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Emerging on the London art scene in the 1960s, Ian Stephenson was one of several British artists whose work featured in Michelangelo Antonioni’s influential film Blow-Up (1966). The following year he embarked upon a series of twelve dioramas, each consisting of two square canvases covered in small colored dots, in which the same image is repeated as if through an inverted mirror. Though Stephenson’s abstraction is suggestive of postwar American painting, and even the pointillism of Georges Seurat, he preferred to see himself as part of a much longer tradition of British painting, comparing his use of white dots in his dioramas to that of John Constable in his landscapes. Despite the unyielding severity of its official title, Stephenson referred to Diorama S.S.6.67 in private by the rather more romantic phrase “the rainbow comes and goes”: a line taken from William Wordsworth’s poem “Intimations of Immortality,” first published in 1807.

Gallery label for A Decade of Gifts and Acquisitions (Yale Center for British Art, 2017-06-01 - 2017-08-13)

Emerging on the London art scene in the 1960s, Ian Stephenson was one of several British artists whose work featured in Michelangelo Antonioni’s influential film Blow-Up (1966). The following year he embarked upon a series of twelve dioramas, each consisting of two square canvases covered in small colored dots, in which the same image is repeated as if through an inverted mirror. Though Stephenson’s abstraction is suggestive of postwar American painting, and even the pointillism of Georges Seurat, he preferred to see himself as part of a much longer tradition of British painting, comparing his use of white dots in his dioramas to that of John Constable in his landscapes. Despite the unyielding severity of its official title, Stephenson referred to Diorama S.S.6.67 in private by the rather more romantic phrase “the rainbow comes and goes”: a line taken from William Wordsworth’s poem “Intimations of Immortality,” first published in 1807.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016