Offer Waterman Modern British Art 2016

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Modern British Art



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18, 19 5 41 14 21 8 27 38, 39 4 30 24 13 22, 28, 33 32 3 29 37 26, 40 23 9, 11, 12 6 10 34, 35 25, 31 17 1, 2 7 15, 16, 20, 36 42

Auerbach Barry Bevan Blake Caro Coldstream Coper Freud Gertler Gilbert & George Hepworth Hilton Hockney Hodgkin John Jones Kitaj Kossoff Latham Moore Nash Nicholson Rie Riley Scott Sickert Spencer Turnbull Whiteread

Artists


Walter Richard Sickert  1860 – 1942 A Canal, Venice: Palazzo Montecuccoli  1901 – 4

oil on canvas 18 ⅛ by 15 inches / 46 by 38 cm signed

Collections Mrs Thelma Cazalet-Keir with Austin Desmond, London, 2004 Private Collection, Australia Exhibited London, Thomas Agnew & Sons, Sickert, Centenary Exhibition of Pictures from Private Collections, 14 March – 14 April 1960, cat no.34 Dulwich, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Sickert in Venice, 4 March – 31 May 2009, unnumbered exhibition, illus colour Literature Wendy Baron, Sickert, Paintings and Drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006, pp272 – 273, cat no.174.2, illus b/w

Like many painters before him, Walter Sickert was bewitched by the unique light and landscape of Venice. Between 1896 and 1904, he painted its grand sites and its quiet backwaters by day, at dusk and by night. The view offered in A Canal Venice, with its lush combination of buildings, vegetation and water, as well as the potential it offered to develop a strong, diagonal composition, clearly appealed to Sickert. Two drawings (one squared-up in preparation for painting) and two paintings of this motif survive. Annotations on the squared-up drawing are unusually informative: ‘2 to 3 PM/ from bridge’ in pencil and ‘Montecuccoli/Polignac’ in ink. The latter inscription serves to identify the subject as the Palazzo Contarini dal Zaffo on the Grand Canal, known locally as Palazzo Montecuccoli; the former inscription confirms that Sickert viewed the scene from the Ponte dell’Accademia looking towards Santa Maria della Salute. The Palazzo Montecucccoli, a graceful 15th century building in the style of Pietro Lombardo, was bought by the Princesse de Polignac (1865 – 1943) in September 1900 as a birthday present for her husband. The trees in full leaf indicate that Sickert studied his subject in high summer, almost certainly the summer of 1901. The Princesse de Polignac (née Winnaretta Singer) was one of the 24 children (legitimate and illegitimate) of the American Isaac Merritt Singer, founder of the sewing machine dynasty. Her first marriage failed. Her second, to the Prince de Polignac was a perfect union. Neither partner was heterosexual; both were passionate about music, he as a composer, she as a talented amateur and discerning patron of contemporary music. Proust was among those who attended their musical salons in Paris. Sickert and the Polignacs undoubtedly knew each other. Friends in common included Madeleine Lemaire, Paul Helleu, JacquesEmile Blanche, Baron Adolphe de Meyer and Olga de Caracciolo. However, plans for the couple to move into the Venetian palazzo were aborted when Prince Edmond died in August 1901. The palazzo is still owned by the Polignac family through the descendants of Winnaretta’s sister, Isabelle-Blanche, Duchesse de Decazes. The present painting formerly belonged to Mrs Thelma CazaletKeir (1899 – 1989), distinguished politician and discriminating collector of 20th century British art. She may have bought it from the Leicester Galleries where Palazzo Montecuccoli (Residence of the Princesse de Polignac) was exhibited in Sickert’s big 1929 retrospective at the Leicester Galleries. TEXT BY dr Wendy Baron

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Walter Richard Sickert  1860 – 1942 The Studio: The Painting of a Nude 1906 oil on canvas 29 ⅞ by 19 ¾ inches / 76 by 50 cm signed

Collections Possibly Bernheim Jeune, Paris Morton H. Sands Lt-Col. M. Christopher Sands with Browse and Darby, London, 1987 Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York Private Collection, USA Thence by descent Exhibited Paris, Bernheim Jeune, Exposition Sickert, 10 –  19 January 1907, as Le Grand Miroir, possibly Paris, Bernheim Jeune, Vente de 84 oeuvres de Walter Sickert, 18 – 19 June 1909, as Le Grand Miroir, possibly London, Eldar Gallery, Walter Sickert, January – February 1919, cat no.41, illus as The Studio London, Tate Gallery, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, Arts Council, 18 May – 19 June 1960, cat no.126, illus b/w, touring to: Southampton, City Art Gallery, 2 – 24 July 1960 Bradford, City Art Gallery, 30 July – 20 August 1960 London, Agnews, Sickert, Centenary Exhibition of Pictures from Private Collections, 14 March –  14 April 1960, cat no.61, as The Model Brighton, Royal Pavilion, Sickert, June 1962, cat no.82 as The Model London, Fine Art Society, Sickert, 21 May – 8 June 1973, cat no.68, touring to: Edinburgh, Fine Art Society, 9 – 30 June 1973 Hull, Ferens Art Gallery, Sickert, Arts Council, 17 December 1977 – 28 January 1978, cat no.35, illus, touring to Glasgow and Plymouth London, Royal Academy, British Art in the Twentieth Century: The Modern Movement, 15 January – 5 April 1987, cat no.3, illus colour … Continues on back pages

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The Studio is among Sickert’s most accomplished and audacious figure paintings. Its composition – at first sight straightforward – is in fact of striking sophistication. The entire scene is a mirror image containing within itself a second mirror image. Deconstruction reveals that the surface of the painting is a disguised looking-glass, which the painter is facing; the painter himself, identified by the brazen diagonal of his arm cutting across the canvas, is largely outside the picture; he is standing with his back to the model, whom he is painting as he sees her reflected in the large lookingglass; she, in turn, has her back to an arched mirror (the door of a wardrobe or perhaps a cheval glass) and is thus revealed to the painter and to the spectator in two aspects. The richness and variety of handling here is likewise remarkable. Sickert has marshalled an armoury of brush marks: linear, hatched strokes, broken dabs of impasto, dry scrapes along the contours; contrasting crusty areas of paint with fat, smooth passages. The compromise between thin and thick paint, summary and laboured definition, broadly swept, untidy brushwork and a delicately precise touch, shows masterly control throughout. The confident maturity of this painting has contributed to its misdating. It seemed self-evident that it must be from the climax of the Camden Town period, hence Lillian Browse’s attribution of c.1917. I first revised this date to c.1911 – 12, while noting the small chance it was painted as early as 1906. Having studied the painting repeatedly in the intervening years, I now judge that 1906 is the correct date. If so, there is a strong probability it is Le Grand Miroir, which was shown at Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, in January 1907 and included in the auction arranged by Bernheim in 1909. The low tonality of The Studio accords with the 1906 date and it is clearly contemporary with The Mantelpiece (coll. Southampton Art Gallery). Both are painted on English-size, 30 x 20 inch canvases. Both represent the same interior, featuring an arched mirror with a jacket hanging from its surround. The main subject, a standing nude and her reflection in a full-length looking-glass, features in other paintings and drawings from 1906. The Studio (like The Mantelpiece) is a London subject; if it is indeed Le Grand Miroir, it must have been painted before Sickert’s visit to Paris and as such anticipates the most fruitful period of his career. TEXT BY dr Wendy Baron



Augustus John  1878 – 1961 Mrs Ambrose McEvoy 1907 pencil on paper 15 by 11 inches / 38 by 28 cm signed, dated and dedicated to Ambrose McEvoy Collections Mrs. Ambrose McEvoy Miss E. Doucet Arthur Tooth & Sons, London, 1945 Dudley Tooth Thence by descent Exhibited London, Alex Reid & Lefevre (details untraced) London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, 1945 (details untraced) Leeds, Temple Newsam House, Paintings and Drawings by Augustus John O.M. R.A., 24 July –  31 August 1946, cat no.83 London, Royal Academy of Arts, Diploma Gallery, Exhibition of Works by August John, 13 March – 27 June 1954, cat no.59, illus b/w p17 Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, Augustus John, 25 August – 8 October 1956, cat no.66 London, Upper Grosvenor Galleries, A Loan Exhibition of Drawings and Murals by Augustus John, 1 – 30 April 1965, cat no.56 London, Olympia Fine Art and Antiques Fair, Augustus John, 23 – 28 February 1999, cat no.66 London, Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, Augustus John: Master Works from Private Collections, 29 September – 29 October 2004, illus colour

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John Rothenstein writes of Augustus John, ‘…his portraits are not merely romantic tributes to the elements of greatness he discerns; they rarely suffer from the absence of the critical spirit, or from the complacent touch of personal appropriation that characterises the great Victorians of Watts. John’s portraits are the products of a more sceptical nature and a less reverent age…John, whose sitters are more arbitrarily chosen, portrays the noble qualities in men and women whose natures on balance are as often base as noble.’ 1 The subject of this drawing is Mary McEvoy (née Edwards), an artist and wife of the painter Ambrose McEvoy. Both were students at the Slade, and Mary, who was eight years older than Ambrose, had exhibited at the New English Arts Club between 1900 and 1906, before abandoning painting until after her husband’s death in 1927. Ambrose had studied alongside Augustus and Gwen John at the Slade and, together with William Orpen and Benjamin Evans, they formed a group of talented young artists that were destined for success at the turn of the 20th century. Ambrose McEvoy, like John, was a popular portrait artist and the pair travelled extensively in Europe before sharing a studio at 76 Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia, in 1898. It was, however, with John’s sister Gwen that he shared the closest relationship, marking a brief but dramatic period in both their lives, which ended when McEvoy became engaged to Mary Edwards. John was a master-draughtsman and was regarded as one of the most successful society painters of the past century. This drawing, however, was not a formal commission and instead, on its completion, remained in the McEvoys’ personal collection. The implication of this drawing, a gift between friends, is reflected in the tangible tenderness and intimacy that it displays. John’s portrait is remarkably complete, his soft, slanting strokes wonderfully capturing the light as it falls onto the sitter’s face in a subtle glow. 1  John Rothenstein, Augustus John, Paintings and Drawings, Phaidon, Oxford,   1945, p20



Mark Gertler  1891 – 1939 Study for Portrait of Natalie Denny 1928 pencil and charcoal on paper 22 ½ by 15 inches / 57 by 38 cm signed and dated

Collections with Campbell & Frank Fine Arts, London, October 1978 Edgar Astaire Thence by descent Exhibited London, Piano Nobile, Mark Gertler: Works 1912 –  28, A Tremendous Show of Vitality, 12 October –  16 November 2012, pp70 – 71, cat no.27, illus colour

Mark Gertler met the 18-year-old Natalie Denny at a New Year’s Eve party hosted by Augustus John in 1927 and immediately asked her to sit for him. He produced two oils soon after and this drawing is the study for one of these, Supper, 1928, now in the National Portrait Gallery collection. Denny was a popular and beautiful young woman with six proposals of marriage to her name. Other artists such as Christopher Nevinson were among her admirers and Gertler feared he would not have her as a model for long. Denny first married the writer Lance Sieveking in 1929 and then later Bobby Bevan, an advertising executive and son of the painter Robert Bevan. The Bevans amassed a significant collection of modern art by the Camden Town artists and others such as John Armstrong, Cedric Morris and John Nash. Their collection included the oil of Supper, which hung above the mantelpiece in their sitting room. Here Gertler recreates the glamorous impression he took from their first meeting. Denny sits in her party clothes at a table surrounded by flowers, her youth and beauty equated with her luxurious clothes and the ripe fruit on the table. Sarah MacDougall notes the influence of both French painting and the Camden Town Group on this highly decorative interior. The drawing is rendered very evenly throughout and the figure is completely integrated within her surroundings. The floral cloth hung up behind the sitter also features in the other oil of Denny draped over a chair and adds greatly to the overall sense of pattern. The soft tone of the drawing and its romanticised female figure are reminiscent of Auguste Renoir, who was an influence on Gertler throughout the 1920s. By the end of the decade, however, Gertler had come to consider this style as ‘too refined…too sweet’, declaring, ‘we must have something more brutal today’.1 In the 1930s, Gertler would further simplify and intensify his depictions of the female form. His blocky treatment of the figure and handling of the flesh tones in his portraits of Denny prefigure this later style. 1  Mark Gertler letter to Valentine Dobrée, May 1924, partly reproduced in Mark   Gertler Selected Letters, 1965, pp210 – 211 text Abridged from the catalogue, Mark Gertler, Works 1912 – 1928, Piano Nobile, 2012, curated by Sarah MacDougall, pp70 – 73

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Claude Francis Barry  1883 – 1970 The Grand Fleet: Searchlight Display 1919

oil on canvas 47 ⅝ by 72 inches / 121 by 183 cm signed; also signed twice and indistinctly inscribed on stretcher

Collections Estate of the Artist Private Collection, UK, acquired directly from the above 1985 Exhibited London, Royal Society of British Artists, 1920, cat no.207 Literature The Connoisseur, vol.LVIII, September –  December 1920, p237

The Grand Fleet: Searchlight Display is one of Claude Francis Barry’s most striking wartime works, in which the artist’s interest in Vorticist and Futurist aesthetics is united with his own individual poetic vision. After the outbreak of war in 1914, the artistic community of St Ives, where Barry had been based, was disbanded. Barry did not serve at the front but instead was drafted in to do agricultural labour. As such he was in an ideal position to record the effects of the war at home, and the paintings he produced during this period, such as London and Wartime: Nocturne, 1918, which depicts searchlights blazing across the sky during an airstrike, are some of the most lyrical and accomplished of his career. The present work is directly related to this earlier painting both in style and subject, although here the searchlights are accompanied by fireworks, which illuminate the sky in celebration of the end of the First World War. The location of this scene is Southend, one of the first towns to be hit by German air raids when, on 10th May 1915, a Zeppelin aircraft dropped more than a hundred bombs on the area. In this context, the celebration of victory here would have held a particular resonance, and indeed melancholy, for those who witnessed this momentous occasion. This melancholy is felt in the contemplation of a vast sky, which dominates the composition. Below, only the silhouettes of boats floating out at sea are pictured and, devoid of any human action, there is a certain emptiness to the scene, which reminds us of the immeasurable scale of human loss during the war. The crisscrossing beams of light seem to reference the compositions of Vorticist art and draw our eyes upwards towards the heavens. However, the violence and frenetic energy of much Vorticist art is not present here. Rather, Barry’s handling of paint feels closer to that of Claude Monet’s in his depictions of Charing Cross Bridge, painted between 1899 and 1903. Both present misty, impressionistic landscapes, delighting in the dappled effect of light as it falls across the water, creating strikingly atmospheric and poetic images.

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Paul Nash  1889 – 1946 The Path 1922

oil on canvas 28 ½ by 19 ½ inches / 72.5 by 49.5 cm signed

Collections with Mayor Gallery, London with Leicester Galleries, London J.S. Sykes, acquired 1935 Thence by descent Exhibited London, Leicester Galleries, Watercolours and Drawings by Paul Nash, November 1932, cat no.35 Literature Margot Eates, Paul Nash, The Master of the Image, John Murray, London, 1973, p116 (as Path in a Wood) Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, p377, cat no.336, illus b/w pl.213

Just as Cézanne had used layers to create pictorial depth, here in Path, Paul Nash constructs a series of three horizontal planes, which draw the eye into the landscape. In the foreground, the path is in complete shadow, surrounded by trees dipping their boughs laden with leaves. The path dips over the hill and down to an open area of lush, soft and chalky green meadow. Finally, the path leads back into the overgrown obscurity of the forest, which recedes into the distance of the painting. There exists the possibility here that the path masquerades as another tree in the composition, its end surrounded by a web of luscious green leaves. Indeed, there are other possible readings of Path, as Andrew Causey comments: ‘The triangle in the bottom centre of Nash’s design, pointing upwards into the dry wispy branches, is a stylisation from forms he (Nash) had used to express the idea of penetration in naturalistic paintings of the 1920s, such as Path of 1922 and Savernake of 1927. Now the image is a sexual one, while the earlier pictures share the religious aura of the Places woodengravings Winter Wood and Paths into the Wood.’ 1 Sex, the rebirth of a new world after war and, perhaps, a sprinkle of magical realism are all suggested in this painting, setting up a ‘starting block’ for the forthcoming surrealist canvases of the 1930s. Prior to 1922, Nash had frequently revisited and reimagined the path as a motif: ‘In The Wanderer (1911, coll. British Museum), this path leads to an escape into the woods, whether of the artist himself, or of the traditional wild man. One of his few nudes appear in The Orchard, 1914, welcoming the visitor who follows the path into the wood. This echoes the mood of Paul’s honeymoon holiday with Margaret … as they imagined an escape into nature.’ 2 Nash had been an official war artist. The wartime brutality illustrated in pictures such as Mule Track, 1918 (coll. Imperial War Museum), fundamentally transformed his style from the deliberately formalised works of 1910 – 14. The presence of nature’s regenerative powers here exemplifies the ways in which Nash’s landscapes were to become richer in symbolism, conveying an intense mysticism. 1  Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, p377 2  David Fraser Jenkins, Paul Nash, The Elements, exh. cat., Dulwich Picture Gallery,   London, 2010, p20

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Stanley Spencer  1891 – 1959 Crocus 1938

oil on canvas 8 by 6 inches / 20.2 by 15.2 cm

Collections The Artist Arthur Tooth & Sons, London Viscountess Cawdor, acquired 1938 Arthur Tooth & Sons, London Private Collection, Canada, acquired 1981 Literature Keith Bell, Stanley Spencer: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, Phaidon, London, 1992, p457, cat no.267, illus colour p290

In this glorious little painting, Stanley Spencer depicts a cluster of crocuses springing directly from the ground, their golden-yellow offset by a handful of purple flowers behind. In English gardens, the crocus is one of the earliest flowers to emerge after winter. Sometimes called the lightbulb flower, the Victorians associated the crocus with cheerfulness and the gladness of youth. Spencer clearly revelled in capturing the details of specific plants and foliage. There are detailed depictions of flowers in some of his most important allegorical works, such as The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924 – 6, which has a significant group of flowers at the front of the scene, including lilies (representing death), anemones, hyacinths and chrysanthemums; there are also wild flowers, such as fritillaries and daisies, and a mass of heavenly white roses in the very centre of the painting. In the first panel of his master work, Convoy of Wounded Soldiers Arriving at Beaufort Hospital Gates, 1930 – 1, we see beautifully rendered flowering rhododendron bushes bursting through the gates of the hospital. In another panel, Idea for Riverbed at Todorova, Spencer includes a flower with distinctive spotted leaves in the foreground, which he most likely remembered from his military service in the Balkans. It is clear that Spencer paid particular attention to the plants that surrounded him and that they added a further element of personal feeling to his paintings. In 1938 Spencer painted all manner of flowers, including Hyacinths, Narcissus, Columbines, Poppies and Peonies. Some of these paintings were sold directly to local patrons, who were often keen gardeners themselves, and others were sent up to the Tooth Galleries in London, whose owner, Dudley Tooth, encouraged Spencer to focus on landscapes and other commercial images such as flower paintings. The first owner of this work, Viscountess Cawdor, was herself an ardent gardener and she also bought the paintings Flowering Artichokes, 1936, and Polyanthus, 1938. Keith Bell notes that in the 1930s Spencer adopted a new approach to landscape painting, producing a number of works that were in effect ‘still-lifes in a landscape’. In these new oils, the foreground was often filled with flowers rendered in sharp detail, which related directly to Spencer’s concentration on flower paintings at this time. Note: The paintings referred to are listed in Keith Bell, Stanley    Spencer, Phaidon, London, 1992, cat nos. 116, 130a, 130m,     205 and 256

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William Coldstream  1908 – 1987 Sergeant Major Bellani, Italian Prisoner of War  c. 1945

oil on canvas 36 by 25 ½ inches / 91.4 by 64.8 cm Collections The Artist John Rake, c 1945 Mrs C. B. Canning, gifted from the above Private Collection, UK Exhibited London, South London Art Gallery, William Coldstream, Arts Council, 27 April – 26 May 1962, cat no.41, illus b/w, pl.21, touring to: Leeds, University of Leeds, 9 June – 30 June 1962 Bristol, City Art Gallery, 7 July – 28 July 1962 Swansea, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, 4 August –  25 August 1962 Southampton, City Art Gallery, 1 September –  22 September 1962 Birmingham, City Museum and Art Gallery, 29 September – 20 October 1962 Literature Bruce Laughton, William Coldstream, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2004, pp120 – 121, illus b/w fig.63

William Coldstream was appointed an official war artist in 1943. He travelled with the army through campaigns both in Egypt, where he produced a series of notable portraits of Sikh soldiers from Indian regiments, and then Italy. After his return to Britain in 1945, his friend John Rake – a doctor and amateur artist – arranged sittings with servicemen at army camps within his own practice, in order that Coldstream might fulfil his commitments to the War Office. As opposed to more typical subjects, commonly higher-ranking officers or generals, Rake proposed portraits of a Jamaican airman and an Italian former prisoner of war (now technically an ally) named Sergeant Major Bellani. The present work was painted at Dr Rake’s family home in Shenington, Oxfordshire where Coldstream was a regular visitor and where he stayed for the duration of his work on the painting. Bellani, taking advantage of his new freedom, was able to cycle the five miles from Horley Camp near Banbury for each of his sittings. The first of these took place on 17 September 1945; work progressed over 24 sittings until 29 November, when the process was brought to an enforced end by Bellani’s repatriation. During the course of the war, Coldstream’s painting had matured and grown more responsive to colour, as one may see in the warm greens of the Italian officer’s greatcoat. And unlike his Egyptian desert landscapes, where he had been forced, grudgingly, to use white and lighten his tonal palette, here Coldstream maintains the severe discipline with which he had worked since his return to painting in 1937: a gradual, progressively downward darkening of tones across an undifferentiated visual field, and delicate transcriptions of local colour measured at regular intervals, vertically and horizontally, to create an impartial grid of isolated, but very precise, notations. The scrupulous detachment that informed Coldstream’s passive gaze might today be compared to the pixelated grids of digitally produced photographic images, aspiring to create a pure transcription of what is seen, undiluted and undirected. In an interview in 1937 he said, ‘I find I lose interest unless I let myself be ruled by what I see.’ 1 1  William Coldstream quoted in ‘How I Paint’, The Listener, 15 September 1937,   pp 570 – 22, reproduced in William Coldstream, Arts Council, 1962, p7

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Henry Moore  1898 – 1986 Stringed Figure 1939

bronze with red string length 8 inches / 20.5 cm inscribed Moore and numbered ⅛, cast in 1968

Collections Marlborough Galerie AG, Zurich Private Collection, USA, acquired from the above May 1968 Exhibited New York, Museum of Modern Art, Henry Moore, 18 December 1946 – 16 March 1947, cat no.46, lead and copper wire version illus b/w p58, touring to: Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, 17 April –  18 May 1947 San Francisco, Museum of Art, 9 July –  6 August 1947 London, Tate Gallery, Henry Moore, Arts Council, 17 July – 22 September 1968, p105, cat no.50, another cast illus b/w pl.93 Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Henry Moore, Sculptures, May – June 1970, cat no.1, another cast illus b/w London, Lefevre Gallery, Small Bronzes and Drawings by Henry Moore, 30 November –  23 December 1972, p12, cat no.3, another cast illus b/w Florence, Forte di Belvedere, Henry Moore, 20 May – 30 September 1972, cat no.45, p131, another cast illus b/w Tokyo, Metropolitan Art Museum, Henry Moore, Sculptures, Drawings and Graphics, 11 April –  5 June 1986, cat no.154, another cast illus b/w p117, touring to: Fukuoka, Art Museum, 21 June – 27 July 1986 London, Tate Gallery, Henry Moore, 24 February – 8 August 2010, cat no.72, plaster and string version illus colour p148 Literature Will Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1960, cat no.78, lead and wire version illus … Continues on back pages

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Between 1937 and 1939 Henry Moore produced some of his most experimental sculptures, which included a series of stringed figures inspired by the mathematical models at the Science Museum in South Kensington: ‘Whilst a student at the RCA I became involved in machine art, which in those days had its place in modern art. Although I was interested in the work of Léger, and the Futurists, who exploited mechanical forms, I was never directly influenced by machinery as such. Its interest for me lies in its capacity for movement, which, after all, is its function. I was fascinated by the mathematical models I saw there, which had been made to illustrate the difference of the form that is halfway between a square and a circle…It wasn’t the scientific study of these models but the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and to see one form within another which excited me.’ 1 It’s likely that these sculptures were influenced, in part, by the constructivist artist Naum Gabo, whom Moore first met in 1935, and also perhaps by Man Ray’s photographs of mathematical models, which had been published in Cahiers d’Art in 1936. Moore’s stringed sculptures variously combined wood, lead or bronze with string or wire to create dramatic internal spaces that simultaneously enclosed and revealed, the strings imparting ‘a metaphorical as well as an actual tension’. 2 The first version of Stringed Figure, 1939, made in lead and wire, features in a drawing from the same year, Ideas for Sculpture in Metal and Wire. The form also appears in Five Figures in a Setting, 1937, the sculpture set within an eerie street-scene, in an image that combines both abstract and surrealist elements. Moore exhibited at, and helped organise, the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 and the following year decried ‘the violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists […] All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements – order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. Both sides of the artist’s personality must play their part.’ 3 1  The artist cited in John Hedgecoe, Henry Moore, Simon and Schuster, New York,   1968, p105 2  Chris Stephens, Henry Moore, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 2010, p127 3  The artist cited in David Sylvester (ed.), Henry Moore, Volume 1: Complete   Sculpture 1921 – 48, Lund Humphries, London, 1990, p35



Ben Nicholson  1894 – 1982 1936 1936

gouache on board 14 ¾ by 19 inches / 37.5 by 49.8 cm signed, dated and inscribed Ben Nicholson / 1936 / painting (in gouache) version 5⁄12 / Nicholson / Dunluce / Trelyon / St. Ives / Cornwall verso Collections Ivor Braka, London Richard Green, London, April 2003 Private Collection, Europe, June 2003 Literature Norbert Lynton, Ben Nicholson, Phaidon, London, 1993, pp160 – 164, Victoria & Albert Museum version illus colour pl.146

‘In 1936 Nicholson began to make non-representational, coloured paintings. Although he had never actually abandoned colour in painting, as opposed to relief carving, in this series of abstract paintings he employed colours much higher in key and in a manner which was considered by the architect, Leslie Martin, among others, to be constructive in its ability to suggest space. Nicholson had undoubtedly absorbed the impact of paintings by Mondrian but his range of colours was wider and his use of colour more complex than Mondrian’s.’ 1 Ben Nicholson created 12 versions of the present 1936 painting, at least three of which are held in public collections, in MoMA, the V&A, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The juxtaposition of interlocking light and dark, opaque and transparent coloured planes of varying sizes creates the illusion of different depths in space. The introduction of vivid primary colours to an otherwise muted if not monochromatic palette can be attributed to a number of artistic influences, including Mondrian, whose studio Nicholson first visited in 1934. In 1935, the year prior to this work, Nicholson took his then-girlfriend, Barbara Hepworth, to Paris to see the latest works by Picasso, Braque, Arp, Mondrian, Hayter and Hélion. These first-hand viewings were vital to the evolution of his work. Both Nicholson’s and Mondrian’s coloured abstract works incorporate a small area of intense colour – in the present work this is red – into a rigorous system of straight-edged, interlocking planes. While Nicholson centralised the arrangement of his composition around the key note, it was Mondrian’s practice to relegate it to the margins. The links between abstraction, the power of colour relationships and the illusions of pictorial space had already been established for Nicholson in the early 1920s by the post-collage, Cubist works of Picasso and Braque. Nicholson created his first abstract paintings in 1924, while in the same year he experienced a ‘completely abstract’ work by Picasso with, at its centre, ‘an absolutely miraculous green – very deep, very potent and absolutely real.’ 2 1  Jeremy Lewison, Ben Nicholson, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1993 – 4, p221 2  The artist in a letter to John Summerson, 1944 cited in Picasso & Modern British  Art, exh. cat., Tate Publishing, London, 2012, pp95–96

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Henry Moore  1898 – 1986 Recumbent Figure 1938

Henry Moore experimented widely during the 1930s, and the decade culminated with an exceptional group of sculptures, produced at Moore’s Kent studio, between 1938 – 1939, which offered a radical reinterpretation of the reclining nude.

Collections Henri and Hélène Hoppenot, Paris Private Collection, Paris

This bronze is a sketch model for the large stone carving Recumbent Figure, 1938 (coll. Tate Gallery). The carving was originally commissioned by the architect Serge Chermayeff for the terrace of his Sussex home overlooking the South Downs. Moore’s choice of a horizontal reclining figure echoed Chermayeff’s long, low-lying building, and his monumental female form was placed between house and landscape, uniting one with the other. As Moore explained:

bronze length 8 ⅛ inches / 13 cm edition of 9 (unnumbered), plus 1 lead version, cast 1948

Exhibited Wakefield, City Art Gallery, Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings 1923 – 1948, 2 April –  21 May 1949, cat no.42, another cast, touring to: Manchester, City Art Gallery, 1 June – 17 July 1949 York, City Art Gallery, Henry Roland Collection, March 1950, another cast, touring to: Newcastle, Hatton Gallery, April – May 1950 Leicester, Museum and Art Gallery, June – July 1950 Brighton, Museum and Art Gallery, September 1950 Bristol, City Art Gallery, Contemporary British Painting, 11 May – 8 June 1951, Festival of Britain exhibition with the Arts Council, another cast Southampton, City Art Gallery, Modern Painting and Sculpture of the British and Continental Schools from the Collection of Dr H.M. Roland, 29 November – 17 December, 1952, another cast, touring to: Bournemouth, Art Gallery Cardiff, National Museum of Wales, British Art and the Modern Movement 1930 – 1940, 13 October – 25 November 1962, cat no.43, another cast Florence, Forte di Belvedere, Moore e Firenze, British Council, 20 May – 30 September 1974, cat no.34, cast unknown Farnham, West Surrey College of Art & Design, Works from the Roland Collection, 24 November – 10 December 1975, p50, another cast … Continues on back pages

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‘My figure looked out across a great sweep of the Downs, and her gaze gathered in the horizon … I think it introduced a harmonising element; it became a mediator between modern home and ageless land.’ 1 Moore often worked with British stone and wood, carving outdoors so that he might respond directly to the landscape. In this work, the undulating forms of the body echo the rolling hills of the English landscape, establishing a direct relationship between the idea of the feminine and nature. This notion is enhanced when we consider Moore’s use of the hole – carving out the areas under the breasts and between the legs, Moore opens up the figure to reveal the landscape behind. The introduction of the hole was a revelation for the artist, who stated: ‘The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shapemeaning as a solid mass. Sculpture in air is possible, where the stone contains only the hole, which is the intended and considered form. The mystery of the hole – the mysterious fascination of caves in hillsides and cliffs.’ 2 Moore’s fragmentation of the human form is closely connected to his engagement with surrealism during the early 1930s. Surrealism’s foregrounding of the unconscious offered Moore new formal possibilities for the human body, which were, ‘…underpinned by a new emphasis on irrationality, intuition and emotion…’ 3 1  The artist quoted in a talk recorded by the artist for the British Council, 1955 2  ‘The Sculptor Speaks’, The Listener, 18 August 1937; reprinted op. cit., pXXXIV 3  Chris Stephens, ‘Anything but Gentle’, exh. cat., Henry Moore, Tate Gallery,   London, 2010, p16



Henry Moore  1898 – 1986 Small Maquette No.1 For Reclining Figure 1950

bronze length 9 ½ inches / 24 cm inscribed and numbered Moore 5⁄9, cast between 1963 and 1965 Collections with Marlborough Fine Art, London with Wolfgang Fischer, London with Waddington Galleries, London Jeffrey Loria, New York Private Collection, Switzerland Exhibited London, Marlborough Fine Art, Henry Moore, July – August 1966, cat no.6, illus b/w Literature Herbert Read, Henry Moore, Sculptures and Drawings, Volume 2, Lund Humphries, London, 1965, cat no.292a, illus b/w pl.XXXIV John Hedgecoe, Henry Moore, Thomas Nelson, London, 1968, p150, pl.1&2, another cast illus Ionel Jianou, Henry Moore, Arted Editions, Paris, 1968, p76, cat no.276, not illus Robert Melville, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1921 – 1969, Harry N Abrams, New York, 1970, cat no.418, another cast illus b/w Alan Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Volume 2: Complete Sculpture 1949 – 1954, Lund Humphries, London, 1986, cat no.292a, another cast illus pl.XXV

This bronze is one of three preparatory sculptures for Henry Moore’s monumental Reclining Figure: Festival, a seven and a half foot bronze commissioned by the Arts Council for the Festival of Britain in 1951. Despite being commissioned to make a family group, Moore instead offered a radical new form, which he later recognised as a breakthrough work. In 1968, he explained: ‘Certain of my works are more important to me than others, and I tend to look on them as keys to a particular period. Ones I can quickly pick out are the 1930 Reclining (Recumbent) Figure in Hornton stone, in the Tate Gallery; the large elmwood 1939 Reclining Figure, now in the Detroit Museum (Institute of Arts); the 1951 Festival Reclining Figure … and my first large bronze two-piece Reclining Figure (1959).’ 1 Moore’s ideas for this sculpture have their origins in two drawings from 1949 and 1950 (AG 48.5 & AG 50 – 51.70), which show seven and eleven variations on the theme respectively. From this, Moore developed two maquettes (this and the slightly smaller Maquette No.2, length 8 ¼ inches), and a larger working model (length 17 inches), upon which the full-sized plaster was based. The resulting bronze was sited prominently on the South Bank, becoming a popular symbol of the Festival’s ‘determinedly modernist bias.’ 2 For Moore, the success of this work lay in its formal possibilities: ‘I had reached the stage where I wanted my sculpture to be truly three-dimensional. In my earliest use of holes in sculpture, the holes were features in themselves. Now the space and form are so naturally fused that they are one.’ 3 Whereas in Recumbent Figure, 1938, the hole was used in isolated areas, here Moore’s radical hollowing out of the figure offered a more open, rhythmic form. This particular version has wonderfully incised lines and an uneven surface, as if it has been lifted from the pages of one of Moore’s sketchbooks. These contour lines are repeated in the final work, but while in the large bronze these appear more predetermined, here they are more intuitive and spontaneous, existing as lasting traces of the visceral process of imagining the body. 1  Henry Moore, quoted in John Hedgecoe, Henry Moore, Simon and Schuster,   London, 1968, p197 2  Becky Conekin, The Autobiography of a Nation, The 1951 Festival of Britain,   Manchester University Press, 2003, p51 3  Ibid, p188

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Roger Hilton  1911 – 1975 September 1953 1953

oil on canvas 30 by 15 inches / 76.2 by 38.1 cm signed and dated verso Collections with Waddington Galleries, London Private Collection, UK Exhibited Edinburgh, Scottish Arts Council Gallery, Roger Hilton, Drawings and Paintings, Scottish Arts Council, 15 June – 15 July 1974, cat no.10 London, Hayward Gallery, Roger Hilton, 4 November – 6 February 1994, cat no.13, illus colour

Roger Hilton was aware of developments in European modern art from early on in his career, having studied at the Académie Ranson in Paris during the 1930s. He settled in London in 1945 and was given his first solo exhibition of Tachiste-style paintings at the Gimpel Fils gallery in June 1952. In early 1953, Hilton was introduced to the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys and the pair travelled to Holland in February, viewing paintings by Piet Mondrian at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. Between 1952 and 1954, Hilton made a considerable number of paintings that share September 1953’s distinctive Mondrianesque palette of blue, red, grey, black and white. He was also highly influenced by Nieuwenhuys’ concepts of ‘space-creating colour’ in modern architecture. In Lawrence Alloway’s influential book Nine Abstract Artists, published in 1954, Hilton stated, ‘I have moved away from the sort of so-called non-figurative painting where lines and colours are flying about in an illusory space; from pictures which still had space in them; from spatial pictures, in short to spacecreating pictures. The effect is to be felt outside, rather than inside the picture; the picture is not to be primarily an image, but a spacecreating mechanism.’ 1 Hilton’s motivating principle, then, is a heightened experience of the painting as object, rather than image. This ‘objectness’ is foregrounded by Hilton’s acknowledgement of the edges of the canvas within the image – as we see here in the vivid blue that streaks down the left-hand side of the canvas and in the triangle of red that points to the right-hand corner. Hilton’s thick application of paint with a palette knife (comparable to the work of painters Nicolas de Staël and Serge Poliakoff) provides a sensual quality that tempers the austere abstraction of the forms. In some areas, underlying colour shows through, a flash of blue escaping where the black meets red, for example, suggesting that this painting’s origins are more complex than a dry composition of interlocking shapes. 1  Roger Hilton, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1993, cat no.15

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Peter Blake  b.1932 Circus Act  c. 1957

collage and mixed media on paper laid on board 8 ¾ by 5 ¼ inches / 22.2 by 13.3 cm

Collections The Artist Private Collection, UK, gifted from the above 1958 Private Collection, UK, acquired 2007

This work is one of a series of collages by Peter Blake that share the title Circus Acts. Natalie Rudd writes specifically about this important early series in her 2003 monograph: ‘It was during these relatively quiet years of the late 1950s that [Blake] produced a remarkable range of work that set a precedent for a younger generation of British artists in the early 1960s … a favourite subject from college – the circus – remained prominent. In 1957, he made a series of collages, each featuring a different circus act (knife throwers, animals, human cannonballs and so on) performing in front of a ringside audience. Although the influence of Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, and the visual mayhem of collaged Victorian screens are discernible in the Circus Act works, Blake’s increasingly skilful and original use of the medium is clear to see.’ 1 Describing another work from the series, Jockey Act, 1957, she explains how, ‘It offers an early glimpse of [Blake’s] interest in magical crowds, of people from different times and places, while reflecting his own love of watching from the sidelines’. 2 In Jockey Act the crowd comprises a densely-packed group of cut-out heads, set behind the horses and riders, a formal device which prefigures by a decade Blake’s cover art for The Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Here, the crowd are an eccentric gaggle of men, women and children, this time standing in front of the performers. Blake’s Circus Acts collages share a number of formal characteristics that would go on to become identifiable motifs in his oeuvre. These include the use of distinctive red and blue stripes, the naïve, flattened perspective, and the division of the composition into discrete horizontal bands. Here, Blake revels in an array of surface textures, enhancing his collaged imagery by the inclusion of embossed papers and gold and silver foil. 1  Natalie Rudd, Peter Blake, Modern Artist Series, Tate Publishing, London,   2003, p23 2 Ibid

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William Turnbull  1922 – 2012 Idol 2 1956

bronze 64 ¾ by 17 by 19 ¾ inches / 164.5 by 43.2 by 50.2 cm stamped with the artist’s monogram, dated and numbered 4⁄4, from an edition of 4 plus 1 AC Collections The Artist Waddington Galleries, London Private Collection, UK, acquired 2007 Exhibited London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, William Turnbull: New Sculpture and Paintings, 25 September – 2 November 1957, cat no.23, illus b/w London, Tate Gallery, William Turnbull: Sculpture and Painting, 15 August – 7 October 1973, cat no.29, illus b/w London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull, 28 October – 21 November 1987, cat no.6, illus colour Wakefield, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, William Turnbull, Retrospective 1946 – 2003, 14 May –  9 October 2005 London, Tate Gallery, William Turnbull, 14 June – 26 November 2006, cat no.29, illus b/w London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull, Sculpture and Paintings 1946 – 1962, 31 January – 24 February 2007, cat no.4, illus colour Bakewell, Chatsworth House, William Turnbull, 10 March – 30 June 2013, cat no.47, illus colour p45 Literature Theo Crosby (ed.), Uppercase 4, Whitefriars, London, 1960, illus b/w, unpaginated, as Permutation Sculpture Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, Henry Moore Foundation / Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, cat no.67, illus b/w p98

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Between 1955 and 1957 William Turnbull produced a series of five sculptures with the title Idol. Each was ostensibly a standing female figure, facing forward, with hands pressed to her sides, among this group, however, Turnbull employed varying degrees of abstraction. Idol 1 and 2 are the most obviously figurative, 3 and 5 are much more geometric and in 4 the form is notably smoothed out. In Idol 2, we see how Turnbull has impressed corrugated cardboard into the wet plaster, creating a ribbed texture that delineates the breasts, hair and legs. The figure is also decorated with a series of small tattoo-like holes. Turnbull’s technique here is comparable with the methods of his friend Eduardo Paolozzi who, at this time, was similarly engaged in incising and impressing his plaster models prior to casting. Richard Morphet wrote about the Idol series for Turnbull’s 1973 Tate retrospective, where all five bronzes were exhibited. Noting how these forms resemble ‘archaic spearheads or blind sentinels’ 1 he compares Idol 1, 2 and 4, in particular, to a leaf form. Morphet suggests that their inherent stillness and the flat frontality of these figures connects them less to in-the-round Renaissance sculpture, and more to ancient Greek and Egyptian figures. Here the name Idol has a double meaning – referring both to prehistory and also to contemporary ‘screen idols’. This mixing of high and low references is consistent with the Independent Group’s nonhierarchical conception of contemporary culture, in which artist and viewer are surrounded by a proliferation of imagery, past and present. Turnbull was a key member of the Independent Group and a participant in Theo Crosby’s ground-breaking ICA exhibition This is Tomorrow, a collaborative show to which he contributed Sun Gazer, 1956. Turnbull’s totemic bronze was placed in an architectural space made from plastic, plywood, blockboard and photographs. The accompanying catalogue, in effect a manifesto, presented the artists’ declarations interspersed between collages, drawings and photographs. In Turnbull’s section it stated, ‘Within this massproduced environment the sculpture represents the imprecise yet recognisable image of the irrational and of chance; non-utilitarian yet necessary, they focus the environment and are the poetic equivalent of man […] Sculpture used to look modern, now we make objects that might have been dug up at any time in the past forty thousand years’. 2 1  William Turnbull, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1973, pp34 – 35 2  This is Tomorrow, exh. cat., ICA, London, 1956, Part 1, unpaginated



William Turnbull  1922 – 2012 Untitled 1959

indian ink on paper 31 ⅛ by 23 ⅝ inches / 79 by 60 cm signed and dated Collections Estate of the Artist

This wonderfully exuberant calligraphic drawing dates from 1959 and is part of a group of works discovered only recently at the artist’s Camden Square home. These dramatic and appealing works on paper show William Turnbull exploring a range of gestural marks, which inform his paintings from the same period. Turnbull’s works on paper give an invaluable insight into his thought processes. His key motifs – the human head, walking and standing figures, calligraphic mark making – recur throughout his career and in many forms. His works on paper are diverse in both process and media, and they include works in crayon, charcoal, gouache, watercolour and oil, unique monoprints, symmetrical prints folded though the centre, silkscreen prints and lithographs. The circular motif in Untitled, 1959, is derived from Turnbull’s earlier paintings and drawings of human heads from the mid-1950s, in which the head was built up from a series of calligraphic marks, and which were later developed into bronze reliefs. Here, the central ‘head’ shape is enclosed by another circle; in other drawings from this group, the circle progresses out to the edges of the paper so that only a section is left showing. We see this reflected in Turnbull’s oils from the period – 15-1959 (coll. National Galleries of Scotland), for example, features a perfect circle of dark red on a light red ground, while the following year, in 12-1960 (Plate 20), we find a curved section painted in the same two colours. This drawing is highly reminiscent of an ensō, (Japanese for ‘circle’), one of the most important symbols in Zen Buddhism. Traditionally, the action of making such a drawing, which should be made using one or two brushstrokes, is a meditative practice presenting a single moment of creative expression. The ensō symbol should be reflected upon and has numerous associations, including as a symbol of enlightenment, infinity and strength. It also presents a number of dualities within a single form – fullness and emptiness, perfection and imperfection, movement and stillness – ideas which Turnbull was engaging with in his own practice. In 1960, William Turnbull married the Singaporean sculptor Kim Lim. In 1962, they travelled to Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore, a significant experience that invigorated Turnbull’s work and deepened his understanding of Southeast Asian art and culture.

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William Scott  1913 – 1989 Painting 1959

oil on canvas 33 ¾ by 44 inches / 86 by 112 cm signed Collections With Galleria Lorenzelli, Bergamo with Lorenzelli Arte, Milan Private Collection, Italy Exhibited Zurich, Galerie Charles Lienhard, William Scott, 11 November – 12 December 1959, cat no.27 Hannover, Kunstverein, 124. Fruhjahrsausstellung, 10 March – 14 April 1963, cat no.141 Bergamo, Galleria Lorenzelli, W. Scott, February 1978 Literature Sarah Whitfield and Lucy Inglis (eds.), William Scott, Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings, Volume 2: 1952 – 1959, Thames and Hudson / William Scott Foundation, London, 2013, cat no.415, illus colour p292

This work is one of a group of oils shown at Galerie Charles Lienhard in Zurich in the winter of 1959. Introducing the exhibition, Alan Bowness summarised the special character of these paintings: ‘The apparent serenity and amplitude of William Scott’s recent work hides a struggle between two qualities that in combination and in conflict give the painting its particular flavour – austerity and sensuality. They help explain colour that is sumptuous but never gaudy, textures that are rich but never pretty, composition which is complex and calculated and never slack, and imagery which is mysterious and often ambiguous.’ 1 Bowness attributes Scott’s ‘austerity’ to his heritage, relating the primitive and elemental qualities in his work to a simple childhood spent in the sometimes harsh environs of Northern Ireland. In Painting, 1959, this is conveyed through a certain economy of line, reduced forms and a muted palette. However, this sense of restraint is counterbalanced by the inherent sensuality of Scott’s technique. Confronted with the painting first hand, one is aware of the tactile nature of the painted surface, which has been built up in layers – a ground of deep blue, followed by terracotta red, then white and finally, in parts, thin layers of ochre. In places, Scott has incised thin lines into the surface, revealing the warm terracotta beneath. The effect is reminiscent of the colour beneath the body’s skin, suggesting a direct relationship to Scott’s reclining nudes of the period, which were often imagined in deep reds and oranges. Painting, 1959 continues Scott’s long-time preoccupation with still life. Bowness explains that Scott chose this subject for its simplicity; it was, ‘the most fundamental and most anonymous of all possible subject matter’. Surveying the 1950s, we see how his imagery has evolved from the recognisably figurative Mackerel on a Plate, 1951–2, (coll. Tate Gallery) to the subtly charged and expressive abstraction we find here. Bowness places these paintings within a long tradition of European and ancient art: ‘Scott has always had a strong sense of the past, both for the living tradition of Chardin, Corot, Cézanne and Bonnard to which he feels he belongs, and for the distant European past of the cave paintings and archaic Greek sculpture and Pompeian frescoes in which he sees the same strong sensual and plastic qualities, the combination of erotic and austere that he seeks in his own paintings.’ 1  Alan Bowness, William Scott, exh. cat., Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zurich,   1959, intro.

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Frank Auerbach b.1931 Head of Gerda Boehm III 1961

charcoal and chalk on paper 30 by 22 inches / 76.2 by 55.9 cm

Collections The Artist Gerda Boehm, gifted from the above Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Frankfurt, gifted from the above 1980 Thence by descent Literature William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, p248, cat no.114, illus b/w

Head of Gerda Boehm III has remained in the collection of the artist’s family since 1961, when Frank Auerbach gave the drawing to his first cousin, Gerda Boehm, soon after it was completed. Nearly 20 years later, in 1980, Gerda gave the drawing to her brother, the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, for his 60th birthday and it remained on the wall of his Frankfurt apartment until his death in 2013. It was later inherited by Marcel’s granddaughter. Gerda and Marcel were the elder first cousins of Auerbach and, after moving to Berlin in 1929, they were brought up on the same street as the artist, who was born in the city two years later. In his autobiography, Marcel fondly recalls his time spent babysitting his younger cousin, who was just five years old, writing: ‘The child I had to look after during those evenings never woke up once. An exemplary charge, and now one of the most famous painters in England – Frank Auerbach.’ 1 In April 1939, Auerbach was sent to England to attend Bunce Court School in Kent. He would not see his parents again as they remained in Germany and died at Auschwitz. In the same year, Gerda and her husband Gerhard (Gerd) also left Berlin for London. As Auerbach’s closest living relative, Gerda became his legal guardian, supporting him financially during his time at art college. After Gerd’s death in November 1956, Auerbach would meet with Gerda every Sunday evening, a tradition that continued until 2004. Gerda passed away in 2006, aged 99. Gerda sat for Auerbach every week from 1961 to 1981, and Head of Gerda Boehm III is the third drawing he made of her. As a group, Auerbach’s first three drawings of Gerda provide a remarkable insight into his working process, revealing the artist’s deep engagement with his subject in his search for an authentic image. In the present work, Auerbach adopts a similar viewpoint to that in his first drawing Head of Gerda Boehm, 1961. Gerda is shown at a slight angle with her eyes downcast, but now, perhaps more used to his subject, Auerbach approaches her at an even closer range. Her domed head fills the entire sheet and confronts the viewer with an image of undeniable power and intensity. In conversation with Catherine Lampert in 1978, Auerbach explains the necessity of knowing his sitters well outside of the artistic process: ‘… simply because one knows more about them. The thing is, after all, done from the mind, and the accrued information enriches the content to an extraordinary degree. I mean, if one has the chance of seeing people apart from the time when one’s painting them, one notices all sorts of things about them. If one sees them in movement, one sees all sorts of truths about them and one’s infinitely less likely to be satisfied with a superficial statement. Those things that are particular to them to some

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Frank Auerbach and Marcel ReichRanicki at Gerda Boehm’s home, 1970. Photo: Andrew Ranicki

extent may lead to a particularity of image, because one thereby gets the confidence to make statements that one knows to be true, which conform to no statement that exists in painting.’ 2 Auerbach’s desire to express the essential truth of his subject can be traced back to his artistic education under David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic. Bomberg’s advocation of ‘an intenser expression…stripped of all irrelevant matter’ and his belief in ‘the spirit of the mass’, 3 that is, in achieving an exact expression of the thing you are representing, by seeing and feeling, would have a profound impact on Auerbach’s work. In his own words, creating works in this vein would mean ‘…they would not be paintings or images but that they would carry in them hints of a language of greater depth, freedom and courage…’ 4 Auerbach’s portrait drawings are a testament both to his powers of perception and his emotionally and physically demanding artistic process. Produced over countless sittings, in which charcoal is applied in much the same manner as oils in his paintings – building layer upon layer, then rubbing away and reapplying again – they often bear the marks of this visceral process. In Head of Gerda


Boehm, the paper is worn away in huge areas to reveal a second sheet underneath, which Auerbach has continued to work on until the repeatedly erased and reworked marks create an almost silvery surface. In Head of Gerda Boehm III, Auerbach binds two sheets together in anticipation of his process and, although there are fewer areas of wear, if one looks closely, one can see the paper beginning to soften under the weight of this repeated mark making. When approaching the human head, Auerbach has commented, ‘I have to begin with a lump in my mind’ 5 and in this sense, his drawings, like his paintings from this period, have a wonderfully sculptural quality. Out of his ‘lump’ appears a human presence created through thick, broad ‘brushstrokes’ of charcoal and areas of deep, dark black; these are countered by highlights of white, made with an eraser, which show how the light touches the surface of Gerda’s face, describing the bridge of her nose or bottom lip. There is a palpable sense of movement in the sweeping arc of Gerda’s dome-like head and, despite the stillness of the pose, a sense of energy emanates from the inside out and is heightened by marks made in charcoal, blue and red that dance across the page in quick succession. Here one can see Auerbach’s desire to distil the aura of his sitter, giving it a physicality through material and form in this powerful and resonant drawing. Marcel Reich-Ranicki is regarded as one of the most influential contemporary literary critics in the field of German literature and has often been called the Literaturpapst (‘Pope of Literature’) in Germany. His autobiography, published in 2001, was the numberone bestseller in Germany for over a year and was made into a feature film for television in 2009. In January 2012, Marcel addressed the Bundestag in Berlin on the annual Holocaust Memorial Day, recounting the story of his rushed marriage to Tosia in the Warsaw Ghetto on 22 July 1942, the same day the order to liquidate the Ghetto was issued. In 2003, Marcel dedicated the book Meine Bilder, a collection of his own artworks, mostly portraits of writers, to Frank Auerbach. 1  Marcel Reich-Ranicki, The Author of Himself, The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki,   Princeton University Press, 2001 2  ‘A Conversation with Frank Auerbach, 1978’, reproduced in Frank Auerbach,   exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 2015, p146 3  Bomberg quoted in William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, p9 4  Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p32 5  Ibid, p135


Frank Auerbach b.1931 E.O.W. on her Blue Eiderdown V 1963

oil on board 22 ⅝ by 32 ⅝ inches / 57.5 by 83 cm Collections Beaux Arts Gallery, London Marlborough Gallery, London Private Collection, Canada Thence by descent

Exhibited London, Beaux Arts Gallery, Frank Auerbach, 5 September – 12 October 1963, cat no.7 Literature William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, Rizzoli, New York, 2009, p252, cat no.149, illus b/w

‘Again, for me, like time travel, these things unlock memories, sometimes more, sometimes less; it certainly takes me back to a time that, even though it is 45 years ago, it does that thing that a painting is supposed to do, that is drag the past into the present and reanimate it.’ 1 So Auerbach says of the paintings of E.O.W. he produced in the early 1960s. Auerbach met Estella Olive West in 1948 and the pair embarked on an intense relationship, both personal and artistic, with Stella providing the subject for some of Auerbach’s most powerful and enigmatic paintings. He painted ten versions of E.O.W. on her blue eiderdown between 1962 and 1965, all of which are notable for their heavily worked surfaces and dynamic colour, a result, in part, of their having been painted at night under electric light. E.O.W. on her Blue Eiderdown V incorporates a much wider spectrum of colours than others in the series, giving a unique energy and vigour to the image. Thick, uneven and almost sculptural in its heavy impasto, the painted surface draws the viewer’s eye into its dense internal landscape. As such, Auerbach’s subjects reveal themselves to us gradually and, as Catherine Lampert has noted, ‘The longer one looks at pictures of E.O.W. made in the years 1963 – 1965, the stronger the sense of her magnetism and her essence.’ 2 Auerbach has spoken of his sense of urgency when working from the model and this is felt acutely in the present work. Here, the image is formed from rivers of paint that stream across the picture surface. These have been rapidly layered, then scraped away, one image after another destroyed to make way for the next. Auerbach recalls working on his knees when painting E.O.W., in a cramped space, with his chair acting as an easel. Yet, this intense process, his closeness to his subject, only enhanced his understanding of the image. Auerbach has stated recently, ‘I never found it irksome to work in a crowded, small room, to paint or be on my knees, unable to get too far away from it, because finally, I think, all that thing of unity is in one’s head as much as it is by looking.’ 3 1  Catherine Lampert, Frank Auerbach, Speaking and Painting, Thames and Hudson,   London, 2010, p105 2  Ibid, p109 3  Ibid, p106

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William Turnbull  1922 – 2012 12-1960 1960 72 by 60 inches / 182.9 by 152.4 cm oil on canvas signed and titled on the overlap Turnbull / 12 – 60 and also inscribed EXPANDING RED Provenance Estate of the Artist Exhibited London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull: Beyond Time, 9 June – 3 July 2010, cat no.34, illus colour

In early 1957, William Turnbull visited New York for the first time. There, the collector Donald Blinken introduced him to a circle of American artists, including Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Even before his trip, Turnbull had begun to make monochrome paintings and, from this point, he rejected figurative imagery, and even notions of shape, in order to create paintings based on pure sensation. Between 1957 – 1962, we see Turnbull experimenting widely with expansive fields of colour – producing paintings of a single colour bordered by thin bands of other hues; sometimes adding a wide band at the bottom; sometimes a thin channel of opposing colour bisects the picture; and occasionally employing more gestural marks, floating in squares (No.1 1959, coll. Tate Gallery). There are also paintings in which Turnbull places two tones of the same colour (often red and dark red), side by side, vertically, or, as in 12-1960, with one gently curving around the other. In 12-1960, the edge where the two reds meet is not sharp but pleasingly soft and imperfect. The darker red curves over the lighter, the lighter red seeming to push up against it. This curving motif traces back to Turnbull’s mid-1950s Head paintings, in which the head was described by a perfect circle of calligraphic marks. By the late 1950s, the notion of the head is gone but the circle remains, as we see in a series of gestural works on paper, from 1959, in which the circle gradually expands to the outer edges of the paper until it is just a curve (see Plate 16). Here Turnbull’s paint is thinly applied, retaining the texture of the canvas beneath. In 1961, Lawrence Alloway explained: ‘Materiality in painting has often been identified with the weight of painting lying thickly on the canvas. To Turnbull, however, like Rothko in this respect, materiality is a function of the ground itself. His colour is flat and bodiless as a dye, so that the tangibility of the canvas surface itself is preserved. The luminosity of his colour thus appears to emanate from the surface: it does not… dissolve the surface.’ 1 The painting glows with colour. It is not so large as to envelop the viewer, one is aware of its edges; rather it appears, as Turnbull would wish, as an object, quietly, radiating light. 1  Introduction, exh. cat., William Turnbull, Molton Gallery, London, 1960

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Anthony Caro  1924 – 2013 Strait 1967

painted steel 58 ⅝ by 132 by 80 inches / 149 by 335.5 by 203 cm unique Collections The Artist with Kasmin Ltd, London Colin St. John Wilson, 20 December 1967 with Waddington & Tooth Galleries, London, February 1977 André Emmerich, New York Exhibited Cambridge, Arts Council Gallery, Seven Sculptures, 1968, illus London, Waddington Galleries, British Artists in the Sixties: Anthony Caro, 6 September –  1 October 1977, unnumbered exhibition, illus New York, Ameringer Howard Fine Art, Coloured Sculpture, 16 March – 22 April 2000, unnumbered exhibition Youngstown, Butler Institute of American Art, Paint and Steel, Anthony Caro, 1 July –  20 September 2000, unnumbered exhibition, 9 works exhibited Baltimore, Constantine Grimaldis Gallery, Anthony Caro, A Survey: 1960s through 2000, 15 October – 27 November 2004, unnumbered exhibition Philadelphia, Locks Gallery, Recent Modernist Sculpture, 9 September – 8 October 2005, unnumbered exhibition, illus Literature Dieter Blume, Anthony Caro, Catalogue Raisonné Vol. III, Steel Sculpture 1960 – 1980, Verlag Galerie Wentzel, Köln, 1981, cat no.909, illus b/w p200

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By the 1960s Anthony Caro’s reputation as a radical sculptor whose work broke with convention had been established internationally. At the end of the 1950s he had departed from figuration stating, ‘I had decided that it was no longer desirable for a sculpture to be a single object, a metaphor for the human body.’ 1 This rejection of the traditional ‘closed’ monolith form led to one of his most celebrated innovations, in which he eliminated the plinth, placing his sculpture directly on the ground, giving it, ‘the immediacy one feels talking one-to-one with another person.’ 2 Strait is part of a major body of work, dating from the mid-1960s, which is characterised by its commitment to linearity and the exploration and activation of space. In spite of the sheer weight and mass of material, this sculpture has a lightness and energy to it, each element giving the impression of moving through space as if being drawn in the air by a finger. The artist acknowledged this comparison in 1991 commenting, ‘I think the edges of subjects are interesting: where sculpture meets drawing, where sculpture meets architecture – these are borderlines that invite comparison.’ 3 This reductive approach to form, encouraged by Kenneth Noland, allowed Caro to push the concept of the ‘sculptural gesture’ to its farthest edge. As John Canaday of The New York Times wrote in 1967, ‘Using sections of I-beams and other structural steel members as his material, Mr Caro dramatises their geometrical shapes in structures of stark elegance. One feels that this is an art of reduction by distillation, but there is no loss of force in his spare purity.’ 4 In these works, an austerity of form is counterbalanced by Caro’s use of colour, which imbues his sculpture with a painterly sensibility and suggests an emotive quality and lightness not easily achievable with industrial steel. By using flat, bright, commercial colours, Caro freed his sculpture from the confines of art history and instead the welded steel elements retain their architectural quality and speak of the building sites and streets from which they came. 1  Anthony Caro, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 2005, p11 2  Ibid, p12 3  Ibid, p18 4  William Rubin, Anthony Caro, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York,   1975, p183



David Hockney b.1937 Tree? 1962

oil, letraset and indian ink on canvas 23 ⅝ by 35 ⅝ inches / 60 by 90.5 cm titled; also signed, dated and titled verso Collections Private Collection, Belgium Jan Krugier, acquired 1989

After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1962, David Hockney travelled to Italy, Munich and Berlin, producing several works on his return including Tree?, 1962. Since his student days, Hockney has been concerned with using various modes of representation to challenge the viewer’s conception of what art is and how it might be experienced. In the present work, which shows a male figure questioning whether a drawn tree is an actual tree, Hockney exposes the artificiality of the image, engaging playfully with a critical response to art. Text is used to emphasise the notion that images are only the representation of an idea and, according to the artist, to encourage people to examine his work carefully and engage with it proactively. Hockney explains, ‘My intention was to force you to go and look closely at the canvas itself, and then in that sense it’s naughty because it’s robbed you of what you were thinking before, and you’ve got to look at it another way. That was the intention.’ 1 For Hockney, the tree, a natural living organism, is an ideal vehicle to present the idea that visual representations are merely metaphors for the objects to which they refer – the ‘tree’ is there and not there, tree-like and simultaneously nothing like a tree. Hockney augments this idea by using various stylistic devices; the solid, uniform appearance of the leaves, for example, gives the impression of a stamp, and Letraset spells the word ‘tree’. Several aspects of this painting can be found in other works – the black speech bubble, for example, reappears a year later in Man Saying Absolutely Nothing, 1963. Likewise, the figure in this painting is an amalgamation of various approaches to the human figure that Hockney was exploring in the early 1960s. The precise and delicate outline of the male figure recalls the linear style found in his series of etchings A Rake’s Progress, 1961 – 63, while the appearance of the figure, the disproportionate head, abstracted limbs and the patterns inscribed over his body refer to a multitude of influences, including Egyptian, naïve and folk art and the work of Jean Dubuffet. 1  The artist quoted in Nikos Stangos (ed.), David Hockney by David Hockney,   Thames and Hudson, London, 1976, p47

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John Latham  1921 – 2006 Untitled 1962

oil on canvas on masonite with collage 27 by 24 ¼ by 8 ½ inches / 68.5 by 61.5 by 22 cm indistinctly signed, dated and inscribed Mtal / Nov 1962 / Chelsea Hotel verso Collections The Artist Charles H. Carpenter Jr, acquired directly from the above Thence by descent

John Latham is well-known for the conceptual work, Still and Chew, 1966 – 7, (coll. MoMA, New York), in which he invited his students at Saint Martin’s to chew up the college’s copy of Clement Greenberg’s Art & Culture, the pulpy remains of which were distilled into a vial of brown liquid and later returned to the library. However even before this, the material and symbolic potential of books had been a dominant theme in Latham’s eclectic practice. Latham made his first assemblages using books in the late 1950s – see Belief System, 1959 (coll. Tate Gallery) – and these had evolved from his earlier spray-gun paintings. For the anarchic and intellectually curious Latham, the incorporation of books within the canvas was a subversive gesture, but also reflected his desire to include the disciplines of literature, science and philosophy within the sphere of fine art. As with Greenberg’s art criticism, books were often aligned with authority, and therefore suspect, but equally, they were the material embodiment of the world of ideas, the physical manifestation of other ways of thinking. In Latham’s assemblages, books are dangled, burnt, skewered with wires and embedded in plaster and paint. In 1963, Lawrence Alloway described how Latham… ‘transforms books as objects, by unexpected spatial displays and unpredicted relationships, into a new non-verbal order’. The enmeshing of two books, as we see in Untitled, 1962, is a common motif. The books merge, exchanging their contents and forming a new impenetrable unit. Here, the presentation of just one pair of books foregrounds the sexual connotations of the form, which protrude rudely from the surface. Despite their conceptual basis, Latham’s assemblages have a distinct aesthetic sensibility and they sit quite comfortably within the language of painting, the abject cousins of Abstract Expressionism and Pop. Untitled, 1962 was made during the three months Latham spent at New York’s Chelsea Hotel, a hip hangout that offered a temporary home to many of the leading artists, writers and auteurs of the day. During his stay, Latham met Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol and Clement Greenberg, who would later become the uncredited star of Still and Chew. Untitled, 1962 is a rare example from this period – Latham was productive during his stay in New York, even organising an informal exhibition, but much of this work is now lost. 1  Latham’s Noit, exh. cat., Kasmin Gallery, London, 1963, intro

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Barbara Hepworth  1903 – 1975 Goonhilly September 1963

alabaster 10 ⅜ by 19 13⁄16 by 18 inches / 26.3 by 50.3 by 45.7 cm unique

Collections Marlborough Fine Art, London with Waddington Galleries, London New Art Centre and Gimpel Fils, London, purchased from the above Private Collection, New York, 1989 Exhibited Zurich, Gimpel Hanover Galerie, Barbara Hepworth, 16 November 1963 – 11 January 1964, cat no.25 London, Gimpel Fils, Barbara Hepworth, Twenty – Five Sculptures and Three Drawings, June 1964, cat no.25 New York, Marlborough – Gerson Gallery, Barbara Hepworth: Twenty – Eight Sculptures and Twelve Drawings, April – May 1966, cat no.11, illus b/w London, New Art Centre, Barbara Hepworth, Ten Sculptures, 1951 – 1973, 19 November 1987 –  16 January 1988, cat no.9, illus b/w Literature Alan Bowness and Barbara Hepworth, The Complete Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth, 1960 – 1969, Lund Humphries, London, 1971, p36, cat no.342, illus b/w pl.82

‘Today, when we are all conscious of the expanding universe, the forms experienced by the sculptor should express not only this consciousness but should, I feel, emphasise also the possibilities of new developments of the human spirit so that it can affirm and continue life in its highest form. The story is still the same as that of the Gothic or any other culture …the point is that we must be aware of this extension of our knowledge of the universe and must utilise it in the service of the continuity of the human spirit. And as we are speaking of sculpture, let us remember that sculpture affects the human mind through the sense of sight and touch.’ 1 Goonhilly refers to a sparse area of heathland in the western part of the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, which today is known as the site of the largest satellite earth station in the world. The first dish, Antenna One (dubbed ‘Arthur’), was built in 1962 and its striking design as the first open parabolic satellite (measuring 85 feet in diameter and weighing 1,118 tonnes), provided a dramatic addition to the landscape of Goonhilly. Also located at this site is the ancient Dry Tree Menhir, an imposing megalith that dates back 3,500 years to the Bronze Age. In light of Hepworth’s sentiments above, the poetry of this juxtaposition, two icons of communication, one a symbol of the modern and manmade world, the other a mysterious remnant from an ancient civilisation, would not have been lost on her when she visited Goonhilly in February 1963. Indeed, the two elements of this sculpture – an upright form with curved edges and a narrow base that widens in the middle, and an ovoid form whose flattened plane faces up towards the sun and which rotates on its base – directly reference the shapes of the standing stone and the moving satellite as they stand side by side. The decision to carve these forms in alabaster lends them a timeless quality and reflects a broader tendency in Hepworth’s art at the time to return to the themes and techniques that had occupied her in the 1930s, when she had first earned her reputation as a pioneer of modernist sculpture. By 1963, Hepworth’s international standing had been confirmed with a series of retrospectives and awards. In 1958 she was honoured with a CBE, and in 1959 she won the Grand Prix at the São Paulo Biennial. Hepworth was also offered a second Whitechapel exhibition in 1962, the year before she made this work. Around this time, abstract art from the 1930s was enjoying renewed critical interest, evident in, for example, the staging of Art in Britain 1930 – 40, Centred around Axis, Circle, Unit One at Marlborough Fine Art in March – April 1965. All of these factors contributed to Hepworth’s re-engagement with her early work, and the present sculpture is a perfect amalgamation of the major themes that had driven her practice from the very beginning. Hepworth had always preferred direct carving to modelling. In 1925 she studied the traditional techniques of marble carving with Ardini

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in Italy and was inspired by the vitality of the Etruscan artworks and classical architecture she encountered there. Later, after moving to Cornwall at the beginning of the war, she continued to develop her work in this medium, responding to the landscape around her, creating works that, in J.P. Hodin’s words, presented a ‘humanised landscape’. He explains: ‘In her work we find all the elements of poise, rhythm and movement, of gravity, depth and space governed by the vertical and the horizontal – the whole gamut of sensations that one experiences when moving in a landscape.’ 2 Goonhilly September presents two forms that are connected but not carved from one piece. The first examples of this date back to 1934 – Two Forms; Mother and Child; Large and Small Form – where the decision to combine two forms offered Hepworth new possibilities for the play of light and space within the work. In an assemblage, there was now both the relationship between each form and their relationship to the landscape to consider. This is expressed beautifully in the present sculpture, particularly when one rotates the ovoid form on its pin, changing the space between the two forms in what feels like a very organic movement. Hepworth’s decision to incorporate movement into the work encourages a playful, interactive element, but also encourages a deep appreciation of these objects as living entities that contain the same energy and vitality as those forms from the landscape to which they relate. Hepworth writes that, ‘Sculpture communicates an immediate sense of life – you can feel the pulse of it’, and in Goonhilly September this is articulated wonderfully. 1  The artist in conversation with J.P. Hodin, ‘Two Conversations   with Barbara Hepworth, Art and Life’, Barbara Hepworth,   Lund Humphries, London, 1961, p23 2  Ibid, p16



Bridget Riley  b.1931 Study for Breathe 1966

ink and pencil on paper 27 by 20 inches / 68.6 by 50.8 cm signed Collections Robert Fraser Gallery, London Richard Feigen Gallery, New York Private Collection, UK

The present work is one of several studies for a larger painting, now in the permanent collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The method upon which Bridget Riley’s paintings are based often includes various ‘phases’, and her drawings both form an important part of this process and exist as significant works in their own right. When interviewing Riley in 1967, Maurice de Sausmarez described this process as follows: ‘…if you could describe the phases through which an idea moves it might be something like this: initially you have a sort of ‘hunch’ about a configuration and the unit involved. Then you put the unit, or structural elements, that have occurred to you through a whole series of different situational responses, provoking them, so to speak, to vibrate against each other in several ways, in a set of structural variations. This goes down in a number of small physical notations and drawings. Often I suppose it is only necessary for you to work out a quite small fragment to see the potentialities in it.’ 1 This is the case for Study for Breathe, 1966, where we see Riley working out the forms, which will eventually fill the whole picture plane in the final painting, as a fragment on the page. In her drawings, Riley can be seen to be harnessing certain potential forces and playing them against each other to create new sensations. The effect of presenting these relationships on a smaller, more condensed scale in this drawing is that it intensifies the energy created, encouraging a faster visual frequency in the work. As de Sausmarez has suggested, ‘Breathe is a really slow painting … and yet the elements used to bring it about are quite powerful.’ 2 The titles of Riley’s works often link her pictures with certain visual or physiological sensations and in Study for Breathe, the elongated triangles mimic the motion of fast breathing as they dramatically rise and fall down the page. Whereas in Study for Breathe, this sensation is centred with equal spacing between each triangle, in the final painting, the triangles are built on an off-centre organisation consisting of a short, speedy movement on the left and a long, slow one to the right. 1  In conversation with Maurice de Sausmarez, Bridget Riley, Works 1960 – 1966,   exh. cat., Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert and Karsten Schubert, 2012, p84 2  Ibid, p85

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Leon Kossoff b.1926 Dalston Junction  c. 1973

charcoal and oil on paper 22 ¼ by 28 ¼ inches / 56.4 by 72 cm Collections The Artist with Anthony d'Offay, London with Rex Irwin, Sydney Private Collection, Australia, acquired August 1987

Leon Kossoff’s earliest drawings of Dalston Junction date to the early 1970s, when he took a second studio close to the east London station. The catalogue for his 1981 exhibition at MoMA Oxford includes a photograph of the view from the window, which by then had become an important subject. The photo allows us to see through Kossoff’s eyes – we look down onto industrial buildings and the railway line, next to which there is a church and at the bottom a road which traverses the scene from left to right. The exact point where the tracks go under the bridge is partly obscured by a large billboard. Kossoff’s various charcoals, gouaches and oils of this view show the poster on the billboard changing from month to month, a chance element that offered Kossoff a pleasing image-within-animage and adds to the sense of time passing. Here the drawing is densely worked. Kossoff seems to relish the zig-zagging lines he uses to build up tone, some of which travel continuously from one side of the drawing to the other. There is a stillness to the scene and yet the image appears alive and full of dynamism, as if a train might dash across the drawing at any moment. Kossoff’s studio would have been crammed with such drawings and the few splatters of oil seen here are most likely intended for a nearby painting. In a recent review, the writer Iain Sinclair describes encountering Kossoff’s drawings, en masse, in the artist’s studio in the run-up to his exhibition London Landscapes: ‘Silent, heavy doors, open on a line of dense and minatory charcoal drawings, linked like coal trucks, and arranged on the floor in provisional order … I was thrown off balance by the intense energy of these marks: the dashes, counter-strokes, over-reaching arcs, sweeps and surges; the structural skeletons lodged in each of these panels […] Railways play a large part in the story. Railways as ladders of memory and as metalled rivers sliced by the branches of a cherry tree at the bottom of a Willesden Green garden… The railway drawings are epics of uninhabited spontaneity, monochrome Turner seizures of elemental forces choked back by the broken ribs of cancelled strokes, weighed down under a curtain of solid smoke.’ 1 1  ‘At Annely Juda’, London Review of Books, vol.35, no.11, 6 June 2013, p26

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Hans Coper  1920 – 1980 Small Cycladic Arrow Form  c. 1972 stoneware height 7 ½ inches / 19.2 cm impressed with artist's monogram on the base Collections The Hawley Collection, New York Literature Tony Birks, Hans Coper, Marston House, Yeovil, 2005, similar examples illus b/w p194 and illus colour p204

Hans Coper’s rare ‘Cycladic’ series is his last major body of work and is regarded as the culmination of everything that he had achieved throughout his lifetime. Tony Birks writes: ‘In this breathtaking collection Hans seems to have carried to the ultimate the purity of form that he had been seeking for so long. The new pots, though small, seem to concentrate energy and to be denser than anything natural. Hans had pursued Mies van der Rohe’s maxim, less is more, and produced his finest forms.’ 1 Each distinct form in the series would include four or five unique variations. These forms were usually made up from two separate pieces, with tops and bases matched after firing and joined by a short metal pin that ran up into the body and down into the base. The pin was fixed in place with an epoxy glue and then covered over with soot. Coper would glaze both parts with a deep black glaze, except for a thin horizontal band, which was left to stop the kiln support sticking to the work during firing. In some of the Cycladic forms, including this one, the unglazed ring is left showing, in others the line has been filled in afterwards. Coper left few written records, but he did write a brief introduction to the catalogue for his 1969 exhibition at the V&A in which he explained his approach: ‘My concern is with extracting essence rather than with experiment and exploration, the wheel imposes its economy, dictates limits, provides momentum and continuity. Concentrating on continuous variations of simple themes I become part of the process; I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now – in this fantastic century. Practising a craft with ambiguous reference to purpose and function, one has occasion to face absurdity. More than anything, somewhat like a demented piano-tuner, one is trying to approximate a phantom pitch. One is apt to take refuge in pseudoprinciples that crumble. Still, the routine of work remains. One deals with the facts.’ 2 1  Tony Birks, Hans Coper, Marston House, Yeovil, 2005, p71 2  The artist quoted in Hans Coper and Peter Collingwood, ex. cat., Victoria and   Albert Museum, 1969

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David Hockney b.1937 Celia, Paris 1969

ink on paper 17 by 14 inches / 43.2 by 35.6 cm initialled, dated and titled Celia. Paris. March. DH. 1969 Collections Kasmin Ltd, London Private Collection, UK

Exhibited London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, David Hockney, Paintings, Prints and Drawings 1960 – 1970, British Council, 2 April – 3 May 1970, cat no.D32, illus b/w, p94, illus b/w p94, touring to: Hannover, Kestener – Gesellschaft, 22 May –  21 June 1970 Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 25 July – 29 August 1970 Belgrade, Muzej Sauremene Umetnosti, 18 September – 15 October 1970 Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Gesellschaft der Freunde Junger Kunst, English Artists, 4 May – 17 June 1973, cat no.8, touring to: Bremen, Kunsthalle Bremen, 1 July – 5 August 1973 Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, David Hockney, Tableaux et Dessins, 11 October – 9 December 1974, cat no.74, illus b/w p53 London, Knoedler Gallery, Kasmin’s Hockneys, 45 Drawings, July – August 1983, illus b/w p26 London, Offer Waterman, David Hockney, Early Drawings, 25 September – 23 October 2015, cat no.24, illus colour, touring to: New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, 3 November –  1 December 2015 Literature Nikos Stangos (ed.), David Hockney by David Hockney, My Early Years, Thames and Hudson, London, 1976, cat no.241, p188 Nikos Stangos (ed.), Pictures by David Hockney, Thames and Hudson, London, 1979, illus colour p82

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‘We have always felt completely comfortable in each other’s company. We amused each other. I found posing for him to be a very intimate, and silent, affair…’ 1 David Hockney met the British textile and fashioner designer Celia Birtwell in 1968 and she soon became one of the most significant female figures in his life. The present work, produced just a year after they met, already suggests an easy intimacy between artist and sitter. Celia appears relaxed with eyes averted in a convivial gesture of acquiescence and a feeling of quiet contemplation pervades the scene. Hockney’s drawings of Celia in Paris represent both his growing closeness to her and to the idea of femininity itself. As Henry Geldzahler wrote, ‘In these drawings we see the influence of a century of French art – Ingres, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pascin, Matisse and Balthus. At a time when School of Paris painters have joined American abstractionists in abandoning women as a subject, a provincial painter from the north of England was able to surprise and delight Parisians by continuing a tradition that seemed to be passing away with Picasso.’ 2 The artists Geldzahler cites all favoured private domestic scenes of women engaged in everyday activities, dreaming or lost in thought, a subject and atmosphere he finds echoed in Hockney’s drawings of Celia. Here, the intimacy of the scene is enhanced by Hockney’s acute observation of Celia’s appearance, the essential qualities of her character so succinctly described in single, black lines. Hockney explained, ‘Celia has a beautiful face, a very rare face with lots of things in it which appeal to me. It shows aspects of her, like her intuitive knowledge and her kindness, which I think is the greatest virtue…Portraits aren’t just made up of drawing, they are made up of other insights as well. Celia is one of the few girls I know really well. I’ve drawn her so many times and knowing her makes it always slightly different.’ 3 1  Celia Birtwell on sitting for David Hockney 2  ‘Introduction by Henry Geldzahler’, David Hockney by David Hockney, My Early  Years, Thames and Hudson, London, 1988, p22 3  The artist quoted in ‘Notes on Sitters’, David Hockney Portraits, exh. cat.,   National Portrait Gallery, London, 2006, p22



Allen Jones b.1937 Please Don’t Forget To 1973

oil and collage on canvas 15 ¾ by 11 ¾ inches / 40 by 30 cm signed on the canvas overlap Collections with Marlborough Gallery, London Private Collection, Italy Literature Marco Livingstone, Allen Jones, Sheer Magic, Congreve Publishing, New York, 1979, illus colour p129

After a formative stay in New York in 1964 – 5, Allen Jones began to include more overtly erotic motifs in his paintings, adopting a smoother, hard-edged painting style, informed by the American fetish illustrators Eric Stanton and Eugene ‘Gene’ Bilbrew. Jones’ obsession with sexual imagery is linked to a preoccupation with eroticism, and in his early paintings he explored this through a profusion of male/female couplings, in for example Hermaphrodite and Man Woman, both 1963. Jones’ paintings are known for including stilettos as a shorthand for domination and sadomasochistic sex. In Please Don’t Forget To, 1973, Jones instead incorporates a found object to refer to the subject of shoes more obliquely. The paper he has fixed to the painting is a table of prices for mail-order shoes before and after decimalisation. The five shillings one must ‘not forget’ to include are the postal charges for their delivery, and the sheet also includes an instruction, ‘Moral – take care of your shoes; they become worth more daily.’ This list is fixed over a band of red paint on the right, which is equal in size to the area taken up by the stylised female figure on the left. Red, an aggressive colour that Jones identifies with the phallus, replaces and stands in for the male figure in the composition. A cloudy-coloured smear of something, perhaps varnish, is found in the centre of the picture, joining the male/female areas together and drawing our attention to the surface of the picture. This stain addresses the various subtexts within the painting (fetishism, crossdressing, the commodification of sexuality), presenting the act of sex directly in the form of ‘une petite mort’. Despite the explicit nature of his subject, Jones’ synthesis of different modes of representation – found object, gestural markmaking, flat areas of colour and stylised figuration – suggests that he wishes us to understand this work on both a visceral and intellectual level. His subject is not the act of sex itself but the intermingling of the sexes as a metaphor for the masculine and feminine aspects of our nature.

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Gilbert & George  b.1943, b.1942 Rose All Around 1975

postcards and paper collage on paper 39 ¼ by 27 ¾ inches / 99.5 by 70.5 cm signed, dated Summer 1975 and titled; with a label verso reading 36 PART / 6 Rows of 6 vertical cards Collections with Galleria LP 220, Turin with Galleria In Arco, Turin Private Collection, Italy Literature Michael Bracewell, The Postcard Art of Gilbert & George, 1972 – 1989, Delmonico Books-Prestel, Munich, 2011, illus colour p77

Since 1967, when they first met at Saint Martin’s School of Art, Gilbert & George have striven to make an ‘Art for All’ that would chime with the inner thoughts and true preoccupations of the average person – sex, death, politics, good and bad. Their watershed work, Singing Sculpture, 1970, not only eliminated the plinth, but also threw out the sculpture. Their artistic collaboration itself became the ‘living sculpture’ and from this point on objects would only appear in their work in the form of postcards, found objects or organic materials such as trees and flowers. Rose All Around is an early example of Gilbert & George’s postcard collages. The work is formed of thirty six individual postcards, dating from before or just after the First World War. Arranged in rows, a number of the postcards sit either upside down or on their side. The outer border consists of twenty coloured postcards illustrating various species of rose. These red, pink and white roses suffocate and encase the remaining cards. Inside, there are twelve black and white cards illustrating buildings, including Gravesend Milton, The National Memorial Library and the site of Queen Anne Boleyn’s execution, and in the centre lie four staged portraits of a dandy gentleman. The artists consider their postcard sculptures to be sketches for their larger ‘photo-pieces’, which they began creating in 1971. The present work relates directly to the Bloody Life series of photo-pieces, conceived in 1975, which are: ‘An aggressive desolate series with the title being both a curse against life and an appeal for salvation from decadent violence (the artists report they were thinking of the ‘’blood of Christ’’ when they adopted the blood imagery).’ 1 In Rose All Around, the ‘blood’ red roses surround the colourless postcards of locations either commemorating death or depicting associated sites. Flowers are a recurring symbol for Gilbert & George, representing the fleeting cycle of life and death. Four images of the actor John Martin-Harvey make up the centre of the composition. A symbol of hope and an ‘appeal for salvation from decadent violence’, Martin-Harvey provided salvation during the First World War by touring the country to raise money for the Red Cross and the Nation’s Fund for Nurses. 1  Brenda Richardson, Gilbert & George, exh. cat., Baltimore Museum of Art,   Maryland, 1984 – 5, p25

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Bridget Riley b.1931 Bright Red, Blue, Green Diagonals  1975

gouache and pencil on paper 15 ¾ by 26 ¼ inches / 40 by 66.5 cm signed, dated and titled

Collections with Sidney Janis Gallery, New York with Jacobson Howard Gallery, New York with Karsten Schubert Gallery, London Private Collection, UK Exhibited New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Bridget Riley, 30 April – 31 May 1975, (probably) gouaches not listed

‘I have to build up a bank of visual information first – about colours, forms, proportions, directions etc. This is the essential basis to my work.’ 1 In this colour study we find Bridget Riley investigating the optical properties of red, green and blue – the three colours that were the main focus of her work from 1967 to the mid-1970s. This deceptively simple work presents each colour in turn, surrounded by the other two. In the left column, we see red bounded by green and blue, in the centre, green is contained by red and blue, and on the right, blue is contained by red and green. Laid out in this way, the viewer is able to perceive a wide range of colour effects across the sheet. The red, for example, is truest and somehow darkest on the left, it appears more orange in the middle, and on the right appears closer to a pink. Equally, the painted bands affect our perception of the white of the paper, which appears most brilliant at the bottom left, when bounded by strips of blue, and more so than in the centre column, where the white is also contained by blue, but where the colour around this is green, rather than red. In 1975, Riley was predominantly working with curving forms; however, by the 1980s the rhomboid shape we see here had become a key motif. This shape allows colours to be placed side by side vertically (as we see in Riley’s stripe paintings) and also along longer, diagonal lengths (as in the curve paintings), but unlike these other motifs, the rhomboid offers a further complexity in that it can be built up in irregular-shaped blocks, such as in Nataraja, 1993 (coll. Tate Gallery). Riley’s works on paper are the first stage in her now well-established working process. After developing initial ideas, Riley (working with assistants) typically makes up painted paper shapes, allowing her to rearrange the colours by hand, before fixing them down. The resulting collage is then translated into a full-size cartoon, after which work begins on a final oil or wall painting. Given this, Riley’s studies on paper may be considered the most intimate and direct expressions of her thinking – they are exquisitely made and now widely recognised as important works in their own right. 1  The artist quoted in exhibition guide, Bridget Riley, Tate Gallery, London, 2003,   Room 5

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Howard Hodgkin  b.1932 Study for Birthday Party 1976

oil and gouache on paper 20 by 23 ¾ inches / 50.5 by 60.5 cm initialled and dated in pencil Collections Ian Starr, on long term loan to Wakefield Art Gallery & Museum Private Collection, UK

The 1970s were an important period for Howard Hodgkin, both in terms of his formal developments and the public recognition that he was receiving for his art. In 1976, Hodgkin was appointed CBE and had his first retrospective exhibition, Forty-Five Paintings, 1949 – 1975, at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. In the early 1970s, Hodgkin began to extend his paintings outwards, working not only on the canvas itself, but on the wooden frame surrounding it, a format he has continued to use throughout his career. In this work on paper, Hodgkin recreates this effect by painting a ‘frame’ into the work, applying bright yellow and deep blue gouache in broad brushstrokes to establish the picture’s perimeters and create a central window of condensed action and colour. This clever pictorial device draws the eye in towards the centre of the image, giving the viewer the sensation of being able to put his hand in and rip the heart out of the design. The title of the present work, as with many of Hodgkin’s paintings from this period, refers to a specific event, and much of his work can be understood as an attempt to distil the transitory and multilayered nature of memory into a single visual metaphor. As Hodgkin explained in 1967: ‘As far as the subjects of my pictures go, they are about one moment of time involving particular people in relationship to each other and also to me. After that moment has occurred, all the problems are pictorial. My pictures have become more elaborate because I want them to contain more of the subject, but for me the paramount difficulty is to make the picture into as finite and solid an object as possible in physical terms and to include nothing irrelevant or confusing. Ideally they should be like memorials.’ 1 Colour is the primary means through which Hodgkin conveys atmosphere in his paintings, and here the layering of oil and gouache is particularly effective, allowing the colours to overlap and merge with one another, creating complex colour effects that suggest the ever-changing haze of memory. 1  The artist quoted in John Russell, ‘Hodgkin Colour Locals’, ART news 66,   May 1967, p62

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David Hockney b.1937 Gregory in the Pool (Paper Pool 4) 1978

hand-coloured and pressed paper pulp 32 ⅛ by 50 inches / 81.3 by 127 cm initialled and dated D.H. 78; also signed and numbered Hockney 4–K verso Collections with Tyler Graphics, New York with Knoedler Gallery, London with DM Gallery, London Private Collection, UK, acquired c1983

Exhibited Madrid, Juan March Foundation, David Hockney, 18 September – 13 December 1992, cat no.33, illus colour p66 London, Offer Waterman, David Hockney, Early Drawings, 25 September – 23 October 2015, cat no.54, illus colour, touring to: New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, 3 November –  1 December 2015 Literature Nikos Stangos (ed.), David Hockney, Paper Pools, Thames and Hudson, London, 1980, another variant illus colour, cover image and p35 K.E. Tyler, Tyler Graphics: Catalogue Raisonné, 1974 – 1985, Tyler Graphics, New York, 1987, cat no.237: DH4, another variant illus colour, p163 Palais des Beaux-Arts, David Hockney, exhibition catalogue, Brussels, 1992, another variant illus colour, pl.33, p66

Gregory in the Pool (Paper Pool 4) is the last of four unique works that depict Gregory Evans leaning out of Ken Tyler’s swimming pool at his home and studio in Bedford Village, New York. Tyler, an influential printmaker, collaborated with Hockney on Paper Pools, a series of 30 works (of which this is the fourth) created between August and October 1978. Each work was produced using hand-coloured, pressed paper pulp, a new medium that enabled Hockney to approach his iconic swimming pool motif with renewed impetus. As Hockney recalled: ‘I love new mediums and this was something I had never seen or used before. I think mediums can turn you on, they can excite you: they always let you do something in a different way, even if you take the same subject, if you draw it in a different way, or if you are forced to simplify it, to make it bold because it is too finicky.’ 1 The nature of water as something constantly in flux offered Hockney a huge range of possibilities for representation and, in this series, the formal values of the pool were particularly well suited to a process that required bold colours and simplified forms. Further, the notion of using a watery medium to represent a watery subject appealed greatly to the artist’s playful side. For this series, Hockney recorded the pool at different times of the day and night, over a period of two months, making both pencil and photographic studies. From these he produced scaled-up, coloured line drawings, which formed the templates for cloisonnélike metal moulds. Once made, the moulds were placed over sheets of wet, newly-made paper and filled in with coloured pulp. After the moulds were lifted off again, further pulp and liquid dyes were applied by hand to finish off the image. The wet sheets were then individually pressed between felts in a hydraulic press under great pressure to fuse the layers of coloured pulp and begin the drying process. Sometimes a sheet was only partially pressed, allowing Hockney to make any last-minute alterations before the work had completely dried. The papers were finally dried off completely between wool felts and blotters in the press. This process is extremely labour intensive and these works have a physicality to them that is unusual in Hockney’s work. Indeed, Hockney recalled his delight in kneading the paper with his fingers and in using such a tactile process to describe different areas of Gregory’s body. There is a wonderful texture to the paper in this work, and the formal qualities of the material, such as the distressed edges of the natural paper fibres, become as relevant as the image itself. The mottled surface lends itself perfectly to the description of water shimmering under a bright summer light, and gives weight to the hazy silhouette of Gregory’s body as it leans against the side of the pool, casting a dark shadow across the ground. Rendered in stencil-like forms, this work is saturated with a sun-kissed palette of

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Detail of the colour pulp surface of David Hockney’s Gregory in the Pool I from the Paper Pools series, Tyler Graphics Ltd, Bedford Village, New York, 1978. Photo: Lindsay Green. Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.


dappled aquamarine, lemon yellow and shadows of mauve, bright orange and deep blue. It articulates an energy and dynamism and an opening up of forms and scale, which Hockney had been searching for in his art at the time. As he acknowledged: ‘They are like paintings, which is why I stayed; if they hadn’t been like paintings, I think I would have left after doing the first two or three small ones, I would have thought that was enough. And they also helped me in another way; painting in England before, I kept saying, I thought the paintings were getting too grey, too tight and I kept getting finicky and I wanted to be bolder. And another thing that was nice about Paper Pools was that you were forced to do it in a way, you were forced to think of things in another way, you couldn’t work in the way you had been doing before and put detail in; somehow, working like that defined another kind of essence of making a picture that couldn’t include detail. I think that’s why I enjoyed doing it. And as I say, working with someone who has an awful lot of energy is very thrilling. With Ken Tyler, nothing was impossible. If I said, could we, he said yes, yes it can be done.’ 2 1  Nikos Stangos (ed.), David Hockney, Paper Pools, Thames and Hudson,   London, 1980, p10 2  Ibid, p100

Kenneth Tyler, Lindsay Green and David Hockney hugging in front of Gregory in the Pool I paper pulp work from Hockney’s Paper Pools series, Tyler Graphics Ltd, Bedford Village, New York, 1978. Photo: Gregory Evans. Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.


Lucie Rie  1902 – 1995 Vase with Fluted Body  c. 1976

stoneware with a white and blue pitted glaze height 8 ¼ inches / 21 cm impressed with artist's seal on the base Collections Private Collection, USA Literature Tony Birks, Lucie Rie, Marston House, Yeovil, 1994, similar example illus b/w p69

Vase with Fluted Body is a very fine example of Lucie Rie’s work in stoneware. Rie eschewed the coventional two-stage process of bisque-firing, glazing and then refiring her forms, choosing instead to apply glazes directly onto her ‘greenware’, meaning they only had to be placed in the kiln once. The technique of fluting is only found in Rie’s stoneware pieces, where she would work a spiral of deep parallel lines around the body of a vessel, as we see in this example. This was achieved by carving into the body of the pot, with a spoon-shaped metal tool, when the clay was leather-hard. Rie often used this technique in the 1950s and 1960s, but it is rarer in her later work. The distinctive shape of this vase, which opens up into a wide, flared lip, is found in other examples, some of which have a more extended neck. In order to create this shape, the neck and body would have been thrown on the wheel separately and then joined together afterwards. The resulting form is a pleasing combination of rhythms – the neck and body are pinched, rather than round, while the lip of the vase curls both up and down on opposing sides, in contrast to the body. Volcanic, or crater, glazes begin to appear in Rie’s work in the 1960s. This distinctive effect is produced by mixing silicon carbide, or sometimes barium oxide, into the glaze. Both react with heat towards the later stages of the firing process, giving off carbon dioxide, and it is this gas that causes the surface to bubble up. Here, the eruption of the glaze has softened the sharpness of the fluted lines, while some of the glaze has travelled down the body in rivulets. The combination of gently tapering grooves, with a mottled, pitted surface and grey-blue glaze, is highly reminiscent of weathered seashells, particularly cockle shells. Rie’s vases have been likened to other organic forms, such as opening flowers, but while Rie was inspired by nature, she did not intend to represent it in any explicit way. Cyril Frankel recalls how Rie could ‘absorb the perfection of a bird’s feather, the structure of a leaf, the natural colours of marble as well as the form of a Cycladic carving.’ 1 1  Cyril Frankel, Dame Lucie Rie: Sale of a Lifetime, Bonhams, 17 April 1997, intro. p27

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Lucie Rie  1902 – 1995 Sgraffito Bowl  c. 1978

porcelain with white, brown, manganese and bronze glazes and sgraffito decoration diameter 9 inches / 22.7 cm impressed with artist's seal on the base

Collections Private Collection, UK Literature Tony Birks, Lucie Rie, Marston House, Yeovil, 1994, similar examples illus b/w pp164 – 165

The term sgraffito is taken from the Italian sgraffito, meaning to scratch, and the related graffiti, meaning to inscribe. In ceramics it describes the technique of layering two or more glazes onto a vessel, then scratching through the top layer to reveal fine lines of the contrasting glaze beneath. Lucie Rie sometimes combined this with the related technique of inlay, in which fine lines are carved into the surface and then filled in with another glaze. While Rie would have always been aware of the technique, she only took it up in earnest after visiting Avebury, Wiltshire, in the late 1940s, where she saw a collection of Bronze Age pottery and the bird bones that had been used to inscribe them. Tony Birks explains: ‘The painstaking sgraffito technique with a needle is a longwinded business, like tattooing, and more than doubles the amount of time which a pot takes to make. Lucie’s great skill in the fine-detailed sgraffito pots, which span the central part of her career from the late 1940s to the end of the 1960s, lay in matching the design with manganese of the appropriate thickness; sometimes this rises up around the sgraffito design with an arched meniscus, sometimes the manganese is so thin that it is like a varnish. Done mechanically or clumsily, sgraffito can be a boring and soulless technique, like scraperboard; also, when applied to finely-thrown porcelain, it can be an extremely dangerous technique as far as the structure of the pot is concerned, since the incising of the clay weakens the wall and sometimes, even with Lucie’s experience, the pot will be lost when it bursts apart like a seedpod along one of the incised lines.’ 1 As with all of Rie’s work, her sgraffito bowls are delicate and precise, but their wavering lines also have a charming liveliness that suggest her hands at work. When seen collectively, Rie’s ceramics can be truly appreciated – hers is an art of subtle variations, each object a progression, a new note, in harmony with the last. Working within a limited scale and range of motifs, she was able to produce an extraordinarily varied body of work, and her later ceramics benefit from a technical prowess accrued over decades of dedicated practice. 1  Tony Birks, Lucie Rie, Marston House, Yeovil, 1994, p68

Rie’s monogram on the bowl’s base

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William Turnbull  1922 – 2012 Metamorphosis 1 1979

bronze 6 ⅝ by 4 ⅛ by 1 ⅛ inches / 16.8 by 10.5 by 2.9 cm stamped with the artist’s monogram, dated and numbered 7⁄9, from an edition of 9 plus 1 AC

Collections The Estate of the Artist Literature Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, Henry Moore Foundation / Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, cat no.190, illus b/w p148

William Turnbull was awarded a major retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1973. For the artist it marked something of an end point, provoking a crisis in direction. His solution was to begin to work figuratively again, modelling with air-drying clay on a small scale. Amanda Davidson describes Turnbull making hundreds of little figures, some resembling ‘fertility figurines’, others like ‘pre-historic tools.’ 1 ‘I felt up to here with my own sculpture and had a tremendous drive to start at the beginning again instead of adding on and developing pieces. So I changed the scale completely and started doing very small things. I was trying to do things as if I wasn’t thinking. Of course it’s a total illusion – you find it all comes out like you in the end.’ 2 It was a major stylistic switch from the large-scale, minimalist sculptures he had produced in the 1960s. But it wasn’t until 1979 that Turnbull began to cast his clay experiments in bronze, and then in only relatively small numbers. In the catalogue raisonné, we see illustrated, side by side, the ten little bronzes Turnbull chose to cast in 1979. 3 They present a fascinating cross-section of motifs, which prefigure many of the forms that preoccupied the rest of the artist’s career. The paddle shape, flattened torso and arrowhead are all present, emerging as if all at once, from what was, in fact, an extended period of experimentation. Furthermore, Turnbull had first found a number of these motifs in the mid-1950s, so this series could more accurately be considered a definitive restatement of his core forms. Metamorphosis I presents an intriguing figure. Viewed from the front, the form is broad and curvy, the pert breasts and gently rounded belly suggestive of a fertile female body. From the side, the form is very thin, offering an entirely different bodily presence within the same figure. The undulating surface has evidently been modelled by hand and this adds to the sensuous nature of the sculpture. The patination of the bronzes varies across the edition – here it is a beautiful mottled sea green, as one might find in ancient Greek and Egyptian artifacts. 1  Amanda Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, Henry Moore Foundation /   Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, p62 2  Conversation with Clare Lilley, February, 2005, Yorkshire Sculpture Park   exhibition guide 3  Amanda Davidson, pp148 – 151

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R.B. Kitaj  1932 – 2007 The Sniper 1987

oil on canvas 120 by 36 inches / 304.9 by 91.4 cm Collections Saatchi Collection Private Collection, Europe

Exhibited London, Tate Gallery, R.B. Kitaj, A Retrospective, 16 June – 4 September 1994, cat no.79, illus colour p141, touring to: Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 23 October – 8 January 1995 New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 15 February – 14 May 1995 Literature Marco Livingstone, Kitaj, Phaidon, London, 1985, cat no.453, not illus Alistair Hicks, New British Art in the Saatchi Collection, Thames and Hudson, London, 1989, cat no.43, illus colour p58

Writing about The Sniper for his 1994 Tate retrospective, Kitaj explained: ‘There are snipers about, firing from apartments at strangers they don’t like. This picture-parable is a reminder not to throw stones from glass houses. If the sniper is surprised to be taken so seriously, he or she may be lacking in imagination, which may be the reason to have become a sniper in the first place. When I was a boy, during the Second World War, I liked to draw battle scenes full of criss-cross, zinging shots exchanged by Americans and their enemies. This composition is a stagey reversion to that. The pedestrian victim becomes a doppelgänger, reacting to phases of his wounds. In his instant of wish-fulfilment, he, or an ally, has clambered up gaily decorated dream steps to shoot back at the sniper, hitting the sniper’s head. I like to think my tall stage could be cleared away for a second act, the farce removed so that a new street scene might be enacted. Maybe a more tragic version of The Sniper, for which the present events are only a comic rehearsal…’ As with all the School of London painters, Kitaj’s closely observed drawings of the human figure are the foundation of his practice. There is something of the quality of his charcoal drawings in the central figures here, which are outlined in black, then overpainted in lighter tones to produce a complex, textured surface. The exaggerated limbs of the main figure, which fill the bottom third of the canvas, are described in writhing strokes, suggesting an underlying musculature one sees in the paintings of Francis Bacon. Kitaj offsets these passages of gestural figuration with cartoonlike gunfire and more flatly painted areas behind. The paintings of Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni di Consolo) were a notable point of reference at this time and The Sniper mimics the vivid pinks, greens and blues of the San Sepolcro Altarpiece, 1437 – 44 (coll. National Gallery). Here the extreme perspective of Kitaj’s ‘tall stage’ also suggests street scenes by Giorgio de Chirico and his scuttling figures are reminiscent of George Grosz. Kitaj’s paintings are highly personal propositions, often incorporating references to other artists, literature and historical events. While The Sniper does not directly describe the Holocaust, Kitaj’s Jewish identity became an important subject for his paintings in the 1980s. This painting’s themes of random violence and arbitrary persecution are in keeping with other paintings from the period that address the subject more directly.

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Lucian Freud  1922 – 2011 Man Resting (State II) 1988

etching on paper 18 ½ by 19 ¾ / 47 by 50.2 cm, sheet size initialled and numbered IX/X A.P., from an edition of 30 plus 10 APs printed by Marc Balakjan at Studio Prints, London published by James Kirkman, London and Brook Alexander, New York Collections Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York Exhibited Rome, Palazzo Ruspoli, Lucian Freud, Dipinti e Opere Su Carta 1940 – 1991, 3 October –  17 November 1991, cat no.76, another edition illus b/w Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Lucian Freud, British Council, 31 October 1992 – 10 January 1993, cat no.64, another edition illus b/w p82, touring to: Perth, Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1 February – 14 March 1993 London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Lucian Freud: Recent Work, 10 September – 21 November 1993, cat no.44, another edition illus colour, touring to: New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 16 December 1993 – 13 March 1994 Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 6 April – 13 June 1994 New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, Lucian Freud, Etchings from the Paine Webber Art Collection, 23 January – 21 March 1999, cat no.22, another edition illus b/w p48, touring to: San Diego, Museum of Contemporary Art, 10 April – 23 May 1999 Seattle, Seattle Art Museum, 10 June –  15 August 1999 Houston, Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, 21 January – 19 March 2000 Stanford, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, 7 June – 13 August, 2000 Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art, 16 September – 12 November 2000 … Continues on back pages

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Man Resting (State II) depicts Angus Cook, a young filmmaker and one of the first people to sit completely naked for Lucian Freud. Between 1985 and 1990, Freud created at least seven oil paintings and seven ‘naked man’ etchings of Cook, including Naked Man on a Bed (State 1), Naked Man on a Bed (State 2), both 1987, and the present work, which is a direct continuation of these two. In these earlier etchings Freud shows the entirety of Cook’s sleeping body from above, as he lies on his side, his torso turned slightly down so that we have a three-quarter view of his face. Here, in the present work, Freud creates a more concentrated energy by focusing on Cook’s head, cropping the image just below the top of the shoulders. He uses cross-hatching unsparingly, creating a heavily worked surface that describes the exaggerated features of the human face under the effects of sleep, ‘…where veins bulge and slackened skin crumples stiffly upon itself.’ 1 Etching is the only form of printmaking Freud chose to explore as it allowed him to work on a plate as he would a drawing or painting, in his own studio and from direct observation, until the image was ready to be sent off to a printer. The high level of draughtsmanship required and element of risk involved in the process appealed to him, he relished the ‘…element of danger and mystery. You don’t know how it’s going to come out. What’s black is white. What’s left is right.’ 2 Nb: Despite the print’s title suggesting there are ‘two states’, this    is in fact the only version to have been published by the artist. 1  Starr Figura, Lucian Freud, The Painter’s Etchings, exh. cat. Museum of Modern   Art, New York, 2008, p28 2  Ibid p15



Lucian Freud  1922 – 2011 Head of Ib 1988 charcoal on paper 10 ¾ by 13 inches / 25 by 33 cm Collections The Artist James Kirkman, London Private Collection, London with Malborough Fine Art, London Private Collection, Spain

‘My work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings. It is an attempt at a record. I work from the people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know. I use the people to invent my pictures with, and I can work more freely when they are there.’ 1 Head of Ib is a portrait of Isobel Boyt, one of Lucian Freud’s fourteen children and one of four from his relationship with Suzy Boyt. For Freud, the time he spent in the studio with his subjects was often the means by which his emotional relationships would develop. As the artist himself has recognised, during this process, ‘You’re living, and your relationships grow and mature or decay.’ 2 Isobel Boyt has also spoken candidly about this experience: ‘Each time I did a picture with him I swore I’d never do it again, but then I do because it is a way of having a relationship with my dad as well as there is a part of me that if he wants to paint me I am quite flattered… I see each picture as representing a period in my life, it is more than a snapshot, six months or something is a substantial enough period to have had to see how you felt that time, your state of mind, your concerns and what you were going through encapsulated.’ 3 Ib appears in several large-scale paintings, including Large Interior, Paddington, 1969 and Ib and her Husband, 1992, and in smaller portraits in various mediums. Freud frequently depicts his daughter sitting alone, focusing on her head at close range, often with face turned away or eyes averted. Here her pose implies a certain level of submission to the artist’s scrutiny and, in turn, the viewer is invited to study Ib, absorbing the lines and shadows used to describe not only the physiognomy of her face, but the character behind it. In contrast to his etchings of Ib, by their nature more linear and severe, here, Freud’s charcoal drawing conveys a real tenderness in its gentle and intuitive marks. 1  The artist quoted in John Russell, Lucian Freud, exh. cat. Hayward Gallery, London,   1974, p13 2  The artist quoted in William Feaver, ‘Lucian Freud: Life into Art’, Lucian Freud, exh.   cat., Tate Gallery, London, 2002, p43 3  Isobel Boyt quoted in Jake Auerbach and William Feaver, Sitting for Freud, film,   BBC, 2004

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Leon Kossoff  b.1926 Christ Church 1999

oil on board 83 ⅞ by 80 inches / 213 by 203 cm dated

Collections The Artist with LA Louver, Los Angeles Private Collection Exhibited London, National Gallery, Leon Kossoff, Drawing from Painting, 14 March – 1 July 2007, p47, cat no.2, illus colour p11 and p46 (detail) London, Annely Juda Fine Art, Leon Kossoff, 29 October – 17 December 2010, cat no.25, illus colour, touring to: New York, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 5 May –  18 June 2011 Los Angeles, LA Louver, 8 September –  8 October 2011

Christ Church is an imposing baroque church on East London’s Commercial Street, built between 1714 – 1729 to a design by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The building was a landmark familiar to Leon Kossoff, who had lived in nearby Wentworth Street after the war. Kossoff first began to draw the church in the 1950s while it was still semi-derelict, returning again in the 1970s when it was under threat of demolition. But Kossoff only began to truly engage with the subject after reading Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor in 1985, after which he worked regularly on the subject until 2000, producing drawings, etchings and around twenty large-scale oils. Kossoff’s numerous studies of the church can be understood as a gesture of memorialisation in the face of change. As the artist elucidated in 1989: ‘In the dusty sunlight of this August day, when this part of London still looks and feels like the London of Blake’s Jerusalem, I find myself involved once again in making drawings and the idea of a painting begins to emerge. The urgency that drives me to work is not only to do with the pressures of the accumulation of memories and the unique quality of the subject, but also with the awareness that time is short, that soon the mass of this building will be overshadowed, the character of the building will be lost forever, for it is by its monumental flight into unimpeded space that we remember this building.’ 1 Kossoff’s paintings of Christ Church echo Claude Monet’s series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral made just over a century earlier between 1892 – 1894. By observing the same subject through the seasons, and over a sustained period of time, both artists were able to explore the effects of the changing natural light on their chosen subjects. Georges Clemenceau’s comments on Monet’s Cathedral paintings, made in 1896, could just as easily be applied to Kossoff’s depictions of Christ Church a century later: ‘In front of the 20 views of the building by Monet, one notices that the art, in its persistence of expressing the nature with increasing exactitude, teaches us to watch, to perceive, to feel. The stone itself is transformed into an organic substance, and one can feel how it changes in the same way that a little moment of the life is followed by another one.’ 2 1  The artist quoted in New Criterion, March 1989, p52 2  Georges Clemenceau, Le Grand Pan, Imprimerie Nationale, 8 April 2003

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Tony Bevan b.1951 Violet Interior  2003

acrylic, pigments and charcoal on canvas 97 ⅝ by 144 ⅞ inches / 248 by 368 cm signed and inscribed with artist's reference PC 0311 in charcoal verso Collections Michael Hue-Williams, London Private Collection, UK Literature Kosme de Baranano, Jon Bird, Marco Livingstone, Klaus Ottmann and Jonathan Sinclair-Wilson, Tony Bevan, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2006, closely related painting illus colour p157

Tony Bevan’s paintings of architectural interiors from this period typically comprise a single, vivid colour – red, orange, cobalt blue or violet, (as here) – on an unprimed ground. The vast scale of these paintings necessitates that Bevan work directly on the floor. Fragments of charcoal and smears from where he has knelt and moved over the canvas remain on the surface, lending a visceral quality to the paintings. He comments: ‘I need that contact, to be physically close to them … I can’t feel over-awed by them when they are on the ground … I also need the gravity if I’m trying to build up the thickness’ 1 Bevan’s interiors do not necessarily describe a specific place, they are more a confabulation of spaces, remembered and imagined. His Deptford studio is in an area once known for its thriving docklands, a function that has now fallen away. The glass structure and sawtooth roof seen in Violet Interior seem to reference the disused industrial buildings that surround the studio. Postcards depicting tunnels, cathedrals and ancient sites are pinned to Bevan’s studio walls, informing the work. He has also suggested that some of his paintings might relate to a Dutch barn he visited as a child. In conversation with Richard Cork, Bevan explains another painting, Red Interior, 1999, as… ’not a house, or a space, but a place beyond – an area difficult to quantify, almost like the jungle in Conrad’ 2 Klaus Ottmann describes Bevan’s portrait heads as ‘exposed structural portraits’, and in Violet Interior Bevan treats architecture in the same way by presenting the skeletal structure of the building. Bevan’s figure paintings are psychologically charged and, by extension, his paintings of dark corridors, weighty ceilings and cavernous chambers are less portraits of places than manifestations of (his own) psychological state. His interiors suggest feelings of containment, isolation, physical pressure, perceptual distortion and release. By working repeatedly within a small range of architectural motifs, Bevan has developed a parallel body of work as powerfully expressive as his portraits. Nb: Violet Interior has the artist’s code PC 0311. This denotes a    ‘Painting on Canvas’, completed in 2003, and the 11th painting    produced that year. 1  Richard Cork, Tony Bevan, Paintings and Drawings, Michael Hue Williams,   London, 2000, p21 2  Richard Cork, p6, and also, Kosme de Barañano, Klaus Ottmann, Jonathan   Sinclair-Wilson and Marco Livingstone, Foreword by Jon Bird, Tony Bevan,   Lund Humphries, London, 2005, p51

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Rachel Whiteread b.1963 Model III 2006

plaster, wood and aluminium, comprising one shelf and seven plaster units 8 by 15 ¾ by 7 ¾ inches / 20.3 by 40 by 19.7 cm

Collections Galleria Lorcan O'Neill, Rome Private Collection, USA

Since the early 1990s, Rachel Whiteread has been casting the negative space inside and around domestic objects and buildings, conjuring these notional spaces into solid forms. She has developed this apparently simple process into an ambitious and sophisticated formal language and is now regarded as one of the most important sculptors of her generation. Several writers and critics have noted the connection between the artist’s recent sculptures and the vocabulary of painting. Chris Townsend relates Whiteread’s work to the tradition of vanitas painting, observing that both have a concern with the everyday and with the imitation of the unseen. Similarly, Jennifer Gross sees a link to Chardin’s cool-eyed scrutiny of domestic objects. Whiteread has herself discussed her interest in the still-life paintings of Giorgio Morandi (1890 – 1964), and Model III forms part of a series of smallscale sculptures that make explicit reference to still-life painting and specifically to Morandi’s work. Here, Whiteread’s close arrangement of objects, one behind another on a shelf, directly recalls the bottles and boxes of a typical Morandi still-life. The muted tones of grey, white and yellow also echo the austere and simplified colour range of Morandi’s paintings, which invariably present a limited range of pastel tones. The varying heights and even the delicate, jagged seams of Whiteread’s casts, seem to echo the wobbly silhouettes of Morandi’s paintings. Both artists address the difficulty of representation itself, their forms, like ghosts, vital not for their likeness, but for the way they express some essential characteristic of the original objects. Whiteread’s process contains an inbuilt narrative of loss – that which has gone – and yet her objects simultaneously reinforce an explicit sense of the present. Jennifer Gross describes how, ‘Whiteread encourages us – as well as herself – not to see beyond our real means, but rather to see what is right in front of our noses. The ideal she wishes us to apprehend is carpe diem, the seizing of the present. There is no mystery of mastery in her work but the present interface of life and matter at hand …Like Chardin, Whiteread literally pulls out the surface and spaces of her new world and from this humble store she casts for us objects through which we encounter unremarkable yet significant reflections, of our present time, our unseen life.’ 1 1  Jennifer Gross, The Art of Rachel Whiteread, Thames and Hudson, London,   2004, p50

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In September 2015, Offer Waterman relocated to No. 17 St George Street, an early 18th century townhouse in Mayfair. The building is one of only two remaining from an early Georgian development by Lord Scarborough and is unique in retaining much of the original interior layout. From 1917 until the early 1940s, the building was home to the William Morris & Co showroom, where tapestries were displayed around the main staircase. The gallery officially opened on 25th September with the inaugural exhibition David Hockney, Early Drawings.

Left: Installation photograph from William Turnbull: Selected Works from the Artist’s Estate, 17 November 2015 –  15 January 2016. Photos: Nick Guttridge



As dealers and agents in Modern British Art, Offer Waterman handles the finest paintings, drawings and sculpture from the 20th century onwards. Established in 1996, the gallery works closely with private, institutional and corporate collectors from across the UK and internationally. In addition to our specialist knowledge of 20th century British art, we have an in-depth understanding of the art market as a whole. Our expertise enables us to assist clients with the acquisition of American and European Modern and Contemporary art. We are always looking to acquire important paintings, drawings and sculpture and will purchase, or consign, directly from private and corporate collectors. We are also interested to hear from current or future collectors. All enquiries are treated in the strictest confidence. In addition to maintaining a wide inventory of 20th century British art, our services to clients include: Discreet negotiation for both purchase and sale on behalf of private, corporate and institutional collections. Confidential advice on the purchase of art at auction. Valuations for the purpose of sale, insurance, probate, estate and inheritance tax. Advisory work for funding bodies. Curatorial services including: research, cataloguing, conservation, framing, display and lighting advice.

17 St George Street London W1s 1fj t +44 (0)20 7042 3233 e info@waterman.co.uk w www.waterman.co.uk The gallery is open Monday to Friday, 10am to 6pm, and Saturday by appointment

Installation photograph from William Turnbull: Selected Works from the Artist’s Estate, 17 November 2015 – 15 January 2016


Modern British Artists


Adams Aitchison Allen Andrews Armitage Auerbach Bacon Barry Bell Bevan Blake Blow Bomberg Boyle Family Brown Burra Butler Caro Caulfield Chadwick Clough Coldstream Collins Coper Craig-Martin

Craxton Dalwood Davie Deacon Dobson Doig Flanagan Freud Frink Gabo Gaudier-Brzeska Gertler Gilbert & George Gill Ginner Gore Grant Hamilton Hepworth Heron Hilton Hitchens Hockney Hodgkin Hoyland

Hume John Jones Kennington Kitaj Kossoff Landy Lanyon Latham Lin Lowry McWilliam Martin Minton Moore Moss Nash Nevinson Nicholson Ofili Paolozzi Pasmore Penrose Perry Piper

Redpath Rego Rie Riley Roberts Scott Scully Self Sickert Smith Spencer Sutherland Tunnard Turnbull Uglow Vaughan Wadsworth Wallis Whiteread Wilding Willing Wood Wyndham-Lewis Wynter Yeats


2 (continued) Walter Richard Sickert  The Studio: The Painting of a Nude  1906 …

9 (continued) Henry Moore  Stringed Figure  1939 …

London, Browse and Darby, British and French Paintings and Drawings, 1987, cat no.39, illus colour

Robert Melville, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawing 1921 – 1969, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1970, cat no.204, another cast illus b/w

New York, Hirschl and Adler, British Modernist Art: 1905 – 1930, 1987, cat no.34, illus colour

Elda Fezzi, Henry Moore, Sansoni Editore, Florence, 1971, pl.15, white string version illus colour

London, Royal Academy of Arts, Sickert: Paintings, 20 November 1992 – 14 February 1993, cat no.56, illus colour, touring to: Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, 25 February –  31 May 1993 Literature Lillian Browse, Sickert, Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1960, illus b/w pl.74 Wendy Dimson, 'Four Sickert Exhibitions', The Burlington Magazine, vol.102, 1960, p440, illus fig.31 Wendy Baron, Sickert, Phaidon Press, London, 1973, pp118, 129, 354, cat no.160, illus b/w fig.206 Richard Shone, Walter Sickert, Phaidon Press, Oxford, 1988, illus b/w pl.36 Lisa Tickner, 'Walter Sickert: the Camden Town Murder and Tabloid Crime,'Modern Life and Modern Subjects’, British Art in the Early Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000, illus fig.29 David Peter Corbett, Sickert, Tate Publishing, London, 2001, illus fig.21 Anna Gruetzner Robins, Sickert and the Paris Art World, Tate Gallery, London, 2005, p171, illus fig.47 Wendy Baron, Sickert, Paintings and Drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006, pp58 – 59, 321 – 323, cat no.270, illus colour p322

Franco Russoli and David Mitchinson, Henry Moore, Sculpture, Rizzoli, New York, 1981, p76, cat nos.126 & 128, another cast illus David Sylvester (ed.), Henry Moore, Volume 1: Complete Sculpture 1921 – 1948, Lund Humphries, London, 1998, cat no.207.88, original lead and wire version Stringed Figure, dated late 1939, illus b/w p133


11 (continued)  Henry Moore  Recumbent Figure  1938 …

38 (continued) Lucian Freud  Man Resting (State II)  1988 …

London, Camden Arts Centre, The Roland Collection, 15 September – 10 October 1976, cat no.80, another cast

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings, 16 December 2007 –  10 March 2008, pl.50, another edition illus colour p81 and front cover

Paris, Orangerie des Tuileries, Henry Moore: Sculptures et Dessins, 6 May – 29 August 1977, cat no.28, cast unknown London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, Works from the Roland Collection, Arts Council, 2 March –  3 May 1979, cat no.64, another cast, touring to: Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, May – June 1979 York, City Art Gallery, July – August 1979 Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, August –  September 1979 Milton Keynes, Art Gallery, September –  October 1979 Plymouth, City Museum and Art Gallery, October – December 1979 Literature Barrie Stuart-Penrose, The Art Scene, Paul Hamlyn, London, 1969, p35, illus b/w David Sylvester (ed.), Henry Moore, Volume 1: Complete Sculpture 1921 – 1948, Lund Humphries, London, 1988, p11, cat no.184, not illus

Literature Craig Hartley, The Etchings of Lucian Freud: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1946 – 1995, Marlborough Graphics, London and New York, 1995, cat no.34 Bruce Bernard and Derek Birdsall, Lucian Freud, Random House, New York, 1996, cat no.218, illus b/w William Feaver, Lucian Freud, Rizzoli, New York, 2007, cat no.228, illus colour


Please contact the gallery for details of available works. Offer Waterman Managing Director

Design Richard Ardagh Studio

Research Polly Checker

Rebecca Beach Director

Photography Bonhams Prudence Cuming Associates Lindsay Green Nick Guttridge Gregory Evans Andrew Ranicki Sotheby’s

Special Thanks Dr Wendy Baron Diarmuid Kelley Thomas Lighton Michel Schranz Anne Soward Alex & Johnny Turnbull Stella Vasileiadou

Printing Graphius, Gent

ISBN 978-0-9574188-4-4

James Gould Director Polly Checker Associate Director Grima Quintana Senior Gallery Manager Emily Drablow Gallery Manager




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