Alan Gouk, who has died of cancer aged 84, was an ambitious abstract painter and an eloquent and passionate writer committed to the enduring power of modernism. For many years he taught sculpture at St Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins, part of the University of the Arts London). He was influenced primarily by American abstract expressionism, but became aware of the European basis of his art – his personal lodestars were the painters Henri Matisse, Hans Hofmann and Patrick Heron.
A job as an exhibitions officer for the British Council in the early 1960s gave Alan an important introduction to the London art world. In 1967 he was recommended by the sculptors Anthony Caro, Phillip King and Isaac Witkin to chair the Sculpture Forums at St Martin’s, where students and professional artists presented and vigorously debated their work.
In 1970 he became Head of the Advanced Sculpture Course at St Martin’s and in 1981 he became Lecturer in Sculpture. Working with the Head of the Sculpture Department, Tim Scott, Alan was involved in a controversial and short-lived redesign of sculpture training, focusing on an intensive study of the body. He retired from St Martin’s in 1990.
During the second half of the 1970s, Alan participated in the artist-organized studio exhibitions at the Stockwell Depot in south London, strongholds of increasingly marginalized modernist abstraction. His participation in an exhibition of four London-based Scottish painters at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 1977 led to a dispute between him and the American critic Clement Greenberg, one of several public disagreements between Alan and leading figures in the art world.
Alan held his first solo exhibition in London in 1987 and subsequently showed his work at the Flowers Gallery, the Poussin Gallery and most recently at Felix & Spear. I met Alan at Poussin and our conversations were an important part of my introduction to modern painting and central to my research on Stockwell Depot. I wrote three short essays on his paintings, most recently in 2022 for the Hampstead School of Art.
Alan was born in Belfast to nurse Grace (née McElhinney) and travelling salesman Ronald Gouk. In 1944, when he was still a small child, the family moved to Glasgow, where he attended Hutcheson’s Grammar School. He did not complete his studies in architecture in Glasgow and London and psychology and philosophy in Edinburgh. After the early death of his father in 1963, Alan devoted himself to painting.
He won the John Moores Painting Prize twice, in 1967 and 2002. In 1987, Tate acquired his Cretan Premonition. Other paintings are owned by the Arts Council of Great Britain, the British Council and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
His first marriage, to Margaret Emburey, ended in divorce in 1967. In 1968 he met Patricia Guy, they married in 1984 and lived in Stroud, London and Ramsgate. Alan maintained his main studio in Montrose on the coast between Dundee and Aberdeen and usually lived there alone for half the year in a flat that was once part of a house that belonged to his great-grandfather.
He leaves behind Patricia, three children – Paul from his first marriage and Alexis and Sholto from his second – and six grandchildren.
