Page 41 - Studio International - July/August 1967

less uniform colour. Instead of extending the full width nowledged his indebtedness to the New York School but
of the picture, most of these patches were rectangular or also criticized the Americans for sacrificing too many
even square (i.e. non-directional) and were distributed painterly qualities in their search for extreme solutions.
asymmetrically so as to form an irregular balance. They Patrick Heron's paintings of 1959-62 are mostly soft
not only appeared to hover at different intervals in and atmospheric in treatment, with a few blurred-edged
depth but sometimes to be coming forward or sinking discs or squares (sometimes positive, sometimes shadowy)
backward, expanding or contracting. Though these pic- floating in a ground of a contrasting colour. The colour
tures had a certain similarity to the pre-1950 paintings of areas vary greatly in density and luminosity so that, for
Rothko, the earliest of them were done before Heron had example, the discs sometimes have more body than the
seen any of Rothko's works of this type: he says that he surrounding area (like islands in a sea) and sometimes
only saw one for the first time in the exhibition of pictures less (like water surrounded by land), while broken colours
from the E. J. Power collection at the I.C.A. in March— are played off against vibrant pure ones, transparent
April 1958 and wrote about it enthusiastically. colours against opaque areas, and so on. The colours
In the pictures developed from works like Red Ground: are treated lyrically with a musical freedom. This ex-
May 1957 in 1958 and early 1959, the paint was applied perimentation is pushed in certain works to the point
more thickly and opaquely, so that the colours had a where a ding-dong relationship is established between
richer, deeper resonance and the colour patches were two shapes on opposite sides of the picture, so that the
given greater density and weight—they became the eye is drawn first to one then to the other, or else a
dominant elements in the composition. Fuzzy, soft-edged coloured area is made to pulsate, to expand or contract
squares, rectangles and lop-sided circles (sometimes a (a kind of optical flicker involving after-images).
circle within a rectangle) were distributed not only to His growing reaction against what he felt to be the
produce a rhythmical, asymmetrical pattern but also a over-simplification of American painting eventually led
movement in and out of depth. This to-fro movement him from about 1963 to re-complicate his compositions
was enhanced by the use of much more pronounced once more. He broke away from the idea of a ground
tonal contrasts, so that some areas seemed to glow with lapping round the forms and began to make the ground
concentrated light whereas others were dark and mysteri- an active area, divided up like everything else. Or rather
ous and almost merged with the background. But it he tried not to have a ground at all but to give all the
would be wrong to assume that the luminous areas areas equal weight and interest. His pictures of this type
always appeared to come forward and the darker ones have a shallow ambiguous spatial structure, with sil-
to go back: sometimes the roles were reversed; and if we houetted wafers of colour set in layers parallel to the
look at Heron's work of this period as a whole we can picture surface, sometimes behind, sometimes in front
see that he had begun to experiment very boldly and of one another. Instead of the soft-edged organic colour
empirically with different colour combinations and the shapes of 1959-62, there is a new crispness and smooth-
spatial movement of colours. The atmospheric use of ness and a harder flatness, with uniform areas of colour
colour was combined in these works with a return to and precise outlines. The compositions are nearly geo-
deliberate contrasts of brushwork, ranging from a delicate metrical, based (like many of Ben Nicholson's abstracts
rhythmical caressing touch to boldly scribbled lines. of the 1930s) on rectangles and circles but with a charac-
Although Heron's admiration for the paintings of the teristic irregularity of outline and there are sometimes
New York Abstract Expressionists was in some respects strong and even harsh contrasts of colour.
reinforced by the exhibition of The New American Painting In his works of the last two years he has carried this
at the Tate Gallery in February—March 1959 (an exhibi- complexity yet further by the use of freer, more dynamic
tion which included important groups of works by Mark shapes: shapes which are still related to circles and
Rothko, Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb), his rectangles but whose edges have been sliced into and
attitude towards American painting had already started opened up so that the colour areas interlock like the
to become somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand his pieces of a jig-saw. Though they sometimes have a
paintings of 1959-62 were much more simplified and similarity to collages of roughly-torn paper, they also
empty, sometimes containing only two or three very mark a partial return to the kind of restless linear struc-
simple areas surrounded by a ground of a contrasting ture which one finds in his works of 1950-2, particularly
colour. But on the other hand he had begun to feel that in their extravagant irregularity and in the avoidance
his interests were radically different from those of the of any straight lines. The effect tends to be sharper and
Americans. Whereas the Americans liked symmetry, he more vibrant than in his earlier abstract works.
always chose a marked asymmetry, an irregular balance, The stand which Heron has taken recently against the
even to the point of pushing all his shapes right to one dominance of American painting (particularly in Studio
side of the picture, and whereas the Americans tended to International, December 1966) becomes very easy to under-
repeat a compositional schema, he was always searching stand in the light of his development: indeed it seems
for new variations. Moreover he had no special pre- almost inevitable. He believes that the American painters
ference for working on a monumental, environmental have pushed simplification to its ultimate extreme and
scale, but was equally at home on much smaller easel- that it must be followed by some sort of re-complication
type formats, and even in gouache. When he addressed of the picture surface, in which British artists and not the
the Artists' Club in Greenwich Village in April 1960, at Americans are now taking the lead. 'But of course it is
the time of his first visit to New York for his exhibition also obvious', he wrote in 1962, 'that colour is now the
at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, he not only freely ack- only direction in which painting can travel.' q
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