Gimpel Fils, London, where acquired by the present owner, 8th November 2007

Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, Alan Davie, June - August 1965, cat. no.11.

Alan Bowness (ed.), Alan Davie, Lund Humphries, London, 1967, cat. no.127, illustrated, unpaginated.

The board appears sound. There are nail heads visible to the extreme edges of the board, as well as to a horizontal band running through the centre of the composition. There is an old spot of loss to part of one of the raised areas of thicker impasto at the top centre, visible upon close inspection, and a few smaller, lesser traces visible elsewhere. This excepting the work appears in very good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals some scattered areas of fluorescence and probable retouchings to the extreme edges, most probably in line with old frame abrasions, as well as to the aforementioned nail heads. There is a further isolated area in the bottom left quadrant. There are further areas of fluorescence which appear in keeping with the nature of the artist's materials and do not suggest retouchings. Housed in a thin strip wooden frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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London in the 1950s was an exciting artistic hub with both home-grown shows and touring international exhibitions bringing exciting artistic developments from across the Atlantic. The Museum of Modern Art in New York sent over two travelling exhibitions that were to dramatically shape the work of young British art students who flocked to see them – Modern Art in the United States (1956), and The New American Painting (1959). Yet whilst these shows provided for many the first opportunity to witness the works of Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning, for Alan Davie these were works, artists and images that he was already familiar with. It was whilst on a travelling scholarship to Venice in 1949 that he first saw these exciting works of his now legendary American contemporaries. In the first Biennale since the end of the Second World War Davie saw the travelling collection of leading American collector Peggy Guggenheim, housed in the otherwise empty Greek Pavilion. Perhaps the first British artist of his generation to be exposed to the paintings of the New York School, Davie was drawn to the bold, sweeping canvases of Rothko, and the densely worked surfaces of Pollock, fascinated by the striking sense of artistic freedom that abounded in these works. The scale of the works, their bold handling and ritualistic imagery made a deep and lasting impression on the young Scot. Later in the same year Guggenheim was to purchase Davie’s Music of the Autumn Landscape, thus beginning the strong flow of American interest in Davie’s work, followed by several solo exhibitions in the United States both at major public museums and institutions but also at the Catherine Viviano Gallery, which represented him across the Atlantic.

The influence of artists of the New York School is an important and much-discussed aspect of Davie’s approach, but it is important to remember that he was already proving a promising and engaging artist ahead of his exposure to their work, and that he also drew from a number of other art historical, cultural and contemporary sources. Whilst for many of his Briti🥃sh contemporaries (including artists such as Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon and William Scott) their work was a form of abstracted reality, Davie’s was more in line with an abstracted Surrealism, in part inherited from an early twentieth century appreciation, akin to the likes of Paul Klee, whose work he had also seen in the 1948 Biennale.

One is able to see this strong semi-surrealist approach in terms of composition, colour, form and even title, and this is all wonderfully encapsulated in Bird Cage No.1. The board is worked with richly textured paint and rubbed back, with further bold, sweepingly applied brushstrokes and fiercely applied pigment on top. Looking at the painting you sense the energy emitted during the very physical production of the work. Like Pollock, Davie would often🍃 work on his compositions flat on the floor (often with the canvas unstretched). The result is a very visceral imagery which confronts the viewer, drawing them in and making them question the work before them.