Patrick Heron

(British, 1920-1999)

5 DISCS IN RED : MARCH 1964 96.5 x 122 cm. (38 x 48 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With Waddington Galleries, London, October 1964
T. W. (Fello) Atkinson, thence by descent to the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Literature
'Dosez les couleurs osées', Elle, November 1967, p.123 (col.ill.)
Alan Gouk, 'Patrick Heron II', Artscribe, no.35, June 1982, p.42 (ill.b&w)

In the mid 1960s Heron declared how he and his British contemporaries were building on the achievements of the abstract expressionists in ways that were quite distinct from the new generation of US painters such as Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland whose work was variously characterised as Post-painterly or Color-Field painting. Having visited New York in 1960 for his first solo exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery that year, Heron subsequently wrote to the American critic Clement Greenberg how pleased he was by the 'glow and resonance' of his own painting and to offer his recognition that 'The best American painting has a sort of bareness by comparison: and while this open clean bareness is terrific [...] it is not what I want (in my own work, that is).'[1] 5 DISCS IN RED : MARCH 1964 indicates quite what Heron had meant by this, and how his own painting had continued to quickly develop. In the space of two years he had moved from open and simplified compositions to paintings which were loosely conceived in broadly rectilinear – if still lop-sided and asymmetrical – ways. Their continued 'glow' and 'resonance' being the result of an increasing chromatic intensity, a continued reduction of overpainting that would soon lead to the reintroduction of drawing, and an amplification of his distinctively textural brush marks – remarking to Greenberg that 'My painting has always been unashamedly "scribbled".'[2]

Heron's attention to the physicality of the act of painting and the marks that derive from it, corresponds to an attitude to colour and his desire is to 'saturate the surface of the canvas with [...] varying quantities of colour', manipulating 'the varied and contrasting intensities, opacities, transparencies; the seeming density and weight, warmth, coolness, vibrancy [...] Certainly I can get a tremendous thrill from suddenly seeing two colours juxtaposed.'[3] The wide variety of brush marks that can be seen in 5 DISCS IN RED : MARCH 1964 echoes its nuanced colour range, but also contrast with the degree to which the edges of each disc are now more distinctly defined and drawn – if still freehand and irregular. There is a visual jump between each disc and the neighbouring colour areas that he would start to explore even more acutely by the end of the decade when his painting process radically changed. But the consistent thread throughout the decade can be located in each painting's foundation on the physical quality of his spontaneous (yet deliberate) brush marks allied with an expression of spatial ambiguity and colour intensities that is so exhilaratingly expressed here in 5 DISCS IN RED : MARCH 1964.

1. Patrick Heron to Clement Greenberg, 9 May 1960, Clement Greenberg Papers, Archive of American Art, Smithsonian Library, Roll N69-91R.
2. Patrick Heron to Clement Greenberg, 19 June 1962, Clement Greenberg Papers, Archive of American Art, Smithsonian Library, Roll N69-91R.
3. Patrick Heron, 'A Note on my Painting', Art International, 25 April 1963, p.50.

We are grateful to Dr Andrew Wilson for compiling this catalogue entry.

The Patrick Heron Trust is in the process of researching 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 Patrick Heron Trust, c/o Modern British and Irish Art, Bonhams, 101 New Bond Street, London W1S 1SR or email [email protected]