David Gommon

Born into a working-class family in London’s Battersea, David Gommon (1913–1987) started studying art at local colleges when he was 16. By the age of 19, he had been taken up by Lucy Wertheim (1883–1971) – the pioneering London-based gallerist. Renowned for adventurously showing work by artists such as Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis and Frances Hodgkins, she gave Gommon his first solo exhibition in 1934. In his late teens, Gommon’s art was transformed by the ‘vivid sight’ of Chesil Beach in Dorset: he was ‘overwhelmed by the revelation of beach, the sea, the sky! It was biblical in its splendour.’ Moved by such moments, throughout the 1930s Gommon became a painter of enigmatic, phantasmagoric images, often rooted in the landscape, that hover on the verge of surrealism. Aided by the artist’s own evocative writings, Philip Vann’s text examines the development of this visionary landscape art – embedded latterly in the paradisical surroundings of the Northamptonshire village of Hardingstone, where Gommon and his wife Jean lived for several decades. He looks, too, at how Gommon’s art – notable for its subtle but audacious colourism – is enriched by his love and appreciation of poetry (including works by John Clare, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot) and friendship with figures such as the poet–artist David Jones. The book also explores other aspects of Gommon’s work. These include the excoriatingly satirical expressionistic artwork, The Book of the Dead, made during the Second World War, and his discerning portraits of creative people he knew and admired, such as the great Modernist poet Basil Bunting.

About the Author :
Philip Vann is a writer on the visual arts and a freelance exhibition curator. He is the author of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century (Sansom & Co, 2004) and texts for numerous books and catalogues on British, Irish and international painters and sculptors. Since being Assistant Exhibition Organiser of the British Council-funded show ‘New Frontiers of Naïve Art in Europe’ (Royal Festival Hall, London, 1984), he has written a good deal about naïve, Outsider, self-taught and children’s art from Britain and around the world, as well as central and eastern European folk art. He has long been fascinated by the ways leading Modernist artists often find themselves enriched and inspired by art beyond the mainstream – for example, work by great self-taught painters such as Henri Rousseau, Louis Vivin, Alfred Wallis and Madge Gill. Karen Taylor is the Collections and Exhibitions Curator at Towner Eastbourne, a public art gallery in East Sussex, England. In 2022, she researched and curated an exhibition about visionary 1930s art collector, patron and gallerist Lucy Wertheim – the champion of David Gommon who gave him his first solo show and became a lifelong friend.