Alan Reynolds (1926-2014)

Born in Suffolk, studied at the Woolwich Polytechnic from 1948-1952 and at the Royal College of Art from 1952-53. Throughout the 1950’s, he taught at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and began teaching at St Martin’s School of Art in 1962.

Although he originally made his reputation as  a landscape painter, the 1960’s and the influence of Europe brought about his development of a completely different abstract style. During the war he had been posted to Hanover and felt the impact of German expressionism while other British artists were focused on France. His early influences were Constable and Samuel Palmer, but he later looked to Paul Klee and Mondrian, abandoning depiction in favour of the abstract.

Reynolds has been exhibited extensively on an international scale, with representation in major permanent collections worldwide including the MoMA, New York, the Berlin National Gallery, the V&A and the Tate.

 

Alan Reynolds (1926-2014), Landscape with a Thorn Hedge, 1955

Alan Reynolds (1926-2014), Landscape with a Thorn Hedge

 

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Watercolour and gouache on paper
10 x 12½ in (25 x 32 cm)
Signed and dated

Collection: The artist’s widow Vona Reynolds until the present day

Alan Reynolds begun showing at the Redfern gallery as an unknown art student in 1952 and by the end of a meteoric decade, in which he was described by Bryan Robertson as ‘’the Golden Boy of post-neo romanticism in England’’, his work was represented in 30 major museum collections ,twelve of them overseas.

Reynolds practice was not to work on the spot but back in the studio. The critic J.P. Hodin writes that his art of this period displays “his genuine, loving attachment to nature, both to landscape as a whole and to its particular shapes and their arrangements, to blossoms and fruit, to grasses and weeds, to leaves and buds, to branches and twigs, and to the varied tree forms which, with their special features, define and characterize a landscape in its various moods …… his preoccupation was not with the grand or with the picturesque …. rather a penetration into the spirit of nature.”

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