Grand fields of colour
A major retrospective prompts Ruth Guilding to reflect on the career of an artist critic who created his own brand
My main interest, in my painting, has always been in colour, space and light,’ wrote Patrick Heron in 1958. These were the values governing his art, but the business of being an artist was what drove him. This retrospective, which has moved to Margate from Tate St Ives, places Heron among the most significant and innovative figures in postwar abstract British art, although without quite acknowledging the insider knowledge and selfpromotion that took him there.
Heron was born into an arty, left-leaning family and moved as a child to Cornwall, where his father managed a company printing silk scarves and textiles, for which his precocious son was designing aged only 14. After a spell at the Slade and then working out the last years of the Second World War as a conscientious objector in Bernard Leach’s St Ives pottery, he married and returned to live in Cornwall in the 1950s.
Despite his art-school training and still-lifes and landscapes painted in the manner of Matisse and Bonnard, his first career was as a critic. He would write thousands of words, comprising art theory and personal manifestos, as well as reviewing, broadcasting for the BBC and sitting on public committees concerned with the business of art.
During the 1950s, a second generation of artists, including Terry Frost, Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton, were working in St Ives. The art world, meanwhile, was investing its money and faith in the American market, where Abstract Expressionist painters such as Rothko and Jackson Pollock were painting big, exciting, high-status pictures for big bucks. Heron ‘got’ this and, by 1953, was opining: ‘The picture is not the vehicle of meaning: the picture is the meaning.’ As he surveyed the art scene,
his understanding of what was wanted from a ‘modern’ painter became ever more sophisticated.
Up until 1955, he was still hedging his bets over Abstraction. Heron called himself an ‘abstract-figurative’, yet his paintings—scribbled networks of lines in a flat, Cubist-inspired picture space—were backward-looking by comparison with what Frost and Nicholson were doing.
In 1955, he bought Eagle’s Nest, the house near Zennor high above the sea where he had spent a winter as a child, and made vivid tachiste paintings of the boulder-strewn garden there. Then, between 1956 and 1959, the Tate held two major shows of American art and it became clear that the tide of opinion had turned.
Heron now painted his first wholly abstract work, Horizontals: March 1957, following it with more ‘horizon’ stripe paintings made in the large studio above Porthmeor beach that had been Ben Nicholson’s. The following year, he conducted the visiting American artist Mark Rothko around St Ives.
By the early 1960s, Heron had arrived at his signature style, using his early experiments designing textiles and his knowledge of contemporary fashion tones to harness colour, shape and contrast on a grander, simpler scale. His writings were increasingly directed towards preparing the market for the St Ives School or—in the case of his formal manifesto, A Note on my Painting: 1962—for his own oeuvre. Cadmium with Violet, Scarlet, Emerald, Lemon and Venetian: 1969, an expanse of four tones of red with a shy corner edged in green, demonstrates his growing ambition and self-confidence.
When the critics didn’t say what he wanted, he said it himself, developing a theory of ‘edge consciousness’ and calling himself a ‘wobbly, hard-edge painter’. He understood how light worked on the retina and calculated how to create equilibrium in his colour relations and formal equality across his canvases. In emulation of Jackson Pollock’s lively gestural brushwork, he laboriously filled in yards of canvas with tiny watercolour brushes so as to register expressive markmaking in every scrap.
None of this means that he was not an outstanding, innovative —or even a ‘great’—painter. This show, with its huge, sensual colour-field paintings such as Mainly Ultramarine and Vene
tian: November 1966, which drown our senses and ping on the eyeball, is a contemplative delight.
However, Heron was someone who set out to become a major cultural influencer and he knew exactly how to go about this. Exhibiting works alongside his self-penned commentaries fails to convey that successful artists are rarely spontaneous ‘geniuses’, but aesthetically tuned grafters with the killer instinct, ego and eye for success.
‘Patrick Heron’ is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, Kent until January 6, 2019 (01843 233000; www.turnercontem porary.org)
Next week Vuillard at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts