Patrick Heron

Heron’s experimentation with the still-life genre closely echoes the French Cubist, Georges Braque, in his clever interplay of colour, form and interior and exterior space. Heron visited the French artist in Paris in 1946 and later deemed Braque to be the ‘greatest living master of still life’, who made leaping developments in ‘the most powerful fusion so far made of the abstract and the representational’ (Patrick Heron, ‘Paris Summer, 1940’, The New Statesman and Nation, 16 July 1949). Following the French artist’s approach, Heron explored the ‘transparency’ of objects – for example, how the lines of the windowpanes dissolve into each other. The still-life elements – a table, window and vase – are painted as silhouettes, broad areas of colour that seem to occupy the same plane. Here, characteristic of Heron’s oeuvre at the time, line and colour now orchestrate a perpetual and almost abstract rhythm that runs throughout the painting: the flowers in the vase or the pattern of the rug delineated through simple brush strokes.

As Heron wrote many years later in a letter to the Tate about his table-by-the-window pictures of this period, it was the unique sensation of space that had effectively prompted his exploration of colour as space in these paintings. A year before the present work was painted, Heron curated an exhibition at the Hanover Galley in London, titled Space in Colour. Heron’s work was exhibited along with a further nine British artists who were experimenting with colour as the descriptive emphasis of the painting.
In Blue Cat Under Table: 1954, colour takes the focus over observational accuracy. Referenced in the title, the cat is captured as a simple blue shape but also a shadowy presence under the table. Mel Gooding describes how his still-life paintings ‘have a spontaneous gaiety and an unabashed enjoyment of colour as light, colour released from description, colour shape as a determining dynamic in the formal organisation of the picture ... a lucent clarity is achieved by the direct laying of pure colour onto the primed canvas’ (M. Gooding, Patrick Heron, London, 1999, p. 66).

During the early post-war years, Heron frequently travelled between London and St Ives. After a journey from London, he wrote that ‘I shall never forget the immense sensation of space the first moment we entered that room ... this was the window occurring over and over again in my paintings of that period, whether we were actually in St Ives when I painted them, or at home at Addison Avenue, Holland Park’. Blue Cat Under Table: 1954 offers an exciting glimpse into Heron’s exploration of documenting space through colour and looks forward to his later abstraction where unmodulated colour assumes the entire picture.