Lot 174
William Gear R.A., F.R.S.A., R.B.S.A. (British 1915-1997) §
Still Life with Bottle, 1955
£9,450
Auction: 28 October 2022 from 10:00 BST
Description
signed and dated (lower right), signed, titled and dated 'Aug. '55' (to reverse), oil on canvas
Dimensions
Provenance
Provenance:
Private Collection, London, acquired directly from the artist circa 1985.
Footnote
William Gear was relatively rare amongst British artists of the 1950s in his being a fully paid-up member of a European avant-garde movement: in his case, CoBrA, named after the three key sites of affiliation: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.
Gear had spent the years immediately after the war in Paris, still just about the centre of the art world (before New York began to draw artists across the Atlantic) and had become entwined in what was known as the Ecole de Paris, where European painting started its own journey towards abstraction. In the French capital, he became friends with Nicholas de Staël and there is a definite confluence between the two artists' work in the early 1950s, as can be seen in Still Life with Bottle. An image that is nominally figurative (depicting objects in a three-dimensional space) but which is really about abstract values – the interplay of colour and form, creating a procession for the eye to travel around the painting, which in turn asserts its own flatness – its artificiality – in the heavy slabs of colour applied with a palette knife. The abstract nature of the work is further enhanced by its loose orthogonal structure, a Giorgio Morandi distilled through Piet Mondrian, so it could – if one wanted – be read as entirely abstract, the direction of travel for Gear himself and his work of the 1960s.
Gear’s palette in the mid-50s is often dominated by these steely blues, flat greys and blacks – close harmonies of tone through which Gear creates subtle shifts of mood. Here his work comes close to another friend from the Ecole de Paris, Pierre Soulages, himself a master of the emotive oscillation between black and blue.
