John Armstrong was born in 1893 in Hastings. He studied at St. John’s College, Oxford, 1912-13, and then at St. John’s Wood School of Art 1913-14. During the war he served in the Royal Field Artillery 1914-19, before briefly returning to St. John’s Wood School. He began his professional career as a theatre designer in London, gaining important patrons including Lillian and Samuel Courtauld, who commissioned Armstrong to decorate a room in their Portman Square home. His first solo exhibition was at the Leicester Galleries in 1928. In 1933 he joined Unit One alongside Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, Edward Burra, Henry Moore, Edward Wadsworth, John Bigge and Barbara Hepworth, with whom he exhibited at the Unit One exhibition. From the early 1930s onwards his work became Surrealist in style – uncanny, romantically dream-like and heavily imbued with symbolism. Armstrong died in 1973. His work is held in numerous international public collections including the Tate, the Imperial War Museum, the National Galleries of Scotland, and the National Gallery of Australia.

Armstrong’s membership of Unit One propelled him to the forefront of the British avant-garde as a compatriot of Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Edward Burra, Edward Wadsworth and John Bigge. Brought together under the auspices of Paul Nash and critic Herbert Read, the aim of the group was to seek, through diverse ways, “the meaning of ‘the contemporary spirit’” as Nash wrote for the catalogue to the group’s only exhibition in 1934 at the Mayor Gallery, the headquarters of the group. Within Unit One, Nash sought to unite two opposing artistic poles of abstract and figurative practices; this figurative element, although without the participation of John Armstrong, formed the core of the British component of the first Surrealist exhibition in London in 1936.

The self-consciously avant-garde nature of the group – the manifesto of intent, the alignment as a self-defined group, the catalogue by Herbert Read with statements by each artist – was a deliberate decision by British artists to align themselves with revolutionary continental groups such as the Futurists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists. John Armstrong’s vision was closely aligned to that of Nash: both were, as Annette Armstrong, John’s widow, argued “fundamentally painters of metaphysical reality, increasingly concerned with the relationship between and beyond appearances”. It was, however, perhaps the Unit One member and architect Wells Coates who was the greatest source of mutual inspiration. Armstrong’s continual preoccupation throughout his career with architectural motifs and with structural composition more generally were in part instigated by Coates, and indeed the two worked together in 1931.

In keeping with the guiding vision of Unit One to unite abstraction and figuration in art, Into the Deep is amongst Armstrong’s most abstract works from the entirety of his career, and such abstraction would not be seen again until Armstrong’s return to it in the 1960s. Armstrong exhibited four works at the 1934 exhibition, and another five were illustrated in Herbert Read’s catalogue published in the same year of which Into the Deep was the fifth. Despite the bold aim of Unit One to find a synthesis between abstraction and figuration, these divisions proved too great to be surpassed and the group split following the 1934 exhibition. Nash, Wadsworth, Burra and Bigge formed the basis of the basis of the British Surrealism, whilst Nicholson and Hepworth pursued pure abstraction. John Armstrong was not a group-joiner and subsequently pursued an individual path after Unit One, one that was surreal without being Surrealist.

Into the Deep is a profoundly mysterious painting, amongst Armstrong’s largest, and most historically and artistically significant works. Armstrong produced just a handful of works for Unit One at the start of the 1930s, and beyond these paintings this decade was dominated by his work for the great film producer Alexander Korda. Epitomising the paradox of Unit One’s strategy to fuse the abstract with the figurative, Into the Deep foreshadows Armstrong’s preoccupation with this elusive undertaking throughout his career. The central form is inanimate and abstract, yet alludes to recognisable animate creatures, lingering enigmatically between the real and imagined world. Such hybrid creatures populated Armstrong’s works for Unit One – an anthropomorphic classical column becomes an owl in Pillar Over the Sea, 1933, and triangular form simultaneously takes on bird and fish features in On the Balustrade, 1933.

Marine qualities abound in Into the Deep: the predominance of green suggests great watery depths, sinuous curving lines are read as stylised waves, and the central form possesses a fish-like tail. So-called ‘Seaside Surrealism’ was integral to British Surrealism. The hidden mysteries of the underwater world featured frequently in the work of Armstrong’s Unit One colleagues, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth and Tristam Hillier, amongst many others. The idea of art uncovering the secrets of an impenetrable depth closely aligned this interest in the sea with Freudian thought: the sea is often symbolic of the subconscious. The individual manifestoes of Unit One were consciously Freudian, in line with European Surrealism’s fascination with Freud’s exploration of the psyche. In his statement for the Unit One catalogue, Armstrong wrote that his extraordinary imagery derived from the “scattered fragments of my own mind, a desert with certain mirages on the horizon of broken columns and white horses and large women asleep”. Psyche and sea become synonymous in Into the Deep: an exploration of depths physical and psychological and a metaphysical investigation into the subjective and fantastical.

Into the Deep is amongst Armstrong’s most sculptural works: exquisite contouring and shading of the central shape give it a structural solidity, an immeasurable presence. It seems to approach us, as though gliding through water, tail behind the body propelling it onward. The minimal palette, restricted to green in varying shades, an inky blue, and white direct the focus towards the relationship of forms. The influence of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore’s sculpture upon Into the Deep is palpable: organic, sinuous forms constructed from amalgamated shapes. Simplicity and totality of the structural whole is elevated above detail, and vitality and sensuality are paramount. Even the surface of Armstrong’s painting can be seen in tandem with the surface details of single incised lines present in Hepworth and Moore’s sculpture. Painted in tempera, Armstrong’s medium of choice for the major part of his career, the surface of Into the Deep is heavily worked with scrapping, scratching, incising and hatching across the entire panel. This technique parallels the painting method of his Unit One colleague Ben Nicholson in the early 1930s – repeatedly scrapping back layers of paint and overlaying with graphic details. It was within this medley of ideas and experimentation that Into the Deep was produced, as John Armstrong was at the heart of the most potent of Britain’s avant-garde groups.

Of Armstrong's five works illustrated in the Unit One book, three are now in museum collections, one is recorded as lost, and Into the Deep is the only Unit One work which will ever be available for private collectors. A work of immense historical importance, Into the Deep reveals both the mutual collaboration and inventiveness of the Unit One members, and John Armstrong’s unique, enigmatic personal vision.