Pallant House Gallery presents a major exhibition
on the British artist John Minton (1917 – 1957), marking the centenary
of his birth and 60 years since his death. It explores the artist’s
achievements far beyond his reputation as a leading illustrator and
influential teacher, spanning:
Evocative wartime landscapes, including views of London, rooting him firmly in the Neo-Romantic tradition.
Exotic
subject matter in a new colour palette inspired by travel to Corsica,
Jamaica, and Spain, including the newly rediscovered
Figurative work including portraits of young
male students and friends that express something of Minton’s experience
as a leading gay artist in the 1940s and 1950s. These have added
poignancy as 2017 marks 50 years since the decriminalisation of male
homosexuality in England and Wales.
Book illustrations, posters and lithographs, showing his position as a leading post-war illustrator.
Ambitious
paintings exploring historic and current events, as he sought a new
context for history painting in an increasingly abstract art world.
Minton was a Bohemian figure in
London during the 1940s and 50s who counted artists such as Lucian Freud
and Keith Vaughan in his circle, and a following of Camberwell School
of Art and Royal College of Art students known as ‘Johnny’s Circus’.
Often the life and soul of a party but also plagued by self-doubt, his
work reflected his complex character.
The exhibition opens
with Minton’s evocative wartime landscapes, including moving depictions
of post-war London, which gained him the moniker ‘urban romantic’.
Placing him firmly within the context of Neo-Romanticism in Britain, it
explores the influence of the 19th century visionary Samuel
Palmer as well as that of his contemporaries including the Polish émigré
Jankel Adler, and also Keith Vaughan, Michael Ayrton, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, all of whom he shared a home with during the 1950s.
Extensive travels to Europe and the Caribbean in the late 1940s
and early 1950s offered Minton exotic subject matter that was an
antidote to the reality of post-war Britain. With financial support from
the publisher John Lehmann and a commission to illustrate the travel
title ‘Time was Away’, Minton travelled to Corsica with the poet Alan
Ross. It was for Lehmann that Minton produced illustrations for
Elizabeth David’s much-revered cookbook ‘A Book of Mediterranean Food’
in 1950. The exhibition brings together original designs for these and other publications, including Treasure Island, and The Leader magazine, showing how Minton's commercial work was central to his fine art practice.
In 1951, a three-month trip to Jamaica inspired a new colour
palette of sharp, acid colours and presented the artist with a backdrop
of political and racial tension that mirrored his own search for
equilibrium. This disquiet is evident in the recently rediscovered
‘Jamaican Village’ (1951) - this huge mural painting, first exhibited at
the Royal Academy in 1951 and gifted to fellow Royal College of Art
tutor Pf. John Morris Wood, resurfaced for the first time in 65 years at
a Christie’s sale in 2016. Thought to have been intended for the walls
of legendary London clubs The Gargoyle or the Colony Room, this is the
painting’s first showing in a public institution since 1951.
The second half of the exhibition focusses on Minton’s
figurative paintings which demonstrate a remarkable skill in
draftsmanship. In many, the artist’s roots in illustration are visible
in the use of black paint and outlining. Minton’s sensitive and often
psychologically intense portraits of young men, some of them his
students, as in David Tindle, and some his lovers, as in Raymond Ray,
can be analysed in relation to the artists’ own tortured homosexuality.
Minton did not keep his sexuality secret, but battled with the stigma
and risk attached to being gay at a time before the Wolfenden Report in
1957 and the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967. The 50-year
anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England
and Wales in 2017 brings added poignancy to the exhibition.
In the late 1950s Minton increasingly felt out of step with the
rising interest in abstract art. The exhibition culminates with a group
of paintings depicting historic and current events – the death of
Nelson and that of the musician James Dean - in his attempt to find a
modern form of history painting, a genre which had become deeply
unfashionable. It was perhaps this feeling of being left behind that
contributed to his suicide in 1957, aged just 40.
The exhibition is curated by Simon Martin, Director of Pallant House Gallery, and Frances Spalding, art historian and biographer of Minton.
An illustrated book by the curators, adding significantly to the critical
discourse on John Minton, accompanies the exhibition and is available in
the Pallant Bookshop.
The exhibition is complemented by a display of paintings by
William Coldstream, who also taught at the Royal College of Art
alongside Minton. An exhibition of John Minton’s friends and
contemporaries in the Neo-Romantic movement in the historic townhouse
will provide further context to the narrative of Minton’s life and
career.
About Pallant House Gallery: Located
in the heart of historic Chichester on the south coast, Pallant House
Gallery houses one of the most significant collections of Modern British
art in the country. Acclaimed for its innovative exhibitions and
exemplary Learning and Community programme, the Gallery has won numerous
awards since re-opening in 2006. www.pallant.org.uk.
