* BRUCE TIPPETT (BRITISH 1933 - 2017),
UNTITLED
charcoal on paper, signed and inscribed '6.58' (June 1958)
46cm x 36cm
Mounted, framed and under glass.
Note: Bruce Tippett was a British born artist who was championed by Philip Granville (Lord's Gallery, London) and the legendary Betty Parsons (Betty Parsons Gallery, New York) and others. Jane England writes in her 1992 catalogue : "In 1957, he (Tippett) saw Japanese brush paintings for the first time at the British Museum (which now houses nine Bruce Tippett drawings). He recalls now that 'Something awoke in me and I entered another realm'. The works of the Japanese calligraphers inspired him by their mixture of spontaneity and contemplation. Like the Zen masters, Tippett achieved spontaneity by constantly paring down the image and concentrating on its essential spirit, with no sign of the struggle involved. When Tippett first saw a work by Hartung at Gimpel Fils in May 1958, he was struck by the similarities of their respective calligraphic styles. These similarities had different origins. In Tippett's case the energetic strokes and lines came from his early drawings of reeds and stakes in marsh landscapes and the studies he had made of building structures, whereas Hartung's expressive calligraphy came from his early experiments with automatism." Alan Bowness pointed out in his "Portrait of the Artist" (1958) that "having made the first steps on his own Tippett realized that the calligraphic paintings of Hartung pointed in the direction he wished to go but by the end of 1957 Tippett had reached something that was recognizably an original manner, and the drawings done then and at the beginning of this year have a remarkable ease and assurance." After Peggy Guggenheim closed her Art of This Century Gallery in 1947, Parsons was one of only a very few gallery owners to promote avant-garde American art at a time when the commercial demand for it was minuscule. The Betty Parsons Gallery was also, for a considerable time, the only gallery in the US which promoted and supported Abstract Expressionism. Parsons played a major and significant role in establishing New York as the centre of the art world and Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, William Congdon, Clyfford Still, Theodorus Stamos, Ellsworth Kelly, Hedda Sterne, Forrest Bess, Michael Loew, Lyman Kipp, Judith Godwin, Tony Smith, Robert Rauschenberg, Barnett Newman and many other artists owed much to Betty Parsons. Bruce Tippett first visited New York in 1965 when Dorothy Miller bought one of his paintings for MOMA. He met Betty Parsons at the Venice Biennale in 1966 and immediately afterwards she visited his studio in Rome and bought several paintings and drawings for her gallery. Bruce Tippett exhibited regularly at The Betty Parsons Gallery (New York) from 1967 and had his last solo show there in 1981, the year before Betty Parsons died. Bruce Tippett continued to exhibit in the US and the UK and even more frequently in Italy and France. He died in France in 2017, where he had lived and worked since 2005. His work is held in some of the most important collections in the US and Europe including The Louvre (Paris), The British Museum (London), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Rome) and MOMA (New York), yet in his country of birth, his work remains relatively unknown.