Patrick Heron (1920-1999)

Patrick Heron was born in Leeds but lived in St Ives as a child, returning there permanently in 1956. He did some successful textile designs in the 1930s and 1940s for Cresta Silks, a company owned by his father. He studied at the Slade School of Art from 1937 to 1939, and worked as an assistant to Bernard Leach in St Ives, 1944-45. He was deeply impressed by the Braque exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1946, and his paintings were influenced by Braque’s use of space as form, although his use of colour was derived from Matisse. In the mid 1950s his work, influenced by the American Expressionists, became, and remained, abstract.

Heron taught at the Central School of Art, London between 1953 and 1956. He won the Grand Prize at the John Moores Exhibition in 1959, and a silver medal at the Sao Paolo Bienal in 1965. He had retrospectives at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1972; the Barbican Art Gallery in 1985; and at Tate Britain in 1998. Heron was also a writer on art: he was the art critic of The New Statesman from 1947 to 1950, and London correspondent for Arts (New York) in the late 1950s. He wrote The Changing Forms of Art (1955), Ivon Hitchens (1955), Braque (1956), and The Shape of Colour (1973).