Andrew Lambirth

Gentleman abstractionist

Adrian Heath (1920—92), like so many artists, was a mass of contradictions. Jane Rye begins her excellent study of him by quoting Elizabeth Bishop: ‘A life’s work is summed up as the dialectic of captivity and freedom, of fixed form and poetic extravagance, of social norms and personal deviance.’ Heath thought of his painting as an attempt to reconcile the intellectual and the sensual, a meeting point of classical and romantic. Roger Hilton complained that Heath couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be a painter or an accountant. Certainly, Heath did not conform to the public’s cherished image of the artist as bohemian. He wore a suit to visit galleries, came from a long line of soldiers and colonial administrators, had been educated at Bryanston and enjoyed private means. Some called him a ‘gentleman abstractionist’, yet few possessed his scholarship and intelligence or were anything like as devoted to a radical notion of the avant-garde.

Born in Burma, Heath was an only child and was soon sent back to England where he was brought up by women. Good at games, he was weak at maths and failed the entrance exam for the Royal Navy. Drawn to art, he admired flamboyant stylists such as Sargent and wanted to be a portrait painter. In 1939 he worked with Stanhope Forbes in Newlyn, fell in love for the first time, and studied briefly at the Slade before joining the RAF. After his plane crashed on active service, he became a PoW and continued to paint in captivity, inspiring a number of fellow prisoners, including Terry Frost. But Heath was not content to sit back and paint. He escaped from camp four times, and spent a year in solitary confinement, during which time he said he started seriously thinking about abstract shapes, by rearranging in his mind’s eye the cracks in the wall.

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