William Gear

There are two letters from William Gear to Ruth Borchard, dated July 1961, sent from Eastbourne. In his first letter, he writes: 'I am sending you herewith the only suitable “Self Portrait” I have. It is a drawing in Indian ink of March 1953 [...] You may have it for 15 gns. Wishing you well with your collection.'

In his second letter, Gear writes: 'I am glad to know that you have safely received my portrait drawing and that you like it. As you will have surmised I have no self portraits in oil. Similarly I think you will find a good number of contemporary painters are in the same position. As you say, in reproduction, a drawing of this nature, especially in black and white, will show to advantage. I should be pleased to let you have it for 12 gns.'

Gear was thirty-eight years old when he made this self-portrait. The beret conceals his relative baldness but it could be a self-portrait of an older man, on whose countenance a lifetime's 'marks of weakness, marks of woe' are delineated; or that of a younger man whose burden of hardships has literally marked him out.

The drawing's pared-down bone structure shows the use of Indian ink in its most calligraphically raw and succinct state. The following details are conjured up through bold, tersely modulated sweeps of the brush: the sunken (virtually excavated) cheeks; two lines seemingly grooved by anxious thought above the nose; deep shadows under the eyes; a spidery concatenation of lines around the mouth and the minefield of shapes that make up the nose; the profound abysses which are the eyes themselves, their pupils hugely dilated. Not a stroke, not a feature could be altered without changing the entire facial inscape.

It is illuminating to compare this drawing with another pen-and-ink self-portrait by the artist from the same year, probably one of a series made during a short period, quite possibly at a single sitting. In this latter work, the bone structure is much less fiercely etched; the cheeks, though still gaunt, are evidently covered in smooth skin; the eyes, somewhat less pronounced, seem almost to actively challenge the spectator (rather than drawing us into cavities of impenetrable sadness): the beret is worn with an air of quite jaunty defiance. Perhaps in these two works, the artist saw very different aspects of himself. In the first, he appears as a man of ageless suffering and hard-won wisdom; in the second, he is shown more naturalistically, nearer to his true age, a more extrovert figure still marked by wisdom accrued through suffering and experience.

After contemplating these two harsh yet compassionate self-portrayals, it is salutary to come across a 1949 photograph of Gear in his Paris studio, in which he is seen, tea-cup in hand, looking very mild, sociable and benign alongside several contemporary young artists, and surrounded by his own paintings. We are reminded of the vast variety of expressions that can fleet across our faces within just a few moments, and the subjectivity and transient nature of our own self-identities. Yet each of Gear's 1953 Indian ink self-portraits (both rooted in momentary perceptions) transcends mere ephemeral appearances. Each work presents us with a unique yet universal aspect of himself.

Much of Gear's work from his student days onwards seems to be built around what one critic has called 'a dark structural grid' – the skeletal armature approaching abstraction, for example, of his self-portrait drawing. Another self-portrait drawing was commissioned in 1949 for the front cover of the fortnightly Art News & Review – but perhaps its savage forcefulness deterred the journal's editor Bernard Denvir from using the image; here, the characteristic armature has solidified to such a degree that the 'leaded' lines – each measuring anything between half an inch and an inch and a half in thickness – have the effect of darkening almost the whole countenance, until it is virtually obliterated.

Denvir contacted Gear again, and in Art News & Review (18^th April 1953), a finely wrought, realistic pencil self-portrait appeared, showing the artist austerely appraising himself from eyes, beneath a slanting beret, of intense, melancholy focus. As in a few other self-portrait drawings of this time (including the one acquired by Ruth), the artist is seen in collar, tie and jacket.

From 1948 to 1953, the artist made at least a dozen self-portrait drawings that we know of, and though their psychic and formal scope is quite vast – ranging from, at one extreme, the immaculate 1953 pencil drawing just discussed to the bizarrely startling 1948 ink Head, in which four floating black dots for eyes (two, we may conjecture, perhaps evoking the pair of spectacles other self-portrayals show him wearing) are tethered amidst a dense, angularised Klee-like armature. Physiognomic likeness is not entirely suspended here; rather, it is engaged with, and transcended too, with almost brutal playfulness; affinities here with Picasso are clear.

The art historian Dennis Farr in 1976 described Gear's 'formidable combination of Scottish dourness, in the best sense, with impish joie de vivre’. In his monograph William Gear (Sansom & Company, 2015), Andrew Lambirth quotes the artist and art teacher Michael Ginsbourg, saying of Gear, whom he met in the mid-1980s when the latter would have been about seventy, 'He had a twinkle in the eye, a slight formality of manner, and he conveyed a sense of being busy, on the way to something else [...] He was dapper [...] jacket and tie and nice raincoat. You wouldn't have guessed he was an artist.'

William Gear was born in 1915 into a Scottish mining family, which endured great hardships especially around the time of the 1926 General Strike. Many years later, he realised how his early environment on the ‘rocky [Fife] coast with castles, wild storms and huge trees [...] the pit head, the winding gear and structural aspects of the chimneys [...] must have been the most impressive visual things [...] to a child’. He studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art from 1932-36 (where his teachers included William Gillies and John Maxwell) and in 1937-38 (after a year studying Art History at Edinburgh University) was taught in Paris by Fernand Léger (a prime influence on his art). He then travelled to Italy, Greece and Turkey. Interestingly, years later he acknowledged 'traces of the Byzantine approach in my paintings [...] the structural quality, this vertical accent, and a fragmentation that is rather like a mosaic.' Lambirth acknowledges too the significance of what he calls 'the El Greco Factor' in Gear's art, the way that in the late 1940s Gear 'began to paint Spanish-inflected pictures of considerable verve and dark but flickering presence'.

Called up into the Army in 1940, he continued to draw prolifically in the countries where he was stationed. During the war he had exhibitions in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Cairo and Florence. Wartime gouaches he made in Italy have since been described as 'strong fragmented local colour against the black grid of burnt-out orchards and charred houses’.

A visit to the newly liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and his experiences of war-devastated Germany, especially during the cold winter of 1946-47, profoundly affected the artist. Sarah Wilson has written about Gear's response to extreme human suffering: that such sights 'paradoxically bore witness to a rugged human tenacity, and explained Gear's more than robust attitude to the “stupid small-time provincial Hampstead-type talk about Zeitgeist and angst and fears” [quoting Gear himself] in 1950s London, dismissed [by him] as “just small beer”.' If anything, Gear's self-portrait drawings from 1948 to 1953 are a witness to this tenacity.

From 1947-50 Gear had his own studio in Paris, and enjoyed visits from CoBrA artists like Karel Appel (1921-2006) and Jean-Michel Atlan (1913-60), and others of the paysagisme abstrait movement, whose work (like his) imposed a grid-like form onto articulated perceptions of landscape. He later recalled:

‘The important thing of that period was that everything was so fluid. The war had put a massive blanket on real artistic activity. France had been occupied. Europe was torn to bits. There were no real threads to pick up and start again. The situation was wide open. The major fashion before the war had been surrealism – and this was really out. What emerged, in fact, was what became known as “abstract expressionism”. These labels were just not invented then. When asked about my work, I would say it was “abstraction lyrique”. The new style was abstract, it was painterly, it brought together the Cubism and Fauvism and the great French painterly tradition of Braque, Bonnard and Matisse.’ In 1950, Gear returned to live in Britain. 'I went first to America in 1956 [...] When I went to New York I met people like Motherwell, Guston and Kline. They were very welcoming – again it's this feeling of internationalism.'

In a catalogue essay for an exhibition of 'Paintings by Gear' in Hamburg in 1947, and at Gimpel Fils in London the following year, David Sylvester wrote about 'a revolution [...] in [the] syntax [...] of the painter's language.' The ultimate faith of this movement towards a synthesis [of abstraction and figuration] – born out of easel work, not café talk – has never been more neatly expressed than by Gear himself: “I don't want to draw nature; I want to draw in nature”.'

Gear's late 1940s paintings of trees and landscape forms, with their intermittent taches of exuberant colours sparkling within tight-meshed grid, were followed by less rectilinear, more generally vibrant and fluid abstract landscapes in the early 1950s. The Russo-French painter Nicolas de Staël ((1914-1955); who exhibited first in London in 1952) and the American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), whose work was exhibited at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1959 (Gear had exhibited alongside Pollock in New York as early as 1949) were meteoric influences on the post-war British avant-garde. De Staël's influence seems to have accelerated the use of simplified abstract forms in Gear's paintings; Pollock perhaps had the opposite effect of helping to heighten his work's dancing complexities.

Around 1970, Gear moved on to a late painting phase of notable visionary originality. The taut black armature and grid patterns that had characterised much of his art were finally subverted, indeed detonated, in paintings such as Yellow Spine (1970), Super Structure (1971), Green Fuse (1973) and Spring Frolic (1975). In these works, dark dynamic diagonals splinter the composition, with symphonies of proliferating orbic shapes (both microcosmic and macrocosmic) oscillating all around in gorgeous rhythms. There are affinities in these ecstatic, well-deliberated compositions with the St Ives artist Bryan Wynter's post-1956, mescaline-inspired abstract paintings, which themselves explored patterns of core human consciousness from a transcendent perspective.

Human portrayals are relatively rare in Gear's oeuvre, but even in those his intuitive maxim about drawing in nature rings true. A lyrical 1947 head in gouache with seemingly arbitrary yet harmonious facial fields of lemon and pink and blue, obliterates any hard-held distinctions between interior and objective reality. John Berger, writing in The New Statesman (10th April 1953), said that in Gear's major 1953 painting Footballers, 'The sunlit yellow bars of the striped shirts lam up and down with agitated speed. The white bars of the goal-posts and the transposed white lines, marking the pitch itself, form a grid through which, from the ball in the foreground, one races past two large, abruptly halted figures [...] back through a corridor that suggests [...] the action of the other players [...] There have been few serious attempts to interpret movement in terms of “impressionist” dazzle, rather than by a “cubist” analysis of planes; this is a worthy and brave one.'

In 1958, Gear was appointed Curator of the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, and, often having to counter insular municipal opposition, went on to acquire for its Collection works by Edward Wadsworth, Edward Burra, Peter Lanyon, Brian Wynter, Sandra Blow, Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron and William Crozier (q.v.), amongst others. He went on to enjoy a varied career as an art school administrator, and as an art teacher and lecturer. In 1964, he was made head of fine art at Birmingham College of Art, retiring in 1975 as head of the department of fine art at Birmingham Polytechnic. He had many exhibitions in Britain and abroad and, in 1997, a fifty-year retrospective of his work at London's Redfern Gallery. An exhibition conjoining Gear's art and CoBrA art toured from Aberdeen Art Gallery in 1997-99. He became a Senior Royal Academician in 1995. His work is represented in the Tate Collection. William Gear died in 1997.