St Ives Modernism
John Swarbrooke Fine Art is delighted to introduce St Ives Modernism, a summer exhibition this August dedicated to pioneers of 20th century Modernism in Cornwall.
Inspired by Mark Rothko’s visit to Cornwall in the summer of 1959, the exhibition includes artwork by Terry Frost and Peter Lanyon, who met Rothko in St Ives, as well as Adrian Heath and Alan Davie.
Introduction to the Exhibition
In 1959 St Ives in Cornwall was becoming more widely recognised as an artists’ community. The pioneering abstraction of artists working in and around the harbour town was reflecting the experience of the dramatic coastal landscape.
North American painter Mark Rothko visited Somerset and Cornwall in August 1959. At the time, Rothko was becoming established as one of the most successful painters of his generation. His visit reflected a dialogue between British and North American artists that was part of the increasingly international nature of modernism in Britain.
The Cornish landscape inspired the St Ives artists in different ways, and was far removed from Rothko’s New York. Nevertheless the landscape evidently inspired the artist, who liked the possibility of out-of-the-way places ‘where the traveller or the wanderer could come for an hour to meditate on a single painting.’
All pricing includes framing but excludes shipping and artist resale right.
Artworks can be viewed at Cromwell Place, South Kensington by prior appointment.
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Sir Terry FROST, RA (1915 – 2003)
Born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, Frost did not become an artist until he was in his 30s. During his army service in World War II, he met and was taught by Adrian Heath while a prisoner of war. Subsequently, he attended Camberwell School of Art and the St. Ives School of Art. In 1951, he worked as an assistant to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth.
He was a member of the Penwith Society, St Ives and had his first one-man exhibition in London at the Leicester Galleries in 1952 and in New York at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery 1960. Frost taught at Bath Academy, Corsham, 1952 was a Gregory Fellow at Leeds University 1954-6 and taught at Leeds College of Art 1956-9. He was a member of the London Group 1958, lived in St Ives 1959-63 and then moved to Banbury.
Red, black and white, 1990
signed and dated lower right Terry Frost 90
mixed media on paper
a unique study for lithograph Kemp no. 126
sheet: 50 x 50 cm. (19 2/3 x 19 2/3 in.)
framed: 70 x 70 cm. (27 5/9 x 27 5/9 in.)
£8,500 + ARR
Frost believed that colour and shape could realise an image or feeling more successfully than figurative imitation. His works were grounded in the real world – his visual language was the landscape of Cornwall – and his works are full of colour and light. They speak of the pleasure of human existence, and Frost's own sensations and experiences. He had a sense of delight when looking at nature.
As Frost said: 'A shape is a shape, a flower is a flower. A shape of red can contain as much content as the shape of a red flower. I don't see why one should have to have any association, nostalgia or evocation of any kind. It boils down to the value of the shape and the colour.'
The 1990s saw Frost elected as a Royal Academician in 1992 and he received a knighthood in 1998.
Ochre, Red and Blue, 1969
signed lower right Frost 69
acrylic on paper
a unique study for lithograph Kemp no. 50
sheet: 75 x 55 cm. (29 4/7 x 21 5/8 in.)
framed: 102 x 80 cm. (40 1/7 x 31 4/9 in.)
“A circle means so much to me; it’s become like a god”
SOLD
The 1960s marked a high-point in Terry Frost’s commercial success as an artist and included is first exhibition in New York in 1960. He said of the experience: 'In New York they all came to my exhibition, de Kooning, Rothko, Klein. Newman and Motherwell took me to their studios…They worked hard; they would sleep until noon, do eight or nine hours in the studio, and then starting at eleven at night proceeded to drink me under the table! Then we'd go at four in the morning and have breakfast at a Chinese restaurant.'
For the edition for which this unique study is made see the Indianapolis Museum of Art
Untitled, 1974-5
signed lower right T. Frost
mixed media on paper
sheet: 36 x 49 cm. (14 1/6 x 19 2/7 in.)
framed: 70 x 82 cm. (27 5/9 x 32 2/7 in.)
£8,500 + ARR
Formerly in the collection of a Southeastern Institution, USA.
Untitled dates to the time of Frost’s move to Newlyn, Cornwall, where he lived for the rest of his life. The 1970s saw Frost rediscovering colour, in part thanks to his reassessment of such artists as Matisse and Léger.
In the present work quarter circles in alternating colours hover dynamically in squares, the eye animating the shapes as it moves across the composition. Indeed, the sparing use of black in the centre challenges the viewer, leading them to imagine a primary colour in its place. This inventive work thus dates to a time of experimentation in Frost’s work, in which he tests the power of colour and shape to its limits.
Peter LANYON (1918 – 1964)
Born in St Ives, Cornwall, which remained his home throughout his life, Lanyon was a well-known member of its artist colony and a founding member of the Crypt Group in 1946.
After taking painting lessons with Borlase Smart in 1936, in the following year Lanyon was accepted into the Penzance School of Art. He attended the Euston Road School in 1938, where he was taught and nurtured by Ben Nicholson, Adrian Stokes and Naum Gabo. Lanyon made his first construction in 1939, though his artistic pursuits were put on hold during his service with the Royal Air Force from 1940 to 1945.
Despite his early death at the age of forty-six in a gliding incident, Lanyon achieved a body of work that is amongst the most original and important reappraisals of modernism in the 20th Century. His work found an international audience, with his first New York exhibition taking place as early as 1957.
Yellow Construction, c. 1950
estate stamped verso lower left
gouache, watercolour and ink on paper
sheet: 24 x 22 cm. (9 2/5 x 8 2/3 in.)
framed: 42.5 x 38 cm. (16 3/4 x 14 9/10 in.)
POA
Towards the end of the 1950s, Lanyon’s focus began to shift away from the landscape, towards more temporal elements and physical experiences of his environment: gusts of wind, waves crashing, the flight of birds over cliffs. Taking inspiration from his native Cornwall and the Constructivism of Gabo, Hepworth and Nicholson, as well as broader artistic developments in western Europe and North America, Lanyon established a mature mode of working in which close attention was paid to the quality of his materials.
The intricately worked surface of Yellow Construction conveys a powerful sense of the Cornish landscape. Although it is ostensibly abstract the images suggests a weathered structure, such as the mine shafts found across the Penwith peninsula. It is worth comparing with Lanyon’s three-dimensional constructions in this period.
Alan DAVIE (1920 – 2014)
Alan Davie is one of Scotland's most internationally recognised artists with works in public collections across the world. The artist had a close connection to Cornwall, and was aided in finding a cottage in the 1950s in Treen, near Lands’ End, by Patrick Heron.
As a young man, he developed a love of the arts, wrote poetry and played saxophone in a jazz band. He studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1938-40. In 1945 Davie was deeply impressed by two exhibitions: Picasso at the V&A and Klee at the Tate, and not long after he visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where he came across the paintings of Jackson Pollock.
The American Abstract Expressionists inspired Davie, and he developed his own unique form of expression combining mythic imagery, enigmatic symbols and later taking inspiration from African and Oceanic art as well as Zen Buddhism. His first exhibition in the USA came in in 1956 Davie made his first trip to the United States, where he was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Catherine Viviano Gallery. He was introduced to Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.
Opus O.1328, Sepulchre, 1996
signed, dated and titled verso
oil on canvas
76 x 96 cm. (30 x 38 in.)
Provenance:
Gimpel Fils, London
SOLD
“Across maps of many colours, we are transported on a carpet of dreams to magical places.”
Alan Davie’s mature work is characterised by an intuitive and impulsive language which encompassed his passions: writing, Jazz music, Zen philosophy and ‘primitive’ art. Sepulchre is a key example of this, painted with a spontaneity reminiscent of the jazz music that famously engrossed Davie.
For Davie the meanings represented by his imagery were open-ended: ‘Certain images reappear in my work – they become obsessive symbols but are never used consciously for any purpose or conveyance of special meaning. Mainly, I feel, many of them are primordial symbols which have many and varying meanings at different times but unknown to mankind.’ This is certainly seen in Sepulchre, where the imagery belonging to the Indigenous Peoples of America is combined with vibrant blocks of colour. The fluid sweeps of the paint brush recall the action-painting of the Abstract Expressionists, who Davie encountered in New York, and the painting bursts with energy.
Untitled, 2012
signed and dated lower right Alan Davie 2012
oil on paper
framed: 42.5 x 35 cm. (16 5/7 x 13 7/9 in.)
Provenance:
Gimpel Fils, London.
£3,500 + ARR
“What I am trying to get at is at best expressed by the idea of pure intuition… to arouse the faculty of direct knowledge by intuition; and what we feel by intuition requires symbols or pointers more than ideas for its proper expression.”
Untitled, 2012
signed and dated upper left Alan Davie 2012
oil on paper
framed: 37 x 41 cm. (7 7/8 x 10 in.)
Provenance:
Gimpel Fils, London.
£3,500 + ARR
Adrian HEATH (1920-92)
Born in Burma, Adrian Heath moved to England aged five, eventually attending Newlyn School of Art, where he was taught by Stanhope Forbes, and the Slade School of Fine Art. Heath served in the Royal Air Force in World War II and was a prisoner of war for several years. During this time, he met fellow detainee Terry Frost and taught Frost to paint. He later travelled to St Ives in 1949 and again in 1951, meeting Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and became more abstract in his own approach to his work.
Heath's first solo exhibition was held at the Musée Carcassone, France in 1948. He exhibited at Redfern Gallery and Hanover Gallery in London in the decades that followed and throughout Europe during his lifetime.
Untitled, 1979
initialled and dated lower right AH 79
mixed media on paper
sheet: 21 x 21 cm. (8 1/4 x 8 1/4 in.)
framed: 40 x 40 cm. (15 3/4 x 15 3/4 in.)
Heath’s practice was largely informed by his engagement with the work of the American abstract expressionists. But unlike the Americans, Heath's paintings emerged from his preliminary drawings, either of landscapes or figures, and in this sense were not as spontaneous as they first appear. By the 1970s softer more fluid forms had taken over from the geometric, hard-edged shapes Heath had built his early career on, as evident in the present work.
£4,250 + ARR
Untitled, 1979
initialled and dated lower right AH 79
mixed media on paper
sheet: 25 x 18 cm. (9 5/6 x 7 in.)
framed: 41.5 x 35 cm. (16 1/3 x 13 7/9 in.)
£3,500 + ARR
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