.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
Fishermen with Sprat Nets II is a richly worked and intimate scene of two fishermen at work, their careful handling of their catch as skilful as Clough’s distinctive and unique style. Her palette is characteristically dark: ochres, russets and greys, but through her handling of the paint – scraping, scuffing and scratching, the jewel-like flashes of scarlet, turquoise and violet peek through, imbuing this ordinary scene with remarkable sensitivity and detail.
Clough’s family holidayed regularly in Southwold in Suffolk in the 1940s, and she was drawn to the bustle of the nearby ports of Aldeburgh and Lowestoft, where she painted fishermen, lorry drivers and dockworkers surrounded by fishing sheds, boats, nets, floats and boxes of fish. For Clough, the ordinary objects, buildings and workers, so often overlooked by passers-by, were rich sources of inspiration, and the dockside activity of fishermen at Lowestoft and along the Thames became the focus of her work during the late 1940s.
Clough wrote that painting this subject was ‘an attempt to introduce the figure into a contemporary urban landscape without the devices of the past, without the myths of Mars or Venus or the legends of Breughel. I was trying to update the classical Western concern with the figure without benefit of religious or mythical context' (quoted in an interview with Bryan Robertson, cited in exhibition catalogue, Prunella Clough: New Paintings 1979-82, London, Warwick Arts Trust, 1982, p. 3).
Engaged in manual labour, the figures in the paintings of this period are almost inseparable from their surroundings through Clough’s semi-Cubist treatment of them. Indeed, like the Cubists and Futurists, Clough depicts her human subjects with as much intensity and focus as their work and their environment. Fishermen with Sprat Nets II relates closely to the oil of the previous year, Fishermen with Sprat Nets (Pembroke College, Oxford). In both paintings, Clough depicts the man and his environment equally, the two fishermen, their net and silvery fish are all held in perfect compositional tension.
In 1960, Michael Middleton wrote that the effect of this was to dehumanise the worker: he is ‘cast into anonymity by an identification with his labour or surroundings so great that it is not always easy at first to disentangle him: his feelings, skills, memories have been subordinated to his existence as a statistic, a producer of man-hours, a figure in a cloud of steam, the instrument and product of a pattern of society too complex for the old humanities’ (introduction to exhibition catalogue, Prunella Clough, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1960, p. 9).
Margaret Garlake, however, offered a different interpretation of these paintings, suggesting that they depict individuals: 'In her various series of worker paintings, made during the fifteen years after the war, Clough associated herself with an enclave of hitherto male-dominated practice in which she side-stepped both heroicisation and genre by her negotiation of a territory between modernism and realism. ... Clough's workers are simultaneously defined by and define their work, but they are not reduced to mechanical cyphers. Their absorption is the opposite of alienation; her worker paintings reflect the dignity and value of labour’ (New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society, New Haven, 1998, pp. 136-137).
Clough’s family holidayed regularly in Southwold in Suffolk in the 1940s, and she was drawn to the bustle of the nearby ports of Aldeburgh and Lowestoft, where she painted fishermen, lorry drivers and dockworkers surrounded by fishing sheds, boats, nets, floats and boxes of fish. For Clough, the ordinary objects, buildings and workers, so often overlooked by passers-by, were rich sources of inspiration, and the dockside activity of fishermen at Lowestoft and along the Thames became the focus of her work during the late 1940s.
Clough wrote that painting this subject was ‘an attempt to introduce the figure into a contemporary urban landscape without the devices of the past, without the myths of Mars or Venus or the legends of Breughel. I was trying to update the classical Western concern with the figure without benefit of religious or mythical context' (quoted in an interview with Bryan Robertson, cited in exhibition catalogue, Prunella Clough: New Paintings 1979-82, London, Warwick Arts Trust, 1982, p. 3).
Engaged in manual labour, the figures in the paintings of this period are almost inseparable from their surroundings through Clough’s semi-Cubist treatment of them. Indeed, like the Cubists and Futurists, Clough depicts her human subjects with as much intensity and focus as their work and their environment. Fishermen with Sprat Nets II relates closely to the oil of the previous year, Fishermen with Sprat Nets (Pembroke College, Oxford). In both paintings, Clough depicts the man and his environment equally, the two fishermen, their net and silvery fish are all held in perfect compositional tension.
In 1960, Michael Middleton wrote that the effect of this was to dehumanise the worker: he is ‘cast into anonymity by an identification with his labour or surroundings so great that it is not always easy at first to disentangle him: his feelings, skills, memories have been subordinated to his existence as a statistic, a producer of man-hours, a figure in a cloud of steam, the instrument and product of a pattern of society too complex for the old humanities’ (introduction to exhibition catalogue, Prunella Clough, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1960, p. 9).
Margaret Garlake, however, offered a different interpretation of these paintings, suggesting that they depict individuals: 'In her various series of worker paintings, made during the fifteen years after the war, Clough associated herself with an enclave of hitherto male-dominated practice in which she side-stepped both heroicisation and genre by her negotiation of a territory between modernism and realism. ... Clough's workers are simultaneously defined by and define their work, but they are not reduced to mechanical cyphers. Their absorption is the opposite of alienation; her worker paintings reflect the dignity and value of labour’ (New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society, New Haven, 1998, pp. 136-137).