Euan Uglow Drawings
Cover image: Standing Nude III This page: Study for The Quarry, Pignano
Euan Uglow Drawings
15 January – 1 February 2014
Marlborough Fine Art 6 Albemarle Street London W1S 4BY t: +44 (0) 20 7629 5161 e: mfa@marlboroughfineart.com www.marlboroughfineart.com
Euan Uglow: A Clear Defined Line
As more time elapses since Euan Uglow’s untimely death in 2000, his position as a radical and inventive painter is increasingly widely recognized. Instead of being seen as a mere follower of a reactionary realistic tendency in mid 20th century British painting, his originality has begun to reassert itself and the universality of his work understood. His paintings, with their unusual meeting of classical and romantic, their crisp shapes and flooded colour, come back upon our senses with renewed force. And at the heart of Uglow’s artistic endeavour lies drawing. His drawings are compilations of marks, of dots and dashes: a system which sometimes approaches Morse code in its decisive simplifications, and which at others throws off all constraints and embraces a lyricism both unexpected and rewarding. Precisely measured marks can sit side by side with wristy scribble. Some drawings start with an idea, others are a process of uncovering. Uglow drew to discover the details, weight and shape of a body or object. Many, like the sheet of five parts of figures, are exploratory studies, intended ‘to see what a form is doing’. He would also want to investigate,
from time to time, the look of a body from another angle than the chosen pose. Uglow’s drawings of the model were frequently about situating the figure on the paper after (or in the process of) discovering the proportions of the best rectangle for that drawing. But the rectangle was not a fixed entity from start to finish: it would often change as the drawing developed, just so long as the final rectangle was the one most fitted to the idea and composition. Uglow felt deeply the need to find an ordered shape for his images, and much of his work was involved in that exploration. On the drawings he tended to initial the edges of the final rectangle. ‘That’s to tell the printers, the framers or whoever it is, that this is my decision, not theirs.’ Nevertheless, having seen some of the drawings out of their frames, it’s clear that framers sometimes take liberties with the mounting board and don’t always adhere to the artist’s chosen limits. Uglow also talked of drawing as a way of making intentions manifest: ‘A carpenter making a good joint is drawing beautifully.’ But that did not mean that he saw drawing simply as a craft, for his definition of its centrality extended to imaginative as well as descriptive truth. In the end, his principal aim was to get the painting right, to make it work as a
Andrew Lambirth
conceptual and aesthetic whole, and this sometimes involved breaking his own self-imposed rules. If there was nearly always some dialogue (if not outright conflict) between the perceptual and the conceptual, the aesthetic principle would always have the final say. ‘I draw almost every day’, he said, ‘but I’m not compulsive about it, I don’t draw to pass the time.’ He only ever began a drawing if he had something to say – or something to discover – and ideally liked to have a whole day for drawing, not just snatched moments between other tasks. Presentation drawings for exhibition were made for their own sake, not as studies for paintings. These could be of the figure, still-life or the landscape, but the most usual subject was the female nude. Uglow only very rarely drew men or included them in his imagery, so it is especially interesting to see the early works Two Male Figures and Study for David, both included here. A nude drawing of a girl might go on for as long as six months, with the model posing twice a week. It was Uglow’s habit to ask the model to move around the studio and see what positions she’d naturally fall into or assume, rather than immediately dictate a pose. Inevitably, different girls had different capabilities, which also suggested the compositions they might be able to sustain.
Uglow required much of his models, but gave much back in terms of the beauty he made from them.
Two Male Figures
Study for David
Study for Musicians
Uglow always maintained that he didn’t draw according to a schema, and that his drawing was a risky business, a process of discovery, and that if he got it wrong, he would have to do it again. (Probably after liberal use of an eraser.) On the other hand, he did have a scaffolding or safety net in his measuring marks. ‘Because I’ve got a system of measuring, I can dance all over the drawing’, he said. In some of the sheets can be found holes made by dividers which enabled him to navigate around the surface. These holes and the deeply incised lines that are especially to be found in the earlier drawings (made by repeated marks and the artist getting cross and forceful in his search for certainty) give the underside of these sheets a distinctive texture. For example, in Two Male Figures the point of the pencil is used to articulate the form, in addition to the more usual linear mapping. Uglow literally stabbed the paper, either with the sharpened pencil lead or with dividers. Study for Musicians is marked with thick clusters of dots, in a form of monochrome pointillism. Examining Hefty Nude before it was framed, it was possible to feel the stabbings on the reverse of the paper
like the raised surface of Braille. Uglow was allergic to the word ‘sketching’, and would never even refer to a ‘sketchbook’, preferring always to call it a ‘drawing book’. His friend and sparring partner Patrick George (born 1923) used to tease him mercilessly about this dislike. ‘Done any sketching recently, Euan?’ he would mischievously enquire. ‘I won’t have that word in the studio’, was the angry response. George has thought long and hard about the two activities, sketching and drawing, and what these words mean. After due consideration, he thinks that sketching is suggestive, whereas drawing is definitive. George says of his own work: ‘Now I’m very keen about sketching and I very seldom do drawings.’ Does this throw any light on Uglow’s practice? Uglow evidently required the certainty of drawing in all his earlier work, but it can be said that the later drawings are far more suggestive than definitive. Yet again, his work broke his own rules. Uglow liked to draw with a B pencil with a very sharp point so that he could see the edge as it touched the paper. He tended to press hard, to make ‘a clear defined line’. He drew in both natural and artificial light, deploying his lines in a variety of spatial dispositions, establishing limits, connecting forms and moving from positive to negative as the image demanded.
He encouraged a healthy state of emergency in the studio by painting and drawing models who inevitably changed over time, flowers that withered and shed their petals, fruit that decomposed. There was thus an urgency to their depiction (because of their time sensitivity) that he found stimulating. Threshing in Turkey is full of unusual shapes and receding planes reminiscent of a stage set. The profile of the foreground hillock is like the shoulder and flank of a figure lying on one side almost submerged in water. The successive planes receding into hilly distance are not as spatially convincing as they might be, piling up and converging rather than moving smoothly backwards, yet the drawing is sensitive and beautiful, and rare in Uglow’s oeuvre because of its subject. He painted few landscapes and drew the countryside very little. His renditions of towns are more frequent and more assured. Landscape, Italy is a good example of the Uglow architectural study and bears a strong resemblance to a small painting of Florence formerly in the collection of the artist’s close friend, Craigie Aitchison. In Study for David, the hatching takes the form of thin diagonal lines from right to left, moving into a scribble stroke of greater freedom. (‘I hate the idea of doing formulated shading’.)
Landscape Italy
On the sheet Uglow has made notes to himself: “Sunday week” is jotted down, as are phone numbers (perhaps of models). He was not at all precious about his drawings and very often the paper is crowded with marginalia or calculations. Another nude drawing is more heavily scored, but the lines flow into rather than puncture the paper, and the marks are faster and more expressive. In Reclining nude on mattress, which features an arm depicted with what looks like Hogarth’s celebrated serpentine ‘line of beauty’, Uglow has gone over the lines again and again, impressing the form into the paper. This strategy, which amounts to a kind of shallow bas-relief carving, recalls his teacher William Coldstream’s chief injunction to carve with the paint into the space of the picture plane.
Reclining Nude on Mattress
Three Nudes Sitting
A group of three drawings which seem to date from the mid-1960s explore the dynamics of composition in intriguing ways: Three nudes sitting, Room with seated and reclining figures, and Girl on mattress. What is the relationship, if any, between the sitters? In Room with seated and reclining figures, note the lovely gentle lyrical quality of the mark-making in the seated figure, contrasted with the more angular lying girl. The related Girl on mattress is all about the angles of feet and legs and the elbow pushing out to echo the line of the canted-up mattress.
Another drawing of this period, Armchair, carries a real sense of the body and its weight sunk into the chair, relaxing its muscular tensions to make a new formal whole of figure and furniture.
Room with Seated and Reclining Figures
Girl on Mattress
Nude Seated on Armchair
Compare a much later drawing, Standing Nude, in which the character of the mark-making has changed substantially. Although the earlier control is no longer in evidence, the effort to make a determined mark nevertheless required an exertion both physical and mental/ emotional, and here results in a new lyricism, a new sense of movement. The dots, instead of congregating in the problem or focal areas, are more spread out and dispersed, forming a notation of marks which is less obviously linear and more suggestively volumetric. This febrile late style can also be seen to good effect in Study for the lightest picture in the world, in which Uglow throws out a network of marks like the sparks rising upward from a fire. The later drawings tend to be much less heavily-worked, but then this might be not only to do with the changing character of Uglow’s mark-making but his use of increasingly high quality paper. His pencil moves across the thicker surface rather than penetrating it. Among the subjects are possible early versions of such well-known paintings
as Propeller, Articulation or Potiphar’s Wife, either reversed or not yet in their final arrangements. Ashtray with matchsticks is all about the articulation of pictorial space but has a scale and monumentality to it which makes it look like a landscape with megaliths on the horizon. Portraits are an even greater rarity among the drawings, but Fragment for head may be safely identified as a drawing of Uglow’s friend and erstwhile tutor Claude Rogers, presumably in a hospital bed. Looking at this formidable array of drawings and ways of making marks tell, the viewer is impressed by a sense of searching: the constant urge in Uglow’s work to find a grail. He wanted, above all, to transmit some of the passion he himself felt for the beauty of the world – for how marvellous things look. He wrote: ‘Drawing is the most immediate way of making your ideas, sensations, and information, explicit.’ His ability to make things explicit (but also oddly mysterious) is irrevocably manifest in this exhibition.
List of Works
All works are pencil on paper
1. Landscape Italy 38.1 x 28 cm
12. Nude Sitting on Chair 33 x 25.5 cm
2. Landscape Italy 21 x 26 cm
13. Nude Study Sitting 18 x 13 cm not illustrated
3. Landscape Italy 25.2 x 29 cm 4. Threshing in Turkey 1966 17.5 x 27 cm 5. Standing Nude c. 1960 38 x 28 cm 6. Standing Nude II c. 1960 34 x 28 cm not illustrated 7. Standing Nude III c. 1960 36 x 28 cm 8. Standing Nude from the Back 23 x 22 cm not illustrated 9.
Study for David 38 x 28 cm
10. Two Male Figures c. 1949 23 x 38 cm on reverse: Head and shoulder 11. Study for Musicians c. 1949 18 x 16 cm
14. Skeleton 26 x 20 cm not illustrated
22. Three seated Figures 1965 32.5 x 32.5 cm 23. Nude seated on Armchair 1966 22.5 x 30 cm 24. Figure Studies 39 x 36 cm
15. Hefty Nude 22 x 14 cm not illustrated
25. Nude on a Square 38 x 33 cm not illustrated
16. Mother and Child and two Studies 30.5 x 24.5 cm not illustrated
26. Idea for Painting – Nude with outstretched Arms c. 1983 38 x 53 cm
17. Standing Nude c. 1960 38 x 28 cm not illustrated 18. Art School Model 33 x 31 cm not illustrated 19. Room with seated and reclining Figures 23.5 x 35.5 cm 20. Girl on Mattress 1966 21 x 33.5 cm 21. Nude drawing 28 x 40 cm not illustrated
27. Reclining Nude on Mattress 24 x 34 cm 28. Male Nude lying on Mattress 1961 29.8 x 44.2 cm 29. Nude 1970 18.4 x 28.9 cm 30. Study for Narcissus 22.9 x 31.8 cm 31. Fragment for Head 19.7 x 29.5 cm 32. Standing Nude 22 x 18.5 cm not illustrated
33. Study for Egyptian Spearess c. 1986 21 x 15 cm
44. Study for The Quarry, Pignano c. 1979 24 x 37.5 cm
34. Curve 21 x 34.5 cm
45. Study for Articulation c. 1992 18 x 30 cm not illustrated
35. Standing Nude 22 x 15 cm 36. Sitting Nude 22 x 18 cm 37. Standing Nude 43 x 33 cm 38. Girl, Breast and Head 1972 21 x 33 cm 39. Idea for Painting 21 x 30 cm not illustrated 40. Ashtray with Matchsticks 23.5 x 32 cm 41. Liberty Stool 1986 26 x 35.2 cm 42. Study for The Diagonal 1977 18 x 26 cm 43. Study for Nuria c. 1999 17.5 x 23.8 cm not illustrated
46. Girl on arms and knees 25 x 39 cm 47. Room with Reclining Nude 21 x 25.5 cm 48. Reclining Nude 27 x 40 cm not illustrated 49. Curved Nude c. 1996 21.2 x 30.5 cm inscribed : JANA upper right 50. Study for the Lightest Picture on Earth 1989-93 28 x 26 cm 51. Study for Potiphar’s Wife c. 1998 31 x 45 cm
1. Landscape Italy 38.1 x 28 cm 2. Landscape Italy 21 x 26 cm 3. Landscape Italy 25.2 x 29 cm 4. Threshing in Turkey 1966 25.2 x 29 cm
5. Standing Nude c. 1960 38 x 28 cm 9. Study for David 38 x 28 cm 10. Two Male Figures c. 1949 23 x 38 cm 11. Study for Musicians c. 1949 18 x 16 cm
12. Nude sitting on Chair 33 x 25.5 cm 19. Room with seated and reclining Figures 23.5 x 35.5 cm 20. Girl on Mattress 1966 21 x 33.5 cm 22. Three seated Figures 1965 32.5 x 32.5 cm
23. Nude seated on Armchair 1966 22.5 x 30 cm 24. Figure Studies 39 x 36 cm 26. Idea for Painting – Nude with outstretched Arms c. 1983 38 x 53 cm 27. Reclining Nude on Mattress 24 x 34 cm
28. Male Nude lying on Mattress 1961 29.8 x 44.2 cm 29. Nude 1970 18.4 x 28.9 cm 30. Study for Narcissus 22.9 x 31.8 cm 31. Fragment for Head 19.7 x 29.5 cm
33. Study for Egyptian Spearess c. 1986 21 x 15 cm 34. Curve 21 x 34.5 cm 35. Standing Nude 22 x 15 cm 36. Sitting Nude 22 x 18 cm
37. Standing Nude 43 x 33 cm 38. Girl, Breast and Head 1972 21 x 33 cm 40. Ashtray with Matchsticks 23.5 x 32 cm 41. Liberty Stool 1986 26 x 35.2 cm
42. Study for The Diagonal 1977 18 x 26 cm 44. Study for The Quarry, Pignano c. 1979 24 x 37.5 cm 46. Girl on arms and knees 25 x 39 cm 47. Room with Reclining Nude 21 x 25.5 cm
49. Curved Nude c. 1996 21.2 x 30.5 cm 50. Study for the Lightest Picture on Earth 1989-93 28 x 26 cm 51. Study for Potiphar’s Wife c. 1998 31 x 45 cm
Euan Uglow: 1932 – 2000
1932
Born 10 March in London
1948-50 Attended Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, awarded David Murray Scholarship 1951 Received State Scholarship for the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. First exhibited with the London Group 1952 Received Spanish State Scholarship to work in Segovia, Spain 1953 Awarded Abbey Minor Scholarship, the Prix de Rome. Travelled to France, Holland, Belgium; spent six months in Italy 1954 Did building work and farming as a conscientious objector 1957 Worked in Spain and France. Visited Giacometti with David Sylvester
Biography
1959 Moved to studio in Battersea 1960 Elected member of the London Group 1961 Part-time teaching at the Slade and Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts Second prize in junior section of John Moores exhibition, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 1962 Worked in France and Italy 1963 Worked in Morocco 1968 Worked in Turkey 1970 Won Edwin Austin Abbey Premier Scholarship 1972 Won first prize for the painting Nude, from Twelve Regular Vertical Positions from the Eye, 1967, John Moores 8, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
1972-74 Worked in Italy during the summer months 1976 Worked in Italy 1980 Worked in Cyprus 1983 Worked in Cyprus 1984 Invited by the British Council to visit India for the exhibition The Proper Study, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi 1985 Worked in Cyprus 1987 Invited to teach and work in China 1990-95 Artist Trustee, National Gallery, London 1997 Honorary member of The London Institute 2000 Died 31 August in London
One-Man Exhibitions 1961 Paintings and Drawings, Beaux Arts Gallery, London 1969 Drawings, Gardner Centre, Sussex University, Brighton 1974 Euan Uglow, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London Euan Uglow: Drawings, Colnaghi, London 1977 Euan Uglow: Recent Paintings and Drawings, Browse & Darby, London 1983 Euan Uglow: Paintings and Drawings, Browse & Darby, London 1989 Euan Uglow: Euan Uglow’s Nudes, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London Euan Uglow: Drawings, Browse & Darby, London
1991 Euan Uglow: Ideas, 1952-1991, Browse & Darby, London 1993 Euan Uglow, Salander O’Reilly Gallery, New York, in association with Browse & Darby 1997 Euan Uglow, Browse & Darby, London 1999 Euan Uglow: Drawings, Browse & Darby, London 2001 Euan Uglow: Night Paintings, Browse & Darby, London 2002-3 Euan Uglow, Bury St. Edmunds Art Gallery, and tour (Arts Council Spotlight exhibition) 2003 Euan Uglow: A Retrospective, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria Euan Uglow: Drawings, Browse & Darby, London
2006-7 Euan Uglow – A personal choice by Craigie Aitchison, The Holburne Museum of Art, Bath, 14 October 2006 – 28 January 2007 2007 Euan Uglow Paintings and drawings from the estate, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 16 May -15 June 2007 Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, Catalogue Raisonné by Catherine Lampert with essays by Richard Kendall and Catherine Lampert, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2007
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Design: Shine Design, London Print: Impress Print Services Ltd. Photography: Frances Ware, Georgia Georgallas ISBN-978-1-9099707-03-0 Catalogue no. 631 Back cover: Study for The Diagonal
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Euan Uglow Drawings