Sir Terry Frost, R.A. (British, 1915-2003)

In the autumn of 1960, Frost held his first one-man exhibition in New York at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery. Black & White Painting was shown at this exhibition, which was to be a seminal moment in the artist’s career. A second exhibition at the same gallery followed two years later and gave Frost enormous confidence and conviction in his artistic direction.


‘In New York they all came to my exhibition, de Kooning, Rothko, Klein, Newman, Motherwell. I was staying with Larry Rivers. Newman and Motherwell took me to their studios. I accepted it all as normal and they accepted me. They were all painters struggling to get somewhere like I was. They worked hard; they would sleep until noon, do eight or nine hours in the studio, and then starting at eleven at night proceeded to drink me under the table! Then we’d go at four in the morning and have breakfast at a Chinese restaurant’ (T. Frost quoted in E. Knowles (ed.), Terry Frost, Aldershot, 1994, p. 84).