| Peter Lanyon (1918-1964) has come increasingly to be seen as one of the most important and innovative figures in 20th-century British art. The exhibition at Tate St Ives (October 9, 2010-January 8, 2011) is the first thorough retrospective for almost 40 years, focusing upon the technical qualities of his work and emphasizing his innovation and formal progression in both painting and sculpture. Lanyon was the leading innovator in abstract painting in Britain in the 1950s. Paralleling the work of contemporary artists in America and Europe, he developed a new language for painting with his unmatched formal and technical experimentation. |
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Tate St Ives
Peter Lanyon (1918-1964) has come increasingly to be seen as one of the most important and innovative figures in 20th-century British art. The exhibition at Tate St Ives (October 9, 2010-January 8, 2011) is the first thorough retrospective for almost 40 years, focusing upon the technical qualities of his work and emphasizing his innovation and formal progression in both painting and sculpture.
Lanyon was the leading innovator in abstract painting in Britain in the 1950s. Paralleling the work of contemporary artists in America and Europe, he developed a new language for painting with his unmatched formal and technical experimentation. While his roots lay in the Constructivism of Naum Gabo, he saw himself as remaking the tradition of landscape painting, using landscape and places to express ideas about states of being and the human condition.The exhibition begins with an exploration of Lanyon’s adaptation of the language of abstract art to make images concerned with myth and regeneration in the wake of the Second World War, and their development into semi-representational “portraits” of places. The show follows with a focus on the years 1952-55, when he forged a new formal language and technique for painting unlike any other. Bringing together the finest examples of his work of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the exhibition next explores Lanyon’s use of abstract expressionist language to express pictorially the phenomenological sensation of being in certain places, weather conditions, and in the air. Also on display is a selection of his final works, in which experimentation with relief and assemblage hints at an exciting middle and late career that was not to be. Running through the exhibition is Lanyon’s “constructions,” fragile sculptures assembled from found materials that reveal him as one of the most innovative sculptors of his generation.
Lanyon fitted the type of the romantic artist, tortured by the struggle to draw meaningful expression out of his medium and driven to ever more extreme ends to find inspiration. Extending his physical experience of being in landscape, he took up gliding in 1959, which led to some of the most exciting and sublimely beautiful paintings of the post-war period. His ascendant career was, however, cut short when he was killed in a gliding accident aged 46.
