ALAN DAVIE (1921–2014)

Scottish painter Alan Davie has passed away at the age of ninety-three. Bruce Weber of the New York Times writes that Davie was known for “his audacious and colorful abstractions” that “put a personal stamp on Pollock-like expressionism and seized on mythical and mystical imagery from cultures around the globe.” In 1957, Stuart Preston wrote in the New York Times: “His repertoire of shapes is lavish—curlicues, boomerangs, arrowheads, big implacable rectangles, and nests of rat’s cradles. No modern effect, from paint drip to surface elaboration, is alien to his style.”

Though Davie was lesser known in recent decades, his work has often been compared to Moore, Bacon, and Freud. A long-planned exhibition of his paintings opened recently at the Tate Britain and another is slated to begin at Gimpel Fils gallery in the coming days. Mark Hudson, a filmmaker who followed Davie’s work for decades, wrote in The Telegraph_ prior to the Tate show: “Perhaps no other major British artist has undergone such a fall from prominence to obscurity. Not that his work was dismissed or derided by the critical establishment. He went on painting and exhibiting, pursuing his own creative preoccupations indifferent to the opinions of the rest of the world.” Of painting, Davie remarked in an interview with Hudson: “It’s an urge, an intensity, a kind of sexual need. It’s something I do from an inner compulsion, that has to come out.”