Bryan Wynter 1915-1975

Bryan was born on 8th September 1915 into a wealthy industrialist family. His grandfather David Wynter (formerly Winterbotham) was a pioneer of machine powered stream laundrys and built a very sizeable business in London. By 1909 David’s success and wealth was such that he was able to acquire Bishopswood, a mansion on the upper slopes of Highgate Hill.

Bryan’s father James (Jim) commissioned his own estate, Windyridge in Hertfordshire, a mock-Tudor mansion. Bryan was 11 when the family moved there in 1926. Following his prep school education at Seafield Park near Fareham and public school to the age of 17 at Haileybury in Hertfordshire, Jim expected his eldest son to enter the by then highly successful family business in London, the Times Laundry Company. Bryan’s art master at Haileybury was the charismatic Wilfred Blunt (brother of the Anthony, later the infamous Cold War spy). Blunt and Bryan’s father’s twin sister, Jessie, provided early encouragement to his early if modest signs of interest in more creative pursuits. However, he did comply with his father’s wishes for the duration of his late teens, apprenticing to the laundry business and applying himself to every aspect.

A portent for Wynter’s future direction in life occurred in the summer of 1933 when the family took a touring holiday to Cornwall visiting Lands’ End, the Gurnard’s Head, Zennor, St Ives and Porthcurno.

It was not until 1936 that Wynter enrolled in evening classes at Westminster School of Art whilst still working at the Times Laundry Co. in London. In June that year the first International Surrealist Exhibition opened at the New Burlington Galleries, showing works by Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali alongside a British contingent which included Henry Moore, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland. Wynter was intrigued by Surrealism and its debt to Freudian psychoanalysis and the highly successful exhibition marked a step-change in his interest in a career in art.

Finally, and still opposed although financially supported by his father, Bryan, determined to pursue his emerging passion, entered Slade in 1938 at the grand old age of 23 (he would have shared the classes with students as young as 16). His contemporaries there included Paul Feiler and Patrick Heron. Wynter enjoyed a flat close by in Gower Street and as Feiler later recalled, cut a dashing, well-dressed figure driving a smart open top car. Wynter didn’t have long at the Slade before Britain declared war on Germany following the invasion of Poland in 1939. He was called up but, influenced by the readings of Aldous Huxley and the mainly pacifist ideology of contemporary art (Picasso’s Guernica was only completed in 1937), Wynter declared himself a Conscientious Objector and after a tribunal hearing in Reading, was assigned by the Ministry of Labour to work on the land. He variously worked as a labourer and as an animal keeper in vivisection labs at Oxford University. His social life revolved around his Slade contemporaries (the Slade had relocated to share the Ruskin School’s rooms and studios at Oxford) and actors from the Oxford Playhouse. Within this social group he met Hedy Hoffman, a refugee student from Nazi Germany, with whom he entered an intimate relationship for the duration of the war. In July 1942 Bryan, along with his brother Eric, travelled to St Ives for a holiday break. Wynter was initially unimpressed by St Ives and its colony of artists which he found conservative and somewhat pretentious – ‘a Bo’emian rendey-vous’, but was much taken by the surrounding landscape, in particular the coast around Zennor. This was the first encounter with a landscape that was to exert a lifelong hold on the artist.

Back in Oxford he benefitted considerably from the continuing exhibitions at Oxford’s Ashmolean, which was able to show works by Moore, Sutherland, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson and other leading contemporary artists throughout the war. The few surviving works by Wynter from the late war years are landscape sketches and mysterious images of intertwining birds – the reproduction of which in the Oxford journal, Counterpoint, first brought Bryan to public attention in 1945. In that year Wynter was invited to exhibit at the prestigious Redfern Gallery in London. At the same time images of Nazi atrocities at Dachua and Buchenwald were emerging which challenged Wynter’s decision to follow a non-combatant path and the trusted assertion by Huxley, persuasive for Wynter and his contemporaries in 1939, that this war would be a struggle between equally amoral powers. In response to these doubts about his judgement, and his enduring interest in psychoanalytical literature, Wynter kept a Jungian style dream diary in late 1944 and early 1945. Some of the recorded dreams were set in St Ives which he perceived to be a war-free sanctuary. His relationship with Hedy started to flounder and by the end of the war in May 1945 was over.

So single again, at the end of June 1945 Wynter set out for Cornwall, ‘borrowing’ some rationed petrol from his father. The move was full of excitement and just a little trepidation: “It is all rather adventurous as I haven’t the least idea where I’ll stay … if I have to spend a night or two in a cave, a cave it will have to be. … I like to visualise myself arriving in brilliant sunshine through the whitewashed streets of St Ives and crawling straight off my motorbike into the sea.”

Safely ensconced in St Ives Wynter was more drawn to the ancient coastline and Penwith Moors that separated St Ives and St Just to the west, than to the town itself, enthusing “if Dali had been a Celt, this is the kind of landscape he would have painted. As for me, I am wagging my tail …. My solo expeditions onto the moors or to the coast are almost feverishly exciting … it’s like an enthralling book which I cannot lay down. …. The present appears as a recent growth upon the past whose bones project wherever you go.”

In September 1945 Wynter wrote to Hedy excited about moving into an isolated cottage he’d found on Zennor Carn. He rented Carn Cottage (The Carn) initially for £25 per year and was to live there, high above Zennor in Penwith, until 1964. The cottage was constructed on an exposed outcrop of Zennor Carn with a fantastic 180 degree view of the Atlantic and rugged coastline below. Wynter made the cowshed beside the cottage into a studio and ingenuously improvised a means of collecting and supplying rainwater to the cottage (which had no running water or electricity). Days of solitary painting, which he relished, where interspersed with visits to St Ives for groceries and pubs. Sven Berlin and John Minton where amongst the first artists in St Ives that Wynter struck up a friendship with.

In 1946 Wynter took part in the first exhibition of the Crypt Group in the church crypt below the St Ives Society of Artists’ Mariners’ Gallery. Other founding members included Peter Lanyon and John Wells. Like Lanyon, Wynter embraced the rugged landscape of Penwith and adopted an athletic approach to exploring its moors, cliffs and archaeological relics. In April 1947 Wynter had the first of a long series of shows with the Redfern Gallery in London. Although he exhibited only smaller gouaches and drawings, almost all sold grossing 293 guineas. A second show followed quickly in 1948 reviewed by Patrick Heron who himself had enjoyed a debut Redfern show some months after Wynter. Of the 1948 Wynter showing at the Redfern, Heron wrote: “His painting combines the ingenuity of cubism with the mood of a romantic; the discipline in abstract form of a still-life artist with the subjects of a landscapist.” He continued; “Dead birds and the properties of the Cornish moors and beaches inhabit the dramatic twilight of his accomplished gouaches.” Wynter’s biographer, Michael Bird, understandably found this purely descriptive narrative unrevealing and in part at least, explained by Heron’s disdain of surrealism and Braque which Wynter’s spectral birds and other animal forms continued to draw upon.

In 1946 Wynter struck up a relationship with Sue Lethbridge who arrived in St Ives to set up an upmarket boutique toy making company selling to Harrods and Fortnum & Mason. The couple married in 1949 and had their first child, Jake.

In 1951 Wynter was featured in Herbert Read’s Contemporary British Art, a well distributed paperback designed to cultivate public appreciation of modernist artists working in the UK. In that same year Wynter was one of 60 artists, that also included Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, selected by The Arts Council of Great Britain to produce a work for the Festival of Britain’s ’60 paintings for ‘51’; effectively cementing his position in the top strata of young British artists. All the works were to be at least 5 feet in one dimension; Lanyon produced Porthleven and Wynter, Blue Landscape.

Few people in post-war Britain had the finance to acquire contemporary art but whilst the economy sluggishly recovered a lifeline was extended to Wynter and his contemporaries from government grants given to universities and art colleges with the express purpose of retraining ex-servicemen. One institutional beneficiary was the Bath Academy of Art (more colloquially known simply as Corsham). Here Wynter and his St Ives contemporaries Terry Frost and Peter Lanyon were employed as visiting tutors under the watchful eye of the principal, Clifford Ellis. But whilst Corsham undoubtedly provided much needed income it frustrated Wynter in his own work and there remains relatively little to show for his output from 1951 to 55. That said, those that do exist such as Boats in Harbour (1952) illustrate a slow embrace of oil and canvas and a move towards a more tachiste style of work; influenced like Frost and others by Nicholas De Stael’s use of abstract mark-making to produce a semi-representational expression of landscape and natural form.

Describing Wynter’s gouaches in his essay Modern English Romantics, in 1955, Patrick Heron expressed the opinion that “No English artist living excels him in this medium”. These paintings were haunting, mysterious compositions of Cornish landscape; almost a montage of figurative elements, buildings, birds, bones, Cornish fields and hedges, boats, sea and headlands – but imbued with a sense of mystery and myth.

Towards the end of 1955 Bryan’s father sold his laundry business dividing the proceeds amongst the family. With his early inheritance Bryan cheerfully told Sven Berlin he now had “more money than I shall ever want.” Wynters much improved financial position enabled him to give up teaching at Corsham and concentrate on his own art; and to acquire the freehold on the Carn – and even buy a Landover for those previously exhausting 5 mile trips down into St Ives. Plus a camera which he was to use to great effect as another way of looking at landscape and a source of material for his painting.

In 1956 there was a revolutionary transformation in Wynter’s style, scale and subject matter that was to yield an intensely productive and successful period in the artist’s career. The new, generally much larger oil paintings were abstract and constructed from thousands of bold brush stokes, gestural marks, almost calligraphic in places. Wynter’s work of this period is sometimes linked to tachisme; a largely French style of painting in the 1950s which was a more fluid, gestural reaction to Cubism and a counter-point to American Abstract Expressionism, the works characterised by spontaneous brushwork, and sometimes scribbling reminiscent of calligraphy. Leading artists associated with Tachisme were Pierre Soulages and Nicolas de Staël. Of his ‘new consciousness’ painting the artist wrote that year, “I think of my paintings as a source of imagery, sometimes that generates imagery rather than contains it. Obviously it is I who have put into them what they contain but I have done so with as little conscious interference as possible, allowing them at every stage in their growth to dictate their own necessities.” This is a distillation of Wynter’s whole approach to painting; directed by his belief that art could only flourish in the absence of conscious interference and that the work itself should have self-generative powers; notwithstanding the highly skilled construction of the work. Wynter had for some years experimented with the hallucinogenic cactus-derived drug mescalin, but by this period had largely trained himself to eschew a conscious direction in creating an artwork. As part of this process titles were assigned to the paintings after the works were completed and suggested by the final piece, rather than by a preconceived design.

Wynter’s first ‘new consciousness’ painting was Interior (Jan 1956) which in a single step announces his new and mature style of painting with its complex arrangement of free marks, dragged or elliptical brushstrokes and almost spinal forms arranged in a largely vertical and linear composition. So sudden and complete is the transformation represented by this work, that it feels more like a moment of birth rather than the development or evolution of a new oeuvre by the artist. Whilst earlier works by Wynter are clearly influenced by Georges Braque, the new consciousness paintings show an increasing influence by the New York Abstract Expressionists; most notably Bradley Walker Tomlin, Mark Tobey and Jackson Pollock in whose work grilles or networks of interwoven brush strokes (in Pollocks case, brush dribbles and splashes) manifest the painted form. That said, whilst Wynter like all artists assimilated influences from his contemporaries, each of his works of this period are ultimately his invention and uniquely identifiable as a ‘Bryan Wynter’. In 1957 Wynter exhibited 10 works at the Redfern Gallery’s landmark abstract show, Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract: Painting in England Today, alongside Feiler, Frost, Heron, Heath, Lanyon and Blow. The Redfern and Gimpel Fils were amongst a small cohort of London galleries to champion the country’s contemporary abstract artists.

By the late 1950s Wynter’s international standing was becoming established (with shows in Tokyo, Chicago and Rome and acquisitions from the MOMA and leading American collectors) and in fact the artist was singled out as a solitary British match for the titans of New York’s Abstract Expressionism. In 1959 Alan Bowness wrote in Art News and Review “Bryan Wynter is now among the few English painters of unquestionable international status.” Even the US-centric London correspondent for Art and Artists, who slated the ‘mediocre London imitators’ of American Modernism, had to concede that the ‘one serious challenge’ to American dominance was Bryan Wynter.

In 1959 Wynter moved to a new London dealer, Victor Waddington with his first exhibition of 28 paintings in March of that year. Between 1959 – 1961 Wynter’s works, at least the titles, were influenced by his interest in sea sports and exploration; aqualung diving, kayaking and open water swimming. Oceanic 1959, Kayak 1961 and our painting, River Daemon 1960 are such examples. In January 1962 Wynter had an exhibition at Galerie Charles Lienhard in Zurich which included Lightfall.

At the end of the decade Wynter commenced his Firestreak series of paintings, inspired in part by devastating moorland fires which had threatened to destroy his home, The Carn, and between 1960 and 63 the series of 12 Sandspoor paintings.

In May 1961 Wynter suffered a heart attack and spent 3 months in St Ives’ cottage hospital recuperating; that experience along with the birth of a new child, Billy in 1962, ultimately led to a move from the exposed Carn to a substantial much more sheltered property, Treverven, further west near St Buryan and towards the altogether gently and calmer south coast of Penwith. The new property provided ample space for Wynter’s studio and for hanging even his largest canvases. The move coincided with a noticeable departure from un-preconceived marks and compositions to more consciously selected and designed forms, often with the application of a ‘stream’ metaphor inspired in part by his kayaking river trips. (Following the heart attack Wynter had sensibly adopted river rather than ocean going kayaking). Canoeing and kayaking expeditions dominated Wynter family holidays thoughout the 1960s. Wynter was fascinated and extremely well read on the science of water flow and movement.

From the mid-1960s titles which denoted water activities such as Kayak and Tailrace became supplanted by titles which suggested river flow and water movement such as Confluence and Meander. Wynter’s kinetic constructions or IMOOS (Images Moving Out Into Space) which rendered movement and flow via 3-dimensional kinetic art, the visual effect additionally warped and distorted in convex mirrors, also had a cross-fertilising impact on his large paintings of this period. Wynter undertook a series of Pentel pen studies of complex patterns of flow and from these developed his Confluence paintings; 11 or so works completed between 1965 and 67 which also bear an awareness of pop art with their flatter forms and brighter poster-like colours. In 1966 Wynter showed works from his Confluence series in Belfast’s Arts Council Gallery and again at a solo exhibition at Waddingtons in 1967 where the works were exhibited alongside the subsequent Meander series of paintings. In 1965 Wynter had also begun teaching again as a visiting lecturer, this time at The Falmouth College of Art, alongside Terry Frost and Peter Lanyon, formerly his colleagues at Corsham.

From 1970 to 1972 Wynter’s artistic output was dominated by IMOOS production, in response to an American commission for a new advertising agency in Dallas and a commission from Leslie Waddington for what amounted to 2 years’ output of the kinetic sculptures. In fact the artist didn’t return full-time to painting until 1973, returning to his stream themes and producing some truly momental works, including the 9 feet Red and Black Streams.

At the start of February 1975 Wynter was about to collect his young sons from school, when noticing a flat tyre on the family mini, set about removing the wheel. The wheel bolts were seized on and after struggling to release them Wynter was struck down by severe chest pains. He was ferried by ambulance to Penzance hospital where he was expected to recover but sadly on 11 February suffered another heart attack, this time fatal. Bryan Wynter is buried in the old churchyard at Zennor, below the moorland and rugged outcrop of Zennor Carn, which he so loved.

Despite his immense talent and inventiveness born of an instinctive curiosity with the world around him, and unlike some of his contemporaries, Wynter was little interested in self-promotion or his public stature as an artist. Of Wynter, Patrick Heron wrote “Seldom has there been an artist of such great inventive intelligence who professional stance was so lacking in that egocentricity of which many a great painter had been personally guilty.”

In March 2024 Meeting Place by Bryan Wynter set a new auction world record at Sothebys New York, selling at USD 533,400 + taxes. In that same month a smaller work, Flowering Monolith, sold at Christies London for £207,900 + taxes perhaps suggesting that Wynter is at last being valued in a similiar ballpark to his St Ives peers and friends, Roger Hilton and Patrick Heron.