WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 6 JUNE 2022 AT 6PM

86 63 Patrick Heron CBE (1920-1999) EMERALDWITH REDS AND CERULEUM : FEBRUARY- APRIL 1977 oil on canvas signed, titled and dated on reverse 59.50 by 82.75in. (151.1 by 210.2cm) Provenance: Waddingtons, 1990; Private collection, 1990-2003; Collection of George and Maura McClelland Exhibited: Patrick Heron - Paintings 1950-55 and 1970-77’, Oriel Gallery, Cardiff, 5-28 April 1979, catalogue no. 18; ‘Paintings by Patrick Heron 1965-1977’, The University of Texas at Austin Art Museum, 28 March to 7 May 1978, catalogue no. 27; ‘Patrick Heron - Gouaches’, Waddington & Tooth Galleries, London, December 1977; ‘Coast-Lines’, IMMA Main Galleries, Dublin, 13 October to 16 September 2018 Literature: Isabel Hitchman, Patrick Heron, Patrick Heron, Paintings 1950-55 and 1970-77. Oriel, Cardiff, 1979, p. 14 (illustrated, b&w); Patrick Heron, R. C. Kenedy, Alan Bowness, Kelly Fearing et.al, Paintings by Patrick Heron 1965-1977. The University of Texas at Austin Art Museum, Texas, 1978, Unpaginated (illustrated, colour); Kelly Fearing, Patrick Heron, The Colour of Colour. E William Doty Lectures in Fine Arts, Third Series 1978. The University of Fine Arts, Austin, Texas, 1978, Unpaginated (illustrated, colour) Emerald with Reds and Cerulean, 1977 was executed during a pivotal period in Patrick Heron’s career from the mid-1960s when his visual language moved away from the motifs which defined his earlier work, the soft-edged circles and squares, to a more personal idiom, his ‘wobbly, hard-edge’ forms, a reference to the more linear work of this time and his answer in some respects to the hard-edged abstraction of the New York painters. In the artist’s words, ‘The ‘wobbly hard-edge’ which is a feature of all my work since 1965 has itself become the source, or vehicle I should perhaps say, of what still looks to me to be a limitless variety of spatial ambiguities or mysteries. Most obvious of these spatial ambiguities or contradictions are those cases where the ‘drawing’ of the outline of a colour-area implies recession but its colour generates the opposite sensation of something protruding - or vice versa.” (Patrick Heron, ‘The Shape of Colour’, The Power Lecture in Contemporary Art, 1973) Patrick Heron was born in Leeds and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1937 to 1939. In the 1940s Heron worked as an art critic for the New English Weekly, New Statesman and Nation and Arts (New York). In the 1950s he relocated to Cornwall and became identified with the St. Ives artists, among them Ben Nicholson, Roger Hilton and, later, Irish artist Tony O’Malley. Heron declined to accept a knighthood from Margaret Thatcher’s government and rejected an invitation to become a member of the Royal Academy. He was a Trustee of The Tate Gallery from 1980-1987 and was the subject of a major retrospective there in 1998, the year before his death. Tate St Ives hosted another landmark retrospective twenty years later which toured to Turner Contemporary, Margate, until January 2019. The importance of colour in Patrick Heron’s oeuvre cannot be underestimated. It is both the subject and the mechanism for communicating his unique interpretation of the world and while his paintings do not figuratively represent the surroundings of his studio and home the essence of them is felt through his expert use of form, line and colour. The artist’s daughter, Katharine Heron, a Professor of Architecture, recalled for the 2018 Tate retrospective the influence of the French masters on her father’s work, particularly Henri Matisse: ”Patrick had an experiential spatial approach to paintings. I have a vivid memory of going to Paris with him and my mother, Delia, in 1970 to see the centennial exhibition of Matisse at the Grand Palais. Here were the rarely seen (and never before seen by Patrick) great paintings collected by Sergei Chtchoukine in Russia - La Danse 1909 and La Musique 1910 - each measuring 2.6 metres in height and 3.91 in length. Patrick walked up and down the space before them, his figure close enough to their surfaces to paint them himself, immersed in their majestic size and absorbed by their colour.” Emerald with Reds and Cerulean, 1977 was on long-term loan to the Irish Museum of Modern Art from the prestigious collection of George and Maura McClelland and was most recently included in their 2018 show ‘Coast-Lines’ where it was shown in room 3 alongside the work of another champion of British abstract art, John Hoyland and American artist, gallerist and pioneer of the ‘found object’ Betty Parsons. Its inclusion in this show was apt with the museum describing ‘Coast-Lines’ as “Drawing on the paradox implicit in the word ‘coastline’ - for never has a coast followed a linear course - the title…[throwing] a line around a 12 month program of changing displays of artworks and archival material that [explore] our sense of place, perception, representation and memory.”The show included numerous other renowned artists including Dorothy Cross, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Donald Teskey, Tony O’Malley, Bridget Riley to name but a few each mapping what the senses perceive through their respective practice. In 2021 London gallery Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert presented their first exhibition of Heron’s work - Patrick Heron: The Colour of Colour Paintings 1965-1977 - since taking on representation of the artist’s estate. The present work Emerald with Reds and Cerulean, 1977 can be seen in a studio photograph in their exhibition catalogue captioned: Paintings in progress at Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, 1977 alongside four other works by the artist. This seminal work would have made an appropriate addition to this most recent celebration of Heron’s oeuvre. The estate of Patrick Heron is preparing the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the Artist’s work and would like to hear from owners of any works by Patrick Heron, so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue. Please write to The Estate of Patrick Heron, c/o Whyte’s, 38 Molesworth Street, Dublin 2. We are grateful to Dr AndrewWilson for his kind assistance in cataloguing this lot. €150,000-€200,000 (£128,210-£170,940 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot63