W
hat better way to kick-off our cultural section than with a review of ‘The St Ives Artists A Biography of Place and Time’ by Michael Bird?!
Pendour Cove, the inspiration behind one of Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures and the name of our blog is a beautiful scenic walk along the coastline from St Ives.
With detailed colour plate reproductions demonstrating the width and breadth of the artists’ individual styles, this new edition features photographs from the artists’ personal collections and excerpts from letters that have never been published before. All of this helps to shine a brighter light on what drew these artists to St Ives and the surrounding Penwith Moors.
Bird masterfully places us at the crux of what this biography of time and place is about from the very start of the Introduction. We join him sipping a cappuccino in the St Ives Tate cafe, overlooking the surfing activity on Porthmeor beach below. Having inconclusively searched for reasons why a ‘wonky’ nude by Roger Hilton is exhibited alongside a painting of a ship by Alfred Wallis, Bird goes on to conjure a fission in time and space where past meets present. Through the careful study of each of his chosen artists, Bird transports us from the Tate Museum’s gift shop offering mugs decorated with Wallis’ seascapes and Barbara Hepworth themed colouring in sheets for children to descriptions of POW camps, service duties in North Africa, rationing, the space race, beatniks, parenthood and 60s glamour.
With titles such as ‘Landscape with Wild Men’ and ‘Connecting Circles: a detour via Hampstead’ each chapter focuses on a different artist or theme whilst referencing painterly inspirations and forms. We learn how St Ives, although historically difficult to travel to by road was well connected and even cosmopolitan in feel due to its seafaring heritage. We flit from an account of the shipwreck of the Alba, which inspired one of Wallis’ works, to the Spanish Civil War and Picasso’s Guernica. Readers meet the young Terry Frost, catching the train to St Ives past the ruins of Birmingham, Exeter and Plymouth. Gabo’s description of Plymouth burning during the Blitz is interlaced with in-depth study of his constructivist concerns and Perspex maquettes. Bernard Leach’s role in the unfolding development is not overlooked, his Shirakaba expertise placing him as ‘Messenger from the East’, both in St Ives and later on at Dartington Hall in Devon, a further indication of St Ives’ status as a location of cultural fusion and of Bird’s own thorough lines of enquiry.
We learn of Peter Lanyon’s wild side antics, his personal mythology of landscape from his time spent up in the clouds; we read about Nicholson and Hepworth ‘Mondrianising’ their first home in Carbis Bay and christening their next ‘Sky-and-Cherries,’ an amusing take on the Cornish ‘Chy-an-Kerris’. Heron’s thoughts on Cornwall’s luminescent light are revealed and we share in Frost’s relief of the disguise provided by dust-coated overalls, enabling him to pose as a builder when strolling home through the narrow streets. We hang out with Trevor Bell and Bryan Wynter, whose name Bird explains was changed from Winterbottom, a charming photograph dated summer 1933 shows his family enjoying the prehistoric dolmens and wild nature of Lanyon Quoit.
Bird invites us in….
We feel a part of the excitement as the artists hang their 7 & 5 exhibitions and establish the Penrith Society of Arts in Cornwall in 1949. We seemingly float into the audience clapping in anticipation of Wallace Nichol’s Festival of Britain drama performed at the St Ives Guildhall. Such tales are brought back to life and into the present through Bird’s storytelling expertise, with each chapter progressing chronologically, almost mirroring the structure of separate Acts in a dramatic performance or play.
Many of these anecdotes come across as a little humorous perhaps, taking the form of urban legends about the mystique and mastery of the artists. But all of these stories do more than this; they help to focus on the artist’s identities and individual choices for being in St Ives. Through the retelling of such antics, Bird reveals the personalities of these artists beyond their practices whilst revealing a different St Ives to the one we think of today. We are drawn in to the drama and excitement of a St Ives bursting with community spirit, creative energy and ambition in the search for artistic excellence, caught on the tide between ‘ceaseless modernisation’ and Cornwall’s ‘ageless’ charm.
The timeless appeal of the Cornish coastal landscape is noted, Bird claiming its unchanging continuity reassured both artists and the public in the face of war. Projected as a quaint, unthreatening paradise, guidebooks of the time suggested that Cornwall was somewhat ‘sealed-off’ from the after-effects of war, even claiming it had retained a ‘Prehistoric’ identity. However, Bird’s descriptions of Cornwall’s industrial activities, from shipbuilding to mining and farming contradict this utopic mirage. Bird links the Levant Mine Disaster of 1919 by way of Lanyon’s 1950s paintings to disturbing photographic images of the Dauchau and Belson concentration camps. In doing so, Bird provides a record of local Cornish History as much as a timeline of world events, leaning on the artists to offer a summary of the cultural, political and even technological developments of the twentieth century. Even the invention of the washing machine is compared to Hilton’s thoughts about the necessity for an Abstract painting displayed in each and every home in the chapter ‘Spaced Out: Into the 1960s’.
We see the important contribution of female artists, especially in the later chapter ‘Home Ground: Women in St Ives.’ Bird goes on to focus on Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Sandra Blow as well as Hepworth, at one point listing all of the wives whose husbands are considered to be of the St Ives ‘School’. The women portrayed within these pages are more than supportive house wives – Bird demonstrates how many were artists in their own right, with exhibitions, contacts and collectors of their own. There is a suggestion that the location and energy of St Ives possibly contributed to their independent mindsets and ability to pursue the need to make art at a time when the ‘role’ of women in society was being reconsidered in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Bird expresses how there is a unique narrative and much legacy to consider before evaluating this band of artists as a school just because they happened to be in the same place at the same time. They did not always get on with one another. Bird demonstrates the friction between Lanyon, Nicholson and Heron by referencing magazine articles and suggests that their differences possibly reach an apex when one excludes the other from the excitement of Clement Greenberg’s and then Mark Rothko’s visits – which helped establish the ‘St Ives/New York art axis’. Time and time again, we observe how Bird’s delightfully detailed magnifying glass enlarges the dramas of the St Ives scene to scale up with social, cultural and political attitudes of the time.
The ‘newcomers’ from London were sometimes considered ‘unwelcomed cuckoos’ in Cornwall. If not born and bred in Cornwall, can Hepworth, Frost and Nicholson even be considered part of the ‘St Ives School’? Is it not these very artists that help to bring swathes of visitors to the seaside town every summer? Although such questions remain diplomatically unanswered by Bird, what is clear from his research is that had the artists not found freedom and safety in St Ives, this reactionary group would never have achieved such an immense contribution to the making art in the twentieth century.
A number of reviews have perhaps criticised Bird’s account, claiming it lacks essential inclusion of critical discourse. However, we find many inclusions of quotes by contemporary critics of the time, ranging from Berger to Songtag, highlighting how Bird has taken in different points of view and crafted his narrative of time and place based on established art historical and philosophical analysis.
What we do perhaps discover is that Bird only provides fairly brief descriptions of referenced artworks. Deeper consideration as to the process and significance of particular sculptures and paintings could have been further developed, but this this of course would greatly extend the length of the book!
Bird offers not so much a ‘critique’ on the artist’s oeuvres, nor discusses any individual painting or sculpture at great length to provide a new perspective, argument, or to push a series of thoughts into new territory, but positively provides us with all the information required for us to arrive at our own conclusions. It is only by connecting the individual accounts of these artists, their successes, failures, challenges and achievements in the framework of each other and historic contextualisation that the narrative of the St Ives ‘school’ is finally picked apart and considered as a narrative in its own right.
Perhaps it is fair to say that the artists Bird focuses on were bound together more by their experiences of a particular place and time, rather than their support and commitment to one another or even a single agreement of what it is to be an artist, or what in fact art is and could have been in the mid twentieth century.
In the final scenes we join Hilton and Heron in their cold damp cottages, as they write letters to each other. The very abrupt ending of this biography, with the sudden deaths of Wynter, Hilton and Hepworth within a short time of one another, combined with Lanyon’s tragic glider accident, possibly reflects the sudden ending of St Ives as a major player in the art world, as reflected in the title of this chapter, ‘Terrible Times Together: The Poetry of Departures’. The focus on Graham’s poetry at this point reminds us of the storytelling nature of these misty kingdoms of salty, damp cottages, mermaids and wild, windy moors.
Through his careful research, Bird leaves no pebble on this shoreline unturned in search for answers as to why this group of artists with seemingly little in common are classified as an established group. If you are at all a little curious as to why St Ives played such a major role in the development of mid-century British culture, or if you wish to make the most of your upcoming visit to St Ives, then this biography of time and place is an absolute must for you!!
And if you’ve already experienced the pleasure of reading this book, let us know your thoughts in the comments below!