Terry Frost – Toovey’s Blog

Terry Frost, Blue, Black, White, 1960 - 61, oil on canvas, Pallant House Gallery, The George and Ann Dannatt Gift (2011) © Estate of Terry Frost. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2015

Pallant House Gallery’s latest exhibition ‘St Ives and British Modernism – The George and Ann Dannatt Collection’ celebrates these two remarkable individuals through their art collection.

The collection reflects George and Ann’s particular tastes in which they were almost always united. But the art also speaks of their friendships with the artists themselves. They stood against the sort of country house taste and way of life expressed at Charleston House for example. Their home, East End, in Cornwall, provided what has been described as an English ‘abstract aesthetic’. There was always new art to delight the visitor but it was hung and displayed so as not to be crowded. There was a quality of careful composition in the interiors, as though in a painting.

St Ives and British Modernist pictures telling the story of the Dannatt’s home, East End, in a Georgian interior. — St Ives and British Modernist pictures telling the story of the Dannatt’s home, East End, in a Georgian interior

The care with which this current exhibition has been hung in the 18th century part of the galleries provides an intimate context. It allows us to understand how the composition and domestic quality of the interiors at East End informed the viewer’s engagement with the art.

Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, together with a number of others, drew many significant artists to Cornwall before the Second World War. St Ives would become a refuge for modernism in England and a beacon for a new generation of younger artists.

John Wells, Project, 1942, gouache ink and pencil on card, Pallant House Gallery, The George and Ann Dannatt Gift (2011) © Jonathan Clark Fine Art, Representatives of the Artist's Estate

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Barbara Hepworth dominated sculpture in St Ives. Between 1949 and 1959 Denis Mitchell assisted Hepworth. By about 1960 Mitchell’s sculptures combined Cubist geometry with converging contours, angles and mass, redolent of the landscape. His polished bronze sculptures are often vertical in form but ‘Selena’, shown in the foreground here, represents a body of work in the horizontal. It was bought by the Dannatts from the Marjorie Parr Gallery in 1969. These optimistic works responded to the predominate taste of the time for hard edged balanced forms. Taste shared by the Danatts.

In the foreground is Denis Mitchell’s polished bronze ‘Selena’, from 1969, set in the 18th century Pallant House Gallery, from the George and Ann Dannatt Gift (2011)

The Dannatts had met Denis Mitchell in 1963 through Terry Frost and their patronage was enormously important to the sculptor as he established himself. Terry Frost’s ‘Blue, Black, White’ from 1960-61 is evocative of St Ives. When you visit this seaside town the light which inspired artists of the 19th and 20th centuries cannot fail to speak to your heart. The light dances off the sea whilst lines of shadows, cast by scudding clouds, move swiftly and dramatically across the landscape. This wonderful oil painting on canvas captures the essence of this elemental experience. For me it is one of the highlights of the show.

From 1960 Denis Mitchell shared a studio in Newlyn with his friend, the artist, John Wells. Both where great encouragers to George Dannatt as he began to work as an artist himself. John Wells lived in Ditchling in Sussex until 1921. He studied medicine at University College Hospital, London between 1925 and 1930, attending St Martin’s School of Art in the evenings of 1928 and 1929. Like George Dannatt he pursued his artist career later in life. John Wells arrived in St Ives in 1940 from the Scilly Isles where he had been a GP. His work ‘Project of 1942’, shows an openness and sensitivity to the sensations of the landscape. Natural forms would continue to awaken textures and shapes in Wells and remain central to his work.

This fresh and exciting exhibition explores the George and Ann Dannatt Gift, one of the most significant donations Pallant House Gallery has received. It includes a body of largely unseen and newly conserved paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints by key figures associated with the St Ives Group of Artists in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. These include works by Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Denis Mitchell, John Wells and John Tunnard.

‘St Ives and British Modernism – The George and Ann Dannatt Collection’ runs until 20th September 2015 at Pallant House Gallery, 9 North Pallant, Chichester, PO19 1TJ. For more information go to www.pallant.org.uk or telephone 01243 774557.

By Revd. Rupert Toovey. Originally published on 24th June 2015 in the West Sussex Gazette.

Katy Norris, Assistant Curator at Pallant House Gallery, with Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías by Sir Terry Frost

A dramatic exhibition of Terry Frost’s prints from his Lorca Suite is currently on show in the De’Longhi Print Room at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, West Sussex.

It focuses on the British abstract artist Terry Frost and his engagement with the poetry of the Spanish poet, playwright and theatre director Federico García Lorca. Lorca became one of the first martyrs of the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War when he was killed by fascist Nationalist rebels in 1936. Assistant Curator Katy Norris explains, “Lorca’s death has come to epitomise the violent suppression of the intellectual left by right-wing partisans.” When General Franco seized power in 1939, at the end of the conflict, he banned Lorca’s work from publication in Spain.

During the Second World War Terry Frost was a prisoner of war under the Nazis and a victim of fascism. Katy keenly describes how this loss of freedom awakened his political and artistic consciousness, an experience which would inform his life and work, saying: “Frost exercised a lifelong pursuit of his artistic right to freedom of expression.”

Sir Terry Frost 1915–2003, The Moon Rising, 1989, etching with hand colour on Somerset Satin paper, Austin / Desmond Fine Art © The Estate of Sir Terry Frost

Frost would later acknowledge how, as a prisoner, his hunger and suffering gifted him with “a tremendous spiritual experience [and] a more heightened perception”. The artist described this formative experience as “an awakening”. Katy adds: “Frost discovered his profound sense of connection with nature and landscape at this time.”

The liberal society in which Terry Frost was working in the 1970s and 1980s was certainly in complete contrast to Franco’s earlier repressive regime. Frost would return to Lorca’s work over a fifteen-year period, creating paper collages, drawings and prints in response to the writer’s work. It culminated in the portfolio of coloured etchings on display here. Produced in 1989 and titled Eleven Poems by Federico García Lorca, they have become known as the Lorca Suite. Together these images, each based on a specific poem, provide a visual window illuminating Lorca’s writing.

Lorca’s writing employs an economy of vocabulary. In these poems life is stripped back, allowing clarity of vision expressive of the author’s heightened perception. This writing is filled with ambiguity and a lack of fulfilment, which gifts it with space and nobility.

Sir Terry Frost 1915–2003, The Spinster at Mass, 1989, etching with hand colour on Somerset Satin paper, Austin / Desmond Fine Art © The Estate of Sir Terry Frost

This distance between the artistic representation and the reality of the subject would give Frost space for freedom of expression. Terry Frost, like Lorca, also distilled the world around him. He, too, used a carefully conceived vocabulary, though Frost’s was one of colour, light and form in the abstract.

I remark on the dramatic hues of black, white and red which are apparent in many of these works. Katy responds, “Lorca used black, white and red to describe the blazing light and heat of the Mediterranean sun. In the 1960s Frost had begun to use these colours in relation to the Spanish landscape, years before engaging with Lorca’s writing. However, it is in the Lorca Suite that we perhaps see his most sophisticated use of this colour scheme.”

This is clearly illustrated in The Spinster at Mass and The Moon Rising. I am drawn to the emblematic etching Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. Sánchez and Lorca were friends. The matador Sánchez died in the bullring. Lorca’s awareness of death informed his creative spontaneity in this poem; its repetitive rhythm informs this lament. Take, for example, these lines:

“Oh white wall of Spain!

Oh black bull of sorrow!

Oh hard blood of Ignacio!”

Katy Norris reflects on the economy of colour, shapes and form used to the same dramatic effect in Terry Frost’s etching of the same title. She says: “The black of the bull’s horn and the red blood of Ignacio against the white ground echo the description in Lorca’s poem. The action takes place beneath a setting sun represented by a pulsating yellow disc in the etching.”

The drama and tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and the life and death of Lorca are captured with real intensity in Terry Frost: Eleven Poems by Federico García Lorca. Entrance to this exhibition is free but it is worth treating yourself to tickets for Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War. Both exhibitions run until 15th February 2015 at Pallant House Gallery, 9 North Pallant, Chichester, PO19 1TJ. For more information go to www.pallant.org.uk or telephone 01243 774557. You must add them to your 2015 New Year’s must-see list!

By Revd. Rupert Toovey. Originally published on 28th December 2014 in the West Sussex Gazette.

Tag: Terry Frost

Pallant House Gallery Exhibition unites St Ives & Sussex

Terry Frost and the Poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca