London Art Fair 2020 | STAND 44, Business Design Centre, 52 Upper Street, London, N1 0QH
The Scottish Gallery is bringing a Douthwaite one-woman show to the London Art Fair in Islington in January and is delighted to include the following, rediscovered work. It belonged to her friends Peter and Barbara Elstob, the former and writer, entrepreneur and inventor who had known Paul Hogarth from the International Brigades in Spain and had a home in Suffolk, open house to many of the Soho crowd including Colquhoun and McBryde. Later, after her separation, she would stay with the Elstob’s in their home in Belsize Park, where she gave several works to her friends.
The typed label on the verso of this striking painting give the address of Ivy House, Great Linford, Newport Pagnell. It was here, a handsome two-story thatched cottage, that Pat Douthwaite and her husband Paul Hogarth moved in January 1961 with their baby son Toby. Hogarth had taken up a salaried teaching job in Cambridge, setting up a graphic design department at The School of Art, and a period of relative comfort began. The artist was able to send the work she had made that winter for exhibitions in Cambridge and London.
Douthwaite was an avid consumer of contemporary film and Mifuni (her spelling often not precise!) refers to the Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa’s favourite, whose film Yojimbo came out in 1961. The figure seems an exotic, weathered hero, though as with all her works inspired by real people there is an element of provocation.
The painted patterns of the figure, which still owes much to Dubuffet, are reprised from the Village Taxi, a Suffolk work to which she gives the same date. She would shortly move on from tachist, de Kooning-inspired work to the single-figure cast of grotesques of the ensuing years, but Portrait of Mifuni is a significant discovery, a linking work in the artist’s headlong emergence from experimentation to maturity.
VALUATION DAYS AT THE FAIR:
Wednesday 22 January • 2 – 4pm • Guy Peploe & Tommy Zyw
Saturday 25 January • 11am – 1pm • Tommy Zyw
Book your place: mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk
GUY PEPLOE LECTURE:
Thursday 23 January • 1.30 – 2.15pm • RSVP essential: londonartfair.co.uk/talks
