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B R YA N W Y N T E R ( 1 9 1 5 - 1 9 7 5 ) Altar, 1957-58 Oil on canvas Signed, titled and dated, verso 142.2 x 111.8 cm (56 x 44 in) Dimensions with artist's frame: 144 x 114 cm (56 ¾ in x 44 ⅞ in) Provenance The Waddington Galleries, London (1959) Private Collection, UK Exhibited London, The Waddington Galleries, Bryan Wynter, Recent Paintings, 10 March – 4 April, 1959, cat no. 13 a granite-built miner's cottage on the coastal moor of Zennor. Exposure to the geography and elements of Cornwall was constant, resulting in paintings titled Sea Journey, Earth Tremor, Thicket, Forest Journey and Impenetrable Country to name a few. Altar, therefore, is a departure, but not unique in this sense. Much like his paintings within this time frame, individually distinct and handled with varying degrees of control and expressiveness, other titles guide our attention to interiors or events, such as The Interior, Carnival, Prison and indeed, Altar. The palette of Altar with its deep red, rich green, ochre, white and black, certainly recalls a religious interior, perhaps using light refracted through a stained glass window. Interestingly, these works were titled after completion, in consultation with his wife Monica, depending on the imagery they evoked, and therefore an exact interpretation by the viewer is not necessarily required or helpful. Wynter remarked on this process: I think of my paintings as a source of imagery, something that generates imagery rather than contains it. Obviously it is I who have put into them what they contain but I have done so with as little conscious interference as possible, allowing them at every stage in their growth to dictate their own necessities. 1 Altar is a remarkably successful and desirable painting from arguably Wynter's most significant and celebrated period. Its visual complexity and sense of depth created by multiple interlocking forms layered one on top of the other result in a work which merits extended and repeated viewing. The years 1956-1958 were among the most significant for Bryan Wynter's career. Not only did he attend the Tate's seminal exhibition, Modern Art in the United States, which opened in January 1956 and introduced the Abstract Expressionist work of Rothko, Clyfford Still, de Kooning and Mark Tobey to a British audience, at this time he also began to experiment with stereoscopic photography following the acquisition of his first camera in 1955. Wynter's desire to convey a type of virtual reality, where the imagery appears to hover on his newly expanded canvases, was in part influenced by his use of mescalin, a psychedelic drug which the acclaimed British novelist Aldous Huxley had used in 1953. The year before Altar was begun, in 1956, Cinerama was launched in London, a new kind of cinematic experience from the United States, which resonated with Wynter as much as Abstract Expressionism. This Is Cinerama, a 1952 American documentary feature, impressed Wynter with its complex technical processes that delivered dramatic illusions of spatial reality. It was during the mid-1950s that Wynter concentrated on integrating the effects of this new photographic technology in his paintings. Of all the American Abstract Expressionists, Wynter's paintings of the mid-to-late 1950s have the closest affinity with Mark Tobey's work, who had a solo show at the ICA in London in May 1955 and met Wynter in St Ives the same year. The calligraphic mark making in Wynter's work at this time, which is employed with dynamic effect in Altar, was likely inspired by Tobey's paintings, who himself had studied the ancient art form in a Zen monastery in Japan in 1934. The titles of many Wynter paintings from 1956-59 incorporate the natural world. In 1956 an inheritance allowed him to acquire The Carn, where he lived, 1. Quoted in M. Bird, Bryan Wynter, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2010, p. 84. 32