Merlyn Evans British, 1910-1973

An artist of piercing originality, there are few, if any, British painters working in the 1930s and 40s who produced work of such powerful political force, and yet with such imaginative freedom.

Widely praised by fellow artists and critics, then and since, Merlyn Evans’ work is, perhaps, not as well known amongst the general public due to its scarcity outside of national museum collections. It is thought that many of his works from the late 30s and early 40s were destroyed during WW2.

It was not only his singular vision which was so admired, but also his technical brilliance and virtuosity. The influential curator Bryan Robertson, who Studio International called ‘the best director the Tate never had’, and who was to give major presentations of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, wrote to Evans about his 1953 exhibition at the Leicester Galleries.

‘The opening of your magnificent exhibition this afternoon marked your final and complete emergence as a great artist. This is to say, to be reckoned with only in the company of the great and wonderful men of our century: Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, Matisse, Moore and Leger….It is an immense triumph’.

At the age of 21 in 1931, Evans won the Haldane Scholarship which enabled him to visit first Paris and then Berlin; both cities throbbing with new rhythms, ideas and modernist thought. In Berlin he would see works by Feininger, Klee and Kandinsky and was mesmerised by the Chinese paintings from the Song period at the Bode Museum.

Discussing the radical paintings Evans produced 1939-1942, Mel Gooding wrote ‘His response was to develop a uniquely personal and utterly original quasi-figurative style of great expressive effectiveness. Surrealistic and theatrically symbolic in its representations, it was often perverse in the joyous carnival of its colours, extreme in its invention of fantastic scenarios and in its grotesque distortions of figures and forms……In the paintings made between 1939-42, Evans came of age as an artist whose highly original visual language, impassioned, savagely indignant and bleakly ironic, inflected by sorrow and pity, was unmistakably his own’.

Alan Bowness, director of the Tate gallery, in the catalogue forward to ‘The Political Paintings of Merlyn Evans’ exhibition in 1985, in which the painting was included, writes ‘The paintings are not so much about particular historical events as about the attitude of mind behind them’.

Painted in 1940, ‘Puppet Government’ reflects Evans indignation at the news of events unfolding in Europe at the time. Ostensibly inspired by the installation of the Quisling regime in Norway, the painting holds up a contemptuous mirror to the folly of war; as relevant, and poignant, in todays world as it was when it was painted over 80 years ago.