David Boyd Haycock - Essays and reviews
Peter Lanyon
Margaret Garlake, The Drawings of Peter Lanyon. Ashgate Publishing Ltd: Aldershot,
2003.
Published in The Times Literary Supplement, 2004.
Peter Lanyon was twentieth-century English painting’s equivalent of W.
H. Auden and Ted Hughes: all of them were imbibers and recreators of landscape.
Like Auden and Hughes, Lanyon was ruggedly handsome, a craggy face that as
he grew older seemed to mould itself to the features of the Cornish countryside,
the landscape of rocky coastlines, abandoned mines and deserted moors in which
he made his life’s work. ‘An artist who remains where he was born
cannot see his country from the outside,’ Lanyon wrote in 1961, ‘he
already knows it in his bones.’ When his Trevalgan (1951) was exhibited
in 1952 the ever perceptive critic John Berger wrote: ‘It is a painting,
not of the appearance, but of the properties of a landscape: properties only
discovered when one knows a place so well that its ordinary scenic appearance
has long been forgotten.’
Born in St Ives in 1918, Lanyon’s professional training included the Penzance
School of Art and a short stint at the Euston Road School, where his tutors were
William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore; his artistic lineage, he claimed, was
Constable and Turner. But his greatest fortune as a young man was the arrival
in St Ives in the late Summer of 1939 of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, the painter
Ben Nicholson and the Russian emigré Constructivist Naum Gabo. As Garlake
affirms, Lanyon quickly became ‘a late recruit to the 1930s Hampstead avant-garde’ that
also included Paul Nash and Henry Moore. Advancing upon the early influence of
local artist Alfred Wallis, Lanyon received private tuition from Nicholson and
artistic stimulation from Gabo. In 1940 he joined the RAF, becoming a Flight
Mechanic, and he served in North Africa, Palestine and Italy. During this time
of isolation he sought, like Gabo had, to align his art with engineering, producing
his first three-dimensional constructions from scraps of wire and metal. Black
propeller blades were like Brancusi sculptures, whilst the wings of aircraft
displayed ‘shapes I used before I came here’. He carried a photograph
of Gabo’s Construction in Space: Spiral Theme (1941) ‘like a talisman
throughout his war service’.
Returning to his native county at the end of the war, Lanyon told a friend that
he wanted his paintings to be not the things ‘that are apparent on the
surface but only the ECHOES of these things’. Hence his ultimate conflict
with Nicholson, who wanted to force what Lanyon rightly saw as a false distinction
between figurative and non-figurative painting on the Penwith Society of Artists:
Lanyon was both things at once. He absorbed his influences — particularly
the influence of engineering, and, subsequently, what Garlake calls ‘his
increasingly obsessive identification between the female body and the landscape’.
Stimulated by Fraser’s Golden Bough, Lanyon also engaged with religion
and mythology, resulting in the 1950s in the fine ‘Europa’ series.
By the late 1950s Lanyon had, along with his Cornish colleagues Roger Hilton,
Patrick Heron and Terry Frost, become one of the most prominent artists contributing
to the formation of modern British art. St Ives was attracting the interest of
American artists and critics. Their work was regularly exhibited in New York,
and Lanyon became friends with two of the leading members of the American avant
garde, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. The Americans helped turn Lanyon’s
eye to the use of more vivid colour, and at the same time he took up gliding, ‘to
get a more complete knowledge of the landscape’. It was this new hobby
that led to his accidental death in 1964, cutting short a career still filled
with great promise.
Margaret Garlake’s stated intention in this short but well-illustrated
book is to re-examine Lanyon’s ‘use of and approach to drawing and
to question what its significance was to him in varying contexts ... I wanted
to pick apart the role that drawing played in the construction of his paintings,
in formulating his thoughts, both conceptually and practically. ... The question
that has attracted most attention is how he approached the problem of rendering
in visual form his geographical knowledge, the intimate understanding of places’.
Garlake sets about her purpose in six thematic chapters, each like a mini-essay
investigating aspects of Lanyon’s life and art. She certainly intimately
captures the sense of Lanyon at work with his materials, the way he tried using
particular marks to articulate a subject, and explores the psychology and theory
of drawing. In this respect, the book is fascinating in the way it helps us understand
how and why an artist draws, and the pivotal role that drawing can play in painting.
Occasionally this leads Garlake to become caught up in the obfuscation of ‘art-speak’,
to stumble in the sheer difficulty of explaining how or why a piece of art may
be considered to be ‘good’ or even interesting. This is even more
true of drawing than it is of painting, and some viewers will find many of Lanyon’s
drawings to be rough and crude — almost childlike in their apparent simplicity.
But this, of course, is what makes an artist’s drawings so fascinating.
Together, they are more than the sum of their parts: they lead us one by one
to a more intimate understanding of their creator, his or her ambition and purpose
in selecting and often reselecting particular views or themes. Garlake is generally
an excellent guide through Lanyon’s fascinating oeuvre: one is left wanting
more — which is, in part, a criticism: her points are at times left underexplored,
and a concluding chapter would have been welcome. Nonetheless this is a admirable
addition to Ashgate and Lund Humphries excellent series of monographs of 20th-century
British artists.
David Boyd Haycock