As an art student I was tutored by artists who celebrated colour for its own sake: Terry Frost, John Hoyland, Mali Morris, who in turn were influenced heavily by Patrick Heron, the subject of the current exhibition at Tate St Ives. Equally talented as a painter and writer, he painted some of the most vibrant representations of Cornish light and colour from his house, Eagle’s Nest, on the coast to the west of St Ives. I was fortunate to meet and interview him there on several occasions for my Phd research into how and why artists of his generation became so obsessed with their alternative view of abstract painting that was in opposition to the then dominant American abstract expressionists.
So, I looked forward to visiting the exhibition as a real opportunity to view how Heron’s work evolved during his career, and stands up against his great American rivals such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Disappointingly, however, the show provides little information about Heron’s life, or the related developments in art and the wider world that so influenced his career. Modern curators seem keener to find smart visual connections amongst artworks, rather than focusing on a chronological display that I feel is far more helpful to the viewing public. In Heron’s case a chronological display would reveal his early admiration for modern French masters such as Matisse and Braque, his move to abstraction and back to semi-figuration. Instead the curators have arranged his paintings purely according to visual connections.
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