Modern Landscapes

Rasheed Araeen, Lovers  1968

Araeen trained as a civil engineer, and his sculptures are constructed using geometric forms. Lovers combines two structures, each of which consists of a series of triangles that have been rotated and orientated in different ways. The work can be shown in two different configurations: either with the two parts next to each other, or on top of each other. This introduction of alternative possibilities challenges the idea of the artwork as a fixed object conceived by a single individual.

Gallery label, October 2016

Trevor Bell, Forces  1962

Forces is a large painting in oil on canvas. Following his relocation in 1960 from St Ives to Leeds, where he took up a Gregory Fellowship in Painting at Leeds University, Bell continued a mode of painting inspired by landscape, nature and the elemental forces of weather that he had developed in Cornwall. The title of this work refers to both the climatic conditions that were part of its inspiration and the formal qualities of the work itself. The forces of the weather, of clouds passing across the high landscape of the Yorkshire Dales and Fells, are evoked by a group of interlocking forms, which seem to stretch out from the centre of the composition towards the edges. They are also suggested by the rising movement that derives from the triangular form at the centre.

Paul Feiler, Janicon LXII  2002

Janicon LXII 2002 is a square abstract painting on canvas. This canvas has been stretched over a built-up stretcher that, with the addition of silver leaf around the edges of the canvas, provides an illusion of a separate frame for the painting. This is however not the case, and the silver leaf border sets up the sharply recessive space that is described by succeeding horizontal and vertical bands of pale blues, greys, greens and browns. The back board of this illusionistic space is a field of similarly coloured vertical bands, in the centre of which is an upright oblong, bounded off-centre in gold leaf. The title brings together references of the double Janus head that looks both back in time and towards the future, with the gold and silver leaf of Byzantine religious icons. Despite the use of geometry and pale colour, the paintings in Feiler’s extensive Janicon series, of which this is a part, are built up of many layers of colour over a long period of time.

Liliane Lijn, Forcefields 3  1969

Marlow Moss, Composition in Yellow, Black and White  1949

Moss wrote, ‘I am no painter, I don’t see form, I only see space, movement and light’. Moss’s three-dimensional works, which Moss first made in white, relate to the structural grids popular in the Dutch art movement ‘De Stijl’ and the paintings of abstract artist Piet Mondrian. Here, two small black horizontal planes counterbalance a bright yellow section and a network of white lines that stand out from the canvas. Together these white, yellow and black elements interact to create a sense of movement and light.

Gallery label, August 2023

Piet Mondrian, The Tree A  c.1913

Mondrian’s fascination with trees developed out of his earlier landscape painting. This is one of his last paintings of trees and is based on realistic sketches made in the Netherlands. After settling in Paris and absorbing the influence of Cubism, Mondrian reworked the image almost to abstraction. The trunk and branches are condensed to a network of verticals and horizontals. He acknowledged the inspiration of nature but added, ‘I want to come as close as possible to the truth, and abstract everything from that until I reach the foundation of things’.

Gallery label, April 2013

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, The Soul of the Soulless City (‘New York - an Abstraction’)  1920

The skyscrapers and railways of New York epitomised the dynamism of the modern metropolis. This painting, originally titled ‘New York – an Abstraction’, shows the former-futurist Nevinson’s enthusiastic response, in which the urgency of the city is matched with a modernist style of painting derived from pre-war abstraction. However, Nevinson’s work did not receive the success for which he had hoped, and his initial excitement gave way to the disillusion indicated by his revised title.

Gallery label, September 2016

Donna Conlon, Coexistence  2003

Marlow Moss, Untitled (White, Black, Blue and Yellow)  c.1954

Henri Matisse, Trivaux Pond  1916 or 1917

The purchase of a car in 1917 allowed Matisse to take all his painting equipment into the woods. He made several works at Trivaux Pond, in the landscaped park of the Bois de Meudon on the outskirts of Paris. Here, the verticals of the trees establish a strong rhythm. Matisse treats the surface of the pond loosely, simplifying the forms and merging reflections with their surroundings. Although within the immediate environs of the city, Matisse imbued the park with an imagined ruralism.

Gallery label, August 2004

Helen Saunders, View of Port Isaac  1930s

View of Port Isaac 1930s is a view of the harbour painted from the hillside above the village of Port Isaac on the north coast of Cornwall. Saunders often spent holidays in Cornwall as a child and she visited Port Isaac many times in the late 1920s and 1930s. In this work she simplified the roofs of the houses to a series of geometric shapes which cluster at the base of the composition, while the coastline beyond and a road winding up to the top left are tilted upwards to create a vertical arrangement of forms. The art historian Brigid Peppin has described how, in Saunders’ watercolours of this period, she used ‘a tilted and flattened perspective to produce a topographically ambiguous landscape where uncertain spatial relationships enhance the formal design without compromising a sense of place’ (in Ashmolean Museum 1996, p.18). She also notes how the narrow unpainted strips which Saunders often used in this period to outline the areas of wash reverse ‘graphic expectations of dark boundaries [and] served to dislocate illusion’ (ibid.). Peppin argues that these ‘modernist’ affirmations of the picture surface show Saunders’s continuing emphasis on contemporary developments in her later figurative work.

Nalini Malani, Untitled I  1970/2017

Untitled I is one of three works in Tate’s collection from a series of black and white photograms by the Indian artist Nalini Malani (see also Untitled II [Tate P82089] and Untitled III [Tate P82090]). The three images all date from 1970 and are visually similar in nature: monochromatic geometric studies in light and form. Originally produced as photograms, exposing light-sensitive paper to light without the use of a camera, these works now exist as photographic prints in an edition of ten. Tate’s copies were printed in 2017 and are number four in the edition. The photograms were first exhibited at the Pundole Art Gallery, Bombay in 1970, printed to a similar scale as the later edition.

Ida Cadorin Barbarigo, Open Game  1961

Open Game (Jeu ouvert) 1961 is an abstract oil painting in which broad brushstrokes are alternated with thin swirling lines, filling the entire surface. Barbarigo used a limited palette in this kind of abstract canvas. Here, black and white dominate, with occasional red touches, over an off-white background. As the title suggests, this painting conveys a sense of playful experimentation and improvisation; nevertheless, each brushstroke appears to have been executed through controlled gestures, following an internal logic and resulting in a balanced overall composition.

Victor Vasarely, Nives II  1949–58

Jesus Rafael Soto, Horizontal Movement  1963

As the spectator passes this work, an optical effect causes the background of black and white lines to vibrate and flicker. Soto described Horizontal Movement as ‘one of the first truly mobile works that I had made’, referring to the addition of an iron rod that hangs in front of the lines. As in all his works the background lines are drawn by hand.

Gallery label, September 2004

Sir Terry Frost, Green, Black and White Movement  1951

Sir Terry Frost, Winter 1956, Yorkshire  1956

Frost's move from St Ives to Leeds in Yorkshire introduced him to a new landscape. In the Yorkshire Dales he felt like a tiny presence in a huge expanse of space.

He related this unusually long, thin work to a particular experience: tobogganing with friends down a steep hill in Leeds, quite out of control. He said the black form at the top left derived from a Russian hat worn by his friend; the long sweep of the lines evokes his experience of careering down the hill.

Gallery label, September 2004

Fahrelnissa Zeid, Untitled  c.1950s

Fahrelnissa Zeid used swirling, crossing lines to paint this abstract artwork. After drawing the lines in pencil, she filled in the shapes made between them with black, green, blue and pink. The result is a complex, kaleidoscopic effect. Zeid made the painting when she was living in London in the 1950s. In 1949 she had taken her first transatlantic flight and was captivated by the abstracted perspective of aerial views. She later translated their scale and feeling into the whirling shapes that appear in this painting. A divisionist effect is achieved, whereby individual patches of colour are built up to create an overall composition.

Gallery label, November 2021