JOHN WELLS (1907-2000)
JOHN WELLS (1907-2000)
JOHN WELLS (1907-2000)
2 More
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more
JOHN WELLS (1907-2000)

Painting, 1947

Details
JOHN WELLS (1907-2000)
Painting, 1947
signed and dated 'John Wells/1947' (on the backboard), indistinctly signed again and inscribed 'John Wells/Anchor Studio/Trewarveneth Street/NEWLYN/CORNWALL' (on the backboard)
oil and pencil on panel
21 ½ x 7 1/8 in. (54.6 x 18 cm.)
Painted in 1947.
Provenance
Purchased direct from the artist by Henry (Gilly) Gilbert, St Ives, after summer 1994.
with Paisnel Gallery, London, where purchased by the present owner in May 2012.
Exhibited
London, New Art Centre, Cornwall 1945-55, November - December 1977, no. 142.
Ilkley, The Manor House, The Constructed Space: Painting, Sculpture and Verse Commemorating the Poet W.S. Graham, April - June 1994, exhibition not numbered.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

Brought to you by

Pippa Jacomb
Pippa Jacomb Director, Head of Day Sale

Lot Essay

John Wells was a key figure in the dynamic artistic community that sprang up in and around St Ives in the 1940s and included many leading lights of the abstract art scene including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Naum Gabo. Painting, 1947 is a product of this hothouse of creativity and new ideas. Nicholson’s influence is apparent in the muted ground, the network of precise, gossamer-thin pencil lines uniting the composition’s triangular forms, and even the manner in which the reverse of the panel is inscribed. Furthermore, under Gabo’s tutelage Wells became the leading British proponent of constructivist art, at a time when it had been stamped out in the Soviet Union in favour of the staid clichés of Socialist Realism. However, compared to the deliberately mechanical arrangements of artists such as El Lissitzky, the triangular forms of Painting, 1947 feel less constructed than suspended in space, as if they might start twisting in the wind at any moment. In this sense the work shares lineage with the kinetic works which Gabo began to produce from 1920 onwards.

More from Modern British Art Day Sale

View All
View All