Patrick Heron

The artist
The artist's family
Waddington Galleries, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2001

London, The Redfern Gallery, Patrick Heron: Oil Paintings, 1958, no. 11
London, Waddington Galleries, Four Middle Generation Painters: Heron, Frost, Wynter, Hilton, May 1959, no. 21
Edinburgh, Richard Demarco Gallery, Patrick Heron Retrospective, 1967, no. 51
London, Waddington Galleries, Patrick Heron: Works from 1956-1969, 2002, no. 6, illustrated in colour

The colours in the catalogue illustration are accurate. This work is in very good condition. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals very minor lines of retouching to the upper and lower extreme overturn left edges, in four places to the extreme overturn right edge, and a very thin vertical line towards the lower right edge.
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First exhibited in a groundbreaking show at the Redfern Gallery, London in February 1958, Patrick Heron's October Horizon: October 1957 is a historic work that belongs to a crucial turning point in the development of post-war Abstract art in Britain. This inaugural exhibition was quite unlike anything Heron had shown before, and would mark a pinnacle in the artist's career. With striped fields of vibrant chromatic intensity overlaid on top of each other and their respective pigments seeping into one another, the present work encapsulates a courageous and unprecedented working method. Heron had experimented with pure abstraction as early as 1952, rather under the influence of Nicholas de Staël, but he maintained a figurative foundation to his painting until at least January 1956. Thereafter he began to develop a language of strokes of pure colour which moved away from a definite subject. Perhaps a response to the environment of the artist's new home at Eagle's Nest at Zennor in Cornwall and now often known as the 'garden' paintings, the broad subject was often only made clear by the descriptive titles given them, and the idea of an actual physical depiction was clearly subordinate to the artist's exploration of the possibilities of colour itself as the subject. As these works developed, the vertical strokes 'became longer and longer, until in one painting in early 1957 they became so long that the strokes touched top and bottom. Suddenly there were actually seven vertical stripes in one painting, which at the time I actually called Scarlet Verticals: March 1957' (Martin Gayford, 'Looking Is More Interesting Than Doing Anything Else, Ever: An Interview With Patrick Heron', in: David Sylvester, Ed., Patrick Heron, London 1998, p. 29).

Heron continued to combine a vertical and horizontal element in many of these paintings, but out of this group grew a very distinctive corpus, now known generally as the 'Stripe' paintings. Very few in number, they span just over a year, developing fully in March and April of 1957 and reaching their end with Lux Eterna: May-June 1958. Almost all use a tall upright format as their starting point, and are distinguished by their bold, intuitive and non-referential use of colour, and the free and fast handling of the paint which adds to the immediacy of their impact. October Horizon: October 1957 thus stands at the absolute centre of this group of paintings and fully demonstrates how Heron had achieved his aim of creating paintings which did not simply abstract their images from a visual starting point, but that they should use colour and form in an entirely non-referential way.

The visual impact of the palette in October Horizon: October 1957 is remarkable and close inspection of the surface sees Heron working in an equally radical way, the strokes of colour not disguising the swiftness of their application, and indeed in many cases the paint is thinned down to allow it to run and blend with adjacent areas. This startling vibrancy and freshness would have had a simply overwhelming effect on contemporaries at the time. One only need look at paintings of the same period by the other leading British abstract painters of the day, such as Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon or William Scott, to see how radically Heron's approach in terms of colour and handling differed from their own, and critics seemed to be at a loss as to how to approach them. Indeed, it was not until over a decade later that the revolutionary elements of these astonishing paintings began to be recognised. In his introduction to Heron's 1968 retrospective exhibition at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, Alan Bowness reflected on the 'Stripe' paintings' abandonment of the expected concerns with paint surface, something that had been at the forefront of the appreciation of much abstract painting in the mid-1950s. This was developed later in his introduction to Heron's important 1972 retrospective at The Whitechapel Art Gallery: "Bands of colour were not in 1957 the pictorial cliché they later became: on the contrary these were paintings of a remarkable originality and beauty as at least a few perceptive artists and critics were able to recognise...At the time one was told that Heron was simply following Rothko. Now if this means that he was exceptionally quick to appreciate Rothko's quality and his importance, it is true...But the striped paintings of 1957...are not really like Rothko at all, and the American paintings they do recall are later in date...I am inclined to claim now that Heron's paintings of 1957-58 are a major statement by a British artist, and they occupy in the context of their time a situation analogous to William Scott's black and white paintings of 1954, or, to go further back into the past, Ben Nicholson's white reliefs of 1936." (Alan Bowness in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, Patrick Heron: Recent Paintings and Selected Earlier Canvases, 1972, p.2)

The inclusion of a group of 'Stripe' paintings in the 1972 exhibition was almost the first time they had been seen since the 1958 Redfern show, and the retrospective view confirmed that they were unlike anything being painted anywhere else. In 1964, the American critic Clement Greenberg curated an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Post Painterly Abstraction, in which he selected works made after 1960 and included paintings by three artists who were using the 'stripe' image, Gene Davis, Morris Louis and David Simpson. These artists' use of the stripe to free them from the gestural painted stroke (Davis and Simpson used taped areas to define the stripes and Louis used poured paint on unprimed canvas) was very different from Heron's motivation, and execution, but the fact remains that none of these artists had exhibited the form prior to 1960. Although it was almost ten years before Heron was to raise this apparent landmark status and consequent critical oversight of the 'stripe' paintings in print, he has observed that "It's an illustration of how frightfully self-deprecating we are in this country. If an American had come up with something like that, it would have been trumpeted around the world" (Martin Gayford, Op.Cit., p.33).

Today, well over half a century since they were painted, Heron's 'Stripe' paintings are being endowed with the status they deserve, and the appearance of October Horizon: October 1957 at auction offers collectors an extremely rare chance to acquire a superb example of this body of work which has such significance for British abstraction in the post-war period.