Lanyon at Tate St. Ives

Walter Benjamin claimed that in the age of mechanical reproduction original art loses its aura, whether this is true or not (the aura of the Mona Lisa does not seem to have diminished after how many countless postcard sales), the one thing that reproduction does deny is a work of arts sheer physicality, and this certainly applies to the work of Peter Lanyon.
Lanyon, the only native born member of the so-called St Ives group, is long overdue a retrospective at Tate St Ives as he is surely the closest Britain has ever come to having a home-grown abstract expressionist painter to rival those from across the Atlantic.
Lanyon was a difficult character, and managed to fall out with almost everyone within the claustrophobic atmosphere of the St Ives art-world (he reportedly made a habit of urinating against Ben Nicholson’s wall on his way back from the pub in the hope it may eventually cause his house to collapse). However, his commitment to his art was immense, and all the clichés we associate with Pollock et al were just as true of Lanyon.
Lanyon was primarily a painter of landscape, figures appear as an afterthought, mere ghostly forms coalescing out of the black lines and abstract shapes that define his mid period work. The earliest work represented here illustrates his huge debt to Naum Gabo and Ben Nicholson, the formers constructions taught Lanyon about representing space and gave him a lifelong attachment to making these “experiments in space”, both as an end in themselves and as 3D studies for later paintings. Nicholson’s influence is more problematic, as they are very different painters with very different agendas. Nicholson was a self-styled internationalist and Lanyon was a died-in-the-wool Cornishman. The Yellow Runner (1946) and Landscape with Cup (1946) both have the tell-tale Nicholson motifs of faux naïf horse and cup, enclosed by ovals in clearly defined landscapes, but these objects soon disappear in Prelude and Generation (1947) replaced by swooping oval forms enclosing other organic shapes. These heavily worked pieces lack vitality and it is plain to see that Lanyon is struggling to express the depth of his feeling about the landscape with this mannered style.
It is with Trevalgan (1951) that Lanyon hits his stride, with a powerful and confident use of colour and form: ovals and lines defining field formations that are almost map like. These are deeply personal evocations of the Cornish landscape. With the hindsight of his later work you are tempted to call them ‘land-bound’, almost subterranean in their earthiness.
Portleven (1951), below, is Lanyon’s multi dimensional breakthrough work (painted in 4 hours after Lanyon destroyed the much laboured over first version), a view of the Cornish coastal village as seen from a variety of viewpoints, almost a two-dimensional construction on canvas.
Lanyon’s most powerful (and perhaps best known) work, St Just (1953) is the painting where Lanyon shakes off his influences. Much has been written about this work, especially in relation to Lanyon’s feeling for all things Cornish. It is almost a riposte to those modernist interlopers of St Ives busy painting and carving tasteful pieces that float above the world. Lanyon’s work maybe abstract but it is as powerful an evocation of place as anything Constable painted. In St Just we have a mineshaft running down the centre of the painting topped by barbed wire (Lanyon also stressed this could also be seen as a crucifix, although this interpretation seems more like an afterthought). This is a great physical painting, greens and yellows and blacks are smeared and scraped and drawn on with real vigour and strength. It is earthy and heartfelt, and you do not doubt that Lanyon really laboured over it. Lanyon certainly felt guilt that his family had played a part in imposing these awful working conditions on the Cornish tin miners, and painted St Just as a form of memorial. St. Just bristles with energy and tension, and to see it in the flesh is a powerful experience.
Away from his beloved Cornwall, Lanyon struggled, and the Italian paintings Primavera and Saracinesco (1953) are not successful: the lighter mood and colours lack the tension of the Cornish works and although accomplished, they veer towards the decorative.
In 1959 Lanyon took up gliding, a natural progression as his 1956 work High Ground seems to lift the viewer into the sky. Lanyon’s paintings are now transformed, gone are the heavy abstract expressionist landscapes, replaced by a lightness of touch. They are now all swoops and arcs and large patches of pure space. Lanyon is now painting air (his very own Constable cloud studies). If the Met Office had a favourite painter it would surely be Lanyon. This is made explicit in Thermal (1960), where Lanyon has left the ground completely and paints with a palette of blues and whites.
This is Lanyon’s most successful period: the confidence and scale of his work is extremely impressive and his colour palette is assured. However, the art world was moving inexorably on and the influence of Pop Art starts to show in Lanyon’s work from 1963. Lanyon’s colours are flatter and now appear in isolation, gone are the subtle gradations and textures, replaced by areas of pure red and blue. These later works seem to be striving to be more playful, in the spirit of Pop, but Lanyon is at his best when a self consciously serious painter and these later works are not wholly successful. Lanyon died in 1964, the result of complications following a gliding accident. Like all painters who die mid-career there is speculation about where Lanyon would have ended up had he lived and worked to a ripe old age. As this exhibition makes clear it is an intriguing question as his work tracks all the major developments in British art that were occurring in his lifetime.