Featured Artist: Patrick Heron (1920-1999)
Early in the morning of Monday May 24, 2004, a fire destroyed hundreds of pieces of modern art in the Momart warehouse in Leyton, East London, among them work by Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. The ruin of more than 50 canvases by the abstract artist Patrick Heron may be remembered as the greatest loss. One of these pictures was Patrick Heron's Vertical Light, painted at his home in the Eagles Nest in Cornwall in 1957, displaying strokes of brilliant colour which Heron declared belonged to "the realm of pure visual sensation" and which his biographer Mel Gooding numbered among the most spectacularly beautiful paintings made anywhere since 1945.
Black and White: April 1956 (oil on canvas)
Heron (1920 -1999) was one of the twentieth century’s most influential - and controversial - artists and critics. The purchase of his canvas Black and White: April 1956 for the Bishop Otter Collection in 1957 divided the college’s Council and ‘provoked restlessness among students, staff and Council’. One member of Council found the painting ‘neither truthful nor beautiful’, while another expressed concern that Heron’s example might convince art students ‘how easy it was to become an artist’. Heron’s place in British art history is now secure, but Black and White is still capable of unsettling its viewers.
Black and White, an austere composition of abstract forms chopped against white canvas, was painted after Heron had settled at Eagles Nest in Cornwall. His work at the time showed the influence of modernist abstract painting from the late 1940s and he wrote about the work of Braque, Matisse and Bonnard with precision and passion; but it was the Cornish landscape of his boyhood that invigorated his work with what might be described as serious playfulness. At Eagles Nest the artist ‘made it new’, stripping back the landscapes and gardens of Cornwall to rough slabs of colour and granular brushstrokes. He craved the liberation of fractured form – the denial of transparent ‘meaning’ that the modernist writers Woolf, Joyce and Pound had kicked against with gusto – yet his paintings convulse in their attempt to communicate the force of their suggestiveness. Black and White pares back the narrative realism of pre-modernist art to geometrics and stark surfaces, so that the canvas frustrates our learned impulse to look beneath or ‘above’ concrete marks for a figurative meaning. As we puzzle over Black and White, testing our own perspectives and values against its harmonious chaos, we become the painting’s subject.
On first viewing, only the latter part of the painting’s title - April 1956 - seems to connect us with the natural landscapes that Heron painted obsessively during 1956, T.S. Eliot’s April is the cruellest month sounding through our head. Moving closer to the painting, Heron’s dark forms and empty spaces, like Eliot’s Waste Land, are charged with conflict and energy. Black was never less basic: Heron’s slabs of oil are composed of a dozen shades and depths, washed to transparency, slathered grittily, layered in palimpsest.
His vertical structures move the eye upwards, directing the viewer away from the physicality of brush on canvas to a transcendent subject, other and above. Yet Black and White bewilders that convention of verticality. Turn the painting upside down (it hangs in any direction) and the base line of composition becomes the higher subject: as above, so below. Stepping closer still we see Eliot’s dried tubers, his April generation, in the cobwebs and roots that twist out of their restraining verticals across the canvas, entwining black with white, order with unchecked growth. When the borders upon which our sense of meaning rely are scrambled so insistently, how do we read space? Black and White contests its profusion of geometric borders within the canvas, where cobwebbed nets stiffen into rectangular order and collapse again in a dark soup of oil. This is a moment of unresolved and vital opposition, poised at the moment of renewal that is only inevitable in retrospect: the ordinary miracle of April.
The presence of this surviving canvas in a university, a concrete and abstract space with many entrances and exits, endings and regenerations, seems particularly poignant. The physical instances of many of Heron’s paintings are gone, yet, as T.S. Eliot wrote, and Black and White insists, creative energy regenerates endlessly:
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Heron could not have known in 1956 that Black and White: April 1956 would testify to the defiant altruism of his art; but he would, I think, have appreciated how this surviving canvas is so vigorous an affirmation of deep roots and renewal.
Jessica de Mellow, May 2011