Last modified on Wed 26 May 2021 04.53 EDT Had you been in the Gibbs Building at King’s College, Cambridge, one summer’s day in 1969, you might have come across a pair of English artists taking tea. The older was the Bloomsbury painter Duncan Grant, then 84. The younger, halfway through his tenure as the university’s first artist-in-residence, was Mark Lancaster, who has died aged 82. It was, variously, an unexpected pairing. Lancaster, at the time, was painting works such as Cambridge Green, now in the Tate collection – resolutely modernist, grid-based acrylics, seemingly derived from American minimalism. The resemblance was not coincidental. Five years earlier, while still a student at Newcastle University, Lancaster had gone to New York. While there, he had taken up an introduction from his teacher, the pop artist Richard Hamilton, to meet Andy Warhol. Warhol, captivated, offered the young Englishman both casual work at the Factory and an introduction to Henry Geldzahler, curator at the Metropolitan Museum.