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Prunella Clough (British, 1919-1999) Whitewashed Wall 60.9 x 106.7 cm. (24 x 42 in.) (Painted in 1959) image 1

Prunella Clough (British, 1919-1999) Whitewashed Wall 60.9 x 106.7 cm. (24 x 42 in.) (Painted in 1959) image 2

Lot 73^AR

Prunella Clough
(British, 1919-1999)
Whitewashed Wall 60.9 x 106.7 cm. (24 x 42 in.)

22 September – 1 October 2025, 12:00 BST

Online, London, New Bond Street

Sold for £14,080 inc. premium

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Prunella Clough (British, 1919-1999)

Whitewashed Wall
signed 'Clough' (lower right)
oil on canvas
60.9 x 106.7 cm. (24 x 42 in.)
Painted in 1959

Footnotes

Provenance
Cyril Frankel
With Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London, 2000, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Prunella Clough: A Retrospective Exhibition, September-October 1960, cat.no.112
Cambridge, Kettle's Yard, Prunella Cough, 7 August-26 September 1999 (catalogue untraced)

The present work was executed in 1959 and sits at Prunella Clough's stylistic transition from post-war Realism in the early 1950s, to pure Abstraction from the 1960s onwards. Following the end of the Second World War, Clough often depicted dockworkers, factories and machinery, synonymous with the post-war rhetoric of reconstruction. Shifting entirely from figurative imagery, Whitewashed Wall displays Clough's interest in industrial motifs, whilst displaying a growing focus in the materiality of her surroundings. The linearity of the barbed wire and the loose suggestion of a window, root the composition within its environment. These industrial and architectural features, prevalent in Clough's earlier work, are here transformed into suggestive lines and subtle tones. The architectural elements on the façade of the whitewashed wall become shadow-like, whilst sustaining the artist's distinctive visual language of the peripheral and overlooked.

Through the 1960s and beyond, Clough's focus on abstraction resulted in removing entirely the architectural and industrial motifs that are still present in Whitewashed Wall. The abstract areas of the wall, display a glimpse into the layering of mark and form that consume her later years. The present lot is a key example in the intersection between the Clough's earlier affiliation with Social Realism in post-war Britain and an increasing affiliation with abstraction, whilst maintaining a highly distinctive style that displays the disregarded.

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