It is interesting to see that this very atypical Clifford Hall painting has turned up for sale at an auction being held by Lyon & Turnball:
It is also good to see the colouring he used and that it is in fact signed and dated – because until now we only had an old black and white photo of the work in the estate’s image archive which shows no sign of a signature:
The painting has also acquired a new title – “Stones and Elipse, 1954” – somewhere along the way, as on the back of our B&W photo the artist just wrote, “Shapes”. However, I certainly won’t argue with the new title, as it is both more distinctive and descriptive than the artist’s own.
It really is so unlike the kind of work Clifford Hall is generally known for that one could not expect any art market professional to be able to identify it as his work in the absence of a signature and/or a convincing description verso, and/or some very good provenance detailing how and when it was sold.
And whilst it is entirely obvious and facile to describe “Stones and Elipse, 1954” as an unusual and atypical painting by Clifford Hall, it is not quite so easy for me to categorize the picture any further. My feeling is that it pretty much fits the definition of abstract art – or at least this definition of abstract art from the Tate website:
Abstract art is art that does not attempt to represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality but instead use shapes, colours, forms and gestural marks to achieve its effect.
Source: Tate
However, I well remember my father telling me, when we were discussing his versatile exploration of various genres, that he had tried doing some abstract paintings but had decided that abstract art “wasn’t his thing” and had therefore “destroyed them”. At the time, this conjured up dramatic images in my adolescent mind of my father building a bonfire and consigning all his abstracts to the flames, though it is far more likely that he just painted other pictures on top of them, as for an artist he was a reasonably practical man most of the time and he could hardly afford to be so profligate with his materials as to burn some of his canvases – or even any of his boards. Although he did tend to be quite ruthless when going through his working drawings, tearing up and binning any that he considered to be bad work.
So is it the case that he didn’t destroy all his abstract paintings after all and this one is a survivor? Or would he personally not have considered it to be an abstract? Is it a surrealist painting then? Possibly, but it seems more like an abstract to me – if we have to label it one or the other, that is. Which we don’t really, however much we might be tempted to do so.
Atypical it may be, but I know that my father painted at least one other picture in a similar vein. It can be spotted hanging on the wall, to his right, in this photograph of him working on a conventional portrait of the Viscountess St Davids in his studio in Chelsea in November 1954:
This detail provides a closer look at it:
It is possible to tell that this one, which could logically be called “Stones and Elipses”, is more thoroughly worked than”Stones and Elipse, 1954″. Also, the stones have lost all trace of any naturalistic contouring and the standing stone appears to have become diaphanous – unless the reclining stone has become diaphanous and is also levitating into the bargain. If he was happy enough to not only frame and hang this rather strange painting on his studio wall but to have it there in the presence of an important client and a press photographer, it seems highly unlikely that he would subsequently have decided to destroy it. On the other hand, it does not appear to be signed. And we have no evidence that he ever exhibited it or any other painting like it, and it wasn’t still in his possession when he died. Therefore, the most likely explanation is that he sold it privately at some point to someone who visited his studio and took a fancy to it. Or he might have swapped it for another artist’s painting, or even given it away to someone who liked it. Whatever he did with it, if he didn’t paint over it, I hope he signed it before he parted with it.
The auction is due to take place on Friday, 29th October 2021 at the Mall Galleries, London. You can see the full details here:
MODERN MADE: Modern British & Post-War Art, Design & Studio Ceramics – Lot350