Paul Feiler

Paul Feiler (1918–2013) was a leading member of the second generation of St Ives artists, alongside Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon and Bryan Wynter. His work developed from heavily worked Cornish landscapes of the 1950s into increasingly abstract paintings concerned with colour, space and structure. Peter Lanyon wrote that Feiler’s paintings stirred in him “a sense of pause”, while Alan Davie later described his shrine-like works as “some of the most mystical pictures I have ever seen”.

Born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Feiler left Germany for England in 1933 following the rise of Nazism. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1936 to 1939, where fellow students included Patrick Heron and Adrian Heath. During the Second World War he was interned, first on the Isle of Man and then in Canada, before returning to England. He taught at Eastbourne College and, from 1946, at the West of England College of Art in Bristol.

Feiler first visited Cornwall in 1949, where he renewed friendships with Patrick Heron and Bryan Wynter and met William Scott and Peter Lanyon. His first solo exhibition at The Redfern Gallery in 1953 was followed by the purchase of a former chapel at Kerris, near Penzance, which became his Cornish home and studio. While continuing to teach at the West of England College of Art in Bristol, he divided his time between Bristol and Cornwall, later settling permanently at Kerris after leaving his teaching post. He also taught at the St Ives summer school established by Lanyon and Terry Frost. His thickly painted landscapes of this period, with their heavily worked surfaces and increasingly abstracted forms, quickly brought him wider recognition. Large Welsh Bay was acquired by the Arts Council of Great Britain from his 1953 Redfern exhibition.

By the later 1950s and early 1960s, Feiler’s paintings became progressively more abstract. He was included in The Redfern Gallery’s influential Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract exhibition in 1957 and in the British Council touring exhibition British Abstract Painting. In 1961 his work was shown in British Painting in the 1960s at the Tate Gallery, and in 1964 he exhibited alongside Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton and Alan Davie at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol.

From the late 1960s Feiler’s work took a markedly different direction. His interest in what he termed “elusive space”, informed by early memories of Alpine landscapes and classical architecture, led to increasingly ordered compositions of circles, squares and vertical forms. These developed into the shrine-like Sekos, Aduton, Janus and Janicon series which occupied him for much of the following four decades. The later works introduced materials including gold and silver leaf, gessoed board and, eventually, Perspex.

Major retrospective exhibitions were held at Tate St Ives in 1995 and again in 2005, when The Near and The Far placed Feiler’s work alongside paintings he selected from the Tate collection, including works by Cézanne, Lanyon, Malevich and de Staël. In his final years he developed the Square Reliefs, combining painted and collaged elements with Perspex and other materials in a further exploration of pictorial space.

Feiler’s centenary in 2018 was marked by the retrospective Paul Feiler: One Hundred Years at Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, and by Paul Feiler: Elusive Space – A Centenary Retrospective at The Redfern Gallery. His work is represented in numerous public collections, including Tate, the Arts Council Collection, the British Museum, the British Council Collection, The Hepworth Wakefield, Pallant House Gallery, the Whitworth and the Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool.

The Estate of Paul Feiler is represented by The Redfern Gallery.