WHYTE'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 28 NOVEMBER 2016

William Crozier HRHA (1930-2011)

GARDEN AT NIGHT

oil on canvas

signed lower left; signed on reverse

64 by 66in. (162.56 by 167.64cm)

Provenance:

Claremorris Gallery, Co. Mayo;

Private collection

Crozier was born in Glasgow to Irish parents and educated at the Glasgow School of Art between 1949

and 1953. On graduating he spent time in Paris and Dublin before settling in London, where he gained a

reputation as an important young British artist through the early success and notoriety of his exhibitions

of assemblages and paintings at the ICA, Drian and the Arthur Tooth galleries, with whom he had a long

association.

Profoundly affected by post-war existential philosophy, Crozier allied himself and his work consciously

with contemporary European art throughout the 1950s and 1960s, rather than with the New York ab-

stractionists, who were more fashionable in the UK at the time. He was also part of the artistic and literary

world of 1950s Soho, a close associate of ‘the Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde, John Minton andWil-

liam Scott, and part of the expatriate middle-European and Irish intellectual circles in London of the time.

Crozier spent 1963 in southern Spain with the Irish poet Anthony Cronin; this proved pivotal to Crozier’s

development as an artist. On his return to the UK, he began a series of skeletal paintings which anticipat-

ed the ‘New Expressionist’ German painters of the 1980s, and which were influenced by Crozier’s visit in

1969 to Auschwitz and Belsen.

Based in London throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Crozier exhibited his works in London, Glasgow, Dub-

lin and all over Europe. Crozier spent much of 1960s and 1970s teaching. He became a citizen of Ireland

in 1973 and started spending more time in Ireland. From the 1980s, Crozier’s painting blossomed with a

new freedom and confidence, the result of his giving up teaching and the stimulus provided by his stu-

dios in West Cork in Ireland, and in Hampshire in England. His abstract landscapes and still life painting

used sumptuous colour to convey an emotional intensity. To the end of his life, he was endlessly con-

cerned with the challenge of creating a new language in figurative painting.

William Crozier represented Britain and Ireland at overseas exhibitions, and was awarded the Premio Lis-

sone in Milan in 1958 and the Oireachtas Gold medal for Painting in Dublin in 1994. In 1991 the Crawford

Art Gallery Cork and the Royal Hibernian Academy curated a retrospective of his work. He was elected to

Aosdána in 1992 and was elected an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. In 2005 Crozier

celebrated his 75th birthday with a major exhibition in Cork to celebrate the European Capital of Culture.

He celebrated his 80th year with a large exhibition of his current work at the Flowers Galleries. A con-

current exhibition of his painting of the 1950s and 60s was shown at the Pyms Gallery, London, which

triggered a reappraisal of his early painting. Acquisitions of his work by the Tate Gallery and the National

Gallery of Ireland quickly followed.

€20,000-€30,000 (£18,180-£27,270 approx.)