Alan Davie

The Artist, from whom acquired by Hans and Alice de Jong, Hengelo, 1960
Their sale, Sotheby's London, 8th February 2007, lot 152, where acquired by the present owner

London, Gimpel Fils, Alan Davie Retrospective, 1960, cat. no.2;
Hengelo, Hengelose Kunstzaal, Gestalten, 1961, cat. no.23, illustrated;
Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Nederlanders verzamelen en hedendaagse kunst, 1962, cat. no.41;
Arnhem, Gemenntemuseum, Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum, oog in oog met hans en alice de jong, 1970, cat. no.73;
Lyngby, Sophienholm, International Billedkunst, Alice og Hans de Jong's Samling, 1971, cat. no.33.

Alan Bowness, Alan Davie, Lund Humphries, London 1967, cat. no.197, illustrated.

Original canvas. There are two discoloured yellow spots at the top of the red area of paint on the left edge which may correspond to losses of impastoed paint, and a few minor signs of craquelure in the central red oval, only visible upon close inspection. Certain areas of the dark pigment appear to have paint shrinkage but these appear to be original to the artist's techniques; the work appears in good condition overall. Under UV light there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in a simple wooden slip frame. Please telephone the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
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Alan Davie was perhaps the first British artist to gain real exposure to the work of the American Abstract Expressionists. Having already visited the legendary collector Peggy Guggenheim in her palazzo in Venice in 1948, where he will have seen her recent acquisitions of works by Pollock, Rothko and Gorky, he travelled to New York in 1956, for the opening of his show at the Catherine Viviano Gallery, and where he finally met with many of the titans of the New York School.

Davie’s paintings that followed, Monk’s Vision included, can very readily be seen to be influenced by what he saw in America: often vast in scale – by British standards of the time at least ­– they were made on un-stretched canvas laid out on the floor, their wildly gestural, splattered surfaces seemingly combining Pollock and De Kooning in one frenzied burst of ‘Action Painting’ (a term Davie, in fact, disassociated himself from). And no doubt Monk’s Vision was painted with American jazz blaring from the studio record player – the title thus being a reference to Theolonius Monk, who was by the mid 1950s at the height of his powers, following the 1956 release of the acclaimed  Brilliant Corners.

However, these works, in truth, are in many more ways tied to European art, a melting pot of ideas taken from art informel and art brut and beyond, to these two recent movements’ own roots in Surrealism and Cubism, as it was the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20^th Century that first sought out the totems and fetishes of so-called ‘primitive’ cultures in search of a deeper meaning that lay buried behind the rubble of Western European ‘civilization’.

The central section of Monk’s Vision appears to be made up of objects pinned or nailed to a rough armature – possibly an idol that acquires further ritual power through this votive act. Like Kandinsky in the early part of the 20^th Century, Davie was deeply interested in painting as a parallel of shamanic activity.  The act of painting is a mirror of the shaman’s own visionary journey between this world and the next, a journey recorded and understood through symbols and images that are both difficult to read and yet because of their non-linearity extremely resonant. As such, correct though it might be to read Alan Davie’s work of the mid to late 1950s in terms of contemporary movements such as American Abstract Expressionism or French tachisme, perhaps Kandinsky’s breakthrough Compositions of the early 1910s, which are not ‘pure’ abstracts but evocations of visionary spaces with their own symbolic lexicon, are their closest context.

Davie’s exhibition at Catherine Viviano brought him to the attention of major American museums, including MOMA, and following this, his career took off at home too, with a solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1958 (then the public space in London for international contemporary art) from where the Tate made their first purchase of his work.