Patrick Heron (30 January 1920 – 20 March 1999),[1] was an English painter, writer and designer, based in St. Ives, Cornwall.
Early life
Born at Headingley, Leeds in Yorkshire in 1920, he was the son of Thomas Milner Heron and Eulalie 'Jack' Heron (née Davies), the first of four children (Michael, Joannah and Giles). His father was a clothes manufacturer, pacifist, socialist and leading member of the Leeds Arts Club. In 1925 the Heron family moved to West Cornwall where T M Heron took over the running of Crysede Silks, then four years later his father founded the firm Cresta Silk in Welwyn Garden City. It was here at this new school that Patrick Heron met his future wife Delia Reiss.
Becoming a painter
He attended St. George's School in Harpenden and on a school visit to the National Gallery, London in 1933 saw paintings by Paul Cézanne for the first time. He immediately began to paint in a Cézanne-influenced style. Shortly after this he was asked to make designs for Cresta Silks and continued to design for Cresta until 1951. When he was 17 he attended The Slade School of Art for two days a week[2], returning to the West Country to draw the landscape. In World War II he registered as a conscientious objector and worked as an agricultural labourer for three years, then at the Leach Pottery at St Ives between 1944-5, where he met Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and many other leading artists of the St Ives School. He had just seen Matisse's The Red Studio, exhibited at the Redfern Gallery, London and soon after this completed what he later considered to be his first mature work, The Piano.[3]
Early influences
The George Braque exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1946 deeply impressed him and he wrote an essay on Braque for The New English Weekly. Then up to 1953 he spent much time in Europe visiting Paris, Provence and Italy. Heron visited Braque in his Paris studio and presented him with the New English Weekly article. His first one-man exhibition was at the Redfern Gallery in London in 1947. In 1953 he organised, wrote the catalogue and exhibited in Space in Colour[4], an exhibition of ten contemporary artists, at Hanover Gallery, London. Following this he exhibited twelve paintings at the Il Bienal di São Paulo, Brazil. The same year he began teaching at Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and continued there until 1956. In 1956 he saw, and praised highly the American Abstract Expressionists who showed their work for the first time in England at the Tate Gallery. He was inspired by this group of eight painters, their confidence and the large scale and flatness.
A development towards abstraction had been evident in his paintings, for example, Square Leaves (1952) and Winter Harbour (1955) The effect on Heron of the New York painters, together with his move to live at the 'Eagles Nest' house, overlooking the cliffs at Zennor, that year was a pivotal point in the transformation into his now characteristic language of interlinking forms; his balancing of colour and space. Heron's deepest influences were Braque, Matisse and Bonnard and he was connected first of all to the pure abstraction of European lineage; Naum Gabo, Pierre Soulages and Lyonel Feininger. In the 1970s he claimed that American painters practising Post-painterly Abstraction ( a term devised by the critic Clement Greenberg in the 1960s) had actually been inspired by his own work.
Heron's writing on art and art education
Patrick Heron's writing about art began when in 1945 he was invited by Philip Mairet, editor of The New English Weekly to contribute to the journal. His first published article was on Ben Nicholson, followed by essays on Picasso, Klee, Cézanne and Braque [5]. Two years later he became art critic of the New Statesman until 1950. He became London correspondent to Arts Digest, New York,(later renamed Arts(NY)). 'The Changing Forms of Art', a selection of his criticism was published in 1955 [6].
Later life
In 1958, he moved to Ben Nicholson’s former studio at Porthmeor, St Ives and began to introduce the shapes that were to characterise his paintings of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the sharp-edged shapes are reminiscent of the aged Cornish coastline, while the rounded shapes recall the granite boulders in his garden. During the 1980s, Heron returned to a looser compositional format with scumbled surfaces but retained his interest in vibrant colour.
Heron won the Grand Prize at the John Moores Prize Exhibition in Liverpool in 1959 and a silver medal at the Sao Paolo Bienal in 1965. He had retrospective exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1972 and at the Barbican Art Gallery in 1985; the same year he was included in the St Ives Exhibition at the Tate Gallery. He was created a CBE in 1977 and became a Trustee of the Tate Gallery in 1980. He died peacefully at his home in Zennor, Cornwall, in March 1999 at the age of 79.
Many of his works can be seen at The Tate Collection, London and at Tate, St Ives, Cornwall.[7] On 24 May 2004, the Momart warehouse fire destroyed a number of Heron’s most important works.
References
- ^ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Mel Gooding, ‘Heron, Patrick (1920–1999)’, [1] accessed 1 Feb 2007
- ^ Danielle O'Steen (February 2008), Critical Eye, Art+Auction, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/26626/critical-eye/, retrieved 2008-04-23
- ^ Patrick Heron,ed. David Sylvester, Tate Gallery Publishing,. 1998
- ^ Space in Colour, Hanover Gallery, 1953 (catalogue to the exhibition)
- ^ Painter as Critic, Patrick Heron: Selected Writings, Tate Gallery Publishing, ed. Mel Gooding, 1998 ISBN 978-1854372581
- ^ The Changing Forms of Art, Routledge and Kegan Paul.1955
- ^ Tate Collection Online
See also
External links
