Peter Lanyon as sculptor, by Michael Canney

Written to coincide with the exhibition “Peter Lanyon. Paintings, drawings and constructions, 1937-64” at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, 17th August-15th September 1978, and published in “Link” No. 12, 1978, published by The Association of Artists and Designers in Wales.

The current touring exhibition of paintings, drawings and constructions by Peter Lanyon has prompted me to reflect yet again upon the influence of sculpture, and Constructivist sculpture at that, in the development of Lanyon’s paintings.

My own reaction, following a fresh examination of these works, is that they possess such a memorable identity, that I can only regard them as autonomous and complete works of sculpture, regardless of the artist’s intentions. But I have also come to consider whether Lanyon may have had an unconsciously ambivalent attitude to them himself as self-contained works, and this, for two reasons. Firstly, although the constructions were certainly private statements, they were nevertheless exhibited in public in the artist’s lifetime, and not necessarily with the painting to which they were related. Secondly, the constructions could be seen around the house or studio, highly significant totems in the artist’s immediate environment, and works for which he had an obvious affection.

Lanyon was of course an artist who had always expressed an involvement with space in painting, so that the making of constructions was not unexpected, but the full extent of his excursions into the third dimension is still not fully appreciated. At a vital and early period in his development, around 1940, he abandoned painting and underwent a self-imposed apprenticeship as a sculptor. The results of this can be seen in an extraordinary series of photographs of abstract constructions which have never been show publicly. All of these works have been destroyed. From these photographic records it is possible to see that the original works were immaculately assembled, and it is evident that Naum Gabo’s constructions are the inspirations for them. We can therefore see here a perfect example of the development of a young painter through an intelligent and painstaking study of the work of an established master, but a master who was basically a sculptor and not a painter.

Paradoxically, there is no painting by Lanyon which shows an equivalent study of style and structure in relation to another artist’s painting, and although he studied for a short time with Ben Nicholson, this is much less evident in his work than his debt to Gabo. But Lanyon inevitably felt a need to reject Gabo’s influence and to adapt Constructivism to his own needs. This is reflected, when he writes with some concern, “Gabo’s constructions are such COMPLETE things that their very presence is paralysing.” There is a hint here of the possibility of constructions assuming a different role, that of INCOMPLETE objects – stages in a continuing process.

Certainly it was only through his rejection of Gabo’s purism that he could find his own artistic identity, and it is interesting in this respect to examine an early reference to the underlying construction of one painting in particular, “Horizon by the Sea”. Lanyon explains that references OUTSIDE the basic abstract construction of this work are “impurities”, but adds significantly, “it is these references and impurities which I developed…and so by chance opted for a richer and in fact, more local vein”. And it is of course these [impurities” and “references” that distinguish his constructions from the refined and dynamic spatial geometry of Gabo, in which specific references to place or event are absent.

In the fifties and early sixties in Cornwall, there were a number of us, who whilst we admired Lanyon’s paintings, also saw in his three-dimensional works some of his most personal statements, and regretted that these works were not better known. From the first I believed them to exist in their own right as complete objects, although I was aware that Lanyon himself had written statements that appeared to refute this. He made it clear that he saw his constructions as purely intermediate stages in the process of realising a painting. “My constructions are NOT complete things in themselves,” he wrote, “but are experiments in space to establish the content of space in the painting.” In a lengthy discussion that I had with him on the subject, he explained that through the process of actually making these works, he came to develop an empathy [with] and a gut-reaction to the space that he had to deal with, so that this space would then emerge of its own accord at the end of his brush, a mystical idea that was not easily accessible.

In the early days he had difficulty developing an image in his mind. He therefore had to explore it in actual space, so that the constructions became, in effect, a scaffolding for the painting. But it was not to be understood from this that they were maquettes for the final and larger image on the canvas. Direct references to the construction’s appearance might, or might not exist in the painting. The whole process he explained as one of “hands releasing meaning through making”. Returning to the transient nature of constructions, he wrote, “the constructions are essentially throwaway things – they should not be confused with the complete and determined work.”

We see in Lanyon, a very British (or Cornish) refusal to be tied to the doctrinal propositions of any international art movement. What we find instead is a post-Cubist, Constructivist exploration of the Cornish landscape, but one that incorporates that traditional understanding of the “genius loci”. Impurities and references to place and experience make both paintings and constructions what they are, local – but through the underlying Constructivist discipline they also become universal in their appeal.

Some of the later reliefs are distinct from the free-standing works and the earliest constructions, and exist on the same terms as paintings, rather than FOR painting. Indeed, they owe more to Schwitters and Cubist assemblage than to Constructivism. Lanyon found Schwitters’ work “among the most evocative images that I have ever seen”, and he also responded to Picasso’s jokey metamorphoses of everything material which were influential at the time, but it is difficult to know whether it was these artists who encouraged a fresh flowering of constructions and reliefs, or whether  there was some other reason.

There is no doubt that shortly before his death, Lanyon was moving into an extremely fruitful period of creativity, one that gave every indication of a continuing interest in the constructive aspects of art. Had he lived, I have no doubt that Lanyon would have found time to explore still further the possibilities of the third dimension, and that one would find him still, as he put it, “poking around among things, to find something to make into something else.”