The colour of genius

Patrick Heron, who has died at the age of 79, was one of the half dozen important British painters of the twentieth century. Many things contributed to this country's late awakening to the power and importance of modern art after the second world war, but among them Heron's work as painter, critic, and polemicist was a key factor.

When Heron began his professional life, the great modern French masters were relatively unregarded here. His painting and writing were seminal in ending an English tradition of narrative, inward-looking figurative painting. He regarded Matisse as the greatest master of the century and would dearly have loved to elevate Bonnard to second place: these were the two painters from whom he drew most.

It was sometimes remarked that Heron got by on his colour, that he was no draughtsman. This was untrue. His drawing was as incisively accurate as that of Ben Nicholson, the friend from whom he inherited the studio overlooking Porthmeor beach at St Ives. But his portraits of the late 1940s and early 1950s, such as the one of Herbert Read, were not successful, and the big compositions, like Christmas Eve and Harbour Window With Two Figures, were only doubtfully so, though it is unlikely that Heron himself, a great protagonist for his own achievements as well as those of the other painters he admired (Matthew Smith, William Scott, Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton foremost amongst the British) ever thought so.

These linear paintings were attempts to combine the rigour of Braque's shallow space with Bonnard's tapestry-like 'all-overness', to use Heron's inelegant but accurate phrase. But the over-complicated line on the flattened picture plane worked against them, reducing them to an illustrative mode of Cubism. Still, the 1998 Tate retrospective of his work ('20 years too late,' Heron remarked), arranged so that the last gallery with the late paintings adjoined the first gallery with pre-war and early post-war work, showed that the elements on which his career would be founded were already in place.

When the mesh of lines dropped away, he was free to concentrate on his abiding commitment, the non-figurative exploration of colour and the effect on the retina of the juxtaposition of pure colours (he insisted on the term 'non-figurative': all art, he would say, was abstract).

Patrick Heron was born in Headingley, the son of Tom Heron, an entrepreneur who moved to Cornwall when Patrick was five to set up a garment factory in three converted fishermen's cottages overlooking Newlyn harbour. This was to blossom into Cresta Silks at Welwyn Garden City, with McKnight Kauffer designing the stationery and packaging and Wells Coates the exemplary modernist shops. Patrick, still a schoolboy, made some remarkably successful designs for the fabrics. If not a prodigy, he certainly had a high talent that dated back to the age of three, as an extant drawing of Coniston Old Man testifies. Before the war, he had a year at the Slade School of Art, but never felt it gave him very much.

Tom Heron was a pacifist; Patrick likewise. His chronic asthma would have excluded him from military service, but he insisted on registering as a conscientious objector and worked as an agricultural labourer for three years until doctors ordered him to desist. He returned to Cornwall and worked for Bernard Leach for the final 14 months of the war. One of his friends was the Guardian journalist Mark Arnold-Forster, who, a few years later, sold him Eagle's Nest, a house with a famous garden high above the Atlantic at Zennor, near St Ives, where Heron had spent childhood holidays.

Heron's move to Eagle's Nest coincided with his move into non-figurative painting, and among his first works of the period were the garden paintings, opalescent meshes of colour streaked and dribbled vertically on to the canvases.

Painting, as he found it in the late 1940s, was sunk in insularity. The Tate Gallery's modern collection, from Impressionism to Fauvism and Cubism, was thin and inferior. It was during this time that Heron was also an art critic for Arts magazine of New York, for the New English Weekly and then the New Statesman. He deplored the criticism of John Berger, not because it was Marxist but because it was prescriptive, and he coined the phrase 'Art Is Autonomous' for an article he wrote in rebuttal of Berger's arguments.

He stuck to this phrase throughout his life, meaning not that art is uninfluenced by society, but that it cannot be used as a tool within society, that once an artist begins to play to the gallery his work descends to propaganda or pot-boiling. His best criticism was collected in The Changing Forms of Art; long out of print when the Tate published another collection, Painter As Critic, to make available again some of the most perceptive and trenchant English criticisms of 20th century modernism.

Heron saved his own propaganda for his later writing, sometimes in ferocious defences of the landscape of the Penwith peninsula against would-be developers or the Ministry of Defence. His most notable piece was the almost 14,000-word article spread over three days in the Guardian in 1974 in which he attacked the marketing of the New York school of painters by galleries and critics, principally the critic Clement Greenberg, who at this stage was actually dictating to painters and sculptors their disposition of forms and colours.

Partly because he had been the first champion in England of the Abstract Expressionists, Heron's word now carried great weight and checked a tendency even, or especially, in English art circles to discount the achievement of the St Ives group of painters. But it also confused the issue. In spelling out in dates and paintings how he personally had by several years got in ahead of, say, Morris Louis, with his vertical stripe paintings, Heron seemed to suggest that St Ives and New York were doing the same kind of thing. Certainly there were cross-influences between the two, and the Americans looked at the work of the St Ives group as well as vice versa, but the roots of the Americans lay in European Symbolism and Expressionism, whereas the St Ives group were closer to the English landscape tradition, or, in Heron's case, to the school of Paris.

For a colourist of Heron's generation, the great challenge and exemplar was the Matisse of the papier decoupées, the abstracts cut and pasted out of sheets of gouache-soaked paper, like the wonderful L'Escargot that Heron saw many times during his visits as a trustee of the Tate. Heron himself made hundreds of small gouaches, deploying a range of colours brushed on with tiny Chinese watercolour brushes - even on the 15ft canvases - originally in adjacent colour areas pushing up to a fuzzy separating edge, though later the edge became a clean break (Heron called himself at this period a 'wobbly, hard-edge painter').

The aim, as it had been since Gauguin, Cézanne, and, of course, Heron's beloved Bonnard, was to make all areas of the painting of equal importance; there was to be no such thing as an image laid on a ground the sum of several images made up the totality of the main image, the finished painting. The variations seemed infinite, but then in 1979 Heron's wife Delia, his childhood sweetheart, died quite unexpectedly. For a time he did not paint at all; then he began afresh a series of paintings which retained the images of his later work but returned to the misty effect of the garden paintings of the early 1950s. Delia had been mainly responsible for restoring and giving new life to the Eagle's Nest garden. Maybe this new approach to painting was the only way left for Patrick to commune with her.

A few years ago, Heron asked me my age. Fifty-six, I told him. 'Lucky bugger,' he said. He himself had turned 70, but he still had productive years ahead, including the late garden paintings carried right through until his Tate retrospective, the window at the St Ives Tate, and Big Painting Sculpture, the project at Stag Place, Victoria, carried through with the help of his son-in-law Julian Feary.

Heron accepted a CBE but rejected a knighthood, for what Downing Street apparently took to be the utterly frivolous reason that it would make him look silly to other serious artists. There has been talk in the family of turning Eagle's Nest into a permanent gallery for Heron's art, something about which he was untypically diffident. But a Heron museum above the Atlantic would certainly be a beacon shining from a great period of British painting.

Patrick Heron is survived by his daughters, Katerine, an architect, and Susanna, also an artist.

Ravishing beauty born out of chaos, Adrian Searle remembers Patrick Heron

Patrick Heron, dressed in clashing shades of acrylic knitwear, a lurid purple scarf slung rakishly about his neck, stood on a chair in my art school studio and berated me about colour. I never asked why he stood on the chair. His voice was a bit wheezy, reedy and almost camp. 'As I wrote in 1954,' he said, 'colour is the only direction for painting.'

This was 1973, the chair was his soapbox, and I, a cowering student, was his only audience. He reminded me then of a psychedelic Lord Soper. Heron really believed in colour, he was evangelical about colour, he was a walking advertisement for colour and painting.

He was, I thought then, a bit bonkers. He believed, for instance, that cars were nowadays brightly coloured on account of paintings like his, which had attuned the public consciousness to the pleasures of colour, and that the influence of painters like Bonnard and Matisse had dragged British culture out of its grey and umber post-war dinge.

Walking with him around his Tate Gallery retrospective last year, he gave me a running commentary on his recent work, punctuated with hilarious impersonations (he was a great mimic) and gossip. But he was most at home amongst the painted stripes, the fuzzy singing lozenges and blobs and his huge 'wobbly, hard-edge' canvases.

His last paintings were full-on, risky, filled with bright squiggles, painterly flurries and cartoon doodles. They should have been chaotic and absurd, but they were instead open and vital, eye-rocking and beautiful. Heron's retrospective was ravishing, and had the vitality of a much younger artist.

As a painter, Heron got younger as he got older, and couldn't care less for distinctions between abstraction and figuration. The paintings were, instead, filled with life. He briefly returned to portraiture in 1997, with a portrait of A S Byatt, now in the National Portrait Gallery. It looked as if it took just a moment to paint. His last paintings were, I think, very much about capturing the vitality of the moment, and were a celebration of it. He was a passionate and civilising influence on the culture of the past 50 years.paragraph