Peter Lanyon

Gimpel Fils, London, where acquired by the father of the present owners November 1960

London, Gimpel Fils, Peter Lanyon, 11th October - 5th November 1960, cat. no.12;
San Antonio, McNay Art Museum, Tom Slick: International Art Collector, 10th June - 13th September 2009, (unnumbered) illustrated p.65.

Andrew Causey, Peter Lanyon: His Paintings, Aiden Ellis Publishing Limited, Henley-on-Thames, 1971, cat. no.133.

The following condition report has been prepared by Stuart Sanderson, Paintings Conservation, 69 Rylett Crescent London W12 9RP: There is a light uneven layer of dirt on the surface of this unvarnished painting. There was a very small area in the pale central form where the top layer of paint was becoming detached from the layer beneath, leading to micro flaking. There was another small area in the upper left where there was similar lifting paint, and a minute paint loss. I have consolidated both areas, and retouched the micro losses with gouache. There is a slight bar mark on the left and some stress cracks in the white form at the top of the composition. The painting otherwise is in good condition. Please telephone the department on +44 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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From the late 1940s onwards, Lanyon had sought to create a totally personal manner of painting which not only changed the way we look at representations of landscape, but one which extended our interpretation of the landscapes themselves by directly addressing the personal experience of both artist and viewer.

Whilst working in an ostensibly abstract manner, Lanyon himself rejected the burden of abstraction, preferring to think of himself as a landscape painter fully in the romantic tradition. His work combines notational references, history and myth in a way which was entirely his own.

Lanyon's move towards a more abstracted depiction of the Cornish landscape had developed from the early 1950s but in the second half of the decade new elements began to appear. Amongst many of his contemporaries there was a growing awareness of the American avant-garde painters. For Lanyon, there were certain key events that were particularly influential. Whilst he was already aware of some of Jackson Pollock's work from his trip to Italy in 1948, where Peggy Guggenheim's collection had been shown at the Venice Biennale, the 1956 Tate Gallery exhibition, Modern Art in the United States, was much more important, giving a tantalising snapshot of contemporary American painting with only one room of Abstract Expressionist work actually shown. Other artists from Lanyon's circle, such as William Scott and Alan Davie were already exhibiting in New York and they in turn brought back reports of new developments. However in 1957, Lanyon made the trip himself to New York for his first U.S. exhibition. The exhibition, at the Catherine Viviano Gallery, brought Lanyon some good reviews but the visit seems to have been most important for the opportunity to make contact with American artists, critics and curators. He met Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottlieb, the critics Clement Greenberg and Dore Ashton and was later to become friends with Mark Rothko and Wilhelm de Kooning.

The influence of this new exposure on Lanyon's painting begins to make itself seen almost immediately. Although it has become a commonplace to discuss elements of Abstract Expressionism in Lanyon's work of this time, this rather misses the essential differences between the two forms of art. For Lanyon, his experience of American painting seems to imbue his work with a new expansiveness and a sense of space, bringing the gestures that create the work to the fore and making them an integral part of the experience of the landscape transmitted to the viewer via the painting without ever forgetting the initial impulse that creates the image. There is also a brightening and simplification of his palette, with fresher blues, greens, reds and yellows beginning to become more dominant and the earthier colours of his earlier painting falling away.

Paintings such as Down Wind exemplify this bolder manner. The careful use of colour and gesture, draw the viewer into the heart of its composition, and thus into the experience of place the artist is aiming to transmit. The titles Lanyon used at this time tended to be more descriptive than the place names he had used earlier (e.g. Silent Coast 1957, Long Sea Surf 1958, Low Tide 1959) and combined with the greater openness of form, prompts the viewer less to search for immediate references than to work through the layers of the image to reconstruct the process by which Lanyon achieved his end.

Lanyon took up hanggliding in 1960 and thus experienced a very different view of the world, making himself dependent upon the elemental forces of the air. In a tape recording made in 1962 with Lionel Muskin, Lanyon commented,

'I have always been concerned with painting weather. I can't rationalise what the weather does to me. I don't know what it is. It probably creates a sort of excitement in me which will allow me to paint things, and very often images come through which I don't recognise for years after they are painted. It is impossible for me to make a painting which has no reference to the very powerful environment in which I live. I have to refer back continually to what is under my feet, to what is over my back and to what I see in front of me.'

This concern with meteorological phenomena was one that occupied Lanyon up untill his untimely death in 1964, and Down Wind is certainly one of his most accomplished examples of this type.