λ PAUL FEILER (BRITISH 1918-2013)
ZENNOR
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated 62 (lower right); further signed, titled, inscribed and dated 1962 (to backboard)
51 x 46cm (20 x 18in.)
Provenance:
Bohun Gallery, Henley-on-Thames
Acquired from the above in 1997
As a teenage in 1933, Feiler fled his home in Frankfurt to escape Nazi rule, firstly to the Netherlands and then on to England. In the late 1930s, he attended the Slade School of Fine Art and met fellow artists Patrick Heron and Adrian Heath. By the late 1940s, Feiler had gained artistic recognition and exhibited with the Royal Academy, Leicester Galleries, and Redfern Gallery. In 1949, he travelled down to Cornwall to visit friends and was introduced to artists William Scott and Peter Lanyon. Four years later, Feiler relocated to Kerris near Penzance, and took up a teaching position at the St Ives School under Terry Frost. He subsequently went on to become part of the second generation of St Ives artists, depicting the Cornish landscape through their particular vision of Abstraction.
The present work--so named after the village of Zennor on the north coast of Cornwall--sits at the vanguard of Feiler's artistic practice. Around this time, Feiler was occupied with Cézanne's assertion that 'a picture should give us ... an abyss in which the eye is lost.' In a similar vein, Feiler observed that although we experience the world standing vertically, we perceive it in largely horizontal terms. This interest in perspective and our place within it, was powerfully expressed throughout Feiler's oeuvre, and informed his signature use of circular, square, and linear forms. He aimed to convey what he termed 'elusive space', which can be understood as formless volumes of air and light, inspired, in part, by the optical effects he experienced while hillwalking the Alps as a boy.
In Zennor , Feiler employs a restrained palette of whites, greys, blues, ochres, and umbers, and reworks the composition with such rapid and vigorous mark-making. The circular form at the centre of the composition is intersected by a vertical line incised directly into the paint's surface. Elsewhere, he scrapes back areas of thick white paint, to reveal underlayers of blue and grey that create a chalky surface, evocative of the rocks, cliffs, and sea spray of the Cornish coastline. In a closely related treatment of subject and technique, Feiler painted Porthledden, Deep Blue, 1962. The critic John Steer wrote: 'The art of Paul Feiler is a protracted love-affair between himself and the landscape of Cornwall... it is his experience of Cornish space and light that is the real subject-matter of his paintings.'
Zennor, however, sits at a juncture in Feiler's practice. By the late 1960s, he moved away from the painterly Abstraction of his British contemporaries, and towards the conceptual Abstract Expressionism practiced by the American artists. Notably Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock--the former of which Feiler welcomed to his Cornish studio one afternoon in 1958 with Frost and Lanyon. Feiler was also influenced by the idea of 'Suprematism'--developed by Avant-guard artist-philosopher Kazimir Malevich--which is defined as the: 'supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts.' Combined with his interest for the lunar landings of the late 1960s, Feiler channelled these radical aesthetics and developed his Shrine series, characterised by circles set within concentric squares. And whilst his Shrine paintings came to dominate the next forty years of his career, their aesthetic foundation can be trace to the Abstractions seen in Zennor .
John Steer, Review of Paul Feiler's exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, November 1962
Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (translation by Howard Dearstyne), 1926
Paul Feiler (1918-2013), The Redfern Gallery, accessed 2026
The Life & Works of Paul Feiler (1918-2013), Paul Feiler, accessed 2026
Condition Report:
The work is framed and was not examined out of its frame. There is some cracking to the surface of the paint, particularly to the centre left hand quadrant. There are a few losses through the upper section of the painting. There is a further small area of restoration about 2cm in length in the upper right quadrant, which is most visible under UV light.
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