Bryan Wynter

Waddington Galleries, London
Sale, Sotheby's London, 8th November 1982, lot 173 
New Art Centre, London
Private Collection
Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London, where acquired by the present owner

Original canvas. The canvas is sound. There is some minor frame abrasion around the extreme edges, most noticeable at the corners, with a few very small flecks of associated loss in places. There are a few scattered small flecks of loss in the lower right quadrant. There are fine lines of craquelure along the extreme upper horizontal edge, with a few isolated lines elsewhere. There are fine lines of reticulation to some areas of the thin grey pigment in the lower right quadrant. There is some flattening an an element of impasto in the lower left quadrant. Subject to the above the work is in very good overall condition. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals two small areas of possible retouching towards the centre of the lower edge. The work is float mounted within a simple black painted wood frame. Please telephone the department on +44 207 293 6424 if you have any questions.
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The years between 1956 and 1959 witnessed a sustained burst of creativity for Bryan Wynter that resulted in a body of work quite unlike anything else produced in Britain in the post-war era. Although he was very much part of the so-called ‘St Ives School’, through his close friendships with Lanyon, Heron, Hilton and Frost, his work had a dark, hallucinatory quality that felt of an altogether different timbre. If Heron was painting light and Lanyon the elemental forces that swirled around the Penwith peninsular, then Wynter’s work explores a mysterious netherworld – the Cornwall of complex mysticism, as explored by the 2009 Tate St Ives show, The Dark Monarch.

Wynter himself wrote: ‘I think of my paintings as a source of imagery, something that generates imagery rather than contains it. Obviously it is I who have put into them what they contain but I have done so with as little conscious interference as possible’ (Bryan Wynter in Statements: A Review of British Abstract Art, (exh. cat.), Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1957). This call to the subconscious is deliberate. In the mid-1950s Wynter had begun to take mescalin, prescribed to him by a London psychologist keen to understand the effect of hallucinogens on creative minds (and this is a full decade ahead of Ken Kesey’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in California). Frost also took part in the experiment and Hilton too, once, to disastrous effect – but neither found they could work on it. Wynter, on the other hand, could remember his visions, what he saw beyond the ‘doors of perception’ (to quote Aldous Huxley’s classic text on the mescalin experience). Paintings such as Sea Change record this journey: a fractured visual experience, in which the world splits open, revealing itself in layers that suggest shifts in space and time.

The technical and structural base of Wynter’s 1950s work was grounded in tachisme, the European equivalent of Abstract Expressionism, in which the brushstroke – the tache – is made free from describing anything other than itself, instead becoming expressive of meaning in its own right. As with much of what was going on in St Ives at the time, Wynter’s painting though is never purely abstract, there is always a sense of the landscape, although as much a landscape of the mind as of a place. The title of this work, Sea Change, therefore contains a deliberate double-play: referring both to the elemental force most prevalent for those living on an isolated coastal peninsular but also to a state of mind, a complete reversal of all certainty.

Often in these nominally abstract paintings one glimpses skeletal figures, hard to read but definitely there in works such as The Indias (1956, sold in these rooms, The Robert Devereux Collection of Post-War British Art, 3rd November 2010, lot 28), but much clearer in Hostile Tribe (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh). During the Second World War, Wynter had become interested in psychoanalysis and (inevitably for an artist of the post-war period) the work of Carl Jung, in particular his concept of universal archetypes: singular forms of prehistoric origin that are not the creation of individual eras but common to humanity. Wynter’s paintings from this incredibly fertile period can be seen as searches for these archetypes, as totems for the magic lost to mankind through ‘civilisation’. And as such, they can be seen as perfect examples of the fundamental ambitions of Modern art: to return this magic to the modern world.