerbach ‘Recent Work’ 13 January – 11 February, 1983, Cat No 31, Marlborough Fine Art, London

Auerbach met Juliet Yardley Mills in 1956, when she was working as a model at Sidcup College of Art. He began to paint her the following year, and continued to do so, at his studio in Camden, every Wednesday and Sunday, until 1997. As with all his repeated sitters, Auerbach developed an acute awareness of posture and mood:

I notice something when people first come and sit and think, they do things with their faces. It’s when they’ve become tired and stoical the essential head becomes clearer. They become more themselves as they become tired. ₁

JYM was an ideal sitter, capable of holding poses for long periods of time. At first Auerbach painted her without identification in his titles, although she is distinguishable from his previous frequent subject, Stella West (EOW). A characteristic pose shows JYM seated, her head against the back of the chair or supported by linked hands. As Robert Hughes notes, she always returns the artist’s gaze, and ‘there is a look – head cocked back, sometimes seen a little from below, a bit quizzical, sometimes challenging – that makes [her portraits] quite recognizable as a series’. ₂

Auerbach’s drawings evolve and assume their final form across weeks of sittings. A day’s work may be scrubbed back, the following morning, to leave an accumulated deposit of charcoal. In some cases the paper wears perilously thin and needs to be patched. The finished drawing represents the last sitting, the most recent thoughts, yet Auerbach feels compelled to retain the accumulated traces as part of a process of securing the image within its own space and atmosphere. ₃

Head of JYM III gazes partially downwards. There is a weight and solidity that derives from the density of charcoal, implying the settled mass of the sitter, at ease, one shoulder higher than the other. The volume of her head is registered through its eye sockets, cheekbones and chin. Through these we gain an intuition of its totality, and how it might feel to follow the head round, past its visible limits.

₁ William Feaver, Frank Auerbach (Rizzoli, 2009), p. 20.

₂ Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), p. 80.

₃ Feaver, Frank Auerbach, p. 19.

Private Collection, New York, by 1959

Private Collection, 2003

Grosvenor Gallery, London, 2004
Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel London

Colin Ralph, The Colin Collection: Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings and Sculpture collected by Mr. & Mrs. Ralph F. Colin, New York, 1960
Margaret Garlake, New Art, New World: British Art in Postwar Society, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998
Margaret Garlake, The sculpture of Reg Butler, Henry Moore Foundation in Association with Lund Humphries, 2006, cat no.176, illustrated Fig 35, p.43

Hanover Gallery, May-June 1957 (Cat 34.)
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, February 1959 (cat, 14)
J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, Oct.-Dec. 1963, Reg Butler, A Retrospective Exhibition, cat 67

Butler was a man with two distinct, yet highly accomplished, careers. As Cottrell, Butler he was an architect with a burgeoning practice, while as Reg he was an essentially untrained avant-garde sculptor, having only worked briefly as an assistant in Henry Moore’s studio in 1947 and tried his hand as a blacksmith during the war, whose idiosyncratic style and experimental approach drew the attention of contemporary artists and critics alike. While exhibiting at both the 1952 and 1954 Venice Biennales he made a significant contribution to Herbert Read’s defining concept of post-war art, the so-called ‘Geometry of Fear’, and was also talent spotted by international gallerists such as Curt Valentin in New York and later Pierre Matisse.
Figure in Space is one of Butler’s finest explorations into the human figure. His architectural background provided him with a sensitive understanding of the relationship between form and space, an understanding which he applied to strong effect through the creation of cage-like structures, such as that visible here, which are very similar to those used by Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon in their work. In this instance the structures surrounding the atrophied human figure provide the sculpture with an extraordinary sense of movement while also referencing the spruing which surround bronzes in the initial stages of the casting process. By drawing our attention to the making process itself Butler draws our attention to the artificiality of the human figure and encourages a detached, Existentialist, standpoint. Butler explained this to Pierre Matisse: ‘to me the so-called base…is a very important part of the total sculpture – it isn’t merely a base but I’m sure does things to the meaning of the whole thing’ (letter to Pierre Matisse, November 1966, quoted in Pierre Matisse and His Artists (exh. cat)., The Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York, 2002, p.128).
Pierre Matisse was quick to sign Reg Butler into his stable of artists after the Curt Valentin Gallery closed in 1955, although Matisse struggled to develop a close working relationship with Erica Brausen who represented Butler in London. In March 1956 he included Butler in an exhibition alongside prestigious and established names such as Le Corbusier, Giacometti, Marino Marini and Joan Miro (among others), but it was not until February 1959 that he was able to stage a solo exhibition. It was not only Butler’s idiosyncratic approach to form which fascinated Matisse and ensured him a place in his prestigious gallery but also the sensuality of his figures which sat very well alongside those of Balthus and Maillol, who were regular features at the gallery.

The Artist
Galerie Nova Spectra, The Hague, 1988
Private Collection, The Netherlands
Osborne Samuel, London

Herbert Read, Lynn Chadwick, Amriswill, Bodensee-Verlag, 1958, pl. 14 (as Two Dancing Figures II)
J.P. Hodin, Chadwick, Amsterdam, 1961, pl. no. 7.
P. Levine & N. Koster, Lynn Chadwick: The Sculptor and his World, 1988, p. 75 (ill b&w)
Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2014, p. 125, cat. no. 175

Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, March-May 1957 (no.35 as Two Dancing Figures)

The Estate of the Artist have confirmed that this cast was cast before 1963, their records do not specify the exact date of casting or the foundry.  

The Artist
Private Collection, UK (gifted from the above)
Thence by descent

Dennis Farr & Éva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-1996, Lypiatt Studio, Stroud, 1997, p.64, cat. no. 58

The Artist’s Estate has confirmed the provenance and that this is part of F&C 58 (1997), and that Lynn had recorded in his notebook that this section had been gifted.

Mrs. Helen Lessore O.B.E.
Acquired by René Gaffé at the Venice Biennale, 15th September 1956
Private Collection, The Netherlands
Osborne Samuel, London
Private Collection, Canada

J.P. Hodin, Lynn Chadwick, Werk, vol. 44 (no. 3), March 1957, p. 113.
Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, Lypiatt Studio, Stroud, 1997 p. 92, cat. no. 143 (prepatory drawing illustrated; with incorrect dimensions height: 45 cm.)
Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2014, p. 111, cat. no. 143 (ill. b&w)

London, New Burlington Galleries, 53rd London Group: British Painting and Sculpture, November – December 1954, no. 264
Venice, XXVIII Biennale, June – October 1956, p. 412, no. 51 (titled Vacca Shortorn), lent by Mrs H. Lessore

Mrs Helen Lessore OBE (1907-1994) was a painter and British gallerist. She was, most notably, the director of Beaux Arts Gallery in London from 1951 until its closure in 1965.

Having studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (1924-1928), Lessore was an accomplished painter who had a full retrospective exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London in 1987. Her paintings can currently be found in public collections around Britain, including Tate and the Royal Academy of Arts.

Chadwick’s Short Horn was loaned to Venice for the XXVIII Biennale (1956) by Mrs Lessore, where it was subsequently purchased by the renowned Belgian art critic and collector, René Gaffé.

Reflecting on Short Horn, Gaffé wrote:

Délaissant le marbre et le bois, ne voyons-nous pas tous les jours de grands sculpteurs se précipiter sur des métaux quels qu’ils soient, à condition qu’ils puissent, sans trop d’efforts, les plier à leur convenance et en assurer le transport par des moyens moins onéreux qu’autrefois? …Ainsi, chaque matin que le soleil me tire du lit, j’aperçois le Taureau de Lynn Chadwick, armure d’acier recouverte de plâtre [sic] coloré et cette bête puissante, résignée, me regarde en silence. Elle ne perçoit pas les raisons secrètes qui me font assister à ses charges dont elle est généralement frustrée dans l’arène où elle est condamnée à mourir à cinq heures de l’après-midi.

Dans son ‘Guadalquivir’; Joseph Peyré l’a chanté:

Taureau noir, taureau noir,
Une mort à chaque corne,
Une peine dans chaque goutte
De son sang tourmenté.

Leaving aside marble and wood, don’t we find every day some great sculptors rushing to work on all kinds of metals, providing they are able to bend them without to much effort according to their needs, and ship them through less expensive means than in the past?… And so, every morning the sun pulls me out of bed, I see the ‘Taureau‘ of Lynn Chadwick, a steel armor covered with colored plaster, and this powerful beast, resigned, stares at me in silence. It doesn’t perceive the secret reasons that make me watch its charges, from which it is usually deprived in the arena where it is sentenced to die at five o’clock in the afternoon.

Joseph Peyré sang it in his ‘Guadalquivir:

Black bull, black bull,
One death on every horn
One sorrow in every drop
Of his tormented blood.

(R. Gaffé, A la verticale: Réflexions d’un collectionneur, Brussels, 1963, pp. 98-99)

Private Collection, Switzerland

Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2014, cat. no. 187B, illustrated p. 132.

London, Pangolin Editions, Lynn Chadwick: Subliminal Influences, October 2021 – January 2022 (another cast)

The Artist
Private collection, USA (acquired directly from the artist, 1960)
Thence by descent
Osborne Samuel, London

Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, Farnham, 2014, cat. no. 308, p. 179 (ill.b&w)

In 1959, Chadwick began his ‘watcher’ series of solitary, paired or groups of three figures. He described them as abstract versions of the monumental Easter Island stone moai: ‘They’re not, in any way, representative of anything. They’re just shapes. Blobs on the horizon. You see, the Easter Island things … have this great intensity of … message, as it were, and I wanted to do the same thing’.[1]

Two Watchers IV (1959) is a unique working model, distinctive among Chadwick’s ‘watcher’ series in two principal ways. First, its treatment of the figures pre-empts the cloaked forms of significantly later works: dividing surfaces into vertical geometric planes, truncated at a uniform level, suggests the fall of drapery. Secondly, the figures possess a curiously affecting relationship to one another. Where other ‘watchers’ look outwards towards an unseen object, Two Watchers IV stand shoulder-to-shoulder, their gaze grazing one another’s and thus encompassing each other. They are thus closely bonded while contemplating the unknown.

Unique. This was never cast in a bronze edition. 

[1] Lynn Chadwick, Artist’s Lives; quoted in Michael Bird, Lynn Chadwick (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2014), p. 11

Christie’s, Amsterdam,  1997
Private Collection
Sotheby’s, London,  2015
Private Collection, Brussels
Osborne Samuel, London

Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick Sculptor, published by Lund Humphries, no. 735, p.320

Galerie Farber, Brussels, Lynn Chadwick, Victor Pasmore, November – December 1976 (another cast)

Female figure 49.2 cm. (19 3/8 in.) high, Male figure 50.2 cm. (19 3/4 in.) high

Chadwick’s Winged Figures are not allegorical beings but are a result of his intuitive dialogue with materials and process. The leitmotif throughout Chadwick’s career was the paired figure. From 1953 onwards, Chadwick developed an array of typologies, whose features he inflected and interchanged. The first manifestation was Conjunction, followed by Two Dancing Figures (or simply Dance), then Encounter, Teddy Boy and Girl  and Winged Figures.  These were never passive meetings, or, for that matter, decorative pas-de-deux. In each instance, an electricity seems to arc between the figures. 

The Artist

New Art Centre, London

Sothebys London March 2008

Private collection, UK

The New Art Centre, London, no:106/25

For paintings such as Oblique I, inspiration came from surprising and unexpected sources. Clough’s ‘source photos’ and sketchbooks indicate that a patch of worn paint or tarmac might generate a compositional idea or even an entire painting. Thickly painted, thermoplastic road markings on a familiar walk, could easily find themselves rearranged and transferred to one of her paintings. Similarly, a row of twisted, steel rebars sticking out of a reinforced concrete wall could catch her eye.  The random positioning of the hook profiles here set up a rhythmic idea which contrasts with the more angular, geometric patterning.

A curious feature of Clough’s technique was not only the manner in which she applied pigment, but also the way in which she removed it from surface of her canvasses; this was part of a never-ending quest to create interesting surface textures. Paint would be scraped and gouged off the surface while it was still wet, or even after it had dried and abrasive scourers would be used to scrub away a patch of pigment to achieved a more varied and pictorially interesting effect.

The Artist 

Redfern Gallery, London (from the above)

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above, 2001)

Osborne Samuel Gallery

Adrian Heath, at the centre of a small group of British avant-garde artists in the 1950s, was responsible for compiling Nine Abstract Artists (1954): a book including statements by the artists concerned – himself, Robert Adams, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Kenneth and Mary Martin, Victor Pasmore and William Scott – while contextualising their work in the development of abstract art since the 1930s. The publication was preceded by three exhibitions mounted in Heath’s studio at Fitzroy Street, London, where paintings and sculpture were displayed in a stylish, quasi-domestic environment.

Photographs of the first exhibition, in March 1952, show two oval paintings by Kenneth Martin and Victor Pasmore, a format that Heath would adopt for a series made between 1956 and 1959. For Heath, the origin lay in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s book, On Growth and Form (1917), which demonstrated the ubiquity of spiral structures in nature. Oval Theme (1) builds outwards from a central red wedge, unfurling through larger slabs of colour towards the edge of the composition. The materiality of the work – incorporating hessian and Polyfilla – endows it with a tough physicality. 

In Nine Abstract Artists, Heath identified the importance of the size and format of the area to be painted, as well as his intention that colours and forms should bear evidence of their transitions, becoming richer through the process. As he wrote,

The thing of interest is the actual life of the work: its growth from a particular white canvas or board.[1]

With Oval Theme (1), the relatively large scale and unusual format directed the evolution of the composition. 

[1] Adrian Heath, ‘Statement’ in Lawrence Alloway: Nine Abstract Artists: their work and theory (London: Alec Tiranti, 1954).

[2] Adrian Heath, letter (1 February 1971), in The Tate Gallery Report 1970–1972 (London: Tate Gallery, 1972).

The Artist

The Estate of the Artist

Osborne Samuel, London

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above 2012)

Heath conjures an abstract composition dominated by an internal splintered oval – the classic format of the society portrait head – and an earthy, warm brown and ochre colour scheme. Heath’s origins as a landscape painter versed in a Slade ethos, in which analytic and even constructional drawing ruled, developed during his subsequent teaching career to a point where he adopted the motif of the life-room reclining or moving figure. The figure was, however, less naturalistic than a mere cipher for an independent and plastic structural vision.

Heath’s membership of the Fitzroy Street Constructionist group was pivotal and, where the Nine Abstract Artists group was concerned, he acted as a moderating link between the purist or concretist wing and the St. Ives-associated artists who, as Alloway remarked, employed “irrational expression by malerisch means”. The well-informed Heath was a sophisticated artist who, in his book ‘Abstract Painting: Its Origin and Meaning’, divided modern painting into the branches of formal and geometric (cubism) on the one hand and expressively romantic or subjective on the other.

Heath appears to have taken an ambivalent line within this dichotomy for, though his sensual surfaces are painterly and textured there is always a sense the fractured asymmetry of his forms are the logical outcome of implicit divisional order and planned planar cadence. A man of largely independent means, Heath conducted his art career with a gentile grace, relatively carefree that the full depth and subtlety of his painting would only come to full light through the long-term perspective of historical hindsight and reassessment.

The artist’s family
Osborne Samuel, London

Illustrated Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn (1985)

Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn (1985)
Crane Kalman Gallery, London (1986)
Gillian Jason Gallery, London (1990)
Bridge Gallery, Dublin (1997)
Penwith Gallery, St Ives (1996)

The context of St Ives, where Denis Mitchell lived from 1930 until the late 1960s, was critical to his creative development. Trained as a painter, he undertook piecemeal employment as his young family grew, working as a market gardener, fisherman and tin miner. In 1949 he became principal assistant to Barbara Hepworth, and that same year he carved the work he regarded as his first sculpture. Ballet Dancer, which was admired by Ben Nicholson, abstracts gently from the human form, rendering it as two stacked rhomboids, pierced to indicate the dancer’s angled legs and raised arms. From some angles a body is clearly discernible, but as it turns, the outline dissolves into abstraction, to become an exquisitely balanced combination of forms.

In 1952 Mitchell’s work was exhibited in ‘The Mirror and the Square’, at the New Burlington Galleries in London, alongside sculpture by Hepworth, Chadwick and Caro. The exhibition aimed to explore the urgent issues of realism versus abstraction, although its extent and diversity proved too great for most to draw any firm conclusions. Yet Mitchell’s adherence to abstraction was already clear. During his ten years as Hepworth’s principal assistant, he would hone his instinct for carving and the purity of form, exploring the abstract implications of enfolding, modular or asymmetrical structures, even when his titles implied figurative origins.

When Mitchell turned to bronze in the 1960s, by necessity using a local sand-casting foundry at St Just, he brought a remarkable degree of sophistication to the process, filing and polishing the somewhat rough casts to create sculptures that were both elegant and aesthetically unified. Patrick Heron, in his introduction to Mitchell’s exhibition at the Marjorie Parr Gallery in 1969, wrote,

… a Mitchell is a form, usually a single, rather streamlined form, enclosed as it were by a single skin … In such art, intuition and intellect are always inextricably locked. ₁

Roseveor (1985), a woodcarving, exemplifies this premise. The split monolith appeared as a formal device in Mitchell’s work in the early 1960s, around the same time that John Hoskin (like Mitchell, a one-time member of the artists’ cricket team at St Ives) was also exploring its form. Hoskin used welded steel to create a series of linear split columns. Mitchell, essentially a carver, created volumetric forms which curve and taper, ‘conceived’, as Heron recalled, ‘under the maker’s hand’. ₂

Mitchell had worked with assistants since the early 1960s, among them Breon O’Casey. By the mid-1980s his assistant was Tommy Rowe, like Mitchell a fisherman, a sculptor and former assistant to Hepworth. Mitchell returned to earlier sketchbooks for ideas, choosing those he now felt he could alter and perhaps improve. Roseveor thus relates to Argos (1974), as well as to Boscawen (1962), sculptures with an upright form and a characteristic ‘U’ or ‘V’ shape. Detecting in Mitchell’s sculpture an affinity with Nicholson, whose white reliefs were carved from a single piece of wood, then meticulously painted in coat after coat of Ripolin paint (‘always getting to the heart of things with practicalities’), O’Casey nonetheless discerned the greater influence of painters such as John Wells or Roger Hilton:

There is a shape of Roger Hilton’s, a large lump with two uneven horns, that you can see, for example in [Mitchell’s] Geevor, or Talland. ₃

Mitchell seldom used yew for his carvings, the only other known instance being Torso, dating from 1951. Yew possesses a characteristic warmth, orange-brown to purple in colour, with a natural lustre and pronounced grain that can be seen clearly in Roseveor. Consummately carved, Roseveor also evokes a primal quality, redolent of the non-western carvings Mitchell admired and collected.

₁ Patrick Heron, introduction to ‘Denis Mitchell: Exhibition of Sculpture’, exhibition catalogue (London: Marjorie Parr Gallery, 1969).
₂ Heron, introduction to ‘Denis Mitchell: Exhibition of Sculpture’.
₃ Breon O’Casey, in Denis Mitchell and Friends, exhibition catalogue (Dublin: The Bridge Gallery, 1997), p. 11.

Brook Street Gallery, London
Roland Collection, London
Private Collection London
Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London
Sir Joseph Hotung, London
Osborne Samuel, London

Ionel Jianou, Henry Moore, Arted, Paris, 1968, no. 226, ill. p. 74 (another cast)
Giulio Carlo Argan, Henry Moore, New York, 1971, no. 77, ill. n.p. (another cast)
Giulio Carlo Argan, Le Grandi Monografie Scultori d’Oggi Moore, Fratelli Fabbri editori, Milan, 1971, no. 77, ill. p.37 (another cast)
David Sylvester (ed.), Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1921-1948, Lund Humphries, London, 1988, Vol I, cat. no. 239, p. 15

London, Roland, Browse and Delbanco, Henry Moore, 1948 (another cast)
York, York City Art Gallery, The Roland Collection, 1950, no. 35 (another cast)
Leicester, Museum and Art Gallery, The Roland Collection, 1950, no. 35 (another cast)
Bristol, City Art Gallery, Festival of Britain Exhibition, 1951, no. 43 (another cast)
Southampton Art Gallery, The Roland Collection, 1952 (another cast)
London, Geffry Museum, Works by Henry Moore, 1954 (another cast)
Leeds, Leeds City Art Gallery, The Roland Collection, 1962, no. 74 (another cast)
London, Camden Arts Centre, The Roland Collection, 1976, no. 82 (another cast)
Edinburgh, National Gallery of Modern Art, One Man’s Choice, 1985, no. 64 (another cast)

From the edition of 7, plus 1. This bronze is recorded with the Henry Moore Foundation as LH 239, cast f.

A cast is held at the Smart Museum, Chicago USA. The terracotta original and a bronze cast is held by the Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham, UK. The larger version of this bronze, the so-called Stevenage Family Group, are held by the Tate, London, MOMA, New York, Hakone Open-Air Museum, Japan, the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena & the Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham. 

Before the war Moore was asked to create a work for a large progessive school in Impington. This lead to the idea of the Family Group and Moore made a series of Family Group maquettes, this cast being one of them. Moore discusses at length why this cast differs from the larger version which was eventually realised for the Barclay School in Stevenage:

The main differences between the two are in the heads, especially in the head of the man. In the small version (this bronze) the split head of the man gives a vitality and interest necessary to the composition, particularly as all three heads have only slight indications for features. When it comes to the life-size version, (the Family Group in Stevenage) the figures each becomes more obviously human and related to each other and the split head of the man became impossible for it was so unlike the woman and child. (There is a different connection between things which are three feet from each other, as the large heads are, and things which one sees in the same field of vision only two or three inches apart).

The Artist

Ann H. Zwinger (purchased from the above)
By descent, Ann H. Zwinger Trust

Orebro, Sweden, 1952

Dimensions include the artist’s base Height 2cm; 3/4 in

The recent, spectacular exhibition of Moore’s Helmet Heads at the Wallace Collection in 2019 demonstrates their enduring fascination. Moore had visited the Wallace Collection in the 1920s and made drawings of armour, recording details that found their way into his sculptures – most intensely during the 1930s to 1950s, but sporadically throughout the course of his life.

Early intimations of Moore’s Helmet series appear in his drawings in the mid-1930s. Helmets morph into heads, skulls contain blanched structures, branching within them. From these seedling ideas developed Moore’s first metal sculpture. The Helmet (1939–40), originally in lead, is a slender vertical structure. Two holes, piercing its top, appear as eyes. Most importantly, however, it encloses a separately cast inner form suggesting a figure, planted on two stubby legs. The upright form of this figure, in combination with the womb-like enclosure of the outer shell, suggests a mother and child.

Moore, in fact, cited multiple sources for the series that unfolded from this startling composition. In addition to the Wallace Collection, he recalled that his early interest in armour had been informed by the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he wandered at lunchtimes as a student. ₁ He also linked The Helmet’s origin to Wyndham Lewis ‘talking about the shell of a lobster covering the soft flesh inside’. The carapace protects a vulnerable interior, just as a mother shields her child:

The helmet … became a recording of things inside other things. The mystery of semiobscurity where one can only half distinguish something. In the helmet you do not quite know what is inside. ₂

It is an intriguing line of thought, and one that Andrew Causey probed by juxtaposing Moore’s The Helmet with Epstein’s Rock Drill, which likewise shelters an embryo inside its mechanistic ribcage. ₃

Moore’s use of lead for the early versions of the Helmet series was a practical solution to casting his own work. Lead could be melted at a relatively low temperature, from sections of piping, and cast outdoors. Later, Moore cast these same sculptures in bronze to make them less vulnerable to damage. But again, there was an alternative reading. Moore described the original versions as ‘more expressive because lead has a kind of poisonous quality; you feel that if you licked it you might die’. ₄

Helmet (1950) is a maquette for the first numbered sculpture in the series. It has a more open, simplified form from the front, while the back has two pointed apertures and a series of slits, suggesting vents. Echoing this, the inner form is both pointed and curved, containing its own sharp slit. To the top are two circular holes. The catalogue for the Wallace Collection exhibition related the overall shape of this sculpture, with its prominent circular air vents, to the German ‘coalscuttle’ helmet – the M1916 Stahlhelm, which was a sought-after souvenir for British troops in World War I. Moore would have seen such helmets during combat in 1917. ₅

Yet, unlike the larger version of Helmet Head No. 1, the maquette is unique and possesses a distinct history. Cast in 1950, it was chosen in 1952 by Moore and Fritz Eriksson (Head of the Swedish Arts Council) as part of a touring exhibition destined for a year-long tour of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Germany. An installation photograph shows the two maquettes for Helmet Head No. I and Helmet Head No. 2, side by side on a plinth. To the left is Moore’s stone Composition (1932), subsequently bought by the Tate, and to the right, Half-Figure (1929) in cast concrete, purchased by the British Council in 1948. On the walls, enlarged photographs of further works by Moore indicate the breadth of his practice as a sculptor. Sold to its only owner, Ann Zwinger, in the early 1950s, the maquette for Helmet Head No. 1 was in fact a substitution for a different lead sculpture, which was damaged in transit. The maquette’s base touchingly records this provenance, bearing both the British Council’s exhibition label and the handwritten dedication ‘To Ann Zwinger, from Henry Moore’.

₁ Moore, in Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2002), p. 214.
₂ Ibid.
₃ Andrew Causey, The Drawings of Henry Moore (Lund Humphries, 2010), p. 99.
₄ Moore, in Moore: Head-Helmet: An Exhibition to Celebrate the 150^th Anniversary of the Foundation of the University of Durham (Durham: DLI Museum and Arts Centre, 1982), p. 1
₅ Tobias Capwell & Hannah Higham, Henry Moore: The Helmet Heads (London: The Wallace Collection, 2019), p. 86.

The Goodman Gallery, South Africa 

Private Collection, London (acquired from the above in 1981) 

Thence by descent

Osborne Samuel, London

Alan Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture: 1980-86, Vol. 6, London, 1988, no. 788, another cast illustrated, p. 36-37

Collegeville, Pennsylvania, Ursinus College, Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Henry Moore Relationships, Drawings, Prints & Sculpture from the Muriel and Philip Berman Collection, 1993-1994 (another cast).
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Henry Moore, A Centennial Salute, An Exhibition in Celebration of Philip I. Berman, July-November 1998, no. 18 (illustrated, p. 30) (another cast).

A cast from the edition is owned by the Henry Moore Foundation.

In John Hedgecoe’s seminal book on the artist, Moore states, “from the very beginning the reclining figure has been my main theme.’₁  This subject is central to Moore’s creativity throughout his career. In his own words, “the reclining figure gives the most freedom, compositionally and spatially… A reclining figure can recline on any surface. It is free and stable at the same time. It fits in with my belief that sculpture should be permanent, should last for eternity.” ₂

Reclining Nude: Crossed Feet is an iconic sculpture. The initial impetus for the posture of the woman was inspired by the Chacmool figures which the artist first saw at the British Museum in the 1920s; the arms perpendicular to the ground, the knees raised and the twisting contours of the body. However in Moore’s Reclining Figures, the masculine rain god of the Chacmool has been, in William Packer’s words,  ‘transformed into an image more general, unhieratic and benign, as a simple function of the softer, rounded forms that came with the change of sex, and the humanising informality of the relaxed and turning body.’ ₃

The crossed feet and hands are abbreviations of the limbs, an extension of the contradictory, relaxed  torsion in the body. The contours of the sculpture evoke, as Moore noted, the disparate and enigmatic contours of the landscape, opening up voids beneath the shoulders and under the arms, echoed in the arching of the legs.  The sculpture can thus be seen in the round, each angle stimulates a new and perhaps surprising interpretation.

₁ John Hedgecoe, Henry Moore, published by Nelson, New York, 1968, p. 151

₂ Henry Moore cited in J.D. Morse, ‘Henry Moore Comes to America’, Magazine of Art, vol.40, no.3, March 1947, pp.97–101, reprinted in Philip James (ed.), Henry Moore on Sculpture, London 1966, p.264.

₃ Celebrating Moore, selected by David Mitchinson, published by Lund Humphries, 1998, p.125, extract written by William Packer

Galerie Patrick Cramer, Geneva (acquired from the artist, 1984)
Private Collection, purchased from the above in April 1984.
Private Collection, London
Osborne Samuel, London

Alan Bowness, ed., Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture, 1980-1986, London, 1988, vol. 6, cat. no. 901, pp. 58-59 (ill b&w p.59 and pl. 126).

Private Collection, Chicago (acquired before 1950 & thence by descent)
Private Collection, USA

Ann Garrould (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Drawings, vol.3, 1940-49, Aldershot, 2001, no.AG43.107; HMF 2156, ills.p.196

Stanford, Iris & B Gerald Cantor Centre for Visual Arts, Stanford University, on loan, March 2000

This drawing is reminiscent of a work from the same period Reclining Figures: Ideas for Stone Sculpture, 1944, in which each figure appears in an individual pod in a subterranean setting, recalling the mysterious fascination that caves in hillsides and cliffs held for the artist. Moore’s interest in underground landscapes had previously been expressed in his ‘Shelter Drawings’ series of 1941, depicting figures taking refuge in the London Underground during the Blitz, and in his coal mining drawings of the same year.

Private collection, New York
Private collection, Paris

Osborne Samuel, London

A Bowness (ed), Henry Moore Complete Sculpture Volume 6 1980-86, published by Lund Humphries, 1988, no. 811, p.41

Bronze cast and original plaster owned by the Henry Moore Foundation.

The Artist
Curt Valentin, Buchholz Gallery, New York 
Mrs. Vera List, philanthropist and supporter of contemporary art, Greenwich, Connecticut (purchased from the above in 1951)
Thence by descent
Osborne Samuel, London 

Henry Moore, Volume Two: Sculpture and Drawings Since 1948, (London: Lund Humphries, 1955)

Robert Melville, Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings 1921-1969, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970) 

Ann Garrould, ed., Henry Moore: Complete Drawings, Volume 3, 1940-49; (London and Much Hadham: Lund Humphries, 2001, p.288, ref AG48.43; HMF 2515

New York, New York, Buchholz Gallery, Henry Moore, March 6-31, 1951, illustrated cat no. 66 (in this catalogue the drawing is incorrectly dated 1949)

This work is registered in the Henry Moore Foundation archives as HMF 2515 and research file number 2020.38. 

Rocking Chairs was purchased at Buchholz Gallery in 1951. The drawing was executed in 1948, four years before the bronze, Mother and Child on Ladderback Rocking Chair. In this drawing, Moore depicts five figure groups on rocking bases, with the
mother figure holding the child in various positions. Each group is three-dimensional, indicating that Moore conceived of the figure group as a sculpture from the beginning.

Moore’s series of sculptural rocking chairs was begun in 1950, when his daughter Mary, a much-loved and long-awaited child, was four years old. Although Moore had explored the theme of the mother and child since the 1920s, these new works showed a joy and tenderness born of experience. Will Grohman described them as ‘enchanting impromptus, the offspring of a lighter muse.’ 1 Their creation offers a glimpse both into Moore’s domestic life and the extent to which his personal and creative identity intertwined. Just as he experimented with how to balance the sculptures, so that they rocked perfectly, he would encourage Mary to think practically through play. For her eighth birthday party he produced a set of scales and invented a game to guess the weight of each guest. Moore’s estimates, perhaps unsurprisingly for a sculptor, proved accurate to within a few pounds. 2

Moore’s drawings provide a different insight. In the Rocking Chair Notebook (1947–8) he experimented with radically varied designs for the chair as well as the figures seated within them. The drawing, Rocking Chairs (1948), shows Moore adjusting the postures of mother and child so that each suggests an altered dynamic: from a protective embrace, to the joyous wriggling of the child held aloft, to an independent stepping forward, away from the mother’s arms. While mass is weighed through the technique Moore described as ‘sectional drawing’, dividing surfaces into jigsaw grids to highlight curves and planes, relatively little attention is paid to the chairs’ potential for movement: certain of the rockers seem implausibly flat. Instead, Moore lavishes his imagination on the figures. Grohmann noted how such variation developed across the span of the rocking chair series, although his words apply equally to this sheet of drawings: ‘heads became archaic knots, the bodies clothed skeletons, but the expression remains elated.’ 3

Rocking Chairs was bought in 1951 by the American philanthropist and collector, Vera List (1908–2002), from the Buchholz Gallery in New York. List, who a year later bought Moore’s Mother and Child on Ladderback Rocking Chair (1952), was an early and dedicated patron. In 1961 she and her husband sponsored the commission of Moore’s large-scale Reclining Figure (1963–5), in bronze, for New York’s Lincoln Center.

1.    Will Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, new enlarged edition (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1960), p. 142.

2.       Mary Moore, in Elizabeth Day, ‘The Moore Legacy’, The Observer (27 July 2008).

3.       Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, p. 143

Dominion Gallery, Canada

Private Collection, USA

Osborne Samuel, London

D. Mitchinson (ed.), Henry Moore: with comments by the artist, London, 1981, pp. 106, 311, no. 203 (another cast illustrated)
A. Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture 1949-54, Vol. 2, London, 1986, p. 31, no. 289a, pls. 34-35 (another cast illustrated)
S. Compton, Henry Moore: Catalogue of the Royal Academy Exhibition, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1988, p. 226, no. 112 (lead version illustrated)
Exhibition catalogue, Henry Moore: Sculpture from the 40s and 50s, London, Waddington Galleries, 1995, pp. 14-15, no. 5 (lead version illustrated)
Exhibition catalogue, Henry Moore: War and Utility, London, Imperial War Museum, 2006, p. 51, no. 22 (another cast illustrated)

Conceived in 1950 in lead and cast in an edition of 9 in bronze in 1972.

Curt Valentin, New York
Alma Morgenthau Wertheim, New York
Anne Wertheim Werner, New York
Thence by descent
Osborne Samuel, London

Ann Garrould, ed., Henry Moore Complete Drawings 1950-76, vol. III, Much Hadham, 2001, no. AG 47-49.63, p. 273, illustrated

The two seated figures in Women Winding Wool (c.1948) are engaged in an age-old task: rhythmically transferring yarn from hank to ball. We might imagine the women’s arms in motion – tilting, coiling and pulling the wool taut – as they engage in conversation or reflection. The process is as companionable and soothing as it is mundane.

Moore’s drawing, one of several of the subject made at this date,[1] gives a valuable insight into his working methods. The figures are drawn in pen and ink. Clustered lines indicate shadow or depth; their absence creates highlights. Through colour, a sense of an interior is conveyed, albeit without detail: this plain setting, with its square stools and bare floor, might be anywhere from a miner’s cottage in Yorkshire to ancient Greece. Between the figures is a network of pen marks suggesting a transfer of energy. The squared grid overlaying the image indicates that Moore was contemplating a further transformation of the image, whether through enlargement or translation to another medium.

[1] The Arts Council Collection contains a larger drawing of Women Winding Wool (1948), in watercolour, pencil and chalk, 54.2 x 56.3 cm, AC 24.

Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zurich
Margrit and Charles Lienhard collection, Zurich
Deichmann Collection, Milan
Thence by descent 
Osborne Samuel, London

John Russell (ed.), Ben Nicholson: drawings, paintings and reliefs 1911-1968, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969, no. 214, illustrated (as circa 1959 (Relief))

Bern, Kunsthalle Bern, Ben Nicholson, 1961, no. 102

Rowan Gallery, London (#R1302)
Private Collection, New York (from the above in 1975)
Scolar Fine Art, London (before 2004)
Private Collection, UK (before 2004)
Osborne Samuel, London

Diamond Lil: Lilian Somerville, The Woman Behind the Post-War British Art Boom, by Judith LeGrove, Published by Osborne Samuel, 2022, p. 130 (includes text contributed by Bridget Riley)

The curve form was a fundamental part of Bridget Riley’s work since the early 1960s. They were incorporated into several of her most significant achievements during the first full decade of her career, when black emulsion predominated in her work: Current, 1964 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Arrest 2, 1965 (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri) and Exposure, 1966 (Linda and William Hermann Collection, Dallas) are three extremely fine examples. In all these paintings the curve is employed in different ways and with varying rhythms, or ‘change of pace’ as Riley herself described. When considering Rising and Falling Curve with Turquoise, Cerise, Olive and Black (1974) with its long, slow curves it is with Arrest 2 that the closest affinity can be found. Taking the colour element aside, the paintings which are vertical in structure integrate softly undulating curves which never meet, thus creating space between them which allows the compositions to breathe. The units themselves change in width as the eye is drawn both upwards and downwards (Rising and Falling) through the image, to create a destabilising, asymmetrical effect, enhancing their expressive character.

In conversation with Paul Moorhouse, when asked, ‘What is distinctive about the curve as a formal element?’ Bridget Riley explained, ‘Well, in my case the curve is very much a “made” thing. You could say that a square has a great many cultural references. A square is a man-made shape – a very basic one – and as a result very familiar. It must go back to the time when man began to make something, plan something or construct something, but the curve is not defined…It gives me exceptional freedom. Its range is wider and bigger; it can still be a curve when it is doing really quite surprising things’. 1

Whilst tonal gradations were introduced by Riley to her Arrest 2 painting, softening the stark contrasting elements of her pure black and white works, it was not until 1967, with Cataract 2, that the use of colour became a staple in her fields of curves. Speaking further with Paul Moorhouse, Riley noted, ‘I knew that colour was one of my goals. But it is very complex, very difficult and, pictorially, a great challenge. This was clearly realised from the early days of Modern Art. Colour has always posed a great challenge, but I also knew that you had to stalk this particular quarry with great care.’ 2

This ‘great care’ is much in evidence with Rising and Falling Curve with Turquoise, Cerise, Olive and Black where Riley juxtaposes a perfect harmony of warm colours, typical of her palette choice during the mid-1970s. The pink, blue and green are punctuated at intervals by four twisting lines of black which serve to accentuate the depth of the image. It is these elements especially which Riley linked to movement in a standing human figure, and in particular their sensuality. Yet in parallel with this, the feelings and emotions evoked by certain colours being conjoined was of paramount importance to the artist, and with Rising and Falling Curve with Turquoise, Cerise, Olive and Black these are very much ones of joy and warmth.

Ultimately, Riley found the curve both a successful and fulfilling motif. It would play a pivotal role in her work from 1974-80, after which vertical stripes came to the fore. Curves then re-surfaced in the late 1990s, and asked whether she was surprised to see them back, her succinct reply speaks volumes, ‘Well, not really. I was very happy because I had missed them for so long! And also, especially as I got going, a whole range of possibilities opened itself to me. The interaction of colours and curves seemed boundless.’ 3.

1.Bridget Riley in conversation with Paul Moorhouse, cited in Bridget Riley, The Curve Paintings 1961-2014, Ridinghouse in association with De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, 2015, (pp.43&47)

2. op.cit. p.47

3. op.cit. p.51

Estate of the artist and thence by descent

William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings , 2013, edited by Sarah Whitfield: No.394 Volume 2

This painting is unsigned, it was William Scott’s practice to only sign works when they were sold.

The Artist

Lefevre Gallery, London, January 1947

Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Los Angeles, U.S.A.

Private Collection, U.K. (purchased from the above, May 1980) 

Alan Peat & Brian A. Whitton, John Tunnard: His Life and Work, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1997, p. 178, cat. no. 522

Serving as an auxiliary coastguard in Cornwall, during World War II, John Tunnard spent hours watching shipping at sea. His paintings are suffused with forms derived from or invented as a result of this experience: seascapes alive with objects resembling masts, rotors and weathervanes. In Aerial Disturbance (1946), Tunnard creates washes of colour to suggest sand, sea and sky, overlaid with spikes meshed with fronds of weed. Between the foreground and middle distance, strange white forms – hybrids of sea purses, sails or birds – fly from shore to sky.

The Artist

Lefevre Gallery, December 1946

Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Los Angeles, U.S.A.

Private Collection, U.K. (purchased from the above, May 1980)

Alan Peat and Brian A. Whitton, John Tunnard: His Life and Work, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1997, p. 177, cat. no. 516

Having studied textile design at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s, Tunnard gained a reputation as one of the most distinctive British artists of the 1930s. His first major exhibition was held in March 1939 at Guggenheim Jeune, on Cork Street in London’s Mayfair. For the gallery’s owner, Peggy Guggenheim, Tunnard’s paintings were as ‘musical as Kandinsky’s, as delicate as Klee’s, and as gay as Miró’s.’[1] The artist Julian Trevelyan elaborated, conjuring Tunnard as a painter of surrealist bricolage, a ‘hot jazz king’ who transforms what he finds into ‘musical instruments … tightly strung with delicate wires in red and blue’.[2]

Tunnard’s painting, Threat (1946), melds pre-war surrealism with the wartime experience of serving as an auxiliary coastguard in Cornwall. Skeletal forms rear from the right of the composition towards funnels, around and across which wraps a ribbon resembling fish skin. The sky and palette are darkened; the nature of the ‘threat’ ominously ambiguous. Yet despite this, the composition retains a balletic grace, recalling Tunnard’s interest in music and skill as a jazz drummer.

[1] Peggy Guggenheim, Confessions of an Art Addict (London: Andre Deutsch, 1960), p. 19

[2] Julian Trevelyan, Introduction to the John Tunnard exhibition at Guggenheim Jeune, London Bulletin, issue 12 (15 March 1939).

The Artist

Waddington Galleries, London, May 11, 1987

Private Collection, USA

Thence by descent

Amanda A Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, published by the Henry Moore Foundation, 2005, no.267, p. 176

London, Serpentine Gallery, William Turnbull, 1995 (another cast);

London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull, 1998, cat no.1, p.16, illustrated p.17 (another cast);

London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull, 2004 illustrated p.32 (another cast);

London, Sotheby’s S|2, William Turnbull, 9 October – 17 November 2017, p.140, illustrated p.17 (another cast).

‘The idea of metamorphosis in Turnbull’s work is at its most intense in the Blade Venus series. These large sculptures suggest the shapes of Chinese knives, Japanese Samurai swords, pens, paintbrushes, leaves and goddess figures in one elegant, slightly curved form. Their form and inspiration relate them to the Zen paintings that inspired Turnbull and to the calligraphic paintings, drawings and reliefs that he produced in the 1950s. Like a single gesture, with a wide and a thin section, they combine all of the breadth of the front view with the slenderness of the side view in one perception. Part of their ambiguity and their dynamic presence stems from the spectators’ simultaneous ability to see both the wide element and the narrow section as the handle or the blade or tip of the tool. Although they are absolutely still they are also balanced on their sharpest point, poised to act.’

(Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, Henry Moore Foundation & Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, pp.72-73).

Waddington Galleries, London

Professor J. N. Ball

Private Collection, U.K.

Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012, p.178, no. AH519

London, Waddington Galleries, Keith Vaughan: New Paintings, 1973

Glasgow, Compass Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Gouaches, 1976 (no. 5)

London, Austin/Desmond, A Selection of Work, 1987

Vaughan painted the Essex landscape over the course of two decades. Mortimer’s Farm is situated a few miles southwest of Harrow Hill cottage. As the title suggests, Copse by Mortimer’s II was his second attempt at depicting agricultural buildings viewed through the small woodland area between his house and the local farm. The first version caused such problems that he painted over it five years later.

The late Essex paintings are generally small and intimate in conception. They contain little human activity, nor do they depict picturesque subjects customarily found in landscape paintings. The area around Harrow Hill is lacking in scenic hills, rivers or other traditionally picturesque features. The rolling, hedge-less farmland is interrupted only by agricultural buildings, wooded coppices, and some notable medieval barns. It was precisely this unspectacular quality that attracted him:

A landscape must be familiar otherwise I only see the superficial dramatic aspects that any other sightseer sees. The ones that have revealed the most to me are the ones outside the window of my studio. Trees & sky & some man-made objects such as a house – that is enough to start the reaction. A landscape can only be measured by its remoteness from, & similarity to, human beings. But they must be as remote as the landscape is remote, however familiar & visible. What I like best is a small, compact, unspectacular landscape, combining as much of the three basic elements – air, earth & water – within a space not so large that I couldn’t walk around it in half & hour (Keith Vaughan, unpublished and undated studio notes, c. 1959).

The application of the pigment is rich and varied, in places flat and opaque and in others, more translucent. Gestural brush strokes act as an equivalent of dried tree bark or the texture of desiccated, autumnal foliage. They create the quality of flux across the surface of the panel. Some forms appear to advance towards the viewer, while others recede into the distance. For example, the creamy ochres act as a foreground space and the colder, ultramarine blues retreat into the distance. To achieve a sense of space Vaughan has flattened the landscape elements into overlapping planes and blocks of organic shapes. Gradually we become aware of bending boughs, brushwood, distant vegetation and patches of blue sky, glimpsed through the thicket and undergrowth. Vaughan has not attempted to reproduce how the eye perceives the scene but paints the experience of moving though the woodland towards Mortimer’s farm.

Acquired directly from the artist

Marlborough Gallery

Private Collection, France

Osborne Samuel, London

Massey & Hepworth, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Company, Bristol, 2012, p.123, cat no. AH326

London, Whitechapel Gallery, Retrospective Keith Vaughan, March – April 1962, no.265
London, Olympia, February – March 2002, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings,  n° KV 282
Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, February –  March 2007, Keith Vaughan: Figure and Landscape, no.30, ill. p.32

From the later 1950s, Vaughan painted landscapes without figures that verged towards complete abstraction: works in which colour is tessellated into compositions structured by more or less geometrical units. The impetus was light and colour, whether experienced abroad, in France, Greece, Italy and Iowa (where he held a residency), or nearer to home, in London, Dorset, Essex, Northumbria, Wales and Ireland. Landscape would be internalised and re-presented, sometimes leaving vestiges of buildings, trees, snow or hills, sometimes just the trace of these elements through their seasonal timbre. Vaughan described the process and its consequences in his working notes:

Particles of landscape which detach themselves float out into space – continuing a foreground plane against a distant one. Floating particles of landscape create a vivid sense of space … Small floating squares and rectangles. They might equally be leaves or scraps of paper. This is unimportant. Their identity will be determined by their circumstances. ₁

This return to ‘pure landscape’ was noted and commended by Edwin Mullins, reviewing Vaughan’s  large-scale retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1962. ‘Among the best of the recent work’, wrote Mullins, ‘were those in the spirit of the early landscapes; paintings inspired by travel and places, full of atmosphere and effects of light, and painted in the warm, sombre colours of the earth.’² Landscape (1960) was one such work. A source in landscape is hard to detect, yet the composition splinters light and autumnal warmth into a patchwork of lines and blocks, counterpointed by a continuum of hazy blue-greys.

₁ Keith Vaughan, ‘Notes of the Process of Painting and Diary of Work in Progress’; quoted in Keith Vaughan: Myth, Mortality and the Male Figure, exhibition catalogue (London: Osborne Samuel, 2019), p. 36

² Edwin Mullins, ‘Vaughan Reconsidered’, Apollo, Vol. 26, No. 3 (May 1962), p. 219.

The Artist’s Estate

Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London

Private Collection, UK

Osborne Samuel, London

Clark, Jonathan, Ex Studio (exh. cat), p. 122-23

In 1928, during a brief break from his training to become a doctor, John Wells studied painting in Newlyn with Stanhope Forbes. He met Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, and while working as a doctor in the Scilly Isles, during the 1930s, maintained his friendship through visits to St Ives. By the end of the war he had saved sufficient money to abandon his career as a doctor and to buy a studio once used by Forbes in Newlyn. The landscape of Cornwall would form a lasting influence on his work.

In the paintings and constructions Wells made from the early 1940s onwards, Patrick Heron detected a sympathy with Gabo, Hepworth, Arp, Nicholson, Klee and Miró. Yet he also identified a ‘sheer taste so exquisite and so personal as to obliterate any suggestion of undue derivativeness’.1 Wells’ work might allude to the curved forms of boats, to birds or to the horizon, but these references were rendered in terms of geometry – as ellipses, squares and triangles upon textured grounds.

A first solo exhibition at the Waddington Galleries in 1960 proved an unqualified success, selling every work on display. From a second exhibition in 1964, in which Constructed Relief (1963) was included, the only work sold was Painting (1962): a vertical grid-based composition purchased by the Tate. It was an experience that paralysed him, as he wrote soon afterwards to Nicholson, leaving him with ‘permanent depression.’ 2

James Burr’s review of the Waddington exhibition stressed the works’ refinement to such an extent as to imply criticism. Subverting Heron’s decade-old admiration of ‘sheer taste’ to suggest something safe and genial, he described

“a cool, restrained and precise style which echoes the geometric arrangements of Ben Nicholson, except that decorative elegance takes precedence over formal relations, so that one is aware of a faultless display of visual good manners. Clean rectangles with uninterrupted surfaces of tastefully controlled clear colour politely greet the eye in pleasing sequences that leave one agreeably reassured.”3

Looking afresh, there is scant evidence of the decorative, however, Constructed Relief  is an austerely conceived work in painted wood, polystyrene and perspex, composed rigidly of squares, planes and rectangles. It balances perfectly, yet without the complete symmetry that might pall. Was there a motivation beyond its pure form? Wells’ account of creating Painting (1962) provides an interesting parallel. As he worked on it, in the early hours, a storm raged: the roof began to lift and water collected in a bucket nearby. Wells completed the painting’s composition by adding a vertical white line. Only later did he perceive this as representing the wind, shrieking outside.4

1.    Patrick Heron, The Changing Forms of Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 204.

2.       John Spurling, ‘Eminent Edwardian’ [review of ‘John Wells: The Fragile Cell’ at Tate St Ives], The Spectator (1 August 1998), p. 42.

3.       James Burr, ‘Round the London Galleries’, Apollo (September 1964), p. 240.

4.       John Wells (October 1964), in Tate Gallery Report 1964–5 (London: The Tate Gallery, 1965), p. 57.