Text by Martin Holman, 2024

For five years from 1981, Robyn Denny lived and worked in Los Angeles. The painter had been the leading exponent of hard-edged abstraction in British painting throughout the preceding two decades, one of a group of British artists through whose work, according to critic David Thompson in 1966, ‘an entirely new spirit [had] entered into both British painting and British sculpture.’ Drawn since his student days to the art and culture of the US, Denny’s presence in the epicentre of postwar Modernism could be seen as the mere culmination of twenty years of adherence in his work to architectural lines and angles, and to the implied ambiguity between flatness and depth. The big canvases by which he was known were, after all, a response to the scale and ambition of American painting first seen in the 1950s.

Instead, the LA experience had a profound effect on Denny. For a year he occupied a large studio that Frank Gehry had built. Sun streamed through its tall, rectilinear windows to lie in bright patches that flexed and flowed on the floor with the passage of day and shifts in the weather. The artificiality of the city’s environment absorbed him; its light-filled architecture in glass and steel seemed to float in space. He observed how the Pacific climate and urban pollution remodelled his perception of the town. ‘I liked the smog, for example,’ he told art historian David Alan Mellor in 2001, ‘because being an entirely synthetic light, the appearance and “feel” of the city changed on a daily basis.’

 Made towards the end of his stay, My Blue Heaven (1985–86) has two striking features: its lustrous azure body and the nub of activity at eye level to the viewer. Attention naturally gravitates to that concentrated area where the colour turns to lighter tones, through cobalt to a luminous horizon-blue. The effects of chromatic and material transition are close to spellbinding. The dense surface, resulting from multiple layers of acrylic medium, seems to pause, decelerate and loosen as subtle veils, shaped as if atmospherically by a drifting breath suspended in time, suggest a cave-like portal into an interior dimension. Or is it a cloud seen through or reflected in a window? Meaning is as mobile as the freeways straddling the metropolis.

Denny’s longstanding enthusiasm for the possibilities of the flat plane of the canvas is undimmed in this painting, as comparison with Still (1964) makes plain. Dramatically free from external romantic references and the all-over gesture of abstract expressionism, the earlier work exemplifies the formula of single, austerely cohesive compositions that cemented his reputation in the early 1960s. Every element and colour has an equal chance of being the dominant one. The necessity of scale also continued into the 1980s because large-scale canvases invite interaction between forms and colours, and between the painting and its audience. On his return to Britain in 1986, canvases still enclosed the visual field of the spectator and hung only a few centimetres above floor level, proposing continuity between real and fictive space.

But in the later painting, the old formula has changed. The former play on symmetry has developed radically into deeper, inflected monochromes and amorphous, aformal shapes. The surface, always a place of uncertainty, now harbours the sensation of phenomenological turbulence flickering either into awareness or towards extinction. The line of uneven verticals in Finding Out (1982–83) has a primal quality, a basic script on its way to discovering how to communicate. The horizontal that anchors these leaning marks resembles the scored line on which a child learns lettering at school, as play makes way for serious education. The scratchy imprints sit within a faint nimbus of lighter colour, delicate like dawn. Or is it a mist?

Visual signs linking art and life always had a place in Denny’s imagery, channelled through relationships of line and colour. Now metaphors proliferate, manifesting more loquaciously than before. Paint is no longer close to a thin dye; it assumes a major role as matter extending into a physical vocabulary of scuffing, scoring. In Nice Style (1991–95) drips streak the face of four space shapes in primary colours. Another analogy is with performance. Light in these paintings acquires the pin-point quality of stage illumination that did not exist before. Along with its fashions, cars, advertising and super-sized painting, American movies were a long-term interest for Denny that maybe resurfaces in the Tinseltown setting of the film industry. A combination of present reality and reflection on the past pervades Denny’s choice of jaunty titles; chant-like phrases including Razzle Dazzle, Footlights, Sweet O’Zeeta and Love Wall embellish later canvases into a playlist that can read like an abstract haiku. Titles derived from the interwar American popular songbook open interpretation to memory, and so to the passage of time. My Blue Heaven is a popular swing number and Me and My Shadows (1) (2000–03) was Tin Pan Alley hit performed by Al Jolson. The painting that title riffs on, however, has a dark, searching quality not found in the melody – as memory can be bittersweet. 

The captivating paintings from his American stay and beyond remain the least apprehended period of Denny’s production. While they show his engagement with the changing nature of art in those years when figuration, myth and history again became marketable subjects, this survey helps to locate this remarkable late flowering within the preoccupations of several decades. Highlighting both areas of change and consistency in his practice, Denny was regrouping around some elements he had explored at the start of his career, rather than walking away from past achievements. The earliest works in this exhibition catch Denny in search of a distinctive voice with which to convey the visual environment in which he lived: the city, popular entertainment and a slowly emergent consumer culture. In the small collage England Today (1954), Denny composes a flat oblong surface in which vertical strips carry printed colours, clipped images and lettering derived from the material of daily life as indisputable vestiges of reality. The metal razorblade brings a sharply witty totemic domestic silhouette into the visual mêlée. The ensemble is playful, restless and dynamic; the strips might flip at any moment into a new arrangement, like the pivoted slats on a railway terminus departure board.

For Denny, art was a method of communication on a level with the mass media. His RCA thesis in 1957 had been titled ‘Language, Symbol, Image’ with one reference point being the Rosetta Stone, the ancient script of which was indecipherable until decoded by patient study. On the cover he placed a photograph of an American urban street corner, an indisputable emblem of urban modernity that Austerity Britain could not match. A block-end building appears festooned with painted or printed signage and giant lettering hawking parking lots, a motel and a used car outlet. These atmospheric accruals of functional signs also convey notions of use and temporal mobility that Denny wanted his paintings to encompass. Text was seen from the perspective of semiotics, as signs interpreted through recognition. In Wall Game (1956), a Rosetta Stone of his own invention, language is handled as medium, worked in paint rather than collage to contrive a palimpsest where meaning seems short-circuited. He was not isolated in his ambitions: in New York that year, Jasper Johns painted his first engagement with symbols as a subject for art.

For Denny, painting in its varied forms was the vehicle by which art stimulated awareness. Working on board instead of canvas, for instance, underscored the hard and resistant nature of Denny’s combative attitude to the orthodoxy represented by his tutors at the Royal College of Art. John Minton, a tutor that Denny acknowledged as a tolerant and brilliant teacher, repeatedly told his students that ‘painting is made out of a love for the subject.’ Denny thought otherwise and, keen to detach his painting from the idiom’s well-worn traditions, used unfamiliar materials and processes.

Late in 1956, his large abstract in burned and scorched bitumen and gold paint provoked Minton into an outburst. In his view, the splashy exercise in tachiste informality broke accepted standards and undermined art’s essential humanity. ‘You could call this painting anything!’ observed Minton. ’Why don’t you call it “Eden Come Home”?’ – a random topical reference to the then prime minister’s absence abroad to recuperate after the disastrous Suez crisis.

Adding fuel to the fire with purpose, Denny took up the suggestion and applied the title to a new painting with arcs and volutes of scorched bitumen. Then his close friend and fellow painter, Richard Smith, signed it for him.

By then, Denny had been exposed first-hand to the American post-war painting of Pollock, Newman, Rothko and others hung in the last room of the celebrated international touring show ‘Modern Art in the United States’, shown at the Tate in January-February 1956. Study in Paris in 1950 and a scholarship to Italy in 1957 had kept him unusually informed about the continental avant-garde, a factor which made his brand of hard-edged abstraction, once it had emerged, distinct from American work of the time. But this exhibition, and subsequent bouts in group and solo presentations at the Tate and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, gave him and many artists of his generation permission to reject their seniors’ cultural baggage. ‘Suddenly,’ he recalled for historian Alex Seago in 1989, ‘something was happening which had nothing to do with received values … which was our property, that wasn’t something we’d been told or learned about’.

Denny’s paintings were already acutely attuned to the spectator’s perceptions. He agreed with an essay by American scholar Daniel Lerner, which stressed how the enormous variety of situations confronting urban populations gave them the ability to adapt to new demands on their personalities. Art required the same dynamic and flexible relationship with its audience. In 1959 he had been involved with public art projects, most famously a wall-sized painting installed at the Austin Reed store in London. Broken up text, shifts in scale and bold, Union Jack colours, merged distinctive art historical languages with city-centre shopping, the pulse of Regent Street and the rhythms of youth culture.

In the same year he constructed an environment at the ICA in Dover Street to stimulate the viewer into physical or interpretative responses mediated by painting. ‘Place’ was a collaboration with Smith and their contemporary Ralph Rumney and comprised canvases above a little human height placed directly on the floor. Some linked into a free-standing zig-zag pattern through the room so that pictorial and physical space appeared joined. Place 9 (1959) gives a flavour of the experience in a show where formal criteria restricted the unframed paintings to two large sizes only (Place 9 is the smaller size in width), four colours, and stripped-down shapes. 

Of course, the immersive scale of canvases contributes to the sensation. An undated note in the artist’s archives refers to ‘Big pictures, man-scaled for comfort… myopic involvement demanding close spectator participation - I like them to be nice to be near.’ Writing in the introduction to ‘Situation’, the seminal exhibition of British abstract painting held in London in September 1960 where no painting measured less than 30 square feet, former RCA contemporary (by then working at the ICA) Roger Coleman wrote about the value of size to ‘a new conception of the spectator’s relationship to a painting.’

Coleman described Denny’s work as ‘cartographically simple but perceptually complex’, a perceptive phrase that retains its validity. The initial impression of Out-Line 1 (1962) is a severe and impenetrable vertical axis. It dissolves with looking into an ambiguous environment that seems to advance and recede within a shallow space behind the painting’s ineluctable flat surface. Lines, angles and colour feel architectural, vitalising two distinct spaces of which the viewer becomes keenly aware: the ‘outside’ in the verifiable reality of the gallery and a suppositional ‘inside’ territory into which the viewer might imaginatively tumble, where harmonies and dissonances, proportions and imbalances of shape and colour interrelate (likening the structure of this series of works to the “significant place” of a Greek temple, Robert Kudielka wrote in the Tate catalogue that ‘the space in Denny’s mature work… is open, but not immense; the spectator feels contained without being locked in’).

Not surprisingly, allusion to Lewis Carroll’s fantastical stories about Alice is often made, in picture titles such as Drink Me and Garden; perhaps Smith was the first, in an article published in 1956 in ‘Ark’, the journal of the Royal College of Art where both were studying in 1954–57. In ‘Through the Looking Glass’ (1871), Carroll has Alice step through the flat plane of the mirror that separates the known world from an interior dimension where different rules of logic and frequent, chess-like changes of movement occur.

The interior space suggested in A Time (1968-69) is finite; the overlay of rectangles imply its limited extent, while the shapes imply a way of imaginatively penetrating the surface so that the spectator has a role in activating the otherwise static ensemble. The title mentions the dimension of time, and the hard-to-pin-down, shadowy twilight tones that Denny often used play their part in precipitating an indeterminate terrain ‘within’ the canvas temporally rather than spatially.

When his retrospective opened at the Tate Gallery on Millbank in March 1973, Denny was at 42 the youngest artist to be accorded a career survey at the institution. Richard Cork, art critic for the ‘Evening Standard’, opened his review noting that ‘the most successful paintings … appear to contain an invitation. Carefully proportioned, so that their size is in harmony with the physical scale of the person who views them, they beckon you towards the space they inhabit.’ Cork picked out paintings from 1964-65 after which his assessment cooled, a position that signalled the tide turning against the formalism of which Denny was a standard bearer. As the decade continued Denny found himself out of the limelight to a degree that seems inexplicable today, when his intellectually engaged perspective on the medium’s renewability is again the lingua franca of studios in London, New York and elsewhere. While his involvement in group shows remained consistently regular, the pace of solo exhibitions slowed. Between 1974 and 2001, only one took place in the UK.

For Denny, however, his practice kept developing. In White Light 3 (1976) the groundwork of the composition undergoes significant development, with a linear arrangement that implies an excavation of the picture plane. Lines demarcate irregular plots with varying clarity; some are near disappearance; others fail to meet at corners or overshoot. The composition has moved from static symmetry to more hesitant, reduced coordinates reminiscent of an architect’s first sketch. Or the memory of it. Space remains ambiguous and in flux with the surface. Does the viewpoint give onto a screen parallel with the wall or has the viewer been thrown back, peering upward as if from a prone position? The suggestion of a draft is bolstered by patches that inflect the colour like erasures. And the surface is reserved for one colour only, from which the chalky lines lift in an imagined subtle projection to flicker gently in the gallery light. Denny has gone back to the drawing board.

In a critical climate that is enthusiastically reassessing the importance of Richard Smith and other contemporaries, the time to rehabilitate Denny’s enduringly fresh, significant and enigmatic contribution has arrived. Without knowing his work, our grasp of the history upon which new painting is taking shape remains frustratingly incomplete.