Peter Lanyon 1918-1964

New Art Centre, London

From the late 1940s onwards, Lanyon had sought to create a very personal manner of painting which not only changed the way we look at representations of landscape, but one which extended our interpretation of the landscapes themselves.

Whilst ostensibly working in an abstract manner, Lanyon himself rejected the burden of abstraction, preferring to think of himself as a landscape painter fully in the romantic tradition. His work combines notational references, history and myth in a way which was entirely his own.

Lanyon’s move towards a more abstracted depiction of the Cornish landscape had developed during the 1950s but by the beginning of the 1960s, new elements began to appear. It would seem that, like many of his contemporaries, growing awareness of painting in America was beginning to play a role, and for Lanyon, certain events need to be mentioned. Whilst he was already aware of some of Pollock’s work from his trip to Italy in 1948 where Peggy Guggenheim’s collection had been shown at the Venice Biennale, the 1956 Tate Gallery exhibition, Modern Art in the United States, was much more important, giving a tantalising snapshot of contemporary American painting. Other artists, such as William Scott and Alan Davie were already exhibiting in New York and they in turn brought back reports of new developments. However, in 1957, Lanyon made the trip himself to New York for his first U.S. exhibition. The exhibition, at the Catherine Viviano Gallery, brought Lanyon some good reviews but the visit seems to have been most important for the opportunity to make contact with American artists. He met Motherwell and Gottlieb, the critics Clement Greenberg and Dore Ashton and was later to become friends with Rothko and de Kooning.

The influence of these new exposures on Lanyon’s painting begins to make itself seen almost immediately. Although it has become a commonplace to discuss elements of Abstract Expressionism in Lanyon’s work of this time, this rather misses the essential differences between the two forms of art. For Lanyon, his experience of American painting, (and he was to become a regular visitor to America), seems to imbue his work with a new expansiveness and a sense of space, bringing the gestures that create the work to the fore and making them an integral part of the experience of the landscape transmitted to the viewer via the painting. There is also a brightening and simplification of his palette, with fresher blues, greens and yellows beginning to become more dominant and the earthier colours of his earlier painting falling away.

Paintings such as Shore Weed exemplify this bolder manner. Although a relatively small work for Lanyon at this time, the painting has a pronounced vertical emphasis and by the careful use of colour, gesture and composition, the viewer is drawn into its heart, and thus into the experience of the landscape the artist is aiming to transmit. The titles Lanyon used from the later 1950s tended to be more descriptive (e.g. Silent Coast 1957, Long Sea Surf 1958, Low Tide 1959) than the place names he had used earlier and, combined with the greater openness of form, have an ephemeral quality that prompts the viewer less to search for immediate references than to work through the layers of the image to reconstruct the process by which Lanyon achieved his end. The quick, broad brushstrokes seem to suggest the glimpses of landscape seen through broken cloud, with here and there a tiny flash of colour, and these images remind us that from 1959 onwards, Lanyon had taken up gliding, giving himself an additional perspective from which to view the world.