Malcolm Ryan: Swimming Against the Tide

Clare Hall is pleased to present an exhibition titled Malcolm Ryan: Swimming Against the Tide. Its title alludes to a turning point in this artist’s life in the 1960s. After gaining a job in London’s Soho district as a graphic designer, he spent most of his lunch-hours studying pictures in the nearby National Gallery and the Courtauld Gallery, or looking at contemporary art in nearby Mayfair galleries. It was an exciting time, for in the second half of the 1950s two exhibitions of American Art had arrived at the Tate Gallery, in London. The second of these focused on American Abstract Expressionism. It seemed to smash though most of the limitations – notably size – which seemed to inhibit English Art. Young artists in this country went wildly experimental, burning aspects of their canvases or bicycling over them to get the effects they desired. They also lapped up American art theory and sought out new ideas and new methods. Malcolm Ryan became a full-time abstract painter, but having learned much from those silent Old Masters he had met in museums, he soon began to tire of avant-garde experiments and began looking around for a different source of inspiration. 

He found it in Balthus, a Polish-French outsider artist who insisted on having only one name. The Tate Gallery mounted a major exhibition of his work in 1968. Today he is renowned for the large size of his paintings, and for his erotically charged images of pubescent girls. But for Ryan it was the size of Balthus’s paintings that impressed and the fact that the artist had put the human figure back into the centre of the canvas and had nothing to do with abstraction. Malcolm Ryan, himself, now turned to figuration and combined it with a fresh interest in light and all it can bring to a scene. Today he no longer swims against the tide, for it seems to swim with him.

Frances Spalding

Chair, Clare Hall Art Committee