William Crozier

London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, William Crozier, 1961

William Crozier was born in Glasgow and studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1949 to 1953. His expressive landscapes and figurative compositions verge on abstraction and were greatly influenced by his time in Paris early in his career. He quickly gained a reputation in London in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Crozier was profoundly inspired by Pablo Picasso and the existential philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. His vibrant abstract landscapes and still life paintings convey an emotional intensity that more reflects contemporary European art of the 1950s and 1960s rather than the New York abstract expressionists.  

Crozier’s friend, the Irish poet Anthony Cronin, with whom he had spent time with in Spain, in 1963, was pivotal in Crozier’s development as an artist. On his return to the UK, he began a series of skeletal paintings which anticipated the ‘New Expressionism’ of German painters in the 1980s, who were influenced by the works Crozier created after visiting Auschwitz and Belsen. Crozier belonged to the artistic and literary world of 1950s Soho. A close associate of ‘the Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde, John Minton and William Scott, he was also close to central London-based European and Irish intellectuals.

By 1961, Crozier was seen as one of the most promising young artists in London. He had his first solo exhibition that year at Arthur Tooth and Sons, in which the present work was included and subsequently purchased, and is thus making its first public appearance since. In 1964, the Arts Council included Crozier’s paintings in the exhibition Six Young Painters, together with David Hockney, Peter Blake, Allen Jones, Bridget Riley and Evan Uglow. In 1975, he exhibited alongside Francis Bacon in the important exhibition Body and Soul at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

After he stopped teaching, from the 1980s, Crozier found artistic stimulus from his time in West Cork in Ireland and Hampshire in England. In the late twentieth century, Crozier painted more still lifes and joyful landscapes which often captured the blue light of dusk, his favourite time of day. In 1992, he was an elected member of Aosdána and an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy.