Taking to the skies

In the first retrospective of his work for nearly 40 years, Peter Lanyon (1918–64) is given the kind of recognition long his due.

In the first retrospective of his work for nearly 40 years, Peter Lanyon (1918–64) is given the kind of recognition long his due. A major figure in the St Ives group, his work holds its own on an international stage even though it remains rooted in his native Cornwall. He was an inventive and innovative painter who conjured up the sensation of being in certain places and experiencing particular weather conditions. This was not an art bound to the earth’s surface, and it began by delving beneath it, with the Cornish miners, and increasingly rising above it — quite literally — into the air in a glider. Lanyon took up gliding in 1959, and he died aged only 46, following a gliding accident. The question on everyone’s lips — what might he have done had he lived? — is answered in part by the unsettling work in the last room of this exhibition.

Lanyon believed that the artist occupied an important and responsible position in society ‘at the centre of the new and emerging myths of our time’. He wasn’t interested in the self-indulgent artist, obsessed with autobiographical musings. For him the artist was ‘not just a recorder of impulses but also a responsible person, responsible to man. That means to man’s aspirations as well as his aberrations.’ In pursuit of his investigation into man’s condition in relation to his surroundings, Lanyon moved rapidly through a stylistic evolution that encompassed cubist-inflected subterranean imagery and his own interpretations of tachism and abstract expressionism. Although often compared to de Kooning, his work has a potent individuality that makes it hard to categorise.