Alan Davie

New York, Catherine Viviano Gallery, Alan Davie, March-April 1956, no.9
New York, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, New European Painting and Sculpture, 23rd September 1959-16th October 1960 (as Number 9, 1954);
Princeton University, The Art Museum, The Stanley J. Seeger Jr. Collection, June 1961, no.55, as Number Nine, illustrated in the catalogue.

 

Alan Bowness, Alan Davie, Lund Humphries, London 1967, no.80, pl.19.

The board is in stable condition. There are one or two very minor areas of paint loss, one in the upper left quadrant, approximately 2 in. from the left edge and another in the lower left quadrant, approximately 8 in. from the left edge. There is some minor frame abrasion, particularly along the top and right edges, and along the lower section of the left edge, the surface is slightly dirty and the varnish has slightly discoloured. A gilt residue has been left along the upper right edge where the frame has rubbed otherwise in excellent original condition. Under ultra-violet light the picture appears to be free from retouching. Held in a simple gilt frame. The colours are slightly darker and richer in the flesh than they appear in the catalogue illustration.
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Although Davie's work is generally grouped with that of his contemporaries, such as Scott, Lanyon and Heron, in discussions of abstraction in British art in the 1950s, there is a fundamental difference in his work. Whilst many of the leading figures of British painting in the post-1945 period based their work in the abstraction of reality, for Davie his painting was much more akin to the surrealism of artists in the European tradition such as Klee, his first-hand exposure coming by chance in 1946. In 1948 he took up a travelling scholarship deferred due to his war service, and with his wife Bili hitch-hiked across Europe, first to Paris, where they met up with the CoBrA painter and fellow Scot, William Gear, and then on towards Italy. Arriving in Venice for the first post-war Biennale, not only was Davie able to see a major retrospective of Braque and a fine exhibition of Klee, the Greek Pavilion, which would otherwise have been empty, was given over to Peggy Guggenheim's collection of Surrealist and contemporary American art. Thus Davie was probably the first British artist of his generation to experience at first hand works by the painters of the New York School, such as Rothko, Pollock and Gorky, then largely unknown outside the United States. The scale of the works, their bold handling and ritualistic imagery made a deep impression on Davie, and in the later part of the year he held exhibitions in Florence and Venice. The Venetian exhibition, at Galleria Sandri, saw a work purchased by Peggy Guggenheim, Music of the Autumn Landscape. The oft-repeated anecdote that she had assumed the artist to be American perhaps demonstrates how far Davie's painting practice had been liberated from that of his fellows back in Britain. Having struck up a friendship with Guggenheim, he was thus afforded further opportunities to study her collection. An interest in the spontaneous and chance elements of making monotypes was clearly reflected in his painting, and in 1950 he held his first one-man exhibition at Gimpel Fils.

In the mid 1950s he started to become interested in both Zen Buddhism and Jungian psychology and found the emphasis on releasing the subconscious from the strictures of the everyday very appealing. During the decade, Davie was teaching, first at the Central School of Art and from 1956-59 as Gregory Fellow at Leeds University and in his classes he encouraged his students to allow their art to grow in an unforced and relaxed way that released the creative process. In the paintings of the period we are thus faced with what can at first seem to be a bewildering variety of imagery and physical mark-making. The paint is brushed, scraped, splashed and dragged across the canvas to create works which seem to suggest so much yet leave the viewer with a sense that further discoveries are still to be made.

Davie's international reputation grew steadily throughout the 1950s and in 1956 he had his first one-man exhibition in New York at the Catherine Viviano Gallery. During the preparations for that show, Stanley Seeger visited the gallery and was told by the owner that there was someone she wanted him to meet. That person was Jackson Pollock. Davie's paintings were in the process of being unpacked, and while they discussed them, one in particular caught Pollock's eye, Goddess of the Green.  Removing the rest of the packaging himself, Pollock's reaction was instinctive - 'I know exactly what he means, push and pull, black and white, good vs bad'. Struck by the dynamism and immediacy of the painting and Pollock's evident regard, Seeger bought the painting before the exhibition opened and it was thus the first of many important paintings by Davie to enter his collection.