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Lot Essay
'[I was] endorsing the technological optimism of the early 1960s at a time when all things seemed possible' Gerald Laing
Held in the same private collection since the late 1970s, Skydiver II (1963) is a dynamic example of Gerald Laing’s series of ‘Skydiver’ paintings. Created between 1963 and 1964, these seminal works stand among the great icons of the artist’s early oeuvre, with examples held in Tate, London, the Denver Art Museum, Colorado, and the University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque. Here, against a field of vivid cobalt blue, the skydiver’s outstretched arm creates a bold diagonal across the canvas: with volume conveyed in monochrome dots, his clothing contrasts strikingly with the bright blue sky and the perfect white disc of his helmet. The parachute billows behind him in a stream of undulating red and white stripes. The crisp, flat colours convey windblown silk and sky as much as they echo the work of British Op artist Bridget Riley; the skydiver himself, whose half-tone dots derive from commercial printing techniques, bears witness to Laing’s dialogue with Roy Lichtenstein, who was independently exploring similar ideas. Marking a key moment in the transatlantic development of Pop Art, Skydiver II captures the birth of a brave new world that would shatter the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of image-making. As Laing himself leaps into the unknown, the falling man becomes an emblem of exhilarating vertigo.
Laing studied at from St Martin’s School of Art in London between 1960 and 1964. During this period he spent the summer of 1963 working as an assistant to the American Pop artist Robert Indiana in Coenties Slip, Manhattan: it was there that he saw the photographs in Life magazine that would inspire the ‘Skydivers’. He painted the present work in Indiana’s studio, completing later paintings from the series back in London. Laing’s composition hybridises two distinct source images: the first that struck him was one of a parachute collapsing as a skydiver landed. ‘It was a free pattern of bright red and white bands,’ he recalled, ‘criss-crossed by slackening white shrouds and silhouetted against a pure blue sky … I combined this image with another of the man seeming to fly unhindered at altitude, arms spread wide, as the aircraft from which he has leapt speeds away from him’ (G. Laing, 2006, quoted in L. Ingram and R. Halliwell, eds., Gerald Laing Prints & Multiples, A Catalogue Raisonne, London 2006, p. 51). Testament to Laing’s keen visual ingenuity, the combination of these two elements furthers Skydiver II’s visual tension between abstract and figurative registers, at once picturing a body speeding through space and embracing the optical joys of pure colour and form.
'I was interested only in what I considered to be contemporary ‘heroic’ themes' Gerald Laing
Upon graduating from St Martin’s in 1964, Laing returned immediately to New York, where he would remain for the next five years. Alongside the ‘Astronauts’, ‘Dragsters’ and ‘Starlets’ that the artist produced during this period, the ‘Skydivers’ embody the outward-looking spirit of exploration, discovery and optimism he found there. For Laing, the mechanically-reproduced nature of his source images was as tantalising and miraculous as the world they portrayed. In post-war England, a social landscape defined by ‘dreariness and hardship’, he felt that ‘… the perfection of the photograph and the printed image, particularly in the proselytising form of the advertisement, represented not only an ideal but also a plan for the future which could replace a discredited past’ (G. Laing, quoted in ibid., p. 9). In New York—home to America’s booming advertising and media industries—Laing was brought face-to-face with the seductive promises of printed imagery. Pictures of fast cars, glamorous women and the glories of the Space Race were made all the more alluring by their glossy proliferation. There was, he recalls, ‘[a] notion that reproduced media images had a stronger sense of reality than reality itself’ (G. Laing, quoted in The Tate Gallery 1982-84: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, Tate Gallery, London, 1986, p. 222).
Laing’s early encounters with American artists, including Indiana, Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist, were equally infectious. He marvelled that ‘they eschewed the use of muddy palettes to which we seemed condemned, and mixed their paints wholesale on large sheets of glass … even their paint tubes were bigger than ours’ (G. Laing, quoted in ibid., p. 51). Skydiver II’s rhapsody of patriotic hues seems to affirm his enthusiasm. The motif of skydiver and parachute would recur throughout Laing’s practice during the 1960s, increasingly leading him towards abstraction and even sculpture as his fascination with pattern, repetition and objecthood intensified. In the present work, we are presented with the image distilled to bold, streamlined purity: a daredevil expression of youthful hope and clarity, alive with the thrill of new adventure.
Held in the same private collection since the late 1970s, Skydiver II (1963) is a dynamic example of Gerald Laing’s series of ‘Skydiver’ paintings. Created between 1963 and 1964, these seminal works stand among the great icons of the artist’s early oeuvre, with examples held in Tate, London, the Denver Art Museum, Colorado, and the University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque. Here, against a field of vivid cobalt blue, the skydiver’s outstretched arm creates a bold diagonal across the canvas: with volume conveyed in monochrome dots, his clothing contrasts strikingly with the bright blue sky and the perfect white disc of his helmet. The parachute billows behind him in a stream of undulating red and white stripes. The crisp, flat colours convey windblown silk and sky as much as they echo the work of British Op artist Bridget Riley; the skydiver himself, whose half-tone dots derive from commercial printing techniques, bears witness to Laing’s dialogue with Roy Lichtenstein, who was independently exploring similar ideas. Marking a key moment in the transatlantic development of Pop Art, Skydiver II captures the birth of a brave new world that would shatter the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of image-making. As Laing himself leaps into the unknown, the falling man becomes an emblem of exhilarating vertigo.
Laing studied at from St Martin’s School of Art in London between 1960 and 1964. During this period he spent the summer of 1963 working as an assistant to the American Pop artist Robert Indiana in Coenties Slip, Manhattan: it was there that he saw the photographs in Life magazine that would inspire the ‘Skydivers’. He painted the present work in Indiana’s studio, completing later paintings from the series back in London. Laing’s composition hybridises two distinct source images: the first that struck him was one of a parachute collapsing as a skydiver landed. ‘It was a free pattern of bright red and white bands,’ he recalled, ‘criss-crossed by slackening white shrouds and silhouetted against a pure blue sky … I combined this image with another of the man seeming to fly unhindered at altitude, arms spread wide, as the aircraft from which he has leapt speeds away from him’ (G. Laing, 2006, quoted in L. Ingram and R. Halliwell, eds., Gerald Laing Prints & Multiples, A Catalogue Raisonne, London 2006, p. 51). Testament to Laing’s keen visual ingenuity, the combination of these two elements furthers Skydiver II’s visual tension between abstract and figurative registers, at once picturing a body speeding through space and embracing the optical joys of pure colour and form.
'I was interested only in what I considered to be contemporary ‘heroic’ themes' Gerald Laing
Upon graduating from St Martin’s in 1964, Laing returned immediately to New York, where he would remain for the next five years. Alongside the ‘Astronauts’, ‘Dragsters’ and ‘Starlets’ that the artist produced during this period, the ‘Skydivers’ embody the outward-looking spirit of exploration, discovery and optimism he found there. For Laing, the mechanically-reproduced nature of his source images was as tantalising and miraculous as the world they portrayed. In post-war England, a social landscape defined by ‘dreariness and hardship’, he felt that ‘… the perfection of the photograph and the printed image, particularly in the proselytising form of the advertisement, represented not only an ideal but also a plan for the future which could replace a discredited past’ (G. Laing, quoted in ibid., p. 9). In New York—home to America’s booming advertising and media industries—Laing was brought face-to-face with the seductive promises of printed imagery. Pictures of fast cars, glamorous women and the glories of the Space Race were made all the more alluring by their glossy proliferation. There was, he recalls, ‘[a] notion that reproduced media images had a stronger sense of reality than reality itself’ (G. Laing, quoted in The Tate Gallery 1982-84: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, Tate Gallery, London, 1986, p. 222).
Laing’s early encounters with American artists, including Indiana, Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist, were equally infectious. He marvelled that ‘they eschewed the use of muddy palettes to which we seemed condemned, and mixed their paints wholesale on large sheets of glass … even their paint tubes were bigger than ours’ (G. Laing, quoted in ibid., p. 51). Skydiver II’s rhapsody of patriotic hues seems to affirm his enthusiasm. The motif of skydiver and parachute would recur throughout Laing’s practice during the 1960s, increasingly leading him towards abstraction and even sculpture as his fascination with pattern, repetition and objecthood intensified. In the present work, we are presented with the image distilled to bold, streamlined purity: a daredevil expression of youthful hope and clarity, alive with the thrill of new adventure.