Patrick Heron

The Artist's family
Waddington Galleries, London, where aquired by the present owner in April 2004

London, The Tate Gallery, Patrick Heron, 25th June - 6th September 1998, cat. no.34, illustrated in the catalogue p.87.

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar, Fine Art Conservation, 13 & 14 Mason's Yard, Duke Street, St James, London, SW1Y 6BU: Structural Condition The canvas, which is inscribed on the reverse, is unlined and supported on what would certainly appear be it's original wooden keyed stretcher. The stretcher comprises of one vertical and two horizontal stretcher bars. Paint Surface The paint surface is stable and the only retouchings that I could identify are some very small spots in the blue rectangle in the upper left corner. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition.
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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."

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 Staël, 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 Eagles Nest at Zennor in Cornwall and known as the 'garden' paintings, the broad subject was often only made clear by the descriptive titles given to 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' (Heron, quoted in M.Gayford, 'Looking Is More Interesting Than Doing Anything Else, Ever: An Interview With Patrick Heron', reproduced in D.Sylvester (ed.), 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.

From the early part of 1958, and thus before the creation of the last of the 'stripe' paintings, Heron had again begun to move forward. Often using one predominating colour, the horizontal emphasis of the canvases begins to be lessened by the introduction of panels of colour, as in Cadmium Scarlet: January 1958 (Private Collection) and Yellow and Violet Squares in Red: February 1958 (Private Collection). Stung by the suggestion of contemporaries that his horizontal 'stripe' paintings contained landscape references, the simplification of the palette and the introduction of a wider vocabulary of forms allowed the artist to concentrate on the use of colour to form pictorial space. In a way that was comparable to the introduction of what amounted to apertures in the work of Terry Frost, and which Heron had himself praised in a review of Frost's work in 1957, these floating areas of colour allowed Heron to establish a three-dimensional quality in his paintings, using the weight and balance of the colour relationships to engender a sense of depth and spatial recession. Indeed, Heron also seems to have found this quality in the work of Rothko, who he singled out in a review of the 1958 ICA exhibition of works from the collection of E.J.Power for the American magazine Arts, noting that he was 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. By removing any external references, and thus 'meaning',  Rothko had moved towards a manner of 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).    

It was perhaps natural that having found a method by which the balance of colour could be used to create depth and recession within a canvas, Heron would then begin to rebuild the range of colours used within each painting, and thus this re-complication of the image begins to be seen in works such as Blue Painting (Squares and Disc): August 58 - February 59 (fig.1, formerly Collection of Ken Powell, sold in these rooms 28^th June 2006, lot 60) and reaches a climax in slightly later works from 1959 such as the present work, dated June - Sept 1959, and Yellow Painting with Orange and Brown - Ochre Squares: June - Oct 1959 (fig.2, sold in these rooms 11th December 2006). Introducing new forms and colours allowed Heron to build up the surface of the paintings, reworking, overpainting and moving the elements until the required effect had been achieved. As the titles of the paintings of this phase make clear, this would often take place over a prolonged period, with several months elapsing between the start and finish.