Sir Terry Frost, R.A.

Acquired by Adrian Heath in the late 1950s and thence by descent to the present owners

London, Artists International Association, Abstract Art, 1951, no.23;
London, Leicester Galleries, 1952, no.6;
Newcastle upon Tyne, Laing Gallery, 1964, no.4, illustrated in the catalogue;
London, Arts Council/South West Arts, 1976-1977, no.7, illustrated in the catalogue, p.33; 
Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, long term loan;
London, The Tate Gallery, St Ives, 13 February - 14 April 1985, no.99, illustrated, p.80;
London, Royal Academy, Terry Frost: Six Decades, 12 October - 12 November 2000, no.8;
London, Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition 2004, no.3.

Tom Cross, Painting the Warmth of the Sun: St.Ives Artists 1939-1975, Lutterworth Press, Guildford 1984, pp.136-140, pl.89;
Peter Davies, St.Ives Revisited – Innovators and Followers, Old Bakehouse Publications, Abertillery 1994, pp.152-3;
Margaret Garlake, New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society, Yale, New Haven & London 1998, p.161, pl.63;
Chris Stephens, Terry Frost, Tate Publishing, London 2000, pp.18-25, pl.10;
Mel Gooding, 'The Intelligent Eye', published in Terry Frost: Six Decades, London 2000, pp.18-21;
James Beechey, 'Heron, Hilton, Frost, Vaughan', Burlington Magazine, January 2001, 42-44, illustrated, pl.46;
Alastair Grieve, Constructed Abstract Art in England: A Neglected Avant-Garde, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2005,p.15, pl.2;
Michael Bird, The St Ives Artists: A Biography of Place and Time, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2008, pp.106-107.

There is some undulation in the upper corners but otherwise the canvas is in good overall condition. There are small areas of craquelure: in two areas in the blue pigment in the upper left quadrant and to the area of thick white paint in the lower right quadrant. Otherwise the paint surface is in good overall condition. There is no sign of retouching under ultra-violet light. Held in a painted wooden frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

 

When one looks at the oeuvre of any artist, it is possible to identify particular works which stand as significant, works which mark the start or end of a phase, or which bring together new ideas and discoveries. However, more rarely is it possible to identify those which hold not just an important position for that artist, but which also encapsulate the spirit and concerns of the artistic world of the time. Frost's Walk Along the Quay is just such a painting.

 

Whilst there had been a small but thriving modernist movement in Britain in the decade prior to the outbreak of WWII, it was hardly surprising that the privations of the war years had seen a shift in artistic trends. Of necessity isolated, the growth of what we now term neo-romantic tendencies, much involved with a brooding nostalgia, was typified by the works of artists such as John Piper, John Minton and Graham Sutherland, whose crepuscular images of town and landscape exude a sense of Britishness that was perhaps essential to the preservation of national identity in the face of great threat. Even those artists most closely identified with the modern movement of the 1930s, such as Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, had demonstrated a shift in their works away from pure abstraction, and had brought both figure and landscape references into their work. However, as the country emerged from the war, the sense of opportunity to build a new future, perhaps most obviously seen in the rejection of the magisterial war-leader Churchill with a massive Labour landslide in the 1945 election, materialised in every walk of life. The position of the arts in this renewed Britain was much debated, and with the scale of rebuilding that was necessary, the opportunities for the involvement of the arts in this brave new world were much lauded.

 

For the artists themselves, the paths that lay before them were varied. The example of European modernism was still fresh in the minds of many, and indeed in the work of both Hepworth and Nicholson we see the development of a landscape-inspired abstraction that was to typify one major path. As two senior and established figures in the British art world, their move to Cornwall in 1939 had contributed to the significant position that came to be held by St.Ives, and as the 1940s drew to a close, the town boasted a large number of artists who held considerable reputations nationally, and would soon start to be increasingly recognized abroad.

 

Frost had moved to St.Ives in 1946 after demobilization, and thus had immediately found himself immersed in one of the central forums for abstracted art in Britain in the immediate post-war period. He immediately struck up friendships with many of his contemporaries and his recollections tell us a good deal about the collective aims of this group. However, Frost's route to art had come through his meeting with Adrian Heath in a wartime prisoner of war camp. A former Slade pupil, Heath encouraged Frost to follow his incipient interest, and with an ex-serviceman's grant, Frost was accepted to study at Camberwell School of Art (his family remained in Cornwall and he returned there whenever possible). Camberwell gave Frost exposure to another strand of artistic thought, notably Victor Pasmore. Like the St.Ives artists, Pasmore was also treading a path that was drawing increasingly abstracted imagery from natural subject matter. However, whilst the St.Ives tendency was to take an instinctive route to such abstraction, many of the artists associated with Camberwell were becoming increasingly interested in the theoretical aspects of composition. Pasmore himself was very much concerned with the theories surrounding harmonious proportion and the Golden Section, as was his and Frost's friend Heath, whose own move towards abstraction in the 1948-49 must have been a strong example for Frost.

 

The group that was forming loosely around Heath and Pasmore felt themselves to be in the avant-garde of a new and pioneering art. Opportunities for first-hand exposure to works by the ground-breaking continental abstract artists of the 1920s and 1930s were rare indeed in Britain for some time after WWII, and thus the artists returned to the writings of both those creators and theorists who had inspired their predecessors. Essays by Mondrian, Vantongerloo, Arp and Kandinsky were eagerly read, as were the works of the theorists, such as J.W.Power and Jay Hambidge. Pasmore and Heath's early work was particularly influenced by the writings of both, and developed a compositional system whereby units that were proportionally related to the overall dimensions of the support were moved and rotated to create the underlying constructed composition over which the artist was able to make his own aesthetic decisions.

 

This simultaneous exposure to, and friendships within, the two major emerging strands of British abstraction were key to establishing the unique position that is held by Frost's art at this time. The development of a theoretical underpinning to his painting can be seen in what must rank as Frost's first mature abstract painting, Madrigal of 1949 (Leamington Spa Art Gallery), but this does not entirely sit easily with the expressiveness of the source material, W.H.Auden's poem of the same title. A more resolved painting of later the same year, and thus after Frost's return to Cornwall, was Mullion Cove (whereabouts unknown), which the artist recalled resulted from a drawing trip taken with Peter Lanyon. Lanyon's physical involvement with the landscape was a key feature of the direction his painting was taking, and which he shared with his friend;

 

'Peter would drive me all over the place, along the coast and up on the moors...he taught me to experience landscape...so that you knew what was above and below you, and what was above and below the forms you were going to draw...

 

Peter...was so expressionistic while I was very tight-arsed because of Camberwell. He just roared into his drawing...I would get out my geometrical divisions and then find a way to express something like Mullion Cove...until I rediscovered my experience' (the artist, interview with David Lewis, December 1991 & October 1993)

 

This sense of using two apparently contradictory approaches to create his art was clearly not easy for Frost, but in Walk Along the Quay, painted in 1950, he brings them together perfectly to create a work which has a power and freshness almost six decades after it was painted. Although not the earliest of the group of paintings of similar titles, its success was recognised immediately. Frost was seeking to find a visual language which would express the sense of place and movement found in the harbour of St.Ives in an abstract idiom. Derived in part from his experience of early morning walks through the town, the painting uses extremely sophisticated geometrical and colour relationships to suggest familiar forms and shapes whilst never actually offering us pictorially identifiable references.

 

' I never thought about it at the time, I thought of the title after I got the idea, I mean I had been walking along the quay every morning...it was quite a simple experience. I just happened to notice that the boats were there with a different colour on when the tide was out and they were all propped up and there I saw all those semi-circles propped up on a stick...the strange feeling of looking on top of boats at high tide and the same boats tied up and resting...when the tide's out. The size of canvas was suggested to me by one I happened to have. It had to conform to my idea, the walk, so it was long, like the quay (the pier past Smeaton's Lighthouse) and narrow...in fact I just walked up the canvas in paint' (the artist, transcript of conversation with Adrian Heath and John Hoskin, July 1987)

 

Frost's painting in the early 1950s sits at the very centre of the debate between the experience-influenced abstracted images of the St.Ives painters and the rigorously constructivist work of the artists of the Fitzroy group and they therefore have a crucial place in British abstract art of the immediate post-war period. As the key painting of this phase of his work, we can therefore see Walk Along the Quay as a work which is highly important as a landmark in his career and perhaps was the first fully resolved statement of the approach to painting to which Frost would adhere for the next five decades. However, if we accept that Frost's simultaneous involvement at this time in both major groups at the avant-garde of British abstraction is unique, then Walk Along the Quay becomes a unique statement in British art of the time, a beacon of the concerns that would see British art achieving world recognition in the years that followed.

 

Never before offered for sale, Walk Along the Quay has however been exhibited many times since its first showing in 1951 and is thus a painting that has achieved something like iconic status within the canon of British art of its period. 

 

'...you make your myth and paint it. My memory is what I rely upon, from that moment of discovery when I happen to be made aware, or aroused by, something which I've discovered in nature...that becomes my time and space and by the time I use it it's my myth that I'm working on...'(the artist, transcript of conversation with Adrian Heath and John Hoskin, July 1987)

 

 

The early history of this painting is somewhat difficult to ascertain. Although the painting was in the collection of Adrian Heath by at least 1964, a label on the reverse gives the name E.C.Gregory. Gregory, know as Peter to his friends, was a very important figure in the British art world at this time, being both a collector and the chairman of the publishers Lund Humphries. Whilst the connection between Frost and Gregory would become more concrete later in the decade when Frost was to be appointed a Gregory Fellow at Leeds University, at the time when Walk Along the Quay was created, the link between the two men seems to have been via Ben Nicholson. Nicholson had, in 1949, helped Frost secure one of the Arts Council-funded Porthmeor Studios next to his own and it appears that he may have approached Gregory as a potential buyer for Frost's paintings. In his recent study of the period, Michael Bird suggests that 'Nicholson...encouraged one of his own loyal collectors from the 1930s, the publisher E.C. (Peter) Gregory, to buy Walk Along the Quay' (op.cit., p.107). Whilst this does not make clear whether Gregory actually bought the painting (it was not included in the posthoumous exhibition of Gregory's collection held in 1960), that Nicholson would put forward such an idea to Gregory suggests that he felt Frost's work merited the attention of such an influential figure, and that this particular painting was of sufficient importance to be the work offered. Gregory died in 1959 and his not inconsiderable collection was dispersed, mainly through gifts to public collections.