Lot 14
Alan Davie C.B.E., R.A., H.R.S.A. (British 1920-2014) ‡§
Flutter By Night, 1962
£35,201
Auction: 26 October 2023 from 18:00 BST
Description
signed, titled, dated and inscribed Opus O.445 (verso)
oil on canvas
Dimensions
Provenance
Provenance
Gimpel Fils, London, where acquired by Mrs Charles Benenson, August 1963
Gimpel Fils, London, where acquired by the present owner, November 2007
Literature
Alan Bowness, Alan Davie, Lund Humphries, London, 1967, cat. no.381,
Footnote
Alan Davie once noted: ‘Painting is a continuous process which has no beginning or end. There never really is a point in time when painting is NOT’. This sentiment remained his guiding principle across a career spanning over 70 years. Difficult to pin-down as an artist, he worked across disciplines throughout his life: as well as exhibiting his paintings and printmaking internationally, he also designed and made jewellery, wrote poetry and performed as a professional music, most notably as a jazz saxophonist, but also as a cellist and pianist. Davie felt that all these interests and outputs supported and evolved across each other, rather than existing as distinct entities.
Davie was equally as diverse in the sources of his inspiration, seeking it across space and time. He, like many artists of his generation, had a specific interest in Jungian ideas of the ‘collective unconscious’, aiming to paint without thought and consideration and to utilise symbols that had recurred across time periods and distance, a method similar to that of improvisation in jazz. Yet, as was so concisely put in the artist’s obituary, published in The Guardian, ‘the miracle was that out of an eclectic art that was part Celtic, part tribal Hopi, part Hindu or Jain or Tibetan Buddhist, part African and part pre-Columbian, with a hint of William Blake, there came painting of power and individuality.’
Despite such wide-ranging influences and inspirations, Davie’s art is always unmistakeably his and this is particularly clear in an example like the present work. Flutter by Night dates from 1962, an interesting moment in Davie’s artistic life. With the benefit of hindsight and the awareness of the longevity of his career, it feels like a relatively early work but is in fact from a period in which he had already gained significant momentum as an artist. It follows his visit to the U.S.A. in 1956 where he exhibited (with the ground-breaking Catherine Viviano Gallery) and also met artists including Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. It also follows a significant retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1958. Another retrospective took place at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in the same year as this painting was made. It is easy to feel a sense of this inspiration and energy in Flutter by Night; expressive and energetic, the gestural brushwork and bright colour break their way through the swathes of grey. Davie was said to have developed his understanding of the role of the artist from Paul Klee: ‘he neither serves nor rules – he transmits.’ In Flutter by Night Davie succeeds in this quest, his painterly improvisation viscerally conveying his vigorous vision, reaching across time and space all the way out to reach us, in the here and now.
