Page 80 - Studio International - May June 1975

years ago, that Bryan Wynter's elements with highly evocative famous. Despite neglect in essentially calligraphic in the
painting and - latterly - his symbols of the Cornish moors Britain, Wynter's paintings of the nature and character of their
kinetic mobiles were made and coast beyond St Ives late fifties and sixties were shown execution, or construction. Like
visible in that meaningful, provided one of the most in many parts of the world, often the Braque Ateliers late Wynters
unfolding juxtaposition, covering distinguished innovations in in British Council exhibitions. consisted of a succession of
the work of thirty years, which is British painting of the late forties And it is interesting, now, to recall highly complex grids, seen one
known as a 'major retrospective'. (I remember Wyndham Lewis that one of his larger canvases behind another, semi-transparent
If neither the Tate Gallery nor the saluting it in print) - through the was bought by the Museum of screens of brushmarks, each
Arts Council - whose enormous long development of nonfigurative Modern Art, in New York, in the brushmark somehow fluent yet
Hayward Gallery spaces ought to paintings, which began at the turn late fifties. static, at once highly controlled
be given over, for ten months of of the years 1955-56, and It is essential, at this particular yet registering in its calligraphic
the year, I've suggested recently, culminated in the profoundly moment, to point out that Wynter's movement, the speed and energy
to the perpetual display of the beautiful and entirely original formal pictorial vocabulary of the rapid physical gestures of an
work of living British painters and /moos - the kinetic mobiles whose always remained emphatically enormously disciplined and
sculptors, from the student level name Wynter derived from the European. Wynter's own quiet inventive brush - lush blobs
up (just think of the amount of perfectly accurate description, insistence that it was from alternating with drier brush-stabs
official space still permanently `images moving out onto space', Braque's great late Atelier series - and all being strung out on an
available to living French artists and which owed their first that his own first nonfigurative implied grid with an extreme
in Paris: thirty times that made appearance to Wynter's canvases derived their initial sense of elegance and order; all
available to British artists in acquisition of a discarded impulse refers us to facts more expressive of a supremely
London?) - if, as I say, neither search-light reflector (a circular obvious today than they have ever rhythmical logic; and all
institution comes up with a concave mirror) - Bryan Wynter's been. For what is the evocative of an almost
thorough retrospective of the life- entire contribution, from 1945 to overwhelming sensation in all unmeasurable depth of recessive
work of Bryan Wynter in the very 1975, was characterised by the Bryan Wynter's work - whether space, into and behind the surface
near future, we shall have just one brilliant, searching, restless, in paintings or mobiles - once of the canvas.
more scandalous example of inventive intelligence of one of the it had become wholly The words I have just written
neglectful inertia on the part of loneliest and most individual nonfigurative? It is of a quite indicate pictorial qualities, and
this country towards its best talents of our time. Moving to remarkable depth of recessive a preoccupation with the ordering
artists - artists who lead the world, Zennor in 1945 and later living space - a recession revealed in in depth of illusionistic space,
as 1 have pointed out repeatedly near St Buryan, he was a major successive systems of transparent which are even more pronounced
since I published The Ascendancy member of that St Ives-based curtains (so to speak), successive in Wynter than in those late
of London in the Sixties' in `middle generation' of British nets suspended, one behind Braques. Indeed, the subject of
'Studio International' in 1966. painters who may be said to have another, like bead curtains which Wynter's painting, from 1955-56
From the first exhibited post- consolidated that pictorial register a fixed plane in space onwards, may be said to have
war paintings of 1945-46 - in professionalism I've just referred while allowing our eyes to been the organising of those deep
which an extraordinarily to, after a wartime provincialism penetrate still further; each net spaces his calligraphic strokes
professional (and professionalism in England so profound that it or skein consisting of intensely created round themselves. The
in England, then, was itself a had suffocated all but a tiny rhythmic but separated eye sinks through and round and
revolutionary phenomenon) yet handful of four or five pioneers of brushstrokes which are all, it behind one network of
personal amalgam of linear cubist an older generation, all now world should be noted, always rhythmically related brushmarks

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