displacements: The art of prunella clough

Prunella Clough (ed.), exh cat., Tate Britain, London and tour, 2007

We cease to recognize reality. It manifests itself in some new category. And this category appears to be its own inherent condition and not our own. Apart from this condition everything in the world has a name. Only it is new and is not yet named. We try to name it – and the result is art.[1]

When, in October 1999, Prunella Clough was awarded the prestigious Jerwood Painting Prize she commented that it had been given for a ‘lifetime’s grafting.’ She was eighty years old and the prize came fifty-two years after her first solo exhibition and some sixty years after she had made her first paintings. Yet the prize was not a long-service medal: the paintings that Clough made in the last two years of her life were amongst the most powerful of her long career.[2]

That career was one marked by a persistent willingness to take risks – she likened her approach to painting to ‘throwing oneself into the sea to learn how to swim’[3] – but equally by modesty and reticence, a resistance to the fame game of the contemporary art world. While from an early stage Clough’s importance was recognised and acknowledged by her fellow artists and by a small and devoted group of supporters, she never became widely known, much to her relief. This was in part due to her reluctance to exhibit her work (she turned down numerous requests for exhibitions), but also an aversion to making public statements, to explaining herself; there were just a handful of published interviews (two of which are reprinted in this catalogue). As a result there were few exhibitions in public spaces during her life, the first being at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1960 and the last at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge in 1999. The Whitechapel show was her only true retrospective. While other exhibitions – including those at the Warwick Arts Centre, London in 1982, Camden Arts Centre in 1996 and Kettle’s Yard in 1999, contained selections of earlier work, at her insistence the focus of her shows was always on the new and recent paintings. Since 1960 therefore there has been no opportunity to survey the breadth and richness of her achievement. This exhibition, while far from comprehensive, hopefully goes some way to redressing that situation.

Despite her status as an ‘artist’s artist’, Clough was undoubtedly one of the most interesting and important British painters of the post-war period, a distinctive artist whose work, while paying no heed to fashion, does nonetheless maintain a dialogue with a series of contemporary positions in painting, from Neo-Romanticism in the 1940s, realism in the 1950s, Pop and formalist abstraction in the 1960s, to the resurgence of abstract and process painting in the early 1990s. These are the historic contexts against which her work can be situated but, as we shall see, as an artist she remained defiantly individualistic, a member of no school. Ultimately the labels that attach themselves to the art of different periods offer us only limited help in understanding the concerns of the individual. Indeed they can mislead, as the persistent identification of Clough’s work with Neo-Romanticism does.

Clough identified 1949 as the point when she began to produce her mature work and her development after this time can be broadly divided into three phases. The earliest is dominated by figures and industrial landscapes. It demonstrates a fascination with the worker – fishermen on the Lowestoft docks, telephone engineers, printers, lorry drivers in their cabs – and the relationship between man and his mechanised, self-constructed environment. Throughout the 1950s her treatment of this theme becomes progressively more abstracted, the workers less and less distinguishable from their surroundings, until by 1959–60 her focus has broadened and human presence is implied rather than actual, as in Electrical Landscape 1959 and Electrical Landscape 1960. 1960 was a decisive moment for Clough: not only the year of her first retrospective, but the point at which her work took a definite and irreversible step towards abstraction.

The next phase, from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, saw her work subjected to a process of reduction. The visual cues from the observed world, while still present, become increasingly oblique and enigmatic. They are there in the textures and colours of dirty pavements, shabby walls, rain-heavy skies, motifs distantly related to gates, twists of wire, scraps of cloth. Formal considerations take precedence over figurative references. For example, the subject of Double Diamond 1973 – the work that perhaps best exemplifies this period – is primarily the poised relationship between the two shapes and the painterly balancing act between the tones and tints that distinguish figure and ground.

A final phase, from the early 1980s to the end of her life, perhaps epitomised by Wire Landscape 1985 or Plastic Bag 1988, saw a renewed engagement with the urban scene and its particulars: the objects of the street, of the markets, the gutters and the patches of wasteland that punctuate the city. The late paintings are full of playfully enigmatic figurative motifs. They also show an increased boldness of colour. While the focus in the 1980s and 1990s is on a form of still-life painting, landscape is also important, offering both framework and subject. Indeed, in the last year of her life Clough produced a majestic series of large abstract landscapes including Land: Ochre 1998 and Land and Shale 1999.

Despite the importance she attached to graphic work, to drawing and printmaking, the present exhibition is focused on Clough’s paintings. The necessarily limited selection is weighted towards the early and late work in order to demonstrate the extraordinary underlying consistency that unites her oeuvre. Irrespective of the range of her work, a number of persistent concerns and preoccupations become evident: a fascination with abject and seemingly unpromising subject matter, primarily urban; attention to texture, to the figure/ground relationship; an exploration of a kind of expanded notion of what still life might be; a recurrent delight in the possibilities of seeing through things (glass, gauze, wire mesh, gates and fences). It is one of the most varied but consistent oeuvres produced by any British artist in the second half of the twentieth century.

Prunella Clough was born in 1919. Her father was a civil servant at the Board of Trade, yet was also a poet who inspired in his daughter a love of art and literature. Clough’s artistic education was piecemeal and intermittent. She was a part-time student at Chelsea School of Art in 1937 (where she studied design, life drawing and sculpture). During the war she worked at the Office of War Information, where she drew charts and maps (a fact to which a number of commentators have attributed the seemingly aerial viewpoints of her later landscapes and the way her paintings appear to ‘map’ a terrain or surface). After the war, from 1946 until 1949, she studied at Camberwell School of Art, with Victor Pasmore.

Clough was devastated by the death of her father in 1947. She continued to look after her mother until her death in 1966, yet this was to prove a difficult and demanding relationship, especially as the mother ridiculed the daughter’s artistic ambitions. Clough was also to look after her aunt, the designer Eileen Gray, later in her life – commuting back and forth between London and Paris, where Gray lived – and subsequently became her executor. Such demands were both burdens and distractions from her art, and may have contributed to her unwillingness to exhibit, her desire to focus simply on the artistic process rather than its promotion.[4]

Clough reacted against her comfortable middle-class upbringing, and the example of Eileen Gray, to whom she was devoted, was undoubtedly very important to her. Despite the fact that Clough was financially secure, she lived an ascetic life, kept a strict working regime and taught for most of her career (at Chelsea 1956–69 and Wimbledon 1966–97).[5] Late in life, when her eyesight was deteriorating, she insisted on waiting for NHS treatment rather than seeking the quick private treatment she could readily afford. She was by all accounts extremely generous, and anonymously supplied computers to a number of the art schools in London, as well as supporting promising students with bursaries. She kept the prices of her prints and paintings deliberately low. One close friend described her as an ‘idealistic socialist’;[6] another, however, the critic and curator Bryan Robertson, described her as ‘sceptically and inconsistently leftist in her social views so that she is forever doubtful about the point, validity or usefulness of painting…’.[7]

In fact, doubt is a theme that emerges from her few published interviews, and from the reminiscences of friends. For example, she generally told her friend Robin Banks that ‘things in the studio were going from bad to worse…’[8] and in her final interview, with Sue Hubbard, she said that she felt ‘battered by a sense of failure’.[9]

The artist’s doubt as to the validity of her endeavour is reflected in the doubt induced in the viewer – especially by the post-1960 paintings – as to what exactly it is that the image represents. Clough’s paintings occupy a position of uncertainty, instability. What are we looking at? Is the view micro or macro; a tiny patch of ground or wall, a yard or a vista?

It is this doubt or instability, allied to a very personal conception of what constitutes visual interest or beauty, that makes Clough’s later work unique. Her unconventional sense of beauty may have been generated in part by political conviction – what was it right to paint? – but certainly also had an aesthetic basis. Bridget Riley noted how during a visit to Bassacs, Riley’s retreat in the South of France, Clough was utterly uninterested in the stunning natural scenery which has been a source of inspiration for Riley, only becoming excited by a dam and power station condemned as an eyesore by everyone in the region.[10]

III

Clough’s early work consisted mainly of still-life arrangements, many set against the desolate landscapes of the East Anglian coast. Objects such as roots, skulls or dead birds are contrasted with the surreal structures of wartime defence. The rudder of a boat is treated as if it were a piece of bone. Such images recall, in subject if not treatment, paintings by early twentieth-century modernists such as Edward Wadsworth, Filippo de Pisis and Giorgio de Chirico.

In the late 1940s Clough began to focus her attention on the dockside activity she saw at Lowestoft and along the Thames, and found her distinctive artistic voice. She then quickly became acknowledged as a leading British painter alongside a group of artists – often characterised as Neo-Romantic – such as Robert Colquhoun, Keith Vaughan and John Craxton, with whom she socialised. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Leger Galleries, London, in 1947. In 1951 she painted Lowestoft Harbour for the exhibition Sixty Paintings for 1951 organised for the Festival of Britain. The following year she was selected by British Council to represent Britain in the first São Paulo Biennial.[11]

Lowestoft Harbour is a powerful work that demonstrates Clough’s concerns at the outset of the 1950s. It features a figure group engaged in manual labour, integrated with their surroundings through a faux or post-Cubist organisation of space (she later acknowledged that Cubism was something that she and her contemporaries had misunderstood, or understood only very shallowly). It is a tough and unsentimental treatment of an unconventional – and resolutely contemporary – subject, and as such it shows how misleading the association with Neo-Romanticism is, with its focus on the pastoral, the poetic and the ruined.

Clough continued to explore the worker theme to the end of the 1950s. Unlike other socially orientated paintings of the period – such as those of the so-called ‘Kitchen Sink School’,[12] for example, or Josef Herman’s paintings of the miners of Ystradgynlais – Clough’s images are ambiguous. Consequently critical readings of them have ranged between very divergent positions. Michael Middleton observed in 1960 that the workers are dehumanised, ‘cast into anonymity by an identification with his labour or surroundings so great that it is not always easy at first to disentangle him: his feelings, skills memories have been subordinated to his existence as a statistic, a producer of man-hours, a figure in a cloud of steam, the instrument and product of a pattern of society too complex for the old humanities. ’.[13] However, recently Margaret Garlake has argued that these images are of individuals and that they ‘reflect the dignity and value of labour’.[14]

Clough herself suggested that her intentions were simpler (although no less ambitious). She said that they were:

…an attempt to introduce the figure into a contemporary urban landscape without the devices of the past, without the myths of Mars or Venus or the legends of Breughel. I was trying to update the classical Western concern with the figure without benefit of religious or mythical context.[15]

From her habit of keeping a record of what she was reading we know that Clough was extraordinarily widely read. Her earliest extant diary, from 1943, shows that at the beginning of that year she was immersed in James Joyce.[16] In the entry for Sunday 10 January she notes her attendance at a lecture, ‘Scott on epiphany’.[17] As an aside, it is interesting to consider whether Joyce’s notion of the epiphanic perhaps offers a way of understanding Clough’s later working process, which itself is focused on locating and rendering, or more accurately re-creating, such fleeting transformative moments in which the everyday – a patch of wall, a twist of wire in the gutter, a factory worker leaning against his machine –seen as ‘strange and unfamiliar’, is envisaged anew.[18]

Clough’s diaries and extensive notebooks reveal the importance that language had for her. Indeed, her notebooks reveal a working process in which language plays a key role. Visual information is recorded in word sketches rather than drawings. On occasion she made little thumbnail sketches, but there is nothing more worked up. It is language that she uses to record her impressions of places, people and situations, with her photographs functioning as additional aides-mémoire (although not it seems directly as source material).[19]

Her notes from a visit to Southwold in January 1948, for example, show the conception of Fishermen with Sprats I 1948.[20] These are extensive, obviously made in situ, and are worth quoting at some length as they demonstrate the intensity of her scrutiny:

Sprats Fish in tarp on floor in red dark. In nets irreg., being picked & shaken out, flying up in front of men. Net ochre & trans, in all shaken folds being piled onto net carrier, corks and [...] on far side, cords dark. Near fig: cap down, to eyebrow, bluish coat, twist of oilskin from side, hands dark, holding shaking; standing over wood obj, oilskin down to boots. Far fig Holding sorting cork edge, in battledress, leather on R shoulder, less shaking dark sweater up to neck. Cap lighter man water Greenish coat etc oilsk. Ties with the cord green hole

Gulls hovering

Net dragging fr. Boat edge

Pulling over irreg. fish in all ledges, on blue, many things in boat, nb small pail with fish folded sail tarpaulin etc

Tarpaulin grey brown strained with cords Oilskin quite strong yell, cf. net which also has yellower strands…

Given the detail of these observations, it is perhaps not surprising that the finished painting corresponds very closely to them. What is surprising, however, is that there are no (extant) sketches for what is a complicated composition, only this ‘word-vision’, demonstrating the clarity with which the notes function as cues for Clough’s visualisation. Her father was a published poet and she herself wrote poetry in the 1940s (and intermittently as late as 1991);[21] language clearly played a key role in Clough’s creative process.

In later years she developed the practice of recording each painting she was working on with a little thumbnail sketch, and also making detailed notes as to possible colour combinations, painterly options and necessary revisions; for example:

elephant grey + cold reds + greens (arrow)

muffled green darkish + off with pinkish lush umbers (Sironi) + dull pale emerald

Idea of colour without form eg. moss

She continued the habit of making notes wherever she went right through her life. This practice obviously reached a high level of refinement, for her later notebooks are dominated by very succinct, haiku-like notes which contrast with the more comprehensive approach of the 1940s and 1950s, but which presumably serve the same purpose, as cues for recalling distinct visual impressions. For example, a visit to the coast in the 1990s yields:

SEASIDE. Line of (up-ended) strata facing seaward – like heart beat. Water ‘horizon’ shining above, then land

(grey)

rock wet line

out line

with wet drift downhill on sand

Grey rocks, past grey slabby loose rocks there. Each one. Related positions? More random. Excessively tangible visible compared to froth + chance sand-effects. (Also rounded ones of course.)

Such notes may serve as a prelude to one of the late landscapes such as Land and Gravel 1998 or Land and Shale 1999. However, we should not assume that such word-sketches lead directly to a painterly and abstracted depiction of the scene: Clough’s later work is further complicated by the fact that many such moments and memories might combine in one image. As such, her work actually becomes about a process of memory:

Since I do not draw directly in landscape, it is the memory or recollection of a scene, which is also a whole event, that concerns me. A painting is made from many such events, rather than one; and in fact its sources are many layered and can be quite distant in time, and are rarely if ever direct.[22]

Given that Clough conceived of her work as a form of re-creation, stating in 1949 that ‘the original image must be reconstructed; it grows as a crystal or a tree grows, with its own logic’, it may be that she developed this working practice because language allows for a greater freedom, a less definite starting point. While sketches are tied to depiction, words are free to be suggestive, associative, as Clough’s finished paintings are.

Much has been made of the seismic impact of American painting, and specifically Abstract Expressionism, on British artists in the late 1950s. Certainly the inclusion of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko in Modern Art in the United States at Tate Gallery in 1956, the Pollock retrospective at Whitechapel in 1958 and New American Painting at the Tate Gallery in 1959 were key events in post-war British painting.

However, one should not discount the presence of French abstract painting in London at this time. As influential as the American shows, perhaps, was Nicolas de Staël’s exhibition at Matthiessen’s Gallery in February 1953. John Russell, writing in 1965, identified this as one of the most important events in the post-war British art landscape, asserting that ‘English taste has never been quite the same again’.[23]

Certainly Clough’s taste tended towards the European. In 1981 she drew up a list of 101 artists and particular works which were important for her.[24] The only Americans to feature are Ellsworth Kelly, Mark Tobey, Jackson Pollock and Sam Francis. The list is heavily Francophile and orientated towards taschism, featuring, amongst others, Nicolas de Staël, Pierre Soulages, Henri Michaux, Corneille, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze [can we omit some of his first names??]Wols, Jean Hélion and Jean-Paul Riopelle. Also included are international members of the post-war ‘School of Paris’: Alberto Giacometti, Simon Hantai, Serge Poliakoff and Bram van Velde, as well as representatives of matière tendencies exemplified by Antoni Tàpies and Alberto Burri (both of whom were collected by her very close friend David Carr). Curiously (given, or perhaps because of, her close relationships with Patrick Heron, Bryan Wynter, Keith Vaughan, Bridget Riley and others), the only British artist to appear is Raymond Mason.

Like many British artists, Clough responded to the international context that became visible in London in the latter half of the 1950s by exploring abstraction – at first tentatively – and also by increasing the size of her paintings and the range of her brushwork (which until the mid-1950s tends to be dry and inexpressive). By 1970 her work appears to have been wholly abstract. However, no matter how abstracted and apparently minimal her work became, Clough never entirely relinquished a starting-point in the observed world. While formal values – of composition, tone and process – become dominant in her work of this time, her subjects, the abstracted traces of the world, are still to be found in the textures, colours and choice of motifs, such as gates and walls. Even at its most rectilinear, in the series of ‘quadrants’, in which the canvas is divided into regular sections, Clough’s art comes back to the world by referencing a form of mapping.

Such concerns are also implicit in a work such as Wasteland 1979, in which the elements of the image function in the same way as cartographic symbols, although without indicating an exact topography. Wasteland forms a bridge to Clough’s work of the 1980s, with its overt re-engagement with landscape and still life as a subject.

At the beginning of the 1980s Clough was in her early sixties. Yet if anything the last twenty years of her life would witness an increase in the intensity of her vision, as she subjected the objects and things that surrounded her, the landscapes of urban life, to ever more insistent (and joyful) scrutiny. Her work of the 1980s is perhaps exemplified by Plastic Bag 1988, while Stack 1993 or False Flower 1993 are representative of the 1990s. These demonstrate two important aspects of her work of this period: her re-examination of the possibilities of still life (made explicit in the many paintings entitled Still Life, none of which conforms to any received idea of what a still life might be), and the incredible subtlety and delicacy of her use of colour.

Stack might be a pile of small plastic objects or, as Clough told Margaret Garlake, a tower block. False Flower might be exactly that – a paper construction or perhaps some other piece of flotsam glimpsed by a towpath– or perhaps none of these things precisely, but a combination of vestigial memories of such things.

Despite her reputation as a painter of greys and browns, Clough was in fact an extremely sophisticated colourist. The greys and browns are often laid onto, or scrubbed into, or softened by veils, clouds or grounds of colour. She was a precise judge of how a single touch of intense colour might set up a series of jangling relationships across an image otherwise painted in a near-monochrome.

At the beginning of the 1980s Clough found that her eyesight was deteriorating and she had two operations for cataracts. Her friend John Ball recalled that the morning after the first operation she phoned him and exclaimed excitedly, ‘I can see blue!’:

And for a week or two she was almost delirious about the newly visible blue end of the spectrum, sitting, as she said, for ages in her kitchen staring at the blue gas jets on her cooker until inevitably her brain got used to the new sensation, as she had to accept ruefully – but not before she’d incorporated the gas jets and the excitement into at least one picture.[25]

Clough’s work of the 1990s has the feel of a triumphant maturity, a celebration of the joy of sight, of ways of seeing, in which a half-century of experience is brought to bear again and again on a simple question: what to paint and how to paint it.

VII

Prunella Clough is a major figure in post-war British art whose achievement, perhaps due to her reticence, has not achieved the recognition itdeserves. Her influence, subtle as it is, is wide-ranging, and can be perceived in the work of artists as varied as Fiona Rae, Gary Hume and Simon Callery, and especially in the work of the many painters and printmakers she taught.

For Clough each painting represented a fresh start, a new beginning. Each tackled the fundamental problem of making a painting anew. She rejected ‘style’ and the result was an enduring freshness of vision. For all her variety, her visual sensibility is instantly recognisable. Her works – certainly from 1960 onwards – are profound meditations both on the nature and processes of painting and of seeing. Or perhaps not seeing exactly, for as Michael Harrison has suggested,

… Prunella was not so much concerned with how we see than with how we register, how we half-remember and half-forget, how we associate and combine our observations and thoughts; how, in the fluid medium of our memory, freed of measured time and space, images remain and re-emerge transformed to visibility.[26]

Her importance as a woman artist should not be underestimated, although this was something that she herself played down. For many young women, such as Bridget Riley, who began to establish themselves in the art world in the 1960s, Clough was a shining example. Importantly, her work made no concession to notions of femininity: it exists on its own terms, is tough and uncompromising.

In one of her notebooks, in the late 1940s or 1950s Clough made a series of notes titled ‘Investigation into (mental) process’. She quotes Pasternak from Safe Conduct:

Focused on a reality which feeling has displaced, art is a record of this displacement. It copies from nature. How does nature get into this state of displacement? Details attain clarity, losing independence of meaning. Each detail can be replaced by another. Any one is precious. Any one chosen at random serves as evidence of the state which envelops the whole of transposed reality …

This passage might serve as a summation of Clough’s concerns an artist. A sense of displacement, of dislocation, leads the eye to the revelation of reality, a kind of transcendent vision of the materiality of the world. She concludes: ‘Art is as realistic as activity and as symbolic as fact.’

What emerges from Clough’s wide-ranging body of work is a profound sense of visual curiosity and delight. Her stated ambition was to re-visualise the world as ‘strange and unfamiliar’, and in this she succeeded triumphantly. In the process, she offered her audience an exhilarating new perception of our surroundings.[27]

[1] Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct, 1958.

[2] Many of Clough’s friends and contemporaries have been happy to share their memories of the artist. I am particularly indebted to the following for their insights: David Juda, Ian Barker, Robin Banks, Bridget Riley, Gina Burdass, Alan Freer, John Ball, Ken Powell, Toby Treves and Margaret Garlake.

[3] Statement, in ‘Seven Artists Tell Why They Paint’ in Picture Post, 12 March 1949, p.15

[4] Her friend, the artist Bridget Riley, has wondered whether her mother’s antipathy prompted Clough to adopt a position analogous to that of an amateur as a form of protection. By this Riley means that for all Clough’s professionalism and commitment as an artist, she was resistant to the idea of a ‘career’, to the idea of finding an audience for her work. Her painting was therefore an essentially private activity that sometimes, almost by accident, found its way out into the world.

[5] Gina Burdass, who was taught by Clough and subsequently became a close friend, suggest that: ‘She taught so that she had to be in contact with people, especially younger people’.

[6] Conversation with John Ball, 10 November 2005.

[7] Bryan Robertson, ‘Prunella Clough’s Paintings’, Harpers & Queen, June 1979, p.136.

[8] ‘Some Personal Memories’ in Prunella Clough: The Late Paintings and Selected Earlier Works, exh. cat., Annely Juda Gallery, London, 2000, p.5

[9] Quoted in Sue Hubbard, ‘Prunella Clough: An Artist’s Artist’, Contemporary Visual Arts, 27, 2000, p.47

[10] Conversation with Bridget Riley, March 2006

[11] The British Council sent two mixed exhibition to the 1952 São Paulo Biennial. The first was of paintings from the British Council’s collection and included Clough’s Greenhouse in Winter 1949. The second was of prints and included nineteen artists. Clough showed seven lithographs, more than any other participant.

[12] The ‘Kitchen Sink School’ was a name given to a group of four painters – John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith – who were all associated with Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts gallery and exhibited together on a number of occasions. They represented Britain at the 1956 Venice Biennale. The label was coined by the art critic David Sylvester in 1954.

[13] Michael Middleton, ‘Introduction’ in Prunella Clough, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1960, p.9

[14] Margaret Garlake, New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society, New Haven 1998, p.137.

[15] Robertson Interview, 1982, p.00 below.

[16] She notes having read Portrait of the Artist as Young Man and Finnegan’s Wake, as well as Hugh Gorman’s monograph on Joyce and F. Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. That year she also read Huxley (novels as well as The Art of Seeing), Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Aristotle’s Poetics, Gide and Marois, and much poetry including work by Lawrence Durrell, F.R. Leavis, Louis Aragon and William Empson.

[17] This was presumably a lecture as there is no mention of such a volume in her book list for that year.

[18] Joyce characterised his notion of epiphany as the sudden ‘revelation of the what ness of a thing’ or the moment at which ‘the soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant’, phrases which could be applied to Clough’s depictions of plastic swords and other toys, stacks of buckets or patches of cracked plaster.

[19] I am here discussing the role of drawing and note-taking as part of the process of preparing to make a painting. Clough was, of course, a brilliant graphic artist and made many independent drawings, finished and complete in themselves, which were not preparatory works.

[20] The location of the scene is not recorded, but the notebook is entitled ‘Holland Southwold’. It may be that Clough visited the docks at Lowestoft or Felixstowe from her base at Southwold.

[21] In 1943 she thought highly enough of her work to submit a group of poems to the publisher John Lehman for consideration. Diary entry, January 1943.

[22] Bryan Robertson interview, 1982.

[23] John Russell, Private View, p.126.

[24] List dated 30 August 1981, Tate Archive. It is interesting to note that alongside masters of Cubism such as Picasso, Braque, Lipschitz and Leger, and pioneers of abstraction such as Delaunay, Arp and Kandinsky, there are a surprising number of Surrealists: Matta, Delvaux, Paalen, Magritte and Masson.

[25] John Ball, ‘Landscape with Clough’, unpublished memoir, 2004.

[26] Michael Harrison, ‘Paintings that Impress’ in Prunella Clough: The Late Paintings and Selected Earlier Works, Annely Juda Gallery, London, 2000, p.13.

[27] Statement, in ‘Seven Artists Tell Why They Paint’ in Picture Post, 12 March 1949, p.15.