Sir Terry Frost, R.A.

Peter Nahum
His sale, Christie's South Kensington, 15th November 2006, lot 276, where acquired by the present owner

London, Belgrave Gallery, Terry Frost, October - November 1989, cat. no.6;
Chichester, Festival Exhibition, The Tudor Rooms of the Bishop's Palace, Kindred Spirits, Leading Groups of British Painters in the 19th and 20th centuries, July 1993, cat. no.32. 

Margaret Garlake, New Art New World, British Art in Postwar Society, Yale and London, 1998, p.118;
Chris Stephens, Terry Frost, London, 2000, p.26, illustrated pl.14.

The board is sound and mounted to a backboard. The corners of the board are scuffed and worn and there are some old abrasions with some old paper losses to the upper right corner in particular and some further nicks along the edges notably to the bottom of the left edge. There is old glue residue and surface dirt scattered throughout the composition and the collaged elements have old creases, discolorations, pinholes and nicks to the edges which are inherent to those materials. The edges of the circular element in the bottom right corner are also worn and there are further small nicks to any protruding edges of the collaged elements with scattered surface abrasions such as that below the upper left edge which are aged and possibly occurred in the studio when the collage was unframed. There are collaged elements which are also dirty and which have discoloured over time. Held in a painted white box frame, unexamined out of frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Frost moved to St Ives in 1946 after demobilization, and thus immediately found himself immersed in one of the central forums for abstracted art in Britain in the immediate post-war period. He struck up friendships with many of his contemporaries also residing in the remote artistic retreat and his recollections tell us a good deal about the collective aims of this group. However, Frost's route to art had come through his meeting with Adrian Heath in a wartime prisoner of war camp. A former Slade pupil, Heath encouraged Frost to follow his incipient interest, and with an ex-serviceman's grant, Frost was accepted to study at Camberwell School of Art (his family remained in Cornwall and he returned there whenever possible). Camberwell gave Frost exposure to another strand of artistic thought, notably that of Victor Pasmore. Like the St Ives artists, Pasmore was also treading a path that was drawing increasingly abstracted imagery from natural subject matter. However, whilst the St Ives tendency was to take an instinctive route to such abstraction, many of the artists associated with Camberwell were becoming increasingly interested in the theoretical aspects of composition. Pasmore was very much concerned with the theories surrounding harmonious proportion and the Golden Section, as was his and Frost's friend Heath, whose own move towards abstraction in 1948-49 must have been a strong example for Frost.

This simultaneous exposure to, and friendships within, the two major emerging strands of British abstraction were key to establishing the unique position that is held by Frost's art at this time. He was particularly influenced by Peter Lanyon's physical involvement with the landscape, a key feature of the direction his painting was taking, and which he shared with his friend:

'Peter would drive me all over the place, along the coast and up on the moors...he taught me to experience landscape...so that you knew what was above and below you, and what was above and below the forms you were going to draw...' (The Artist, interview with David Lewis, December 1991 & October 1993).

In Moon Quay, created in 1950, Frost brings together these two apparently contradictory approaches perfectly to create a work which has an incredible power and freshness. Frost was seeking to find a visual language which would express the sense of place and movement found in the harbour of St Ives in an abstract idiom. Moon Quay is one of a series derived in part from his experience of early morning walks through the town, using extremely sophisticated geometrical and colour relationships to suggest familiar forms and shapes whilst never actually offering us pictorially identifiable references. The appearances of semi-circles in this work which echo the shapes of the boats, curves of ropes and the gentle waves of the harbour were to become the standard vocabulary of Frost’s later works. He described the genesis of the series:

'I mean I had been walking along the quay every morning...it was quite a simple experience. I just happened to notice that the boats were there with a different colour on when the tide was out and they were all propped up and there I saw all those semi-circles propped up on a stick...the strange feeling of looking on top of boats at high tide and the same boats tied up and resting...when the tide's out' (The Artist, transcript of conversation with Adrian Heath and John Hoskin, July 1987).

Frost's works of the early 1950s sit at the very centre of the debate between the experience-influenced abstracted images of the St Ives painters and the rigorously constructivist work of the artists of the Fitzroy group and they therefore have a crucial place in British abstract art of the immediate post-war period. If we accept that Frost's simultaneous involvement at this time in both major groups at the avant-garde of British abstraction is unique, then works such as Moon Quay become a distinctive statement of British art of the time, a beacon of the concerns that would see British art achieving world recognition in the years that followed.