by Deanna Petherbridge, who has died aged 84, was the prime example of an artist widely known within his own field but little known outside of it.
Mostly, this happened because of the way she chose to do it. At a time when fashions demanded eclecticism in art – the Young Artists of Wales might move back and forth between vision, concept, ceramics and paint – Petherbridge stuck firmly to one medium. That medium, too, seemed almost willfully old-fashioned.
“I did big, expressive paintings when I first came to London,” she said in an interview with Studio International in 2017. “There was a lot of anti-Vietnam work, and some soft sculpture.” By the mid-1960s, however, she had established a career in drawing.
One of the most striking things about her work was size. In contrast to its small size, Petherbridge worked on a monumental scale.
Beginning with Piranesi-esque views of the flat-roofed, white-walled streets of the Greek island where she had a studio, her work developed into huge drawings such as the five-panel Concrete Armada (1978). Dual interests in architecture and travel added the geometric elements of Islamic and Hindu architecture to his repertoire.
In the 1980s, devastated by the Falklands war, Petherbridge also became a regular subject of architectural looting. This highlight was The Destruction of the City of Homs, which was shown in a solo show at Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery in 2016-17 and is now in the Tate collection.
Ink and wash triptych on paper, 106cm high by 228cm wide, The Destruction of the City of Homs depicts the titular city after the ravages of the Syrian civil war. Part expressionist and part vorticist in spirit, it is a meditation on what Petherbridge calls “urbicide”. Like most of her work, it is empty of people.
His imagery was not taken from contemporary sources but from the mind of the artist. “The photograph of the bombed out shell of Dresden, destroyed in February 1945 when I was six years old, lives brilliantly in my memory bank for life,” said Petherbridge.
If pacifism provided one impetus for her work, feminism offered another. The most significant expression of this was found in Witches and Wicked Bodies, an exhibition she curated at the National Gallery of Modern Art of Scotland in 2013, which then traveled to the British Museum.
Beginning with Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of a goat-born harp (1501) and continuing through Goya’s Los Caprichos, he explored the way in which 500 years of mostly male artists had depicted witches as young and allurous or as old and troublesome. Deprived of economic and political power, a witch was, as Petherbridge tartly pointed out, “evil because she was jealous”.
“I’m one of the witches myself,” she told a rapturous audience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2015. Witches and Wicked Bodies, and the accompanying book, were highly scholarly, but happy with them they were alive. that was a sign of much of the work of Peter’s Bridge.
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, to Frieda (née Goldberg), an art student turned housewife, and Harry Schwarz, a lawyer, Deanna studied fine arts at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. When apartheid was relentless, she left for Britain in 1960. “In South Africa at that time there was a significant graphic emphasis,” said Petherbridge. “I came from a country of extreme poverty and discrimination. Drawing is a way of visual thinking on a democratic level. It’s the poor man’s way of framing it.”
It was also easy to move. Short of money herself, in 1967 she took herself to the island of Sikinos in the Cyclades, where she was to keep a studio and spend periods of time for the next three decades. (This studio was followed, later in life, by another in Umbria.) There, she began to draw. “I found pen and ink to be more portable and have stuck with me for life, really,” she said. “Even large drawings like mine can be rolled up and carried over the shoulder.”
After a brief early marriage, she was in a relationship with Guy Petherbridge, whose name she took.
In the United Kingdom, after lecturing in fine art at Reading University and then Middlesex Polytechnic (now University) in the 1980s, she was appointed professor of drawing at the Royal College of Art in 1995. There, she launched the Center for Drawing Research , the first doctoral program of its kind in Britain. She was an honorary fellow of the Warburg Institute, and a research fellow at Yale University (2007) and at the Getty Center in Los Angeles (2001-02); and, in 1996, became a CBE. Petherbridge’s book, The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice, published in 2010, remains a standard text on the subject. It also contributed to a revival of interest among contemporary artists, including Tracey Emin.
Petherbridge is survived by two sisters and a brother, and seven nephews and nieces.
• Deanna Petherbridge, artist, writer and curator, born 11 February 1939; died 8 January 2024
