Sir Terry Frost; Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Artist who won popularity with his eye-catching abstracts
03 September 2003
Terence Ernest Manitou Frost, painter and teacher: born Leamington
Spa, Warwickshire 13 October 1915; Gregory Fellow in Painting, Leeds
University 1954-56; Reader in Fine Art, Reading University 1965-77,
Professor of Painting 1977-81 (Emeritus); RA 1992; Kt 1998; married 1945
Kathleen Clarke (five sons, one daughter); died Hayle, Cornwall 1 September
2003.
The colourful, exuberant paintings of Terry Frost gave a popular dimension
to the sometimes cerebral, landscape-orientated abstraction of post-war St
Ives art.
The mathematic rigour of pure abstract or constructivist art was softened by
his unmistakable brand of quayside cubism. However abstracted, Frost's
compositions invariably derived from the harbours of St Ives and Newlyn;
boats, rudders, taut rigging, sails, masts, tyres or the reflection of sun
or moon on the rippled waters are all registered in the iconography of his
pictures.
An infectious enthusiasm, outgoing personality and common touch made Terry
Frost a distinguished and charismatic teacher, able to communicate
fundamental visual principles to successive generations of students with an
air of fun, experiment and even mischief.
He was born into a working-class family in Leamington Spa in 1915. Having
left school at 14 he spent the 1930s in a series of ordinary jobs. Soon
after the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the Army, later serving
in the 52nd Middle East Commandos. He was captured in 1941 on active service
in Crete and spent the rest of the war in prison camps, notably Stalag 383
in Bavaria.
In this unlikely setting Frost's education as an artist began. A fellow
inmate, the Slade-trained painter Adrian Heath, introduced Frost both to
painting, which he pursued with enthusiasm and promise, and to the history
of art. Heath also told Frost about the long-established artist's colony of
St Ives in Cornwall. Two major events ensued after his release and demob; in
the summer of 1945 he married Kathleen Clarke and early the following
summer he followed Heath's directives and moved to Cornwall. Aged 30 and
about to start a family, Frost was on his way.
Frost encountered St Ives art at a crossroads. The Crypt Group exhibitions
of 1946-48, held in the basement of the traditional St Ives Society of
Artists, led to the formation of the modernistic Penwith Society of Artists
in 1949. Among the artists who were the principal agents in changing the
artistic status quo from late impressionism to modern abstract art, John
Wells, Peter Lanyon, Sven Berlin and, of course, the senior figures of Ben
Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth had the greatest impact on the impressionable
Frost.
Despite a successful 1947 solo exhibition at Downings Bookshop in St Ives,
Frost's raw talent needed fine-tuning. Between 1947 and 1950, aided by an
ex-serviceman's grant, he studied at Camberwell School of Art in London.
Here he found his feet as an independent artist, absorbing the implications
of his tutor Victor Pasmore's celebrated "conversion" to abstract art in
1948. The latter's earliest abstract collages, composed with squares,
rectangles or circles of newsprint or discarded scraps of paper, encouraged
Frost to follow suit.
From 1950 Frost produced his own non-figurative collages, one of which, Moon
Quay, informed his best-known painting, Walk Along the Quay, of the same
year. Henceforth Frost would temper compositional discipline and order -
achieved with the measuring techniques of the Golden Section and other
divisional principles - with a sensuous feeling for materials. His use of
punchy, vibrant colour and luscious paint surfaces lent a natural
expressiveness to his work.
Although Frost had matured by the time he returned to St Ives in 1950, he
confessed to Ben Nicholson that he was "torn between abstraction and
figuration". Nicholson, who was to nurture and encourage Frost in an
abstract direction, told him that the circles, squares, chevrons and other
geometric fragments of his art would serve an entire career. The older
artist's white reliefs of the mid 1930s had by now softened into a more
evocative "cubism". Frost's inability to expunge landscape motifs completely
did not prevent his exhibiting with his wartime friend Adrian Heath in
several important London shows between 1952 and 1955. Along with Pasmore,
Kenneth Martin and others, Heath belonged to a post-war "constructionist"
group, set on reviving the "purist" spirit of 1930s Constructivism.
While Frost was drawn to the reductive, minimalist power of Russian
Suprematism and other forms of modernism, he complained in a letter to
Pasmore that cerebral, impersonal modes were "a departure from life".
The final "constructionist" group show, organised by Heath at the Redfern
Gallery, London, in 1955, included Frost's Blue Movement (1953), inspired by
masts bobbing in St Ives harbour. It was the kind of picture that drove
Lawrence Alloway to complain in his 1954 monograph Nine Abstract Artists
that in St Ives "the landscape is so nice nobody can quite bring themselves
to leave it out of their art".
This sentiment prefigures Alloway's subsequent volte-face, when he
unaccountably lost faith with abstraction and turned to American "Pop" art
in the 1960s.
The genial, if ambitious, Frost always enjoyed the support and patronage of
the art establishment. Hepworth - for whom he worked briefly in 1950 - and
Nicholson opened doors for an outgoing artist who proved the token
working-lass figure in a colony of generally well-connected or "haut
bourgeois" artists. Frost even had an established London gallery, the
Leicester Galleries, where he enjoyed solo shows in 1952, 1956 and 1958.
Together with participation in key group surveys of contemporary
abstraction, such as "The Mirror and the Square" at the New Burlington
Gallery in 1952 and Patrick Heron's "Space in Colour" at the Hanover Gallery
the following year, this exposure established him in London.
Furthermore, his teaching career blossomed. Beginning under William Scott at
Corsham Court, Bath, in 1952 Frost went on to become Gregory Fellow at Leeds
University between 1954 and 1956, a situation that linked him to the vibrant
art college, where Harry Thubron was patenting his Basic Design course and
other radical teaching methods.
Frost's painting, which embraced large-scale, more daring formats and
striking manipulation of paint, changed by responding to the bleak, hard
Yorkshire landscape. Something of the snow-bound hills, with toboggan tracks
or vertical patterns of stone walls, was registered in such classic pictures
as Winter 1956 Yorkshire.
His use of brash imagery on a large scale coincided with the sudden impact
of the "Modern Art in the United States" exhibition at the Tate Gallery
early in 1956. As in other aspects of his life Frost balanced his approach
between two alternatives: the direct, experience-based work of "the American
boys", as he fraternally called them, appealed to his romantic need to
explore and express nature, while the sophisticated surface patterns of
European "Tachism" fulfilled his interest in craft, plastic values and the
particular graphic or painterly problems of image construction.
His interest in the Parisians was encouraged by his friend Roger Hilton,
with whom he visited Paris in 1956. However, Frost's work, both in terms of
style and content, retained an Englishness, possessing neither the "tragic
and timeless" depth of Robert Motherwell's Iberian symbolism or the
uncompromising existential power of Pierre Soulages or Yves Kline.
A real-life encounter with New York School painters followed shortly after
seeing "Modern Art in the United States". Having joined the Waddington
Gallery in 1958 - he would have no fewer than seven solo exhibitions with
them over the next 20 years - Frost began showing in New York. His first
solo show in America, at Bertha Shaefer's New York gallery in 1960, gave him
the cue to meet leading New York painters. The experience both expanded and
diminished his confidence; but out of the confusion he would develop a
stronger sense of the validity of his own stylistic intonations.
Probably as much in response to the zeitgeist of the 1960s as to do with any
Americanisation in his work, Frost opted for brighter, eye-catching colour,
started to replace oil paint with new synthetic acrylics, introduced an
erotic note into his imagery and composed with crisp and distinct areas of
uniform, clearly marked-out colour.
Recalling the post-painterly abstraction of second-generation New Yorkers
such as Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland, large and bold Frost
compositions such as June, Red and Black (1965) or Yellow Moonship (1974)
would lead, during the 1980s and 1990s, to a re-complication of surface.
This took on a distinctly decorative and playful note in the later years,
Frost playing the virtuoso old master and backtracking or parodying previous
forms in new arrangements. Much of his late work has a baroque frenzy and
is, qualitatively speaking, hit-or-miss.
Frost lived in Banbury from 1963 until 1974 and was Reader in Fine Art at
Reading University from 1965 (and later Professor of Painting). He returned
to Cornwall in 1974, taking up a spectacular residence above Newlyn with
panoramic views across Mount's Bay. He loved a party and threw many there.
Despite the sense of joie de vivre registered in his work, Frost's eventual
commercial success was slow in coming. Only after the large 1985 exhibition
"St Ives 1939-64" at the Tate Gallery, London, did the fortunes of Frost -
and that of many of his colleagues - experience an upward turn. He threw
himself into work after retiring from his post at Reading. Upset but not
crestfallen by being released by Waddingtons, Frost sold better on his own,
selling his work after 1985 through an ever wider network of galleries or
dealers. This in turn encouraged his prolific late output, in which
printmaking came to the fore. He became the abstract artist's John Bratby or
Duncan Grant, a ubiquitous presence on the "Mod Brit" market.
Two experiences of Terry Frost stand out for me during the later period. The
first was his exhibition at the furniture maker John Makepeace's Parnham
House, Dorset, in 1980. Everyone from the St Ives milieu seemed present at a
kind of This is Your Life ensemble. The second was seeing the ubiquitous
"Terry", donning beret and loud clothes, punch-drunk at the Tate Gallery's
"Late Picasso" exhibition opening in 1988. It seemed obvious that night he
was going to do a "Late Frost". And so it proved.
Frost received critical, as well as commercial, acclaim during the 1990s. A
large monograph, Terry Frost by David Lewis, edited by Elizabeth Knowles,
was published in 1994, and two smaller books, produced by the Tate Gallery
and the Belgrave Gallery, London, appeared in 2000, the same year that the
Royal Academy held a major retrospective exhibition, "Terry Frost: Six
Decades". His high- profile popularity won him a knighthood in 1998 and an
appearance on the radio programme Desert Island Discs.
Peter Davies