This long overdue re-focus on Lawrence Alloway's small but landmark publication Nine Abstract Artists (1954) throws light on a vital and transitional period in the post-war development of avant-garde art in Britain. Alloway's 16 page text was followed by statements from the nine artists: Robert Adams, Terry Frost, Adrian Heath, Anthony Hill, Roger Hilton, Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin, Victor Pasmore and William Scott.
The original edition consolidated the achievements of a post-war 'Constructivist' group and anticipated the manifold directions that the subsequent careers of the protagonists took. Like that of many of the artists, the subsequent career of Alloway - a curator, lecturer and polemecist as well as author - would later journey along entirely new and indeed disparate channels. This key publication and the attendant exhibition of the same name that followed at the Redfern Gallery in January 1955, with a catalogue written and designed by Hill, identified a certain formal promiscuity and eclecticism, a kind of blurring at the purist edges; as Margaret Garlake has written, 'it proved impossible to sustain the coherence for more than a few years, so that Nine Abstract Artists records the beginning of the dissolution of the group as much as its triumphant emergence'.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this diversity, Nine Abstract Artists defines the parameters of an ongoing post-war avant-garde in tune with the social and economic reconstruction programmes of Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Festival of Britain in 1951 fostered an inclusive context in which fine art joined a wider cultural crusade that sought to transform and modernise all areas of contemporary life. With the exception of Anthony Hill, probably the purest and most mathematically stringent, the artists had all painted or made sculpture indebted in various degrees to traditional notions of landscape or the figure. Adrian Heath had studied under Stanhope Forbes in Newlyn and then at the Slade and Pasmore had painted schematic gardenscapes and Whistlerian river scenes at Hammersmith. But, in concert with core group members Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin and Anthony Hill, they gradually expunged external references to alight at the turn of the fifties on a more or less fully concrete and abstract style.
Owing to the limited commercial appeal of advanced abstraction at the time, a situation exacerbated by the scarcity of suitable progressive galleries in London - only the Gimpel Fils and the Redfern were interested, though by the later 1950s the New Vision Centre, Waddington and the Leicester Galleries were available - a series of weekend exhibitions were held at 22 Fitzroy Street, which had been Heath's studio since 1949. They took place in March and July 1952 and May 1953. All nine participated and were joined by invited artists like Barbara Hepworth, her assistant Denis Mitchell, Eduardo Paolozzi, the architects Trevor Dannat and John Weeks and the furniture designer Terence Conran.
There was a kind of Bauhaus inclusiveness at play here and a common purpose which was clarified in Broadsheet No. 1: Devoted to Abstract Art. This was organised by Kenneth Martin and published by Lund Humphries in 1951. Among the texts Martin's Abstract Art stressed that concrete art copies nature only, 'in the laws of its activities', a statement anticipating Mary Martin's contention that the artwork's 'image quality' should be based on internal logic using man-made rather than organic material. Broadsheet accompanied the exhibition, 'Abstract Paintings, Sculptures, Mobiles', organised by Heath at the Artists’ International Association Galleries in May/June 1951. Heath would act as Chairman of the A.I.A. between 1954 and 1964. A second, somewhat flimsy, Broadsheet appeared in July 1952 to accompany the second of the three Fitzroy Street weekend exhibitions, which was positively reviewed by Alloway in Art News and Review.
Further events immediately preceding and directly feeding into Nine Abstract Artists either defined the objectives of the group narrowly or within a broader pluralist context. Despite his strict allegiance to the constructionist canon, Anthony Hill organised an exhibition, 'British Abstract Art' at Gimpels in August 1951, which included Gimpel's artists of more expressive bent like Davie, Gear and Lanyon. The A.I.A. exhibition, 'The Mirror and the Square' (1952) was even broader, mixing constructed art with realist or naturalist painting. In the exhibition 'Artist versus Machine' however, staged at the Building Centre in Store Street in May 1954, the organisers demonstrated the importance of machine-made materials and modern construction processes to an art that the group envisioned as running directly parallel to architecture. Accordingly, plastics, metals and wood were used in the reliefs, screens or screw mobiles that were exhibited. A screen by International Group member John McHale, a constructed 'tower' by John Ernest and the photograph of reliefs by Charles Biederman prompted Alloway to applaud the internationalism in his Art News review, another preparatory text that won him the ticket to write Nine Abstract Artists.
Heath's pivotal role undoubtedly made him the catalyst for the unfolding events, all of which culminated in 1956 with the Whitechapel exhibition, 'This is Tomorrow'. Heath's studio was close to Alec Tiranti's sculptor's tool shop in Charlotte Street. Tiranti also sold rare art books and published small books on topics as varied as Renaissance painting and design, oriental and antique art, furniture and technical handbooks on sculpture making. He published a re-print of Matila Ghyka's influential The Geometry of Art and Life, A.C. Sewter's pertinent On the Relationship between Painting and Architecture and most relevantly here, Heath's short study, Abstract Art: its Origins and Meaning (1953).
Heath's colleagues were thus able to read key texts by modernist pioneers. Hill purchased Corbusier's Le Modulor in 1950 and an original Bauhaus copy of Malevich's The Non Objective World. Together with Charles Biederman's Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge, John Hambidge's Dynamic Symmetry and D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form, these books were responsible for grafting onto the mathematic rigours and conceptual order of 'constructionist' work a lyrical membrane of 'organic' chance, random expressiveness and intuitive dynamism.
In his lucid, cogently argued but ultimately intellectually detached text - Garlake correctly alluding to a, 'desire to keep his options open for as long as possible' in order to accommodate what turned out to be a necessary re-orientation of critical position in response to subsequent artistic developments - Alloway set the activities of the 'nine' into the context of a pre-war tradition of Constructivist art, centered around the periodical Axis (1935) and the book Circle (1937), which he maintained 'had strong international connections'. But once the Hampstead émigrés drifted away, exacerbating the war-time isolation of Britain, indigenous nature poetry and neo-romanticism reclaimed centre stage, a situation that obliged Alloway to observe in Nine Abstract Artists that, 'in the fifties, none of the pre-war British artists are important for non-figurative art; they have either become romantics or, like Nicholson and Hepworth, at least tired of their thirtyish purity'. And neither did the modernist colony of St. Ives offer sanctuary, Alloway complaining that in the Cornish port, 'the landscape is so nice nobody can quite bring themselves to leave it out of their art'. The trio who were, or would become, most closely associated with St. Ives - Frost, Hilton and Scott - were therefore characterised as using, 'irrational expression by malerisch means'.
In what Alloway describes as Pasmore's, 'desire to revive and continue the principals of the international movement', the former Euston Road painter became 'culture hero', or central cog, for the group. He did however develop in concert with, rather than in the vanguard of, other members, making his first paper and newsprint collages in 1948 and a prototype relief extending into real space in 1951. A similar itinerary characterises Kenneth Martin's development, which sees the first non-figurative painting in 1949 and, in 1951, a first mobile - the same year that Mary Martin created a low relief using climbing and spiralling sequences of cubes and half cubes, 'Columbarium'. In contrast to his late work, this used the traditional material of plaster and avoided colour effects. Similarly in 1950, Heath and Hill adopted strict non-figurative modes and from 1950 onwards, Alloway described how in Adams' sculpture, 'the physical identity of his materials asserted their autonomy', in proportion to the reduction of anatomic imagery. The three non-core group members - Frost, Hilton and Scott - were located as painterly abstractionists who, 'melt, bury or fracture platonic geometry'. As stated above, Heath, by virtue of his leading role as exhibition organiser, facilitator and propagandist, retained the central position of intellectual ringleader.
Alloway, who had been chosen by Heath ahead of Charles Handley-Read to write Nine Abstract Artists, prepared his essay with an array of memorable and evocative metaphors that aptly summarise the issues behind avant-garde practice in Britain at the time. His qualified championing of 'constructionism' as a key avant-garde alternative may be seen in the context of his membership between 1952 and 1955 of the Independent Group, loosely centered around the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where discussion of the implications of science, technology and the mass media led to the introduction of new industrial materials and technical processes into art as well as a growing awareness of, and fascination for, the burgeoning global influence of American culture.
Throughout these years of experimental tumult Alloway found his voice as an inclusive, catholic and broad-ranging apologist for contemporary art. Two factors were constant in his shifting allegiance within the stylistic developments of abstract art; one was a growing and unqualified pro-Americanism while the other was an insistence on the autonomous
status of the artwork as an object, whether of a concrete or painterly kind. Regardless of process or material the artwork vindicated itself when, as he put it, the internal structural relations, 'are satisfactory enough to make the work complete in itself'. In respect to the 'nine' he therefore concluded that, 'most were realists who seek 'the distraction of the external' in their desire for concretion and most conceive of space as an open continuous medium'.
During the years of Alloway's Assistant Directorship of the ICA (1955-60) the growing influence of American culture asserted itself. Between the epochal exhibitions, 'Modern Art in the United States' (1956) and 'The New American Painting' (1959) Alloway made an official visit to America and in 1961 he emigrated there with his wife the Welsh painter Sylvia Sleigh. Alloway was a curator at the Guggenheim Museum (1962-66) where he promoted American Pop Art through his involvement with the 'Situation' group in London (Sleigh painted a group portrait, 'The Situation Group' in 1961) and his curating, 'The Shaped Canvas' (1964) at the Guggenheim confirmed an interest in hard edge abstraction that linked back, inadvertently at least, to the geometric or systematic compositional purity of the nine abstract artists a decade earlier. The Guggenheim years were followed by writing art criticism for Nation and Artforum and during the 1970s he was professor of art history at the State University of New York. He died in America in 1990.
Though less divergently problematic than Alloway's later career, the fate of the nine artists stressed the group's underlying individuality. Frost, Heath, Scott and Hilton each re-engaged with figurative or landscape source
material in later work. Only three, the Martins and Hill, pursued a systematic and mathematically rigorous art on a consistent basis. Hill's 'Orthogonal Composition' (1954), illustrated in Nine Abstract Artists but not among his pair of exhibits at the original Redfern show, was one of his last works before he abandoned painting and constructed with ready made industrial materials. It is loaned to the current exhibition from Ken Powell's comprehensive collection of the period. Utilising the manual skills of a craftsman friend Stanley Bishop, the constructions that followed operated along divisional and proportional systems. These preoccupations brought him into contact with Marcel Duchamp and Max Bill, with whom he corresponded and later met and about whose work he wrote illuminating articles. The Martins, recently hailed by Hill, 'the stars of the group', also resisted a 'romantic' return to subjective imagery though Kenneth's late 'Chance and Order' canvases and Mary's 1960s chequerboard reliefs using sequences of open or truncated cubes made from Perspex or mirror glass allowed either the incidentals of paint and colour or of distorted or reflected light to mitigate the stringent compositional order. The hidden harmonies of the golden section or Fibonacci series were thereby randomised by the chance effects of movement and changing light. In Kenneth's screw mobiles, one of which featured in the Redfern show in 1955, this movement took on a literal, kinetic guise.
Whether using traditional paint on canvas or new industrial materials, the nine artists agreed that, as Alistair Grieve has put it, 'in abstract art, medium and meaning were bound together as never before and that abstract work was an object in its own right....which affected the environment in which it was placed.'
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The current exhibition is timely in celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Nine Abstract Artists. Although impossible to fully replicate the original exhibition, the spirit of that event has been accurately evoked by unearthing enough key works of the period and also by tracing the subsequent developments of the nine with sample works from the 1960s and beyond.
Peter Davies |
