Saturday, July 28, 2018

Figuration in Paint – Nineteen Sixties

Carel Weight
The Friends
1968
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

Ruskin Spear
Professor Carel Weight
1961
oil paint on board
Tate Gallery

Richard Eurich
Beach with Bathers
1969
oil paint on board
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Bather: August 4th 1961
1961
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

– W.S. Merwin, from The Lice (Atheneum, 1967)

Patrick Caulfield
Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi (after Delacroix)
1963
oil paint on board
Tate Gallery

Josef Herman
Study for 'Dusk'
1965
gouache on paper
Tate Gallery

John Lessore
Annonciade
1961-77
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

Isabel Rawsthorne
Baboon and Child
ca. 1964
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

Isabel Rawsthorne
Male Baboon
ca. 1964
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

The Unknown Travelers

Lugged to the gray arbor,
I have climbed this snow-stone on my face,
My stick, but what, snapped the avalanche
The air filled with slowly falling rocks

Breathed in deeply – arrived,
The white room, a table covered
With a towel, mug of ice – fear
Among the legs of a chair, the ashman,
Purple and gray she starts upright in her chair.

– John Ashbery, from The Tennis Court Oath (Wesleyan University Press, 1962)

Anthony Fry
Dance, Blue and Yellow
1960
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

Antonio Saura
Imaginary Portrait of Goya
1966
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

Joseph Beuys
Tails
1962
oil paint and felt on canvas
Tate Gallery

Leonora Carrington
Eluhim
1960
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery

Robert Medley
Figuration on White
1963
oil paint on canvas
Tate Gallery