signed and dated ‘John Minton October 1940’ (lower left)
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The Kite, 1940
Exhibition History:
Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Dreams and Nightmares, 22 May – 15 July 2012;
London, RCA, A Perfect Place to Grow, 16 November 2012 – 3 January 2013;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Colourful Lives of Artists, 30 April – 30 June 2013;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Skyscapes, 10 May – 22 June 2014;
Woking, The Lightbox, John Minton and the Romantic Tradition, 28 January – 9 March 2017;
Chichester, Pallant House Gallery, John Minton: A Centenary, 1 July – 1 October 2017;
Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, War and Rumours of War: 1940s British works on paper from The Hepworth Wakefield, 6 July – 15 September 2019
John Minton was a celebrity of London’s bohemia and a key figure of Neo-Romanticism in the 1940s. At the outbreak of war he registered as a conscientious objector, but later enlisted in the Pioneer Corps. He was invalided out of the army in 1943 and devoted himself to art. One of his recurring themes, partly homoerotic, was the young male figure in emotionally charged settings. The Kite, fraught with tension, depicts a wasteland, a shattered world in ruins, the emaciated figures dressed in rags and a small boy in the distance holding a small red kite which flies tentatively and optimistically above the destruction.
