Michael Ayrton

(British, 1921-1975)

February Head

Footnotes

Provenance
With Grosvenor Gallery, London
Sale; Bonhams, Knightsbridge, 22 March 2011, lot 94
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Grosvenor Gallery, Michael Ayrton: Bronzes, Paintings, Collages and Drawings, 7 June-2 July 1966, no. 57

February Head is one of a series, based on the legendary priestess-prophets of the god Apollo. Ayrton first visited Cumae, on the Italian peninsula near Naples, the oldest Greek colony in Italy, in 1956. The Temple of Apollo on the Acropolis was famous for the prophecies of the Cumaean Sibyl, a figure who, Ayrton wrote, 'haunted me ... Like her sister in prophecy, the Pythian Oracle [at Delphi] she breathes the fumes of drugging leaves, and does not understand what she says when she speaks. Until it is interpreted, neither do we, and who knows the value of the interpretation?'

The irony of consulting such ambiguous utterance in pursuit of certainty confirmed Ayrton's conviction of the timelessness of myth - as part of a generation inheriting the legacy of two World Wars he was in no doubt that the desire for oracular utterance was as much a part of the modern human condition as a story from the distant past, and his images set out to make that clear. His Oracles are timeless: enigmatic, ultimate tragic figures, at once powerful and powerless, their beauty an austere thing of bone and shadows. Women sacrificed and transformed in the service of a ruthless god, they remained for Ayrton, 'human ... your fault and mine'.

By the time February Head was painted the Oracle had become, for Ayrton, more than simply herself, being, he wrote, 'continuously and variously transformed until, irrationally, she has become identified with the goddess Demeter ... The Oracle exists to confirm what is already known, by prophecy. Transformed ... she confirms the changing seasons and the perpetual passage of youth into age which is what we all know'. Thus the skeletal leaves collaged into the picture (collected in the extensive garden outside Ayrton's studio) take on a double significance: on the one hand they may represent the remnants of the laurel leaves that according to ancient texts were chewed and burned to produce the hallucinogenic state in which prophecies were uttered, but they also recall the passing of the seasons and the coming of winter.

We are grateful to Dr Justine Hopkins and the Ayrton Estate for their assistance in cataloguing this lot and for compiling this catalogue entry.