Modernists and Mavericks by Martin Gayford

Author:Martin Gayford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2018-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

HOWARD HODGKIN Mr and Mrs Robyn Denny, 1960

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It was a strange irony that the close alliance between Alloway and his carefully assembled team of hard-edge painters was finally shattered partly at least because of a portrait – and a much more naturalistic one than any by Hodgkin – painted by Alloway’s wife, Sylvia Sleigh.

Although few went to ‘Situation’, there was a reprise of the show – with changes and additions – the following year, at the smart Marlborough New London Gallery, an off-shoot of the main gallery intended to showcase the cutting-edge art that was now appearing, unexpectedly, in this previously staid city. For the catalogue of the second ‘Situation’ exhibition, it was proposed there should be a frontispiece: a group portrait of the artists by Sleigh, a figurative painter who – though she was already in her mid-forties – had not gained much attention up to that point. The picture depicted Alloway’s ‘team’ as it was in March 1961, or at any rate most of the principal players: Mundy and Ayres are at the left, Denny, wearing glasses, centre right, Alloway himself is in the bottom right-hand corner.

Several of the painters were extremely unhappy about this picture – so far from abstract, instead rather quirky and almost naive in style – being at the front of their resolutely hard-edged, contemporary catalogue, with its own hard-edge typography and design by Gordon House (front centre in Sleigh’s painting, next to Alloway). Henry Mundy described what happened next:

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