1962
Oil on canvas
h127 x w150cm (unframed)
h147.5 x w173cm (framed)

Signed ‘Frost’, titled and dated ‘1962’ (on the reverse)

Provenance:
Redfern Gallery, London, where acquired by David Hughes, 11 April 1989;
Paisnel Gallery, London, where acquired by the previous owner, October 2003;
Their sale, Sotheby’s London, 4 November 2010, lot 144;
Godson & Coles, where acquired by the present owners in 2011

Literature:
David Lewis, Terry Frost, Scholar Press, Aldershot, 1994, illustrated p.105.

The present work comes from a private collection comprising significant British artists, which together shed a light on the course of abstraction in Britain in the 20^th century. It also includes Three Chevrons & Spiral for Red, Black and White, where both have remained for over ten years.

Sir Terry Frost was one of the foremost abstract painters working in Britain, part of the post-War generation that emerged as a force on the international stage in the 1950s. These artists, which included the likes of Alan Davie, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, William Scott and Roger Hilton, pushed abstraction in Britain in a way that paralleled the Abstract Expressionists in America – such as Rothko, Kline and Pollock, with whom they were in cultural conversation.

Frost trained at Camberwell School of Art under Victor Pasmore, whose interest in theories surrounding harmonious proportion and the Golden Section instilled a strong theoretical element to Frost’s paintings. Upon moving to St Ives, Cornwall in 1946 after demobilization, Frost encountered new developments of abstraction unfolding there, particularly the freedom within Peter Lanyon’s approach, which loosened up his own process. Drawing upon the external world, his works provided an abstracted version of his experiences underpinned by theoretical structures, notably in his ‘Walk along the Quay’ series of the 1950s.

By the 1960s and the time of the present painting, we see how Frost’s abstract language continued to evolve. The natural world is made explicit in the title and informs the three circles across the top of the painting, while the oval shapes suggest boats, reminiscent of those forms in his works of the 1950s ‘along the quay’. The increased expansiveness of the painting and its simplification reveal Frost’s response to the American Abstract Expressionists. He encountered their work first hand at the Tate Gallery exhibition in London in 1956 and again in 1960, when he had his first solo show at the Bertha Schaeffer Gallery in New York, endorsing him as one of the key exponents of abstraction working in Britain at that time.