Albert Irvin

The Times. 6/4/2015
Influential abstract expressionist painter whose London bus commute inspired his large, colourful canvases
The British abstract colourist painter Albert Irvin, one of our most influential abstract expressionist painters whose progressiveness did not falter throughout his long life, has died carom heart failure aged 92.

Although he painted all his life, recognition came relatively late, not getting his first solo show until he was nearing 40. He took his cues from the American Expressionists, Turner, Matisse and the St Ives artists but created his own ways of capturing light and movement on the canvas and never ceased to find new expressions for his conceptions of light and colour, often with enormous canvases. He was prolific and still painting at his Stepney studio of 40 years until a few months before his death.

“Seeing a new painting by Irvin can be an extraordinary experience akin to discovering a young, energetic artist in the first flush of ambition,” wrote his biographer, Paul Moorhouse, in Albert Irvin: Life to Painting. “Given the force of its restless energy, its freshness and the sense it communicates of an artist in love with his chosen activity, it is even more surprising to realise that this is the work of an artist in his late seventies.”

His youthful exuberance stayed with him. A tall and genial man Bert, as he was always known, was an imposing figure whose delight was talking to and encouraging the young artists he met. The son of a shopkeeper, Albert, and his wife Nina, Irvin was born in Bermondsey, south London, and brought up with his brother in north London where his lifelong devotion to Arsenal football club began.

Evacuated to Northampton on the outbreak of the war, he studied at Northampton School of Art on a scholarship before war service in the RAF as a navigator in bombers over Germany, a nerve-wrenching experience that never left him. On being demobbed in 1946 he continued his studies but at Goldsmiths College, New Cross, where he later taught for 20 years. In 1947 he married Betty Nicolson whom he had met at Northampton where she was also an art student (she became a graphic designer). They were inseparable for the rest of their lives, and although married for almost 70s years he still introduced her as “my girlfriend”.

His wartime experiences as a navigator instilled in Irvin a love of camaraderie and also an urgency which can be seen in his early figurative work, and is still there in the intricate but exuberant abstracts he matured to in the mid-1950s, influenced at first by Willem de Kooning.

He remembered the Tate’s 1956 exhibition of the huge works of the American expressionists, in particular Pollock, Kline, Rothko and Still, “like a bomb going off”, he told the art critic Sam Cornish. He was also influenced by young British artists such as Edward Middleditch, Peter Lanyon and Terry Frost, all of which helped him feel liberated to be inventive with colour, structure, size and composition. But he also acknowledged debts to Van Gogh, Matisse, Sickert and Turner.

“Years ago,” he said on his 90th birthday, “in order for you to make an important painting, one felt that the colours had to be subdued or the painting wouldn’t have the right gravitas. After studying the work of Matisse and Van Gogh I realised it was possible to create meaningful work with dense bright colours, and that’s what I’ve continued to do”.

Irvin combined his love of conviviality with his devotion to Turner when he began his annual Turner lunches. He had a studio in a St Katharine Docks warehouse beside Tower Bridge, along with Bridget Riley, Basil Beattie and other artists. Irritated that although the date April 23rd was also Turner’s birthday each year St George’s Day was associated with Shakespeare and not Turner, they organised the first Turner lunch in 1969. They have happened every year since, in studios, galleries, above pubs, but latterly at the Chelsea Arts Club of which Irvin was an enthusiastic member. An enlarged image of Ruskin’s portrait of Turner presides, and the toast is given in rum because when Turner was invited to give a speech at the Royal Academy’s annual dinner he stood, gazed glumly around at his fellow Academicians and their guests, said, “Art is a rum business”, and sat down again. Bert Irvin will be included in the toast at this year’s April 23rd gathering.

Recognition for Irvin was slow in coming, however, and he was largely by-passed in the 1960s enthusiasm for the avant garde, perhaps because he was not then associated with a fashionable gallery. In the 1970s, however, he began experimenting with media and changed from oils to acrylic and gouache, tried lithography unsuccessfully but had more joy with screenprinting, which he began to work with when he was already almost 60 and continued with until last year, liking the collaborative nature of the process.

Irvin came into his own in the 1980s after being included in the Hayward Annual Exhibition in 1980 by its curator that year, John Hoyland. The Mayfair gallery Gimpel Fils saw his work and signed him on, representing him for the rest of his life with an exhibition of new work nearly every May, so prolific was he.

Much as he enjoyed the company of other artists, Irvin was essentially a family man, devoted to Betty and their two daughters. He commuted everyday from their Battersea home to his studio at Stepney Green by bus – he did not drive – a journey that often helped give him images for his painting. He loved teaching, which he did at Goldsmiths until he was 60, and when he was belatedly elected to the Royal Academy in 1998 his special delight was the contact it gave him with the students of the Royal Academy Schools. “He never forgot how tough it was for young artists,” says one painter, Stewart Geddes, whom Irvin took under his wing, “and he made introductions where he could and never failed to come to our private views. Knowing he’d been where we were and made a success of his career gave us confidence when we most needed it”.

But he also loved the RA, never failing to attend the RA annual dinner for which he reluctantly had to put aside his preferred denims and brightly coloured trainers. He had to put them aside again in 2013 when he received the OBE from the Prince of Wales.

He is survived by Betty, his two daughters, Priscilla and Celia, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Albert Irvin, OBE painter, was born on August 21, 1922, and died on March 26, 2015, aged 92