Page 40 - Studio International - March 1968

Derek Southall

John Russell

Derek Southall's new paintings are the beginning of First, then, Southall developed the idea of the other-
something. Unlike so many paintings made in this than-rectangular canvas. He did not pursue the possibili-
country at this time, they do not bear the invisible label ties of shaped three-dimensional canvas, but concentrated
fin de ligne: somewhere within them an exasperated instead on constructional units which were, in effect,
energy is casting round for fuller expression. planks or laths wrapped round with canvas, rather than
Very few galleries could show Southall's new paintings wooden frames with canvas stretched across them. Some-
at all. (El Hacedor, for instance, is thirty-two feet long.) times these long thin rectangular units were combined
Fewer still would want to show them. It is very much to with conventional areas of stretched canvas, but the basic
the credit of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford that formal element was, more often, an L-shape or V-shape;
it has had both the wit and the willingness to put them sometimes reversed, sometimes stood on end, sometimes
*Until March 23 on view.* The upper room at the Museum is one of the combined in echo-forms, sometimes allied to parallelo-
grandest arenas now available to an English painter; and grams set apart in space. All these forms and combina-
very few painters now working in this country could tions of forms were kept as simple as possible. In scale,
command that arena as Southall does. they were as big as Southall could make them in his
Southall's work has not been seen in London (or any- house at Harwell; ideally they could perhaps have been
where) in bulk since his first and only show at the Rowan a good deal bigger. (The very large paintings of 1967 were
Gallery in 1965. That show was made up primarily of made in separate sections and were not assembled till they
shaped canvases painted with vertical stripes. The shapes got to Oxford.)
had often a sexual reference—breasts, belly, pelvis—and The second point of concentration, in these pictures,
the stripes suggested a Morris Louis tamed and softened was the colour. Southall has mastered, by dint of painting
by Thames Valley mists. Southall had been making very thinly, layer upon layer upon layer, a soft refulgent
three-dimensional paintings since 1960: these particular colour which modulates from one extreme to another with
ones were midway between sexy dolls, lifesize, and an a sureness and a delicacy which are rare in English paint-
avant-garde form of kite. When one was sent in to the ing. The thinness of the physical structures out of which
John Moores exhibition in the autumn of 1965 it was the pictures were built helped the observer to concentrate
picked out at once by Clement Greenberg, who was undistractedly upon the tranquil, majestic progressions of
chairman of the jury, and eventually it was awarded a colour which were what the painting was about. Looking
prize. Nothing was seen of Southall's later paintings until at them, I was reminded of the way—lost, it would seem,
another and very different picture of his won a prize at to later generations—in which pianists formed before 1914
the John Moores exhibition in 1967. One small and diffi- could produce a crescendo so subtly, and with such
cult Palindrome was shown at the Axiom Gallery around reserves of tonal control, that we were never aware of
the same time. them 'playing louder', but simply of an irresistible power
There is nothing unusual about this pattern of events. that seemed to lift us out of our seats. Doubtless this
John Hoyland, for example, went through an equally could have been done within the context of an ordinary,
discouraging period before taste suddenly came round to `composed', landscape-shaped canvas; but Southall
his way of doing things. But as Southall has always been achieved a particular intensity by isolating the pheno-
a relatively isolated figure it may be worth while to run menon until the picture was, as it were, all colour.
briefly through his activity over the last few years. That The colour itself was sometimes perfectly logical, and
activity had two main points of concentration, and the sometimes not. Sometimes, that is to say, it kept within
importance of the three new big paintings lies in his a single identifiable gamut: heroic colour, lyrical colour,
having been able to combine both areas of research in elegiac colour, 'serious' colour, dictionary colour. But
complex and monumental structures. sometimes it was frivolous, sardonic, almost abusive
colour: the jumps were meant to break the spell, not to
intensify it. In the three big new pictures at Oxford, both
tendencies recur. In El Hacedor, for instance, there is a
great tuft of commercial pink at the extreme right of the
Derek Southall
picture, and this pink breaks completely with the 'fine
b. 1930. Last London one-man show, Rowan Gallery 1965.
art' tonalities of the rest of the picture. There is also a new
Prizewinner at John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1965 and
1967. Recently made Director of Post-Graduate Painting move in the actual handling of the paint: tonal grading
Department at Birmingham College of Art. persists in all the thinner, narrower stretches of the pic-