Patrick Heron

(British, 1920-1999)

MANGANESE, ULTRAMARINE AND INDIGO : 1964 101.5 x 152.5 cm. (40 x 60 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With Waddington Galleries, London, where acquired by
Judge Dennis Levy, thence by descent to the present owner
Private Collection, U.S.A.

Exhibited
London, The Waddington Galleries, Patrick Heron, November-December 1964, cat.no.4

Heron had experimented with pure abstraction as early as 1952 but maintained a figurative base to his painting (see lot 60) until 1955/6 when he began to develop a language of strokes of pure colour which moved away from a definite subject. The 'garden' and 'stripe' paintings of the late 1950s may have been in response to the light and environment of the artist's new home at Eagles Nest, Zennor, in Cornwall. But amongst the many remarkable features of Heron's career was his ability to continually develop and renew his paintings and by 1958/9 a new shift was already emerging. This was evidenced by a simplification of the palette and the introduction of a wider vocabulary of forms which allowed the artist to concentrate on the use of colour to form pictorial space.

Discussing this in A Note on my Painting: 1962, written for the artist's exhibition at the Lienhard Gallery in Zurich in January 1963, Heron comments, 'For a very long time, now, I have realised that my over-riding interest is colour. Colour is both the subject and the means; the form and the content; the image and the meaning, in my painting to-day ... It is obvious that colour is now the only direction in which painting can travel. Painting has still a continent left to explore, in the direction of colour (and in no other direction) ... It seems obvious to me that we are still only at the beginning of our discovery and enjoyment of the superbly exciting facts of the world of colour. One reels at the colour possibilities now: the varied and contrasting intensities, opacities, transparencies; the seeming density and weight, warmth, coolness, vibrancy; or the superbly inert "dull" colours - such as the marvellously uneventful expanses of the surface of an old green door in the sunlight' (Vivien Knight, Patrick Heron, London, 1988, p.34).

Heron's work of this period is sometimes compared to that of Mark Rothko, who came to Cornwall in August 1959 to meet those artists he knew of and admired, painting with a freedom he felt difficult to achieve in New York. Much has been written about the cross Atlantic currents that ebbed and flowed between the American Abstract Expressionists and British artists such as William Scott, Alan Davie and Peter Lanyon. But it was Heron, as an art critic, who perhaps engaged most publicly with the wider impact of their work. He had always been impressed by Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning et al, indeed the first time he saw many of their pictures at the Tate in 1956 he was 'instantly elated by the size, energy, originality, economy and inventive daring of many of the paintings'. But he had always felt a lack of resonance in their use of colour. Heron's paintings of this time, such as the present work, are in fact radically different from Rothko's formal, hieratic works. They are more dynamic, more complex – in both colour and handling – and with an innate ability to draw the viewer in. In the present work, the simplification of the picture plane allowed Heron to use large areas of colour to set the tone of the painting. This is taken even further by drawing nearly all the colour from within a single range of blue. Limiting himself in this way ensured that the weight of the forms was not overwhelmed by the contrast of the colours, rather that the differing tones worked together to define and place the forms within the composition.

In 1963, the year before MANGANESE, ULTRAMARINE AND INDIGO : 1964 was painted, Heron had begun to plan his compositions through drawing the shapes in charcoal directly onto the canvas. Although these paintings were initially inspired by the hard-edged modernism that Ben Nicholson demonstrated in his ordered reliefs, Heron's evident brush marks convey a more organic practice. Indeed, he famously quipped that ''Unlike Ben Nicholson, I have never in my life drawn a straight line or a purely circular circle or disc". So, although the abstract shapes hint at geometry, they are emphatically painterly and gestural, gaining brilliance from the white priming beneath.

As the decade progressed Heron would reintroduce stronger, more contrasting colours and explore the points at which these colours met, but in MANGANESE, ULTRAMARINE AND INDIGO : 1964 we see him working in 'soft edges' at a point where he relishes the challenge of bringing together a purity of intention and imagination using only restricted means. The result - a deep saturation of the mind's eye that cements the artist's reputation as one of Britain's greatest abstract painters of the 20th Century.

The Patrick Heron Trust is in the process of researching the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work and would like to hear from owners of any works by Patrick Heron, so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue. Please write to the Patrick Heron Trust, c/o Modern British and Irish Art, Bonhams, 101 New Bond Street, London W1S 1SR or email [email protected].

We are grateful to Dr Andrew Wilson for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.