Patrick Heron

Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York
Waddington Galleries, London
Sale, Sotheby's London, 5th December 1974, lot 157
Ken Powell, London
His sale, Sotheby's London, 11th November 1987, lot 265
Rutland Gallery, London
Severn Family Foundation, 1987
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London
Private Collection, U.K., from whom acquired by the present owner

New York, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, Patrick Heron : New Oils, 3rd April - 11th May 1960, cat. no.3, illustrated on the cover;
London, Rutland Gallery, Patrick Heron: Paintings 1958-1966, 6th - 31st May 1975, cat. no.3, illustrated on the cover;
London, Hayward Gallery, Hayward Annual, 29th August - 12th October 1980 (ex. cat.);
London, The Barbican Art Gallery, Patrick Heron, 11th July - 1st September 1985, cat. no.35 (lent by Ken Powell);
Leeds, University of Leeds, The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, temporary loan, 2013.

Art News, January 1960, illustrated p.53;
Vivien Knight (ed.), Patrick Heron, John Taylor in association with Lund Humphries, London, 1988, illustrated pl.37.

Original canvas. There is a very faint horizontal stretcher bar mark to the centre left of the composition. There are instances of very minor, light rubbing to the extreme tips of the four corners, only visible upon extremely close inspection. There are instances of minor reticulation to the red pigment, predominantly in the lower half of the composition, and in keeping with the nature of the artist's materials and techniques. There are a couple of extremely minor, fine lines of craquelure to the top of the white pigment in the upper left, together with some minor instances of light flattening to one or two of the raised tips of thicker impasto. This excepting the work appears in excellent overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a few small isolated areas of fluorescence and probable retouchings, including a small square in the upper left quadrant; a small square to the top right side of the orange/red square on the right hand side and to the top left red quadrant, together with smaller, lesser instances elsewhere. These have all been very sensitively executed. Tightly float-mounted in a thin, dark wooden frame. Please telephone the department on +44 207 293 6424 if you have any questions or queries regarding the present work.
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The Estate of Patrick Heron is preparing the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the Artist's work and would like to hear from owners of any works by Patrick Heron, so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue. Please write to The Estate of Patrick Heron c/o Modern & Post-War British Art, Sotheby's, 34-35 New Bond Street, London, W1A 2AA or email modbrit@sothebys.com

Standing in front of Tall Brown : June 1959 there is no doubt that here is a British painting that stands shoulder to shoulder with anything that was made in America in the post-war period. Not only has it got both the scale and ambition of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, but it also has a presence, the sense of painting as an event, which one finds in Rothko, Pollock, Newman et al.

Painted in 1959, it marks the high point of a two-year journey for Heron, as the tachisme of his break-through 'garden paintings' and the 'horizontal stripe' paintings of 1956-57 gives way to more meditative ‘colour-fields’. This is where Heron fully establishes his idea (first imagined in 1953) of 'space in colour’, where a sense of space and light are created through the careful placement of colours side by side. Key to this concept is the moment of contact between individual colours – the interplay of edges – all of which is beautifully expressed in Tall Brown : June 1959. 

The title of this painting is something of a puzzle, in that one would expect brown to be the dominant colour. Instead, it is suffused with a deep red that creates a resonant, luminous field, drawing the eye into a seemingly limitless space, much in the way reds in Rothko do. Over this field, Heron has then laid loosely painted 'lozenges' of orange, white and black, that seem both to float on the surface and yet also create windows within, to alternate spaces and depths. This is certainly the function of the only brown to be seen - the small, shimmering circle that creates an almost optical effect, a vibration between its own colour and the red that causes the viewer to wonder whether it sits on top or behind.  

It is this movement and uncertainty – perceptual and conceptual – that not only made Heron’s work of the late 1950s different, but also put him at odds with Clement Greenberg, the kingmaker of Abstract Expressionism (and Heron’s running critical battle with Greenberg over the next few decades says much about his courage as an artist). After seeing Heron’s new work in 1958, work that moved away from the ‘horizontal stripes’ of 1957 to works approaching Tall Brown : June 1959 constructed from ‘lozenges’ of colour, Greenberg wrote to Heron: ‘Always, I felt, a few too many discs or rectangles were put in to prevent that wonderfully original colour of yours from realising itself…every one of the five paintings could have been decisively strengthened by simply or mechanically wiping out every silhouetted form that was less than a foot and a half away from the edge of the canvas, that is, by bunching and clearing…’ (Clement Greenberg, letter to Patrick Heron, 17th August 1958, quoted in Michael McNay, Patrick Heron, Tate Publishing, London, 2002, p.57). Yet in paintings such as Tall Brown : June 1959 much of their beauty and interest takes place precisely within a ‘foot and a half from the edge’.  Indeed, no British artist of the period explores the possibilities of the edge of the canvas – that borderland between our world and the painted world – quite like Heron.

At this point in time in his career, Heron didn’t work out his paintings beforehand, beyond creating a rough route-map in his head, and so compositions grow organically on the canvas, as each form and each colour follows the suggestion of the preceding elements. These are paintings made up of a series of moments: as the eminent art historian and critic Mel Gooding notes, ‘Time is as much their subject as space and colour’ (Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, Phaidon, London, 1994, p.161). Heron wanted his paintings to be alive with details: the way two colours work against each other; the visual intrigue of edges and margins; the exquisite beauty of a brush running dry of paint midway thorough describing a form.