Sir Terry Frost, R.A.

Rowan Gallery, London

 

The canvas is in good original condition. There are some isolated areas of paint separation in the purple pigment in the lower left quadrant and in the blue pigment in the lower right quadrant. Otherwise the paint surface is in good overall condition. Examination under ultra-violet light reveals a few spots of fluorescence in the middle of the painting which appear to be a naturally fluorescing black pigment. Held in a simple wooden frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Painted in 1953.

Frost had moved to St Ives in 1946 after demobilisation, and thus had immediately found himself immersed in one of the central forums for abstracted art in Britain in the immediate post-war period. Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson had moved to Cornwall in 1939 and had contributed to the significant position that came to be held by St Ives. Frost 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 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).

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. The group of works to which Blue Harbour belongs roughly date from 1951-53 and the genesis of which is generally considered to be the important 1950 painting Walk Along The Quay (Private Collection). In this work and others of the group, Frost sought 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 paintings use extremely sophisticated geometrical relationships to suggest familiar forms and shapes whilst never actually offering us identifiable references. These paintings also see the earliest appearances of what was to become the standard vocabulary of Frost's art; the semi-circles, the highlighted discs and the truncated L and T forms.

The paintings of this group are also distinctive in their use of colour, each tending to have one overall dominant palette which is varied throughout the painting. In Blue Harbour the masterly use of the small segment of bright ultramarine is almost an object lesson in how the smallest area of paint can influence the entire composition, lifting the darker hues of the rest of the painting and providing vivid contrast and counterbalance with the orange forms to the left.

Blue Harbour is a painting which combines theoretical concerns as evinced by Frost's friends Heath and Pasmore, such as the use of geometric partition of the picture plane and the clear influence of the writing of D'Arcy Thompson, with the more romantic suggestion of boats at anchor, the encroaching tide and the forms and movement of the harbour-side to create an image of great power and impact which over fifty years after its execution still looks fresh and exciting.