The Drawings of Peter Lanyon

Margaret Garlake

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138710610
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351775083
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2003. Peter Lanyon stood at the forefront of landscape painting in Europe during the late 1950s and early 60s. A prominent St Ives artist, he was associated with Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo; his work also has affinities with abstract expressionism. Lanyon's career started just as the study of drawing was being liberated from 19th-century academic constrictions. His many drawings range from records of trips to the Netherlands and Italy to portrait sketches and abstract studies. Lanyon also used drawings extensively in the development of some of his most important paintings. In this study, Margaret Garlake explores Lanyon's theory and practice of drawing; the contribution of drawings to the evocation of place in paintings; his use of models and the metamorphosis of the human body into landscape images, as well as his use of three-dimensional constructions as equivalents to drawing.

1
Drawing in life and art

Drawing is closer to poetry than to prose or painting. It is free to act irrationally, think the unthinkable and ignore convention. Like poetry it can be intuitively understood; it crosses cultures and generations. Drawing can act through grace or awkwardness; it can reveal the most profound truth or conceal it; adopt the starkest linear austerity or the most indulgent excess. It can do all this within a very small space and with the minimal means of pen or pencil on paper. Colour is a bonus to be exploited occasionally.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century drawing is more popular in western culture and more widely scrutinized than it has been for several hundred years; it is acknowledged as an autonomous practice with a high critical status. In November 2000 the first gallery in England dedicated exclusively to drawing opened with the foundation of the Centre for Drawing at Wimbledon School of Art. It is now easy to overlook the implications of David Bomberg's bitter comment, found among his papers after his death in 1957: 'I am perhaps the most unpopular artist in England - and only because I am draughtsman first and painter second.'¹

The last fifty years has been drawing's period of liberation from the constrictions of a pedagogic discipline. Only Peter Lanyon's earliest drawings display a certain studious inhibition; for most of his too-short career he drew fluently, inventively and variously. His media ranged from silver-point to charcoal, his supports from paper to glass. The drawings themselves, in which the marks are always attuned to the subject, exist in registers implausibly remote from one another. What has the operatic drama of an Atlantic storm gathering over Portreath (see Figure 40) in common with the almost fearful lightness of the pencil lines - faint as a breath - that settle the church at St Just (in Figure 34) within its landscape? The answer lies within the practice of an artist for whom drawing was a profoundly serious activity (though he often drew rather good jokes); who recognized it as the foundation of his imagery; who respected it and exploited it to produce a body of graphic work that is among the most eloquent, accomplished and excoriatingly self-revealing of the mid-twentieth century.

Peter Lanyon (1918-1964) is known primarily as a landscape painter. Except during the Second World War he lived all his life in Cornwall. His father was a photographer and an amateur musician whose own father had been a minedirector in the Redruth area. On their marriage, Lanyon's parents, Lilian and Herbert, moved to St Ives, already an artists' centre, a place that promised a more fulfilling life. Herbert was a socialist, who believed in the arts and his local community and had a vigorous distaste for social hierarchies, convictions retained by his son throughout his life.

After leaving school, having decided to become a commercial artist, Lanyon spent eighteen months at Penzance School of Art and took private lessons with the well-known sea painter Borlase Smart. Many days were spent sketching out of doors, establishing a life-long habit that he pursued enthusiastically on family holidays in the south of France, the Netherlands and, in 1938, South Africa. On this trip of several months with his mother and his younger sister Mary, Lanyon visited relatives involved in mining near Johannesburg and travelled round the Rhodesias (now Zimbabwe and Zambia). Finally, returning to Johannesburg, he exhibited paintings made during the trip together with others that he had brought from England. This, his first solo exhibition, lasted only two days but received a favourable review in a local newspaper.

South Africa made an enormous impact on Lanyon. For the first time he had found himself in a place completely unlike any that he had previously known. Nothing in his hitherto sheltered life could have prepared him for its racial politics, which appalled him, nor for the unimaginable scale of its landscape, its brilliant, hard light, its dryness and its ochre colours, far removed from the damp, misty greens and greys of Cornwall. The intensity of his South African experience made it all the more difficult to settle back in Cornwall, difficult to know how to 'be an artist' or how to progress. One thing was clear: commercial art was no longer a desirable future.

Help was to come from a friend, the painter-critic Adrian Stokes, who recommended that he study at the Euston Road School in London, which was then in its second year. During its brief existence the School was as singular and eccentric as the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham where Lanyon was to teach in the 1950s. In the summer of 1939 Lanyon, like the painters Alison Debenham and Stephen Spender, became an 'occasional visitor'² at the School. Though he stayed only two months, its emphasis on drawing and observation were of enduring significance to his work. He received forceful messages from his tutors William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore about, respectively, the importance of precise observation and the luxuriant, sensuous use of oil-paint.

Once again the return to Cornwall was difficult. Cornwall was Lanyon's home - the place to which, above all others, he was profoundly attached, where he was most completely himself, where not only joy and enthusiasm but pain and anxiety could be expressed. Painting was no response to the tensions that followed the Munich Agreement of September 1938: already politically conscious, Lanyon felt directionless and frustrated.

At the end of August 1939 the quiet fishing port of St Ives received an influx of artist refugees from Hampstead. An important centre for academic artists during the inter-war years, the town now became the home of three leading modernists. Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson went to stay at Little Park Owles in Carbis Bay - the house that the Lanyons were to buy in 1954 - with Stokes and his wife, the painter Margaret Mellis, while the constructivist artist Naum Gabo and his wife, who arrived hard on their heels, were installed in a nearby cottage, Faerystone. For a second time Stokes was to offer a solution to Lanyon's personal dilemma, suggesting that he study with Nicholson. Lanyon fell on the opportunity, becoming a late recruit to the 1930s Hampstead avant-garde. If Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo had dreams of reconstructing this group in St Ives, Lanyon's enthusiasm should have filled them with optimism. Nicholson was able to solve his protégé's problem of how to progress by teaching him to make drawings based on vision but without literally reproducing what he saw.

An introduction to Gabo soon followed. If Nicholson - author of the all-white reliefs, of paintings of Mondrian-like blocks of colour as well as comic drawings of farm animals - was unimaginably modern, Gabo's work went some steps further into the unknown. His constructions, entirely unlike conventional sculpture, were made of perspex and thread, unprecedented materials for a new aesthetic. He was secretive, but Lanyon picked up enough to fuel his imagination, to add to Nicholson's lessons on space and balance. Gabo was the senior artist among the incomers. He formed the link back to Constructivism at source in Russia, after which he had worked in Munich and Paris, founding centres of modernism. When he settled in England in 1936, he was welcomed to the artists' enclave in Hampstead as one of the creative forces in twentieth-century art. His example as artist, philosopher and mentor made an enormous impact on Lanyon, who carried a photograph of his Construction in Space: Spiral Theme (1941) like a talisman throughout his war service. If Lanyon regarded Gabo as both an intellectual font and a father-figure, Gabo for his part had great affection for Lanyon, treating him like a younger brother.³ Lanyon conducted an intense if intermittent correspondence with him after the Gabos left to live in the United States in November 1946.⁴

In March 1940 Lanyon joined up as a Flight Mechanic in the RAF. Because he suffered from migraines he was debarred from flying, a bitter disappointment that was no doubt exacerbated when, in the Battle of Britain, pilots became the early heroes of the war. He spent 22 months training in the north of England, mostly at Hawarden, near Chester. Evidently a talented engineer, he sought, as Gabo had done many years earlier, to align engineering and art, using scraps of metal and wire to make his first three-dimensional constructions, for which he also produced meticulous preliminary drawings.

Postings followed, to North Africa, the Middle East and, late in 1943, southern Italy, during which he managed to find time to draw and paint, amassing a body of work that incorporated portraits, still lifes, abstract images that resemble Gabo's paintings, landscapes and complicated imaginary buildings and enclosures that drew on both Nicholson and the legendary St Ives eccentric and painter, Alfred Wallis. Lanyon returned to Cornwall in December 1945, was demobilized the following March and married Sheila St John Browne in April. They settled in St Ives where Lanyon set about establishing himself as a modern painter and active member of the local community of artists.

As an indication of his awareness that post-war society would provide unimagined opportunities for a committed modernist like himself, a letter written late in 1944 to Hepworth and Nicholson is informative: 'You will know what AIA [the Artists' International Association] are doing and what such people as Read, Bernal etc are doing. I know nothing I only want to do something to help in these new years.'⁵ Lanyon was also aware that his mentors belonged to an older generation and that at the end of the war it would fall to the younger artists to provide fresh models. On his return home he visited exhibitions of new work in London⁶ and sought out his contemporaries in Cornwall. With John Wells, Bryan Wynter, Wilhelmina Barns Graham and the printer Guido Morris, Lanyon became a founder member in 1946 of the Crypt Group, an alliance of younger modernists in St Ives. Though they only showed together three times, the Group introduced a new generation of artists with Lanyon as its leader.

In September 1947 he held a solo show at Downing's Bookshop in St Ives. It included four paintings catalogued under the heading 'Generation Series': The Yellow Runner, Prelude, Landscape with Cup (Annunciation) and Generation. Later he told Gabo that this group consisted of eight paintings, made in 1946-1947, though only the four shown at Downing's are conclusively identified.⁷ Focussing on both the real world and an imaginary subterranean space, they fall into pairs, of which one is in each case markedly less abstract than the other, though they are all made up of entwined curves that form deep, sheltering enclosures. As titles like Generation, Prelude and Annunciation suggest, the series is inextricably linked with Lanyon's marriage and the birth in May 1947 of the first of his six children.

An extremely turbulent period followed. Lanyon had been closely involved with art politics in St Ives since his return from the war; as almost the only native Cornish professional artist in the town, he felt that he had an authority that incomers lacked. In February 1949 the Penwith Society, a new local exhibiting group, was formed following the mass resignation of the modern membership of the St Ives Society of Artists. Hepworth and Nicholson rapidly emerged as leading members of the Penwith but deep tensions emerged in reaction to the acceptance of a ruling proposed by Hepworth to divide artists into categories of figurative, abstract or craft (the 'ABC' ruling). Lanyon, with some others, rejected it as restrictive and misleading; as a result he resigned from the Society in May 1950 and became extremely ill because of the emotional turmoil engendered by quarrelling irreparably with Hepworth and Nicholson. Shortly after his resignation his wife Sheila took him to Italy to recuperate. During a strenuous trip of just under a month, which he recorded in drawings and gouaches, they visited her brother's grave near Pesaro, as well as Florence, Siena, Assisi, Urbino, Bologna, San Gimignano and Venice.

Later that year Lanyon worked obsessively to finish the initial version of Porthleven (Figure 27), his first very large painting, commissioned by the Arts Council for its Festival of Britain exhibition, '6o Paintings for '51'. The final painting was completed in February 1951 and followed by Bojewyan Farms (1952) and St Just (1953; Figure 28), all of which are of comparable size. For each of them Lanyon made at least one construction, quite different in form and purpose from those that he had made hitherto, though he still used left-over scraps of material. Wood and metal were usually painted; glass might be stained or, as is the case with the Construction for St Just (1952; Figure 38), almost entirely clear and stuck together with Bostik. He regarded such constructions as parallel to drawings, made as aids to converting three-dimensional spatial relationships to flat surfaces, rather than as autonomous works of art. Towards the end of the 1950s he developed another constructive medium, usually described as collage constructions (see Figure 13 and Plate 2). These are wall-mounted reliefs, as much pictorial as sculptural and composed of a great variety of media.

The three large paintings of 1951-1953 were Lanyon's breakthrough, in which he demonstrated a new approach to landscape painting. Freely adopting multiple viewpoints but closely related to vision and place without being overtly representational, this may be understood as post-cubist. Of his close friends and colleagues in Cornwall, among them Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron and Terry Frost, Lanyon was the most completely devoted to landscape - or place painting, describing himself as 'a provincial landscape painter' in the lineage of Constable and Turner, by which he meant that he concentrated on the landscape of Cornwall, his 'province'. He implied also that he was primarily a painter; that drawing, like print-making and painting in gouache, was subsidiary. This does not diminish the importance of his drawing, which was often the crucial means by which he analysed visual and sensory perceptions and elided them with topography. It was a way of thinking visually, a function shared by the constructions associated with Porthleven, Bojewyan Farms and St Just.

In the course of making these paintings, Lanyon developed his characteristic repertoire of bold, gestural marks, with dense layers of colour and surface textures that range from scratched incisions to broad, smooth brushstrokes. His colours were equally characteristic: the blues, greys and greens of the Cornish landscape dominated his early work, though later, perhaps under the impact of American painting, he favoured brighter, more dramatic colours. It is not surprising that people found his work difficult to understand and tended to describe it as 'abstract', even though several critics acknowledged that it could have been painted nowhere but in Cornwall.

A case in point is the painting called Trevalgan (1951),⁸ the name of a low hill west of St Ives, A more or less rectangular green shape, from which a prominent white knob protrudes, almost fills the canvas. Smaller blue areas indicate sea and sky. The green mass appears to be undecipherable, though it is crisscrossed with linear marks. However, if one walks up Rosewall, the hill facing Trevalgan across the B3306, it is apparent that this painting is no less than a 'portrait' of a hill:⁹ the knob is a dramatically silhouetted rock outcrop and the linear marks are a network of paths through the gorse, while smaller rocks and patches of vegetation are also indicated. When Trevalgan was exhibited at Gimpel Fils in 1952 John Berger wrote: 'It is a painting, not of the appearance, but of the properties of a landscape: properties only discovered when one knows a place so well that its ordinary scenic appearance has long been forgotten.'¹⁰ Berger as so often the most perceptive of critics - thus summarized the essence of Lanyon's approach to landscape painting. He was to spend the rest of his career exploring the properties of places.

Today it is easy to describe Trevalgan as a portrait of a hill, but for Lanyon to reach the point where he could paint the 'properties' of a landscape rather than its strict appearance required a protracted and painful exploration of the dilemma of what representation meant. Letters and notes track the course of his thinking on this issue, which took several years to resolve. In March 1949 he explained to John Wells that when he set about constructing an image it was to be a synthesis of prolonged and various experiences of his subject.¹¹ Thus, as he wrote to another c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Photograph credits
• 1 Drawing in life and art
• 2 Drawing, teaching, exhibiting
• 3 Drawing as experiment
• 4 Drawing for the record
• 5 Drawing the model
• 6 Drawing places
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index