The abstract art full of 'breasts and bottoms'

Is there any such thing as abstract art? Narratives and coherent harmonies seem to me always to emerge from the shapes and colours. Picasso’s cubist planes, as critics have noticed, usually disclose wine bottles, mandolins and bread baskets upon a table — icons of his Catholic childhood. The red and black slabs of Mark Rothko are our planet as mapped from outer space. Jackson Pollock created mad spiders’ webs. Klee is full of farmyard animals. Piet Mondrian’s grids are Holland’s dikes and polders.

Our own best abstract artist was Terry Frost. Here again the semicircles and thin looping lines are as representational, as ascertainable in the real world, as any horse by Stubbs or cloud by Constable. What looks like a geometric pattern has a local habitation and a name: St Ives, Cornwall. Frost’s allegedly abstract pictures are arrangements of small fishing boats moored and rocking in the harbour, with the giant sun and moon and stars rising in the background.

If you want to see the curves as something more suggestive — as ‘breasts and bottoms’ say — or his chevrons as ‘a graphic symbol of female cleavages, the vagina or even the act of penetration’ (as Roger Bristow surmises), Frost probably wouldn’t have complained. ‘If you lose interest in flirting,’ he once said, ‘you lose interest in life.’ Somebody who’d have kept anyone’s blood pressure on the boil was his neighbour in Cornwall (and my great chum — she’s a Welsh Mistress Quickly), Molly Parkin. Molly looked at a Frost canvas and claimed to see not ships and ropes but the stylised female form. ‘Is that me, flashing my tits or dropping my drawers?’ she asked the artist. ‘You did both, darling,’ Frost replied.