The Heron family
Waddington Galleries, London, 2nd August 2001
Whitford Fine Art, London, where acquired by the present owner, 1st October 2004

London, Waddington Galleries, Patrick Heron, 28th February - 23rd March 1963, cat. no.17, illustrated.

Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, Phaidon, London, 1994, illustrated p.169.

Original canvas. Generally the work is in good overall condition. There is some minor craquelure visible upon close inspection to the bright red circle upper right, with a resultant tiny spot of lifting. To the outline of the blue circle lower left there is some craquelure to the thicker impasto with one two extremely tiny minor fleck of loss. There is evidence of blooming across the surface. Ultraviolet light reveals an uneven varnish layer which makes the fluorescence difficult to interpret. There are some minor retouchings to the extreme edges. Held in a white painted wooden frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 294 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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The Estate of Patrick Heron is preparing the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the Artist's work and would like to hear from owners of any works by Patrick Heron, so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue. Please write to The Estate of Patrick Heron, c/o Modern & Post-War British Art, Sotheby's, 34-35 New Bond Street, London, W1A 2AA or email at modbrit@laitexier.com

Tall Venetian: October 1962 was painted during a crucial period of creativity and experimentation during which Heron established himself as not only one of the most important abstract painters working in Britain but also as a major voice of the European avant-garde. He led the ongoing transatlantic dialogue with the American art critic Clement Greenberg who he had first met in 1954 and corresponded with regularly about theories of modernism. However, by the early 1960s, the relationship between the two was already strained - Greenberg criticising Heron's paintings of 1958: 'I felt, a few too many discs or rectangles were put in to prevent that wonderfully original colour of yours from realising itself' (Greenberg, Letter to Heron, 17 August 1958, quoted in Michael McNay, Patrick Heron, Tate Publishing, 2002, p.57). Heron was in disagreement with Greenberg's claims of the supremacy of American art; and was to challenge the authority of Greenberg's views and defend the position of European Abstraction in two articles published in Studio International in the late 1960s and in the Guardian in 1974. Heron ignored Greenberg's criticism and continued to paint works retaining the spontaneity of form and colour so evident in Tall Venetian.  Painted in the year of his second solo exhibition in New York at the Bertha Shaefer Gallery, Tall Venetian is one of a series of vertical paintings which include Tall Brown, 1959 (Private Collection) and Tall Purple, 1962 (Private Collection). His work of this time met a positive response from other American art critics with a review in the New York Post of 17th April 1960 praising his 'highly sophisticated and cultivated sensitivity ... It is an art of harmony, of sensu𒅌ous appreciation of the loveliness of colour and deep regard for the many comforts that are to be obtained from the placement of shape within an arbi🎃trary boundary'.  

Colour was now the main content and subject of Heron's painting. It was not Heron's intention for a meaning to be found from outside the canvas but that colour alone dictate the form of the composition, evident from the use of colour in his title – ‘Tall Venetian’ – venetian red is the dominant colour in this work. Here, the disparate soft-edged squares and lopsided discs in reds, greens and purples spring out against the dominating background colour like shimmering islands which appear to float towards and apart from each other creating an intriguing spatial sensation. Sometimes their edges are indefinite, whilst at other times they are highlighted by a halo of lighter pigment or defined by unruly black lines which add to the vibrancy of the composition. These black lines were to appear to a greater extent in works from the following year when Heron started to use charcoal to map out his coꦫmpositions.

Heron's summary of his ideas at this time appear in 'A Note on my Painting: 1962', cited in the introduction to his exhibition at Galerie Charles Leinhard which could almost be describing the present work: 'It seems obvious to me that we are still only at the beginning of our discovery and enjoyment of the superbly exciting facts of the world of colour ... Colour determines the actual shapes, or areas, which balance one another ... I have turned my back on the idea of a uniformly covered canvas, empty of all but one tone without the interruption or incident of any kind. If the entire surface is Chinese vermillion - then one's eyes soon become so saturated by the vibration of vermilion... One must then allow a tiny slither of dull green to swim into the arrangement... [this colour] cries out to be matched, or balanced ... And, of course, the sharp and small green form may well be balanced by a much larger, softer, diffuse form ... In any case, optical after-images inevitably join the dance' (The Artist quoted in Patrick Heron, Gallery Charles Lienhard AG, Zurich, 196💦3, u🌞npaginated).

Heron's works from this time, emerging out of the stripe paintings of 1957-58 were breaking new boundaries in his exploration of 'space and colour'. As Michael McNay comments, 'Even the stripe paintings had been attributed to the influence of Rothko by critics who had as yet grasped neither what Rothko nor Heron were about. But now the time had come when never again would a painting by Heron be mistaken for a painting by any other artist; never again would the influence of another painter be thought to have pushed Heron in a particular direction' (Michael McNay, op. cat., p.49).