BENJAMIN, Anthony

Anthony Benjamin  British 1931-2002

Anthony Benjamin painter, suclpture and print maker, was born in Hampshire and began his studies in engineering at Southall Technical College but began studying art at the Regent Street Polytechnic in 1949, during which time he spent three months studying drawing in Paris with Fernand Léger and was awarded a silver medal for painting. After his graduation in 1954, he worked in London and a year later moved to St Ives, where he developed a reputation as an abstract artist.

In 1956 Peter Lanyon encouraged him to join the Newlyn Society of Artists. He soon had his first solo exhibition at the Newlyn Art Gallery in 1958, which featured paintings abstracted from the Cornish landscape and sea. During these formative years, Benjamin studied and worked in Paris and Italy, before moving back to London where he lived with his partner, Nancy Patterson. In London, he began working with more intense colours and hues. He exhibited at the ICA in 1966 and then at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford the following year, where he displayed large perspex and fibreglass sculptures.

From 1967 Benjamin worked as a fine art professor in institutions throughout North America and Canada. After returning to Britain in 1973, he worked as a printmaker by the late 1980’s, began a series of large drawings in graphite. These were followed by a group of brightly coloured canvases which were still growing in scale at the time of his death in 2002.

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