Alan Davie RA
Alan Davie RA (1920–2014) was a Scottish painter, printmaker and musician whose work combined gestural abstraction with a highly personal language of signs, symbols and forms drawn from a wide range of cultures. His paintings are characterised by improvisation, strong colour and an energetic handling of paint, reflecting his parallel interests in jazz, Surrealism, Zen Buddhism and ancient systems of imagery.
Born in Grangemouth, Davie studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1937 to 1940. After wartime service with the Royal Artillery, he worked for a period as a professional jazz musician and travelled widely in Europe. In Venice in 1948 he met Peggy Guggenheim, who bought several of his works and encouraged his interest in recent American painting.
By the early 1950s Davie had developed a spontaneous approach to painting in which composition emerged through the act of working rather than from a fixed preliminary design. He often worked on canvases and boards laid on the floor, using sweeping gestures and dense layers of colour. His love of jazz provided an important parallel for this improvisatory method.
Davie’s association with The Redfern Gallery includes his participation in the important 1957 exhibition Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract: Painting in England Today. The exhibition brought together thirty British painters, among them Sandra Blow and Peter Lanyon, and examined the impact of French Tachisme and American Abstract Expressionism on contemporary British painting.
During the later 1950s and 1960s his imagery became increasingly populated by signs and emblematic forms. Sources ranged from maps and ancient rock carvings to American Indian pottery and Aboriginal art, but these references were absorbed into a highly personal visual vocabulary rather than copied directly.
Davie exhibited extensively in Britain and internationally. A major retrospective was held at Wakefield City Art Gallery in 1958, followed by exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Royal Scottish Academy, the Barbican Art Gallery and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Tate St Ives presented Alan Davie: Jingling Space in 2003, and Tate held a further exhibition of his work in 2014. He was appointed CBE in 1972 and later became a Senior Royal Academician.
His work is held in major public collections including Tate, the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
