JOHN ARMSTRONG

(1893-1973)

On the Promenade

Footnotes

Provenance
Lefevre Gallery, London (1947).
Prof. G.E. & Mrs. A. Blackman Collection (acquired from the above).
A gift from the above to the previous owner (circa 1977); their sale; Bonhams, London, 14 June 2017, lot 1.
Private collection, UK (acquired at the above sale).

Exhibited
London, Lefevre Gallery, New Paintings by John Armstrong and William Crosbie, April 1947, no. 14.

Literature
A. Lambirth, John Armstrong, The Paintings, London, 2009, no. 343, p. 190.

The 1931 exhibition at Arthur Tooth & Sons, Recent Development in British Painting, included six artists who would go on to form 'Unit One': John Armstrong, Edward Burra, Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, John Selby Bigge and Edward Wadsworth. In a letter to The Times on 2 June 1933, Paul Nash outlined their doctrine, part of which stated, 'The formation of Unit One is a method of concentrating certain individual forces, a hard defence, a compact wall against the tide, behind which development can proceed and experiment continue.'

This short-lived group of like-minded artists only staged one exhibition, at the Mayor Gallery in April 1934 (which toured to Liverpool, Manchester, Henley, Derby, Swansea and Belfast), before it broke up, but it has become a seminal moment in the history of modern British art. As the surrealist scholar Michel Remy remarks, 'It was in its readiness to take new initiatives that Unit One paved the way for surrealism: the part played by the figurative artists of the group, Armstrong, Bigge, Hillier and Wadsworth, cannot possibly be underestimated. What they shared was a fascination with the lines and forms of nature, whether mineral, animal or vegetable, and with the intrinsic force of growth that these suggested. Expanded and hypertrophied, this or that leaf, corolla or seashell is given a presence, which, made overwhelming, endows the object with an oneiric quality, a pulsating hesitancy, and casts doubt on how one can judge the reality of what one sees. (M. Remy, Surrealism in Britain, Aldershot, 1999, pp. 37-38).

By 1938, the Tate Gallery purchased their first John Armstrong painting, Dreaming Head (1938), and other works of his from this year make references to sleep and dreaming, such as The Heaviness of Sleep (collection of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art) and Dream at Dawn. It was at this time T.W. Earp wrote in The Daily Telegraph, that Armstrong's first one-man show at the Lefevre Gallery, 'confirms his title as our foremost surrealist painter.'

Shortly after World War II had ended, Armstrong left London in October 1945 and moved to Oriental Cottage, in Lamorna, Cornwall. As his biographer Andrew Lambirth remarks, 'He did not associate with the St Ives school of abstraction local to him in Cornwall, but continued to plough his lonely furrow. In fact, this paid dividends, and this period was productive of an exceptionally high number of fine works. All the hypnotic post-war tempera leaf and feather paintings were made here, and the lush fantastic landscapes of giant plants, which reflected Lamorna's balmy climate.' (A. Lambirth, John Armstrong, The Paintings, London, 2009, pp. 85-86).

On the Promenade (1947) was included in John Armstrong's critically acclaimed and commercially successful, third one-man exhibition at Lefevre Gallery in London, during 1947. It is a painting of immense beauty and sensuality, as two elegant feathers of slightly differing colours take on anthropomorphic qualities as they face one another and interact. Indeed, the title of the work indicates that one of these beings has been escorting the other in a public place for purposes of display, and to be admired by others. The austere background serves to heighten their lusciousness of form and texture. As a wind blows from behind the upper character, the edges of its feather separate into surreal, delicate white tendrils that seek out its companion in a moment of intimacy. Although their narrow and pointed bases appear fragile, balanced precariously on the promenade, their posture and solidity communicate they are in fact grounded and secure.

A handful of other paintings from the period, and included in the same Lefevre Gallery show, used feathers and also leaves as a metaphor for the human form; The Pink Feather (1946), Encounter and The Embrace of the Shadow (both 1947), along with On the Promenade formed what the artist's biographer, Andrew Lambirth, described as 'a group of superb tempera paintings'. But only in the present work does the artist employ the curvaceousness of form with the highly charged richness of colour that lends it such extraordinary appeal.

As Andrew Lambirth notes, 'Maurice Collis, writing in April 1947 in The Observer, had this to say of Armstrong's third show at the Lefevre: "In the past I had to take to task John Armstrong – one of our little galaxy of original artists – for the rigidity of the manner in which he was then enfolding himself. He has abandoned that rigidity, and in the present exhibition displays what I imagine must be not only the most attractive work he has ever shown, but also what I conceive to be more germane to his essential self". Collis writes of the "spectral mortality" of Armstrong's objects, the vast wind that seems to be "blowing from the void", and the perfection of his technique' (op. cit. p. 112).