Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum, Blast to Freeze: British Art in the 20th Century, September 2002 - January 2003, not numbered: this exhibition travelled to Toulouse, Les Abattoirs, February - May 2003.
London, Osborne Samuel, William Scott and Friends, June - July 2013, exhibition not numbered.
Literature
Letter from Janet Axten, secretary to Patrick Heron, to Robert Scott, 28 September 1998.
H.M. Hughes and G. van Tuyl, exhibition catalogue, Blast to Freeze: British Art in the 20th Century, Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum, 2002, p. 149, pl. 100.
Exhibition catalogue, William Scott and Friends, London, Osborne Samuel, 2013, pp. 46-47, not numbered, illustrated.
Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by William Scott in 1957.
Mary Scott, and by descent.
Notes
It was characteristic of Patrick Heron for most of his artistic life to work in explosive bursts of prolific activity, often preceded by agonising procrastinations. Red Verticals: March 1957 (a title given to the painting by Patrick Heron some years later) was painted during a furry of intense creativity, after a period of artistic inactivity through the summer and autumn of 1956, during which he had concentrated on the heavy work required to reshape the remarkable garden of Eagles Nest. This had been the Herons first year of living through all the seasons’ changes of weather, light and colour in the house and garden – ‘surely the windiest garden in Britain’ - high on a promontory above the cathedral cliffs and gleaming sea at Zennor. It was to have profound implications for his art: ‘This is a landscape which has altered my life,’ he wrote; the house in its setting is the source of all my painting’.
Heron was, however, thinking deeply at this time about the exciting new direction in his art, away from the Braquean free line and arbitrary colour of his quasi-figurative paintings of the early ‘50s towards a pure colour abstraction. His elimination of the linear grid of figurative drawing, he wrote in January 1957 ‘has freed me to deal more directly and inventively (I hope) with every single aspect of the painting that is purely pictorial, i.e. 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 of these I now explore with a sense of freedom quite denied me while I still had to keep half an eye on a “subject”’.
The first outcome of this impulse to abstraction were the so-called ‘Garden Paintings’ of the Spring of 1956, which had something of what the artist had observed in late Bonnard, an all-over distribution of pictorial emphasis, what Heron had called an ‘abstract music of interacting form-colour’ that related nonetheless directly to the perceived things of the phenomenal world (in Heron’s case, the azaleas, camellias, the morning mist in the garden, a granite wall face). The paintings of March 1957, however, of which Red Verticals: March 1957 is a brilliant example, effected a new extremism of formal manner, an escape from external appearances altogether, from any allusion to things seen. It was the painting itself that presented to the eye a new thing to see, to look at, to contemplate: it was its own phenomenon. From now on Heron was walking, on his own, what Matisse had called ‘the path of colour’: colour freed of descriptive function. ‘Colour’ wrote Matisse, ‘exists in itself, has its own beauty’.
Red Verticals: March 1957 is characterised (as are all the other paintings from this decisive moment) by an absolute directness of address to the viewer, an immediate disclosure of its own facture, a thrilling lack of disguise. We are struck by the spontaneous dramatic succession of downward strokes across a rarely visible translucent scarlet wash, from left to right, from a strange floating compression of dark opacities, a middle passage of tonal reds, like curtains that do not quite reach the lower edge, a complication of dark verticals to the right of centre, arbitrarily smeared by an attention-seeking thin downward slick of opaque white, until the movement is temporarily stopped by a dark red top-to-bottom bar. Crossing this, the eye is entranced by gradations of light and shadow and a final bright scarlet translucency. Tracking back it seeks gaps through which might be glimpsed the horizon that the format implies. Its expectations are confounded. Colour here is its own thing. It imitates nothing: it is a marvellous material correlative for light and shadow; for colour and tone are precipitates of light and shade, the complex aerial element we inhabit and possess through the eye.
For all their apparent (and actual) spontaneity, and the arbitrary simplicity of their formal programme, the paintings in this famous series are more various and more complicated than the somewhat inaccurate historical description of them as ‘stripe paintings’. The stripe in 1960s art is an enclosed geometrical form, created by sharply defined parallel linear edges, whereas these 1957 paintings of Heron’s are created by complex and soft-edged strokes, applied spontaneously and without a precisely premeditated outcome. Though Heron was by this time aware of New York School abstraction in all its varieties, the creative provenance of the 1957 paintings is European rather than American: they have much in common with the contemporary painterly abstractions of de Staël and Soulages (both greatly admired by Heron the critic).
It was in fact from his friend William Scott, a painter as deeply immersed in modernist French painting as himself, that Heron first heard of the New York painters in 1953. And it was Scott who played a significant role in the creation of the work under consideration. Admiring a painting in Scott’s Chelsea studio, Heron found himself suddenly presented with a similar work on the condition that he painted a picture of the same proportions in exchange. I have no doubt that the outcome pleased Scott by its directness of touch, the quality of sophisticated ‘gaucheness’ of finish that he valued above all in French painting, and which to no small degree gives Red Verticals: March 1957 its extraordinary verve.
References: P. Heron, ‘Pierre Bonnard and Abstraction’ in M. Gooding (ed.), Painter as Critic Patrick Heron: Selected Writings, London, 1998, pp. 19-25.
We are very grateful to Mel Gooding for preparing this catalogue entry.
For details of the William Scott Foundation please see www.williamscott.org
The Estate of Patrick Heron is preparing the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the Artist's work and would like to hear from owners of any works by Patrick Heron, so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue. Please write to The Estate of Patrick Heron, c/o Christie's, Modern British and Irish Art Department, 8 King Street, St. James's, London, SW1Y 6QT.
