Patrick Heron

By Andrew Wilson and Sara Matson

Published to accompany the first major Patrick Heron retrospective in two decades, this book will feature the best of Heron’s paintings, from the 1940s to his late career, alongside thought-provoking text.

Patrick Heron (1920–99) held a unique position in twentieth-century art. As one of the first British artists to embrace abstraction, he played a major role in the development of postwar art. Heron welcomed the eruption of American art in the 1950s and was strongly affected by his first encounters with abstract expressionism yet European artists such as Matisse, Bonnard and Braque remained a fundamental influence on his work. This dialogue was played out in paintings that pursued the ideal of an art as pure visual sensation.

This illuminating publication will range from Heron’s paintings of the 1940s to his late career, showing the full evolution of his vibrant abstract language and offering a unique opportunity to explore the extent of this modern master’s sense of scale, colour and composition. Reflective analysis will introduce and explain Heron’s visual strategies including themes on autonomy, formal equality, edge consciousness, scale and asymmetry. This unique approach allows Heron’s practice to be reviewed from an entirely fresh perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Oct 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781911624615

Andrew Wilson

Andrew Wilson is an award-winning journalist and author. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications including the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Sunday Times, and the Smithsonian Magazine. He is the author of four acclaimed biographies, a book about the survivors of the Titanic, and the novels The Lying Tongue, A Talent for Murder, A Different Kind of Evil, and Death in a Desert Land.

Book preview

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Andrew Wilson

Unity of the Total Work

The Painting’s Edges

Explicit Scale

Asymmetry and Recomplication

What Is Seen

Robert Holyhead

Heron and French Modernism

Éric de Chassey

Heron and American-type Painting

Andrew Wilson

‘A Note on my Painting : 1962’

Sara Matson

Heron’s Paintings of the 1980s and 1990s

Sarah Martin

Heron’s Shapes

Matthew Collings

Chronology

Notes

Selected Bibliography

List of Works

Index

Foreword

It is with enormous pleasure that we present a major exhibition of Patrick Heron’s painting, which will be on display through the summer months of 2018 at Tate St Ives, followed by an autumn showing at Turner Contemporary in Margate. From its position on the Cornish coast, the town of St Ives looks across the Atlantic Ocean in the direction of America; in Kent, the outlook from Margate is across the very different water and sky of the English Channel towards France. Heron’s painting – like much painting of the 1950s and 1960s – communicates his responses to the twin poles of Atlantic and European culture. How this affected his work is explored both in the exhibition and the publication.

This exhibition has been long awaited. The last major survey of Heron’s painting was his 1998 retrospective held at the Tate Gallery in London the year before his death, and there has not been a presentation in a public gallery since the 2001 St Ives exhibition of his Early and Late Garden Paintings. We are delighted that a new generation can now encounter Heron’s vision of a painting built from colour. It would have been impossible to conceive such an important exhibition without the support and guidance of Heron’s family and, in particular, his daughters Katharine and Susanna, as well his son-in-law, the architect Julian Feary. We greatly appreciate the time, care and generosity they have given to this project. Their characteristically committed involvement and their trust in our desire to present Patrick’s paintings to a new audience has been inspirational. We also acknowledge the kind support provided by Waddington Custot: Heron has been represented by Waddington Galleries continuously since 1958, with a close, affectionate relationship with Leslie Waddington and his family. Stéphane Custot has remained dedicated to Heron’s work. We would like to thank him and his dedicated staff. We are extremely grateful to Lord David Thomson for his encouragement from the very outset of the project. His deep respect for and insight into Heron’s art was so important over the last decade of the artist’s life and an exhibition such as this would not have been possible without his close participation.

Of course, we could not have realised this ambitious undertaking without the generosity of our lenders who have so kindly agreed to be parted from the works in their care: thank you to the Government Art Collection and its director Penny Johnson as well as the private collectors, including Frank Cohen, Giles Heron, and Katharine and Susanna Heron. For help in locating loans as well as for their careful advice we are especially grateful to Barbara Adams, John Austin, David Cohen, Sam Fogg, David Franklin, Michelle Gower, Peter and Renate Nahum, Timothy Prus, Frances Christie and Simon Hucker at Sotheby’s, Kathleen Bartels at the Vancouver Art Gallery, David Ward and Offer Waterman. We are also indebted for the assistance and encouragement given to us by the Patrick Heron Exhibition Supporters Group.

The scope and focus of the exhibition has been devised over the last five years by Andrew Wilson, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art, and Archives at Tate Britain. With the support and wise counsel of Sir Nicholas Serota, previously Director of Tate and that of successive artistic directors at Tate St Ives – Martin Clark, Sam Thorne and now Anne Barlow alongside Mark Osterfield, Executive Director – the show has been finally realised for the first summer season in Tate St Ives’ expansive new gallery designed by Jamie Fobert Architects. The exhibition, however, could not have been achieved without the contribution of a wide range of staff in both St Ives and London, and at Turner Contemporary in Margate – all of whom have our sincere thanks.

Andrew has had a long relationship with Heron and his work, dating back to the early 1990s: we offer our deepest gratitude to him for using this expertise to frame Heron’s work in a new way, and to Sara Matson, Curator at Tate St Ives and Sarah Martin, Head of Exhibitions at Turner Contemporary for their creative input during the process of developing the exhibition alongside him. They have been aided at Tate St Ives by Helen Bent, Tate St Ives Registrar, Ross Peakall, Senior Technician and George Kennedy, Melanie Stidolph and Rachel Woodhead, Learning Curators. Mary Bustin and Tate colleagues Helen Brett and Katey Twitchett-Young have overseen the preparation and conservation of the works. At Turner Contemporary many people have been involved in the realisation of the exhibition, and especially Andrew Shedden, Gallery, Technical and Security Manager, and Clare Warren, Programme Co-ordinator. A symposium on Patrick Heron is planned at Turner Contemporary in November 2018 and we are grateful to the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for its support for this.

We would like to recognise the contributors to the publication for their new texts, which each bring fresh perspectives to the artist’s work and re-assert the enduring significance of abstract painting to contemporary artists and audiences. We are also very grateful to Judith Severne at Tate Publishing who has expertly co-ordinated the development and production of the book, together with her colleagues Juliette Dupire and Roz Hill; the elegant design is by Adam Brown. This book has been co-published with Pavilion, and we thank Polly Powell, as well as John Stachiewicz and Jane Ace at Tate Publishing, for nurturing this relationship.

Heron’s painting is about being in the world and encountering it in a profoundly visual way. The experiences of his reality were then harnessed into the more specific pictorial reality of paintings contained within the four edges of the canvas. Following Heron’s own path, the exhibition adopts the same direct approach: it is about looking at our surroundings and correspondingly looking at and in Heron’s painting. Writing in 1956, Heron exclaimed that ‘seeing is not a passive but an active operation’. For him, such visual experiences are emotional and sensual, leading him to explain not long before his death that ‘looking at something – anything – is more interesting than doing anything else, ever’.

Anne Barlow

Director, Tate St Ives

Victoria Pomery

Director, Turner Contemporary

Illustration

Detail from Complex Greens, Reds and Orange : July 1976 – January 1977 (p.47)

Introduction

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Andrew Wilson

The true painter lives in his painted surfaces … The glory of the pictorial art lies not in any poetry which it may or may not transmit: but rather in the final or absolute experience of formal grandeur, of that contrapuntal play of form upon form, colour upon colour, flatness upon flatness, depth of space upon depth of space. These are the physical realities of painting.1

When Heron wrote these words in 1953 about the work of Graham Sutherland he was three years away from becoming an abstract painter. In one crucial respect, however, he had been taking an abstract approach since the 1940s. His standpoint as an artist was built on formalism, in which the most important aspect of a work of art is its form – the way it is made and its purely visual aspects – rather than its narrative content or its direct relationship to the visible world. Heron’s aesthetic outlook was derived, most especially, from the writing of the critic and painter Roger Fry, who had first developed these theories. In essays collected in his book Vision and Design (1920), Fry offered an account of the artist’s transformation of a visual reality into the pictorial reality of the painted surface. He argued that the apparent distortion of appearances found in contemporary representation was a result of a painter’s vision being both ‘more intense and more detached’; this described the work of artists ‘entirely absorbed in apprehending the relation of forms and colour to one another, as they cohere within the object’ in ways that demand ‘the most complete detachment from any of the meanings and implications of appearances’.2 In such a state of formal absorption (but a detachment from appearance), a painting might be seen to be abstract as a result of the use of areas of flat colour, yet still be figurative in terms of what that flat colour represented. In terms of Heron’s ‘true painter’, the pictorial reality – a play of form, colour, space knitted together in a given composition – had been extracted from a visual reality that provided one subject for the work. However, whether the abstract form underpinned this subject, or conversely whether the motif – such as a still life – provided the necessary armature for the otherwise abstract marks, might indicate the degree to which the painting was conceived as autonomous, detached from the world. Thus in 1956 Heron wrote of Paul Cézanne that he ‘arrived at the abstract through (or in) the figurative, just as he arrived at the universal (i.e. the nature of form, of space, of light) through the particular (i.e. ginger jars and mountains near Aix-en-Provence)’.3

Illustration

Red Painting : April 1956 127 × 101.6

Indeed, at this pivotal moment of change in his own work between 1955 and 1956, Heron believed that his new abstract painting promised an untried type of figuration and in a 1955 text, ‘Art Is Autonomous’, he outlined the essence of his beliefs as an artist. He explained there that ‘Art is, and always has been, a formal invention’ and outlined the two current tendencies of art, the ‘abstract-figurative’ and the ‘non-figurative’. He allied himself with the former, admitting ‘an irrepressible desire to comment upon that visual reality which my eyes actually encounter every day … Although I am convinced that it is the underlying abstraction in a painting which gives that painting its quality, its life and its truth … I believe in abstract-figuration.’4

In a statement on his own painting from January 1957 Heron says of his abstract paintings – such as Camellia Garden : March 1956 (p.53) or Red Painting : April 1956 – that they are very close to his figurative paintings ‘but they lack the linear grid of figurative drawing. This has freed me to deal more directly and inventively … with every single aspect of the painting that is purely pictorial.’ Heron then goes on to identify those expressly formal aspects of picture making that his new approach has enabled him to concentrate on – freed from ‘figurative drawing’:

The architecture of the canvas, the spatial interrelation of each and every touch (or stroke, or bar) of colour, the colour-character, the paint-character of a painting – all these I now explore with a sense of freedom quite denied me while I still had to keep half an eye on a ‘subject’. Just what it is in such pictures that one comes to regard as their ‘content’ (and it is an unmistakable entity) is certainly mysterious. But its mystery does not invalidate its reality: quite the contrary, in fact. Thus exclusive concentration upon the palpable facts of colour and form and spatial illusion does not oust, but actually introduces, the essential element of the mysterious.5

In this sense Heron’s abstraction was not the result of a simplification of figurative mark-making to become abstract, but rather a concentration on the formal or compositional aspects of his painting that had always been and remained present, but were now relieved of that element (identified by Heron as ‘drawing’) that directly communicated a specific figurative subject. My view of Heron’s painting is drawn from this standpoint; that the character of his painting throughout his life was utterly consistent – as he himself admitted in 1956 with the statement ‘I am committed to formal consistency, I must confess’.6 This book and the exhibition it accompanies aim to draw this out by isolating these aspects of his painting, making this clearer through the juxtaposition of paintings of different periods. This also encourages a way of looking – looking both at the world and looking at painting – that will reveal Heron’s abstraction to be rooted in immediate and tangible experience.

Born in 1920, Heron had grown up in an environment in which Bloomsbury aesthetics of formalism – from Clive Bell’s notion of ‘significant form’ to Fry’s ‘plastic colour’ and ‘disinterested and contemplative imagination’ – held sway.7 However, for Heron, issues of formalism and abstraction were initially interchangeable, and this underwrites his account of the changes his own painting went through in the mid 1950s. When, in 1947, for instance, he equated abstraction with the structure of Pierre Bonnard’s paintings – where ‘the abstract music of interacting form-colour’ bore ‘reference at every point to particular substance’8 – he is describing a formalist response to the pictorial image where abstraction is still registered in terms of a rhythm (or ‘form-colour’) extracted from the motif. The meaning of the painting did not reside in its representational motif but in the formal values that could be invested through the act of painting. In Heron’s painting, colour rarely marks something out, or delineates an object or a space; instead colour describes shape (a ‘colour-shape’) and so induces an identification of space. Thus even a line becomes a shape.

The connection with visual reality – what Heron saw around him, what his eyes alighted on – was not realised at a descriptive level but instead pictorially through the creation of, in Fry’s words, an ‘abstract language of form’ triggered intuitively.9 In 1951, Heron outlined how this might occur as he described the genesis of one painting from looking through a window out across St Ives Bay and