FIVE REDS, FOUR DISCS : MAY 1965
signed, titled and dated May 1965 to the reverse
oil on canvas
122 x 132cm

Exhibited:
Private Collection (via Waddington Galleries, London and Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh), September 1966
With Waddington Galleries, London August 1967
Private collection, Cambridge

Exhibited:
New York, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, Patrick Heron: New Oils, 4-23 October, 1965, cat. no.9
Edinburgh, Richard Demarco Gallery, Inaugural Exhibition, August-September, 1966, cat. no.73

We are grateful to Dr Andrew Wilson for his assistance in cataloguing this work and for compiling the catalogue note.

The Patrick Heron Trust is in the process of researching the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work and would like to hear from owners of any works by Patrick Heron, so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue. Please write to the Patrick Heron Trust, c/o Cheffins, 1-2 Clifton Road, Cambridge CB1 7EA or email fine.art@cheffins.co.uk

Patrick Heron was a pioneering British abstract painter of the second half of the 20th century, his aesthetic position was grounded firmly within European sensibilities through which he engaged with the achievements of French artists such as Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Pierre Bonnard, yet also responded to the possibilities of new approaches to abstraction he recognised both in American abstract expressionism and in the work of British artists of his own generation.

FIVE REDS, FOUR DISCS : MAY 1965 occupies a significant position in Heron’s oeuvre, and was included in his third solo exhibition in New York at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery. Each of his three exhibitions in New York – in 1960, 1962 and 1965 – offered both a response to the possibilities he at first recognised in new American abstract painting after 1956 and a challenge to what he saw increasingly as its shortcomings. The paintings that were included in his 1965 New York exhibition stand in high contrast to American ‘post-painterly’ abstract painting typified by the airbrushed open colour fields of Jules Olitski or the stained symmetrical compositions of Kenneth Noland, and reveal the degree to which Heron was expanding the possibilities of abstract painting.

Limiting the composition of this painting to four disc shapes and the colour to five different reds underlines how Heron created compositional and spatial complexity out of comparatively simple means. These colours and shapes are arranged within planes parallel to the picture surface expressed through drawn lines that define the interacting colour areas. The ways in which these colour shapes interact is how an active pictorial illusion of space is created that contradicts the flatness of the canvas surface itself. Each colour shape for Heron is just that, interacting with each other shape as a fully realised compositional unity and not in the way the hierarchy of a traditional figure/ground relationship might work. The illusion of space is active because it changes along with the colour relationships, shifting and altering in character as the viewer’s eyes move over the canvas led by line, colour and shape. Brush marks offer visible traces of the act of painting rather than just mark down paint literally as colour – adding further spatial complication to the colour-relationships he has created. FIVE REDS, FOUR DISCS : MAY 1965 is a painting animated by the interaction of colour within a complex composition that creates space, playing equally on the eye and the emotions.

Condition Report

The unlined canvas is attached to a wooden stretcher with two vertical cross bars. The canvas tension is adequate and the painting is generally in plane. Water staining is evident on the reverse of the picture and this has affected the paint layers. Flaking and loss has occurred at the top and bottom edges, where moisture has been retained by the stretcher bars behind. The flaking has been recently stabilised to prevent further loss to the original paint. There are other localised areas of cracked and raised paint in the main composition. Water drips are evident on the surface, in the lower circle, this has affected the paint layers, revealing the white ground below. There is also dark staining, possibly mould, which has formed along the brushstrokes of the lower circle and upper right orange section. There is a white, sparkly haze across the surface of the unvarnished painting, which is likely a bloom caused by damp conditions.