Prunella Clough

The New Art Centre, London
Sale, Sotheby's London, 2nd March 1988, lot 353
Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London, where acquired by the present owner, 7th August 1997

London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Prunella Clough, A Retrospective Exhibition, September - October 1960, cat. no.133, illustrated, with tour to City Art Gallery, York.

Original canvas. There are some old, minor frame abrasions visible to the extreme edges, but these excepting the work appears in very good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals an area of fluorescence and probable retouching to the sky in the upper right hand quadrant, with further very minor flecks apparent to the aforementioned frame abrasions. These have all been very sensitively executed. Housed in a thick white wooden frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present lot.
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While Mary Potter was exploring parklands, Anne Redpath was painting vases of flowers and Mary Fedden was depicting cats and table-scapes, Prunella Clough was putting on her wellington boots and trudging through mining areas, factories and boiler houses. Having previously investigated the flotsam and jetsam washed up on the beaches of Lowestoft in the 1940s and the working environments of fishermen and lorry drivers, during the early 1950s, Clough now turned to a particular terrain hitherto unmapped and unexplored. She gravitated towards the industrial landscape (see also Mining Area (1954-6) and Cooling Towers (1958), ills. 14 and 15, Prunella Clough, Tate Gallery, 2007; Slag Heap (1958), ill. 24, Prunella Clough: 50 Year Making Art, Annely Juda, 2009, etc.) and her preference for wasteground themes is typified in Slagheap:

‘I see my subject matter mainly as landscape, but the kind of landscape that I am dealing with is something that I cannot match up to because it demands something tougher and more brutal in terms of pictorial response than I can give it…I used to think of Italian painting in which there was a liking for the immediate townscape and I wanted to make its equivalent in urban twentieth-century landscape.’ (Prunella Clough, New Paintings 1979-82, Warwick Arts Trust, 1982.)

What at first appears to be of limited visual interest is actually a landscape affected by atmosphere, wind and weather. The seemingly drab form presented is, in fact, a subtly worked surface texture; the monochromatic treatment is, on close inspection, enlivened by carefully selected colour accents.

‘Clough herself sensed alienation in industrial areas, noting that there was very little man-sized detail, but the main response that she sought to evoke in these scenes was ‘a sense of weight gravity volume (enclosing) scale, significant space.’ (Frances Spalding, Prunella Clough: Regions Unmapped, Lund Humphries, 2012).

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings, author of Prunella Clough and Keith Vaughan: Visions and Recollections, Pagham Press, (Menier Gallery), 2014, for compiling the catalogue note for the present work.