Rodrigo Moynihan, R.A. 1910-1990

Leicester Galleries, London

Fischer Fine Art, London

The Artist's Family, by descent to the present owner

(Probably) London, New Burlington Galleries, The London Group, 34th Exhibition, 1936, details untraced;

London, Royal Academy, Rodrigo Moynihan, A Retrospective Exhibition, 1978, no.9.

Bruce Laughton, The Euston Road School, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1986, p.102, pl.V, illustrated in colour;

John Ashberry and Richard Shone, Rodrigo Moynihan, Thames and Hudson, London, 1988, p.19, pl. 3, illustrated in colour (dated as 1935 and incorrectly referred to as pl.2).

In the early 1930s Rodrigo Moynihan was the chief contributor to a remarkable prophetic episode in British art. ‘Objective Abstractions’ was the name of the brief movement in which from 1933 to late in 1936 Moynihan, Geoffrey Tibble and to some extent Graham Bell explored the possibilities of a form of painting entirely devoid of subject and pursued for the sake of the activity alone. The term was also the title for a single exhibition held at the Zwemmer Gallery in March 1934 in which seven artists each exhibited three or four works under the title Painting. In fact four of the seven, Hitchens, Pasmore, Ceri Richards and Thomas Carr, showed work with clear figurative references and it was only in subsequent London Group exhibitions of 1935-6 that the first completely abstract paintings were seen.

Works from this period are rare. Most of Graham Bell's and Geoffrey Tibble's works were destroyed. Moynihan painted a total of nine Objective Abstractions; two are in the collection of the Tate Gallery; one belongs to the Hirshorn. The present picture bares closest comparison to the 1935 work in the Tate although Bruce Laughton in a detailed account of the movement cites it as ‘an even finer example’ (op cit., p.102). In contrast to their rarity Moynihan’s Objective Abstractions have generated an astonishing amount of writing; the Journals of the artist William Townsend; correspondence between Moynihan and both Victor Pasmore and David Sylvester; as well as eloquent accounts by Richard Shone and John Ashberry.

Most insightful of all is Lawrence Gowing who begins his introduction to the catalogue of the Moynihan retrospective at the Royal Academy with a challenge: ‘Imagine a researcher, deep in the archives of modern art and thought, who comes up with this text:

   ‘He has achieved some very curious effects: as though a Kandinsky has been using the bleary technique of a Monet with a range of pale dirty colours laid on very thickly. At first one suspects Mr. Moynihan of being a blagueur but when one has been looking at his work for some time one becomes aware of an extraordinary vitality in the very surface of the paint… One had thought that Impressionism could go no further than Monet; but now it seems it is being developed along a line of non-formal, i.e. non-geometrical, abstraction, an abstraction built purely from colour and light…’

Gowing’s point comes when he reveals that this was written not about the direction of painting in say New York in the 1950s but about the 1934 Zwemmer Gallery exhibition by the poet-critic David Gascoyne. Moynihan himself admitted the importance not only of late Monet and Turner - especially Rouen Cathedral and The Storm Cloud in the Tate - but also of Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, particularly evident in his watercolours at this time (see lot 30). Gowing pinpoints the very specific influence of Monet in a passage that refers directly to the present work and articulates Moynihan’s pre-occupation:

   ‘The contention was that objectively painting consisted simply of paint, the brushmarks themselves, and the painter’s commitment to them. Objectively a Monet was the crust of pigment; the sun-baked, granular consistency of one biscuit-coloured Rouen Cathedral was a talisman and one of Moynihan’s pictures showed amid the furrowed paint the outline of a quatrefoil, like the window in a gothic façade, in tribute to it.’

More importantly Gowing sums up the legacy of the Objective Abstractions:

   ‘Moynihan not only foresaw the way that painting was to go in the next decade and showed in an extreme form the homogeneous all overness that was the natural outcome of a conception of painting as paint itself. He was one of the first of a new kind of artist, which became typical of the second half of the century, the "intelligent painter", as the type was to be described by Robert Motherwell in 1951, ‘who carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head.’