John Russell Taylor
Review in the Times 12 November 2011
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By Eric W Sykes,
Editor, Colour Photography, Jan-Feb 1964
Pub: Fountain Press Ltd, London.


The everlasting challenge

What can the colour photographer learn from the painter?
At a recent exhibition of paintings by Cyril Mann we were much impressed with the vivid richness of his colours, and by the impression of movement he conveys, particularly the illusion of shimmering, reflected light.
After thirty years of experiment, Mann is convinced that light can and must be represented by the painter as what it is… a fast-moving thing, not static and having – to use his own words – both a disintegrating and enhancing (accentuating) influence on objects.
Mann himself uses colour photography to record his paintings before they are sold. His camera work is purely functional. Can colour photography ever be anything more? Can it break out of its straitjacket of what Mann calls ‘tinted monochromes’ and become a significant, creative art form?
He is not sure. The physical limitations are considerable: limitations of optics, mechanics, chemistry and mono-vision – the latter militating against rendering the third dimensional quality with which painters have long experimented.
The greatest of all limitations, Mann believes, is the camera’s inability to capture anything of the mind of the man behind it. “A painter paints not only with brushes and pigment,” he says, “but also with mind and heart. The camera is wholly insensitive and wholly unemotional. That is the photographer’s real handicap.”
At one time Mann spent five years experimenting with the painting of shadow forms. But it was always LIGHT – as a moving and living force – that fascinated him and which he sought to express in a more tangible way than had hitherto been done. He had to find a way of presenting to the spectator that which in effect (as he puts it) “is a more real realism – a greater vitality.” In his paintings he seeks to show that light does not merely lie on the surfaces of objects to be painted, but is rebounding off them, in constant movement: absorbed to a degree, but to a far greater degree being radiated… given off.
…. From Cyril Mann’s restless, original mind we can learn that in photography, as in painting, we must never accept the supposed limitations of our medium. Much that Mann is doing in paint now would have been regarded as ‘impossible’ not long ago.
To create – not to copy – is the everlasting challenge!”

Excerpt from: “Genius of the ordinary”
Review by David Hamilton Eddy
Times Higher Education Supplement, Perspective, October 16, 1992

“…..According to one of his former students, Criton Tomazos, Mann, like Wordsworth writing in the Preface to “Lyrical Ballads” believed that the truly extraordinary could only be found in the ordinary.
In practice, Mann’s work is characterised by a visionary fury whose active element, light, is transformed into an apparently plastic substance splintering reality and splattering on solids in liquid fashion. Despite the explosive quality of much of his work, however, Mann’s sense of composition is always serene and calming. This harmony of furious spirit and rock solid composition is undoubtedly the key to his genius as a painter.”

Excerpt from: “Cyril Mann”
Review by Rachel Barnes, Galleries Magazine, April, 1993

“….In the ‘fifties, Mann returns to a more structured, analytical approach in carefully staged still lives, which, for all their linearity and precision, are still vibrantly and richly coloured. This love of brilliant, explosive colour really takes hold in Mann’s work of the ‘sixties, when his flower studies and interiors are treated with a wild, almost uncontrolled sense of excitement and vivacity as he starts to handle the paint differently, often using thick impasto effects. It is during this period that Mann discovered his mature style and some of these paintings – Lord of the Flies (1966) and Rhubarb and Apples of the same year, for instance – are beautifully and powerfully painted.”

Excerpt from: “The Sun is God. The Life and Work of Cyril Mann”
Monogram by John Russell Taylor
pub: Lund Humphreys, 1999.

(With reference to the post-war paintings of the City of London by Cyril Mann)

“It was almost as though he was belatedly fulfilling the function denied him during the war, recording devastation as an official war artist.  Something of that may have been at the back of his mind, but it seems unlikely. His mind was as ever on more abstract considerations: the primacy of the sun, the dreamlike quality of everything beneath compared with this ultimate, vibrant reality.”

Excerpt from: The Art Newspaper
October 1999

“….Mann developed his own style which had close affinities with the English new-Romantics… As we look back at British art through the whole twentieth century, Mann appears not as a major innovator, but as a formidable talent, described simultaneously as ‘difficult’ and ‘charismatic’, who deserves greater recognition.”

From: Antique Trades Gazette
October 2, 1999

“…Mann’s eerily expressionistic paintings of Blitz-scarred London in particular are worthy of more than just a passing footnote in the history of British Post-War art.” 


From: The Times
“Around the Galleries”, by John Russell Taylor
October 13, 1999

“Cyril Mann (1911-1980) had an unfortunate propensity for quarrelling with any influential dealers who showed an interest in his work or deciding, when he was about to be conscripted in 1946, after fighting throughout the war as a Gunner in the Royal Artillery, that he was a conscientious objector, and so putting himself through the ordeal of a disbelieving tribunal and wrecking his health for several years. But he was totally dedicated to art – preferably making, but also teaching it – and everything else in his life took second place to that obsession.
He proves, from the mini-retrospective at Piano Nobile, to have been absolutely unpredictable in his development while it was happening, but rigorously logical when seen in hindsight. He went to Canada as a teenager and there came in contact with the Group of Seven, local Post-Impressionists, who strongly influenced his work. Back in Europe he studied at the RA Schools and worked in Paris where (typically) he was primarily obsessed with Turner and produced an amazing series of apocalyptic visions of the city under hallucinatory sunbursts. After the war he went through his ‘solid shadow’ phase with astonishing self-portraits looking like psychedelic relief maps, and still-lifes tied to their bases by shadows you could cut with a knife. Meeting his second wife in 1960 he broke free of this with a group of joyous female nudes and many flower pieces in which the floods of light are rendered with almost Abstract Expressionist verve and spontaneity. Right at the end comes the monumental nude self-portrait Ecce Homo. There is no reason now why he should not come into his own as one of the most striking and independent of 20th century British artists.”


From: The Times Literary Supplement
Excerpt from ‘In Brief’ by Keith Miller, reviewing The Sun is God, the life and work of Cyril Mann by John Russell Taylor.
November 5, 1999

“…. John Russell Taylor’s biography is reticent on the more lurid aspects of Mann’s life story, although short pieces by his daughter and second wife testify how difficult he was to live with. Taylor sees Mann as an artist caught “between Impressionism and Expressionism”, that is, between a desire to transcribe his petite sensation before a given subject and a desire to dramatize the elements of forms, light and colour resonating in that subject. Certainly Mann’s interest in light went beyond the illustrative; he loved Turner (the book’s title is Turner’s alleged motto ultimo) and much of his work renders light as a kind of architecture, not only dissolving form, as in Turner’s work, but bracing it like a scaffold in a manner reminiscent of Lyonel Feininger’s woodcuts or certain works from the margins of Cubism.
The reproductions which take up much of the book reveal other influences: Cezanne and his Scottish admirers such as S J Peploe and I D Fergusson (who briefly taught Mann in Paris), the Canadian Group of Seven, Palmer and the Visionary English landscape tradition, elements of Nolde and Matisse, a dusting of Euston Road (school) grime. Taylor’s insistence on the coherence of Mann’s output is essentially right, but in fact the paintings are surprisingly various for someone who went on about ploughing a lonely furrow as much as Mann obviously did. Certainly his work anticipates other artists who would do rather better for themselves: Leon Kossof, Lucian Freud, even Patrick Caulfield or Michael Craig Martin.”

Galleries
December 1999

“….The effect of sunlight upon landscape has been explored by generations of artists; few, if any but Cyril Mann (1911-80) have chosen to embody the sun itself, centre stage in their work. Mann however was always something of a maverick; owing little to any recognised school his paintings (like his personality) were idiosyncratic and rarely easy.”

This is Local London
February 17, 2005

“….Dr Travers (of Piano Nobile Fine Paintings, which handles the Cyril Mann estate) argues that Mann should be acknowledged as a major post-war artist, on a global scale. He writes (in the foreword of The Sun is God, the life and work of Cyril Mann by John Russell Taylor): His ability to create a new dimension and vitality to figurative work has ensured that Cyril Mann can be numbered among the outstanding painters of his time.”


Excerpt from an essay by
David Hamilton Eddy (Copyright D.A. Hamilton Eddy 2007)

“Mann’s great gift was to see through the surface of things to discover the dynamic and dramatic realities that characterised his vision. He is an Expressionist but also something of a Futurist in his sensitivity to the large forces operating on the most mundane things. See his Homage to Tintoretto or his London scenes or his extraordinary explosive yet tightly coordinated nudes and still lifes. When a painter can produce masterpiece after masterpiece with absolute confidence and authority we have to take note.
It was that absolute authority as an artist that immediately struck me when I first saw and wrote about his work over twenty years ago. Mann’s artistic achievement was so compelling that I had not the slightest doubt that I was in the presence of greatness.
The first thing that struck me was the sense of perfect composition, form and colour working completely harmoniously together. This was so unusual in the world of British art since, say, Turner that I was completely nonplussed. British painters don’t do authority – they do charm, evocativeness, sometimes violence or brutality, sometimes they like to shock (it is the converse of our puritanism) – but absolute easeful mastery, forget it, leave that to the Italians or the Dutch or the French or Americans like Edward Hopper.”