Patrick Heron

Waddington Galleries, London, where acquired by a Private Collector, 1st May 1986
Private Collection, London

London, Waddington Galleries, Mixed Show, May 1986 (details untraced).

Heron/Wynter (An Exhibition Organised by Richard Demarco), David Hume Tower, Edinburgh, exh. cat., 30th August - 11st September 1965, cat. no.2 (not shown).

Original canvas. There is very minor canvas undulation in the corners. There are some very minor, slight possible old frame rubbings to the painted surface in the top left hand corner, only visible upon extremely close inspection, but this excepting the work appears in excellent overall condition. Please contact the department for an ultraviolet light report. Housed in a thin, dark wooden frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present lot.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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."

The Estate of Patrick Heron is preparing the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the Artist's work and would like to hear from owners of any works by Patrick Heron, so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue. Please write to The Estate of Patrick Heron, c/o Modern & Post-War British Art, Sotheby's, 34-35 New Bond Street, London, W1A 2AA.

'For a very long time now, I have realised that my overriding interest is colour. Colour is both the subject and the means; the form and the content; the images and the meaning...'
(Patrick Heron, 'A Note on my Painting: 1962', introduction to the catalogue for his exhibition at Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zurich, January 1963)

Vertical Blue and Indigo: 1962 marks a highly significant point in Heron's career. It was the year of his second solo exhibition in New York at the Bertha Shaefer Gallery and undoubtedly the culmination of his ongoing dialogue with the great American art critic Clement Greenberg who he had first met in 1954. Much has been written about the cross Atlantic currents that ebbed and flowed between the American Abstract Expressionists and British artists such as William Scott, Alan Davie and Peter Lanyon. But it was Heron, as an art critic, who perhaps engaged most publicly with the wider impact of their work. He had always been impressed by Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning et al, indeed the first time he saw many of their pictures at the Tate in 1956 he was 'instantly elated by the size, energy, originality, economy and inventive daring of many of the paintings'. But he had always felt a 'lack of resonance' in their use of colour; de Kooning was 'all ladylike, gossamer, pastel tints!', all rather 'lightweight' compared to what he had expected from black and white reproduction (Heron, 'The Americans at the Tate Gallery', Arts (New York), March 1956, quoted in Vivienne Knight (ed.), Patrick Heron, John Taylor in association with Lund Humphries, London, 1988, p.28).

At the heart of it lay a complicated critical relationship with Clement Greenberg. By 1962, the initial honeymoon between the two was certainly starting to pinch from Heron's end. He sensed Greenberg's omnipresent conductor's baton, influencing the path of American Post-war art history to the detriment of the Europeans and indeed, on a micro level, his hand in directing the development of individual artists - he had written to Heron in 1958 about some of his latest work shown to him by Victor Waddington that introduced his signature discs and lozenges: 'Always, I felt, a few too many discs or rectangles were put in to prevent that wonderfully original color of yours from realising itself... every one of the five paintings could have been decisively strengthened by simply or mechanically wiping out every silhouetted form that was less than a foot and a half away from the edge of the canvas, that is, by bunching and clearing...' (Greenberg, letter to Patrick Heron, 17 August 1958, quoted in Michael McNay, Patrick Heron, Tate Publishing, 2002, p.57). 

Heron pointedly ignored his advice, determined to retain the sense of liberation and spontaneity of form and colour that is so present in Vertical Blue and Indigo:1962. Quite the opposite of 'bunching and clearing', the lozenges are perfectly yet spontaneously spread around the composition as if by natural osmosis. A photograph of Heron shows the composition in an earlier state (fig. 1) before the bold black calligraphic strokes took hold, sweeping down through the composition, flickering out like flames into the surrounding areas of blue and indigo. The flash of orange is crucial and perfectly offsets the rich tonality of the darker hues; a nod to the traditional complementary pairing of blue and orange but also the ultimate confirmation of Heron's commitment to the spontaneous exploration of colour. As for Clement Greenberg, Heron challenged the hegemony of his view in two articles published in Studio International in the late 1960s and a conclusive long essay in The Guardian in 1974 in which he defended the position of European Abstraction.

Vertical Blue and Indigo: 1962 comes at the zenith of a four year journey that began with the last of his so-called 'stripe' paintings (see lot 30) and represents the path through which his discs and lozenges emerged as if with a mind of their own, governed purely by the experience of colour. He summarised his process in 1962 for the introduction of his exhibition to take place the following year at Galerie Charles Lienhard in Zurich: 'I do not find myself "designing" a canvas; I do not "draw" the lozenge-shaped areas or the soft squares. And these forms are not really "forms" at all, anyway, but simply areas (of soft vermilion? Violet? Ceruleum? Brown ochre?) materializing under my brush when I start to try to saturate the surface of the canvas with, so to speak, varying quantities of this colour or that' (Heron, 'A Note on my Painting: 1962,' quoted in Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, Phaidon, London, 1994, 2008, p.174). 

Yet the confident black strokes that so enliven Vertical Blue and Indigo: 1962 are also prescient of his next great development; having stated that he did not "draw" before the application of paint onto the canvas, that same year, 1962, he began to use charcoal to map out his composition and the next phase of his development was to begin, culminating with the so-called wobbly hard edge paintings of the late 1960s and 1970s such as Yellow and Reds with Violet Edge: April 1965 (Private Collection) and Scarlet, Emerald and Orange: July - September 1976 (Tate, London).