Albert House

watercolour 2010, 20 x16in 50x40cm

All will be well

oil, 2010, 14 x 10in 35 x 25cm

.

Lydia Corbett

In possession of the ‘secret de la jeunesse’, a quality of graceful and disarming innocence powered by a vigorous optimism of spirit, is how Picasso described the appeal of the young artist Lydia Corbett (nee Sylvette David) when she first caught his eye and became for a period of several months in the early 1950s his chief muse, the subject of some fifty paintings and works in oils and other media. Close to sixty years on this same freshness in approach, a determination to express and share insights of a life lived in harmony between two cultures , radiates from the new cycle of watercolours Corbett has completed for her eleventh one-person exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery.

 ‘It was my enthusiasm for the world of Byzantium,’ comments Corbett ‘which first encouraged me to introduce a goldleaf background into some of my compositions.’ While it is now excepted that in the earliest wall mosaics blue, fittingly a  favourite colour of Corbett’s, preceded gold as a means of suggesting divine light, gold was considered to represent best the world of the spirit. In Corbett’s work gold is particularly effective beside the artist’s subtle and feminine palette          with its emphasis on delicate shades of pink and blue.

Interacting with a predominant blue (in sea, sky, ceramics, flowers and textiles), the gold background in many of Corbett’s new compositions reinforces the sense of harmony that so permeates her work. These still lifes – which is how her compositions begin, though they often evolve to encompass landscapes, musical instruments, figures seen close to or distantly – feature mostly everyday ingredients: domestic tableware, a vase of flowers, Mediterranean fruit and vegetables, a reminder of how Corbett is accustomed to dividing her time between the studio in her father’s old house in the Vaucluse and her home in the West Country where she brought up her family. Between the two regions, as also between past and present, there flows a current of gentle and inviting reverie. Memories, sometimes real or imagined, some rooted in Corbett’s long-standing attraction to the Heian culture of old Japan, others leading her back to the magical time when she became for some brief months the toast of Picasso and his circle at Vallauris, all these meet and fuse in her work.  

Brought up in sympathetic proximity to much of the contemporary art of her time as the daughter of a successful Paris art dealer with a gallery in the Champs Elysées. Lydia Corbettfound her own way to artistic expression. An important early influence was her English mother, herself a painter, who introduced her to the world of Samuel Palmer and William Blake. Later came first-hand acquaintance with Jean Cocteau, with his fine and distilled graphic line, but most of all it was another artist from Picasso’s circle, the Russian-born Marc Chagall whose example strengthened Corbett’s confidence in developing a strong spiritual and emotional dimension in her work. In a lighter vein speaking directly out of a time of intense personal discovery and experiment which Corbett went through into her 20’s was the pleasure she found in the making of pots, in both throwing and decorating these as her fancy took her, originally in order to provide props to inhabit her watercolour subjects. The exhibition is completed with a small selection of recent work in this genre. 

Biography

LYDIA CORBETT (née Sylvette David) was born Paris 1934. She grew up in an
artistic environment (her English mother being a painter, her father an established
dealer in contemporary art), though she received no formal training.

In the 1950s she met Pablo Picasso at Vallauris on the Riviera. Following
the artist’s separation from Françoise Gilot, his meeting with Lydia (then still
Sylvette) introduced a new phase in his work and she became the model for a
cycle of some fifty paintings and drawings (the Sylvette cycle) as well as many
ceramics of this period. The ‘heads of Sylvette’, a series of unfolded metal
sculptures which Picasso developed at this time, marked the next major innovation
in his sculptural work. In 2003 in Picasso et les femmes at the Chemnitz Museum,
Germany many of these works were shown in a section of the exhibition devoted
to the Sylvette cycle. In 1968 Lydia Corbett moved to England and has been
represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1989.

On the occasion of the Tate Gallery’s 1993 exhibition of Picasso’s sculpture and
paintings, a documentary film on Picasso and Lydia Corbett was shown on BBC2.
In 1991 she exhibited in Japan and in 2004 in the United States.

One-person exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1989, 1991, 1993, 1994,
1996, 1998, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2009 and 2011

Comment

‘I see my work as bringing together experiences and feelings from both past and
present: I would like to gather it under a heading, infinitas gracias, for if I express in
this way my dreams and my ideals, it is all a celebration and a thanksgiving for debts
I cannot repay – to the experiences, painful and joyous, of a wartime childhood in
the Drôme Mountains, to my encounters in spirit across the years with great teachers
such as St. Francis and St. Ignatius of Loyola, to all the artists I have known and
revered – most specially to Pablo Picasso who made me his protégé and the subject of
his art in those unforgettable months of 1954.’
Lydia Corbett

‘Lydia art arises, as I have experienced it in my long friendship, from a contemplative
spirit; a natural ability to listen to and watch the spirit within and then allow that
skill to be obedient to the inner life. Watching Lydia draw and paint reminds me of
watching the baffling skill of a jazz pianist improvising on a given melody.’
Martin Shaw
Bishop of Argyll and The Isles
Oban, November 2008

Copyright © Francis Kyle Gallery. All Rights Reserved