Secret revealed
Andrew Lambirth
Dennis Creffield: A Retrospective Flowers East, 82 Kingsland Road, E2, until 3 April Nine Abstract Artists — Revisited Osborne Samuel, 23a Bruton Street, 1+1, until 9 April ‘Mr Jeremy Moon Experiments’ Rocket Gallery, 13 Old Burlington Street, 1+1, until 2 April Jeff Gibbons: Paintings Art Space Gallery, 84 St Peter’s Street, N1, until 16 April The Flowers emporium in Shoreditch, which does such a competent job of purveying art to the chattering classes, shows an eclectic range of artists, from the geometrically abstract to the photo-realistic. Dennis Creffield (born 1931) belongs to neither extreme, but fits into that fruitful expressionist middle ground where the quondam students of David Bomberg struggle with charcoal and pigment to discover the ‘actuality’ of a subject. Flowers must be heartily congratulated on having mounted a decent retrospective of Creffield’s work, for we have seen little of it in London (besides an exhibition of the Orford Ness pictures a decade ago) since the magnificent English Cathedrals show at Camden Arts Centre in 1990. Now the greater part of its gallery space is devoted to showing some 66 works, both paintings and drawings, a good number borrowed back from private and public collections, including the Tate and the Arts Council. Inevitably, some of the finest images are not for sale, but a proper sample of Creffield’s work is on view.
Creffield is best known as a draughtsman, and the first and overwhelming impression on walking in off the street is of charcoal imagery: drawings of subjects such as anxious father, mother and baby, Nijinsky as Petrushka and the Cathedrals themselves, both English and French, occupying the end wall like the massed flanks of the army of God. (And these were drawn by an artist who does believe that the world is ‘the handiwork of God’.) There are paintings in this room, but they are surrounded by seven times as many drawings. The other downstairs gallery, looking out on to the street, showcases four large oils, including two versions of the lyrical ‘Lovers’ theme, intriguingly based on a 19th-century photograph of two girls in a bordello. Upstairs are earlier works, including a self-portrait done at the age of 16 on a tall thin panel, and a 1959 London landscape ‘The Isle of Dogs from Greenwich Observatory’, which emanates an austere but palpable presence. Other subjects include the rooftops of Leeds (where Creffield was Gregory Fellow in Painting 1964–8) and the beach at Brighton. The paintings will come as a revelation to many, challenging Creffield’s reputation as ‘one of England’s closely guarded secrets’. Kitaj wrote that more than 15 years ago and went on to say, ‘It’s about time someone blew his cover.’ This exhibition does just that.
A considerable service to lovers of mid20th-century abstraction has been volunteered by Osborne Samuel, which has reprinted the well-nigh unobtainable book Nine Abstract Artists by Lawrence Alloway, published in 1954 by Alec Tiranti. Its current show reprises the 1955 Redfern Gallery exhibition that built upon Alloway’s text, and accompanies it with a double-catalogue in a folder: a facsimile of the Alloway book and a handsome colour catalogue with an informative essay by Peter Davies. The same artists are featured, with some of the original work, plus representative examples for sale. Thus Adrian Heath’s cool lucid ‘Interlocking Planes’ appears in both publications, along with some later work, hotter in palette and more sensual in content. We are offered a projective relief in white, black and natural wood by Victor Pasmore, a couple of later linear and spray-paint motifs, and some plangent Terry Frosts. There’s a gorgeous black on white ‘Figure into Landscape’ (1954) by William Scott, whose prices have recently gone through the roof, and a couple of typically strange Roger Hiltons, including a painting of an untitled frame structure like a ‘Geometry of Fear’ head. The Martins, Anthony Hill and Robert Adams are also included.
‘Mr Jeremy Moon Experiments’ is the last show that Rocket will mount in their present space — where they’ve been doing business for the past decade — before relocating to Shoreditch. And it’s certainly worth a visit, being an exhibition of draw ings and collages (and one painting) by the talented abstractionist Jeremy Moon (1934–73). Moon’s career was short: he died tragically young in a motorbike accident and came to painting late, after working as an advertising executive. But his sure feeling for colour and form qualify him for the closest attention. He made very few collages, three of which are on view here, while the previously unseen pastels glow with a freshness and contemporaneity remarkable in work more than 30 years old. The strong clear colours jump and oscillate, fighting joyously for position. The grids and simple geometric shapes pulse and dance (Moon took evening classes in ballet), abut and overlap and edge out of the picture. These drawings have all the spontaneity the painting seems to lack, and the show, taken in conjunction with the Matisse at the RA, affirms unchallengeably that ‘decorative’ is not a dirty word in art parlance.
Further to John McEwen’s laudable mention in last week’s issue of Peter de Francia’s current exhibition at James Hyman Fine Art (6 Mason’s Yard, Duke Street, St James’s, SW1, until 15 April), I should like to mention a major painting included in that show only at the last minute, and not even illustrated in the catalogue. It is ‘The Execution of Beloyannis’ (1953–4), the first of de Francia’s three main political pictures of this period, preceding ‘The Bombing of Sakiet’ (currently on loan to Tate Modern, and on show there) and ‘The African Prison’ (in Sheffield). ‘Beloyannis’ has never previously been exhibited and is a searing indictment of the unlawful execution of the communist known as ‘the man with the red carnation’ (the flower slips from his grip at bottom left of the long painting), about which both Sartre and Picasso protested. De Francia, a gutsy realist painter in the European mould of Goya and Grosz, deserves wider recognition. This is a museum-quality picture awaiting the right buyer.
Hot tip: the painter Jeff Gibbons (born 1962) is showing an impressive selection of paintings at Art Space Gallery. Those who have followed his progress through brief sightings in London churches (most recently St Giles Cripplegate, and St Peter’s De Beauvoir Town) and at such crowded venues as the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the John Moores, will realise the nature of the treat in store. Gibbons, a thoughtful and intelligent painter, makes images of apparent simplicity. He favours unstretched canvas, which he imbues with a strange and compelling sense of place, conjured forth by the exact placing of a schematic chair, table or window, a line or two or a smudge for context, and very often the addition of a written quotation or a single word. Gibbons is marinated in the work of the great poets and novelists — Eliot and Henry James spring immediately to mind when viewing this new body of work — but will extract as much resonance from the German words ‘Herz’ (heart/hurts) or ‘Unrichtig’ (wrong/ write), as from a passage from The Ambassadors. Although intensely painterly and unprecious, Gibbons’s work also sounds the literary note so beloved of the English ear, but without relying on narrative. Prices start at £450 for a small oil.
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