Peter Lanyon

Catherine Viviano, New York, by whom gifted to the present owner 28th December 1982

New York, Catherine Viviano Gallery, Peter Lanyon, 26th January - 21st February 1959, cat. no.7.

Andrew Causey, Peter Lanyon: His Painting, Aidan Ellis Publishing Limited, Henley-on-Thames, 1971, cat. no.106.

The board is sound. In the upper right quadrant there are two small surface abrasions, one near the upper edge, and one to the light green pigment. There is a further small surface abrasion above the centre of the lower edge, otherwise in generally good original condition. The surface is slightly dirty with a few specks of staining and may benefit from a light clean. Ultraviolet light reveals two spots of fluorescence to the aforementioned abrasions upper right, which may be retouching. There is a vertical line of fluorescence to the centre right edge, and a few spots of fluorescence along the right edge, but these do not appear to be retouching. Held in a gilt and stained simple wooden frame. Please telephone the department on +44 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present lot.
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From the late 1940s onwards, Lanyon sought to create a totally personal manner of painting which not only changed the way we look at representations of landscape, but which extended our interpretation of the landscapes themselves by directly addressing the personal experience of both artist and viewer. Whilst working in an ostensibly abstract manner, Lanyon himself rejected the burden of abstraction, preferring to think of himself as a landscape painter in the romantic tradition. His work combines notational references, history and myth in a way which is entirely his own.

Unlike some of his contemporaries who sought to eradicate any reference to the landscape or the figure in their work, the landscapes and the weather of Cornwall were eminently important to Lanyon's vision, and the titles of his paintings often refer to specific Cornish places, to meteorological conditions, or for works such as Green Coast, to geographical environments. This lifelong connection with both place and atmosphere became more meaningful when Lanyon took up gliding in 1959, making himself dependant upon the elemental forces of the air. In a tape recording made in 1962 with Lionel Muskin, Lanyon commented:

'I have always been concerned with painting weather. I can't rationalise what the weather does to me. I don't know what it is. It probably creates a sort of excitement in me which will allow me to paint things, and very often images come through which I don't recognise for years after they are painted. It is impossible for me to make a painting which has no reference to the very powerful environment in which I live. I have to refer back continually to what is under my feet, to what is over my back and to what I see in front of me.'

Lanyon's move towards a more abstracted depiction of the Cornish landscape developed from the early 1950s but in the second half of the decade new elements began to appear. It would seem that, like in the work of many of his contemporaries, a growing awareness of painting in America was beginning to play a role. Whilst Lanyon was already aware of some of Pollock's work from his trip to Italy in 1948 where Peggy Guggenheim's collection had been shown at the Venice Biennale, the 1956 Tate Gallery exhibition, Modern Art in the United States, was much more important, giving a tantalising snapshot of contemporary American painting (only one room of Abstract Impressionist work was actually shown). Other artists from Lanyon's circle, such as William Scott and Alan Davie were already exhibiting in New York and they in turn brought back reports of new developments, and there were further exhibitions of American painting in London, such as the Pollock retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1958. However in 1957, Lanyon made the trip himself to New York for his first American exhibition. The exhibition at the Catherine Viviano Gallery brought Lanyon good reviews but the visit seems to have been most important for the opportunity to make contact with American artists such as Motherwell, Gottlieb, Rothko and de Kooning, and critics and curators such as Clement Greenberg and Dore Ashton.

Lanyon's direct exposure to America made an impact on his painting almost immediately. Although it is now commonplace to discuss elements of Abstract Expressionism in Lanyon's work of this time, this rather misses the essential differences between the two forms of art. As is clear from Green Coast, for Lanyon, his experience of American painting seems to imbue his work with a new expansiveness and a sense of space and depth, bringing the gestures that create the work to the fore and making them an integral part of the experience of the landscape transmitted to the viewer via the painting without ever forgetting the initial impulse that creates the image. There is also a brightening and simplification of his palette, with fresher blues, greens, reds and yellows beginning to become more dominant and the earthier colours of his earlier painting falling away.