Works of the Week: Prunella Clough

Prunella Clough
Fence and Gate, 1956
Oil on canvas
51 x 41 cm
20 x 16 in.

Born in London in 1919, Prunella Clough is noted as a significant British artist of the modern post-war period. During the Second World War, Clough worked as a cartographer for the War Office, and in 1947, had her first solo exhibition at Leger Galleries, London. Her rise to prominence followed her touring retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960, and in 1999, just three months before her death, she won the Jerwood painting prize. Today, Clough’s work continues to be exhibited and celebrated with major exhibitions, including at the Tate in 2007, and at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester in 2019/20.

The New Art Centre has exhibited Prunella Clough’s paintings and prints in a number of solo shows between 1971 and 1986 at its location on Sloane Street, London.

Prunella Clough
Men by Tank, 1959
Charcoal and chalk on paper
Framed : 58 x 64 x 2.6 cm 1 ft 10 ⅞ x 2 ft 1 ⅛ x 1 in.
Image : 36 x 42 cm / 1 ft 2 ½ x 1 ft 4 ½ in.

"All of Prunella’s paintings testify to a highly original and very personal perception of the world around us. They are about shared memories and the need for human presence in all things. Often sombre and grave in mood, they always also contain a touch of irony or humour, a dash of colour in a muted canvas." – Peter Adam, September 2000.

From 1938, Prunella Clough trained at Chelsea School of Art under the tutelage of Ceri Richards, Julian Trevelyan, Robert Medley and Henry Moore. She subsequently studied part time at Camberwell School of Art under Victor Pasmore.

In Clough’s work, subjects stem from her formative exploration of London’s industrial wastelands and bombsites in the years following the Second World War. Factories and scrapyards, the detritus of street and gutter, are transmuted with an abstraction of composition, texture and experience. Her paintings, as exhibited in Men by Tank and Fence and Gate indicate an uncanny sense of familiarity, as they capture the unconsidered landscape, her commonplace surroundings and the intersection between humanity and machinery. As Clough put it, anything that the eye or the mind’s eye sees with intensity and excitement… it is the nature and structure of an object – that, and seeing it as if it were strange and unfamiliar, which is my chief concern.

Through Clough’s eyes, we are able to observe the urban and banal with a renewed unsentimental curiosity.

Prunella Clough
Road by Coke Heap, 1954
Pencil drawing on paper
46 x 37 cm / 18 x 14 ½ in.

Prunella Clough’s work is held in numerous major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Tate Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; British Museum, London; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Scottish National Gallery of Art, Edinburgh and Wakefield City Art Gallery, Yorkshire.

Prunella Clough
Still Life with Pears, 1948
Lithograph
Artist's Proof
Image: 16.8 x 21.5 cm / 6 ¾ x 8 ⅖ in.
Framed: 35 x 38.5 cm / 13 ⁷⁄₁₀ x 15 in.