Douglas Portway was born in Johannesburg on 22 September 1922. After attending Witwatersrand Technical Art School from 1943–4, he established himself as a teacher and artist in South Africa. Moving to St Ives, Cornwall in 1967 in search of new inspirations, Portway was an important member of the St Ives School, contributing to the development of UK abstract painting in the 1960s and 1970s.
Painter, draughtsman, designer and printmaker Douglas Portway was born in Johannesburg on 22 September 1922. Following an unsettled childhood and a period as a window-dresser, he attended Witwatersrand Technical Art School from 1943–4, though he was unhappy with his instruction there. Portway then taught at Witwatersrand and at the University of Johannesburg for several years, and held his first solo show at Constantia Gallery, Johannesburg in 1945. He married art student Rosalind Hertslet in 1948 (they later divorced), and together they designed murals, tapestry and stained-glass windows, often exhibiting together. Initially inspired by African themes and European primitivists such as Picasso and Paul Klee, Portway embraced the intellectual currents of American abstract expressionism (particularly responding to the work of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline) and Zen Buddhism, following a travel grant to the USA in 1952. His paintings thereafter ‘explored the possibilities of saturated pigment and non-objective form’. Subsequently ‘frustrated by what he saw as the provincialism of the South African art scene,’ Portway travelled extensively in Europe and spent some time living in Ibiza between 1959 and 1966; a period in which he held a string of solo exhibitions at Halima Nalecz's Drian Galleries, London (after signing a contract with the gallery, established by Polish refugee, Nalecz) and showed at the Studio International Jubilee Exhibition in London in 1964 (Peffer, 2009). He eventually settled in St Ives, Cornwall in 1967.
By this point, Portway ‘had already progressed beyond his liberating experiments towards a brilliant and distinctive mature style’, and his paintings were ‘on an ambiguous plane somewhere between the figurative and non-figurative’ (Berman, 1993). Already an established artist internationally, Portway became an influential mentor to South African artists. Previously mentoring Louis Maquabela in 1966, he was also highly influential to painter Bill Ainslie, who sought out Portway as a mentor and even moved his family from South Africa to St Ives near Portway’s studio between 1969 and 1970. Part of the St Ives School, Portway met many artists there who were involved with the British Abstract movement, including Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and Terry Frost, and he became an important member of this dynamic artistic community. Following his involvement in the St Ives School, Portway held many solo shows with Marjorie Parr Gallery, London and its later manifestation, Gilbert-Parr Gallery, between 1970 and 1981, a relationship established by the gallery’s championing of Cornish art in particular.
Portway moved to Bristol in the early 1980s, and, as a ‘prolific loner’, thereafter did not exhibit in the UK as frequently as he had in the previous two decades (Art UK). Regarding his legacy, the Czechoslovak émigré art historian and critic, Joseph Paul Hodin (who owned a second home in Cornwall and became close friends with Portway and his wife Caroline) commented that ‘Portway’s style cannot be defined on the whole as exclusively Abstract Expressionism, for this term always includes the notion of aggression and dynamism, but rather as Abstract Poeticism, the poetic approach being the primary approach to the comprehension of the miracle of Being’ (Hodin, 1983).
Douglas Portway died in England 1993, having never returned to South Africa, and a memorial retrospective exhibition of his works were shown at Gallery Gilbert, Dorchester from 1997-98. Since then, his works have been included in group exhibitions such as the annual St Ives Exhibition held at Belgrave St Ives in 2018 and 2020, and the Power of Print show at Clifton Contemporary Art, Bristol in 2018. His works can be found in UK public collections including Tate, British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Douglas Portway]
Publications related to [Douglas Portway] in the Ben Uri Library