Elements of Abstraction

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Elements of Abstraction: Space, Line and Interval in Modern British Art

Southampton City Art Gallery, 30 September 2005 – 8 January 2006.

Elements of Abstraction is an exhibition of abstract art in Britain, from about 1914 to the present. The sixty or so works on display take up three rooms of Southampton Art Gallery, an ideally peaceful space in which to soak up a rich variety of paintings, some of them lamentably neglected by art historians.

Before 1920, we find two kinds of British artists testing the borders of figurative art. There were the Bloomsbury group, who adopted the sensuous colours of Gauguin and Matisse to produce images of bourgeois comfort; and then there were the Vorticists, represented here by Edward Wadsworth. Theirs is a very different language, close to Italian futurism. It expresses energy and power through thrusting angles and aggressive compositions. But both Bloomsbury and Vorticism stand as false starts in the light of what happened later.

For in the war years, and the decade following, Britain became remote from continental art: these were the years of Russian Constructivism, of De Stijl and the Bauhaus, but initially these movements had little impact on British art. It was not until the thirties that groups and magazines with stridently modern names appeared: Unit One, Axis, Circle. Political convulsions abroad brought important artists to Britain: Naum Gabo, in particular, had a far-reaching influence. The dominant language was Constructivism – the relation of art to science and engineering, through pure geometric forms. This visual rhetoric expressed a productive, utopian social spirit and represented freedom from oppression.

British artists picked up on these ideas in different ways. In the forties and fifties, two main groups emerged. One was the West Country School, who took the Constructivist vocabulary and, not always consciously, absorbed into it the sights and atmosphere of the Cornish coastline.  Ben Nicholson’s hypnotic squares and circles point to the local scene with their soft greys and browns. Peter Lanyon’s dramatic perspectives, and Terry Frost’s painterly grids, both resonate with the sensations of the Cornish landscape.  Even Roger Hilton, who wanted the picture surface to be an autonomous image, suggests the local scene: his painterly Black on White March 54, could be country roads or hedges on snowy fields, seen from far above. Through such artists, the Constructivist language had lost its revolutionary Russian origins, and become applied to the exploration of the inner life and natural forms.

The second major group using Constructivist ideas was gathered around Victor Pasmore in London after 1945. Their more hard-edged work articulates  post-war optimism. Artists like Kenneth and Mary Martin used geometric art and modern materials to express a defiant modernity, self-consciously international.

This fascinating group – other names are Adrian Heath, Gillian Wise, Anthony Hill – was soon overshadowed in the art world by Abstract Expressionism. Their successors are the Systems Group, who employ mathematical formulae to make visual patterns. They, too, have been overlooked, and it is good to have a chance to see their work here: when described it sounds severe and unemotional, but there is also something exhilarating in these complex, repetitive configurations.

Another strand is that of British colourists – there are fine works here by Heron and Hodgkin, grandiloquent canvases by John Hoyland and an example of Callum Innes’s poured paint technique.  If there is a theme that links all the approaches taken it is a generally positive mood. Whether the work is contemplative in the St Ives mode, or ebullient as in the energetic brushwork and flaming colours of Gillian Ayres, it consistently communicates a passion for making. A well-produced catalogue, with colour plates of some rarely seen works and meticulous scholarly essays by Brandon Taylor and Alan Fowler, adds to the attraction of this intriguing and uplifting show.