John Latham 1921-2006

The present work is an extremely rare example of the artist's early work executed circa 1948 and shows the influence of the neo-romantic artists especially Minton, Colquhoun and MacBryde.

Born in Africa, Latham studied at Chelsea School of Art from 1946 - 50. He later taught at St Martin's where he was famously dismissed for chewing pages from the library's copy of Greenberg's Art and Culture, spitting them into a bowl and then fermenting the pages in acid and distilling them into a phial. The phial and his dismissal documents were later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.