Bold, flawed show that dazzles and perplexes
‘It’s difficult to fully focus when your attention is continually yanked from one decade to another’
Exhibition Patrick Heron Tate St Ives ★★★★★
No post-war British artist is more powerfully associated with colour than Patrick Heron. Equally talented as painter and writer, he produced some of the most vibrant and vivacious explorations of Cornish light and colour from his house, Eagle’s Nest, on the rugged coast west of St Ives.
At the same time, he used his position as critic to advocate a Eurocentric view of abstract painting that was in opposition to the then dominant American abstract expressionists. Most crucially, he promoted the work of the brilliant group of young painters gathered in St Ives, including Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton and – not least – himself. Yet, as with all the St Ives artists, I’m tempted to wonder if we slightly over-rate them because of the irresistible appeal of the St Ives legend: the idea of this Cornish fishing-village-cum-seaside-resort as a global centre for modern art. It’s a legend that Heron himself had a large part in creating.
This exhibition provides our first opportunity since Tate Britain’s major retrospective of his work 20 years ago to really assess Heron’s stature, and see how he stands up beside great American rivals such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
The show, however, provides little information about Heron’s life or career, never mind related developments in art and the wider world. Rather than trace his development chronologically – from his early admiration for modern French masters such as Matisse and Braque to abstraction and back to a quasi-figuration – or analyse his work thematically, the curators have taken the bold step of arranging his paintings according to purely visual criteria.
From the tiny painting that Heron considered his first mature work – The
Piano (1943), painted in response to Matisse’s The Red Studio – Heron’s work went through several major phases but, the exhibition argues, his visual concerns remained constant: the predominance of colour as an end in itself; the way the edges of a painting determine its content; symmetry and asymmetry, and so forth.
The essential impression is that every room includes a bit of every period. “Edges”, for example, contains two of Heron’s most powerful paintings: the Braque-influenced Christmas Day, 1951, still discernibly figurative with its dizzying sense of reality fractured and reassembled, and 1969’s Cadmium with Violet, Scarlet, Emerald, Lemon and Venetian, apparently abstract with its improvised organic shapes, which he called “wobbly hard-edge”, rendered in burning-hot, saturated colour. Yet you can sense the atmosphere of the elemental landscape around his house bleeding into these primal forms.
This is the first exhibition of painting in Tate St Ives’s awardwinning new extension, opened last October, and the high ceiling and broad walls make it perfect for showing off Heron’s big, boldly coloured abstract painting. The wide gaps between the dividing screens make it easy to spot how a free-flowing shape in zinging magenta, in a painting from 1955, is echoed on the far side of the adjacent space in one of Heron’s Eighties’ “garden paintings”, in which free-form brush strokes and pastel colours evoke a sense of sub-tropical profusion without doing anything as banal as simply portraying Heron’s gorgeous garden.
For anyone very familiar with Heron’s work, such an associative approach provides a wonderful opportunity to see how themes and motifs vary and recur in a quasi musical fashion over decades. The rest of us, however, may struggle to keep our bearings, or indeed come to any sort of conclusion about the quality of Heron’s output. I’ve always thought that those “wobbly hard-edge” paintings of the Sixties and Seventies were some of the nearest things to a genuinely profound St Ives painting to rival the likes of Pollock and Rothko, while suspecting the garden paintings were a touch lightweight. This exhibition sort of confirms these views, but it’s difficult to fully focus when your attention is continually yanked from one decade to another.
The ahistorical approach, meanwhile, in which nothing is related to its time, means we don’t get to feel how radical these paintings must have seemed in their day. Indeed, some of the works that might have made this point most effectively, such as the wonderful, if blankly titled, Horizontal Stripe Painting, 1957-8 – arguably the best of Heron’s exuberant “stripe paintings” of the late Fifties – have been omitted, and perplexingly so, since many are in Tate’s own collection. The curators presumably feel that “everyone” has already seen them. Well, far from everyone has seen them, and you can always get something new from seeing a great painting in a fresh context.
Don’t let me put you off seeing this original, if somewhat misfiring exhibition. It takes guts to stage a show with no beginning, middle or end, which relies entirely on the visual curiosity of the viewer. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the definitive Patrick Heron exhibition.
Until Sept 30; 01736 796226; tate.org.uk