Berenice Sydney (1944–1983), or ‘Berenice’ as she was professionally known, was a dynamic and hugely talented British artist who produced an astounding body of work in a career that was tragically curtailed by her death a little before her 39th birthday.
In recognition of her outstanding contribution, her oeuvre, which comprised paintings in oil on canvas, drawings, prints, performance and costume designs, was celebrated a year following her death at the Royal Academy, London, in a show entitled ‘Salute to Berenice’. Today, her work is held in scores of important private and public collections, including those of Tate Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Smithsonian, Washington and she continues to be exhibited, most recently in 2018 at the Saatchi Gallery in ‘Dancing with Colour’, a solo show of her paintings organised in collaboration with Mallett Fine Art and the Dreweatts Auctioneers.
Dancers from Semaphore Ballet Company, Royal Academy of Dance, perform at Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Dancing with Colour’ (photograph by Alexander Yip photography). The exhibition contextualised Berenice Sydney’s work within the canon of Modern British painting in an effort to recognise her importance and bring her to wider public attention.
Work & Influences
Berenice led an astonishingly full creative life. Born in Esher, Surrey in 1944, she was educated from the age of six at the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in London where, inevitably, she became fluent in French; however, she went on to become fluent in five languages, travelling widely throughout her life. She embraced the histories, cultures and mythologies of the places she visited; these were fertile ground for the subject matter of her early figurative work, which contains motifs and themes from Persian and Greek mythology.
IMAGE: Psyche and Eros, from a series of drawings and linocuts based on mythology; her stylistic use of the silhouette and black figures incised often in full or three-quarter profile draws from the vernacular of Greek pottery.
From an early age Berenice studied ballet with the renowned Marie Rambert and classical guitar with Adele Kramer; these were passions that occupied her into adulthood when she balanced studio life with training at the Covent Garden Dance Centre and flamenco studies in Hampstead and New York.
Her love of these sister arts informed her work always. Her early figurative pieces are alive with the joy of music and dance; tangible both in their subject matter and style. Her drawings combined fluid lines with spontaneous, dynamic, gestures in the manner of the Fauvist painters, who were key influences on her practice.
As her work evolved, it moved towards semi-abstraction. Her untitled 1966 oil on canvas marks a key moment in this evolution and demonstrates her gift as a colourist. Most notably, it makes explicit reference to the influence of the artist Matisse, the rhythms and colour frame here directly echoing that of this 1909 study ‘Dance I’.
Berenice was always experimental in her approach. Her playfulness with colour, form and rhythm eventually lead her to abandon figurative work altogether, in favour of full-abstraction. She made prints that have been called Calder-esque in their use of bold colour and their examination of the relationship between form and movement. However, their approach to representation might also be compared to Jean Arp’s; like his her abstract compositions have an organised abstract language that seems to describe organic forms.
Her later oil paintings have a decisive kinetic energy that aligns her with Bridget Riley and others of the Op Art movement. In them she developed the vocabulary that began in her screenprints and etchings. Abstract shapes based on specific organic forms – ovals, lines, swirls, curves, triangles – exist in vibrant, pulsating, relationships with each other. These works are non-representational, yet firmly rooted in nature, depicting a world memorably described as Berenice’s own floating cosmos. And, if Henri Matisse’s influence prevailed, they perhaps were indeed the realisation of an attempt to present her interior vision of the world ‘as directly as possible and by the simplest means’[1].
Certainly by the early 1970s Berenice was entering the mid-point of an exciting and flourishing career. She was exhibiting widely and successfully in group and solo shows, at the Leicester Galleries in London for example, Kenwood House and the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery; she had been chosen to represent Britain in the Biennale della Grafica m’Arte, Florence; and she had begun teaching, delivering a series of lectures and workshops on etching at Leeds University. Before her death she would have participated in 40 exhibitions worldwide.
So, although Berenice Sydney died shortly before her 39th birthday, her career was substantial to say the least; if somewhat overlooked as in the case of many women artists. She was largely self-taught, having cut short her education at Central School of Art & Design, considering herself ill-suited for formal training in art, to set up her own studio in Chelsea. Her impatience to practice unrestrained by academic systems seems to have made utter sense. She was voraciously experimental, intellectual and driven. Her body of work was prolific. And she was arguably one of the most talented and original artists working in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
More information:
[1] Matisse, Interview with Estienne, 1909
Work Available by this Artist:
No post found