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拍品專文
The mid-1940s were a turning point for Heron. The main influences on his pre-war paintings were Sickert and Cézanne, and he described himself as 'electrified' by the paintings of Braque and Picasso exhibited at Rosenberg and Helft in 1939. There was little access to French painting during the war but he made repeated visits to see Matisse's Red Studio, hanging at the Redfern Gallery during 1943-44. After the war he avidly awaited the first exhibitions of contemporary French painting, finding British art claustrophic and melancholy. When the exhibitions of Picasso and Matisse at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1945 and Braque and Roualt at the Tate Gallery in 1946 were greeted with hostility and incomprehension, he began to write reviews himself in publications including the New English Weekly and in several books published over the next decade.
He continued to paint throughout this time, as an artist rather than a regular critic he had the luxury of being able to choose to write on only the artists he admired. In his essays on Bonnard, Matisse and Braque he acknowledges that his analyses of their paintings reveals their importance for the development of his own work. Their influences were to be enduring, from the formal characteristics in his early work through to his later, abstract work. In Bonnard's work he comments on the idea of abstraction, 'I think we may best conceive this underlying abstract rhythm in Bonnard if we think of a piece of large scale fish-net drawn over the surface of the canvas; it is through an imaginary sturcture of loose, connected squares - sometimes pulled into oblongs and sometimes into diamond shapes - that Bonnard seems to look at his subject' and on the all-over nature of Bonnard's design, 'There is an extraordinarily wide distribution of accent and pictorial stress. Right into the corners of the canvas we follow a display, a layout, in which interest is as intense half an inch from the picture's edge as it is in the centre. Usually the edge of the canvas slices off half, or even four fifths! of some object at which our eyes have arrived with the greatest anticipation' (see P. Heron, Painter as Critic: Selected Writings, London, 1998, 'Pierre Bonnard and Abstraction', pp. 23-24).
Heron's paintings of the 1940s and 1950s are of familiar domestic objects; tables, coffee-pots and plants. He depicts them with an endlessly renewed curiosity, arranging and re-arranging them to create complex and ambiguous spatial relationships. Small patches of bright colour, often pressed straight from the tube, fill intricate frameworks, revealing a pattern which would herald the move ultimately from figurative to abstract by 1956. This move can be seen when comparing Gas Stove with Kettle and Saucepan, 1945-46 (artist's collection) with the present work. Dahlias on the gas stove, although essentially the same composition is more elastic and open with an increasing confidence and assurance.
He continued to paint throughout this time, as an artist rather than a regular critic he had the luxury of being able to choose to write on only the artists he admired. In his essays on Bonnard, Matisse and Braque he acknowledges that his analyses of their paintings reveals their importance for the development of his own work. Their influences were to be enduring, from the formal characteristics in his early work through to his later, abstract work. In Bonnard's work he comments on the idea of abstraction, 'I think we may best conceive this underlying abstract rhythm in Bonnard if we think of a piece of large scale fish-net drawn over the surface of the canvas; it is through an imaginary sturcture of loose, connected squares - sometimes pulled into oblongs and sometimes into diamond shapes - that Bonnard seems to look at his subject' and on the all-over nature of Bonnard's design, 'There is an extraordinarily wide distribution of accent and pictorial stress. Right into the corners of the canvas we follow a display, a layout, in which interest is as intense half an inch from the picture's edge as it is in the centre. Usually the edge of the canvas slices off half, or even four fifths! of some object at which our eyes have arrived with the greatest anticipation' (see P. Heron, Painter as Critic: Selected Writings, London, 1998, 'Pierre Bonnard and Abstraction', pp. 23-24).
Heron's paintings of the 1940s and 1950s are of familiar domestic objects; tables, coffee-pots and plants. He depicts them with an endlessly renewed curiosity, arranging and re-arranging them to create complex and ambiguous spatial relationships. Small patches of bright colour, often pressed straight from the tube, fill intricate frameworks, revealing a pattern which would herald the move ultimately from figurative to abstract by 1956. This move can be seen when comparing Gas Stove with Kettle and Saucepan, 1945-46 (artist's collection) with the present work. Dahlias on the gas stove, although essentially the same composition is more elastic and open with an increasing confidence and assurance.