Adrian Heath was one of the most important British painters of the twentieth century.
Heath was born in Matmyo, Burma, before moving to England in 1925 where he attended Bryanston School, Dorset. During 1938, he studied painting with Stanhope Forbes at Newlyn in Cornwall. The following year he began his studies at the Slade School of Art, returning after demobilisation to complete them. During the Second World War, Heath served in the RAF as a tail gunner in Lancaster bombers; he was captured early on and spent most of the war years as a prisoner in Stalag 383, Berlin. He became close friends with a fellow POW by the name of Terry Frost, whom he taught to paint while the two were imprisoned together, with Frost describing Heath as 'the bravest man I ever knew'.
After graduating from the Slade, Heath began his forays into the art world of mid-century Britain and Europe. He moved to France, living in Paris and then Carcassone, where he held his first exhibition at the city's Musée des Beaux-Arts in 1948. Heath returned to London and, in 1949 and 1951, made the journey to St Ives, the Cornish town that was quickly developing as an important artist's colony, and was introduced to Ben Nicholson. Heath was also a friend of Victor Pasmore, Anthony Hill, Robert Adams and Kenneth and Mary Martin and, as such, he became an important link between the emerging St Ives School and British Constructivists.
Heath's paintings of the 1950s are largely abstract and formed from fractured blocks of rich colour, heavily brushed on to his support. The artist would create his compositions using Euclidian geometry, before moving carefully proportioned template shapes across a surface and recording their movements in the paint, a form of history-writing. Heath is known for creating great depth and texture in his paintings by adding, scraping-off and re-applying wet or semi-dry medium in successive layers, sometimes revealing the ground in hazy patches through the paint. His abstractions do allude to a 'subject' as their compositions are clearly read and tend to have a focal point. A simple dialectic between hard-edged shapes and more organic, sinuous forms is often played out in his work.
From 1959, Heath’s painting began to move gradually away from the overtly geometric constructions that had underpinned his earlier 'analytical' work and took on more organic forms. It was in this period that the artist began to spend more time exploring collage and constructions, with his painting becoming freer and more dynamic in response. His discovery of D’Arcy Thompson’s ‘On Growth and Form’ () and his teaching at Corsham Court, Bath Academy of Art, may also be ascribed to the loosening of his pictures. This development may also be in part from Heath's growing interest in abstract expressionism, with Jane Rye, who wrote a monograph on the artist, referring to his works from this period as 'Romantic realisations of action painting'.
Heath was a key proponent of abstract art, which many felt embodied an idealism so desperately needed in the post-war years. At his London studio, 22 Fitzroy Street, the previous home of James McNeill Whistler and next door to London's most noted art bookshop, Heath organised the collective Weekend Exhibitions of abstract and Constructivist works in 1952 and 1953. The building was also the venue for the first planning of the landmark exhibition 'This is Tomorrow', held at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. In '53, Heath also published the popular summary book 'Abstract Painting: Its Origins and Meaning' which was a short history of the development of abstraction by modern British painters. A summary of public opinion on abstraction before this time can be found in the book's opening sentence, ‘There seems to be little understanding of the values of abstract painting and consequently no general appreciation of its qualities.’
From Fitzroy Street, Heath and his wife Corinne moved to 28 Charlotte Street in 1957. Having been a part of the Fitzrovia community for many years, the couple became campaigners for the preservation of the character and heritage of the area, including as founder-members of the campaign group The Charlotte Street Association who are still fighting to increase social housing in Fitzrovia. It was in the basement of their Charlotte Street home that Birgit Skiöld ran the noted Print Workshop from 1958, a print studio that attracted Michael Ayrton, Jim Dine, Allen Jones, Eduardo Paolozzi, Tom Phillips, Dieter Roth, Michael Rothenstein, William Tillyer, and Joe Tilson and where David Hockney proofed and editioned his first lithographs.
Heath was integral to the successes of the faculty at Bath Academy of Art, where he taught from 1955 to '76, and he helped to establish the institution as one of the most adventurous art schools in Britain. He later taught at the University of Reading (1980–85), as well as being the artist in residence at the University of Sussex in 1969 and a Senior Fellow at the Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education, Wales (1977–80). Heath was also a member of the London Group, Chairman of the Artists' International Association (1954-64), served on the Arts Panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain (1964-67) and was a member of 56 Group Wales (1978 to 1982).
He exhibited with Gimpel Fils (1952), Redfern Gallery (1953-89), Hanover Gallery (1959-62), and other London galleries, as well as being shown at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (1976) and in exhibitions in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and Belgium. Heath has had retrospectives at the City Art Gallery, Bristol, touring to the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield (1971-72), Camden Arts Centre, London (1975) and Pallant House Gallery (1981).
His work is in the collections of the Arts Councils of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; British Council; British Museum; V&A Museum; Tate Gallery; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; Jerwood Collection, London; Hepworth Wakefield; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; Southampton City Art Gallery; Victoria Art Gallery, Bath; Bristol Museum and Art Gallery; Newnham College, University of Cambridge; Sainsbury Centre, Norwich; Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Cooper Gallery, Barnsley; Sheffield Museums; Leicester Museum; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Glasgow Museum; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; Museum am Ostwald, Dortmund; Billedgalleri, Bergen; Goteborgs Kunstmuseum; King George VI Art Gallery, Port Elizabeth; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
