Table Of ContentContents
Foreword
Introduction
Andrew Wilson
Unity of the Total Work
The Painting’s Edges
Explicit Scale
Asymmetry and Recomplication
What Is Seen
Robert Holyhead
Heron and French Modernism
Éric de Chassey
Heron and American-type Painting
Andrew Wilson
‘A Note on my Painting : 1962’
Sara Matson
Heron’s Paintings of the 1980s and 1990s
Sarah Martin
Heron’s Shapes
Matthew Collings
Chronology
Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Works
Index
Foreword
It is with enormous pleasure that we present a major exhibition of Patrick Heron’s
painting, which will be on display through the summer months of 2018 at Tate St
Ives, followed by an autumn showing at Turner Contemporary in Margate. From its
position on the Cornish coast, the town of St Ives looks across the Atlantic Ocean in
the direction of America; in Kent, the outlook from Margate is across the very
different water and sky of the English Channel towards France. Heron’s painting –
like much painting of the 1950s and 1960s – communicates his responses to the
twin poles of Atlantic and European culture. How this affected his work is explored
both in the exhibition and the publication.
This exhibition has been long awaited. The last major survey of Heron’s painting
was his 1998 retrospective held at the Tate Gallery in London the year before his
death, and there has not been a presentation in a public gallery since the 2001 St
Ives exhibition of his Early and Late Garden Paintings. We are delighted that a new
generation can now encounter Heron’s vision of a painting built from colour. It
would have been impossible to conceive such an important exhibition without the
support and guidance of Heron’s family and, in particular, his daughters Katharine
and Susanna, as well his son-in-law, the architect Julian Feary. We greatly
appreciate the time, care and generosity they have given to this project. Their
characteristically committed involvement and their trust in our desire to present
Patrick’s paintings to a new audience has been inspirational. We also acknowledge
the kind support provided by Waddington Custot: Heron has been represented by
Waddington Galleries continuously since 1958, with a close, affectionate
relationship with Leslie Waddington and his family. Stéphane Custot has remained
dedicated to Heron’s work. We would like to thank him and his dedicated staff. We
are extremely grateful to Lord David Thomson for his encouragement from the very
outset of the project. His deep respect for and insight into Heron’s art was so
important over the last decade of the artist’s life and an exhibition such as this
would not have been possible without his close participation.
Of course, we could not have realised this ambitious undertaking without the
generosity of our lenders who have so kindly agreed to be parted from the works in
their care: thank you to the Government Art Collection and its director Penny
Johnson as well as the private collectors, including Frank Cohen, Giles Heron, and
Katharine and Susanna Heron. For help in locating loans as well as for their careful
advice we are especially grateful to Barbara Adams, John Austin, David Cohen, Sam
Fogg, David Franklin, Michelle Gower, Peter and Renate Nahum, Timothy Prus,
Frances Christie and Simon Hucker at Sotheby’s, Kathleen Bartels at the Vancouver
Art Gallery, David Ward and Offer Waterman. We are also indebted for the
assistance and encouragement given to us by the Patrick Heron Exhibition
Supporters Group.
The scope and focus of the exhibition has been devised over the last five years by
Andrew Wilson, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art, and
Archives at Tate Britain. With the support and wise counsel of Sir Nicholas Serota,
previously Director of Tate and that of successive artistic directors at Tate St Ives –
Martin Clark, Sam Thorne and now Anne Barlow alongside Mark Osterfield,
Executive Director – the show has been finally realised for the first summer season
in Tate St Ives’ expansive new gallery designed by Jamie Fobert Architects. The
exhibition, however, could not have been achieved without the contribution of a
wide range of staff in both St Ives and London, and at Turner Contemporary in
Margate – all of whom have our sincere thanks.
Andrew has had a long relationship with Heron and his work, dating back to the
early 1990s: we offer our deepest gratitude to him for using this expertise to frame
Heron’s work in a new way, and to Sara Matson, Curator at Tate St Ives and Sarah
Martin, Head of Exhibitions at Turner Contemporary for their creative input during
the process of developing the exhibition alongside him. They have been aided at
Tate St Ives by Helen Bent, Tate St Ives Registrar, Ross Peakall, Senior Technician
and George Kennedy, Melanie Stidolph and Rachel Woodhead, Learning Curators.
Mary Bustin and Tate colleagues Helen Brett and Katey Twitchett-Young have
overseen the preparation and conservation of the works. At Turner Contemporary
many people have been involved in the realisation of the exhibition, and especially
Andrew Shedden, Gallery, Technical and Security Manager, and Clare Warren,
Programme Co-ordinator. A symposium on Patrick Heron is planned at Turner
Contemporary in November 2018 and we are grateful to the Paul Mellon Centre for
Studies in British Art for its support for this.
We would like to recognise the contributors to the publication for their new
texts, which each bring fresh perspectives to the artist’s work and re-assert the
enduring significance of abstract painting to contemporary artists and audiences.
We are also very grateful to Judith Severne at Tate Publishing who has expertly co-
ordinated the development and production of the book, together with her
colleagues Juliette Dupire and Roz Hill; the elegant design is by Adam Brown. This
book has been co-published with Pavilion, and we thank Polly Powell, as well as
John Stachiewicz and Jane Ace at Tate Publishing, for nurturing this relationship.
Heron’s painting is about being in the world and encountering it in a profoundly
visual way. The experiences of his reality were then harnessed into the more
specific pictorial reality of paintings contained within the four edges of the canvas.
Following Heron’s own path, the exhibition adopts the same direct approach: it is
about looking at our surroundings and correspondingly looking at and in Heron’s
painting. Writing in 1956, Heron exclaimed that ‘seeing is not a passive but an
active operation’. For him, such visual experiences are emotional and sensual,
leading him to explain not long before his death that ‘looking at something –
anything – is more interesting than doing anything else, ever’.
Anne Barlow
Director, Tate St Ives
Victoria Pomery
Director, Turner Contemporary
Detail from Complex Greens, Reds and Orange : July 1976 – January 1977 (p.47)
Introduction
____
Andrew Wilson
The true painter lives in his painted surfaces … The glory of the pictorial art lies not in any poetry which it may or
may not transmit: but rather in the final or absolute experience of formal grandeur, of that contrapuntal play of
form upon form, colour upon colour, flatness upon flatness, depth of space upon depth of space. These are the
physical realities of painting.1
When Heron wrote these words in 1953 about the work of Graham Sutherland he
was three years away from becoming an abstract painter. In one crucial respect,
however, he had been taking an abstract approach since the 1940s. His standpoint
as an artist was built on formalism, in which the most important aspect of a work of
art is its form – the way it is made and its purely visual aspects – rather than its
narrative content or its direct relationship to the visible world. Heron’s aesthetic
outlook was derived, most especially, from the writing of the critic and painter
Roger Fry, who had first developed these theories. In essays collected in his book
Vision and Design (1920), Fry offered an account of the artist’s transformation of a
visual reality into the pictorial reality of the painted surface. He argued that the
apparent distortion of appearances found in contemporary representation was a
result of a painter’s vision being both ‘more intense and more detached’; this
described the work of artists ‘entirely absorbed in apprehending the relation of
forms and colour to one another, as they cohere within the object’ in ways that
demand ‘the most complete detachment from any of the meanings and implications
2
of appearances’. In such a state of formal absorption (but a detachment from
appearance), a painting might be seen to be abstract as a result of the use of areas of
flat colour, yet still be figurative in terms of what that flat colour represented. In
terms of Heron’s ‘true painter’, the pictorial reality – a play of form, colour, space
knitted together in a given composition – had been extracted from a visual reality
