ABSTRACT
Born of English parents in Dublin, he had little conventional education, and in 1925 came to London where he started as an interior decorator and designer of furniture. He visited Paris and Berlin, 1927–8, and began to paint, taking up oils in 1928. Self-taught, he was advised by his friend Roy De Maistre. By 1931 he was painting full-time, and had a Crucifixion reproduced in Herbert Read’s book Art Now. He lost confidence during the later 1930s and worked in Civil Defence during the war, resuming painting about 1944. His Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 (Tate), created a sensation when shown at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945. Since the mid- 1950s his work has been regularly exhibited internationally (Grand Palais, Paris, 1972; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1975; the Tate Gallery, 1985) and acquired by most major museums 18around the world. He painted portraits of friends, figure compositions and fantasies including animals, often in intense colour, and usually suggesting involuntary movement. Executed with a bewildering technical virtuosity, his work tended to become more freely painted, but his essential subject – a pessimistic view of the human condition – did not fundamentally change over the years. He used famous paintings by former artists, stills from films and published photographs as a source of inspiration; the resultant images are dionysian, violent and pathetic, evocative of alienation, horror and suffering.
