Grand Fields Of Colour

A major retrospective prompts Ruth Guilding to reflect on the career of an artist critic who created his own brand

My main interest, in my painting, has always been in colour, space and light,’ wrote Patrick Heron in 1958. These were the values governing his art, but the business of being an artist was what drove him. This retrospective, which has moved to Margate from Tate St Ives, places Heron among the most significant and innovative figures in postwar abstract British art, although without quite acknowledging the insider knowledge and self-promotion that took him there.

Heron was born into an arty, left-leaning family and moved as a child to Cornwall, where his father managed a company printing silk scarves and textiles, for which his precocious son was designing aged only 14. After a spell at the Slade and then working out the last years of the Second World War as a conscientious objector in Bernard Leach’s St Ives pottery, he married and returned to live in Cornwall in the 1950s.

Despite his art-school training and still-lifes and landscapes painted in the manner of Matisse and Bonnard, his first career was as a critic. He would write thousands of words, comprising art theory and personal manifestos, as well as reviewing, broadcasting for the BBC and sitting on public committees concerned with the business of art.