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Lot Essay
David Thompson discusses Donaldson’s entries into The New Generation: 1964 in the exhibition catalogue, and writes ‘The advent of “Pop Art”, whatever else it has done, has at least made a nonsense of the figurative-abstract controversy. It has settled any worries about the relation of art to life, and left the painter free to explore what, in an abstract sense, is visually interesting about his chosen motifs. Shapes here are repeated so that the peculiarity and character and transient changeability of certain images are brought out. The painting is flat and “hard-edged”, emphasising contrasts of pattern and field, throwing up the fresh, cheerful colour, so that Matisse has as much to do with it as bill-boards or advertising … His is rather the attitude of a painter who wants to see his activity as a skilled technique, not as an indulgence in self-expression. His simplifications (the elimination of eyes and mouth in a face, for example) concentrate on the essentials of form to avoid the banality of “expressiveness” … His repeated and mirrored shapes, like stills from a film-strip, register how from moment to moment an image can be the same and yet different each time, and this in itself is a pattern, as independent of the artist as his finished painting’.
(D. Thompson, exhibition catalogue, The New Generation: 1964, London, Whitechapel Gallery, 1964, pp. 27, 28).
Donaldson comments that by 1964, bored with thinking about names for his paintings, he decided to title them after what he dreamed to spend any sale proceeds on. The present lot received its name because at this time he wanted buy a Lancia Aurelia car. However, between finishing the painting and exhibiting it at The New Generation: 1964, he had won Second Prize at the Fourth John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool, 1963-64 (in the senior category despite entering the junior competition), for Three Pictures of You (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). He then spent less than half his prize money on an Aurelia and therefore exhibited the present lot at The New Generation: 1964 under the title ZigZag-Past an Aurelia.
(Private correspondence with the artist, May 2015).
(D. Thompson, exhibition catalogue, The New Generation: 1964, London, Whitechapel Gallery, 1964, pp. 27, 28).
Donaldson comments that by 1964, bored with thinking about names for his paintings, he decided to title them after what he dreamed to spend any sale proceeds on. The present lot received its name because at this time he wanted buy a Lancia Aurelia car. However, between finishing the painting and exhibiting it at The New Generation: 1964, he had won Second Prize at the Fourth John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool, 1963-64 (in the senior category despite entering the junior competition), for Three Pictures of You (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). He then spent less than half his prize money on an Aurelia and therefore exhibited the present lot at The New Generation: 1964 under the title ZigZag-Past an Aurelia.
(Private correspondence with the artist, May 2015).