BG 99
PATRICK HERON
Headingly, Leeds 1920 – 1999 Zennor
The Jardinière : 1948
Signed and dated ‘48
Canvas: 30 x 25 in / 76.2 x 63.5 cm
Framed size: 39 ½ x 34 ½ in / 100.3 x 87.6 cm
In its original frame
Provenance:
The Redfern Gallery, London, 4th December 1948
Toulmin family, then by descent
Exhibited:
Wakefield, Wakefield City Art Gallery, Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Patrick Heron, 5th April – 3rd May 1952, no.38: this exhibition travelled to Leeds, Leeds University (10th May – 24th May), Halifax, Bankfield Museum (31st May – 28th June), Scarborough, Scarborough Art Gallery (19th July – 10th August), Hull, The Ferens Art Gallery (30th Aug – 21st September)
Literature:
Vivien Knight (ed.), Patrick Heron, Lund Humphries, London, 1988, no.7, illustrated
Though the title The Jardinière : 1948 refers to the ornamental plant stand in the foreground, this picture belongs to a series of works Heron painted from the mid 1940s to 1950s on the theme of interiors and windows. ‘The feeling of a sort of marriage of indoor and outdoor space, through the aperture of the window frame, itself roughly rectilinear and parallel to the picture surface, was really the main theme of all my paintings – or nearly all – between 1945 and 1955’ (Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, Phaidon Press London and New York, 1994, p.74). Rather than revealing a dramatic view of the Cornish coast, the window in the present work seems to emit a bright, hazy green light, perhaps reflecting the tones of a garden outside punctuated by railings[1]. The light green of the windows is also picked up in the foliage of the indoor plants, in particular the zigzagged stem of the central plant and the outline of its leaves, which seem to be executed in the same deep blue as their pots and framing curtains/paneling. Underneath the window and behind the plant stand is a large area of rusty red paint, which could be a wall, as it shows three bright red diamonds in a row following the line of the ledge. However, it could also be the floor, being shaded in spaces between the bars of the stand. The restless linear rhythm of the jardinière which overlaps the white stripes of light falling onto the window-ledge, as well as the three upright plants which seem to dissolve and reappear both in and outside the window, cause the eye to continually re-adjust to ‘the contrast of recessional illusion and decorative flatness, pictorial space and surface pattern’ (ibid., p.67)[2].
At this decisive point in his career, Heron had developed not only his own voice as an art critic/historian, but also his own distinct visual language in painting. Writing of the inspiration behind his stylistic advances at this time, Heron described how, ‘it was largely based on the French masters I so admired, and which I was alone (with William Scott) in England, let alone Cornwall, in being influenced by at that time…From Braque came the idea of the ‘transparency’ of the objects…On the other hand, the nature of my charcoal drawing is far removed from Braque; for instance, there is not a single rigidly straight line, nor a pure arc or circle; in their lose and speedy linearity these charcoal grids are, therefore, if anything, nearer Matisse – though I would have thought they are perhaps personal and rather English’ (ibid., pp.74-5).
The importance of Matisse and in particular The Red Studio (Museum of Modern, New York), which Heron frequently visited while it was on display at the Redfern Gallery, London in 1943 and declared to be ‘the most influential single painting in my entire career’, can be seen in the transparency of the leaves and plant pots, the ambiguity of perspective, the compositional rhythm and creation of space in planes of pure colour. Though Heron fully acknowledged the importance of significant French masters, these key influences were fully integrated into a style undeniably his own.
Writing four years after the present work was painted, Basil Taylor recognized the originality of the artist’s recent work and the importance of his devotion to colour and form. ‘In Heron’s pictures until recently, a lamp, a figure, a flower meant the erection of a screen, an opaque area of blue or pink or yellow pigment, obscuring the forms or spaces which lay behind it as the objects themselves did in nature. Now those screens are dissolving, the objects are defined not by screens of colour controlled by a contour, but by an open skeleton of lines which reveal the forms and articulate the design in a different, more penetrating way. The screens of colour have not disappeared entirely, any more than opaque surfaces will vanish from architecture, but they are no more the basis of the composition. These pictures seem to me remarkable both in their spaciousness and in their lucid description of space’ (Basil Taylor, Introduction, Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Patrick Heron, exhibition catalogue, Wakefield City Art Gallery, 1952).
PATRICK HERON
Headingly, Leeds 1920 – 1999 Zennor
Although Heron was born at Headingly, Leeds, much of his childhood was spent in West Cornwall. His father was a manufacturer who founded Cresta Silks and employed such artists as Paul Nash, Cedric Morris and McKnight Kauffer. Heron studied part-time at the Slade School of Art between 1937 and 1939, and during the Second World War, as a conscientious objector, he worked as a farm labourer and later as an assistant in the Bernard Leach Potter, St Ives from 1944-1945, where he met Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and many other leading artists of the St Ives School. Considerably influenced by Braque and Matisse, his early figurative works included interiors, landscape and still lifes. During this period Heron was also an influential art critic, writing for the New English Weekly from 1945-1947, New Statesman and Nation from 1947-1950, the London correspondent for Arts, New York, from 1955 to 1958, and published his important book The Changing Forms of Art in 1955.
It was not until 1956 that Heron took up abstraction, inspired by the first exhibition of American Abstract Expressionism at the Tate Gallery that year. This change to abstraction coincided with his move to Eagles Nest, Zennor, and the following year he exhibited his first stripe paintings at the Redfern Gallery in a group exhibition entitled ‘Metavisual, Techiste, Abstract’. In 1958, he moved to Ben Nicholson’s former studio at Porthmeor and began to introduce the shapes that were to characterise his paintings of the 1960s and 1970s; many of the sharp-edged shapes are reminiscent of the aged Cornish coastline, while the rounded shapes recall the granite boulders in his garden. During the 1980s, Heron returned to a looser compositional format with scumbled surfaces but retained his interest in vibrant colour.
Heron won the Grand Prize at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1959 and a silver medal at the Sao Paolo Bienal in 1965. He had retrospective exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1972 and at the Barbican Art Gallery in 1985; the same year he was included in the St Ives Exhibition at the Tate Gallery. He was created a CBE in 1977 and became a Trustee of the Tate Gallery in 1980. He died peacefully at his home in Zennor, Cornwall, in March 1999 at the age of 79.