Terry Frost 1915-2003
The Three Graces and Linen, 1960
oil and burlap on canvas
36 by 60 inches
signed, dated and titled verso

Provenance
Waddington Galleries, London
Mr & Mrs Kunstadter, USA

Exhibited
London, Waddington Galleries, Terry Frost, June 1961, cat no.12 illus b/w

Literature
Chris Stephens, Terry Frost - St Ives Artists, Tate Gallery Publishing Limited, London, 2000, pp 51-2



In 1959 Terry Frost joined Waddington Galleries, and was included in their May exhibition Middle Generation alongside Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton and Bryan Wynter.

By the late 1950s the St Ives artists were keenly aware of the movements in American abstract painting, and many were showing their work in New York. In 1959-1960 Frost made a number of large scale paintings, whose elements were drastically simplified and which employed a smaller range of (mostly neutral) colours. He began for the first time to introduce collage into his oils, fixing pieces of burlap to the canvas. These pieces were then incorporated into the picture’s surface by painting over and around their edges with the background colour, or by penetrating their boundaries with strong coloured brushstrokes.

The classical subject of the Three Graces is one that Frost returned to throughout his career, another version of this subject painted in the same year, is in the collection of the Bristol City Art Gallery. Like Hilton and Scott, Frost was at this time exploring how he might introduce the figure into his otherwise almost abstract compositions. Less sexualised and less obviously identifiable than the figures in Hilton’s paintings, here the three female figures of the title are represented simply by three curved forms. The flesh-toned colour of the collage elements perhaps the only further reference to the human body.

Many critics at the time downplayed these bodily references, and one could argue that many of these Modern abstract artists approached the body as simply another source material for their work; painting the figure in much the same way as they might approach a table top (Scott) or an expanse of land or sea (Lanyon).