GLASGOW in December. It can be dreich. But look closely and you'll catch the glory stuff. Shards of intense emerald green in grass which a day earlier has been carpeted by layers of frost. Look skywards and there's hints of blues, violets and greys; at this time of year a base coat for a web charcoal black bare branches.
Walk into the Studio Pavilion at House for an Art Lover on Glasgow's south side and your eye adjusts organically to 41 small square coloured canvases, all hung around eye level. Outside a large south-facing window, the eye darts to intense green grass in the garden beyond and stark tree branches set against a sky which glitters like mica.
All the paintings are by the late Bernat Klein (1922-2014). The Serbian-born painter, designer and industrialist made his home in the Borders in the years following the Second World War and all the paintings were made in his house outside Selkirk from 2011-2012, with Klein was approaching his 90th year.
This body of work is a distillation of a lifetime spent looking at – and loving – colour. Each canvas is primed with a different colour, and your eye moves from the first one on the left hand side of the room, slowly though the spectrum to the right hand side. It takes your eyes from violet to rose pink and everything in between. In the centre of each square, there's a squarish slash of colour. A guddle of oil paint mingles in at the top of each slash, creating an abstract landscape of colour, tone and texture. Oh, that texture! Forged using a mix of brush and palette knife, it's so thick and so right, you want to reach out and touch each and every picture.
In his 1965 memoir, Bernat Klein: an Eye for Colour, the artist laid bare his his passion for colour, which he admitted was bordering on "obsession". In a chapter titled The Liberation of Colour, Klein writes: "…I think that colours are as important in our lives as words are; and words cannot be used as substitutes for colours."
The Colour Circle series was first shown in Galashiels in 2012 when Klein was still alive. It was around this time that Alison Harley, former head of the School of Textiles and Design at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, met him and interviewed him about his life and work. Following Klein's death, his archive – almost 2,000 items ranging from sketches for his designs to finished garments, photographs, catalogues, paintings and tapestries – was acquired by National Museums Scotland. His textiles archive is housed at Heriot Watt.
Alison Harley is now working closely with the artist's family on Klein's legacy as a post-war artist and designer of international renown. This includes securing the future of the family home, High Sunderland, near Selkirk, commissioned in 1957 by Klein and designed by modernist architect Peter Womersley. Harley is on the board of directors at House for an Art Lover and has curated The Colour Circle, working closely with Shelley Klein, the artist's daughter, in making this exhibition at House for an Art Lover happen.
Klein, who in his teenage years was destined for a life devoted to his Jewish faith, studied textiles at Leeds University and moved to the Scottish Borders in 1950, when the firm he was working for, Munrospun, relocated from Edinburgh to Galashiels. There, he set up his own business, drawing on an innate flair for colour to create the exotic tweed and mohair fabrics that would become signature Klein textiles. Widely accredited with transforming British textiles in the post-war era, he found success when his work was taken up by fashion houses Chanel, Balenciaga, Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent. Fashion bible Vogue praised him for having “revolutionised traditional English fabrics to win them new recognition abroad”.
Klein established a weaving mill in Galashiels which at one stage employed 600 people. In 1966, he set up a hand-knitting business, with more than 200 workers, near Selkirk. He also designed textiles for furniture and interiors. He officially "retired" in 1992 but continued to draw and paint. When his wife Margaret died in 2008 though, he suddenly stopped painting.
Shelley Klein explains: "My mother had always been his sounding board and without her he said there was no longer any point in continuing to put paint to canvas."
A few years after Klein’s wife's death, an old family friend asked the artist to paint a picture as a gift, which stopped the rot. After completing the painting for his friend, Klein asked his daughter to buy more oil paint and some small square canvases.
Over the course of the next two years, Klein worked with renewed vigour on the series which became The Colour Circle. "The joy I took in seeing him start to paint again cannot be described," says Ms Klein. "Nor can I describe the pleasure each one gives me each time I look at them." I second that emotion. A lifetime of looking, analysing and loving colour is wrapped up in this perfect circle of paintings.
Bernat Klein: The Colour Circle, House for an Art Lover Studio Pavilion, Bellahouston Park, Glasgow until March 26, 2017 (closed from Dec 21– Jan 3, 2017)
www.houseforanartlover.co.uk
House for an Art Lover will be hosting four weekend workshops exploring colour and the work of Bernat Klein. See website for details
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