Description / Expertise
PRUNELLA CLOUGH
(British, 1919-1999)
Enclosure
Signed, watercolour, 1973
Floated in a white Cornish box frame
Sheet height 48cm., 18.7/8in., Length 35cm., 13 3/4in.,
Floated in a white Cornish box frame
Frame Height 64 cm., 25 in., Length 49.5 cm., 19½ in.
PRUNELLA CLOUGH (British, 1919-1999)
Although critically acclaimed as one of the most interesting British artists of the postwar period and highly respected among her peers, Clough is not well-known amongst the wider public. She devoted her career to finding beauty in unconsidered aspects of the urban and industrial landscape. Clough’s preoccupation with abstract, formal qualities such as composition, colour and texture, which is foregrounded in her later works, also underpinned her earlier, figurative work.
Born in Chelsea, she was the daughter of Eric Clough-Taylor, a published poet. At Chelsea Art School from 1938, she was taught by Ceri Richards, Julian Trevelyan, Robert Medley and Henry Moore. She studied commercial graphic design and sought advice from Graham Sutherland when he came in to use the etching press.
During the second world war, Clough drew charts, maps and graphs for the office of war information (US), bicycling to an office in the basement of Selfridge's. By 1945 she was exhibiting small still-lifes and landscapes at the Redfern gallery, and presented her first solo show at the Leger gallery two years later. She found her subjects by touring the industrial wastelands and bombsites - docks, power stations, factories, scrapyards - for gritty urban paintings. Slowly she focused on the components of the cityscape (literally the nuts and bolts of the picture) as her art floated towards abstraction. But her paintings, drawings and prints never quite lost the shadowy shapes of the recognisable world, as if reality were being placed under a microscope.
From 1946 to 1951 Clough produced etchings, lithographs and paintings of fishermen and dockers in London, East Anglia and the industrial Midlands. During the 1950s, preoccupied with the potential for abstraction in flatness of form, she introduced plant motifs into her urban scenes. Her work was shown at the 1951 Festival of Britain.
Clough was drawn to the Soho pub and club circuit, and, in a 1949 article in Picture Post magazine, was named, among several friends, as a young artist to watch - the others being the Roberts (Colquhoun and MacBryde), Patrick Heron, Leonard Rosoman, Keith Vaughan and John Minton. She was then unfairly bracketed with the neo-romantic movement, when the real link here was social rather than artistic. Her art resisted the allusive and illustrative image, and she owed far more to Braque than to Samuel Palmer.
And yet, in her very distinctive handling of paint (stencilling, spraying, blending and blurring, scraping and scratching out - never repeating and never revealing any clues of technique), and in her delight in the visual evidence all around her, she managed to convey the fabric and the feel of urban life in general and her native London in particular. Into a basic palette of browns, greys and ochre, there might be an iridescent flash of red and green, bringing to mind a plastic bag blowing in a gutter.
Like all great artists, Clough made us look at the world in a new way. A decade ago Patrick Heron wrote: "Her paintings are machines for seeing with. It is impossible, after contemplation of them, to be aware of the street, the yard, the facade, as existing in any formal patterns other than those one's eyes have just enjoyed savouring, as one's gaze crossed and recrossed the endlessly subtle surfaces of her canvases."
After a retrospective at Bryan Robertson's Whitechapel gallery in 1960, Clough exhibited widely - latterly with Annely Juda Fine Art - but she gently rebuffed biographers (destroying personal papers, as had her aunt, the architect and designer Eileen Gray, who had been a mentor and ally) and rejected major overviews of her career.
Towards the end of her life she became regarded largely as an abstractionist, but her work always retained a figurative base, as if form had been filtered through memory. In the late 1960s Clough's style became even freer in terms of colour and scale, but it still revealed her continuing fascination with the ‘edginess' of form, the sudden intrusion of hard shapes into softer areas. Later pictures describe colourful objects in shallow space with playful tonal gradations that suggest movement.
Moves for a retrospective at the Tate received no encouragement from the artist, but she did allow substantial surveys at the Camden arts centre (1996) and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (1999). For the former, Clough asked Judith Collins to pen only a short text - "anything you don't write, we can fill in with drawings". In Cambridge, she advised Michael Harrison not to bother with a catalogue (guidance which, thankfully, was ignored).
Prunella Clough toiled hard to erase what she saw as unnecessary elegance in her art - a characteristic which she believed had ruled out wider international recognition - and, in this, she never entirely succeeded. Somehow, every mark she made on paper or canvas appeared beautiful.
Teaching at Chelsea and then, for more than 30 years, at Wimbledon school of art, she was painting - still stretching her own canvases - and printing almost to the end.
One of her last acts was to give the prize money from the 1999 Jerwood award to other artists, adding to earlier scholarships she had instituted anonymously. Prunella Clough died on December 26th 1999
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