Andrew Lambirth talks to Alan Reynolds, who abandoned a lucrative career as a landscape painter to follow his instincts towards abstraction
At the age of 85, Alan Reynolds is enjoying a sudden and well-deserved flurry of interest in his work. A superb monograph has just been published on his art, written by Michael Harrison, director of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, and to launch the book there’s an exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art (23 Dering Street, W1, until 26 March). This is Reynolds’s seventh solo show at the gallery, which has successfully represented him since 1978, and which has been responsible for promoting his work in Europe. The new work consists of white reliefs and pencil drawings, which continue Reynolds’s exploration of the dynamic relationships between the horizontal and the vertical. The work can look a trifle austere at first glance, but the exquisitely balanced tonal drawings display a lyricism that leads you to the heart of his endeavour.
Reynolds’s work has not always been so obviously abstract. In the 1950s, he made such a name with his landscape paintings that he was dubbed ‘the golden boy of post-neo romanticism’. He was seen as the saviour of the English landscape tradition, heir to Samuel Palmer, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland. His 1956 exhibition at the Redfern Gallery was one of the most successful and talked-about of that decade, but within a couple of years he was moving away from landscape towards art that engaged more directly with poetry, music, harmony; in other words, he was becoming a geometric abstractionist. For just half a dozen years he was a painter of organic form, particularly noted for his ears of wheat and teazels. By 1958 he was working exclusively in straight lines and circles. What brought about this dramatic change?
In the first place, it’s important to realise that Reynolds was never a straightforward realist. He made representational paintings, but, as he says, ‘I never painted landscape on the spot, apart from one occasion when our dear old drawing master took us out into the countryside and we did a few oil sketches.’ It’s clear that right from the start there was a great formality in his approach — an understanding of the essentially abstract construction of a painting — and when I suggest that Reynolds is really a formal artist he agrees. ‘Yes, I suppose I am. I got that of course through my baptism in Germany of modern art, after the war.’ Reynolds was called up in 1944, aged 18, and volunteered for action with the Highland Light Infantry. ‘When the war finished, my division was broken up. We were all sent off to different places and I finished up training as an army schoolmaster and eventually settled in Hanover for about a year and a half.’ That was where Reynolds first encountered avant-garde art. ‘It was the most important experience I had, I would think.’
Back in England it took time to understand the implications of what he’d experienced. ‘I was on a high over what I’d seen in Germany but I didn’t understand the philosophy. I call it that but for an artist to have an aesthetic philosophy is poisonous in this country — you can get shot for that. When I came back here I was totally baffled by the more sophisticated art circles in London. It was such a gloomy sort of set-up, partly as a result of the war, I suppose, an indrawn nationalism. You can understand it: the country had been through a hell of a time and it had been cut off culturally, no question of that.’
The post-war years saw a gradual opening up and Reynolds can vividly remember the first Skira books coming out when he was a student. (He studied at Woolwich Polytechnic School of Art, 1948–52, then spent a year at the Royal College where he won a medal for painting.) Before that there had been no art books to speak of — a fact we tend to overlook with our glut of words and images today. Travel was limited: difficult to get to Paris, let alone Hanover or Munich. ‘The art world or art groups in Europe are much more open and accessible, and always have been, than in this country. France and Germany are big countries, and Germany especially has centres of excellence everywhere — a legacy of the old princedoms. It’s not all centred on one place, like London, and it stops this dictatorship — the rule of the arbiters of taste that we have here.’
Reynolds’s first one-man exhibition was at the Redfern Gallery in 1952 while he was still a student, and his distinctive silhouetted style, in which dark linear forms stand out against luminous backgrounds, caught on at once. He says his early success was embarrassing, though the financial rewards were welcome.
The problem was that success created a demand for more of the same, and Reynolds knew his art had to develop. ‘I was after something else, I had something ticking away inside me. I was lucky enough to read some things by Herbert Read, particularly his Faber book on Klee, and it was just like getting a pat on the back. It was marvellous — I thought, “This man’s been there.” Read was a great scholar and an extraordinary man and he was British! I only met him twice but he gave me a lot of support.’
Klee was evidently a crucial influence on Reynolds, more important even than other admired European masters such as Arp or Mondrian. ‘What I really got from Klee was an aesthetic philosophy. He was a wonderfully accomplished musician — first violin for the Bern chamber orchestra, for a start — and he brought something of the insight of music into statements he made on visual art. He was incredibly articulate and also into metaphysics and that again is a German trait.’ It was a European view of art that Reynolds now responded to, not a nationalist celebration of English landscape. As he says, ‘I’ve been a European since the war finished. I think of myself first as a European and an Anglo–Scot after that.’
He has Scottish blood on his father’s side, his mother hailed from Suffolk, and he grew up in Newmarket. As an adult, Reynolds settled in Kent, where he still lives. But instead of painting the Kentish landscape, he chose to eliminate the romantic figurative element and concentrate on art that dealt with balance and equilibrium. He found his true voice in mid-life and began to make contemplative work that is a distillation of the visual world. In 1967 he abandoned painting entirely to make constructed reliefs, and for the past 30 years he has made only white reliefs, tonal drawings and woodcuts. Yet there is great richness in the subtleties of his work.
It takes courage to abandon a lucrative career as a popular landscape painter in order to follow your instincts and make rigorous abstractions. Reynolds never again enjoyed the same degree of commercial success, and had to teach at art schools until he retired in 1990. These days, his reputation stands higher in France and Germany than it does in his homeland. Neglected by the English art establishment, he nevertheless stuck to his guns and continues to produce the most meticulous body of drawn and constructed abstract art, exploring rhythm, interval and volume through black and white, shadow and light.
As you look closer, the continuity emerges between the early landscapes and the current reliefs: there is no great change of direction, no sudden shift from organic to abstract. As Reynolds says, the geometric was always there: the white buildings in his early landscapes prefigure the all-white reliefs of later years. There’s an unfounded art-world rumour that he rejects his early work, but this makes him cross, for examples of it still hang on his walls at home and form an essential part of the narrative of his art.
In Michael Harrison, Reynolds has found the perfect interpreter. Harrison trained as a sculptor, made his own wood constructions and understands
the process inside-out. He writes with refreshing clarity and charts the course of Reynolds’s career with insight and understanding. His monograph (published by Lund Humphries at £40) is a model of lucidity: beautifully designed by Dalrymple and concisely illustrated, it reads extremely well. It’s a testament to a lifetime of devoted effort, for which Alan Reynolds is now justly celebrated.
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