Margaret Mellis (1914-2009)

The career of Margaret Mellis was a chequered one, with the personal events of her life and situation playing a crucial role in her artistic development. She had approached abstraction through her contact with Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, brought about by her marriage to Adrian Stokes; equally, when he left her for her younger sister Ann in 1946, she abandoned the intellectual rigours of abstraction and returned to an École de Paris-inflected realism, taking refuge in the colour and appearance of the real world. Two Dog Roses is a fine example of this second figurative period, much reliant upon formal pattern and accentuated colour for its potent effects, before she once more began to venture into abstraction around 1953. Flowers were always a favourite motif for Mellis and here they are the central component in a surprisingly joyous composition — perhaps indicative of her new-found happiness with her second husband, the collagist Francis Davison.

A.L.