Still Life

In August 1947 John Minton travelled with the poet Alan Ross to Corsica, both having been commissioned by the publisher John Lehmann to produce an illustrated book based on this island. They experienced Mediterranean heat; and, through conversations with the island’s inhabitants, picked up awareness of corruption, drug-running, inertia and a sense of fatalism stemming from the legacies of the island’s colonial past. Cumulatively, it seemed as if time had stopped. This Still Life, painted the following year when the book came out, includes an hour glass that can be seen to act as a mnemonic for Time Was Away, the book’s title, which drew on Meeting Point, a Louis MacNeice poem that begins: ‘Time was away and somewhere else’. Admittedly, while in Corsica and travelling by bus from place to place, Minton had spent much time asleep, his head lolling against Ross’s shoulder. But whenever the bus stopped for ten minutes, he was immediately up and out, sketching the rich variety of foliage or the ingredients of a scene. Ross, less entranced, felt he was looking at ‘a succession of stage-sets but never any drama’.

Time Was Away: A Corsican Notebook opened up a whole new repertoire for Minton. In his memoirs Lehmann states that he had deliberately wanted the book to be ‘an extremely lavish, anti-austerity production’. It remains the most outstanding of all Minton’s illustrated books, with its rich velvety blacks in its many drawings and its eight colour plates, using four colour separations and the mixtures they create when overlaid, thereby adding to the exotic, sultry atmosphere of the whole. Minton, visually and imaginatively energised by the trip to Corsica, returned to the subject matter of his illustrations in some of the oil paintings and watercolours that he produced during 1948 for two exhibitions, one held in October 1948 at Durlacher Bros in New York, the other, at the Lefevre Gallery in London in February 1949. In some of these, as Minton admitted to his friend Edie Lamont, he used ‘the brightest possible colours’.

This small painting belongs to a particular moment in Minton’s career when he was managing to maintain a balance between his own interests as a painter and the demands made on him as a commercial artist. The stark handling of the ingredients in this picture look back to the wartime still-lives painted by Picasso, examples of which Minton had seen at the Victoria & Albert Museum in the winter of 1945-46, in the Matisse and Picasso exhibition which brought the British public up-to-date with the developments made by these two artists during the war years. In Still Life Minton combines Mediterranean colour with a formalist rigour that owes much to the example of Picasso.

We are very grateful to Professor Frances Spalding for preparing this catalogue entry.