Irvin, Albert
Born in London in 1922 Abert Irvin became interested in drama, literature and drawing in his early teens. His family praised his talent and the boy frequented the National Gallery where Titan (1490-1576), Rembrandt (1606-1669) and John Everett Millais (1829-1896) made a lasting impression on him. Albert had been advancing his ambitions to study art and commenced at Northampton School of Art in early 1940. He immersed himself in the rigours of traditional life drawing under the guidelines of John Spencer who promised the students to teach them ‘to draw like Augustus John and Rembrandt’ and infected them with the fantasy and romance in art and his allegiance to Modernism and especially Paul Cézanne ( 1939-1906).
After eighteen months in the art school, Irvin was called up into the army and spent his war years training and fighting as an RAF pilot from 1941 to 1945, the experience which he called ‘terrifying’.
In 1946 Albert, on the advice of Reginald Robert Tomlinson (1885–1978), the head of Central School of Art, enrolled on National Diploma of Design course at Goldsmith College where his fellow student included Bridget Riley (b.1931) and teachers Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) and Clive Gardiner (1891-1960) among the others who encouraged the artist’s contact with modern British art. Irvin learnt about Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), Keith Vaughan (1912-1977), Edward Burra (1905-1976) and Robert Colquhoun (1914-1962). He also gained first- hand acquaintance with European avant-garde when he visited the joint Picasso-Matisse exhibition opened the Victoria & Albert Museum in December 1945.
Albert took part in his first group show The Young Contemporaries in his final year, alongside with Gillian Ayres (1930-2018) and was noted by the members of the London Group. He showed his still figurative works with the group in 1952 and was approached and commended by Ceri Richards (1903-1971). Irvin continued to exhibit his art with the Group throughout the 1950s. However, his style had already been changing especially after his meeting with Peter Lanyon (1918-1964) in 1957 on his visit to St Ives where he also met Roger Hilton (1911-1975), Bryan Wynter (1915-1975) and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004). He came close to international abstract art when he saw the New American Paintings exhibition containing eighty-one paintings by seventeen artists at the Tate in 1959.
From 1960s Albert Irvin started to make large, completely abstract paintings with freer brushwork. He observed that maps employ a visual symbolic language and this discovery made a profound influence on his style first directly than metaphorically. Irvin showed his works in Vienna and had his first one-man show at 57 Gallery in Edinburgh in 1960 and his work was bought by the Arts Council. His second personal exhibition was at the New Art Centre, London in October 1963 during which time Albert returned to Goldsmith as a member of staff. His painting became sharper in form and their structure more defined with the emphasis on darker colours. Black Moves (1964) is one of the best works of this series with bold and vigorous brushstrokes and defined contrasted areas just with a sense of the map-forms.
In 1968 Irvin went to the USA where he visited museums, saw Jack Tworkov (1900-1982), the Chairman of the Art Department at Yale, and met Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008). His visit to America had influenced his thinking and opened a way to the new phase of his activity. Albert occupied a new studio in St Katharine Dock and his paintings became larger, their compositions barely reminded the earlier street-shapes and colours became more translucent and subdued. He won a prestigious Arts Council Award in 1975.
Albert began to make mural-size stain paintings after moving to an even larger studio pouring and throwing paint onto canvas and increasing use of acrylic rather than oil. He had his breakthrough in 1980 when he had a one-man show at the Acme Gallery, Covent Garden, London in April –May and six of his canvas were included in the Hayward Annual between August and October that year with many favourable reviews calling his paintings ‘powerful manifestations of Abstract Sublime’ thus linking him to William Turner (1775-1851).
Albert embarked on the exploration of space in his large works and arrived at the idea of painting directly on the unprimed canvas and of use of long brushes and bright colours which was rewarded by the purchase of one of his paintings by the Tate in 1982. The mid-eighties saw the artist’s increasing interest in screenprinting which contributed to his rising fame and a Gulbenkian Printmaking Award in 1983 and culminated in his first retrospective exhibition at Serpentine Gallery in London in February-March 1989.
Albert Irvin was invited to make now well-known works for London hospitals and continued to exhibit widely in the UK and abroad in Birmingham City Art Gallery, Manchester City Art Gallery, Leeds City Gallery, Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Oxford University, Cambridge University and Warwick University Arts Centre as well as in Australia, Austria, Russia and the United States. In 2013, for his services to the visual arts, Irvin was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).
