Exhibition of the week John Minton: A Centenary

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (01243-774557, www.pallant.org.uk). Until 1 October

In the early 1950s, John Minton was “probably Britain’s most popular artist”, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. His colourful and romantic paintings won over postwar British audiences with their “alluring vision of foreign climes”, and his reputation eclipsed those of his contemporaries Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. How quickly – and in Minton’s case, calamitously – fortunes can change. Within a few years, he found himself out of fashion, unable to come to terms with his “conflicted homosexuality”, and battling with drink and drugs. He died of a possibly self-administered overdose in 1957, aged just 39. Posterity has not been kind. Minton is little remembered these days. His work – if thought of at all – is seen as “reflecting the provincialism of postwar British art”. Now, a century on from his birth, an “atmospheric” new retrospective at Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery aims to reaffirm his status as a “significant artist”. The show brings together a wealth of Minton’s paintings and drawings, alongside some “wonderfully evocative” archive material. This “delightful” exhibition demonstrates that although he spent much of his life in “despair”, Minton’s art abounds with “joie de vivre”.

Minton was an “abundantly gifted draughtsman and graphic artist”, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. A series of drawings of Blitz-ravaged London (drawn after he was invalided out of the Army on medical grounds) are superb, balancing “desolation” with “exhilaration”. Better still are the works he produced after the War. A view across the Thames painted in 1946 makes the capital look like “some magnificent blackened Venice”, while a series of paintings of early1950s Jamaica mark the show’s “apogee”. They are full of “frozen figures”, “blue-edged in the Caribbean streetlight”. From here on, however, it was all downhill. By the mid-1950s, Minton’s style was deemed obsolete compared with the newly fashionable abstract art coming out of the US. He went into a downturn, “losing his grasp” and producing lacklustre images.

Far from it, said Richard Cork in the FT. The “most poignant” picture here is Composition: The Death of James Dean (1957), an unfinished painting created shortly before Minton’s death. The body of the film star, whom the artist adored, is surrounded by “mourning figures” who themselves seem to be “fading away”, “as if acknowledging not only Dean’s death but also the imminence of Minton’s own”. This “fascinating” exhibition only underlines “just how much was lost” with his tragic demise.