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Lot Essay
Peter Rose Pulham was first a photographer before he took up painting in the late 1930s. He was one of the rare 20th century artists to leave photography for painting – Man Ray was another – but continued like many of the greatest modern painters to interrogate the differences between these mediums, and to seek to prove that painting could, in his own words, ‘express some supposed reality, to illuminate ordinary objects with that vivid flash of light which suddenly makes everything seem clear and inevitably right, and I really believe now that a painting can be more realistic than a photograph’ (Pulham, ‘The Camera and the Artist’, 1952, in D. Mellor, Too Short a Summer: The Photographs of Peter Rose Pulham, exh. cat., York, 1979, p. 19). Pulham understood the ‘real’ in the same way as his friends the Surrealists: experiences and ideas not circumscribed by the conscious and immediate ‘reality’ but open to the imagination. Like Hans Bellmer, Max Ernst, or Giorgio de Chirico, he expressed sensations and desires through his paintings of distorted figures and through strange interiors.
Pulham had four major exhibitions in London: at the Redfern Gallery in 1943, the London Gallery in June-July 1948 and November 1949, and at the Hanover Gallery in March 1950. George Melly, who worked at the London Gallery until it closed in 1950, believed that he would have become an important painter had he not died at a relatively young age. Paintings by Pulham now reside in prominent public collections: Horse’s skull and Moon, 1941, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and L’Hotel Sully, Courtyard with Figures, 1944-45, at Tate Britain, but rarely on view; it is not easy to see enough of his work to get a clear sense of his development, but what can be seen makes one eager to see more.
Grisaille: Figures I is one of three grisaille paintings, all from December 1947, that he exhibited among the seventeen oils and gouaches at the London Gallery exhibition in 1948. The London Gallery, the centre of Surrealist activities in Britain, was run by the Surrealist artist and writer, E.L.T Mesens, who was also the first owner of Grisaille: Figures I. The subtle gradations of the greys of the distended body, which slither between the fleshly and the mechanical, against the deep black, in Grisaille, recall the range of tones Pulham achieved in his photographs but go beyond them, to a modelling of flesh that shifts from soft to hard. In the other two canvases of the series there is obviously more than one body. Its/their position, orientation and limbs are ambiguous: gymnast, bather, lover. George Melly described them as ‘grey humanoids copulating precariously on athletes’ bars’, and remarks that they were ‘in advance of Bacon’s screaming Popes, and equally intense’ (G. Melly, Don’t Tell Sybil, London, 1997, p. 92).
Dawn Ades FBA, CBE, Professor Emerita, University of Essex.
Pulham had four major exhibitions in London: at the Redfern Gallery in 1943, the London Gallery in June-July 1948 and November 1949, and at the Hanover Gallery in March 1950. George Melly, who worked at the London Gallery until it closed in 1950, believed that he would have become an important painter had he not died at a relatively young age. Paintings by Pulham now reside in prominent public collections: Horse’s skull and Moon, 1941, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and L’Hotel Sully, Courtyard with Figures, 1944-45, at Tate Britain, but rarely on view; it is not easy to see enough of his work to get a clear sense of his development, but what can be seen makes one eager to see more.
Grisaille: Figures I is one of three grisaille paintings, all from December 1947, that he exhibited among the seventeen oils and gouaches at the London Gallery exhibition in 1948. The London Gallery, the centre of Surrealist activities in Britain, was run by the Surrealist artist and writer, E.L.T Mesens, who was also the first owner of Grisaille: Figures I. The subtle gradations of the greys of the distended body, which slither between the fleshly and the mechanical, against the deep black, in Grisaille, recall the range of tones Pulham achieved in his photographs but go beyond them, to a modelling of flesh that shifts from soft to hard. In the other two canvases of the series there is obviously more than one body. Its/their position, orientation and limbs are ambiguous: gymnast, bather, lover. George Melly described them as ‘grey humanoids copulating precariously on athletes’ bars’, and remarks that they were ‘in advance of Bacon’s screaming Popes, and equally intense’ (G. Melly, Don’t Tell Sybil, London, 1997, p. 92).
Dawn Ades FBA, CBE, Professor Emerita, University of Essex.