Jerwood Gallery

Paul Feiler (b. 1918), Chrome & Lemon (1956). Purchased in 1993.
Image © Paul Feiler, courtesy of the Redfern Gallery.

Born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Paul Feiler was sent to England in 1933 and studied from 1936 to 1939 at the Slade School. Interned in Canada when the Second World War broke out, Feiler returned to Britain in 1941, teaching at the Combined Colleges of Eastbourne and Radley and the West England College of Art from 1941 to 1975. Since 1953 he has lived and worked in Cornwall, exhibiting regularly at the Redfern Gallery in London and in 2005 a major exhibition of his work was held at Tate St Ives. He was initially associated with the St Ives School of artists, who by the 1950s were experimenting with a non figurative approach to landscape painting and who are well represented in the Jerwood collection.

Chrome & Yellow (1956) is one of series of works that can be traced back to drawings made two years earlier on a visit to Gandria in Lago Maggiore, in which Feiler depicted distant spaces through a screen of foreground forms. His period of internment during the war may also have contributed to his decision to focus on vertical forms, while childhood holidays spent amongst the snow-covered mountains of the Bavarian Alps explain the liberal use of white and the ambiguous sense of scale. Feiler delighted in applying thick paint with broad brushstrokes and when told of Nicolas de Staël’s similar approach ‘made them broader and the paint thicker. It was the handling of the paint that I found exciting’.

Chrome & Yellow was exhibited at the Redfern Gallery in 1956 and a statement from an exhibition at the ICA the following year explains his approach to painting at this time, ‘I have always enjoyed writing down with paint what I felt the world around me looked like. This has been a limited world: a world of open spaces with snow and ice-covered mountains; later, the sea and the rocks seen from a height. This has led me to try to communicate a universal aspect of forms in space; where the scale of shapes to each other and their tonal relationship convey their physical nearness to the spectator and where the overall colour and its texture supplies the emotional overtones of the personality of “Place”’.