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Between 1960 and 1965, a generation of artists in Britain found new ways to paint. As the centre of the art world shifted from Paris to New York, a window of opportunity was open for fresh experiments in painterly abstraction. Piano Nobile’s display includes the work of Alan Davie (1920–2014), Albert Irvin (1922–2015), Peter Lanyon (1918–1964), William Scott (1913–1989), William Turnbull (1922–2012), William Crozier (1930 - 1911) and Bryan Wynter (1915–1975). Each of these artists developed personally distinctive styles that responded to French tachisme and American abstract expressionism. Concerns with landscape, atmosphere and the elements, automatic technique, and aerial and non-linear perspectives were formative themes in their work. Navigating between the dominant trends in painting from Europe and the United States, these artists made exciting new developments as they sought to reconcile their peculiar, often local interests with a rapidly expanding horizon of formal possibilities. As the art historian Alan Bowness later wrote, ‘there was a tremendous mood of confidence in British art at that time’.
For many artists at the time, easel painting was no longer a valid creative endeavour. Instead they adopted a large format, which concurrently hastened the rejection of literal representation and began a search for symbols, marks and formal units that could maintain their vitality when realised in grand proportions. A new freedom entered the studio behaviour of these artists. Wider brushes, the rapid application of paint (often worked wet-on-wet) and the use of luminous synthetic colour contrasts became de rigueur. Irvin, Lanyon and Turnbull had wartime experience of flying in the RAF, while Lanyon and Davie adopted gliding as a hobby, and their paintings suggest the enhanced insight into landscape afforded by an aerial perspective. In glider paintings made between 1959 and his premature death in 1964, Still Air among them, Lanyon developed an original notation for evoking air currents, cloud movements and a flight path. The painterly paintings of Wynter, a keen swimmer and canoeist, suggest an intimate proximity to earth, water and fire, while William Scott, in his Berlin Blues series of the mid-sixties, created solemn hieroglyphs redolent of Celtic runes.
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‘My concern’, Peter Lanyon once said, ‘is not to produce pure shape or colour on a surface, but to inform and fill up every mark with information which comes directly from the world in which I live.’
In his gliding painting Still Air, the interaction of whiteness and colour suggests the relationship between the ground below and a numinous body of cloud above that conceals and envelopes.
The dominant motif, a stream of downward yellow brushstrokes, along with other ribbon-like forms, may suggest the progress of the artist’s glider through the skies. Lanyon was acutely interested by a glider’s sensation of air masses rising and falling, and the title ‘Still Air’ evokes a qualitative subject—the artist’s experience of gliding in static air conditions.
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The all-over pattern of working and the consequent absence of focus points was a defining characteristic of Wynter’s work between 1956 and 1964. His approach to making abstract art was accretive, and this colour contrast - predominant areas of lilac-purple on the left-hand side and orange-yellow on the right - was not the fulfilment of a predetermined scheme but an organic result, arrived at over a lengthy period spent painting and re-painting the surface. This was a process of enrichment, wholly unplanned, and the final appearance of a work like Maremma is the result of wellpractised improvisation.
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Dragons’ Eggs Assorted is a wild, joyous painting that was made using Alan Davie’s distinctive improvisatory method. He espoused an automatic technique in which the artist allowed the richness of life and existence itself to flow through their work.
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Witing in 1962, Heron summarised his artistic concerns: ‘For a very long time now, I have realized that my over-riding interest is colour. Colour is both the subject and the means; the form and the content; the image and the meaning, in my paintings today.’
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Expanded is one of Scott’s ‘Berlin Blues’ series, a significant part of his second phrase of exploring abstraction. The series is named quite literally after a particular blue pigment that Scott discovered while he was working in West Berlin on a fellowship. The picture is painted using a signature narrow, polarised palette of the eponymous blue, and white and green. The balloon-like figure at the centre of the painting is a poignant image - an engaging yet untranslatable hieroglyph. The round-corned triangle beside it has a similarly elementary form and feels richly symbolic without being an obvious or accepted signifier. Possible interpretations include flint arrow heads and simple directional instructions (up/down, forward/back), though it may also be considered a mannerist sharpening of the archetypal bowl-like silhouette used to represent vessels in Scott’s earlier still-life paintings.
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1-1965 is a significant example of Turnbull's colour field paintings from the 1960s. In the winter of 1962-63, he went to Singapore and was drawn to the motif of a river winding its way through the dense jungle seen from the sky. Throughout his career, Turnbull was fascinated by aerial views, as well as animals and objects present in the sky after a period of service with the RAF during World War II. 1-1965 carries an abstracted echo of the river's meandering line. An issue of great importance to Turnbull was that the line did not become a fracture in the surface of the painting, but that it functioned as an internal edge – a meeting point of sorts. Turnbull's vertical elements were not designed to separate a painting but to be an element within, contributing to the stillness and integrity of the work.
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In Cloud carefully modulated areas of colour are juxtaposed to create a self-contained universe, resounding with nuances of space, internal movement, and compositional emphasis. The title ‘Cloud’ focuses the viewer’s attention upon atmospheric effects in the painting, with lighter paints layered over dark creating an effect akin to mist or fog.
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Abstract Painting in Britain : 1960–65
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