Peter Lanyon

Catherine Viviano Gallery, New York, where acquired by the present owner in the 1960s

New York, Catherine Viviano Gallery, Peter Lanyon, 26th January - 21st February 1959, cat. no.10;
Lincoln, University of Nebraska Art Galleries, Nebraska Art Association: 69th Annual Exhibition, 1959 (details untraced); 
Iowa, Scheaffer Gallery, Grinnell College Fine Art Centre, An Exhibition of Paintings by 4 Contemporary Artists from Europe and Asia, 1969, un-numbered catalogue. 

Andrew Causey, Peter Lanyon, Aidan Ellis Publishing Limited, Henley-on-Thames, 1971, pp.21, 56, cat. no.108, illustrated pl.66.

The board appears to be sound. The edges of the board are slightly scuffed in places, and there are some very small losses, primarily at the upper right corner, along the left vertical edge and along the upper horizontal edge. There are some extremely minor scattered lines of reticulation and craquelure, only visible upon very close inspection. There is a slight spot of very minor discolouration to the orange pigment towards the upper centre of the work. There is some light surface dirt across the work. Subject to the above, the work appears to be in good overall condition. The work is presented in a gilt wooden batten frame. Ultraviolet light reveals several spots of retouching in isolated areas across the work, primarily in the lower left quadrant. Stuart Sanderson, Paintings Conservation: There are areas especially on the left hand side where the paint is cracking, and there is a breakdown in the bond between the paint layers, particularly where the underlying paint layer is a yellow colour. There has been some paint loss which will be evident, as I did not fill and texture the losses, but retouched them in gouache. Where I have been able, I have fixed some of the raised paint with reversible conservation grade PVA. However I think it would be prudent post sale to do a further and more thorough consolidation of the cracking areas. I do not think there is any noticeable loose layer of dirt, though there may be some more that is ingrained into the surface of the paint. The slight unevenness of the surface is original, though the painting may have become duller over time. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

We are grateful to Martin Lanyon and Toby Treves for their kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work, which will feature in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings and three-dimensional works, to be published by Modern Art Press in association with Yale University Press.

In the white heat of the New York art world of the mid-1950s, the dealer Catherine Viviano took the decision to look outside of the American scene and matched her roster of young American painters with European artists, such as Burri, Afro, Mirko, Renato Guttuso and two young painters from Britain – Alan Davie and Peter Lanyon, giving both their first American shows. Indeed, Viviano’s gallery was a highly significant outlet for Lanyon during the phenomenal burst of creativity that marked the years just prior to his untimely death in 1964, holding five exhibitions there in seven years, although so many major works went directly to America from his studio, that one wonders about the impact this had on his reputation at home. 

In a work such as Harvest Mile one can easily see what it was that must have led to a cutting-edge New York gallerist such as Viviano taking on the young Cornishman. It has a very Italian interest in matiere, the quality of paint itself, the interest in surface and the physicality of the painting as an object and yet it also has the broad, ambitious gaze of American art, a panoramic, widescreen nature, in which the sweep of the brush is amplified. If Pollock, a habitué of the gallery, saw something of himself in Davie’s work, then one wonders what de Kooning would have made of Lanyon's Harvest Mile. It is certainly a work where one senses the confluence (sometimes purposeful, sometimes accidental) of ideas between St Ives and Long Island, at the time two spaces on the geographical periphery that had serious impact on the centre (London and New York).

Lanyon, almost inevitably, was always going to introduce an element of landscape that was not American abstraction’s intention (and anathema to Greenberg). From the very beginning, he wanted to paint the experience of the world around him, seen from above and below, in the mind’s eye, across time and place: ‘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 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 (along with Alan Davie and William Scott) by David Sylvester, for the BBC, 19^th June 1950, Tate Archive (TAV 214AB). 

In Harvest Mile, therefore, the blaze of orange certainly alludes to the cutting of hay, the wild swirls of white and blue to the left the wind driving over the Cornish peninsular and back out to sea, which itself is imaged in several places, as roiling waves or as the flat, slate blue to the bottom centre. Yet Lanyon is never just mapping a physical space, or the experience of that place, but the space of the painting itself. All the mark-making and fields of colour hang from the top of the image, as they would in a Clifford Still, clear in their own abstract nature.

If these maps were constructed from Lanyon’s imagination and from his deep knowledge of the landscape of West Penwith, in 1959 he was able to see what he has sensed, when he took to the skies in a glider, to see the landscape in ‘all dimensions’. As he wrote a few months before his death: ‘ I believe that landscape, the outside world of things and events larger than ourselves is the proper place to find our deepest meanings… I want to make the point that landscape painting is not a provincial activity as it is thought by many to be in the United States, but a true ambition like the mountaineer who cannot see the clouds without feeling the lift inside them. These things take us in to places where our trial with forces greater than ourselves, where skill and training and courage combine to make us transcend our ordinary lives.’ (Peter Lanyon from ‘Some Aspects in Modern British Painting: An Artist’s Point of View’, lecture for the British Council in Czechoslovakia, 27^th January 1964).