Painting, 1947

John Wells was a key figure in the dynamic artistic community that sprang up in and around St Ives in the 1940s and included many leading lights of the abstract art scene including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Naum Gabo. Painting, 1947 is a product of this hothouse of creativity and new ideas. Nicholson’s influence is apparent in the muted ground, the network of precise, gossamer-thin pencil lines uniting the composition’s triangular forms, and even the manner in which the reverse of the panel is inscribed. Furthermore, under Gabo’s tutelage Wells became the leading British proponent of constructivist art, at a time when it had been stamped out in the Soviet Union in favour of the staid clichés of Socialist Realism. However, compared to the deliberately mechanical arrangements of artists such as El Lissitzky, the triangular forms of Painting, 1947 feel less constructed than suspended in space, as if they might start twisting in the wind at any moment. In this sense the work shares lineage with the kinetic works which Gabo began to produce from 1920 onwards.