ALEXANDER MACKENZIE

AU STI N DE S MON D F I N E ART

1 Fishing Boats 1951 Oil on canvas 40.5 x 51cm

4

Pencilled in a small black notebook in Alexander

Mackenzie’s clean, open italic script: ‘We find in the

countryside the character of enduring things’. Is he quoting

someone? – Thomas Hardy, maybe, or Edward Thomas. Or

W.G. Hoskins in his 1955 classic The Making of the English

Landscape, which scraped down the post-war landscape’s

layers of social and cultural accretion to decipher the

human palimpsest they contained? Whatever its source, the

sentiment sounds familiar. It may have come from some

volume Mackenzie pulled from his studio shelves, as he

did when he wanted to illustrate a point, but the precise

choice of words makes me think that this is the artist

himself speaking. Mackenzie looked long and deep into

landscape. Like Hardy or his own contemporary Peter

Lanyon, he was haunted equally by its tactile, impersonal

contours and its imagined histories. What he found there,

however, and what he made of this in his art were wholly

distinctive.

In Character: Alexander Mackenzie and Landscape

Michael Bird

2 Still life (Buoys), Kehelland, Cornwall 1951 Gouache on paper 35 x 44cm

6

3 Still Life 1953 Oil and collage on board 16 x 22.5cm

4 Painted Relief 1953 Oil on board 13 x 40.5cm

8

‘Character’ is what Mackenzie would have called the

operative word in the aphorism. When we use it as a

synonym for personality, we forget that it is a physical

metaphor, from the ancient Greek kharassein, to scratch or

carve a furrow. The marks charactered in landscape may be

hardwearing as the ramparts of a hillfort or accidental as a

tree’s shadow. To an observer of Mackenzie’s reflective

temperament, both types signify ‘enduring things’ –

archaeological ancientness in one case, the ephemeral

brushwork of profound cyclical recurrence in the other.

Mackenzie thought of painting as a parallel process; though

all painters are revealed in the detail of their mark-making,

his artistic personality is notably (and characteristically)

concentrated in his. Lines, scratches, abrasions, collage, cuts

and cloudy flourishes of rubbed-down pigment re-enact on

gesso panels, canvas, parchment or paper landscape’s ‘wild

structural’i qualities. In the abstract idiom he practised

consistently from the early 1950s until his death in 2002,

Cup and ring marks - artist’s slide, 1979

5 Llan, Gwynedd 1953 Oil On board 15 x 28cm

Mackenzie seems often to be referencing patterns of field

walls or hill contours as though they were calligraphy in a

lost language, interpretable only through meditation on the

marks themselves.

Mackenzie said that he thought of his work as ‘paintings

first, with landscape elements’,ii but this didn’t stop

reviewers placing him firmly in the English landscape

tradition. This was a mixed blessing for a young artist

around 1960, especially one who was by then associated

with Nicholson, Hepworth and the Middle Generation

painters of St Ives. ‘In St Ives’, the easily unimpressed young

trendspotter Lawrence Alloway quipped ominously as early

as 1954, ‘they combine non-figurative theory with the

practice of abstraction [i.e. abstracting from observation]

because the landscape is so nice nobody can quite bring

themselves to leave it out of their art.’iii Lanyon distanced

himself from the word landscape’s picturesque connotations

10

6 Chapel Street 1954 Oil on Board 12.5 x 54.5cm

7 April-May 1959 Oil on board 42 x 29cm

by talking instead about ‘place’. The more homely

‘countryside’ in Mackenzie’s note is apt too – for him it

started as the green hinterland outside his native Liverpool,

and his lifelong enjoyment of it was unashamedly that of the

twentieth-century, city-bred incomer. It was experienced

though weekend rambling around Cornwall, where he took

a teaching job in the art department of a Penzance secondary

school in 1951, occasional holidays elsewhere, and amateur

passions for archaeology and ornithology.

Mackenzie’s analytical approach to ‘wild structure’ insulated

him from the atavistic mythologizing of the Celtic landscape

he could easily have picked up from the charismatic Lanyon

or heard expressed with stately fervour by Barbara

Hepworth. He saw the cliffs and moorlands of West Cornwall

neither as turbulent Romantic heritage nor as neo-

Constructivist ecosystem but as layered, resonant surfaces

inscribed with meaning. A small work from 1953 in oil and

12

Landscape - artist’s slide, 1979

8 Green Red Coast 1959 Oil on board 26.5 x 42.5cm

14

Autumnal Equinox 1959 Private Collection

collage on board, Still Life (cat.3), shows Mackenzie learning

from Nicholson’s formalistic conflation of still life and

landscape as well as from Neo-Romanticism’s brooding

thorniness, but it asks to be enjoyed primarily for its

carefully organised translations of surface texture. In this

sort of effect, Mackenzie was tuning in at least as sensitively

to developments in post-war European art as to the legacy of

pre-war abstraction, with which even self-consciously

experimental work by Lanyon, Hepworth, Nicholson, Frost

and other artists in West Cornwall was still emotionally

entangled.

16

9 Reclining Dartmoor 1960 Oil on Board 7.5 x 20.5cm

10 July Pool c.1960 Oil on Board 17.5 x 38.5cm

‘The most obvious difference between the art of today and

the art of the inter-war period’, wrote David Sylvester in

1955, ‘is that rough surfaces have taken the place of smooth

ones … the present age delights in texture and irregularity,

exploits the accidental, courts imperfection.’iv He was

thinking of Bacon and Giacometti, and we could add the

Cobra group, Burri, Rauschenberg or Tápies (the last

particularly admired by Mackenzie) – the post-war

preoccupation with objectified surface texture can be seen

everywhere in the 1950s, as Sylvester noted, across ‘styles

ranging from the purely abstract to the naturalistic.’

Although he described paintings here as if they were meant

to be touched, the new taste for tactile roughness was in

practice satisfied in the viewer’s imagination. In Mackenzie’s

painting this interest in the irregular and accidental doesn’t

make itself felt in terms of impulsively scrunched hessian

collage like Sandra Blow’s or Auerbachian worm-cast

impasto but through a steady clairvoyant pressure under

18

12 Untitled c1960 Oil on board 5 x 15cm

13 Cross Current 1961 Oil on board 52 x 37cm

20

above: Granite Tower 1961 Private Collection

above right: Granite White/Black 1961 Private Collection

15 Untitled, June, 1964 Oil on board 41 x 25.5cm

which, as he worked his panels with ink, paint, sandpaper or

pencil, depth’s complex textures push against the picture

plane like archaeological strata or mistbound rockscapes

contemplated through glass. His paintings’ physical finish,

even where he used collage, is always as smooth as possible.

But though he may have picked up a certain streamlined

fastidiousness from Nicholson, the penetrable, organic aura

of Mackenzie’s surfaces makes them hard to mistake for

anyone else’s.

Mackenzie’s eye for structure and surface can be detected

well before he found his mature painting idiom in the mid-

1950s, in photographs from the motorcycle trip he took

through France and Spain in the summer of 1950, after he

finished at art school in Liverpool. From a shot of a Parisian

street corner, built around the dynamic tilted T-shape of the

junction, you’d guess he had been looking at classic Kertész

or Moholy-Nagy. His enjoyment of ripped layers of posters

22

left to right: From Hotel window, Montmartre | Wall Posters | Road out of St. Owen, Road trip 1950

16 Untitled 1965 Mixed media on paper 38 x 58cm

and motley typography on the side wall of a provincial

French café is more Aaron Siskind. But all the time you can

feel Mackenzie wanting to go deeper than the camera will let

him. Other snapshots, some pasted together into miniature

panoramas, pick out the interplay of horizontal landforms

and vertical structures. He noticed the unclassifiable kind of

aqueous shadow contained by open windows reflected in

still water, an effect many of his paintings reproduce. Some

24

top, clockwise: Landscape | Alex asleep in a hayloft at High Wycombe | Town Square, Road trip 1950

18 Cottages c.1975 Oil on board 18 x 49cm

images from this trip could translate with little difficulty into

drawings he made many years later. A 1984 drawing, Grange

Keswick (1984, cat.21), shows his ability to evoke an entire

landscape with a gnomic balancing of glyph-like lines. From

a visit to Italy in 1989 comes a concise yet lyrical rendering

of the Mediterranean fieldscape through shaded-in abstract

shapes, animated by inscrutable deputations of Tuscan

cypresses. In both snapshots and drawings, people are

mostly absent – except when Mackenzie’s travelling

companion Jack Derbyshire managed to photograph him

unawares, crashed out in a haystack, head down in textured

surface.

26

Green (Landscape) Movement 1970 Private Collection

19 Beacon Fell 1977 Oil on board 59 x 84cm

‘I like the contrast between paint and texture,’ Mackenzie

reflected in his seventies. ‘I don’t like paint that’s just put on.

It has to have an experience of its own.’v The idea that paint

needs ‘an experience of its own’ relates to the post-war

vogue for texture identified by Sylvester (though few artists

could be personally less voguish than Mackenzie); it also

sounds – strangely enough - very like Roger Hilton. Both

Mackenzie and Hilton used their materials to create a sense

of penetrability in the inscribed (or charactered) surface,

although in Hilton’s case it wasn’t prehistoric field

boundaries and fissured cliffs but unkempt pubic thickets or

the wonky geometries of breasts and buttocks that informed

28

21 Grange Keswick 1984 Oil wash and graphite on paper 33.5 x 40cm

20 Chalk, Dorset 28.08.1983 Oil on board 56 x 76cm

30

the abstract lexicon. His earthy Flying Tamarisk, March

1959, in which a seigneurial scribble of white cradles a dark,

shield-like central form, is a Dostoevskian cousin to

Mackenzie’s more classically articulated Autumnal Equinox

(1959, page 14).vi Like Hilton, too, Mackenzie could wield a

line with impromptu flawlessness and (in contrast to

Nicholson’s elegant graphic style) a honed bravura edge.

The scything verticals and horizontals in Green Red Coast

(1959, cat.8) or Cross Current (1961, cat.15) have an inky

decisiveness that recalls the interior darks of Fontana’s

slashed canvases – literal openings into the picture plane.

Mackenzie’s finished paintings can’t be separated from his

habit of constant drawing and note-making. His notebooks

are filled with raw materials in the form of bus tickets,

24 Guiseniers, 18.12.85 Mixed media on card 20 x 26.5cm

above top: 22 Untitled (Farm Buildings) c.1985 Mixed media collage on board 19 x 25cm

above: 23 Curlew Disturbed Yordas Cave, Yorkshire 13.3.85 Oil and graphite on board 19 x 24cm

magazine clippings or scraps of parchment as well as visual

ideas that are not just sketched out but taken almost to the

point of completion, as in the drawings reproduced above.

When painting, usually scribe-like at a worktable rather

than standing at an easel, Mackenzie constantly referred to

the open notebooks b eside him.vii

32

Sketchbook studies, 1987

25 Ritual Stone I June 1987 Oil wash and graphite on paper 42 x 53cm

What Mackenzie shared most obviously with other artists of

his generation in West Cornwall was, of course, not only a

dialogue with landscape but also a first-hand experience of

war. The nouveau rough-stuff that appeared on the walls of

art galleries a few years later began in places like the field

hospitals where Burri served or the air-raid shelter where

the teenage Mackenzie started to draw as a way of passing

the comfortless, musty nights. At eighteen he volunteered for

the Inns of Court Regiment, soon to be absorbed into the

newly formed Royal Armoured Brigade, with which, in

charge of an armoured car, he embarked for the D-Day

landings in June 1944. As the 11th Brigade’s hard-fought

34

27 Colle Val D’esa, Tuscany 1989 Graphite on paper 23 x 32cm

26 Oracle April 1989 Oil and graphite on board 57 x 81cm

36

campaign took him through the Netherlands and into

Germany, Mackenzie experienced the topography of

northern Europe from the rumbling innards of a steel-plated

weapon. In such conditions, landscape takes on an alert,

hostile otherness in which a hillside, forest or farmstead

must be reliably decoded in terms of the minefields or

enemy units it might (and in practice often did) conceal. In

quieter moments Mackenzie took photographs from his

turret – bombed-out town squares in the Netherlands, a

bridgehead over the Rhine and, on a sunny day in the flat

countryside of Lower Saxony, the shambling surrender of

two SS infantrymen and a Wehrmacht S. Major on a long,

straight road that leads upwards out of the frame. Mackenzie

conscientiously labelled his snaps in white ink; ‘Near

Belsen’ he wrote on the back of this one.

left to right: The artist in his armoured car close to the Aller river, 1944 | The surrender of SS troops and a Wermacht S. Major near Belsen,

1945 | Rhine Crossing, 1945

28 Pellegrino in Alpe, Garfagnano 1990 Oil and graphite on board 36 x 26cm

Like his doctor father, who had served with distinction in

World War I, Mackenzie didn’t tend to anecdotalise such

episodes, but they are certainly reflected in the way

landscape enters his art. They may even account for his

predilection for narrow horizontal formats – the letterbox

shape of a gun-turret slit. His identifiable landscape forms –

cliffs, escarpments, field networks – never feel like a view he

has simply sat down and savoured but like terrain into

which he has projected an anticipatory watchfulness, within

which it is possible to plot a course but not to define

appearances. What’s behind the darkening pallor that

underlies this veil of lilac grey? What light can this low, red

sun cast on the ambiguous scattering of flecked brown

spoors? It is not only a question of the superimposed strata of

cultural archaeology, as in Hoskins’ landscape analysis, but

of tracing a path in which each step opens into an altered

38

30 Untitled May 1992 Oil wash and graphite on paper 25.5 x 65.5cm

29 Larrasa Marble Quarries from Massa Oct 1990 Oil wash and graphite on paper 42 x 60cm

situation. In other words, Mackenzie’s art is an art of

thresholds, as he explained in an interview many years later

when recounting a visit to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in

the late 1980s.

As he speaks on tape, the generally dry-humoured Mackenzie

becomes animated when he describes how the Pythia, the

priestess of the Delphic oracle, ‘could read enigmatic

questions in stones, the flight of birds’.viii He likes the idea that

people who had a good response from the oracle would ‘give

something to the place’, often a sculpture or precious artefact.

The suggestion is that Mackenzie too wanted to give the place

something, an image perhaps of the enduring things he found

charactered in its particularity. ‘How’, he asks, though, ‘does

one put that into visual terms? It’s not a landscape … but it

has a connection with a particular place. It’s enigmatic,

perhaps opening doors.’ After thoroughly investigating the

40

32 Study for Pednvounder 1993 Graphite on card 17.5 x 50.5cm

31 Austwick July 1992 Oil and graphite on board 32 x 86.5cm

ancient site, looking around the base of the temple for the

place where the Pythia inhaled the smoke of aromatic leaves,

Mackenzie says that he ‘came to the conclusion that the forms

should be like doors opening … or screens’. He carried this

idea back to the studio for his painting Oracle (cat.26).

When he made Oracle in 1989, Mackenzie’s work had long

been out of fashion. Not that artists of his generation were, or

were expected to be, fashionable in the celebrity sense. In

1961 The Tatler ran a photo-essay by Ida Kar touting St Ives as

Britain’s Rive Gauche,ix in which Frost and Lanyon make an

unconvinced showing as forty-something family men on day

release as sexy existentialists, but if this was the way things

42

33 Castle at Frosini 12th Aug 1996 Oil and graphite on board 26 x 36.5cm

34 Llangyndir March 1996 Oil wash and graphite on paper 33 x 56cm

were going, the real action had moved elsewhere. The

professional high-point of Mackenzie’s career, between his

first solo show with Waddington’s in 1959 and his last there in

1963, coincided with this shift. During these four years he also

showed twice at Durlacher’s Gallery in New York and was

selected for the 1962 Premio Marzotto exhibition of

contemporary European painting. His work sold well; he had

arrived. But during the same four years, British painting and

fashion, previously considered irreconcilably highbrow on the

one hand and frivolous on the other, became creatively yoked

in the public mind. David Hockney’s emergence at number

one slot in the Royal College of Art defined the moment. In

1962 Peter Blake, who had featured in the Young

Contemporaries show the previous year with Hockney and

Kitaj, starred in Pop Goes the Easel, a BBC documentary about

Pop directed by Ken Russell. Even if he’d wanted to, how could

a serious-minded schoolteacher in Penzance compete?

44

St. Ives harbour beach after hanging Summer Show (with Terry Frost)

35 Dunkery Beacon/Exmoor 1998 Oil and graphite on board 35.5 x 76cm

When West End galleries got the message that the long-awaited

marriage of painting and mass culture was finally taking place,

Mackenzie, together with Wells, Wynter and other artists

considered to be engaged in the rather earnest, reclusive

business of landscape-abstraction, found himself out in the

cold. In 1970 Mackenzie had what was to be his last London

show for almost thirty years. He seems to have been

philosophical about the near total eclipse of his reputation

outside Cornwall during these decades. Like Frost, who in the

1970s similarly slipped from critical view, Mackenzie needed

regular income from teaching to support his family. And like

his friend John Wells, he was not particularly adept at – or

bothered about – cultivating useful connections. As head of fine

art at Plymouth Art College from 1964 to 1984, his teaching and

administrative commitments made it difficult enough to make

time for work, let alone self-promotion. Mackenzie wasn’t

46

37 Birkdale/Yorkshire c.2000 Oil and collage on board 15 x 30.5cm

38 Palazzone, Siena Casole D’Elsa 20.2.2000 Oil wash and graphite on paper 37 x 27cm

48

39 Newgrange (Version One) October 2000 Oil on board 27 x 33cm

immune to the possibilities (and humour) in art’s expanded

range of contemporary cultural reference in the 1960s – a

notebook spread from 1969, year of the first moon landings,

juxtaposes a large cut-out of astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s helmeted

head side-on to related abstract sketches. In contrast to Heron

or Blow, however, his paint handling betrayed few signs of

being touched by Pop or any of the movements that followed.

The scale of his work, moreover, remained intimate – small

panels destined to be viewed by individual aficionados, like a

poem on a page, not the mural-sized works that became de

rigueur from the Situation shows in 1960 through the 1970s, as

40 Granite Continent July 2000 Oil on board 122.5 x 61cm

painting, like other art forms, developed ambitions to create

or reflect a total environmental experience.

Though he seldom worked at dimensions of more than 3 ft or

so, Mackenzie’s painting creates the sense of a complete

environment. It functions, as he concisely and suggestively

put it, not like a window to look through passively but like an

opening door, which is always in the nature of a challenge. A

door opening not only into an environment of pathways and

textures. He was fascinated by musical notation, using

fragments of printed scores for collage, copying and

cannibalising medieval manuscripts on vellum. In one

notebook, maybe carried in his pocket on a birdwatching

excursion to the Hayle Estuary or the Yorkshire Dales, he

transcribed the cry of a curlew, subsequently playing around

with the forms of the written notes as though trying to capture

the sound’s graphic imprint more completely. This is the

purest form of abstraction, the equivalence (which we

50

41 Mary Rose October 2000 Oil and graphite on board 43 x 62.5cm

habitually try not to consider too deeply) between sounds,

meanings and characters. On another occasion he

photographed ancient carvings in the form of concentric cup

marks in rock (see page 8), which echo the abbreviated runic

scrapings on small early panel, Llan, Gwynedd (1953, cat.5).

Look for a while at this piece, which may have been a try-out

for something more developed, and you almost start to hear as

well as read the inscribed forms.

Visitors to Mackenzie’s studio in the 1980s and 1990s, on the

ground floor of his Penzance home, found themselves in a

highly ordered, almost monastic atmosphere – blinds drawn

down against the distractions of the street outside, tools and

brushes laid out neatly on the work table, in the air an

intuition of something that must be said but cannot be said in

words. When does the shape of a word become the outline of

a valley of the traces of birdsong? It’s not always possible to

tell. In Untitled (1965, cat.16), Beacon Fell (1977, cat.19) or

52

Sketchbook study, 1978

42 From La Rocca, San Gimignano, Tuscany (Second Version) July 2001 Oil on board 53 x 78cm

43 Santuario Francescano, La Verna 2002 Oil wash and graphite on card 36.5 x 39cm

Ritual Stone I (1987, cat.25), for example, there are linear

flourishes that could stand for any of these things – or none,

being oddly mesmeric in their own right. In Zig Zag/Selborne

(2002, cat.44), where a few upended letters in medieval-style

penmanship appear, the picture’s vertical divisions offer

themselves, together and in isolation, like clues in a quest.

Mackenzie’s comments on Oracle are relevant here, and could

really stand for his whole oeuvre: ‘It has a certain mystery,

which I like, and it’s similar to archaeological sites, which I

also find interesting, mainly because one doesn’t know

exactly what happened there. [There is] a certain amount of

mystery attached to it.’ When he adds ‘And there should be

with painting, I think’, I need no persuading.

April 2007

54

44 Zig Zag/ Selborne May 2002 Oil and collage on board 27 x 44.5cm

NOTES

i Alexander Mackenzie: Paintings, Collages and Drawings (exhib.

cat., Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London, 1999), p.7.

ii Ibid.

iii L. Alloway, Introduction to Nine Abstract Artists: Their Work and

Theory (London, 1954), p.12.

iv D. Sylvester, ‘End of the Streamlined Era’, The Times (2 August

1955), repr. in About Modern Art (London, 1996), p.49.

v Alexander Mackenzie interviewed by Keith Chapman in July 2001

for the National Sound Archive series Artists’ Lives, audiotape 6b.

vi Mackenzie said he ‘would always rate Hilton as being one of our

best men’ (NSA interview, audiotape 6a).

vii I am grateful to Michael Gaca for this and other observations of

Mackenzie’s studio practice.

viii NSA interview, audiotape 6b.

ix I. Kar (photographer), ‘Le quartier St Ives’, The Tatler (26 July

1961), pp.170–73.

56

45 Newgrange (Version 2) 21 May 2002 Oil on board 30 x 48cm

58

CATALOGUE

1.Fishing Boats, 1951Oil on canvas40.5 x 51cm

2.Still life (Buoys), Kehelland,Cornwall, 1951 Gouache on paper35 x 44cm

3.Still Life, 1953Oil and collage on board22.5 x 16cm

4.Painted Relief, 1953 Oil on board 13 x 40.5cm

5.Llan, Gwynedd, 1953 Oil On board15 x 28cm

6.Chapel Street, 1954Oil on Board41 x 57cm

7.April-May, 1959Oil on board 42 x 29cm

8.Green Red Coast, 1959 Oil on board26.5 x 42.5cm

9.Reclining Dartmoor, 1960 Oil on board7.5 x 20.5cm

10.July Pool, c.1960Oil on Board 17.5 x 38.5cm

11.Drawing (Reclining), 1960 Oil and charcoal on paper 39 x 53cm

12.Untitled, c1960 Oil on board5 x 15cm

13.Cross Current, 1961 Oil on board52 x 37cm

14.Newlyn, 1962-73 Graphite on paper 40 x 50cm

15.Untitled, June, 1964Oil on board 41 x 25.5cm

16.Untitled, 1965 Mixed media on paper38 x 58cm

17.Black Lines on Green, 1966Graphite and watercolour on paper54 x 37cm

18.Cottages, c.1975Oil on board18 x 49cm

19.Beacon Fell, 1977 Oil on board 59 x 84cm

20.Chalk, Dorset, 28.8.1983Oil on board56 x 76cm

21.Grange Keswick, 1984 Oil wash and graphite on paper33.5 x 40cm

22.Untitled (Farm Buildings), c.1985Mixed media collage on board19 x 25cm

23.Curlew Disturbed Yordas Cave,Yorkshire 13.3.85Oil and graphite on board19 x 24cm

24.Guiseniers, 18.12.85Mixed media on card20 x 26.5cm

59

25.Ritual Stone I, June 1987Oil wash and graphite on paper42 x 53cm

26.Oracle, April 1989 Oil and graphite on board57 x 81cm

27.Colle Val D’esa, Tuscany, 1989 Graphite on paper23 x 32cm

28.Pellegrino in Alpe, Garfagnano,1990Oil and graphite on board36 x 26cm

29.Larrasa Marble Quarries fromMassa, Oct. 1990 Oil wash and graphite on paper42 x 60cm

30.Untitled, May 1992Oil wash and graphite on paper25.5 x 65.5cm

31.Austwick, July 1992Oil and graphite on board32 x 86.5cm

32.Study for Pednvounder, 1993 Graphite on card17.5 x 50.5cm

33.Castle at Frosini, 12.8.1996Oil and graphite on board26 x 36.5cm

34.Llangyndir, March 1996Oil wash and graphite on paper33 x 56cm

35.Dunkery Beacon/Exmoor, 1998Oil and graphite on board35.5 x 76cm

36.Ancient Village, Oct. 1999 Mixed Media on board52.5 x 20.5cm

37.Birkdale/Yorkshire, c.2000Oil and collage on board15 x 30.5cm

38.Palazzone, Siena Casole D’Elsa,20.2.2000Oil wash and graphite on paper37 x 27cm

39.Newgrange (Version One),October 2000Oil on board27 x 33cm

40.Granite Continent, July 2000Oil on board122.5 x 61cm

41.Mary Rose, October 2000Oil and graphite on board43 x 62.5cm

42.From La Rocca, SanGimignano, Tuscany (SecondVersion), July 2001Oil on board53 x 78cm

43.Santuario Francescano, LaVerna, 2002Oil wash and graphite on card36.5 x 39cm

44.Zig Zag/ Selborne, May 2002Oil and collage on board27 x 44.5cm

45.Newgrange (Version 2), 21.5.2002Oil on board30 x 48cm

60

Studio portrait by Jorge Lewinski, 1963 © Courtesy Jorge Lewinski Archive

61

ALEXANDER MACKENZIE

1923 Born Liverpool1932-41 Lived in Yorkshire1941-45 H.M. Forces1946-50 Liverpool College of Art1951 Moved to Cornwall1952 Elected member of Penwith Society of Arts, Cornwall1956 Elected member of Newlyn Society of Arts, Cornwall1958 Joined the Waddington Galleries1960 Visited U.S.A.1964 Moved to Trefrize, Cornwall

Appointed Vice-Chairman of Penwith Society of Arts, CornwallAppointed Head of Fine Art, Plymouth Art College, Devon

1981 Moved to Penzance1984 Retired from Plymouth Art College2002 Died on 18th September

SOLO EXHIBITIONS1959 Waddington Galleries, London1960 Durlachers Gallery, New York1961 Waddington Galleries, London1962 Durlachers Galleries, New York1963 Waddington Galleries, London1965 Plymouth City Art Gallery, Retrospective Exhibition

Paintings by Alexander Mackenzie, DevonMaltzahn Gallery, London

1968 Maltzahn Gallery, London1970 Maltzahn Gallery, London1977 The Truro Gallery, Retrospective Exhibition Paintings

and Drawing by Alexander Mackenzie, Cornwall1980 Newlyn Orion Gallery, Newlyn1982 Festival Gallery, Bath1999 Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London

MIXED EXHIBITIONS1952 Penwith Society of Arts, St Ives (and then annually)1955 Daily Express Young Artists Exhibition, London1956 Whitechapel Art Gallery, Society for Education in

Art Exhibition, London

Artists International Association, Modern Trends, London1957 Redfern Gallery, Summer Exhibition, London

Arts Council Exhibition, The Penwith Society of Arts in Cornwall, touring show

1959 Whitechael Art Gallery, Graven Image, LondonArte Grafica Britanico, Bogota, Colombia

1960 City Art Gallery, Contemporary British Art, BradfordBrooklyn Museum, 21st International Water Colour Biennal, New York, U.S.A.Arts Council Exhibition, Northern Artists, touring showPlymouth City Art Gallery, Painters in Cornwall, Devon

1961 Arts Council Exhibition, New Painting 58-61, London1962 Waddington Galleries, Six Painters, London1962/63 Premio Marzotto E L’Arte, European Community

Contemporary Painting Exhibition, Rome, Milan and London

1964 City Art Gallery, Contemporary British Art, Bradford1968 Arts Council Exhibition, Painting 64-67, London1970 Plymouth City Art Gallery, Alexander Mackenzie and

Bryan Wynter, DevonArts Council Exhibition, Open Painting ’70, Belfast

1975 Plymouth City Art Gallery, Painting & Sculpture 1975(with Denis Mitchell and John Wells), Devon

1977 New Art Centre, Cornwall 1944-55, LondonKunst Aus Cornwall, Cuxhaven, Germany

1984 Newlyn/Orion, Second Nature, toured to Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

1985 Tate Gallery, St Ives 1939-64, LondonPlymouth City Art Gallery, Landscape: Fact and Feeling(with Fay Godwin, Ian McKeever, Colin Self and Anthony Whishaw), DevonMichael Parkin Gallery, Cornwall 1925-75, London

1986 Pallant House Gallery, Cornwall in the 80s, Chichester1987 Newlyn Art Gallery, Looking West, touring to the

Royal College of Art, London1988/89 Belgrave Gallery, Some of the Moderns I & II, London1989 Truro, A Century of Art In Cornwall 1889-1989, Cornwall 1992 Royal West of England Academy, Artists in Cornwall,

Bristol1999 Austin/Desmond Fine Art, Aspects of Modern British

and Irish Art, London2002 Austin/Desmond Fine Art, Aspects of Modern British Art,

London

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BIBLIOGRAPHYHerbert Read & Roland Penrose, Premio Marzotto AwardCatalogue, 1963A. Cumming CBE, Profile of Alexander Mackenzie, Arts ReviewVol XX No.20Sir Herbert Read, Contemporary British Art, PenguinPublications, 1964Dictionary of Twentieth Century Art, Phaidon Press, 1973Tate Gallery, Catalogue of Acquisitions 1976-8, LondonArts Council Collection 1979Richard Mabey, Second Nature, Jonathon Cape, 1984Tate Gallery, St Ives 1939-64, Tate Gallery Publications, 1985Alan Windsor, Handbook of Modern British Painting 1900-1980,Scolar Press, 1992Peter Davies, St Ives Revisited, Old Bakehouse Publications, 1994Melissa Hardie, 100 Years in Newlyn/Diary of a Gallery, PatttenPress, 1995David Archer, Alexander Mackenzie, Austin/Desmond Fine Art,1999

COLLECTIONSArts Council of Great BritainBishop Suter Gallery, Nelson, New ZealandBrasenose College, University of OxfordBlackburn City Art GalleryBradford City Art GalleryCalouste Gulbenkin FoundationContemporary Art SocietyCornwall County CouncilCuxhaven Town Council, GermanyLeamington City Art GalleryArt Gallery of New South Wales, Sidney, AustraliaNuffield FoundationOldham City Art GalleryPlymouth City Art GalleryTate Gallery, LondonWest Riding County Council, YorkshireYork City Art GalleryPrivate Collections in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy,Switzerland and U.S.A.

Austin/Desmond Fine ArtPied Bull Yard68-69 Great Russell StreetUK - London WC1B 3BN(t) +44 (0)20 7242 4443(f) +44 (0)20 7404 4480(e) gallery@austindesmond.com(w) www.austindesmond.comMon – Fri 10.30am – 5.30pmSat 11.00 – 2.30pm (during exhibitions only)

IBSN 1 872926 21 5

Exhibition curated by David ArcherCatalogue photography by Alexander Mackenzie, Colin Mills and courtesy of the Jorge Lewinski Archive Introductory essay by Michael BirdCatalogue design by Peter GladwinPrinted by SpecialblueMay/June 2007