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拍品专文
By 1952, Patrick Heron was both a painter and a prolific critic, writing regularly for the New Statesman. In its pages he had set out his ambition to occupy ‘the middle way between pure abstraction and abject representation’ (P. Heron, ‘English and French’, New Statesman, 7 January 1950), and The Playing-Card Girl: 1952 treads that path with assurance.
A girl, seen in profile, sits at the centre of the composition. She is drawn rather than modelled, conjured from a web of loose lines of black, cobalt, red, yellow and dark olive green that loop freely across the pale ground. Figure and surroundings pass through one another, so that the eye moves constantly between the girl and a lattice of pure line and colour.
This fluid interplay draws on the French painters Heron so admired. From Braque – whose studio interiors he had seen in 1949 – came what he called ‘the idea of the “transparency” of the objects’ (Heron, quoted in M. Gooding, Patrick Heron, London, 2008, pp. 74-5). Matisse was a still deeper source: Heron described The Red Studio (1911) as ‘by far and away the most influential single painting in my entire career’ (ibid., p. 56). The present work’s free arabesques indeed echo the older painter’s fluent hand. Yet the line is unmistakably Heron’s own, with colour and drawing fused into a single gesture.
Within four years, Heron had turned decisively to non-figurative painting, and the seeds of his later saturated fields of colour and soft-edged, floating forms are already discernible here. The Playing-Card Girl: 1952 captures a pivotal moment at which figuration began to yield to the art for which he is best known.
A girl, seen in profile, sits at the centre of the composition. She is drawn rather than modelled, conjured from a web of loose lines of black, cobalt, red, yellow and dark olive green that loop freely across the pale ground. Figure and surroundings pass through one another, so that the eye moves constantly between the girl and a lattice of pure line and colour.
This fluid interplay draws on the French painters Heron so admired. From Braque – whose studio interiors he had seen in 1949 – came what he called ‘the idea of the “transparency” of the objects’ (Heron, quoted in M. Gooding, Patrick Heron, London, 2008, pp. 74-5). Matisse was a still deeper source: Heron described The Red Studio (1911) as ‘by far and away the most influential single painting in my entire career’ (ibid., p. 56). The present work’s free arabesques indeed echo the older painter’s fluent hand. Yet the line is unmistakably Heron’s own, with colour and drawing fused into a single gesture.
Within four years, Heron had turned decisively to non-figurative painting, and the seeds of his later saturated fields of colour and soft-edged, floating forms are already discernible here. The Playing-Card Girl: 1952 captures a pivotal moment at which figuration began to yield to the art for which he is best known.