Stephen Gilbert; Guardian (Cobra artist)
Hyfler/Rosner
Alastair Grieve
Wednesday February 14, 2007
Guardian
The artist Stephen Gilbert, who has died aged 96, did not
perhaps receive the recognition in this country that he
deserved. He was himself partly responsible for that, since
he was self-effacing and worked for most of his life abroad.
He had scant regard for local chauvinisms, preferring
international groups in Ireland, Paris, Denmark and
Holland - as well as in England.
He was born near Perth, in Scotland, of English parents, the
grandson of the sculptor Sir Alfred Gilbert. From 1929 to
1932, he studied painting at the Slade School, London, where
he befriended Roger Hilton and met the sculptor Jocelyn
Chewett, whom he married in 1935. The couple established
themselves in Paris in 1939, but the following year, Stephen
having been turned down for military service, they left for
Ireland, where they spent the war years.
It was in Ireland that Stephen painted a series of small
canvases of spectral insects with staring eyes and ferocious
mouths, and of human hydras. Described by Edouard Jaguer as
"la peinture de paroxysme", these were anguished paintings,
usually with a balance of wings or heads, on either side of
a central body. They were inspired partly by Masson's
surrealist art and by reading Jung, Nietzsche and Jakob
Böhme. Stephen showed them with the White Stag Group in
Dublin in 1944.
The Gilberts returned to Paris in 1946; it was a tough
environment and they lived extremely frugally. A decisive
moment came in 1948 when his paintings at the Salon des
Surindépendants attracted the attention of the Danish artist
Asger Jorn, who invited him to join the recently formed
radical group, Cobra. Apart from William Gear, Gilbert was
the only British member. He held an important position
within Cobra, painting a central wall in the house they
decorated with murals at Bregnerod, near Copenhagen, in
1949, and being the subject of a monograph in the series
Petite Bibliothèque de Cobra. He also worked with the Dutch
member, Constant Nieuwenhuys, in Amsterdam and Paris.
Together, in 1950 and 1951 Gilbert and Constant developed
from the febrile imagery of Cobra to an abstract art of
loose geometric forms and restricted colours, chiefly black
and white. In Holland they studied Mondrian, Malevich and
Rietveld, and, in the face of the rising tide of tachisme in
Paris, structured their paintings of 1952 to 1953 with clear
geometric planes coloured with strong primary colours on
white grounds.
Wanting his colour planes to occupy real space, Gilbert
moved from painting to three-dimensional, orthogonal
constructions in 1953 to 1954, precisely made from painted
aluminium sheet and angle. His move linked him to the
English group of constructivist artists gathered around
Victor Pasmore, including Anthony Hill and Kenneth and Mary
Martin, and he showed with this group in London in 1954. In
Paris, he joined André Bloc's Groupe Espace. Strongly
influenced by De Stijl ideas, he aimed to destroy closed
volumes and activate open space by means of rhythmic placing
of coloured planes on an architectural scale.
In 1955 Gilbert moved further towards an architectural
realisation of his ideas with a model for a house to be
built in Yorkshire by an enlightened developer, Peter Stead.
Further projects followed for blocks of flats made of
mass-produced coloured metal and glass panels but, in the
end, only two houses were built, and without Gilbert's
collaboration. But he continued to develop his
constructions, and in 1957 abandoned rectilinear frames and
let coloured planes, in reacting curves, stand on their own.
By 1960 he had ceased to use colour, relying on curved
planes of polished metal, spreading from a central stem, to
reflect the light and the environment in which they were
placed.
He achieved some fame with these works, winning first prize
for sculpture at the Tokyo Biennale in 1965. By the end of
the decade, he was producing more earth-bound constructions
of welded tin or copper. His wife died in 1979 and, perhaps
in homage to the forms of some of her carvings, he began a
group of tall copper pillars with subtly modulated edges.
These were his last major sculptures and by the mid-1980s he
had returned to painting. Using India ink, pastel and
watercolour he painted a long series of loose abstracts
with, at times, hints of imagery of the kind he had invented
in Ireland. His last exhibition was organised by the Henry
Moore Institute in Leeds early last year. He is survived by
a son and a daughter, two grandchildren and one great
grandchild. A full retrospective would be a revelation.
· Stephen Gilbert, artist, born January 15 1910; died
January 12 2007