WILLIAM CROZIER | Untitled

Acquired directly from the Artist by Roger Mayne, as payment for photographing his work 

Katharine Crouan (ed.) with essays by S.B. Kennedy and Philip Vann, William Crozier, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2007, p.49, illustrated pl.6. 

The board appears to be sound and stable. There are a small number of cracks that run horizontally along the grain of the wood: these all appear stable and in keeping with the medium. There are a number of very small holes to the surface of the wood, thought to be in keeping with the Artist's working methods. The paint surface, in particular to the cream pigment, is slightly textured, in keeping with the Artist's technique and working methods. There is some surface dirt and studio matter throughout. Subject to the above, the work appears to be in good overall condition. The work is unframed. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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We are grateful to Professor Katharine Crouan and the William Crozier Estate for their kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

In 1957 William Crozier, with fellow Scots, William Irvine and John Wright, exhibited collages and constructions at David Archer’s Parton Gallery in Soho in an exhibition they called ‘Stimulants’, the title intended to “stimulate viewers beyond the borders of what was regarded as ‘art’.” (William Irvine, unpublished MS, 2006). This was Crozier’s first exhibition in London and brought him to the attention of fellow artists, gallerists and critics.

Many painters of Crozier’s generation looked to collage and assemblage at this time in the 1950s, as may be witnessed in the seminal ‘Pictures Without Paint’ exhibition of 1957 at the AIA gallery curated by Gillian Ayres and Adrian Heath.  For Crozier, as for many of his contemporaries, collage and the use of found materials was a necessity as much as an aesthetic stance.  Crozier observed "in the 1950s most younger artists used household paints, bitumen etc, and painted on hardboard, newspaper … partly to break with tradition and partly because it was all they could afford. I used household paints from Woolworths….I was at the beginning of an anarchic enthusiasm, fuelled by the work of the Dadaists. My materials were the flotsam and jetsam of the street. The more dissimilar it was from ‘ART’ the better. I eschewed the traditional materials of the artist and what I considered to be their values.” (William Crozier, 2006, unpublished MS. Estate of William Crozier).

Crozier’s collages and constructions of the 1950s are a vital bridge between his academic art school training in Glasgow and avant-garde practice in painting. As Crozier later explained "In retrospect I now see that I was abandoning and eliminating the baggage of my skills and training, shocking myself, trying to establish my credentials as a contemporary, even a modern.” (ibid).

Roger Mayne was a close friend of Crozier at this time. Mayne documented the ‘Stimulants’ exhibition and the following year, 1958, was commissioned by Crozier to photograph his one-person exhibition at the AIA Gallery in Lisle Street. The present lot was given to Mayne as payment for photographing the ‘Stimulants’ and the AIA exhibitions.