Albert Irvin

Albert Irvin’s abstract painting Cloud is inflected with the zeitgeist of Abstract Expressionism, a loose-knit movement which originated in New York and started spreading across the Atlantic to London in the mid-1950s. Irvin belonged to a generation of painters who were deeply affected by the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and others which they first saw in the Modern Art in the United States exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1956, a selection which was borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Rothko’s sonorous, large-format canvases had a particular effect upon Irvin. So much is evident from Cloud in which carefully modulated areas of colour are juxtaposed to create a self-contained universe, resounding with nuances of space, internal movement, and compositional emphasis. The title ‘Cloud’ focuses the viewer’s attention upon atmospheric effects in the painting, with lighter paints layered over dark creating an effect akin to mist or fog.

Irvin’s personal response to contemporary American painting of the late 1950s and early 1960s can be related to a high point of British abstract painting between 1955 and 1965. Writing in 1976, the historian of modern art Alan Bowness described it thus:

There was a tremendous mood of confidence in British art at that time, a great wave of enthusiasm which affected everybody from the older generation of Nicholson and Moore to the youngest still at art school. I suppose this was the result of the final realization that French art was not inherently superior to British, and at that time there was not that depressing subservience to American art that has replaced French dominance today.

In 1963 Irvin began exhibiting at the New Art Centre, London, and his work of the period is marked by painterly freedom and a fresh creative energy which bears testament to Bowness’s remarks. Another work by Irvin, Evening (circa 1961, Arts Council Collection) (fig. 1), uses a similar palette of russet orange, ochre and modulated yellows. The mixture of round- and straight-edged forms in both paintings amounts to an evocation of some vivid sensation in an original formal language. As with the colour field painting of Rothko, the effect of Irvin’s work in this period is never decorative but rather terse, luminous, and richly suggestive.