Peter Lanyon
Soaring beauty from an artistic life cut short
Soaring Flight: Peter Lanyon’s Gliding Paintings
Courtauld Gallery
Peter Lanyon was compelled to push things to extremes. The only one of the so-called St Ives artists who was actually Cornish, he was the most temperamental of this group of young postwar abstract painters that included Patrick Heron, Terry Frost and Roger Hilton, and he was probably the most brilliant. This gem of an exhibition demonstrates the strength of the talent snuffed out by Lanyon’s death in 1964, aged 46.
The paintings, inspired by Lanyon’s obsession with gliding, take us to a single moment towards the end of his troubled career. It is that rare thing, an exhibition of abstract painting with a clearly discernible beginning, middle and – in this case tragic – end.
Born into a wealthy mine-owning family, Lanyon started out obsessed with the earth. His craggy, early semiabstract paintings sought to give a feeling of being simultaneously inside and outside the landscape of the Land’s End peninsular, in the tunnels of the tin and copper miners, and on the granite outcrops above. Wanting to get ever more extreme perspectives on this ancestral landscape, he took to painting on clifftops and high on the moors, until one day in 1956 he saw three gliders soaring over the coastline and realised flying would give him the omniscient vantage point he craved. The first room contains High
Ground (1956), the painting he was doing when he saw those gliders. Inspired by looking down on a pattern of fields at the sea’s edge, there’s a restless immediacy to the scraping and smearing of blacks and yellows, as though Lanyon wants to rub our faces in the earth, while a kind of window of exquisite greenish milky blue could stand for either sea or sky.
But the perspective here is still earthbound. When he finally got up in the air two years later, Lanyon realised that far from being just another way of looking at the earth, the sky was a landscape in its own right, with continual changes in pressure and atmosphere that were generally invisible. The resulting paintings, which fill the main room, aren’t so much about what the earth and sky look like from a glider as what it feels like to hang thousands of feet up on a bank of air or to be sent plunging by a sudden change in temperature.
In Solo Flight (1960), ethereal blue is scraped brutally away, revealing earthy browns, the slithering motion giving an impression of speed or panic, while a framing rectangle, roughly painted in red, represents both the path of Lanyon’s red glider and the visceral human presence.
These are risky paintings. Thermal (1960), painted entirely in liquid blues and whites, conveys the exhilaration of being carried on a sudden upward surge of warm air, while Backing Wind (1961) represents a pocket of “heavy air” with a jagged mass of excremental brown that almost obliterates the pretty pale blue composition beneath.
Lanyon confronted not only the hazards of changing weather in the sky, but his own demons. In Cross
Country (1960), black streaks that might be seen as vapour trails viewed against the sun clearly allude to the Christian cross, while he found a sense of sexual sublimation in the releasing of the glider from the winding winch, which inspired Drift (1961). If these allusions aren’t always apparent, there’s a sense that each painting is trying to push a different moment of feeling and looking to the limits. I can’t think of a British postwar painter who tried to get as many dimensions of experience on to canvas at one time.
While he was seen at the time as a British equivalent to American abstract expressionists such as Pollock and Rothko, these are barely abstract paintings at all. Rather than being entirely concerned with form, colour or space, they’re about living and feeling outside the canvas and a very British preoccupation with landscape and atmosphere that harks back to the experiments of Turner and Constable.
While Lanyon’s death after a gliding accident made him a legendary figure among artists, it cut off a spectacular artistic progress and left him far less well known than he should be. This beautiful exhibition should go some way towards redressing that situation.
Until Jan 17. Tickets and information: courtauld.ac.uk