PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE LATE PETER ADAM (LOTS 28-36)
PRUNELLA CLOUGH (BRITISH, 1919-1999)
Woman Minding Machine
oil on canvas
62 x 51.2 cm. (24 3/8 x 20 1/4 in.)
Painted in 1953

Provenance
The artist, by whom gifted to
Peter Adam (1929-2019), thence by family descent

Exhibited
London, Olympia, Prunella Clough, 2-7 March 2004, cat.no.10
London, Osborne Samuel, Prunella Clough: Unconsidered Wastelands, 16 April-16 May 2015

Clough was born in Chelsea, London, in 1919 and taught initially by her father, the poet Eric Taylor. Her aunt was the famous Irish designer Eileen Gray, who’s biography was written by Peter Adam, whom this wonderful collection of artwork belonged to before it’s descent by family. Peter Adam was close friends with Clough and Keith Vaughan, and this connection and friendship is the centre of this collection.

Prunella Clough enrolled at Chelsea College of Arts and Design in 1937, where she would take classes with Henry Moore. During the war she worked as a cartographer for the Office of War Information and witnessed first-hand the vast change in the urban landscape caused by the war, something that would have a profound influence on her work.

After the war she painted full-time, and would throughout her lifetime, supplementing her income with teaching positions at Wimbledon School of Art and Chelsea. Her early work of the 1940s and 1950s was the most figurative stage of her career. Many of her paintings featured depictions of fishermen or quarrymen, often from her family holidays in Southwold with visits to Lowestoft and Yarmouth. Later in her career her work would become increasingly abstract, mechanical and industrial. Her bold and innovative interpretations of industrial structures, urban landscapes and objects would toe the line between representation and abstraction, expanding the boundaries of painting in the modern era.

Woman Minding a Machine is an early and rare example of a female figure as a focal point in one of Clough’s paintings. Clough was part of a post-War generation of female artists who faced huge struggles and barriers not only in art but also in wider society. There were societal expectations around gender roles, emphasising women should be limited to domestic roles, there was limited artistic representation and in a male-dominated institutions. There was also a huge amount of uncertainty and anxiety in the country with post-war devastation and consequent reconstruction in progress, austerity measures and Cold War tensions.

In the present painting, we can see the female figure at the centre of a complex network of levers, cables and machine elements. Clough’s personal experience as a cartographer a clear influence on the work, the figure here seemingly attempting to plan and decipher the new world, and riddled with the uncertainty and constraints of it.