Deanna Petherbridge, who has died aged 84, was the prime example of an artist widely celebrated within her field but rather less well known outside it.
Largely, this was because of her chosen way of making. In a time when fashion called for eclecticism in art – the Young British Artists might move back and forth between video, concept, ceramics and paint – Petherbridge stuck firmly to a single medium. That medium, too, seemed almost wilfully old-fashioned.
“I did do rather large expressionist paintings when I first came to London,” she recalled in an interview in Studio International in 2017. “There was a lot of gory anti-Vietnam work, and some soft sculpture.” By the middle of the 1960s, though, she had settled on a career in drawing.
Size was one of the most striking things about her work. In contrast to her own diminutive stature, 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 evolved into huge drawings such as the five-panel Concrete Armada (1978). Dual interests in architecture and travel added geometric elements of Islamic and Hindu building to her repertoire.
In the 1980s, appalled by the Falklands war, Petherbridge also took as a regular subject the razing of architecture. This culminated in The Destruction of the City of Homs, exhibited in a solo show at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester in 2016-17 and now in the Tate collection.
A triptych in ink and wash on paper, 106cm high by 228cm wide, The Destruction of the City of Homs shows the titular metropolis after the ravages of the Syrian civil war. Part expressionist and part vorticist in mood, it is a meditation on what Petherbridge called “urbicide”. Like most of her work, it is empty of people.
Its imagery is taken not from contemporary sources but from the artist’s mind. “A photograph of the bombed-out shell of Dresden, destroyed in February 1945 when I was six years old, has lived potently in my lifelong memory bank,” Petherbridge said.
If pacifism provided one stimulus for her work, feminism offered another. This found its most memorable expression in Witches and Wicked Bodies, an exhibition she curated at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2013, which then travelled to the British Museum.
Starting with the engraving of a goat-born harpy by Albrecht Dürer (1501) and proceeding via Goya’s Los Caprichos, it examined the way in which 500 years of predominantly male artists had portrayed witches either as menacingly young and alluring or as old and repulsive. Kept from economic and political power, a witch, as Petherbridge tartly noted, “was evil because she was envious”.
“I’m one of the old hags myself,” she told a cheering audience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2015. Witches and Wicked Bodies, and its accompanying book, were deeply scholarly, but they were enlivened by a deadpan puckishness that marked much of Petherbridge’s work.
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, to Frieda (nee Goldberg), an art student turned housewife, and Harry Schwarz, a lawyer, Deanna studied fine arts at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Finding apartheid abhorrent, she left for Britain in 1960. “In South Africa at that time there was a significant graphic emphasis,” Petherbridge said. “I had come from a country with immense poverty and discrimination. Drawing is a way of thinking visually at a democratic level. It’s the poor person’s way of inventing.”
It was also easy to move. Short of money herself, in 1967 she took herself off 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, in later life, by another in Umbria.) There, she began to draw. “I discovered that pen and ink was more portable and have stuck with it all my 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 adopted.
In the UK, after lecturing on 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 Centre for Drawing Research, the first doctoral programme of its kind in Britain. She was an honorary fellow of the Warburg Institute, and research fellow at both Yale University (2007) and the Getty Center in Los Angeles (2001-02); and was, in 1996, made 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 helped spur a revival of interest among contemporary artists, among them Tracey Emin.
Petherbridge is survived by two sisters and a brother, and by seven nephews and nieces.
• Deanna Petherbridge, artist, writer and curator, born 11 February 1939; died 8 January 2024
