.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
In 1948 Alan Davie, with his wife Bili, embarked on the Edward Grant travelling scholarship which he had been awarded in 1941. They journeyed through France and Switzerland ending up in Venice during the first Venice Biennale since the War. During the Biennale Davie was able to see Peggy Guggenheim's collection exhibited in the Greek Pavilion. Later in the same year he held a small one-man exhibition at the Galleria Sandri in Venice and Peggy Guggenheim purchased Music of the Autumn Landscape. She encouraged and supported his work and exposed him to the work of the American contemporary artists, Rothko, Motherwell and Pollock in her collection.
By 1956, the date that White Magician was painted, Davie had held four solo exhibitions with Gimpel Fils in London, of which the last in 1956 was critically acclaimed. In the same year he also held his first one man exhibition in New York at the Catherine Viviano Gallery, which was a resounding success with paintings purchased by the Museum of Modern Art and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, as well as by several private collectors, amongst them Stanley Seeger, Jnr.
As is well known, the search for magic in painting led Davie deep into what Jungian psychology would call the collective unconscious, and he combined this with his interest in Zen Buddhism and oriental mysticism. His paintings are laden with symbolic and mystical elements, drawing from many ancient cultures and traditions, possibly even magical realism. In White Magician the anthropomorphic writhing figure between the yellow cube and blue clock is not clearly defined, is it surrounding the cage-like structure from which protrude two legs, seemingly belonging to a zebra? Or is this the figure alluded to in the title of the work? Whilst the lower left corner of the structure hints at an equine, or zebra like head. This centre of intense visual activity, accentuated by the impasto, scraping back, layering and dripped paint is precariously balanced on the black central line that divides the painting horizontally – possible allusions to a finely balanced magician's cage and even a circus tightrope. This is placed on a background that hints at further imagery or ‘presences’ through the yellow and brown mists and purposeful dripped paint. His painting has an inner compulsion, where the ‘miraculous’ happens, as Davie stated in the catalogue for his first retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, June 1958, "When I am working, I am aware of a striving, a yearning, the making of many impossible attempts at a kind of transmutation – a searching for a formula for the magical conjuring of the unknowable. Many times the end seems just within reach, only to fly to pieces before me as I reach for it".
‘The artist was the first magician and the first spiritual leader, and indeed today he must take the role of arch-priest of the new spiritualism’ (Alan Davie quoted in Towards a New Definition of Art, Some Notes on (NOW) Painting, 28 October 1959, see exhibition catalogue, Alan Davie, Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zürich, April - May 1960).
A study for The White Magician, No. 3 was sold in Abstraction: Post-War Paintings from the Collection of David Thomson in London in 2013 for £86,500.
By 1956, the date that White Magician was painted, Davie had held four solo exhibitions with Gimpel Fils in London, of which the last in 1956 was critically acclaimed. In the same year he also held his first one man exhibition in New York at the Catherine Viviano Gallery, which was a resounding success with paintings purchased by the Museum of Modern Art and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, as well as by several private collectors, amongst them Stanley Seeger, Jnr.
As is well known, the search for magic in painting led Davie deep into what Jungian psychology would call the collective unconscious, and he combined this with his interest in Zen Buddhism and oriental mysticism. His paintings are laden with symbolic and mystical elements, drawing from many ancient cultures and traditions, possibly even magical realism. In White Magician the anthropomorphic writhing figure between the yellow cube and blue clock is not clearly defined, is it surrounding the cage-like structure from which protrude two legs, seemingly belonging to a zebra? Or is this the figure alluded to in the title of the work? Whilst the lower left corner of the structure hints at an equine, or zebra like head. This centre of intense visual activity, accentuated by the impasto, scraping back, layering and dripped paint is precariously balanced on the black central line that divides the painting horizontally – possible allusions to a finely balanced magician's cage and even a circus tightrope. This is placed on a background that hints at further imagery or ‘presences’ through the yellow and brown mists and purposeful dripped paint. His painting has an inner compulsion, where the ‘miraculous’ happens, as Davie stated in the catalogue for his first retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, June 1958, "When I am working, I am aware of a striving, a yearning, the making of many impossible attempts at a kind of transmutation – a searching for a formula for the magical conjuring of the unknowable. Many times the end seems just within reach, only to fly to pieces before me as I reach for it".
‘The artist was the first magician and the first spiritual leader, and indeed today he must take the role of arch-priest of the new spiritualism’ (Alan Davie quoted in Towards a New Definition of Art, Some Notes on (NOW) Painting, 28 October 1959, see exhibition catalogue, Alan Davie, Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zürich, April - May 1960).
A study for The White Magician, No. 3 was sold in Abstraction: Post-War Paintings from the Collection of David Thomson in London in 2013 for £86,500.