Patrick Heron (30 January 1920 – 20 March 1999) was a British abstract and figurative artist, critic, writer, and

polemic Polemic () is contentious rhetoric intended to support a specific position by forthright claims and to undermine the opposing position. The practice of such argumentation is called ''polemics'', which are seen in arguments on controversial topic ...

ist, who lived in

Zennor Zennor is a village and civil parish in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. The parish includes the villages of Zennor, Boswednack and Porthmeor and the hamlet of Treen. Zennor lies on the north coast, about north of Penzance,Ordnance Survey ...

Cornwall Cornwall (; kw, Kernow ) is a historic county and ceremonial county in South West England. It is recognised as one of the Celtic nations, and is the homeland of the Cornish people. Cornwall is bordered to the north and west by the Atlantic ...

. Heron was recognised as one of the leading painters of his generation. Influenced by Cézanne, Matisse, Braque and Bonnard, Heron made a significant contribution to the dissemination of modernist ideas of painting through his critical writing and primarily his art. Heron's artworks are most noted for his exploration and use of colour and light. He is known for both his early figurative work and non-figurative works, which over the years looked to explore further the idea of making all areas of the painting of equal importance. His work was exhibited widely throughout his career and while he wrote regularly early in his career, notably for ''New Statesman'' and ''Arts New York'', this continued periodically in later years.

Personal life

Born 30 January 1920 at

Headingley Headingley is a suburb of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, approximately two miles out of the city centre, to the north west along the A660 road. Headingley is the location of the Beckett Park campus of Leeds Beckett University and Headingley ...

Leeds Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by popula ...

in Yorkshire, Patrick Heron was the eldest child of Thomas Milner Heron and Eulalie Mabel (née Davies). When Patrick Heron was five and his brother Michael (later known as Dom Benedict) was 4 the family moved to

, where Tom joined Alec Walker at Cryséde to manage and expand the business from artist-designed woodblock prints on silk to include garment-making and retail. The whole family, now four children (Joanna born 1926 and Antony Giles born 1928), moved again in 1929 to

Welwyn Garden City Welwyn Garden City ( ) is a town in Hertfordshire, England, north of London. It was the second garden city in England (founded 1920) and one of the first new towns (designated 1948). It is unique in being both a garden city and a new town and ...

where Tom established Cresta Silks. Notable designers including Edward McKnight Kauffer and Wells Coates, Paul Nash and

Cedric Morris Sir Cedric Lockwood Morris, 9th Baronet (11 December 1889 – 8 February 1982) was a British artist, art teacher and plantsman. He was born in Swansea in South Wales, but worked mainly in East Anglia. As an artist he is best known for his portra ...

worked with Cresta, and Patrick also created fabric designs for the firm from his teenage years. At school, Patrick Heron met his future wife, Delia, daughter of Celia and Richard Reiss, a director of the company which founded

. Registered as a conscientious objector in World War II, Heron worked as an agricultural labourer in Cambridgeshire before he was signed off for ill health. He returned to Cornwall to work for

Bernard Leach Bernard Howell Leach (5 January 1887 – 6 May 1979), was a British studio potter and art teacher. He is regarded as the "Father of British studio pottery". Biography Early years (Japan) Leach was born in Hong Kong. His mother Eleanor (née ...

at the Leach Pottery, St Ives, in 1944–45. During this time, he met many leading artists of the

St Ives School The St Ives School refers to a group of artists living and working in the Cornish town of St Ives.Barbara Hepworth and

Ben Nicholson Benjamin Lauder Nicholson, OM (10 April 1894 – 6 February 1982) was an English painter of abstract compositions (sometimes in low relief), landscape and still-life. Background and training Nicholson was born on 10 April 1894 in De ...

. Reacquainted with Cornwall, Heron spent each summer there until it became his permanent home in 1956 after his purchase and refurbishment of ''Eagles Nest'' the year before from Mark Arnold-Forster, a house Heron had lived in during his childhood. He spent the rest of his life here, until he died at home in March 1999. Patrick and Delia married in 1945 and had two daughters: architect and educator Katharine (1947) and sculptor Susanna (1949). Heron was appointed a

CBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...

in 1977 under Harold Wilson, but rejected a knighthood under

Margaret Thatcher Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the first female British prime ...

Career as a painter

Heron used that most rare and uncanny of gifts: the ability to invent an imagery that was unmistakably his own, and yet which connects immediately with the natural world as we perceive it, and transforms our vision of it. Like those of his acknowledged masters, Braque, Matisse and Bonnard, his paintings are at once evocations and celebrations of the visible, discoveries of what he called "the reality of the eye".

Heron's early works were strongly influenced by artists including Matisse, Bonnard, Braque and Cézanne. Throughout his career, Heron worked in a variety of media, from the silk scarves he designed for his father's company Cresta from the age of 14, to a stained-glass window for

Tate St Ives Tate St Ives is an art gallery in St Ives, Cornwall, England, exhibiting work by modern British artists with links to the St Ives area. The Tate also took over management of another museum in the town, the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture ...

, but he was foremost a painter working in oils and gouache.

Early years

Heron first saw the paintings of Cézanne at an exhibition at the

National Gallery The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director ...

in 1933, an influence which continued throughout his career. Having seen '' The Red Studio'' by Matisse (one of his other significant influences) at the Redfern Gallery in 1943, Heron completed ''The Piano'', which he considered to be his first mature work. His first solo exhibition was held in 1947 at the Redfern Gallery, London. That same year, Heron began a series of portraits of T. S. Eliot, one of which was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1966. In 2013 this highly abstracted portrait was the centre of an exhibition at the gallery, displayed for the first time alongside a selection of Heron's original studies from life and memory from which it was produced.

From 1956

Heron's permanent move to Eagles Nest above the Cornish village of Zennor in 1956 coincided with his commitment to non-figurative painting and resulted in a very productive period of his work. Its roots can be seen in the ''Space in Colour'' exhibition held at Hanover Gallery, London in 1953 where the works of Heron and nine of his British contemporaries were displayed, which he both curated and wrote the catalogue for. His Tachiste paintings made reference to the garden at Eagles Nest, such as ''Azalea Garden'', in the Tate collection. His 'Stripe' paintings, described by Alan Bowness as being 'suffused with light and colour and full of a positive life-enhancing quality so free and so refreshing' emphasised this move towards the principles of colour. Writing in 1968, Bowness went on to describe how he could 'think of few more disconcerting paintings in the last twenty years than Herons stripe paintings of 1957'. Heron described how the 'vertical touch' of the Tachiste paintings were pushed to the ultimate conclusion, as the lines "became longer and longer, until on one painting in early 1956 they became so long that the strokes touched top and bottom". From 1958 onwards, Heron was represented by Waddington Galleries in London, and in the 1960s he was also represented by the

Bertha Schaefer Gallery Bertha Schaefer (1895–1971) was an American designer and gallery director, she was known for her furniture designs, and as an interior designer. Biography Schaefer was born in Yazoo City, Mississippi in 1895. Her father Emil Schaefer was a ref ...

in New York. When

moved to Switzerland in 1958, Heron took over his studio at Porthmeor Studios, overlooking the beach at Porthmeor, St Ives, and began to take advantage of the larger space to paint at a bigger scale – first soft-edged and then the self-described "wobbly hard-edge painting", such as ''Cadmium with Violet, Scarlet, Emerald, Lemon and Venetian: 1969'' in the Tate.

From 1979

The shock of Delia's unexpected death in 1979 meant Heron did little painting for some time. When he did return to the canvas, he turned to the garden at Eagles Nest. Just as it had shown a route to abstraction when Heron first moved there in the 1950s, through it he found a way to reinvigorate his creative approach: rather than rapidly drawing large shapes in pen across the canvas which would then be filled in with a fine Japanese watercolour brush as he had through most of the 1970s, Heron used a large brush, mixed different colours together, and painted from the arm rather than the wrist, allowing the works to develop through the act of painting. This burst of creativity, resulting in paintings such as ''28 January: 1983 (Mimosa)'', formed Heron's Barbican exhibition of 1985. In 1989 Heron was invited to be artist-in-residence at the museum of New South Wales in Sydney, and this resulted in another highly prolific period of his work. Drawing inspiration from his daily walk to his studio through the city's Botanic Gardens located by the harbour, Heron produced six large paintings and 46 gouaches in sixteen weeks. These works are reactions to real visual experiences, yet are not direct representations; instead the line and colour encapsulate "specific visual realities without ever depicting them". These intense periods of activity characterised Heron's later career, made obvious through his exhibitions at the Barbican, and another at Camden Arts Centre in 1994. Taking advantage of the space of the centre, Heron created a series of paintings of grand proportions – at and ranging from long, they were conceived with Camden Arts Centre's galleries in mind. These paintings formed the exhibition entitled 'Big Paintings' that went on to tour Britain. The year before, Heron designed a coloured glass window for the new Tate St Ives with his son-in-law Julian Feary, which opened in 1993. Heron was commissioned to paint a portrait of author AS Byatt (1997), and the following year Tate Gallery, London staged a major retrospective of his work in 1998. This was the most comprehensive exhibition of Heron's work and brought together items from the different decades and periods of his working life. Selected by David Sylvester, the works were displayed so that the last gallery with his late paintings adjoined the first gallery with his earliest works, making explicit how the elements on which Heron's career was founded were already in place.

Nicholas Serota Sir Nicholas Andrew Serota, (born 27 April 1946) is an English art historian and curator, who served as the Director of the Tate from 1988 to 2017. He is currently Chair of Arts Council England, a role which he has held since February 2017. ...

, former director of the Tate Gallery, who was a friend as well as patron, described Heron as "one of the most influential figures in post-war British art". Once the exhibition closed, at the Tate Gallery, London, Heron embarked on a series of 100 gouache paintings, each no bigger than A4. He stopped at 43rd, the number it took to cover the carpet in his sitting room at Eagles Nest.

Career as a critic

Naturally I like the article n the'' New English Weekly''very much indeed – but not only because what you say about my work pleases me, but also because it is criticism that could only come from someone who has practised himself – and responded to the work in the way it was done. Henry Moore

Dear Mr Heron, I have translated certain sections of your book on paintings which I have read with interest. You throw a new light on those things about which run-of-the-mill criticism is bewildering. My sincere compliments, Georges Braque

Heron was highly acclaimed as a writer as well as an artist, and respected by his contemporaries for being able to articulate art from the perspective of a practitioner. His writing about art began in 1945 when he was invited by

Philip Mairet Philip Mairet (; full name: Philippe Auguste Mairet; 1886–1975) was a British designer, writer and journalist. He had a wide range of interest: crafts, Alfred Adler and psychiatry, and Social Credit. He translated major figures including Jean ...

, editor of The New English Weekly, to contribute to the journal. His first published article, on Ben Nicholson, was written while Heron was still at Leach Pottery. This was soon followed by essays on Picasso, Klee, Cézanne and Braque. Within the next two years Heron began broadcasting a series of talks on contemporary art on the BBC World Service and the newly founded

Third programme The BBC Third Programme was a national radio station produced and broadcast from 1946 until 1967, when it was replaced by Radio 3. It first went on the air on 29 September 1946 and quickly became one of the leading cultural and intellectual f ...

, and wrote regularly for ''New Statesman''. In 1955, he became London Correspondent to Arts Digest, New York (later renamed ''Arts(NY)''), and in the same year a selection of his criticism was published by Routledge as ''The Changing Forms of Art''. In 1958, Heron took a "vow of silence" as a critic, giving up his regular columns as he said he wanted to be a painter who wrote, not a writer who paints. He did continue to contribute to exhibition catalogues, and wrote some key articles. Notably in 1966, 1968 and 1970 he published a series of articles in ''

Studio International ''Studio International'' is an international illustrated contemporary art magazine, formerly published in hard copy in London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Ki ...

'' questioning the perceived ascendancy of American artists, at the expense of British and Parisian artists. His final essay on the subject was in a closely worded article of some 14,000 words published over a period of three days in ''The Guardian'' in October 1974. He also wrote passionately in defence of the independence and autonomy of English Art Schools against their integration into the polytechnic system. Heron's articles and essays have been republished in collected works, such as "Selected Writings by the Artist" in ''Patrick Heron'' (Oxford: 1988), ''Patrick Heron on Art and Education'' (Leeds: 1996), and ''The Colour of Colour'' (Texas: 1979).

Major solo exhibitions

Heron exhibited his work throughout his career. Key solo exhibitions include: * 1947 The Redfern Gallery, London 'First solo exhibition''* 1952 Wakefield City Art Gallery * 1960

, New York * 1960 The Waddington Galleries, London * 1963 Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zurich * 1965 Hume Tower, Edinburgh * 1965 VIII Biennal de São Paulo: Gra-Bretanha 1965: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo * 1967 The Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh * 1968 Museum of Modern Art, Oxford * 1972

Whitechapel Art Gallery The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery in Whitechapel on the north side of Whitechapel High Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The original building, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, opened in 1901 as one of the ...

* 1973 Bonython Art Gallery, Paddington, Sydney, NSW * 1978 The

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

Art Museum, Austin, Texas * 1985

Barbican Art Gallery The Barbican Centre is a performing arts centre in the Barbican Estate of the City of London and the largest of its kind in Europe. The centre hosts classical and contemporary music concerts, theatre performances, film screenings and art exhib ...

* 1990

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), founded as the New South Wales Academy of Art in 1872 and known as the National Art Gallery of New South Wales between 1883 and 1958, is located in The Domain, Sydney, Australia. It is the most import ...

* 1994

Camden Arts Centre Camden Art Centre (formerly known as Hampstead Arts Centre until 1967 and Camden Arts Centre until 2020) is a contemporary art gallery in the London Borough of Camden, England that hosts temporary exhibitions and educational outreach projects. T ...

* 1998

Tate Britain Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in ...

* 2018

* 2018 Turner Contemporary * 2021 Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert * 2022 Cristea Roberts Gallery

References

Sources

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External links

* * http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/1999/mar/22/guardianobituaries.michaelmcnay
National Portrait Gallery Patrick Heron (1920-1999), Painter and art critic
{{DEFAULTSORT:Heron, Patrick 1920 births 1999 deaths 20th-century English painters Abstract painters Academics of the Central School of Art and Design Alumni of the Slade School of Fine Art Artists from Leeds English conscientious objectors British contemporary artists British contemporary painters Commanders of the Order of the British Empire English male painters People educated at St George's School, Harpenden St Ives artists 20th-century English male artists