Frost: A lover of life

When I went to see Terry Frost at his house above Newlyn in 1994 he was one year short of 80, but still brimming with vitality. One of the first things he told me about was the trip he had made to the USA, and the series of images involving spirals that had come out of it (Arizona Spiral, 1990-94, in this exhibition is one of them).

‘The spiral motif all started’, he explained, ‘because I went to see my eldest son who was in Tucson, Arizona, and he took me into the desert as far as the Grand Canyon. It was a shock to me because the desert I saw during the War in Egypt was all sand. Here there were cacti 14 feet high all in bloom, and wonderful mountains all around. There were blue mountains, pink mountains, white mountains, double rainbows and thunder clouds! The whole thing was a spiral of excitement. So it started a relationship for me with the idea of foreverness.’

That whole account was completely typical of the man: the joyous pleasure in the visual world, the easy, apparently straightforward movement from a concrete experience to an abstract shape – a spiral – and then an idea: eternity. When I found the cassette tape of our conversation 15 years ago and put it in a near-obsolete machine, Terry Frost was immediately there in the room with all his joie de vivre and enthusiasm.

His was an unusual career in art, if only because – like Van Gogh’s - it did not properly begin until he was almost 30. His delayed entrance into the world of painting came as an unpredictable result of being taken prisoner of war by the German army, and sent to Stalag 383 in Bavaria. There he came across the painter Adrian Heath and other artists and scholars of art, and received a sort of ad hoc further education not just in aesthetics, but in a moral world-view.

‘I think perhaps I was lucky in not being educated at a university. In a way I was educated in the prison-camp where I met Adrian Heath and the other lads, who had been educated by life – so they were kind, considerate, even the man who pinched my bread turned out to be marvellous. I came to the conclusion that there is more good in people – everybody - than bad. That’s a hard conclusion to come to, but I reached it in that POW camp.’

If he had not been deposited by fate in Stalag 383, Frost would doubtless have spent his life doing mundane jobs in the West Midlands (he was born and brought up in Leamington Spa), and never found his true vocation. Naturally, therefore, that wartime and immediately post-war moment – when British society seemed to change and a new world open out - was very important to him.

‘People were very kind, it was so different to before the War when you had to doff your cap to people across the road and you daren’t put your foot out of line or you got the sack. But the doodle bug didn’t differentiate whether you had been to Oxford or Elementary school. Bullets didn’t differentiate. I found it a wonderful period, everybody helped each other.’

Just at that moment, Frost was discovering the whole world of modern art, and with it abstraction. In the 1940s, through a series of lucky chances, he quickly found himself in the centre of British modernism. Adrian Heath recommended him to go to St Ives. Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth were neighbours; Peter Lanyon took him for walks through the landscape.

Frost was strongly attracted to another period, a quarter of a century earlier and in another country, when there had seemed to be a similar dawn of equality - in Russia immediately before and after the 1917 revolution. ‘The Russian constructivist movement’, he remembered, ‘was very much of a force on us. In that revolutionary moment, thinking they were making a new art for the people, they had had terrific structure, wonderful design that went through their ceramics and every medium. Rodchenko’s photography, and El Lissitzky’s typography were absolutely fantastic in that period.

‘Then there was Malevich’s Black Square – why should it be such a knock-out? It stops my heart whenever I see it. It’s more than perfection. It’s love and it’s beauty, and it’s poetry. It comes from a period when there was great hope and great opportunity.’

That’s the essence of Terry Frost’s art too: simple forms filled with feeling, love, beauty and poetry. Indeed, he found that however austere the geometry he used, feelings and bits of the natural world kept creeping in. ‘I did do pure abstracts, using semi-circles, triangles, geometry – a lot of things that were worked out mathematically. I did that quite religiously, because I believed in it. But even so, once you put a bit of colour on – such as that pale ochre over there on the bench - that was to me the colour of the sand outside my studio, and I couldn’t stop the relationship, even if I wanted to be purely abstract.’

After all, total abstraction is an impossibility. Every form in geometry is bound to suggest something – probably many things – in the real world. In this exhibition there are circles that are also suns, olives, and some lines that metamorphose into Niagara Falls. His breakthrough painting, Walk Along the Quay, came directly out of an experience of landscape. Every morning he took his oldest child for a walk in St Ives at dawn, to prevent him disturbing the neighbours.

‘The baby cried every morning, and every neighbour – they were all local fishermen - would give my wife a hell of a lesson about what she was doing wrong with the child. So I used to get up at dawn and push it along the quay, if you are walking down the quay and the boats are down there you aren’t looking at them from the normal direction. I was looking down, learning more about the shapes. So I’m seeing all the shapes and the masts, and as the tide came in you got a movement. So it was a true happening: a walk in the morning.’

In a world of forms, Terry Frost was strongly drawn to semi-circles, like those boats along the quay at St Ives. This exhibition is full of them. Suspended Forms, 1967, is a good example. You could say that curved segments were almost as characteristic of his art as rectangles were of Mondrian’s. But he was well aware that they were full of potential meanings.

‘I like that shape, I always have. It’s a very feminine shape, or reminds you of hills. So it’s part of natural form: bottoms or boats or breasts. There’s no argument about that, but I don’t think about that when I’m working – I use it because I like it.’

Terry Frost was, it was immediately apparent from talking to him or looking at his work, a lover of life. A few years later he took part in ‘Artists on Art’, a series of interviews I did for the Daily Telegraph in which contemporary artists chose a work from the past to talk about. It shouldn’t have surprised me – though it did, a bit - that he selected not a Malevich or Mondrian but Rubens’ Judgement of Paris in the National Gallery. He’d copied that trio of generously curvaceous goddesses as a student at Camberwell School of Art, somewhat preferring it to the Seurat he also studied (‘I like more juicy things’). Actually, some Frost abstractions – Red Midland is a case in point - can get quite sexy.

Those hot reds and pinks seem to indicate sensuous passion.In origin, however, his approach to colour was robustly practical.

‘I seem to get on better with red, black and white. At first it was just black and white because cadmium red cost money, but black and white didn’t. So that’s why I painted with black, white, ochre and Indian red originally, because they were all 1 shilling and 9d a tube. Compared with cobalt blue, which was 5 and 9d. So my colour theory was based on cost originally.’

He was still using that simple but powerful combination in 1968 for Red, Black and White Movement, long after the price of paint could have made much difference to his palette. He thought of the choice prosperity brought as a complicating factor. ‘Now it’s quite tricky because I could use any colour under the sun. But very often I don’t use many. Or I use different colours but often their values are about the same. I like to get the weight of each colour balanced, so one doesn’t come down - wham! - in the scales. Then you can hold your surface better.’ You can watch him balancing the colours just like that in Suspended Forms, 1967, or Frisky, 2003.

He liked to observe the behaviour of colours in differing lights. ‘If you can keep that structural control of the colours as the light changes in the evening, the painting alters completely. It’s wonderful how they move about.’ One of his daily pleasures was watching the disc of the sun coming up over Mount’s Bay from his house on the hill above Newlyn. Another was watching the colours slowly disappear in his garden at dusk.

Which, he asked me, is the last to fade? Answer: blue. It’s a simple question, which I’d never thought to consider. Once you know the answer, you never forget it. Terry Frost’s art can be rather like that, too.

Martin Gayford

Martin Gayford is the London-based art critic for Bloomberg and author of The Yellow House (Fig Tree, 2006)

1915 Born 13 October, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire

1930 After attending local schools, begins work, first in a cycle shop, then at a radio factory, bakery, aircraft factory and electrical component wholesaler in Birmingham

1939-41 Called up as a member of the Army Reserve and serves in Palestine and France

1941-45 Transfers to the Commandos, serves in the Middle East and is taken prisoner in Crete. POW until April 1945, during which time he meets Adrian Heath who gives him drawing lessons and encourages him to paint. His first solo exhibition is held in his home town, but in his absence

1945 After his release, marries Kathleen Clarke in August, and returns to wholesaling work in Birmingham, while attending art classes in the evening.

1946 Following an illness, resigns his job and moves to Cornwall at Heath’s suggestion, to study at Leonard Fuller’s St Ives School of Painting. Becomes friends with Peter Lanyon, Sven Berlin and also Leonard Richmond, who teaches him to paint landscapes in oil 'that might sell’

1947 Meets Ben Nicholson, with whom he corresponds. In the autumn starts his studies at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, taught by Coldstream, Pasmore and Kenneth Martin, inter al.

1948 Introduces Pasmore to Ben Nicholson. Returns each summer to St Ives to work at the Sunset Bar, and to paint and exhibit with the St Ives Society of Artists. Begins to experiment with abstraction

1949 Awarded NDD and continues to study pottery and lithography unofficially at Camberwell

1950 Returns to live in St Ives, taking a studio next to Ben Nicholson’s and working part-time for, and occasionally exhibiting with, Lanyon at Robin Nances’s, the furniture-maker

1951 Starts to work as an assistant to Barbara Hepworth (together with John Wells and Denis Mitchell) while studying for his ‘Intermediate’ at Penzance School of Art.

Meets Roger Hilton. Elected a member of the Penwith Society. E.C. (Peter)

Gregory buys his important oil painting ‘Walk along the quay’ (now Coll. Adrian Heath, on loan to Sheffield City Art Galleries). Meets Sam Francis for the first time, then exhibiting at the ICA in London

1952 Begins to teach life drawing at Bath Academy of Art at Corsham, while also teaching anatomy and still-life drawing part-time at Willesden School of Art,

London. Stays with Adrian Heath in London during term-time

1953 E.C. Gregory purchases the artist’s ‘Blue movement’ 1952 for the CAS (illustrated in its Annual Report for 1952-53), and the British Council makes its first purchase (a watercolour) from the artist

1954 E.C. Gregory offers Frost the two-year Fellowship in Painting which he was funding at Leeds University. Returns to St Ives for the summers while at Leeds

1955 Teaches part-time on Harry Thubron’s Basic Design Course at Leeds School of Art.

First visit to Paris, accompanied by Roger Hilton, who also takes him to visit Sam

Francis and Soulages in their studios, and to Noguchi’s sculpture garden for UNESCO

1956 Returns to live and paint full-time in St Ives. Shortly thereafter becomes acquainted with the American critic Clement Greenberg, and later with the dealer Martha Jackson and with Rothko, who all visit St Ives towards the end of the decade

1959 The Tate Gallery purchases its first painting by the artist, from E.C. Gregory’s collection. (It has since purchased more paintings, notably in the 1970s)

1960 First visit to the USA including three weeks in New York and visits to several artists’ studios

1963 Moves to Banbury and begins part-time teaching at Coventry School of Art

1964 Visiting Lecturer in Fine Art at Reading University. Summer teaching at San José, California, and that autumn takes up a Fellowship in Painting at Newcastle University

1965 Appointed Lecturer in Fine Art at Reading University. Awarded a Non-purchase Prize at the 5th John Moores exhibition, Liverpool

1967 Teaches at Voss Summer School, Norway

1969 Awarded a Prize at the Arts Council of NI Open Painting exhibition, Belfast

1970 Promoted to Reader in Fine Art at Reading University

1973 Member of the Selection Jury for the First British International Drawing Biennale, organised by Teesside BC at Middleborough

1974 Moves to live and work in Newlyn, Cornwall

1975 Summer teaching at Banff, Canada

1976 Summer teaching at the University of Western Ontario, Canada

1977 Appointed Professor of Painting at Reading University. Teaches at the Summer School, Nicosia, Cyprus

1980 Teaches at the Summer Academy, Umea, Sweden

1981 Retires from Reading University, and made Professor Emeritus. Visits Russia for the first time to see the early work of Kandinsky and Matisse

1992 Elected a Royal Academician

1998 Knighted

2003 Dies September 1

Selected Solo Exhibitions

1944 Leamington Spa Library

1952 Leicester Galleries (also 1956, 1958)

1960 Bertha Schaeffer Gallery, New York

1961 Waddington Galleries (also 1963, 1966, 1969, 1971, 1974, 1978)

1964 Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zurich

Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

1969 Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

1970 Plymouth City Art Gallery (also 1986)

1971 Institute of Contemporary Arts

1976 Arts Council and South West Arts Retrospective Tour

Serpentine Gallery

1980 New Art Centre

1982 Gloria Gallery, Nicosia

1986 University of Reading and Newlyn Art Gallery, and tour to Plymouth.

1989 Mayor Gallery

Belgrave Gallery

1993 Austin Desmond Fine Art

Tate Gallery St Ives

1994 Adelson Gallery New York

1995 McGeary Gallery, Brussels

Newlyn Art Gallery

1997 Belgrave Gallery, St Ives

1998 British Council, New York

1999 Arts Council Spotlight, touring exhibition

2000 Terry Frost: Six Decades, Royal Academy

Beaux Arts, London

2001 Mead Gallery, Warwick University Galleria Multigraphic, Venice

Maison des Arts, Colle sur Loup, France

2002 Belgrave Gallery, London

Strand Gallery, Aldeburgh

Badcocks Gallery, Newlyn

Russell Cotes Museum, Bournemouth

2003 Beaux Arts, London

2007 Beaux Arts, London

2008 Beaux Arts, London

2008 The Paintings of Sir Terry Frost, Reading useum

2009 Five Decades of Terry Frost (Prints), Stoneman Graphics Gallery, Penzance

2009 Works on Paper from the Artist’s Studio, Belgrave Gallery, St Ives

2010 Terry Frost: A Lover of Life, Beaux Arts, London

Selected Group Exhibitions

1951 Danish, British and American abstract art, Riverside Museum, New York

Abstract Art, Gimpel Fils

1952 CAS Exhibition, The Tate Gallery

British Abstract Art, Galerie de France, Paris

1953 Space in Colour, Hanover Gallery

1954 Abstract, Cubist, Formalist, Surrealist, Redfern Gallery

1955 50 Years of British Art, British Council Tour

1956 Recent Abstract Painting, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

Critics’ Choice (Herbert Read), Arthur Tooth & Sons

1957 Statements, ICA

British Art, Galerie Creuze, Paris

Lissone International Painting Prize

Tokyo International

New Trends in British Art, Rome, New York

John Moores Liverpool 1, Walker Art Gallery

1958 Pittsburgh Bicentennial, Carnegie Institute (also 1959, 1961)

Guggenheim International, New York (also 1959)

Gregory Fellowship exhibition, Bradford City Art Gallery

1959 Recent paintings by 7 British Artists,

British Council tour to Australia

John Moores Liverpool 2, Walker Art Gallery

The Developing Process, ICA

1960 British Painting 1720-1960

British Council tour to Russia

1961 The 21st International Watercolour Exhibition, Brooklyn Museum, New York

John Moores Liverpool 3, Walker Art Gallery

1962 Kompass II Stedelijk van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven

British Art of the 20th Century, Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon and tour

British Art Today, San Francisco Museum of Art and tour

1963 British Painting in the Sixties, CAS at the Tate and Whitechapel Galleries

John Moores Liverpool 4, Walker Art Gallerie

1964 Contemporary British Painting and Sculpture, Albright-Knox Art Gallery,

Buffalo 1954-1964:

Painting and Sculpture of a Decade, Gulbenkian Foundation Collection,

Tate Gallery

New Painting, 1961-64, Arts Council Tour

1965 John Moores Liverpool 5, Walker Art Gallery

Frost, Heron, Hilton, Wynter, Waddington Galleries

Peter Stuyvesant Foundation collection purchases, Whitechapel Gallery

1966 Blow, Frink and Frost, Prestons Art Gallery, Bolton

3rd Open Painting Exhibition, Ulster Museum, Belfast

1967 Recent British Painting, Stuyvesant Collection exhibition, Tate Gallery

1968 British Art Today, Hamburg Kunstverein

1969 John Moores Liverpool 7, Walker Art Gallery

1970 British Painting, 1960-1970, National Gallery of Art, Washington

1974 British Painting 1974, Arts Council, Hayward Gallery

1977 British Painting 1952-1977, Royal Academy

Pier Art Gallery exhibition, Tate Gallery

Cyprus Summer School staff exhibition, Gallery Zygos, Nicosia

1980 Hayward Annual, Arts Council, Hayward Gallery

Pictures for an Exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery

1984 Landscape in Britain, Arts Council, Hayward Gallery

English Contrasts, Art Curial, Paris

Frost, Paraskos, Charalambides, Gloria Gallery, Nicosia

1985 St Ives, 1939-1964, Tate Gallery

1986 Looking West, Newlyn Art Gallery and the Royal College of Art

1989 The Presence of Painting, South Bank Centre

1993 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

1994 Here and Now, Serpentine Gallery

1995 British Abstract Painting, Flowers East

McGreary Gallery, Brussels

Newlyn Art Gallery

2000 Summer 2000, Beaux Arts, London

2002 Square Root, Sarah Myerscough Fine Art, London

In Print, Contemporary British Art from the Paragon Press,

worldwide touring exhibition

Summer 2002, Beaux Arts, London

2003 Painting Not Painting, Tate St Ives

2004 Featured at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

2006 Irving, Hoyland, Frost, Château de Sours, France

2009 A Select Exhibition from the Arts Council Collection, York Art Gallery (touring)

Public Collections

UNITED KINGDOM

Aberdeen – Art Gallery and Museums

Belfast – Ulster Museum

Birmingham – Museum and Art Gallery

Bolton – Museum and Art Gallery

Bristol – City Museum and Art Gallery

Cambridge – Fitzwilliam Museum

Cardiff – National Museum of Wales

Cornwall – County Education Committee

Edinburgh – Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Exeter – University

Glasgow – University

Huddersfield – Art Gallery

Hull – Ferens Art Gallery

Kendal – Abbot Hall Art Gallery

Leamington Spa – Warwick D.C. Art Gallery and Museum

Leeds – City Art Gallery

– University

Leicestershire – County Education Committee

London – Arts Council of Great Britain

– British Council

– Contemporary Art Society

– Government Art Collection

– Gulbenkian Foundation

– Tate Gallery

– Victoria & Albert Museum

Manchester – City Education Department

– City Art Gallery (Rutherston Collection)

Northampton – Museums and Art Gallery

Oldham – Art Gallery

Plymouth – City Museum and Art Gallery

Reading – University

Southampton – City Art Gallery

Sunderland – Museum and Art Gallery

Swindon – Museum and Art Gallery

Wakefield – Art Galleries and Museums

AUSTRALIA

Adelaide – Art Gallery of South Australia

Perth – Art Gallery of Western Australia

Sydney – Art Gallery of New South Wales

CANADA

Ottawa – National Gallery of Canada

Vancouver – Art Gallery

ISRAEL

Tel Aviv – Museum

NEW ZEALAND

Christchurch – Canterbury Museum