British Abstractions

For all the world attention they get, British abstract expressionists might as well be painting on another planet. The British public might even suspect that it's one of those things that isn't done. But it is done--and sometimes pretty well.

A whole generation of British artists, bowing distantly to Paris, but taking more cues from New York, is achieving a specific British combination of emotion and sensibility. Sometimes the paintings evoke the grime of cities whose burdens are overpowering. At other times the warm freshness of nature overwhelms the painters' defenses, leaving a happy glow. The style tends to be neater and less vigorous than the American. More than fellow abstractionists elsewhere, the British acknowledge and reflect a debt to more conventional artists, such as the 19th century's Constable and Turner, and to contemporaries like Ben Nicholson and Graham Sutherland. Any complete sampler of British abstractionists would include:

Peter Lanyon, 43. Living in the harsh hills of Cornwall, Lanyon studies land and sea by foot, car and snorkel, but his passion is to float silently overhead in a red glider (see color). This leads him to probe in paint the mysteries of experience, to try to pinpoint man's place in nature, neither here (on the ground) nor there (in the air). "We must break that 18th century way of looking into the foreground," he insists. "Painting has to look behind its back."

Keith Vaughan, 49. Assuming that professional art was for only "the very rich or very foolish," Vaughan went into advertising during the Depression. After the war, borrowing from the cubists, Vaughan extracted and refined his forms "out of the vast ore" of his visual experience. He began painting muted-palette manscapes--landscapes chockablock with men. "I try to divest my figures of any particular identity of purpose or recognizable activity and retain only their essential humanity," he says.

Terry Frost, 45. Abandoning the bakery where he decorated "three thousand bleeding hot cross buns at 4 o'clock in the morning," Frost went to war in 1939, spent four years in German prison camps. "I remember watching the last golden leaf fall from a tree across the wire in Bavaria," he recalls. "It was a terrible loss." Now a Cornwall man like Lanyon, he says: "I've got a feeling I'm losing the landscape. I'm getting nearer and nearer to pure abstract painting. I want conflict and contrast."

Ivon Hitchens, 68. Capturing the jagged sense of natural creation. Hitchens--whose first paintings were infant dabbles on the back of his artist father's canvases --looks to landscapes for the music of his spheres. He prefers to work outdoors, goes musical in trying to explain why. "Vision, emotion and memory orchestrate one sound." he says. "To re-create this in a synthesis of space by its equivalents in line and color is the artist's task.'' He likes to paint a subject many times over, and the practice makes perfect riots of dissonance in which the order of the English garden sometimes goes to pot.

Britain's view of its own abstract art is highly selfconscious, aware that Paris decades ago showed the way to abstractionism and that the U.S. went farthest with it. Or as Bryan Robertson, director of London's Whitechapel Gallery, puts it: "British painting is just part of the international style, and the only English thing about it is its limitation.'' His view of Lanyon. Vaughan. Frost and Kitchens: "Jolly dreary." But that is just one opinion, and Britain's art row bristles with contrary judgments.

Dealer Victor Waddington credits English painters with capturing Britain's "quality of nuance." He says: "Paris is in full decadence, is nothing but decoration. Americans had all the vitality between 1940 and 1950, but it has largely disappeared. Within five years. Britain will be the most important center."

The British abstractionists themselves are more modest in their claims. Abstractionist Lanyon denounces current French painting as dull, and adds: "New York has a sense of bigness. We needn't paint big. We haven't got the great land mass behind us. British art is emerging from limbo. It's individual, not a school." Painter Frost says: "The ruination of British art was the bloody Establishment. It was getting to be a bloody ladies' watercolor circle. Now that we've got some ordinary blokes in it, maybe we'll make a noise, eh?"

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