Alan Davie

Catherine Viviano Gallery, New York
Private Collection, St. Louis
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1972

New York, Catherine Viviano Gallery, Alan Davie, March-April 1956, no.17.

Alan Bowness, Alan Davie, Lund Humphries, London 1967, no.90.

The masonite appears to be in good original condition. There are artist's pinholes in each corner. The paint surface appears to be in good overall condition. There is also a painting on the verso, the surface of which is also in good condition. There is no sign of retouching under ultra-violet light. Held in a simple gold painted rectilinear frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Painted in 1955.

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.