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Nevill Johnson (1911-1999) COMPOSITION
Currency:EUR
Category:Everything Else / Other
Start Price:NA
Auction Date:2005 Apr 26 @ 18:00 (UTC+00:00 : GMT)
Location:Dublin, Ireland
Nevill Johnson (1911-1999) COMPOSITION<BR>signed in monogram lower right<BR>oil on canvas<BR>61 by 91cm., 24 by 36in.<BR><BR>Provenance:<BR>Gorry Gallery, Dublin;<BR>‘The Irish Sale’, Sotheby’s, 21 May 1999, lot 364;<BR>Private collection<BR><BR>Exhibited:<BR>Gorry Gallery, Dublin, 28 April – 11 May 1989, catalogue no. 14<BR><BR>Literature:<BR>Dr S. B. Kennedy, catalogue entry in the Gorry Gallery catalogue, 1989, page 3<BR><BR>In the mid-1950s, as he became more distanced from Victor Waddington, Nevill Johnson received a commission from the English industrialist Cyril Lord for a painting to record his recently constructed carpet factory in Donaghadee. Johnson had painted a highly stylised work merging coastal landscape and machinery, Linenscape, for Laurence Bryson in 1943, and in both commissions he managed to produce a work that still remained deeply personal for him.<BR><BR>From around 1946, Nevill Johnson had begun to work on a series of barren, post-apocalyptic landscapes that have suggestions of surrealism in terms of their imagery or mood. The present painting has elements of these landscapes and their tragic seriousness, but also displays the humour that is in much of Johnson’s work. It has been interpreted as a complex allegory of the new factory and its effect on the locality, but according to the artist the picture’s symbolism was not intended to be read in such a didactic manner. Certainly there are clear visual references to the Copeland Islands off the coast by Donaghadee and to the location and nature of the factory and its machinery. Also, one can read the long line of peaks as representing the unemployed seeking work, which is consistent with the social comment of much of Johnson’s painting and photography in its anger at inequality and the inaction of the state. Most importantly in the present work, Nevill Johnson saw magic as a redemptive spiritual force in a modern world in which he considered the church had become increasingly irrelevant, and this painting sets out to create an atmosphere of magic through the shapes and objects employed, and in particular through the magical symbols inscribed on the red cone.<BR><BR>The treatment of the sky is reminiscent of the organisation of pictorial space we see in early analytic cubist compositions (the sky in Braque’s 1910 Rio Tinto Factories is unusually close to this), but Johnson’s ambitions are very different. Deeply interested in science, he sought to establish a visual convention that clarified the molecular structure that underlies our understanding of physical form and likeness. In paintings such as these, Johnson unites the two opposing aspects of his art, the serious thinker and angry commentator and the unsettling wit of the homo ludens. <BR><BR>Dickon Hall,<BR>Killinchy, Co. Down,<BR><BR>March 2005<BR><BR>
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