Tony Bevan (painter)
Encyclopedia
Biography
Bevan was born in BradfordBradford
Bradford lies at the heart of the City of Bradford, a metropolitan borough of West Yorkshire, in Northern England. It is situated in the foothills of the Pennines, west of Leeds, and northwest of Wakefield. Bradford became a municipal borough in 1847, and received its charter as a city in 1897...
, Yorkshire. He studied at Bradford School of Art from 1968 to 1971, followed by Goldsmiths' College, London from 1971 to 1974, and the Slade School of Fine Art
Slade School of Fine Art
The Slade School of Fine Art is a world-renownedart school in London, United Kingdom, and a department of University College London...
from 1974 to 1976. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
in London as an Academician in 2007.
Bevan came to prominence as an artist in the 1980s, taking part in the ICA show Before it hits the floor in 1982, Problems of Picturing, curated by Sarah Kent
Sarah Kent
Sarah Kent is a British art critic, formerly the art editor of the weekly London 'what's on' guide Time Out. She was an early supporter of the Young British Artists in general, and Tracey Emin in particular, helping her to get early exposure. This has led to polarised reactions of praise and...
and held at the Serpentine Gallery
Serpentine Gallery
The Serpentine Gallery is an art gallery in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, central London. It focuses on modern and contemporary art. The exhibitions, architecture, education and public programmes attract approximately 750,000 visitors a year...
in London in 1982-83, and The British Art Show, a touring exhibition of contemporary art, in 1984. This was followed by exhibitions mainly in the USA and Germany, including the LA Louver Gallery, California, in 1989, 1992 and 1995, and Kunsthalle, Kiel, in 1988, Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst Haus der Kunst, Munich, in 1989, and Galerie Wittenbrink, in Munich, during the 1990s.
In 2006 Bevan was invited to explore the printmaking technique of monoprints, a technique he had not previously tried, at the Scuola de Grafica in Venice. This resulted in over 80 images which were subsequently shown at Marlborough Fine Art in London, and marked the beginning of an interest in printmaking Bevan retains to this day.
Bevan has work in many major art collections around the world, including Arts Council England]], the Israel Museum
Israel Museum
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem was founded in 1965 as Israel's national museum. It is situated on a hill in the Givat Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem, near the Bible Lands Museum, the Knesset, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem....
, Jerusalem, the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
, the Louisiana Museum
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located directly on the shore of the Øresund Sound in Humlebæk, north of Copenhagen, Denmark. It is the most visited art museum in Denmark with an extensive permanent collection of modern and contemporary art, dating from World War II and up...
in Denmark, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is a contemporary art museum with three locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near Walt Disney Concert Hall...
, the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, New York and the Tate
Tate
-Places:*Tate, Georgia, a town in the United States*Tate County, Mississippi, a county in the United States*Táté, the Hungarian name for Totoi village, Sântimbru Commune, Alba County, Romania*Tate, Filipino word for States...
. He is represented by Marlborough Fine Art, L.A. Louver and Ben Brown Fine Arts, London.
Style and Influences
Bevan's subject matter focuses predominantly on the human figure. In doing so he uses a distressed linear style, which has been described as graphic and even deliberately crude. In the estimation of the art critic Sarah KentSarah Kent
Sarah Kent is a British art critic, formerly the art editor of the weekly London 'what's on' guide Time Out. She was an early supporter of the Young British Artists in general, and Tracey Emin in particular, helping her to get early exposure. This has led to polarised reactions of praise and...
, writing in 1985, this quality is a reflection of the social times in which Bevan finds himself, with the highly charged political climate of the mid-1980s in Britain, under the government of Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...
, provoking artists like Bevan to 'roll over and play dead, to escape into fantasy, or to stand and fight'. The implication of Kent's analysis was that Bevan chose to stand and fight.
What this meant in practical terms was that Bevan produced psychologically charged images of people at the edge of respectable society, in a style that drew influence from sources ranging from early twentieth century New Objectivity
New Objectivity
The New Objectivity is a term used to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it...
artists, to Frances Bacon and the painters of the School of London, and the ephemera of street graffiti and popular culture. Indeed, commenting on Bevan's entry in the Whitechapel Open exhibition in 1992 art critic David Cohen described, as a compliment, one of Bevan's self portraits as looking like 'a cross between Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud
Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH was a British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time...
and Dennis the Menace
Dennis the Menace (UK)
Dennis the Menace, later called Dennis the Menace and Gnasher and now Dennis and Gnasher, is a long-running comic strip in the British children's comic The Beano, published by D. C...
... arousing associations of delinquency and social unrest.'
In addition to his 'rough, jagged lines', Bevan's work is characterised by a limitation placed on his colour palette, and his addition of grit or sand to the acrylic paint
Acrylic paint
Acrylic paint is fast drying paint containing pigment suspension in acrylic polymer emulsion. Acrylic paints can be diluted with water, but become water-resistant when dry...
he uses. Although this handling has led some critics to associate Bevan with the School of London, this connection has been disputed, most notably by Grace Glueck in The New York Times. So it is possibly more accurate to link Bevan to artists like Steven Campbell, Ken Currie and Peter Howson, who also came to prominence in the 1980s, and like Bevan worked under a noticeable influence from 'expressionistic' forms of German art. Bevan himself wrote his thesis at art school on the highly expressive German eighteenth-century sculptor, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, and acknowledged Messerschmidt's influence on his own work. In an interview in 2011 Bevan stated: 'I've used elements [of Messerschmidt] in the past, but recently I decided to work specifically through these sculptures. So I used formal elements from the sculptures to make self-portraits because it's believed that a lot of these sculptures were self-portraits. So I used the formal elements of his to work through my own self-portraits.'
As with the Scottish artists Campbell, Currie and Howson, there is a clear interest in attempting to represent an internal or psychological reality in Bevan's paintings by finding visual equivalents to a subject's state of mind. It is also notable that Bevan's most frequent subject in his paintings is himself, which again adds weight to the argument he is seeking to create 'psychological portraits'. Indeed, this is a quality Bevan himself notes, admitting that he was heavily influenced as a student by a book called Psychoanalytic Approaches to Art (unidentified).
Paradoxically, despite being described as having a 'graphic style', it was not until relatively recently that Bevan began making prints. This followed a two week professional workshop at the Scuola de Grafica in Venice with the printmakers Simon Marsh and Mike Taylor in 2006. Writing in the catalogue for the exhibition of these prints in London in 2007 Marco Livingstone noted they possessed many of the same physical and psychological qualities of Bevan's paintings, writing that they `reveal as much in their materiality as in the imaginative and emotional dimension of their imagery.’
Further reading
- de Baranano, Kosme, Tony Bevan http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tony-Bevan-Jon-Bird/dp/0853319510 (London: Lund Humphries, 978-0853319511, 2006).
- Livingstone, Marco, Tony Bevan: Monotypes http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tony-Bevan-Monotypes-Marco-Livingstone/dp/190437249X (London: Marlborough Fine Art, 2007)