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Lot Essay
Returning to St Ives from Leeds (where for the past two years he had been honoured as the University’s Gregory Fellow in Painting) in the summer of 1957, Frost embarked on perhaps the most productive period of his career. Already a leading figure in non-figurative painting, around 1960 Frost entered into a phase of particularly distinctive work. Generally larger, flatter and more simply constructed, such work seemed characterised by a new kind of sparseness, tautness and innuendo. Frost recalled these years of ‘change and consolidation’ (see C. Stephens, Terry Frost, London, Tate, 2000, p. 54), as ‘a period of total confidence’ (exhibition catalogue, Terry Frost, London, Belgrave Gallery, 1989, no. 19).
In 1960 he travelled to New York for his first exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery where he was welcomed by such artists as Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline, several of whom invited him to visit their studios. In London he was showing regularly with the recently established Waddington Galleries and in 1961 had his first solo show at the dealer’s Cork Street gallery. The following year saw a second dedicated exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York as well as the completion of a sensual series of collaged paintings including White Painting (Bollards). Frost’s pair of curved forms nestle amid thinly, insouciantly painted white space.
First introduced in Force 8, 1960 the v-shaped wedge formed a new addition to Frost’s repertoire of discs, half discs and quarter disc segments, circles, lozenges, truncated ovals, triangles and diamonds. At a time when the line between abstraction and figuration was increasingly called into question, such allusive forms began to feature prominently in Frost’s work, not only serving a purely formal, compositional function, but also signifying, albeit somewhat crudely and reductively, the female nude. In numerous works, as in White Painting (Bollards) an arrow is fired, entering the painting with unequivocally erotic intent, eliciting in the viewer an unmistakably visceral thrill upon reaching its target. And yet, far from brash, Frost’s rendering of such an encounter is ambiguous, understated, described in charcoal lines of inimitable inexactitude.
The subject of ‘The Three Graces’, or three female nudes, had fascinated Frost since he first encountered Rubens’ Judgement of Paris at the National Gallery while still at student at Camberwell. The combination of the girls’ glances, of the interaction between the three figures- or even the same figure seen from three different viewpoints, intrigued Frost. We might see the three bollards featured on the left hand side of the canvas in White Painting (Bollards), assertively upright, sloping, inclined and finally indistinct, as formal reflections on this theme.
Undoubtedly inspired by his friend and former Camberwell tutor, Victor Pasmore’s painted collages (Pasmore produced his first abstract, collaged piece in 1948) Frost attributes his adoption of the medium to his work for Barbara Hepworth. In 1950 Frost was taken on by Hepworth to assist with the carving of Contrapuntal Forms, 1951, a large two part sculpture in blue Connemara limestone commissioned by the Arts Council for the Festival of Britain. Frost later said that ‘working for Barbara made me think that the whole thing was totally illusionistic, painting, and made me lose confidence, I think, because if you’re making actual shapes there’s something marvellous about it’ (Terry Frost, interview with David Lee, June 1993). Although featuring consistently throughout the artist’s oeuvre, from 1960 onwards collage gained increasing prominence, augmenting, as in White Painting (Bollards) the tension between the two curved protagonists, ambiguous, indeterminate and yet reminiscent for the artist both of boats and buttocks. Frost said of the origin of SS09, a painting similar in form and content to White Painting (Bollards): ‘I made a drawing of Kath from behind … and there were these two semicircles of her buttocks coming in from the side of the paper … And then when I looked at those semicircular shapes in the drawing my mind went back to the boats’ (Terry Frost, interview with David Lewis, July 1993, in D. Lewis, Terry Frost: A Personal Narrative, Aldershot, 1994, p. 78).
In 1960 he travelled to New York for his first exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery where he was welcomed by such artists as Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline, several of whom invited him to visit their studios. In London he was showing regularly with the recently established Waddington Galleries and in 1961 had his first solo show at the dealer’s Cork Street gallery. The following year saw a second dedicated exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York as well as the completion of a sensual series of collaged paintings including White Painting (Bollards). Frost’s pair of curved forms nestle amid thinly, insouciantly painted white space.
First introduced in Force 8, 1960 the v-shaped wedge formed a new addition to Frost’s repertoire of discs, half discs and quarter disc segments, circles, lozenges, truncated ovals, triangles and diamonds. At a time when the line between abstraction and figuration was increasingly called into question, such allusive forms began to feature prominently in Frost’s work, not only serving a purely formal, compositional function, but also signifying, albeit somewhat crudely and reductively, the female nude. In numerous works, as in White Painting (Bollards) an arrow is fired, entering the painting with unequivocally erotic intent, eliciting in the viewer an unmistakably visceral thrill upon reaching its target. And yet, far from brash, Frost’s rendering of such an encounter is ambiguous, understated, described in charcoal lines of inimitable inexactitude.
The subject of ‘The Three Graces’, or three female nudes, had fascinated Frost since he first encountered Rubens’ Judgement of Paris at the National Gallery while still at student at Camberwell. The combination of the girls’ glances, of the interaction between the three figures- or even the same figure seen from three different viewpoints, intrigued Frost. We might see the three bollards featured on the left hand side of the canvas in White Painting (Bollards), assertively upright, sloping, inclined and finally indistinct, as formal reflections on this theme.
Undoubtedly inspired by his friend and former Camberwell tutor, Victor Pasmore’s painted collages (Pasmore produced his first abstract, collaged piece in 1948) Frost attributes his adoption of the medium to his work for Barbara Hepworth. In 1950 Frost was taken on by Hepworth to assist with the carving of Contrapuntal Forms, 1951, a large two part sculpture in blue Connemara limestone commissioned by the Arts Council for the Festival of Britain. Frost later said that ‘working for Barbara made me think that the whole thing was totally illusionistic, painting, and made me lose confidence, I think, because if you’re making actual shapes there’s something marvellous about it’ (Terry Frost, interview with David Lee, June 1993). Although featuring consistently throughout the artist’s oeuvre, from 1960 onwards collage gained increasing prominence, augmenting, as in White Painting (Bollards) the tension between the two curved protagonists, ambiguous, indeterminate and yet reminiscent for the artist both of boats and buttocks. Frost said of the origin of SS09, a painting similar in form and content to White Painting (Bollards): ‘I made a drawing of Kath from behind … and there were these two semicircles of her buttocks coming in from the side of the paper … And then when I looked at those semicircular shapes in the drawing my mind went back to the boats’ (Terry Frost, interview with David Lewis, July 1993, in D. Lewis, Terry Frost: A Personal Narrative, Aldershot, 1994, p. 78).