Alan Davie

Private Collection, Italy
Acquired by the present owner circa 1980

London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Alan Davie, June - August 1958, cat. no.49;
Zurich, Charles Lienhard, Alan Davie, 30th April - 28th May 1960, cat. no.7.

Alan Bowness (ed.), Alan Davie, Lund Humphries, London, 1967, cat. no.167.

Sound board. There are nail heads visible to the corners and at isolated intervals along the extreme edge, with very slight rounding to the corners. There is some isolated craqueloure to a thicker globule of pale blue/white impasto in the centre of the top half of the composition, with further traces of reticulation and very minor craqueloure apparent to this area, and well as to the top left quadrant, visible upon close inspection and in keeping with the nature of the artist's materials and techniques. There is a small area of lifting with a tiny fleck of loss to the black pigment in the upper right quadrant. There is a further area of craquelure to the pink hour glass motif in the lower left quadrant, and to the yellow pigment lower centre. There is further flattening to some of the raised elements of thicker impasto, visible upon close inspection, with some very minor traces of surface matter and studio detritus visible. This excepting the work appears in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals areas of fluorescence and probable retouchings to the centre of the top half of the composition in the aforementioned light blue/white area and to the aforementioned pink and yellow areas, and to the aforementioned nail heads, with some tiny traces visible elsewhere, some of which may be in keeping with the nature of the artist's materials. These have all been very sensitively executed. Housed in an ornate painted wooden frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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‘Painting is a continuous process which has no beginning or end. There never really is a point in time when painting is NOT’ (Alan Davie, from a lecture at the Nordisk Brukskunst Kongress, Lillehammer, Norway, 1966).

Alan Davie was perhaps the first British artist of his generation to be exposed to the work of the American Abstract Expressionists. Whilst travelling in Italy in 1948, Davie met the notable collector Peggy Guggenheim in Venice who was struck by the originality of his work. In her palazzo, Davie would have seen at first hand Guggenheim’s recent acquisitions of works by Pollock, Rothko and Gorky many years before his fellow British contemporaries. The scale of their works, their bold handling and imagery made a significant impact on Davie. Later, he would come to meet Rothko and Pollock at his opening show at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York. Despite the gestural nature of Davie's paintings, they contain surreal elements indicating the influence of Eurpean artists such as Paul Klee, whose exhibition Davie saw in 1948 at the first Venice Biennale after the war.  

Two Upright Characters, painted in 1957, is from a significant decade when Davie’s reputation was growing, both in Britain and abroad. Davie’s breakthrough American show of 1956 at Catherine Viviano, in which every painting sold, (several to major American institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York) took place the year before Davie painted the present work. The following year, Wakefield would host a solo exhibition of Davie’s work which would tour to the Whitechapel Gallery - the major public space in London for showcasing international Contemporary Art. It was this touring exhibition, which was to launch Davie as a key figure of the British avant-garde, indeed the Tate was to purchase their first painting by Davie from this show.

In the paintings of this period, often made on un-stretched canvases laid out on the floor, we encounter wildly gestural splatted surfaces, where the paint has been brushed, scraped, splashed and dragged across the canvas and we are faced with an almost bewildering variety of imagery and physical mark-making. A keen jazz musician, Davie’s free-flowing gestures and marks can be seen as the pictorial equivalent of sound, echoing the rhythms and melodies of the jazz that he often immersed himself in as he painted.

Davie passed away on 5^th April 2014, just prior to the opening of the BP Spotlights display of his work at Tate, London.  In his recent obituary, Mark Hudson described him as ‘the enfant terrible of post-war art … His exuberant improvisatory canvases had a ruthlessness … a sense of mystery and ritual that made the efforts of his British peers look positively effete in comparison’ (Daily Telegraph, 22 March 2014).