Frank Avray Wilson - The Vital Years

All works will be available on receipt of this catalogueOur gallery opening hours are Monday to Friday, 10am to 6pmViewing can also be arranged outside of these hours

All dimensions are approximate, height before width

25th May – 10th June 2011

Paisnel Gallery9 Bury Street, St James's, London sw1y 6ab telephone: 020 7930 9293email: [email protected]: www.paisnelgallery.co.uk

Introduction

The renewed interest in the art of the 1950s has amounted to far more than a mere

revivalist cog in the ever-turning fashion cycle. The widely acclaimed art of the

first full decade of the atomic age is now recognised for what it is – a compellingly

expressive and starkly honest re-definition of the human condition within an

indifferent universe. The progressive nature of avant-garde painting at this time

pushed many barriers in a quest for immediacy of statement, sensual engagement

with materials and unison between plasticity and unbridled vision.

Mauritius-born of Irish and French descent, the abstract painter Frank Avray Wilson

was at the epicentre of international developments under the general informalist,

tachiste and abstract expressionist banner. While sharing in the Zeitgeist that threw

up impastoed and strongly-coloured lyrical abstraction, Avray Wilson contributed

work with an individual intonation, one betraying a scientific background and

marked philosophical mindset. This distinguished, indeed intellectual, painter

authored several important books that aimed to situate the pressing issues of

contemporary abstract art within an expansive cultural, social and scientific field.

These broad-ranging tomes included ‘Art into Life’ (Centaur Press, London 1958),

‘Art as Understanding’ (1963), ‘Art as Revelation’ (1981) and ‘Seeing is Believing’ (1995).

The first of these used his scientific background – he read biology at Cambridge

during the 1930s – to reach a new synthesis between art and science. He therefore

saw abstract painting as embodying an ethical and moral, as well as aesthetic or

narrowly formal, dimension, and, in his own work, elicited a meaningful, if tense,

dichotomy between structure on the one hand and what Avray Wilson termed

‘Vitalist’ or impulsive free form on the other.

These studies took their place alongside books such as D’Arcy Thompson’s ‘On Growth

and Form’, Rudolf Arnheim’s ‘Art and Visual Perception’ (1956) or Anton Ehrenzweig’s

‘The Hidden Order in Art’ to posit a wide cultural and social framework for modern

art. Cosmological analogies abounded in much abstract painting. What Avray Wilson

called his ‘imageries’ were frequently explosive, either drawing on the ‘fissional’ or

‘fusional’ properties of a material cosmos in evolutionary flux. In contrast to Jackson

Pollock’s mature ‘drip’ paintings, however, Avray Wilson’s work showed a European

restraint, a need for a structuring order to counter chaos and random painterly

impulses. In this he cohered with the art of Riopelle and Soulages or, closer to home,

with like-minded artists William Gear, Roger Hilton and Bryan Wynter.

The way order and chaos was fused was simple – a use of black outline or lines of

force to embody or define thick slabs of vivid stained-glass-like colour, as in Forms on

White (Cat No 14), Composition with Orange (Cat No 1), or Pinks on Grey (Cat No 6).

These luscious and lavishly larded palette-knifed canvases also followed the hugely

influential Russian-born French painter Nicolas de Stael in retaining residual,

flickering motifs derived from nature – a figure, landscape or tilted still life table

top perhaps – and conveyed what the one-time Guardian art critic, Cathy Courtney

described in 1995 as ‘something sensed but not fully seen’.

In such guises pictorial art became not just an arena for intense, liberated ‘action’

in the sense espoused by the post-war American art critic Harold Rosenberg, but a

quieter, speculative conduit for man’s psychological vision. The artist as Shaman,

medium or seer carried mystical implications and Avray Wilson, as a child of his

times, transcended the confines of conventional religion to reach a Zen or Vedic

awareness. Avray Wilson’s fellow Redfern Gallery exhibitor Bryan Wynter spoke in

1957 of ‘the moment at which the eye looks out at the world it has not yet recognised...

This moment of seeing is in fact a fragment of a continuing process from which we

construct our world of human experience’. Wynter’s statement chimed with Avray

Wilson’s contemporary thought, the author of ‘Art into Life’ referring to ‘the internal

maturing process after a pleasing or stimulating sight has been contemplated’. This

internalisation of sensory experience of the outer world was key to the creative

transformation of the work of art, envisaged by Avray Wilson as the artist’s ‘innate

realisation of his cosmic participation’. Implicit in this world view was a redemptive

existential truth – that the entire cosmos only ‘exists’ through the unique and

knowing faculty of human consciousness, the abstract painting thereby functioning

as a microcosm of the underlying gravitational forces and expansive energies of

the material universe. When describing the ‘final experience beyond form’, the

‘shimmering cloud’ the ‘light brighter than all light’, Avray Wilson was indeed

investing his pictures with a vision of contemplative grace.

The dichotomy between formal structure and disembodied energy informed this

distinctive artist’s entire ‘oeuvre’. As in the work of many of his contemporaries,

the apparent spontaneity and expansive energy of Avray Wilson’s canvases was an

illusion hiding a robust and carefully wrought craftsmanship. The thick buttery

textures and almost kaleidoscopic colours of eye-catching pictures, such as Abstract

1958 (Cat No 9), Composition, Red and Green (Cat No 11), and Blue Centre (Cat No 13),

were testimony to the laboured execution. The vital dimension of colour, too, was no

accident, expressing deep-hidden reservoirs of experiences ranging from a childhood

spent amidst the tropical flora of the Indian Ocean to the later scientific examination

of the fabulous colour and facetted planes of crystals, minerals and microbiological

structures. Relieved of its associative naturalism within the synthetic context of

abstract art, colour stood as an autonomous agent, single hues often dominating

pictures as with the blues of Abstract 1958 (Cat No 9) and Yellow Square on Blue

(Cat No 4), or with the reds of Red Explosive (Cat No 18), Configuration Red (Cat No 20)

and the gouache, Composition with Red (Cat No 30). This use of colour amounted

to a mini fashion for many late 1950s painters, among them Mathieu, Wynter

(the ‘Firestreak’ series), Turnbull and Denis Bowen, representing for Avray Wilson, as

he put it, ‘the mobilisation of light as form-destroying agency’.

Such painters shared Avray Wilson’s ‘vitalist’ mission. With Denis Bowen, Avray

Wilson co-founded the New Vision Centre Gallery, Marble Arch in 1956, an

underground – in more ways than one − venue for non-figurative art for the next

decade. Colonial by birth and largely of independent means, Avray Wilson did not

need a teaching income with the result that he was, after the 1950s at least, less visibly

present on the London circuit, though his numerous exhibitions at the Redfern

Gallery and elsewhere, notably at the Redfern’s landmark Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract

exhibition (1957) established his name and ensured his work made a distinctive

contribution to what the Redfern exhibition catalogue essayist Denys Sutton termed

‘an international style susceptible to different interpretations’.

The informalism of this post-war ‘international style’ distinguishes it, of course, from

its purist and concretist pre-war predecessor. The artists illustrated in the pioneering

and prophetic book ‘Art into Life’ – Turner, Sam Francis, Gillian Ayres, Robyn Denny,

William Turnbull, Ralph Rumney, Robin Plummer and Denis Bowen – were Avray

Wilson’s closest co-frères, exemplifying his philosophy that paintings ‘have ceased

to be “views” but have become zones of symbolic concentration which radiate out

and “work” upon the surroundings’. Avray Wilson’s elevated notion of the decorative

invested abstract painting with a life-enhancing role, fulfilling what he termed a

‘vitalising, integrating and completing influence’ on the man-made world.

Its role could also be realised in a concrete collaboration with architects in the

functional arena, Avray Wilson working on stained glass commissions while living in

Bisley, Gloucestershire during the 1960s. A stained glass triptych installed in a church

on the Roborough estate near Plymouth emulated Piper, Chagall and Manessier –

extending the pictorial into the architectonic world of literal light, space and colour.

Peter Davies

April 2011

oils

cat no 1 Composition with Orangeoil on canvas

48 x 48 inches / 122 x 122 cmsdated 1955

cat no 2 Configurationoil on board

18 x 15 inches / 46 x 38 cmssigned on label verso

painted circa 1955

cat no 3 Abstract 1955oil on canvas

30 x 25 inches / 76 x 63.5 cmsdated 1955 verso

cat no 4 Yellow Square on Blueoil on board

22 x 30 inches / 56 x 76 cmspainted circa 1955

cat no 5 Forms on Blueoil on canvas

30 x 80 inches / 76 x 203 cmspainted circa 1955

cat no 6 Pink on Greyoil on canvas


cat no 7 Yellows on Greenoil on canvas

60 x 48 inches / 152.5 x 122 cmssigned and dated 1958

cat no 8 Mixed Moveoil on board




cat no 10 Abstract 1959oil on board

70 x 48 inches / 178 x 122 cmsdated 1959 verso

cat no 11 Composition Red and Greenoil on canvas

48 x 48 inches / 122 x 122 cmssigned and dated 1959


30 x 25 inches / 76 x 63.5 cmssigned and dated ‘60

cat no 13 Blue Centreoil on canvas

22 x 18 inches / 56 x 46 cmssigned and dated ‘60

cat no 14 Forms on Whiteoil on canvas

48 x 48 inches / 122 x 122 cmssigned and dated 1960

cat no 15 Nowoil on canvas

60 x 48 inches / 152.5 x 122signed and dated ’60

titled verso

cat no 16 Painting 1960oil on board

30 x 22 inches / 76 x 56 cmssigned and dated 1960 verso

cat no 17 Positiveoil on board

49 x 39 inches 124.5 x 99 cmspainted circa 1960

cat no 18 Red Explosiveoil on board

39 x 49 inches / 99 x 124.5 cmspainted circa 1960

cat no 19 Composition 1960oil on canvas

60 x 48 inches / 152.5 x 122 cmssigned and dated 1960

cat no 20 Configuration Redoil on canvas

48 x 18 inches / 122 x 46 cmssigned and dated ’61

cat no 21 Big Blueoil on canvas

60 x 60 inches / 152.5 x 152.5signed and dated ’63

gouaches, mixed media

cat no 22 Two FiguresMixed media on paper laid on card

30 x 22 inches / 76 x 56 cms

cat no 23 Composition, Blue on Pinkmixed media on paper laid on card

30 x 22 inches / 76 x 56 cms

cat no 24 Purple with Reds and Blackmixed media on paper laid on card

30 x 22 inches / 76 x 56 cms

cat no 25 Accumulationmixed media on paper laid on card

30 x 22 inches / 76 x 56 cms

cat no 26 Orange and Bluesmixed media on paper laid on card

30 x 22 inches / 76 x 56 cms

cat no 27 Red Creationgouache on paper laid on card

24 ½ x 19 ¾ inches / 62 x 50 cms

cat no 28 Yellow and Black Cosmosgouache on paper laid on card

25 ½ x 19 ½ inches / 65 x 50 cmssigned and dated ’60

cat no 29 Blue and Grey Cosmosgouache on paper laid on card

25 ½ x 19 ½ inches / 65 x 50 cms

cat no 30 Composition with Redgouache on paper laid on card

12 x 9 inches / 30.5 x 23 cmssigned with initials and dated ’61

screenprints

cat no 31 Forms on Bluescreenprint

18 ½ x 12 inches / 47 x 30.5 cmssigned and dated ’56

numbered 17 from edition of 20

cat no 32 Forms on Redscreenprint


number 21 from edition of 25

cat no 33 Forms on Greenscreenprint


number 26 from edition of 30

cat no 34 Forms on Burgundyscreenprint

16 ½ x 9 ½ inches /42 x 24 cmssigned and dated ’56


cat no 35 Yellow on Crimsonscreenprint



cat no 36 Yellow Forms on Blackscreenprint

19 ¼ x 12 / 49.5 x 30.5 cmssigned and dated ’56


Biography

1914

Born 5th May in Mauritius, the youngest

of three children.

1921–22

Came to England, attended prep school

at St. Christopher’s School, Eastbourne.

Parents had homes in France, London and

Mauritius.

1927

Moved to Brighton College (the first

public school founded in Sussex) and

immediately engaged with science. Came

to London regularly and stayed with

parents at South Kensington, London.

Viewed exhibitions in London and Paris

with them.

c.1930

Returned to Mauritius for one year under

pressure from his father to take over the

family business there. Advised his father

that he was determined to study science

and returned to England.

1931–1934

Obtained MA in Biology at Cambridge

University.

1935

Returned to Mauritius with his fiancée,

Ivy and married there in 1936. Stayed in

Mauritius with his wife for five years due

to war in Europe.

1940s

Turned down by the Air Force due to

heart condition and instead served with

the Armed Forces in Madagascar.

Two of his children born during the war

and two after.

1944–45

Worked as Nutritional Advisor to

Governor in Mauritius. Painted in his

spare time and decided that on his return

to Europe he would abandon science and

turn to painting.

1945

End of the war. Moved back to London

and started painting at 6 Pembroke

Studios with main house in France.

1946–49

Spent several years painting and travelling

with his wife to Italy, France and Spain.

Spent time in Norway visiting his wife’s

family and whilst there continued to study

art. Also had private tuition in France.

1954

First exhibition in London at the

Obelisk Gallery.

1956

Together with Denis Bowen formed the

New Vision Centre Gallery in London,

which became a platform for modern and

abstract art.

1957

Began exhibiting with the Redfern

Gallery and established his name amongst

collectors and art critics in London.

1958

Art into Life, his first book published by

Centaur Press.

1963

Art as Understanding published.

1970

Stopped painting in the early 1970s to

devote more time to reading and studying

philosophy.

1995

Took a renewed interest in his painting

career with Redfern Gallery holding a solo

exhibition of forty works.

2009

Died 1st January 2009.

Solo Exhibitions:

1954 The Obelisk Gallery, London

1957 Galerie Craven, Paris

1961 Redfern Gallery, London

1995 Redfern Gallery, London

2011 Paisnel Gallery, London

Group Exhibitions:

1957 Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract,

Redfern Gallery

1958 New Trends in British Art, The Art

Foundation, Rome and New York

1959 Six Young Painters, The Arts Council

1961 Commonwealth Vision,

The Commonwealth Institution

1986 Frank Avray Wilson, Warwick Arts

Trust

1988 Post War British Abstract Art, Austin

Desmond Fine Art

Publications:

1958 Art into Life (Centaur Press)

1963 Art as Understanding (Routledge &

Kegan Paul Ltd)

1977 Nature Regained (Branden Press)

1981 Art as Revelation (Centaur Press)

1995 Seeing is Believing (Book Guild Ltd)

Frank avray WIlSonThE vITal yEarS

Published in 2011 by Paisnel Gallery

to accompany exhibition 25th May – 10th June

isbn 978-0-9558255-4-5

Paisnel Gallery

9 Bury Street

St James’s

London sw1y 6ab

Telephone: 020 7930 9293

Email: [email protected]

www.paisnelgallery.co.uk

© Paisnel Gallery and Peter Davies

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted

in any form or by any means without first seeking

the written permission of the copyright holders and

of the publisher.

Photography: Paul Tucker Photography

Introduction: Peter Davies

Design: Alan Ward @ www.axisgraphicdesign.co.uk

Print: DeckersSnoeck, Antwerp

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Frank Avray Wilson - The Vital Years

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