John Tunnard

Acquired by the present owner in the 1970s

The board is sound. The paint surface is in good original condition. The surface is entirely consistent with Tunnard's manner of working, particularly in his abrading of the surface. There is no sign of retouching under ultra-violet light. In the lower left corner there appears to be a white media mark. Held in a plain silvered frame with a linen slip. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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The title of the present work is possibly No. 353 Construction.

Like many British artists of the mid-century, Tunnard seems tantalisingly close to an adherence to the major movements of the time, yet he somehow always manages to retain an individualism that marks his works as something out of the mainstream.

Although for many of his contemporaries WWII caused a hiatus in their work, for Tunnard it was the period when his very particular blend of modernism, surrealism and a futuristically poetic vision of landscape came together to create a body of works that still fascinate and amaze. Always technically innovative, Tunnard perfected his manner of painting in the early 1940s, and much of what he established in these years was to remain at the core of his painting for the rest of his career.

Composition 1944 is a prime example of how this synthesis of subject and technique came together to create works that over sixty years later appear fresh and powerfully mesmeric. Using a roughly applied gesso base, this was then carved, scored, stained, rubbed back and painted, the resulting images having a three-dimensional quality it is often difficult to believe they do not actually possess. In Composition 1944, interleaving abstract shapes, some solid, some spectrally translucent, hover over an empty landscape, drawing the eye of the viewer to a black circular form that seems to hover like a negative residual retinal imprint above the horizon. This gently curving horizon seems oddly prescient of the images of the moon that would only become familiar a quarter of a century later. As is often the case with Tunnard's work, one is left with the vaguely disquieting feeling of looking from a window onto the alien and empty landscape of another world. 

We are grateful to Dr Brian Whitton for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.