A Premium on Pleasure - paintings, Patrick Heron, Tate Gallery, London, England

Art in America, June, 1999 by David Cohen

The English painter and critic Patrick Heron was a life-long champion of retinal beauty. Before his recent death, a retrospective at the Tate Gallery examined six decades of Heron's sensual compositions.

"For a very long time now," Patrick Heron wrote in 1962, "I have realized that my overriding interest is COLOR. Color is both the subject and the means, the form and the content, the image and the meaning in my painting today." Heron's recent retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London did little to contradict this assertion. The eye was entertained by intense concentrations of color and daring harmonics in a survey covering six buoyant decades of painting. The exhibition, which was curated by David Sylvester, began with Walter Sickert-influenced, School of Paris-style paintings from Heron's teenage years and ended with what turned out to be his last style--loosely representational, spontaneous, exuberant paintings in electric colors. Six months after the show closed Patrick Heron died, in March of this year, aged 79.

In conjunction with his achievements as a painter, Heron must be reckoned one of the most significant British art critics of the century. He returned sporadically to writing at various stages of his career, keeping to "vows of silence" for years at a time, ever fearful that his writing activities might obscure his profile as a painter. A new collection of his criticism, edited by Mel Gooding, was published by the Tate Gallery to coincide with the retrospective.

Both Heron's paintings and his extensive writings on art rest on a high-minded, serf-imposed limitation, an epicurean devotion to pleasure and a concomitant avoidance of pain that is ultimately more philosophical, one could almost say spiritual, than formalist strictures alone would demand. In the interview with Martin Gayford which forms the main text of the Tate catalogue, Heron reiterates a point he had often stressed before: "All painting is made up of elements which are in fact operative on our senses pleasurably by mason of purely abstract proportional relationships." Heron's pleasure principle is not limited to a definition of pleasure which might be shared by a psychologist--the idea of agreeable retinal reactions--but insists that pleasure, as a moral condition, is prerequisite to esthetic experience.

Great painting, according to Heron, is always essentially optimistic. The lineage of Heron's esthetics runs directly back to Bloomsbury, to the idealism and altruism embodied in the art criticism of Roger Fry. A French bias, also inherited from Bloomsbury, in Heron's formative tastes encouraged ambivalence towards the northern romantic tradition in general, and an antipathy (bordering on intellectual snobbery) towards the "literary" values of English art in particular. Heron was temperamentally on the side of beauty, not the sublime. Against "literary" values he was inclined to posit "plastic" ones; against expressionism, the decorative.

Heron said he took up art criticism because of his indignation at the way the philistine English press dismissed exhibitions of Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Rouault held in London in the mid-1940s while the public stood in line at the National Gallery to view Klee, whose appeal Heron deemed literary and romantic. Heron was initially hostile to the abstraction of Kandinsky and Miro, which he identified as intellectual and metaphysical in contrast to the sensuality of the French painters. This position may seem surprising in view of his subsequent development, both as a formalist critic and an abstract painter. But in fact he was reluctant for quite a while to go all the way with abstraction. Heron retained recognizable figures and objects well into the 1950s. He took his cue from his painting heroes--Picasso, Braque, Bonnard, Matisse--all of whom preserved a degree of representation throughout their careers. He kept a figurative element much longer than his peers, painters of the so-called Middle Generation such as William Scott, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Winter and Roger Hilton, who like Heron were associated with St. Ives, the Cornish art colony established by Ben Nicholson (whose studio Heron inherited), Barbara Hepworth and Nauru Gabo.

Heron's paintings of the early 1950s look to French models while already containing personal elements which would persist through his frequent changes of idiom. Christmas Eve: 1951 was his most monumental canvas to date; at nearly 10 feet in length, it affords myriad dense, nervous, awkward lines filled with pools of bright pigment. There is a glow of color against canvas, of filled-in shape against filigreelike line. This contrapuntal quality resulting from the disengagement of color and line (line is descriptive, color autonomous) evokes Braque, Bonnard and Leger, while the reconciliation of pictorial depth and decorative flattening recalls Matisse.

The same year he painted Christmas Eve, we find Heron lamenting a sense of marginalization between two equally unpalatable options fashionable at that time, a figurative revival and Tachisme. "Unfortunately," he observed, "these two extremes, these two aesthetic heresies, of pure abstraction on the one hand and expressionist figuration on the other, are much in favor just now: the central tradition, in which the impulse to abstract is checked by the impulse to communicate `a subject,' and in which that subject is divested of its fiercer emotive overtones because it has been translated into formal terms--this is neglected." Heron proposed Bonnard as "a wonderful example of this amalgam of abstraction and figuration." No doubt, he would have found that view confirmed by the Bonnard retrospective that preceded his own at the Tate last year, a show which stressed the French master's modernism. While Heron soon veered towards Tachisme in his own practice (for a while at least), something of this duality, between abstraction and its sensual, observational basis, remained crucial to his painterly sensibility.