Lot 320: MARGARET MELLIS (1914-2009) - Houses by Moonlight, St Ives

MARGARET MELLIS (1914-2009)
Houses by Moonlight, St Ives
signed and inscribed 'Margaret Mellis/Houses by Moonlight' and stamped
with the studio stamp (on the reverse)
oil on canvas laid on panel
8 x 7Ω in. (20 x 19 cm.)
Painted in 1940.


PROVENANCE:
Purchased directly from the artist by the present owner.
This resonant abstraction epitomises the outburst of creativity and change
of direction Mellis experienced on moving to St Ives with her husband Adrian
Stokes. Although there was already a well-established colony of artists in
the area, it was the arrival of Stokes and Mellis in Carbis Bay which made St
Ives a focus for international modernism. Stokes invited Ben Nicholson and
his new wife Barbara Hepworth to come to live with them and escape the
bombs falling on London, and although it was tough for the newly-married
Mellis and Stokes to have Ben and Barbara as house guests (not the most
accommodating of individuals), Mellis found Ben’s company enormously
stimulating. And when Naum Gabo moved into a bungalow at the end of the
garden, the Mellis/Stokes home became a centre of abstract debate and
creativity. Mellis, who up till then had been painting in a fgurative mode,
responded by making a number of resolutely abstract collages and low relief
constructions, and began to experiment with painted abstract imagery too.
Houses by Moonlight anticipates the abstraction that Mellis would develop in
the 1970s and 80s, and ofers a particularly poignant and subtle example of
her work.