Warming to Wynter
An undervalued British master is coming back into fashion, says Colin Gleadell
Anyone inspired by the wonderful exhibition of Peter Lanyon’s semi-abstracted “glider” paintings at the Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House (reviewed on these pages yesterday) should go to Jonathan Clark’s gallery in Chelsea next week for an exhibition of paintings from the Fifties and Sixties by Lanyon’s fellow adventurer-painter in post-war St Ives, Bryan Wynter. Though both are rooted in the Cornish landscape and stretch the tradition of landscape painting in similar ways, they end up in fascinatingly different places.
While Lanyon’s glider paintings derive from the artist’s desire to free himself from earthbound constraints by literally taking wing in the clouds, Wynter’s escape from figurative painting came with the help of controlled experiments with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline and underwater diving and filming.
Born 100 years ago to well-to-do parents, and educated at public school in Hertfordshire, Wynter resisted conformity and a comfortable career running his father’s laundry business and went to art school instead. In 1945, he absconded to Cornwall and settled in a remote cottage on the Penwith Moors with no water or electricity.
At that time Wynter’s art displayed an interest in surrealism and the wartime fashion for neo-romanticism in British art. Fashion, however, was never his concern – breaking boundaries was – and by the early Fifties, when this exhibition begins, he is seeing where his readings of Freud and Jung about the psychology of the unconscious could lead him beyond his earlier attachment to surrealism.
The publication in 1954 of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, in which the author described how taking mescaline freed up his vision of reality, proved a turning point – and in 1956 Wynter answered an advertisement to participate in a controlled experiment with the drug in London. From recognisable landscapes, Wynter was now approaching reality, as he said, “from the other side”, breaking down the process of representing reality by making abstract paintings about the mark-making process that goes into painting what is seen.
This breakthrough came just as the first wave of American Abstract Expressionist painting was being shown in London. Wynter and his St Ives contemporaries – Heron, Lanyon, William Scott and Terry Frost – were seen as the closest British equivalent to the dominant trend of AbEx in the international avant garde. But how original were they?
The relationship between the St Ives artists and the Americans, and the issue of who was indebted to whom, has preoccupied artists, art historians and dealers ever since.
For dealers, the issue has immense financial implications. The huge price gap, where a Rothko or Pollock can sell for tens of millions of dollars, while a British equivalent rarely reaches one million, is something the British trade has long been trying to close. For Jonathan Clark, who represents Wynter’s estate, there is also the issue of how Wynter’s market compares with his fellow St Ives artists.
Here, Patrick Heron and William Scott lead the group, with auction records of just over £1 million each, followed by Terry Frost (£313.250), and Peter Lanyon (£262,850) – all artists who travelled to America and hobnobbed with the AbEx painters.
Wynter, who never travelled or had a dealer there, seems comparatively undervalued with a record of £115,250. Yet at the time, he was rated by critics, such as the future director of the Tate Gallery, Alan Bowness, as the most serious British contender to American dominance of the London scene.
Attempts to create comparative price charts over the years fall down because so few of Wynter’s paintings appear at auction – 15 since 2006. But from those that have, average prices, according to the auction database Artnet, have increased from £18,000 in 2004 to £64,000 in 2014, so something must be stirring there.
At Clark’s exhibition, prices range from just £8,000 for an A4-sized painting from 1961, to £80,000 for the largest (almost 7ft high) painting,
Impenetrable Country from 1957. The Sixties paintings inspired by his underwater photographs are priced from £35,500 to £38,000.