Keith Coventry

Paul Stolper, London
Archeus Fine Art, London, where acquired by the present owner

Unexamined out of frame. There is very minor surface dirt and traces of studio detritus, only visible upon extremely close inspection. There is some craquelure to the Artist's backboard, with a spot of staining on the lower inside edge of the box frame. This excepting the work appears in excellent overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of fluorescence or retouchings. Unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Coventry’s ‘Estate Paintings’ occupy a rather more complicated space than one might first imagine. Seemingly painted as a pastiche of Russian Constructivism, they are in fact based on the ground plans of British public housing estates of the post-war period, and thus make a connection with a utopian vision which time has revealed to be something other than its creators intended.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the opening up of the USSR had enabled a great resurgence of interest in the pioneering Russian artists of the post-Revolutionary period, and the re-instatement of this period of modern art made wider the recognition of how important such artists and ideas had been to the progress of modernism. In Britain, modernism had not only developed its own response to the mainland European currents, but it had also grown and developed with the influx of émigré practitioners who had fled the various fascist regimes of the 1930s. Thus when Atlee’s Labour Party swept into government in 1945 on a wave of popular clamour for change, the materials were there for a huge experiment in the social application of modernist ideas on living.

Designed as an alternative to Britain’s dilapidated Victorian inner city housing stock, the new estates were intended to offer a new future for the working man and his family. However, as we have come to know, the results were often very different and the estates themselves often became worse than the problems they had been intended to solve. Thus, Coventry’s use of the constructivist/modernist visual forms, based on the actual manifestations of those same ideas in post-war social planning, highlights the ways in which modernism actually failed to deliver when applied to the real world.

The present work demonstrates this perhaps better than most. Ronan Point was a tower block in Newham, East London which, only two months after its opening in March 1968, suffered a gas explosion and partial collapse. Four people were killed and several injured, and whilst the building was repaired and indeed important lessons learnt, the detrimental effect on public confidence in tower blocks of this type was strong. Ronan Point was finally demolished in 1984, Coventry’s painting is in white on white, the epitome of extreme constructivist fervour, and thus belongs to a group of ‘ghost’ paintings that depict estates the artist was unable to visit.