Peter Lanyon

Purchased from the artist by Dr Franklin, 1959
Sotheby's, London, 3 July 2002, lot 131

Andrew Causey, Peter Lanyon, Henley-on-Thames, 1971, no.107, p.56

The following condition report has been prepared by Phil Young of Phil Young Conservation Ltd., Studio 3 Nutbrook Studios 33 Nutbrook Street London SE15 4JU. The painting was examined in the store at Bond Street. CONDITION The canvas appears to be in good condition and some past mould growth (not active now) is apparent, indicating the painting may have been held for some time in damp or cold conditions. There is a history of small areas of flaking paint, some with restored losses, and some with unrestored losses. The restored losses can be assumed to pre-date the unrestored losses, indicating that an overall consolidation of flaking areas is required. This is not an uncommon treatment of Lanyon's works, here it seems to be a result of the areas where the artist has painted layers of paint with less medium over layers with more medium, so the lifting paint begins as drying cracks. Most retouchings are in the blue area and look to be quite old; whether they are by the artist or not is certain. There are oil or medium splashes in the centre right area, probably part of the painting and dating from the time it was made. The lower right corner has a paint loss and a related abrasion, similar to other points at the edges. There are scattered marks and abrasions generally and general surface dirt. TREATMENT The losses are realatively small, clearly the painting is in need of cleaning, removal of the old retouchings (unless found to be by the artist) and then a thorough minimal restoration carried out. Housed in a thin wooden slip frame.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Stanley Seeger began buying Peter Lanyon's work in 1957, the year of Lanyon’s first solo exhibition in New York at the Catherine Viviano Gallery, and went on to forge a close relationship with the artist and build a remarkable collection of his works. Perhaps most famously was Seeger’s commission of Lanyon to paint the thirty foot mural for a music studio on his estate, Bois d’Arc, Frenchtown, New Jersey. It was a new and rewarding challenge for Lanyon, and the result was the magnificent Porthmeor Mural, sold in these rooms in The Eye of a Collector: Works from the Collection of Stanley Seeger in 2001. It was also a happy experience for artist and patron alike, Seeger fondly recalling the events that surrounded the commission: the music, the parties and the visits to New York to buy paints. 

Executed in 1959, the same year that Lanyon took up gliding to experience nature all-encompassing, Green Place exemplifies Lanyon’s dramatic and personal response to the landscape, in which he redefined the tradition of landscape painting in a radical manner. While his works are ostensibly abstract, the content is emphatically not - Lanyon combined notational references, history and myth within his paintings. The landscape, the natural elements and the human stories lived within it were all formative to Lanyon’s painting – evoking these experiences was central to his art. ‘The thing that I’m interested in ...is that there’s a place or a hill or a rock, or something like that, the thing that I have experienced that I am able to make it into something new which is an equivalent of that.... In the end the whole picture has to be that. It hasn’t to represent it, I don’t mean photographic representation...it has to be so charged with that experience that it is, the whole self: it will give back that experience to somebody else’ (Peter Lanyon, interviewed by David Sylvester for the BBC, 19^th June 1959, Tate Archive (TAV 214AB)).

Lanyon's paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s reveal a new confidence and the production of some of his finest work. We see an increasing expansiveness emerge, a sense of space and depth and a brightening and simplification of his palette. This new 'lightness' coincided with a number of interplaying experiences, from his gliding, experimenting in new media (such as the enormous ceramic-tiled mural for the Engineering Building at Liverpool University), transferring from board to canvas - as in the present work - and his encounters with the scale and daring of Rothko, Motherwell and de Kooning. In Green Place, colours are limited to greens, blues, whites and blacks, and brushstrokes are layered broadly on top of each other, with dynamic, palette-knife marks pulled this way and that along the left edge. The heavy black boarder along the bottom gives a sudden sense of emptiness, perhaps even danger, threatening to overshadow the encircled ‘green place’. In pictures such as the present work, Lanyon succeeds in transmitting a sense of place while not allowing the specifics of a locale to interfere with the overall experience. This was Lanyon's triumph, enforced with resolute energy and boldness, and with which he made such an important contribution to painting in twentieth century Britain.