Notable for his development of visual interplay between abstract and popular imagery, his work is associated with the Pop Art movement and known for his paintings of fast cars and women.
Throughout his career, Donaldson has exhibited extensively in Europe and all over the world and accomplished public and private commissions (especially in Japan and Hong Kong), but also producing many works for architectural projects in London such as the fountain at Tower Bridge Piazza and the large torso in Anchor Court.
Donaldson was in the vanguard of that change and, as Marco Livingstone has written, his ladies, early and late, while "sexually alluring" on one side, also "exude a certain innocence"[3] on the other, making the possible reading of an objectification of women in a male-dominated society remote.
Marco Livingstone wrote ‘A startling characteristic of British Pop was the speed and confidence with which many of the artists discovered their language and subject matter at a very early age.
During 1964 he won a prize in the open section of the John Moores Painting Prize,[5] Liverpool and was one of twelve young artists selected by Bryan Robertson to show in ‘The New Generation’ exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, which included Derek Boshier, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, John Hoyland, Allen Jones, Peter Phillips and Bridget Riley.
[6] In 1965 he represented Great Britain with Patrick Caulfield, John Hoyland, Paul Huxley and Bridget Riley at the 4eme Biennale des Jeunes Artists at the Musée d'art moderne de Paris.
Antony Donaldson appropriated the language of advertising that was emerging in those years, which acted on the conscious and unconscious desires of the public through the erotic element, showing the female body in whatever state of undress to attract attention to some product or other.
[7] Writing on Donaldson in the catalogue of The New Generation 1964 exhibition, David Thompson states that ‘the advent of "Pop Art", whatever else it has done, has at least made a nonsense of the figurative-abstract controversy.
It has settled any worries about the relation of art to life, and left the painter free to explore what, in an abstract sense, is visually interesting about his chosen motifs.
The painting is flat and "hard-edged", emphasising contrasts of pattern and field, throwing up the fresh, cheerful colour, so that Matisse has as much to do with it as bill-boards or advertising ... His is rather the attitude of a painter who wants to see his activity as a skilled technique, not as an indulgence in self-expression.
But whereas in the case of Warhol that implies a macabre and mechanical coldness, with Donaldson it principally gives substance to a new conceptual abstraction tending more towards pleasure, disconcerting and subverting the very myth of the original.
Their modernist architecture, influenced by cubism with echoing shapes, ornamental zigzags, monumental formal volumes, geometrical fullness, and a volumetric frenzy made all the more vivid in the inimitable Californian light.’[10] 1968 marked the ‘beginning of a time of "unbridled enjoyment" in which taboos were challenged, girls wore trousers and bikinis, and went topless on the beach.
A button falling open, revealing a patch of throat, or just bare flesh, the veiled suggestion of the swelling of a breast, subtle nuances of pressure and tension, all lead us to the sensual and physical reality behind the image.
But the important thing for Donaldson is that this work marks a move away from the manipulation of the imagery, or its self-conscious presentation, into an altogether more painterly mode, where the preoccupation is instead with the process of realisation of the image, and its relationship to its source'.