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St Ives Arts Club and fish cellars
© St Ives Trust Archive Study Centre
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The St Ives Art Colony: 1880-2004 |
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A turning point in the town’s fortunes came in the spring of 1985 when the Tate Gallery organised its seminal exhibition ‘St Ives 1939-64: Twenty-Five years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery’. It was accompanied by a catalogue that detailed the history of the art colony through painstaking research of contemporary newspapers. Legitimate queries were raised as to where works of the featured artists might be seen in St Ives itself. The answer would be the opening of Tate St Ives less than ten years later.
The Tate Musuem |
The energy generated to achieve such a major arts development in a town far from the country’s cultural centre, came not from the Tate Gallery but from Cornwall County Council whose primary concern was to find a way of reversing the numbers of tourists forsaking traditional seaside holiday resorts in Cornwall for cheaper and sunnier climates abroad.
The Council, promised loans of St Ives painting and sculpture stored in the Tate’s basements, and assisted by a large enthusiastic group of supporters from St Ives, could visualise the gallery’s potential and within a short time had raised sufficient funds and publicity to ensure that the project would go ahead. The choice of the modernist architects Eldred Evans and David Shalev was inspired. They designed a stunning building on the site of the old town gasworks, half way along Porthmeor Beach, which immediately caught the public’s imagination.
Words: Janet Axten
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