Alan Davie
Born Grangemouth, Scotland, 28 Sept 1920.
Scottish painter and printmaker. He trained as a painter at Edinburgh College of Art from 1938 to 1940, initially favouring poetic imagery and coming into contact with modernism at exhibitions held in London of works by Picasso (1945; V&A) and Paul Klee (1945; Tate). He explored a diverse range of activities, however, before returning to painting: from 1949 to 1953 he earned his living by making jewellery and in 1947 he worked as a jazz musician, an activity he continued in later life. He wrote poetry during the early 1940s.
From 1947 to 1949 Davie travelled extensively in Europe; in Italy he studied pre-Renaissance art and saw a wide range of modern art, including the Peggy Guggenheim collection in Venice, to which he later continued to have access. Among the works owned by Guggenheim were paintings of the early 1940s by Jackson Pollock, which led Davie to adopt mythic imagery and forceful painterly gestures. He also adopted from later Pollock a procedure of painting rapidly with his canvases on the floor. From this time his pictures concentrated on themes of organic generation and sinister ritual, fluctuating between turbulent paintwork, animate presences and more geometric forms, sometimes in the same work, as in Golden Seam (1952; London, Brit. Council).
From 1953 to 1956 Davie taught in London at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where he became interested in African and Pacific art. Encouraged by his critical and commercial success from the mid-1950s and by the large studio space made available to him during his Gregory Fellowship at Leeds University (1956–9), Davie increased his scale in works such as the Creation of Man, or Marriage Feast. With its teeming animal, human and pictographic forms, this triptych exemplifies Davie’s search for a proliferation of painted signs and images, which bore more of an affinity to artists of the Cobra group such as Asger Jorn than to American Abstract Expressionism. Influenced by his reading of Eugene Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (1953) in 1955, Davie became interested in Zen Buddhism and concluded that conscious decision-making was incompatible with a spiritual quest; as a result he rejected the emphasis on existential choice and immediate emotionalism central to Harold Rosenberg’s definition of action painting.
As early as 1958 Davie emphasized the importance in his work of intuition, as expressed in the form of enigmatic signs. During the 1960s, both in paintings and in coloured lithographs, he represented such images with increasing clarity at the expense of gestural handling. From 1967 to 1971 he worked intermittently on a Berlin school mural involving an angled wall; he later introduced more representations of room-like spaces with zigzagging walls into his paintings. In 1971 he made his first visit to the island of St Lucia, where he began to spend half of each year and which brought Caribbean influences to bear on his suggestive imagery, as in Bird Gong No. 10, Opus 730 (1973; London, Brit. Council). Taking on the role of a disinherited shaman, Davie created a synthesis of mythologies from a variety of cultures for a modern civilization devoid of its own village myths.
Adrian Lewis. " Davie, Alan." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T021582 (accessed May 1, 2012)
