Hirschl & Adler Shows Richard Lonsdale-Hands Modernist Artworks

Written by Anatolie Ginsberg Saturday, 03 September 2011 21:25

New York City.- Hirschl & Adler Modern is proud to present "The Paintings of Richard Lonsdale-Hands (1913-1969)" on view at the gallery from September 8th through October 8th. Born in England, Richard Lonsdale-Hands was a highly successful London-based industrial and package designer. After beginning his professional career as a designer on London’s Fleet Street, in 1937, at the age of twenty-four, Lonsdale-Hands broke out on his own, founding Richard Lonsdale-Hands Associates. Lonsdale-Hands’s company (later the Lonsdale Hands Organisation Ltd) subsequently became the largest European industrial design and market research firm of its time (he also acquired Greenly’s Ltd, a major London advertising agency, further expanding his empire.) Lonsdale-Hands was a leader in British design, and by his mid-30s was an internationally recognized captain of industry.

Lonsdale-Hands spent the war years designing camouflage for the British army. Always attuned to art, and especially enamored of modernist painting, Lonsdale-Hands began to paint in 1947 as a means of recreation and self-expression. By his own admission, design had an inherent limitation to creativity, as it primarily required that aesthetics be subordinated to practical and commercial concerns. Lonsdale-Hands turned to painting as a means of exercising his creative engine. Though initially art was for him a second vocation, Lonsdale-Hands grew increasingly serious about his painting, eventually pursuing a public career as an artist. He was also prolific, producing over 500 paintings from 1947 until his untimely death in 1969. Explaining his motivation to begin painting, Lonsdale-Hands wrote to a friend: “I felt suddenly that I must paint. I had no preconceived ideas, I had been influenced by no books, no movements or fashion, and by no knowledge. Being a designer I had created a great deal of work, but always in a medium and to the brief or even the whims of the client. It was as if I had been a portrait painter—in an engineering sense—and from this situation a certain tension inevitably resulted” (as quoted in Paintings and Drawings by Richard Lonsdale-Hands, exhib. cat. [New York: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, 1961], p. 7). His letter notwithstanding, Lonsdale-Hands’s work is clearly marked by influences from various trends in modern art, including work by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Kees Van Dongen, Emil Nolde, and other expressionist artists.


Energy and vigor characterize his paintings, and indeed he noted of his working method that “my policy is to attack a canvas, rather than paint it” (as quoted in ibid., p. 7). It is this spontaneous, aggressive approach that gives Lonsdale-Hands’s work its vitality and freshness. His subjects come almost entirely from his private life—portraits, self-portraits, figure paintings, animals, still lifes, views of the places he lived and visited—but all merely provide the basis for his free expression in color and form. Lonsdale-Hands painted in England, Italy, France, Switzerland, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago. From 1960 to 1962, his paintings were exhibited in a series of one-man shows in London, Rome, Paris, and New York, including a show of sixty paintings held at Hirschl & Adler Galleries in May–June 1961. In each city, Lonsdale-Hands’s work was celebrated for its almost primitive spontaneity and sophisticated color and design. His work might have received a wider audience but for the fact that many works sold into private collections in the United States and Europe, and for his early death, after which his paintings were stored at his family’s home in France. Now after fifty years his impressive body of post-war expressionist artworks is finally being offered to the public once again.

Hirschl & Adler Galleries was founded in 1952 by Norman S. Hirschl and Abraham M. Adler. In 1967 Stuart P. Feld joined the firm as a partner, and since 1982 has served as its President. Originally housed in the Marguery Hotel on Park Avenue, the gallery moved to a townhouse on East 67th Street in 1958, and in 1977 relocated to a handsome landmark townhouse at 21 East 70th Street. In February 2011, Hirschl & Adler moved to expanded quarters in The Crown Building at the world-reknowned crossroads of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, where the gallery continues to specialize in American and European paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculpture from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries; American prints of all periods; and American decorative arts from 1810 to 1910. Its contemporary arm, Hirschl & Adler Modern, has developed a select group of established and emerging realist artists and also features American and European art from the Post-War period.  Each year, the gallery assembles about a dozen special exhibitions exploring historical and contemporary themes, or examining the work of individual artists, past and present. Most of these exhibitions are accompanied by scholarly catalogues and other publications. The gallery provides a wide range of services to its client base of private collectors, museums, architects, interior designers, art consultants, and other dealers. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.hirschlandadler.com

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