Deanna Petherbridge, who has died aged 84, was a prime example of an artist who was widely known in his field but less well known outside it.
This was largely due to the construction method he chose. At a time when fashion required eclecticism in art (Young British Artists could move between video, concept, ceramics and painting) Petherbridge remained firmly committed to a single medium. The setting also seemed almost deliberately old-fashioned.
“When I first came to London I made some pretty big expressionist paintings,” he recalled in a 2017 interview at Studio International. “There was a lot of bloody anti-Vietnam art and some soft sculptures.” But by the mid-1960s he had decided to pursue a career in drawing.
Its size was one of the most striking things in his work. Petherbridge worked on a monumental scale, in contrast to his own diminutive structure.
His works, which began with Piranesi-like views of the flat-roofed, white-walled streets of the Greek island where his studio was located, evolved into massive drawings such as the five-panel Concrete Armada (1978). His dual interest in architecture and travel added geometric elements of Islamic and Hindu structures to his repertoire.
Horrified by the Falklands War in the 1980s, Petherbridge also made the razing of architecture a regular subject. This culminated in The Destruction of the City of Homs, which was exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester in 2016-17 and is now in the Tate collection.
The Destruction of the City of Homs, a three-part painting on ink and paper, 106 cm high and 228 cm wide, shows the said metropolis after the devastation of the Syrian civil war. Part expressionist, part eddying in mood, this work is a meditation on what Petherbridge calls “urban carnage.” As in most of his works, there are no people here.
His images are taken from the mind of the artist, not from contemporary sources. “The photo of the bombed artillery shell of Dresden, destroyed in February 1945 when I was six years old, has lived strongly in my memory bank throughout my life,” Petherbridge said.
If pacifism provided one incentive for her work, feminism offered another. This found its most memorable expression in the 2013 exhibition Witches and Evil Bodies, which he curated at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and later traveled to the British Museum.
Beginning with Albrecht Dürer’s (1501) engraving of a goat-born harpy and continuing with Goya’s Los Caprichos, the study examined how predominantly male artists have depicted 500-year-old witches as menacingly young and attractive or old and repulsive. A witch who was kept from economic and political power was, as Petherbridge scathingly put it, “evil because she was jealous.”
“I’m one of the old witches too,” she told a cheering audience at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 2015. Witches and Evil Bodies and its companion book were eminently scholarly, but animated with a dull lacklusterness. This marked much of Petherbridge’s work.
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, to art student-turned-housewife Frieda (née Goldberg) and lawyer Harry Schwarz, Deanna studied fine arts at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She went to Britain in 1960, detesting apartheid. “There was a significant graphic emphasis in South Africa at the time,” Petherbridge said. “I came from a country where poverty and discrimination are intense. Drawing is a way to think visually on a democratic level. This is the poor man’s way of inventing.”
It was also easy to transport. He was also short on money and in 1967 he took himself to the island of Sikinos in the Cyclades; he would have a studio here and spend time for the next thirty years. (This studio was followed later in life by another in Umbria.) There he began drawing. “I discovered that pen and ink was more portable, and I really stuck with it my whole life,” he said. “Even large drawings like mine can be wrapped and carried on the shoulder.”
After a brief early marriage, she was in a relationship with Guy Petherbridge, whose name she adopted.
After lecturing in fine art in the United Kingdom at the University of Reading and then at Middlesex Polytechnic (now the University) in the 1980s, he was appointed professor of drawing at the Royal College of Art in 1995. There he founded the Drawing Research Center. The first PhD program of its kind in the UK. He was an honorary fellow of the Warburg Institute and a research fellow at both Yale University (2007) and the Getty Center in Los Angeles (2001–02); and was made CBE in 1996. Petherbridge’s book The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice, published in 2010, remains a standard text on the subject. This also helped revive interest among contemporary artists, including Tracey Emin.
Petherbridge is survived by two sisters and a brother and seven nieces and nephews.
• Deanna Petherbridge, artist, writer and curator, born February 11, 1939; died January 8, 2024