ALAN WHEATLEY ART - Key Persons
Adrian Heath is a 20th century British abstract and semi-abstract painter.
Adrian Heath's great gifts as an abstract painter were consistently reinforced and guided by the idealism felt and shared by an entire generation of post-war abstract artists working in England.
Born in Burma, he studied art under Stanhope Forbed at Newlyn in 1938 followed by the Slade School, London in 1939 and 1945-47 under Schwabe.
His friends and sometimes colleagues in shared exhibitions included Adrian Hill, Victor Pasmore, Malcolm Hughes, William Scott, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and Terry Frost, all exploring different kinds of abstract imagery in varying ways but all united by a subconscious hope, inherited from the pre-war precepts of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, that the purposes of art were not to record the more gross aspects of life but to feed experience, visual and social, into a transcendental and idealistically pure abstract vision which might help to make a better world. Heath retained always in his work that sense of idealism, of imagery purged of dross or any merely descriptive detail, but fleshed out in terms of light, colour, richly varied textures, and taut, precisely balanced structure.
Heath's contribution to post-war British art was distinguished not only through the example of his own painting but also manifest in a good deal of hard practical work on behalf of his fellow artists. He helped to organise the first post-war show of abstract art at the AIA gallery in 1951 and published an essay on Abstract Art: its origin and meaning in 1953. He was chairman of the political idealist AIA (Artists International Association) from 1954 to 1964 and served on the Arts Council's advisory art panel from 1964 to 1967.
His first solo exhibition was held at the Museé de Beaux-Arts, Carcassonne in 1948, and from 1953 he showed at the Redfern Gallery, London.
Alan Davie is one of Britain's most internationally acclaimed artists and is Scotland's most important artist of the twentieth century. He was the first British painter - and perhaps the first of all European artists - to realise the vitality and significance of American Abstract Expressionism.
Alfred Wallis was a British naive painter of sailing ships and landscapes.
Alfred's parents, Charles and Jane Wallis, were from Penzance in Cornwall and moved to Devonport, Devon, where Alfred and his brother Charles were born. Later, when Jane Wallis died, the family returned to Penzance.
Wallis married Susan Ward in 1876, when he was 20 and his wife was 41. He became stepfather to her five children. He continued as a deep-sea fisherman on the Newfoundland run in the early days of his marriage. After the death of his two infant children Alfred switched to local fishing and labouring in Penzance.
The family moved to St Ives, Cornwall, in 1890 where he established himself as a marine stores dealer. In 1912, his business, "Wallis, Alfred, Marine Stores Dealer" closed and Alfred kept busy with odd jobs and worked for a local antiques dealer, Mr Armour, which provided some insight into the world of objects d'art.
Following his wife's death in 1922, Wallis took up painting, as he later told Jim Ede, "for company". Wallis was self-taught, and never had an art lesson.
His paintings are an excellent example of naïve art; perspective is ignored and an object's scale is often based on its relative importance in the scene, giving many of his paintings a map-like quality. Wallis painted seascapes from memory, in large part because the world of sail he knew was being replaced by steamships. Having little money, Wallis improvised with materials, mostly painting on cardboard ripped from packing boxes and using a limited palette of paint bought from ship chandlers.
In many ways, Wallis' timing was excellent. In 1928, a few years after he had started painting, Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood came to St Ives and established an artist colony. They were delighted to find Wallis and celebrated his direct approach to image-making. Wallis was propelled into a circle of some of the most progressive artists working in Britain in the 1930s.
The influence, however, was all one way - Wallis continued to paint as he always had.
Through Nicholson and Wood, Wallis was introduced to Jim Ede who promoted his work in London. Despite this attention, Wallis sold few paintings and continued to live in poverty until he died in the Madron workhouse near Penzance.
He is buried in Barnoon cemetery, overlooking St Ives Porhmeor beach and the Tate St Ives gallery. An elaborate gravestone, depicting a tiny mariner at the foot of a huge lighthouse - a popular motif in Wallis' paintings - was made from tiles by the potter Bernard Leach and covers Wallis' tomb.
Examples of Wallis' paintings can be seen at the Tate St Ives and at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge (Jim Ede's home).
Job Titles:
- Relief Construction H2, 1969
Anthony Hill was a painter and relief-maker, originally a member of the Post-War British art Constructionist Group movement. Fellow members in the group included Victor Pasmore, Adrian Heath, Gillian Wise, John Ernest, Mary Martin, Kenneth Martin and Stephen Gilbert.
Anthony Hill studied at the St Martin's and the Central Schools of Art. He began painting in the style of Dada and Surrealism in 1948 but quickly moved on to geometric abstract idioms.
His first relief was made in 1954 and in 1956 he abandoned painting for relief-making. One feature of these reliefs has been the use of non-traditional materials such as industrial aluminium and Perspex.
Anthony Hill's first one-man show of reliefs was held in 1958 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
In 1978 he exhibited in the Arts Council's exhibition, Constructive Context, alongside a number if artists such as Jeffrey Steele and Peter Lowe who had begun working in a systematised constructive mode in the mid to late 1960s and came together in the Systems Group in December 1969. Hill, however, along with the Martins, declined membership of this group.
In 1983 the Hayward Gallery, London held a major retrospective exhibition of Anthony Hill's constructivist work.
Anthony Hill had a lifelong fascination with mathematics, and there are many mathematicians among his circle of acquaintances. Together with his colleague John Ernest he made contributions to graph theory (crossing number) and in 1979, in recognition of a number of his mathematical papers, he was elected a member of the London Mathematical Society. He was made a visiting research associate in the Department of Mathematics at University College, London.
Although almost all his reliefs have an underlying mathematical structure or logic, he was always insistent that in his art, in his own words, "the mathematical thematic or mathematical process can only be a component: one is calculating or organising something which is clearly not mathematical."
From the late 1980s onward, working in parallel with his systems-based work but in a very different mode, Anthony Hill exhibited Dadaist pictures and collages under the pseudonym Achill Redo. Tate, London has collections under both of the names: Anthony Hill and Achill Redo.
Antony Donaldson studied at the Slade School of Art, London, during the same time as his contemporaries were developing their brand of Pop Art at the Royal College of Art.
It was, however in 1962, whilst teaching at the Chelsea School of Art, where he met Patrick Caulfield and Allen Jones. It was in that year too, when Antony Donaldson developed the simplified treatment of the female figure that typified his work over the next decade. These youthful, sexually confident women, strike flirtatious poses and reveal themselves almost wantonly to the viewer's gaze.
When the opportunity to travel to the United States presented itself in 1966, Antony Donaldson chooses to settle not in New York but in Los Angeles, where he remained for two years before returning to London.
Although Antony Donaldson's early work fits comfortably into the mainstream of Pop both in their subject matter of pin-ups and racing cars and in their references to packing, poster design, photography and cinema, he introduced a new twist on such motifs in the fibreglass sculptures he began making in 1968, which reinterprets details of Art Deco architecture into blatantly synthetic object coated in a dazzling coat of paint.
Antony Donald son has received many awards including:
Winifred Nicholson was born in Oxford. She was encouraged to paint as a child by her grandfather, the artist George Howard. In 1912 she began her formal studies at the Bryam Shaw School of Art.
In 1920 Winifred met the painter Ben Nicholson. They married within the year and worked alongside each other in Italy, France, Devon and Cornwall and spent their Winters at a villa among vines on the mountainside above Lake Lugano in the Italian-Swiss Alps.
In Paris Winifred and Ben were able to see works by Derain, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. They particularly admired the primitivism of Gauguin and Rousseau.
In 1923 Winifred and Ben exhibited alongside each other (the first of many joint exhibitions) at Paterson Gallery in London. The following year they acquired an old farmhouse, Bankshead, in Cumberland. The home became a source of huge inspiration for Winifred and remained so for many years. Artists such as Paul Nash, Ivon Hitchens and Christopher Wood visited the Nicholsons at Bankshead and shared Winifred's love of the farmhouse and surrounding countryside.
Winifred joined the '7 & 5' Society in 1925 and exhibited there for a decade. In 1927 she was seriously injured when she fell through a trapdoor while hanging an exhibition at Beaux Arts. Thankfully, she made a full recovery and was given her first solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1930.
After separating from Ben Nicholson (who had met the artist Barbara Hepworth) Winifred moved with the three children to Paris in 1932. In Paris Winifred met many artists including Naum Gabo, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. By 1938, with war looming Winifred returned to Britain (she also persuaded Piet Mondrian to travel with her to escape the threat of fascism).
Winifred was a keen traveler, together with the poet Kathleen Raine, Winifred visited the Hebrides and Western Scotland on a number of occasions during the early 1950s and in 1953 she exhibited works from these trips at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. She also visited the Scillies, Orkney and Catalonia in the 1950s and made numerous trips to Greece in the 1960s and '70s.
In 1969 a Retrospective exhibition was held at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal. Shortly afterwards, 12 of her pictures were shown in The Helen Sutherland Collection, a touring exhibition which opened at the Hayward Gallery. In 1972 she was given a solo exhibition at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. In 1979 she was given a retrospective exhibition, organised by the Scottish Arts Council, which travelled from Glasgow to Edinburgh; Carlisle; Newcastle and Cornwall.
Ben Nicholson was born in Denham, Buckinghamshire. Both his parents were artists, one of the brilliant poster designer Sir William Nicholson. Ben Nicholson studied at the Slade School, London and then travelled widely in Europe and the United States for a few years.
Ben Nicholson's early work consists of delicately worked still lifes, which show the influence of his father. In the 1920s Ben Nicholson began painting figurative and abstract works inspired by Post Impressionism and Cubism, which he had seen whilst travelling. His first one-man show was held at the Adelphi Gallery, London in 1921.
Bram Bogart was a Belgian expressionist painter most closely associated with the COBRA group.
His paintings are characterized by their heavy impasto applications of color in patterns or loose shapes on thick wooden panels, resulting in palpable and tactile textures.
Bridget Riley was born in 1931 in London. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College; she studied art first at Goldsmiths College and later at the Royal College of Art, where her fellow students included artists Peter Blake and Frank Auerbach.
In the late 1950s, Riley began to produce works in a style recognisably her own, a style inspired by a number of sources. A study of the pointillism of Georges Seurat, and subsequent landscapes produced in that style, led to her interest in optical effects. The paintings of Victor Vasarely, who had used designs of black and white lines since the 1930s also had a strong influence on Riley's early works. It was during this time that Riley began to paint the black and white works for which she is best known today.
In the early 1960s, her works were said to induce sensations in viewers as varied as seasickness and sky diving. Works in this style comprised her first solo show in London in 1962 at Gallery One run by Victor Musgrave, as well as numerous subsequent shows.
In 1965, Riley exhibited in the New York City show, The Responsive Eye, the exhibition which first drew attention to so-called Op art. One of her paintings was reproduced on the cover of the show's catalogue, though Riley later became disillusioned with the movement, and expressed regret that her work was exploited for commercial purposes. Following a major retrospective in the early 1970s, Riley began travelling extensively.
After a trip to Egypt in the early 1980s, where she was inspired by colourful hieroglyphic decoration, Riley began to explore colour and contrast. In some works, lines of colour are used to create a shimmering effect, while in other artworks, the canvas is filled with tessellating patterns. In 1986 Riley met the postmodern painters Philip Taaffe and Ross Bleckner and was inspired to introduce a diagonal element to her work. Typical of these later colourful works is Shadowpla
Bryan Wynter was a landscape painter and part of the St Ives group. Born in London, Bryan Wynter was sent to Zurich to study in the hopes he would join the family business. However, in 1938 he rebelled and decided to go to art school. His decision - bitterly opposed by his father - was partly inspired by the 1936 Surrealist show he saw in London. On his return to London, he attended at Westminster School of Art and continued at the Slade School of Fine Art.
In 1945 Bryan Wynter settled in Cornwall in Zennor, near St Ives. He first painted Cornish subjects on a small scale in gouache and watercolour; the scale dictated by the restrictions of living in a small cottage. The subject matter was recognisably Cornish - gulls and fishing boats and the harsh, bare landscape.
Despite the difficulties of pursuing his art during the war, Bryan Wynter had already started to make a reputation. His work was profiled in the journal Counterpoint, which also featured Paul Nash and Eileen Agar. Bryan Wynter was supposedly the face of a new generation that was going to develop Surrealism into something more humane and mature. This led to the offer of a show at the Redfern Gallery in London in 1947. Bryan Wynter exhibited with the London Group from 1954.
Bryan Wynter was a British artist who didn't simply adopt Surrealist motifs but systematically employed automatist practices. In that respect, other artists around St Ives had little to teach him. He was influenced by Lanyon for a limited time - around 1952-1954, when they were both teachings at Bath Academy, Corsham, between 1949 19and56 - but after that their paths diverge again.
At first, Bryan Wynter worked figuratively, but by 1956 he had evolved a dynamic and more abstract style. He had taken part in experiments with mescaline, which had an effect on his work as it became progressively more abstract. Bryan Wynter had evolved a non-figurative system using a much larger format, which he retained and developed during the remainder of his career.
In 1962 Bryan Wynter suffered a heart attack. Following his illness he experimented for a time with kinetic art, making Kinetic constructions that he called IMOOS (Images Moving Out Onto Space) before returning to painting in the last decade of his life.
In 2001 Bryan Wynter was the subject of an exhibition Bryan Wynter: A Selected Retrospective at Tate St Ives, Cornwall.
Carter Potter has another approach. A hometown movieland boy from L.A., he makes found-film art objects, which he calls "film paintings," by affixing filmstrips to form a picture surface across stretcher bars, usually in neat, square configurations.
Potter's 'film paintings' are not exactly paintings. Each artwork is made out of 70mm IMAX film wrapped horizontally across a painting stretcher.
Ceri Richards was born in Dunvant near Swansea. His father conducted the local choir, with Ceri being taught to play the piano at an early age. Music and poetry formed an important part of everyday life in early twentieth-century Wales, which clearly influenced Ceri's painting, drawing and printmaking throughout his life.
On leaving secondary school, Ceri Richards was apprenticed to an electrical engineer and started to attend evening classes on the engineering drawing. He soon realised that drawing was his main interest and, in 1921, enrolled as a full-time student at the Swansea School of Art. In his final year, during a summer school at Gregynog Hall, the home of Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, Richards encountered first-hand the pictures of the modern European masters and confirmed his vocation.
After winning a scholarship to study at Royal College of Art, Richards moved to London and, in 1929, married his contemporary at the College, Frances Clayton. With the great leaps in his work that followed, his reputation as a painter grew and he held his first one-man show at the Glynn Vivian Museum and Art Gallery, Swansea in 1930.
While at the Royal College, Ceri Richards had read Kandinsky and become absorbed in the work of Picasso and Matisse. In the 1930s he had also become interested in the Surrealists, particularly their automatic techniques of creation and elements of chance. This lead Richards to adapt his subject matter and experiment with style and technique. In his experimentation, Ceri Richards made a number of relief constructions and paintings which reflected his understanding of Cubism and abstraction.
During the Second World War Richards was appointed Head of Painting at Cardiff School of Art, returning to London for good after 1945. By the end of the 1940s Richards was exploring the subject of the music room interior, usually revolving around a pianist. This was an expression of Richard's great passion for music and their mood is not always calm. This period also saw a fascination with the legend of the Sabine women, often finding expression as pictures of the women on the walls of his interior scenes.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Richards was involved in many projects, including his painting of Trafalgar Square for the 1951 Festival of Britain. Tate Gallery, which holds an example of his work, put on a major exhibition in 1981.
Christopher Wood was born in Knowsley, near Liverpool. Wood's interest in art was sparked at age 14 when he began to draw during recuperation from septicaemia, he then went on to study architecture briefly at Liverpool University (1919-20). While at University, Wood met Welsh painter Augustus John (1878 - 1961), who encouraged him to become and artist.
Encouraged by John, Wood pursued an artistic career and soon after meet the French collector Alphonse Kahn, who invited him to Paris, he enrolled at the Académie Julian in 1921. Wood entered effortlessly into fashionable Parisian artistic circles, meeting Chilean diplomat Antonio de Gandarillas, with whom he began a liaison. As well as supporting Wood financially, Gandarillas also introduced him to Picasso, Georges Auric and Jean Cocteau and to the use of opium. Opium would have a devastating effect on the artist and often added to the hallucinogenic quality of his later works.
While in Paris, Wood became a member of The London Group in 1926 and the prestigious Seven & Five Society in 1927. The London Group had been formed in 1913 by a merging of the English cubists with the urban realists group. The Seven & Five society held their first exhibition in 1920 and exhibited annually over the next sixteen years, with the exception of 1930. Frances Hodgkins exhibited with The London Group in 1927 and joined the Seven & Five Society in 1929 after being introduced to the group by Cedric Morris. Hodgkins exhibited alongside Wood in the 9th Exhibition of the Seven & Five Society. Her involvement with the group also brought her into close contact with two of Wood's closest friends, Ben & & Winifred Nicholson. Ben Nicholson joined the society in 1924 and took over as president in 1926, his influence would steer to society into a close relationship with avant-garde developments centring on Paris.
Ben & Winifred Nicholson became enthusiastic supporters of Wood's work. Wood painted with the Nicholson's in Cumberland and Cornwall in 1928. A defining moment in Wood's life was the walk he took with Ben Nicholson in the streets of St Ives in August 1928 when, through an open door, they spotted paintings of ‘dramatic sea voyages painted on an assortment of odd-shaped supports made from salvaged pieces of driftwood and cardboard torn from grocery boxes'. The work they discovered was that of the fisherman painter Alfred Wallis (1855 - 1942), whose work shared an interest in naïve art, where perspective in compositions are eschewed and objects scale is often based on its relative importance in the scene. Nicholson later commented that ‘to Wallis, his paintings were never "paintings" but actual events'. Through Nicholson and Wood, Wallis was introduced to Jim Ede who promoted his work in London.
This chance meeting helped Wood establish his own personal style. His understanding of naïve art was also influenced by his early exposure to the work of modernists in France such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh, who all drew upon Non-Western art. Although there are many canvases from 1920-27 that attest to Wood's prowess most of his best work followed his inspiration by Wallis. Especially notable are the pictures painted in 1929 both in Dieppe and the traditional fishing village of Tréboul in Brittany.
In April 1929 Wood held a solo exhibition at Tooth's Gallery, London, where he met Lucy Wertheim, Hodgkins' gallerist friend and dealer. She purchased a work and arranged for an exhibition at her gallery the following year. An exhibition with Ben Nicholson at the Galerie Bernheim in Paris (May 1930), in which Wood showed paintings made in Brittany in 1929, was met with less success. The results of a second stay in Brittany (June-July 1930) were intended to open the Wertheim Gallery in London in October. During the frenzied preparations for his Wertheim exhibition, Wood became psychotic and began carrying a revolver. On 21 August he travelled to meet his mother and sister for lunch at ‘The County Hotel' in Salisbury and to show them a selection of his latest paintings. After saying goodbye and believing himself pursued (an effect of withdrawal from opium), he threw himself under the London train. Winifred Nicholson, who was so devastated by the news of his suicide that she employed a private detective to try to prove another cause of death, soon found seeds of self-destruction everywhere, and wrote of his works from 1930 that the "cost of such painting is heavy".
In deference to his mother, his death was often subsequently described as accidental. Posthumous exhibitions were held at the Wertheim Gallery (Feb. 1931) and the Lefevre Galleries (1932). In 1938 Wood's paintings were included in the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In the same year a major exhibition was organised by the Redfern Gallery at the New Burlington Galleries, which attempted to re-unite Wood's complete works, and gave impetus to Neo-Romanticism.
Clive Barker is one of the leading British Pop Artists who made his name in the late sixties and for over forty years he has been working with sculpture in chrome-plated steel, bronze and brass, replicating objects from everyday life - including Coca-Cola bottles, a newspaper, buckets and even a set of false teeth. The humorous touches and the acceptance of the banal and the kitsch contribute to the originality of Barker's work.
Born in Luton, Barker studied at the local college of art and technology but left art school as it failed to meet his expectations, to work on the car production assembly line at Vauxhall Motors in Luton.
His experience of working with leather and chrome proved decisive on his choice of materials for his sculptures, leading Barker not only to apply chrome finishes but also to work primarily in polished cast metals.
In 1961 he moved to London and for a time acted as technical assistant to the artist, Richard Smith.
In 1963 he began making his first sculptures. His first one-man exhibitions were held in London at the Robert Fraser Gallery in 1968 and at the Hannover Gallery in 1969.
Barker has produced works depicting artist friends including Allen Jones, David Hockney, Marianne Faithfull, Francis Bacon amongst others, but the main focus work remains firmly on his cast sculptures and on an imaginative reworking of the still-life tradition.
Barker's work has been widely exhibited at high-profile galleries and included in many of the most important Pop Art shows worldwide.
David Bomberg was a British painter best known for his brash, angular avant-garde works.
Born in Birmingham, from the age of 15 he studied at lithographer and from 17 he studied art history at the Westminster School of Art, working as an assistant in the workshop of John Sargent. On the advice of Sargent, he went on to study at the Slade School of Art, London with other artists like Stanley Spencer and Dora Carrington, from where he was expelled two years later: the mentors found the views and works of Bomberg too radical.
He then became a member of the Whitechapel Boys, a group of London based Jewish artists and writers who were particularly interested in exploring political ideologies, including socialism.
Bomberg is spoken of as one of the founders of Vorticism, a purely English modernist invention, close to futurism. However, he himself diligently disowned from belonging to any trends or art groups.
David Bomberg was severely impacted by World War I and its aftermath, and in the interwar period he instead began working primarily on more traditional landscape paintings, reminiscent of Post-Impressionist painting. After the First World War (Bomberg visited the front and saw enough of guns, tanks and bombs), the artist somewhat lost interest in industrial aesthetics, broke with the communist party, began to resort to figurative statements more often.
If his students are Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossof - went to success hard and slowly, then Bomberg did not live to see him. He died in 1957 almost in poverty. He did not suspect that after death he would be proclaimed one of the most important British artists. What will be counted from him such an outstanding phenomenon as the "London School". He relates to the London School as an inspirer, teacher, or forerunner - by the time this term appeared, Bomberg was 19 years old as dead.
Tate, London held a high-profile retrospective on the artist's work on the 30th anniversary of death of David Bomberg.
David Inshaw is one of Britain's leading contemporary artists. He studied painting at the Beckenham School of Art from 1959 to 1963 followed by three years at the Royal Academy Schools, London.
David James Smith graduated from the Camberwell College of Art, London in 2005.
Smith has become famous for producing super glossy paintings by building up layers of household paint, resulting in undulating, seemingly poured waves of haphazard and bright colour.
There's something naïve and childlike about his palette, evoking penny sweets bought at funfairs. He takes simple things and transforms them into fluid, abstract pieces of vivid beauty.
Although Smith's work is considerably recent, his art befits a far more established artist.
David Leverett was working as a designer and scenic design assistant before painting and teaching from 1965. In 1966 he had the first of a series of shows at the Redfern Gallery, London.
David Leverett has taught widely in England and abroad and he was a Visiting Artist at the Royal Academy Schools, the Royal College of Art and at Hornsey College of Art, London.
David Leverett has participated in many significant exhibitions including:
James Hull was amongst the most innovative artists of the Post War period. His earliest paintings were figurative but by 1950 he started producing abstract compositions.
Encouraged by Herbert Read, Hull had his first exhibition in the Brook Street Gallery, London in 1949. His subsequent one-man shows in London include Gimpel Fils Gallery, the Strickland Gallery, the Adrienne Resnick Gallery, and Whitford and Hughes. His work was included in numerous group shows. His reputation as a member of the avant-garde grew as he showed at Gimpel Fils, London and painted his mural The Story of Coal for the Festival of Britain's Dome of Discovery in 1951.
He won a competition to design the interior of the Daily Mirror building, and he worked for the IPC publishing conglomerate until 1970.
In the 1970s Hull moved to Ibiza in 1971 and travelled widely. He spent some time designing jewellery but concentrated again on painting in the 1980s.
John Hoyland held his first one-man show in 1964 at the Marlborough Gallery, London, with subsequent exhibitions in London at the Waddington Galleries, Serpentine Gallery, Flowers East and a major exhibition at the Whitechapel in 1967.
John Hoyland developed a strong attachment to America, from the late 1960s making visits to New York and setting studio there and in 1972 becoming Charles A Dana Professor of Fine Arts, Colgate University, Hamilton.
John Hoyland became an influential teacher at Hornsey College of Art, Croydon School of Art, Chelsea School of Art, St Martin's, the Royal Academy Schools and the Slade.
John Hoyland became an influential teacher at Hornsey College of Art, Croydon School of Art, Chelsea School of Art, St Martin's, the Royal Academy Schools and the Slade.
John Hoyland won a number of prizes, including Calouste Gulbenkian Purchase Award in 1963; first prize at John Moores Exhibition in 1982; joint first prize in Korn Ferry International Award Exhibition in 1986; and in the following year first prize in the Athena Art Awards Exhibition.
Josef Herman was a highly regarded Polish/British realist painter. His work often had subjects of workers and was inherently political. He was among more than a generation of eastern European Jewish artists who emigrated to escape persecution and worked abroad.
In 1938 at the age of 27, Josef Herman left Poland for Brussels where he was introduced to many of the prominent artists working in the city. After the beginning of World War II and the German invasion of Belgium, Josef Herman escaped to France and then to Great Britain.
Josef Herman first lived in Glasgow before moving to London for a time. There he met numerous other European émigrés, such as the Hungarian Michael Peto, with whom he became friends.
Josef Herman's own style was bold and distinctive, involving strong shapes with minimal detail.
Josef Herman studied working people as the subjects of his art, including grape pickers, fishermen and, most notably, coal miners. The latter became a particular interest for Herman during the eleven years that he lived in Ystradgynlais, a mining community in South Wales, beginning in 1944. He became part of the community, where he was fondly nicknamed ‘Joe Bach'.
When commissioned in 1951 to paint a mural for the Festival of Britain, Josef Herman took coal miners as his subject. His work Miners (1951) showed six men resting above ground after their work. Josef Herman said: I think it is one of my key pictures and the most important one I did in Wales. The mural is held in the permanent collection of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, affiliated with the Swansea Museum.
Because of his health affected by the damp climate, Josef Herman left Wales in 1955 and lived briefly in Spain and then in London.
In 1955 Josef Herman moved to Suffolk with his partner, Nini Ettlinger, whom he married in 1961. The tragic death of their young daughter prompted them to move away and from 1972 Josef Herman lived in the house in West London where he died in February 2000.
In 1981 Josef Herman was awarded an OBE for services to British Art and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1990.
Keith Coventry attended Brighton Polytechnic and Chelsea School of Art, London. One of the original Young British Artists, he was included in the seminal exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1997.
In 2010 Keith Coventry was awarded the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize.
At first sight, Keith Coventry's Estate Paintings resemble the abstract oils of Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich or perhaps the Dutch Modernist Piet Mondrian. Closer inspection reveals that the geometric patterns in these paintings are in fact taken directly from the utilitarian notice boards which are invariably found at the entrance to London council estates and which indicate the layout of flats using a simplified aerial plan.
Keith Coventry has painted over a hundred different Estate Paintings, each of which are presented in a box frame made by the artist, often with a museum-style caption fixed to the frame's bottom edge. He subverts both the language of high Modernism and the reserved status of the museum object, highlighting the wide gap which exists between these often neglected estates and the utopian ideals of their original Modernist architects.
Since Keith Coventry began this series in the mid-1990s, many of the estates he has painted have already been, or are now scheduled for, demolition and redevelopment, although the Wenlake Estate, in Old Street, remains standing and has recently been refurbished. Reference to the existing estate map, shows that Keith Coventry has transcribed the layout quite faithfully, slightly rotating the image, but only making very minor simplifications to the shape of the blocks. As such, he treats each estate map as an object trouve, clearly amused to find this formal beauty in such a prosaic source.
Since the 1990s, Keith Coventry has employed the tropes of Modern painting to comment ironically on the realities of contemporary city life. Two paintings from this series East Street Estate, 1994 and Heygate Estate, 1995 are in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London. Demolition of the Heygate Estate began in 2011, but redevelopment has not been without controversy. Some residents, many of them elderly, campaigned to stay in their homes with a determined few occupying the buildings of this and the neighbouring Aylesbury Estate.
John Keith Vaughan was a British painter, draughtsman, designer and writer. He is best known as a painter of figure compositions that attempted to balance male nudes within abstract environments.
John Keith Vaughan was born in Selsey, a seaside town in West Sussex. He attended Christ's Hospital School where the headmaster was H. A Rigby, an authority on the artist Frank Branwyn whose murals adorned the school chapel, and Rigby encouraged his evident interest in visual arts.
On leaving school Vaughan was employed by Lintas, an advertising agency. Privately he continued to paint, mostly with oils. He abandoned a career in advertising in 1939 to pursue painting but was quickly interrupted by the war. For most of the war, he worked as a clerk and German interpreter in a prisoner of war camp in Yorkshire where he found time to draw and work in gouache and he also started a journal which he continued throughout his life.
Vaughan was a self-taught artist and his drawings of army life in World War II attracted a great deal of attention. It was during the war that he formed influential friendships with the painters' Graham Sutherland and John Minton.
On his return to London in the immediate post-war period, he entered the circle of Peter Watson and shared a studio with his friend John Minton until 1952. In the 1940s Minton and Vaughan became one of the leading exponents of Neo-Romanticism.
After 1945, Vaughan travelled in the Mediterranean, North Africa, Mexico and the USA, where he was a resident artist at Iowa State University in 1959. He taught part-time at several art schools in London, most notably Camberwell School of Art (1946-8) and the Slade School of Fine Art (1959-77).
His later work concentrated on his favourite theme of the male nude in a landscape setting. They became grander and more simplified, moving towards abstraction.
In the 1950s and '60s, Vaughan became, with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, a leader of the new figure-based painting practice in Britain. As well as painting, Vaughan designed textiles and book-jackets. His varied activities brought him critical and financial success, including being elected an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Art (1964) and appointed CBE in 1965.
However, his book Journal and Drawings (1966), which was inspired by Andre Gide, revealed deep insecurity about his work and role in life. The book includes extracts from a diary he began in 1939 and, as well as containing many perceptive comments about art, gives a remarkably frank (and often highly amusing) account of his homosexuality and his struggle with cancer; a struggle which ultimately led to his suicide in 1977.
Martin Bradley became a convert to Nichiren Shôshû Buddhism 'which changed the whole foundation of my thinking', and has lived in Italy, France and England. Martin Bradley had more than 130 solo exhibitions and his work has been collected worldwide.
Michael Kidner was Op Art pioneer whose work was informed by mathematics and chaos theory. Most of Michael Kidner's best-known companions in Op Art - among them Bridget Riley, Jeffrey Steele and Peter Sedgley - were born in 1930 or 1931. Kidner was born in 1917, yet became a professional artist after them. He made up for a lost time: he worked until the final month of his life.
Michael Kidner was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire, where his father, Norman, was the ironmaster of works nearby. His mother and elder sister, both Kathleen, were confident and outgoing. Michael was not, and his parents dispatched him to Pangbourne Nautical College, in Berkshire, to toughen up. Instead, he drew into himself and suffered bullying; he was removed and sent instead to Bedales progressive school in Hampshire, where he flourished and, in 1939, took his degree at Jesus College, Cambridge, in history and anthropology.
While visiting his sister in the US as the war broke out in Europe, Michael Kidner enrolled at Ohio State University to read landscape architecture. However, in 1942, he crossed the border to enrol in the Canadian army. Michael Kidner was posted to England and, after D-day, saw active service in France with the Canadian Royal Corps of Signals. After demobilisation in 1946, he taught in Perthshire and began to paint.
Michael Kidner had started painting landscapes as a holiday hobby. On a visit to Provence after the war he came across a summer school run by the artist and influential teacher André Lhote at which, he later said, he first learned that a painted landscape is not a landscape. He followed Lhote to the artist's studio in Paris and studied there until 1949.
In 1949, Michael Kidner met and married an American actress, Marion Frederick, and in 1954, when he committed himself to make a living from art - which would include a 20-year stint teaching at the Bath Academy at Corsham - they bought a house and studio in north-west London. A couple of years later, Michael Kidner met the painter Patrick Heron in Cornwall. But the greater influence was Harry Thubron, a hugely talented artist and a great teacher, who propagated art as a democracy of materials and people and ideas, a construct that has nothing to do with imitation and that can be created with anything to hand and above all is not "art".
Though Michael Kidner soon settled for stripes, concentric circles, waves and moiré effects as the basis of the forms he would use throughout his career, the afterimage of colours in a close liaison that his works leave behind is, curiously, not that far away from Patrick Heron's freer, landscape-based paintings, but the disconcerting disequilibrium of Michael Kidner's work is much closer to the optical effects Bridget Riley's work achieves, though much less declamatory. Michael Kidner worked with mathematics, with chaos theory close to hand, but he never departed from the softer cadences of colour. His first solo exhibition was at St Hilda's College, Oxford, in 1959 and he was recognised as a pioneer of Op Art after 1965, when Bridget Riley's show The Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York drew worldwide attention to her work and to the Op Art movement.
Michael Kidner's work travelled the world - to Lisbon, Malmö, Budapest, Helsinki, Saarbrücken, Krakow, Lodz or Poznan (he had close links with Polish artists).
Later in life, his work explored the third dimension: for this he needed sculpture, and in his last decade his forms became freer and more colourful, and his works' titles freely disclosed their sources, such as interwoven roots of hyacinth bulbs, ocean currents, a lily pond. The colours in his later work are brighter but in inverse proportion to the excitement.
In 2004 Michael Kidner was elected a member of the Royal Academy.
Although stricken by ataxia and unable to walk, he would ascend to his home-based studio in Hampstead, north London, by chairlift every morning. With his hands out of commission, too, Kidner hired the artist Adrian Richardson to execute his paintings for him, just as the arthritic Pierre-Auguste Renoir had employed an assistant to execute the sculptures he designed.
Patrick Heron began exhibiting at the Redfern Gallery, London in 1947 and continued to show there until 1958. Though in 1952 Patrick Heron had experimented with abstract painting, it wasn't until 1956, when he moved to St. Ives, that he took up abstraction and in 1957 painted the first of his stripe paintings.
In 1958 Partick Heron took over Ben Nicholson's former studio and began to introduce shapes that were to characterise his paintings in the 60s and 70s, where colour was to become a dominant concern.
Patrick Heron was awarded many prizes including Grand Prize in 2nd John Moores Liverpool Exhibition, 1959; Silver medal at the VIII Bienal de São Paolo, Brazil, 1965; received Honorary Doctorates from the universities of Exeter, Kent and the Royal College of Art, London. He was created CBE in 1977.
Paul Feiler was married twice. First he was married first to the landscape painter June Miles. His second marriage was to the abstract painter Catherine Armitage.
Peter Lanyon is identified most consistently as a landscape painter, yet he produced prints, made pots, murals and stained glass works, he created sculptures and constructions, and he taught. And in fact the term ‘landscape painter' hardly does justice: as commonly understood, ‘landscape' suggests natural forms, and works created by such an artist are often expected to canvas an arrangement of such forms into easily comprehended compositions. ‘Landscape', for Lanyon, meant more than natural forms: his paintings explore both the natural and the man made, the historical and the contemporary. And Lanyon's paintings are not conventionally composed, nor easily comprehended. Whilst their colours often make a direct reference to the land, their shapes are made semi-abstract or abstract, perspective might be head-on or from above, and content is not always easily discerned.
Lanyon was born in St. Ives, Cornwall. After school he took painting lessons from Borlase Smart, a well respected art teacher and academic painter. He attended Penzance School of Art before moving to the Euston Road School of Art, London, where he was taught by Victor Pasmore. On his return to St. Ives he met Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo - all three of whom had departed London to escape the war, and it was around these artists that the St. Ives School, with Lanyon amongst them, would cohere.
Lanyon's first one-man exhibition was at the Gimpel Fils in London, 1949. Regular exhibitions there would follow in the fifties, and Lanyon also participated in group shows with the Arts Council and the British Council. He sold little, however, and turned to teaching, first at the Bath Academy of Art, Wiltshire (1951-6) and from 1954 to 1960, with the help of Terry Frost and the painter William Redgrave, he set up a small art school: ‘St. Peter's Loft'.
In the late fifties Lanyon visited New York for an exhibition of his works at the Catherine Viviano Gallery. Subsequent exhibitions through the next decade would take place here, but in New York Lanyon also met and befriended Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, both of whom would make visits to St. Ives. His work in England was at this juncture meeting with critical success: he won the Critics' Prize in 1954; second prize in the John Moores exhibition (1959) and the Marzzotto acquisition award (1962), but actual sales were slow. All the more welcome, therefore, his relative success in the US, and sales there allowed Lanyon to pursue an interest in flying.
Lanyon obtained his pilot licence and took up glider flying, and the paintings which resulted - his ‘gliding' pictures - allude to the experience of looking down upon a patchwork of land below. He gained a more complete understanding of landscape, but his source of inspiration also become one of destruction as Lanyon sustained critical injuries as a result of a flying accident, and at the age of only 46, on August 31st, 1964, he died.
Peter Phillips came to Pop Art with extraordinary speed, conviction and clarity of thought and has since stayed true to its principles whilst continuing to push the idiom into new directions. One of the rare British artists never to have spurned the label, Phillips approached Pop as a question of matching subject matter to the style and technique. In this sense, he was closer to the American Pop artists than almost any of his British colleagues. His commitment to Pop was most vividly confirmed by living in New York during 1964-1967.
Reg Butler began making sculpture in 1944, without formal training, but architecture remained his primary activity until 1950 when he gave up his practice and became the first Gregory Fellow in Sculpture at Leeds University. In 1953 he came to prominence upon being awarded the first prize in the international competition organised by the Institute of Contemporary Art for a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner (overcoming Calder, Gabo, and Hepworth among other established artists).
The monument was never built - one of the models is in the Tate, London - but the competition established Reg Butler's reputation among the finest British sculptors of his generation.
Reg Butler learned iron-forging when he worked as a blacksmith during the World War II and iron remained his preferred material, although he was a sensitive draughtsman and made drawings as independent works whilst also producing a few lithographs and wood engravings. An articulate writer and radio broadcaster, Reg Butler vigorously argued the case for modern sculpture; five lectures he delivered to students at the Slade School in 1961 (where he taught from 1951 to 1980) was published in a book form the following year as Creative Development.
Robyn Denny represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1966 and seven years later a retrospective exhibition was held at the Tate, London.
Denny was the first artist in England to respond to American abstract expressionism and to establish an abstract style free of natural associations. Denny was writing on art for the international art magazines such as Das Kunstwerk and Art International.
Roger Hilton is widely thought to be one of the best and most adventurous painters of his generation and one of the pioneers of abstract art in post-war Britain. His paintings can be as rumbustious as the life he led. However abstract they became, the human body was never far away. Spontaneous in gesture, they show him to be one of the boldest yet subtlest colourists.
Roger Hilton studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London from 1929 to 1931 under Henry Tonks and afterwards in Paris where he developed links with painters on the Continent. During this time, Roger Hilton showed annually with the London Group and had his first exhibition at the Bloomsbury Gallery in 1936.
Roger Hilton served with the commandos during World War II, was captured and spent three years as a prisoner of war.
After the war, Roger Hilton worked as a school teacher as well as a lecturer at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London.
Roger Hilton held his first solo exhibition in 1952 at the Gimpel Fils in London.
Based on his visits to France and influenced by Mondrian's work while in the Netherlands in 1953, Roger Hilton started to produce abstract paintings. However, in the late 1950s, Hilton's work became more figurative, following his frustration with the limitations of abstract painting.
Roger Hilton became a prominent member of the St Ives group gaining an international reputation. In 1963, he won the John Morris painting prize and was appointed CBE in 1968.
Roger Hilton's second marriage was to Rose Phipps. By 1974 he was confined to bed with a muscular disease.
During the last period of his working life, Roger Hilton returned to the childlike subjects of animals, boats and nudes that had characterized his early work, using cheap poster paints and children's brushes. Hilton deliberately approached his art with a childlike freshness of vision, but one marked by a lifetime's experience.
Sam Francis was late to start his successful and brilliant career as an artist. He first attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied botany, medicine and psychology. Shortly thereafter, Francis served in the United States Air Force during WWII where he suffered an injury in a plane crash. His artistic career began soon after being released from the hospital when he returned to Berkeley to study art.
Initially, Francis was influenced and inspired by the works of Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky. He lived in Paris during the 1950s where he became associated with Taschisme. This is where Francis's spontaneous and impromptu brushwork, drips and scribbles of paint from the brush or directly from the tube heavily characterized his work. In 1952 he had his first one-man show in Paris and became an accepted as a member of the young European avant-garde, he showed his work at exhibitions in Paris, London and Bern.
After Paris, he spent some time in India, Thailand and Japan, which led to the influences of Zen Buddhism in his work. Participation in 'Twelve Americans', an exhibition mounted in New York by the Museum of Modern Art in 1956, made Francis well-known in America. During this period his style changed from compositions with the picture surface covered in monochrome values to brightly coloured 'islands of colour' on white canvases. His calligraphic handling of brushwork and the lyrical character of his fluid colour now linked Francis with Far Eastern art, which he studied intensively.
Francis returned to California in 1962, settling at first in Santa Barbara and then establishing a studio in Venice, Santa Monica in 1963. During the 1960s Francis developed his own distinctive style of Spontaneous and Gestural Dripping. He guided oils, acrylic and watercolours across his canvases with circling and spraying movements.
Sam Francis was not only a distinguished exponent of Action Painting. He also explored graphic media such as lithography, etching and monotype. His preoccupation with printmaking led to the production of striking experimental work in the early 1980s. Forcefully expressive compositions in several parts, some of them with running paint, are the hallmark of these years. In his final phase, Francis executed commissions for large-scale murals.
Sir Terry Frost was without question one of Britain's most distinguished and passionate abstract artists. He enjoyed a career spanning six decades, much of which was spent living and working in south west Cornwall.
Born in 1915, in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, Terry Frost first began to paint as a prisoner of war. Returning to England, he received an ex-serviceman's grant and attended Camberwell School of Art, London from 1947 to 1950.
He went on to teach at the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham Court from 1952, and was the Gregory Fellow at Leeds University 1954 to 1956, teaching at Leeds School of Art from 1956 to 1957. He was made Artist in Residence at the Fine Art Department of Newcastle University in 1964, became a full time lecturer at the Department of Fine Art, Reading University 1965, and went on to become Professor of Painting at the University of Reading from 1977 to 1981.
Terry Frost's first one-man show was held at the Leicester Galleries in 1952. He continued to exhibit regularly in London and his first international one-man show was held in 1961 at the Bertha Schaeffer Gallery, New York, USA>
A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Mayor Gallery, London in 1990 and in 2000 a major retrospective, Terry Frost: Six Decades was held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Terry Frost was elected Royal Academician 1992 and received a knighthood in 1998.
William Gear was one of the few British painters, the most passionate and committed one, who played an active role in the modern abstract movement of post-war Europe. He continued the tradition of the Edinburgh-Paris axis established by J.D. Fergusson, Samuel Peploe and others, spending vital years between 1947 and 1950 living and working in Paris. William Gear received the greatest acclaim in France, Germany and the Netherlands.
William Gear was born in 1915 in Methil, Fife, into a mining family; the particular landscape of pitheads, the sea, rocks, castles, trees, storms and poverty marked his earliest identity with a place and probably remained the most influential to his art. Art history lessons during student years at Edinburgh College of Art, in particular Byzantine classes under David Talbot Rice, also influenced his concern for structure.
On a travelling scholarship in 1937, William Gear chose to study under French painter Fernand Léger. The Second World War interrupted these formative years and, by 1940, Gear had joined the Royal Corps of Signals. Dispatched to the Middle East, he still had the discipline to paint - mostly works on paper of damaged landscapes - with exhibitions in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Cairo as well as in Italy in Siena and Florence.
As the British officer in Celle, working for the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section of the Control Commission, William Gear focused on securing the safety of the Berlin Art Collection in Schloss Celle and organised an important series of modern art exhibitions, including the rejected work of Karl Otto Gotz. Demobbed in 1947, William Gear headed for Paris. Within a year there were exhibitions at two of the pioneering salons and a first one-man show at the Galerie Arc en Ciel.
At the same time, inclusion in Cobra shows in Amsterdam and Copenhagen in 1949, alongside Constant, Corneille and Appel, underpinned his affiliation to a reinvigorated form of abstract expressionism. William Gear worked at the time in the fluid medium of opaque watercolour, usually on a card with pockets of intense colour on a white or neutral ground. While some pieces were purely abstract, others carried their own suggestion of a landscape or even a form of Celtic figuration.
The same year saw an exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, USA, alongside Jackson Pollock. The impact of American abstract expressionism, however, remained a sore subject, which in conversation was usually dismissed with a curt reminder of what he and others were already painting in Europe.
On his return to England in 1950 he had the first of a series of London exhibitions with the Gimpel Fils gallery. William Gear was also awarded one of the Festival of Britain Purchase Prizes for Autumn Landscape, large oil on canvas which took six difficult months to complete. The event produced written questions and answers in the House of Commons and a tirade of abuse from the national press, not to mention a topic for debate on the radio programme Any Questions. While the episode made him a household name, the longer-term effects were, arguably, more detrimental.
William Gear chose not to live in London or join fellow abstract artists in St Ives, preferring the independence of a village in Kent between 1953 and 1958. This period saw the continued development of large landscape structures, as well as "side-roads" into sculptural subjects and minimalist colour paintings, which openly acknowledged the influence of Nicolas de Stael. His move to Birmingham came with the appointment as Head of the Faculty of Fine Art, Birmingham College of Art, in 1964, a post he held until retirement in 1975.
William Gear together with Stephen Gilbert was the only British artists included in the major Cobra 1948-51 exhibition at the Museé d'Art Moderne, Paris, in 1982. In 1995, William Gear took delight in attending the opening of the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amstelveen, near Amsterdam.
William Gear was elected Royal Academician in 1995.
Trevor Bell is widely regarded as the last of the St. Ives School Modernist.
Born in Leeds in 1930, he was awarded a scholarship to attend The Leeds College of Art from 1947 to 1952 and, encouraged by Terry Frost, moved to Cornwall in 1955.
St Ives was the epicentre for British abstract art being the home to artists such as Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth and Terry Frost, he made his reputation as a leading member who helped establish British Art on the international stage. From these artists, especially Nicholson, Bell received advice and support. Nicholson, alongside his then dealer Charles Gimpel, encouraged him to show in London and Waddington Galleries gave Bell his first solo exhibition in 1958. Patrick Heron wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, stating that Bell was ‘the best non-figurative painter under thirty'.
In 1959 Trevor Bell was awarded the Paris Biennale International Painting Prize, and an Italian Government Scholarship and the following year was offered the Gregory Fellowship in Painting at the University of Leeds whose advisors at the time were Sir Herbert Read and Henry Moore. It was during this period that Bell developed his shaped canvases, setting his work apart from other artists of his generation.
Throughout the 1960's Trevor Bell showed work in major exhibitions in the UK and USA and during this time his work was first purchased for the Tate collection. In 1973 he presented his new work at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, having just taken part in a major exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC. Over the course of the next thirty years Bell combined painting with teaching in various locations eventually moving to Florida State University in 1976 to become the Professor for Master Painting. Here with the provision of a warehouse sized studio and time to really develop his painting he produced the large-scale, intensely coloured works for which he is known, reflecting the influence of the climate and landscape on him and his work. He went on to spend the next 20 years in America. Important exhibitions were held at the Corcoran Gallery and the Academy of Sciences in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum in Miami, The Cummer Gallery and the Museum of Art at Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
In 1985 Trevor Bell was included in the London Tate Gallery's St Ives 1939-64 exhibition and in 1993 he was part of the inaugural show of the Tate St Ives. Moving from Florida in 1996 he established his studios near Penzance, Cornwall and continued to exhibit in London, the USA and St. Ives.
Trevor Bell had a major solo exhibition at the Tate St.Ives in 2004 and, in 2011, a further 14 works were obtained by the Tate Gallery for their permanent collection.
Bell has had works purchased and commissioned by numerous other international museums and public and private collections including (among others) The Arts Council of England, British Council, British Museum, Boca Raton, Laing Art Gallery, Ljubljana's U.V.U Keleia Collection and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Trevor Bell is twice a recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Council of Florida, an Honorary RWA of the Royal West of England Academy, an Honoury Fellow of University College Falmouth and an Emeritus Professor of Florida State University.