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St Ives railway station and Harbour, 1880
© St Ives Trust Archive Study Centre
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The St Ives Art Colony: 1880-2004 |
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World War II witnessed radical changes in St Ives. In 1939, to escape the expected bombing of the capital, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) and her artist husband Ben Nicholson (1894-1982), who had for some years been influenced by the pure, simplified forms of a new European avant garde art movement, arrived from London to live in the town.
They were soon joined by the Russian Constructivist Naum Gabo (1890-1977). Nicholson had in fact visited St Ives a decade earlier with the artist Christopher Wood (1901-1930), at which time they had discovered and become influenced by the then unknown primitive paintings of the reclusive retired mariner, Alfred Wallis (1855-1942).
Landscapes all around |
Although the war years were unproductive artistically, by 1945 the town had become the centre for a new generation of artists who, with Nicholson and Hepworth at its apex, explored the Cornish landscape and sea forms in a variety of non-representational styles. Borlase Smart encouraged the modern group to join the St Ives Society of Artists, but by the late 1940s the inevitable splits began to occur between the opposing practitioners of abstract and realistic art and, in 1949, 19 artists broke away to form the Penwith Society of Arts in Cornwall with its own large exhibition space in the heart of the town.
By 1955 the most significant members of the Society were Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (born 1912), Terry Frost (1915-2003), Patrick Heron (1920-1999) and John Wells (1907-2000), as well as Nicholson, Hepworth and Bernard Leach, although artists such as locally born Peter Lanyon (1918-1964) and Bryan Wynter (1913-1975) had already resigned.
Words: Janet Axten
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