Heron, Patrick

Person

Heron, Patrick

Heron, Patrick (1920–1999), painter and art critic, was born at 12 Hollin Lane, Headingley, Leeds, on 30 January 1920, the eldest child in the family of three sons and a daughter of Thomas Milner Heron (1890–1983), textile and garment manufacturer, and his wife, Eulalie Mabel (1891–1986), daughter of Michael Davies, an uncompromisingly pacifist Unitarian minister from Bradford. The history of Heron's family on both sides was of a combative nonconformism and a high-minded culture of the mind and spirit. His father was a Christian socialist, and had been a pacifist conscientious objector in the First World War. A deeply cultured man, he loved art and poetry, and his business life was devoted to the integration of the ethical and the aesthetic into the commercial production of the useful. If Heron inherited his political idealism and his fearless activism from his father, he owed to his mother his intensity of visual response, his preternaturally passionate eye for the natural world. His parents remained deeply important to him throughout his life, the original

Source of his confidence in his own creative powers, and the continuing inspiration of his ethical and political engagement in the affairs of the world. Intensely political in temperament, Heron was a lifelong socialist and pacifist, and a founding member, in 1959, of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Early life In 1925 the Heron family moved from Leeds to Newlyn in Cornwall, where Tom Heron was to run Crysede Silks, a modest textile business. He arranged its move to expanded premises on the island at St Ives, and rapidly built up the firm with extraordinary flair. Patrick's early years in West Penwith were idyllic: he never forgot the impressions of light, colour, and landscape that streamed in upon him in what he called the 'sacred land' of his childhood. The winter of 1927–8 was spent at Eagles Nest, the house on the promontory above the Zennor cliffs, to which he was to return to live in 1956. The house was borrowed by his parents from Hugh Arnold-Forster, the Labour luminary, in the hope that the altitude and atmosphere would be good for Patrick's asthma. Arnold-Forster's planting of the extraordinary garden was already well advanced, but the many southern-hemisphere flowering trees and shrubs that were to be the glory of the mature garden were as yet no taller than small bushes, and its huge granite outcrops and boulders were still starkly visible. Following a breakup with his business partner, Tom Heron left St Ives in late 1929 to set up his own firm, Cresta Silks, at Welwyn Garden City. From 1932 to 1937 Patrick attended St George's School, Harpenden, a co-educational boarding-school. There he was encouraged by a remarkable art master, Ludvig van der Straeten, who on one memorable afternoon drove his thirteen-year-old pupil to the National Gallery and stood him, enthralled, in front of Cézanne's Mont St Victoire, then on loan from the Courtauld collection. At St George's Heron was allowed to paint through the afternoons while his contemporaries played compulsory games. From 1934 onwards his father commissioned from him designs for silk scarves and dress textiles (and for several years after the war he was Cresta's principal designer). He left school without formal qualifications to go directly to the Slade School of Fine Art in London. In spite of the precocious accomplishment that had secured his place there, his time at the Slade was unhappy and unproductive, and he left after only two years. At the outbreak of the Second World War Heron registered as a conscientious objector and from 1940 spent three years as a labourer for the Cambridgeshire War Agricultural Executive Committee. Frequently appalling conditions exacerbated the asthma for which he had refused to claim exemption. Late in 1943, ill and exhausted, he was ordered by doctors to cease agricultural work, and in early 1944, at the invitation of Bernard Leach, a family friend from the years in St Ives, he took up an approved work placement at the St Ives Pottery, where he worked happily as a journeyman potter for the next fourteen months. The example of Leach's creative integrity, and his subtlety as an artist with the 'power to materialize a concept' (Painter as Critic: Patrick Heron, Selected Writings, ed. M. Gooding, 1998, 69) were formative of Heron's own artistic philosophy. The artist In April 1945 Heron married Delia Reiss (1920–1979), whom he had met at his first school in Welwyn Garden City in 1929. They had two daughters, Katharine (b. 1947), and Susanna (b. 1951). Delia's father, Richard Reiss (1883–1959), an active and practical proponent of the garden city ideal, had been a founding director of the successive companies that created Welwyn Garden City in 1919 and 1920. In Delia, Patrick found a companion whose feeling for art and nature perfectly matched his own. Beautiful, intelligent, and artistic, she was utterly committed to his work as a painter and writer, but retained a fierce independence of spirit. In his own words, she was his 'best and most essential critic' (Gooding, 46). Until 1956 they lived at 53 Addison Avenue, Holland Park, west London, but between 1947 and 1954 they spent some months every year in St Ives, at 3 St Andrews Street, a cottage on the harbour wall, whose interior with its view of the bay, with the figures of Delia and their two daughters, was to feature in many of Heron's paintings over that period. These were usually completed in the London studio. As a figurative artist Heron rarely drew or painted from the motif, feeling that memory was a crucial element in the invention of images that should not merely register appearances, but record their impact upon the receiving imagination. The exceptions to this rule were a handful of portraits of T. S. Eliot (1949), Herbert Read (1950), Jo Grimond (1986), and Antonia Byatt (1997), which began with drawings or oil sketches from the life; these, too, were always finished in studio solitude. 'Seeing', he wrote in 1956, 'is not a passive but an active operation … all art is a convention, an invention. Painting may literally claim to alter the look of the world for us. We only see nature through a system of images, a configuration which painting supplies' (Gooding, 8). In 1955, by a surprising turn of events, Heron was able to buy Eagles Nest, to which he moved with his young family in April 1956, to be enchanted by the springtime azaleas and camellias, and find his work immediately take on a new spirit and new forms. From that moment he moved decisively, once and for all, from a Braque-influenced figuration to a fully liberated abstraction, capable of infinite development. For the rest of his life the house and its garden were to be the centre of his imaginative existence; it was, he wrote much later, 'very nearly the greatest passion of my life' (Knight, 19). Animated by Delia's personality, Eagles Nest became a magical centre of hospitality for the brilliant and sometimes turbulent company of artists and writers that made St Ives and its environs a place of extraordinary artistic vitality during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Among frequent visitors were Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Roger Hilton, Bryan Wynter, Terry Frost, and Peter Lanyon. When Delia died, suddenly, in 1979, Heron was devastated, and for many months he was unable to work. Heron knew from a very early age that he wanted to be an artist, a vocation encouraged with great seriousness by his parents. He spoke without affectation or irony of his infant efforts, signed and dated from the age of five, and carefully preserved in large buff envelopes, as 'early drawings'. His artistic journey was constantly eventful and unpredictable, marked by sudden intuitive breakthroughs to new expressive possibilities, new ways of response to the light and colour of the world. As for others of his generation, the immediate post-war London exhibitions of modern French masters were revelatory, and Heron's painting in the later 1940s was much influenced by the wartime still-life and interior paintings of Picasso. It was from late Braque, however, that he learned the abstracting separation of descriptive line and decorative colour that gave the best figurative paintings of his early maturity (such as Harbour Window with Two Figures, St Ives: July 1950 and Christmas Eve: 1951) their exhilarating graphic rhythms and chromatic brilliance, and their complex cubistic spatial ambiguities. In the early 1950s, as both painter and writer, Heron was much preoccupied by the potentialities of abstraction, but it was not until 1956 that the logic of his development led him to a completely non-figurative painting. 'The pictures I have painted since last January', he wrote in January 1957, have much in common with my figurative paintings: but they lack the linear grid of figurative drawing. This has freed me to deal more directly and inventively … with every single aspect of the painting that is purely pictorial, i.e. the architecture of the canvas, the spatial interrelation of each and every touch (or stroke, or bar) of colour, the colour-character, the paint-character of a painting—all these I now explore with a sense of freedom quite denied me while I had to keep half an eye on a 'subject'. (Painter as Critic: Patrick Heron, Selected Writings, ed. M. Gooding, 1998, 121) From that time on Heron was adamantly abstract, though in later life he was prepared to admit that the experience of the phenomenal world had always somehow entered and affected even the purest of his abstract paintings. Sometimes Heron systematically explored a pictorial idea over several years, producing numerous variations on a theme, as with the atmospheric colour abstractions of the early 1960s, with their floating soft-edged 'square-round' shapes, and the optically dazzling 'wobbly hard-edge' paintings of the following decade, with their distinctive jigsaw-like interlock of opaque high-colour zones. 'Painting', he wrote in 1962, 'has still a continent left to explore, in the direction of colour (and in no other direction)' (Painter as Critic Patrick Heron: Selected Writings, ed. M. Gooding, 1998, 154). At other times, under the pressure of a particular experience, he produced a spate of new work at great speed, as with the tachiste 'garden' paintings of 1956, the 'horizon' and 'stripe' paintings of 1957–8, and the astonishing series of small gouaches and large oils made when he was artist in residence at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney in 1989–90. The late series of so-called big paintings were made in bursts of intensive activity in the first eight months of 1994. Shown that year at Camden Arts Centre, their ecstatic energy and insouciant mastery thrilled and astonished a generation of artists fifty years younger than Heron. His career was crowned by a timely and highly acclaimed retrospective, in 1998, at the Tate Gallery. Underlying every phase of Heron's painting were constant preoccupations: with colour as space; with line as an indicator of dynamic relations as well as a means to describe form; with the primacy of decorative order in the composition of images that begin and end at the four edges of the paper or the canvas. Behind these critical-creative ideas lay the deeper thought: that pictorial dynamics are signs and epiphanies of a greater natural ordering, that painting is a revelation of a beautiful cosmic harmony. 'The ancient valid response of the painter to the world around him', he wrote, 'is one of delight and amazement, and we must recapture it' (Gooding, 9). Like those of his acknowledged masters, Braque, Matisse, and Bonnard, his paintings were at once evocations and celebrations of the visible, discoveries of what he called 'the reality of the eye' (Knight, 24). The writer and controversialist Many of Heron's artist friends, William Scott, Alan Davie, Roger Hilton, Bryan Wynter, Terry Frost, and Peter Lanyon among them, owed much to Heron's intelligent critical championship of their work, writing intermittently as the New Statesman and Nation art critic from 1947 to 1954, and then as London correspondent for Arts (New York) between 1955 and 1958. He was an exciting writer, capable of subtle analysis and great clarity of utterance. By nature a celebratory critic, he had a gift for precise description of the plastic qualities of painting, and of the specific aspects of technique and manner that distinguish one artist from another: his talents as an art critic were those of one whose knowledge was derived from creative practice. His critical career began with a series of remarkably authoritative reviews for the New English Weekly in 1945 and 1946, on Nicholson, Braque, Klee, and Picasso, among others; later he wrote brief monographs: Vlaminck (1947), Ivon Hitchens (1955), and Braque (1958). Edited writings and lectures were published in 1955 as The Changing Forms of Art, and a further selection, Painter as Critic, appeared in 1998. In 1958 Heron gave up criticism, taking 'a vow of silence' (Gooding, 160); notwithstanding this, in later years, among much else, he wrote illuminating essays on the drawings of Bonnard (1972) and Constable (1994), and on late Picasso (1988) and late Matisse (1993). Heron was an inveterate controversialist, a courageous conservationist, and a master of trenchant polemical prose. Beginning with three famous articles for Studio International, in 1966, 1968, and 1970, he conducted a bravely sustained campaign against the programmatic critical promotion in Europe of American art, culminating in October 1974 with the publication over three days of a closely argued, 14,000 word article in The Guardian. As a distinguished artist outside the education system, his disinterested writings in the press against the merger of the English art schools with the polytechnics in the early 1970s, and on subsequent developments in the administration of art education, earned him enduring respect and affection among artist teachers. In the 1960s and 1970s he conducted several successful campaigns in defence of the historically unique landscape of West Penwith, including a celebrated fight in 1961 against the proposal by the Admiralty to requisition the Zennor headlands and moors as a military exercise area. From his eyrie at its highest point above the sea he maintained until his dying day an eagle eye on the twisting road that leads from St Ives to St Just, watching for any sign of straightening to its ancient track-line or of 'improvement' to its green walls and banks. The energizing convictions behind these time-consuming political and public actions were those of a profoundly decent man, inalienably patriotic without any disfiguring prejudice, who justly saw himself as upholding a native radical tradition that went back to Ruskin, Morris, and Shaw, exemplified in his own time by Herbert Read and Bertrand Russell. At its heart was a vital sense of the centrality of art and imagination to the fully experienced life. Heron was a handsome, elegant man, disarmingly charming and attentive to others, not without an almost childlike vanity. He was an emphatic and witty conversationalist, a marvellous story-teller and mimic. The range of his friendship was exceptionally broad and inclusive, for he was capable of inspiring great love and affection on the slightest acquaintance. He died, of a heart attack, at Eagles Nest on 20 March 1999, and was buried on 27 March at Zennor parish church. He was survived by his two daughters.

Source: Mel Gooding, 'Heron, Patrick (1920–1999)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/71796, accessed 6 Aug 2015] Note Author: Mel Gooding