Crozier, William
William Crozier was born in Glasgow in 1930. Although Bill’s passion was history and it ran throughout his life he started to draw and paint every day from the age of fourteen. He inwardly understood that he would become an artist by the age of sixteen.
Crozier was further inspired by Matisse-Picasso exhibition and Van Gogh show at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in 1946 and 1948 respectively and by his trips to Paris in 1947 and 1950 where he visited Musee d’Art Moderne. William became a student at Glasgow School of Art from 1949 to 1953 where his most sympathetic tutor was David Donaldson (1916-1996) who later became the official Painter to Her Majesty the Queen in Scotland. During this time Bill met William Gear (1915-1997) and visited his studio in Edinburgh and got acquainted with Robert Colquhoun (1914-1962) and Robert McBryde ( 11913-1966) who became his close and supportive friends.
After graduating from the art school Crozier went to Paris for almost a year, worked as a set painter at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin and returned to London where he worked on sets at Palladium and other theatres made Dada-inspired collages and assemblages and started to paint his landscapes. He saw the American abstract paintings at the Tate exhibition in 1956 and rated de Kooning highly but was more impressed by the size of paintings rather than their content and noticed that contemporary critics like Clement Greenberg whom he met were more influential than the actual pictures.
William frequented Soho clubs where he came across William Turnbull ( 1922-2012), Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) and Francis Bacon (1909-1992) whose studio he visited. He exhibited at Parton Gallery and the ICA in London in 1957, Gallerie Colette Allendy in Paris in 1958 and was awarded the First Prize for his Essex landscape at Premio Lissone Exhibition in Milan in 1959. The same year Crozier took over William Scott’s position at Bath Academy of Art which he enjoyed and where he met Gillian Ayres (1930-2018) and Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017) as his fellow teachers. From 1964 William was teaching at Ealing School of Art and from 1965 at the Central School of Art in London. Crozier was appointed the Head of Painting in 1968 and shortly after the Head of Fine Art at Winchester School of Art which he remained till 1987.
William painted and exhibited extensively throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He had shows at Bristol Art Gallery in 1960, Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the USA in 1961 and San Francisco Museum of Art in 1962. Crozier travelled to Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Slovenia, the Balkans, the Orkney Islands and New York and had numerous personal shows with commercial galleries in the UK. William Crozier had a solo show at Serpentine Gallery in London in 1978.
William’s career blossomed. He received the Oireachtas Gold Medal for Painting in Dublin in 1994 and was invited to be the Honorary Member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in Ireland in 2001. His major personal show was organised in Cork, Ireland as part of the European City of Culture celebration and to mark his 75th birthday in 2005.
William Crozier works are present in the most prestigious public collections such as Tate Modern and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, the European Commission in Brussels, Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, the National Museum in Warsaw, Museum of Modern Art in Dallas, USA, National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and National Gallery of Australia in Melbourne.
