William Crozier (Irish artist)
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William Crozier was born in Glasgow in 1930 and educated at the Glasgow School of Art between 1949 and 1953.On graduating he spent time in Paris and Dublin before settling in London where he quickly gained a reputation as the 1950s equivalent of a Young British Artist through the early success and notoriety of his exhibitions of assemblages and paintings at the ICA, Drian and the Arthur Tooth galleries, with whom he had a long association.
Profoundly affected by post-war existential philosophy, throughout the 1950s and 1960s Crozier allied himself and his work consciously with contemporary European art, rather than with the then more fashionable (in the UK) New York abstractionists. He was part of the artistic and literary worlds of 1950s Soho, a close associate of ‘the Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde, John Minton and William Scott, and part of the expatriate middle-European and Irish intellectual circles in London of the time. A friend of the Irish poets, Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin, Crozier spent 1963 in southern Spain with Cronin, a period that was to prove pivotal to his development as an artist. On his return to the UK, influenced by the experience of visiting Auschwitz and Belsen, he began a series of skeletal paintings which anticipate the ‘New Expressionist’ German painters of the 1980s.
Based once again in London in the 1960s and 1970s, Crozier continued to exhibit in London, Glasgow, Dublin and in continental Europe. In common with many British artists of the 1960s, the artist combined painting with teaching, first at Bath Academy of Art, (with Howard Hodgkin, Gillian Ayres and Terry Frost), then at the Central School of Art (with William Turnbull and Cecil Collins), at the Studio School in New York and finally at Winchester School of Art where he led a strong centre for painting based on the European tradition. However he always saw teaching as a distraction from painting and gave it up as soon as he could. Released from teaching in the 1980s, and with studios in southern England and West Cork, Crozier’s painting blossomed with a new freedom and confidence. Then as now, his abstract landscapes and still life painting use sumptuous colour to convey an emotional intensity and he is endlessly concerned with the challenge of creating a new language in figurative painting. In 2006 the artist is working with undiminished vigour.
Crozier’s paintings are now in demand at exhibition and at auction. He has represented the UK and Ireland overseas, and has been awarded the Premio Lissone in Milan and the Oireachtas Gold medal for Painting in Dublin in 1994. In 1991 the Crawford Art Gallery Cork and the Royal Hibernian Academy curated a retrospective of his work. He was elected to Aosdana in 1992 and is an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. In 2005 Crozier celebrated his 75th birthday with a major exhibition in Cork to celebrate the European Capital of Culture. Here Crozier exhibited a selection of his drawing work, providing the first opportunity to see that the master of colour was also an inventive artist in black and white.
Several films have been made about Crozier and his work, such as Gordon Smith’s ‘William Crozier’ for Scottish TV (1970) and ‘The Truth about a painter’ directed by Cian O hEigertaigh for RTE (1993). Crozier made two films, ‘’Charlston’ and ‘Meon Shore’ for Meridian TV UK in 1996, and later ‘The Frame: Jane Bown photographs William Crozier’, also for Meridian in 2000. The BBC are currently filming Crozier for inclusion in a forthcoming film on Dali, part of the ‘Secret Life of a Masterpiece’ series. Examples of the artist’s work can be seen in most major public and private collections in the UK and Ireland, and in the National Galleries of Canada, Poland and Australia among many other national collections. He is strongly represented in the corporate collections of Allied Irish Banks, BNP Paribas and British Petroleum Plc. William Crozier’s work features in all current reference works on 20th century Irish and Scottish Art.
Work by Crozier can be seen in the following public collections
ABERDEEN City Art Gallery AMSTERDAM Peter Styvesant Collection BELFAST The Ulster Museum BIRMINGHAM City Art Gallery BRUSSELS The European Commission COPENHAGEN Museum of Modern Art CORK Crawford Municipal Gallery DALLAS Museum of Modern Art DUBLIN Irish Museum of Modern Art; Royal Hibernian Academy; Office of Public Works. DUMBARTON Education Authority EASTBOURNE Towner Art Gallery EDINBURGH City Arts Centre; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Scottish Arts Council GATESHEAD Museum and Art Gallery GDANSK City Art Gallery GLASGOW Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery HUDDERSFIELD City Art Gallery HULL City Art Gallery; Education Authority LIVERPOOL Walker Art Gallery LONDON Arts Council of England; Victoria & Albert Museum; Contemporary Art Society. MANCHESTER City Art Gallery; Whitworth Art Gallery MELBOURNE National Gallery of Australia OTTAWA National Gallery of Canada PITTSBURG Carnegie Institute SHEFFIELD City Art Gallery WINCHESTER Southern Arts STIRLING Stirling University SYDNEY National Museum of New South Wales WARSAW National Museum WORCESTER Dudley Art Gallery
