SOLD
Sir Thomas Monnington:
Geometric design, lozenge format, late 1960's
Framed (ref: 6522)
Pen and ink, colored crayon
6 1/4 x 4 in. (15.8 x 10.2 cm)
Tags: Sir Thomas Monnington crayon ink pen and ink Canney Abstract Art
Provenance: The Artist's Estate; Private collection
This study is closely related to Monngington's Mondrian influence Student's Union mural, (UCL,London) completed in 1969. ‘It has been a failing all my life' Monnington explained in an interview in the Sunday Express, 'that I take a long time to resolve a painting problem. I take a year to do one painting because I make innumerable studies preparing the way … I am now preparing something for the summer exhibition – I expect that I will use that as a basis for the mural’ (interview in the Sunday Express, 1969).
Monnington was the first President of the Royal Academy to exhibit abstract paintings. “Surely what matters is not whether a work is abstract or representative, but whether it has merit.If those who visit exhibitions would come without preconceptions, would apply to art the elementary standards they apply in other spheres, they might glimpse new horizons.They might ask themselves: is this work distinguished or is it commonplace? Fresh and original or uninspired, derivative and dull?Is it modest or pretentious?( Interview in The Christian Science Monitor 29.5.67).
When the Tate purchased Monnington’s Square Design (1967) he spoke of his abstract paintings as “direct descendants from my ceiling painting in the Council House, Bristol, which was my first departure from purely representational painting. Since them I have been increasingly interested in the subdivisions of surface areas contained in equilateral rectangels (squares) and rectangles derived from square roots. These two-dimensional mathematical relationships suggest to me dimensions in depth, and provide a discipline which at the present time I find as necessary and interesting as that imposed previously in representational painting... You can cut out the blurb if you wish, but I was trying for my own edification to put into words what I think I have been trying to do in the last ten years”, (letter of 12th June 1968)
