Patrick Heron 1920-1999

Robert Hosdell, Esq.
His Sale, Sotheby’s, London, 3^rd November 1982, no.171
New Art Centre, London, whence purchased by Ken Powell, 1985

London, Waddington Galleries, Hilton, Wynter, Frost, Heron: Four English Middle Generation Painters, May 1959, no.24;
Paris, Artcurial, English Contrasts: Peintres et Sculpteurs Anglais 1950-1960, September – May 1984, catalogue untraced;
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, New Beginnings: Post War British Art from the Collection of Ken Powell, November 1992 - January 1993, no34, illustrated in colour in the exhibition catalogue, p.28;
London, The Fine Art Society, Austerity to Affluence: British Art & Design 1945-1962, 20^th October – 14^th November 1997, cat.no.P31, illustrated in colour in the exhibition catalogue, p.122;
Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum and touring to Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, From Blast to Freeze: British Art in the 20^th Century, 14^th September 2002 – 19^th January 2003, unnumbered catalogue, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, fig.12, p.137.

Heron’s painting from the early 1950s onwards shows a development of ideas that transmute almost constantly throughout the decade, and within each series of canvases, aided by his frequent habit of precisely dating the period of creation, the changes can almost be tracked from canvas to canvas.

Although Heron had experimented with pure abstraction as early as 1952, rather under the influence of Nicholas de Stael, he maintained a figurative base to his painting until at least January 1956 when he began to develop a language of strokes of pure colour which moved away from a definite subject. Perhaps in response to the environment of the artist’s new home at Eagle’s Nest at Zennor in Cornwall and known as the ‘garden’ paintings, the broad subject was often only made clear by the descriptive titles given them, and the idea of an actual physical depiction was clearly subordinate to the artist’s exploration of the possibilities of colour itself as the subject. As these works developed, the vertical strokes

‘…became longer and longer, until in one painting in early 1957 they became so long that the strokes touched top and bottom. Suddenly there were actually seven vertical stripes in one painting, which at the time I actually called Scarlet Verticals: March 1957.’ (M.Gayford, ‘Looking Is More Interesting Than Doing Anything Else, Ever: An Interview With Patrick Heron’, reproduced in ed.D.Sylvester, Patrick Heron, London 1998, p.29)

Heron’s ‘stripe’ paintings are one of the most contentious groups of paintings produced by a British artist in the post-war period. Relatively few in number, they span just over a year, developing in March and April of 1957 and reaching their zenith with Lux Eterna: May-June 1958 (Private Collection). However, the poor contemporary critical reaction to the 1958 Redfern Gallery exhibition at which they were first shown (the gallery’s poor support of the show precipitated Heron’s move to the then newly-opened Waddington Gallery) belies their importance. By reducing the work to a bare minimum, the use of colour and the amazingly free and painterly handling produce images in which spontaneity is at its apex, a fact attested to by Heron’s own recollection that many of these pieces were the result of less than an hour of carefully controlled involvement and are ‘unlike anything else being painted in England at that time’ (M.Gooding, Patrick Heron, London 1995, p.126).

Although the ‘stripe’ paintings were later to achieve iconic status within Heron’s oeuvre, especially after it became clear that they predated the American ‘stripe’ images of Gene Davis, Morris Louis and David Simpson by at least two years, Heron felt that they were very much a stage in his own painting’s growth. The works which sprang from the immediate post-‘stripe’ period show a much greater complexity and involvement of the artist and, like the contemporary pieces of his friend William Scott, clearly involve repainting and reworking of the image building up an almost historical and organic sense of construction.

The present painting was begun in August 1958 and was developed over the following months, something that is clear from a close examination of the work. Initially appearing to be predominantly formed from a number of varied tones of blue contrasting with a strong fuchsia pink, this final stage is in fact not only partly overlaying a much more varied palette of coloured forms, but is also influenced by these, each final blue being influenced by the preceding ‘ground’ on which it is painted, sometimes clearly two or three layers of very different pigment. In his review of the 1958 ICA exhibition of works from the collection of E.J.Power for the American magazine Arts, Heron acknowledged the influence and excitement of the Tate exhibition of contemporary American painting in 1956, but now reserved his praise only for Rothko as the sole member of the group shown (Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Rothko and Still) to not incorporate suggestive image notation, which he contends as always retaining a figurative element (Heron himself had been stung by contemporaries’suggestions that his horizontal ‘stripe’ paintings contained landscape references), and thus to be looking toward the role of colour as the key to the compositional and spatial relationships within a fully abstracted image. By ridding the painting of “meaning”, he is aiming towards ‘painting that was pure of intent, that freed the imagination of the spectator as music does, and like that of Matisse, offered a profound delight to the senses’ (M.Gooding, Patrick Heron, London 1995, p.139)

Like other paintings executed in the second half of 1958 and into early 1959, varied forms and colour planes progress and recede within the picture plane, as seen in Blue Painting: November – December ’58 (Private Collection) and form a remarkable group of canvases that hint at the leading position that British abstract painting held on the world stage at the time.