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Lot Essay
Painted in 1959, Black & White: December 1959 is a tour de force from Terry Frost’s most sought after decade. In the present work, Frost employs a predominantly monochromatic palette, a prominent feature of Frost’s work at the time, that has been accentuated by small passages of rich, earthy hues. The composition is dominated by vertical lines at varying angles that appear to ricochet within the central form, creating, as remarked by Patrick Heron, a ‘downward-moving rain of pigment gestures … that gives the picture that power and punch, that three-dimensional focus and concentration of space that no purely Tachist picture ever exhibits’ (P. Heron, 'London', Arts, vol. 32, no. 1, October 1957, p. 17).
In 1957, Terry Frost returned to Cornwall from Leeds to work full-time in St Ives, moving into a space at 4 Porthmeor Studios. The small fishing town in the South West of England had become the centre of the European avant garde, after artists including Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo moved there at the outbreak of the Second World War. They were attracting international acclaim as they continued to establish British artists at the forefront of the international Modernist art movement. It was, however, a younger generation of artists that gathered there during the 1950s that the term ‘St Ives School’ was particularly associated, and Frost was at the centre of this pioneering movement. Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham were amongst the artists who were working there, with their shared passion for the Cornish landscape informing their practices. Word of their exploits had crossed the Atlantic, and by 1958, prominent figures of American abstraction including art critic, Clement Greenberg, painters Mark Rothko, John Hultberg and Jack Bush, as well as the New York based dealer Martha Jackson, had all visited St Ives.
In the autumn of 1960, Frost held his first one-man exhibition in New York at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery. Black & White: December 1959 was first shown at this exhibition, which was to be a seminal moment in the artist’s career. A second exhibition at the same gallery followed two years later which gave Frost enormous confidence and conviction in his artistic direction. ‘In New York they all came to my exhibition, de Kooning, Rothko, Klein, Newman, Motherwell. I was staying with Larry Rivers. Newman and Motherwell took me to their studios. I accepted it all as normal and they accepted me. They were all painters struggling to get somewhere like I was. They worked hard; they would sleep until noon, do eight or nine hours in the studio, and then starting at eleven at night proceeded to drink me under the table! Then we’d go at four in the morning and have breakfast at a Chinese restaurant’ (T. Frost quoted in E. Knowles (ed.), Terry Frost, Aldershot, 1994, p. 84).
The artistic dialogue formed between his friends in St Ives and his contemporaries across the Atlantic enabled Frost to forge his own independent visual language, which is exemplified in Black & White: December 1959.
In 1957, Terry Frost returned to Cornwall from Leeds to work full-time in St Ives, moving into a space at 4 Porthmeor Studios. The small fishing town in the South West of England had become the centre of the European avant garde, after artists including Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo moved there at the outbreak of the Second World War. They were attracting international acclaim as they continued to establish British artists at the forefront of the international Modernist art movement. It was, however, a younger generation of artists that gathered there during the 1950s that the term ‘St Ives School’ was particularly associated, and Frost was at the centre of this pioneering movement. Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham were amongst the artists who were working there, with their shared passion for the Cornish landscape informing their practices. Word of their exploits had crossed the Atlantic, and by 1958, prominent figures of American abstraction including art critic, Clement Greenberg, painters Mark Rothko, John Hultberg and Jack Bush, as well as the New York based dealer Martha Jackson, had all visited St Ives.
In the autumn of 1960, Frost held his first one-man exhibition in New York at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery. Black & White: December 1959 was first shown at this exhibition, which was to be a seminal moment in the artist’s career. A second exhibition at the same gallery followed two years later which gave Frost enormous confidence and conviction in his artistic direction. ‘In New York they all came to my exhibition, de Kooning, Rothko, Klein, Newman, Motherwell. I was staying with Larry Rivers. Newman and Motherwell took me to their studios. I accepted it all as normal and they accepted me. They were all painters struggling to get somewhere like I was. They worked hard; they would sleep until noon, do eight or nine hours in the studio, and then starting at eleven at night proceeded to drink me under the table! Then we’d go at four in the morning and have breakfast at a Chinese restaurant’ (T. Frost quoted in E. Knowles (ed.), Terry Frost, Aldershot, 1994, p. 84).
The artistic dialogue formed between his friends in St Ives and his contemporaries across the Atlantic enabled Frost to forge his own independent visual language, which is exemplified in Black & White: December 1959.