John McLean obituary

Painter who continued to champion abstract art in postmodern timesIn postmodern times, the lack of pretension in the artist John McLean, who has died aged 80, was highly unfashionable. So, too, was abstract painting, the mode that he followed for 50 years. Yet neither his plain speaking nor his loyalty to abstraction was unthinking.Historically astute, McLean saw his art as part of the project of modernism, and that project as morally important. “The influence of what we call ‘modern