Duncan Grant
Flowers in a Glass Vase, 1917-18 c.
Oil on board
58.4 x 54 cm
23 x 21 1/4 in
23 x 21 1/4 in
The fusion of abstraction and figuration in Grant’s work around the time of this painting was an attempt to reconcile his spontaneous lyrical gift (as seen in his Omega designs) with a more austere sense of discrete form. Here a shallow spatial recession is established by the geometric abstraction at left cutting in front of the elliptical glass vase of stylised flowers. The écriture behind the vase was used frequently by Grant at this moment – flat yet painterly – and occurs most fully in his and Bell’s wall panels for Maynard Keynes’s rooms in Cambridge (see no XX) from two or three years later. Botanically improbable flowers appear in Grant’s decorative designs throughout his career. [Richard Shone]
Provenance
The artist’s estateAnthony d’Offay Gallery
Private Collection, UK, 1987
Exhibitions
1984, London, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, The Omega Workshops: Alliance and Enmity in English Art 1911- 1920, no.761986 London, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, exhibtion to mark the public opening of Charleston, no.30
1987, New York, Hirschl and Adler, British Modernist Art, 1905-1930, no. 131
1999, London, Tate, The Art of Bloomsbury, no.81
2005, Bangor N.I, Ava Gallery, Duncan Grant, no.9, ill. with verso
2018, London, Piano Nobile, From Omega to Charleston: The Art of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, 1910-1934, no.19
Literature
Simon Watney, The Art of Duncan Grant, (London: John Murray, 1990), pl. 26Gillian Naylor (ed.), Bloomsbury: The Artists, Authors and Designers by Themselves (London: Octopus, 1990), p. 182, ill. cropped
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