WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM : A STUDIO LIFE
By
Lynne Green
Lund
Humphries. 344 pages. £35. ISBN 978-1-84822-095-9
Reviewed by Jim Burns
There
was a few years ago a series of books under the heading “St Ives Artists”,
including works on Terry Frost, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Ben Nicholson,
Barbara Hepworth, Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron, and Christopher Wood. A name
noticeably missing from the list was that of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, who
arrived in St Ives in 1940 and spent the greater part of the rest of her life
there. So, why wasn’t she represented in the series? There may be some practical
reasons, to do with budgets and such matters, but it would be useful to know if
other factors intervened in the decision not to publish a book about her. After
all, she played a part in the life of the artistic community, particularly
during the period from 1940 to 1960, and her work was well within the framework
of the abstract experimentation that typified those years.
Did she
not fit comfortably into what was mostly a predominantly male group? Was the
fact of her Scottish background something that counted against her? Or was it
because she was always fiercely independent? Sven Berlin, who similarly has been
often overlooked when accounts of activity in St Ives have been written, once
remarked that he was “With them but not of them”, and is that a description that
can also be applied to Wilhelmina Barns-Graham? There is an interesting
photograph, taken in her studio in 1947, and often reproduced in books about St
Ives, which shows her in the company of Berlin, Lanyon, Wynter, John Wells, and
Guido Morris, not a painter but important in his own way as a printer, and
usually a forgotten figure in the history of the post-1945 years in Cornwall.
But that’s another story.
One of
the people who worked hard over the years to restore Barns-Graham to her
rightful place in the St Ives chronicle is Lynne Green. Her book, Wilhelmina
Barns-Graham : A Studio Life, was originally published in 2001, with a
second edition in 2011. It has now been reprinted with amendments.
Green
was lucky enough to have known and interviewed Barns-Graham before the artist
died in 2004, so her writing can be said to have more than an element of the
authoritative about it.
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was born in 1912 in St Andrews, Scotland. Her father and
mother were from families which, Green says, were “well-established
representatives of minor Scottish gentry…. She had a strict, possibly tyrannical
father”, who dominated the family, while her mother seems to have remained in
the background. There was a younger sister and a younger brother. The household
was not wealthy, but neither were they poor. Green is of the opinion that they
were “comfortably well-off”, in a town that had its share of poverty and
unemployment. St Andrews had a fishing fleet, though Green suggests that it was
already showing signs of decline, and it’s understandable why Barns-Graham felt
at home with the sights and sounds and smells she would later experience in St
Ives.
She
showed signs of an interest in art when she was quite young, drawing circles and
triangles and colouring in the spaces, and she was lucky enough to have a
sympathetic teacher who encouraged her interests.
Her father, however, wasn’t enthusiastic
about her growing liking for artistic pursuits, but to counter-balance his
opposition to taking them further there was her Aunt Mary who was to prove
supportive. In 1930 she and her husband took Barns-Graham on a trip to Paris,
where she saw paintings by Monet and Cézanne, among other artists. It was a
prelude to her enrolling in 1931 at the Edinburgh College of Art, where she
studied full-time until 1937. The courses she took followed long-established
patterns of drawing and other disciplines. Green thinks that Barns-Graham’s
conventional training, which eventually resulted in her being awarded a
post-Diploma Scholarship to study abroad, might have been held against her by
some of the less-academically-inclined painters in St Ives.
The
outbreak of war in September 1939 prevented Barns-Graham from travelling to the
Continent, so she settled for St Ives, where she moved to in 1940. I’m skipping
a lot of the detail that Green provides about the years Barns-Graham spent in
Edinburgh. She had excellent tuition from artists who had links to movements in
Scottish art such as the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists : “Edinburgh
drummed into her that to be able to draw well was the key to being able to paint
with success”. There is a painting from 1934, “Still Life with Pewter Plate”,
which, while perhaps not being perfect in every detail, nonetheless points to
Barns-Graham’s growing skills. And, though I’m referring to illustrations in
another book, Lynne Green’s Wilhelmina Barns-Graham : A Scottish Artist in St
Ives (The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust, 2012), some portraits from the
1930s give an indication of her drawing proficiency. She was alert to the use of
colour, but Green is of the opinion that “what she gained from the example of
senior Scottish artists in particular, lies less in the way they handled colour,
and more in their approach to pictorial form and space”.
St Ives
in 1940 was dominated by the presence of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth,
though Naum Gabo was also present. Barns-Graham was to meet and mix with them,
and also with Sven Berlin, as well as
several older resident artists like John Park and Leonard Fuller. But
there were problems, and she was unhappy at first. She was short of money,
though she did earn a little from painting portraits. And she suffered from
bouts of ill-health due to weakness in her lungs. Periods of stress or anxiety
could bring on asthma attacks, and she was prone to a variety of
respiratory-related complaints. But she was working, and there are some
delightful harbour scenes, perhaps at times showing the influence of Ben
Nicholson, though always original enough to be identified as by Barns-Graham
:”The individual buildings have been moved round, relative distances distorted,
and each element given a structural role in the construction of the painting”.
The paintings have a life of their own and are not just exact descriptions of
the actual harbour.
I’m
jumping ahead a little to the post-1945 changes as the war ended and a new cast
of artists and others began to arrive in St Ives. They brought with them fresh
ideas regarding what art should be about and aim for. Abstraction of various
sorts wasn’t new, but influences from abroad, and examples of what to fill a
canvas with, had been limited. The abstract expressionists were about to come to
the fore in New York, and it was thought that the closest to them in Britain
were painters in and around St Ives. Time has no doubt tended to break down that
idea, but it was once prevalent enough for people like Mark Rothko and Clement
Greenberg to make the journey to Cornwall to see for themselves what was being
produced there.
There
had been indications of an interest in abstraction in Barns-Graham’s work, but a
painting like the 1945 “Studio Interior” can be seen as still very much
representational, albeit with its geometric lines giving it a modern feeling.
Green says that “the more one looks at it, the more evident its geometric and
abstract qualities become, and the more complex it seems”. Another painting,
“Grey Sheds, St Ives, II”, from 1947 also adheres to a representational theme,
“paring away form to its essentials”. There is a comment by Green which seems
apt: “Like Berlin, the core of her work
remained anchored in the observed world”. Works like these would have
been among those that she chose for exhibitions in the Castle Inn and Downing’s
Bookshop. There is a photo of her hanging the paintings in the bookshop gallery.
The Castle Inn in Fore Street had for its landlord, Endell Mitchell, the brother
of the sculptor Denis Mitchell. There is something rather appealing about a
community where art exhibitions could be seen in bookshops and pubs.
The
community feeling didn’t seem to last too long. Green relates how “From the
rivalry and entrenchment within ‘camps’, which developed in the 1950s there
emerged an unpleasant whiff of male chauvinism”. And she quotes Barns-Graham as
recalling “I thought I was ‘one of the boys’, but came to realise that they
didn’t like competition from a woman…..all along they had been going behind my
back….They had families to support and I didn’t”.
Green adds, “The need to sell work and establish reputations took on an
additional edge when the competition was female”.
It does occur to me to wonder whether or not the fact of her increasingly
displaying abstract work affected attitudes among her male contemporaries? They
could probably ignore her if she stuck to painting portraits to make money, as
she did when she was struggling in the 1940s, or turning out representational or
figurative scenes, but to move into clearcut abstraction was, it might seem, a
challenge. I don’t see her abstract work as similar to that of the other
abstract painters, but it is possible that some people might have thought of
it that way. And those attitudes no
doubt surfaced when certain people reminisced about St Ives in the 1950s.
Barns-Graham had expressed a preference for Cubism over Surrealism, which is
understandable given that, as previously noted, her work was “anchored in the
observed world”. There is, I think, some aspects of Cubism identifiable in a
1951 painting, “Green Skull Form No.2.”, though not to the point where specific
objects are there. It’s more a matter of how the painting is constructed (Green
refers to a “dynamic symmetry”). It is with paintings like this one, and later
canvases such as “Red Painting” (1957) and “White, Black and Yellow (Composition
February)” (1957), that Barns-Graham may have aroused some antipathy among male
artists. They are striking abstract works, their geometric lines combining with
a superb handling of colour. Green quotes Douglas Hall on the subject of
“Red Painting”
: “Anger has seldom had so direct an
expression and nothing quite like it was to reappear”. The anger may have been
caused by a failing marriage, and the fact that she had (reluctantly?) moved to
live in Leeds while her husband (ten years younger) was studying architecture at
the University. But “White, Black and Yellow” has a calmer feel to it and, as
Green puts it, “retains an explicit relationship with landscape”.
Green
has some interesting things to say about Barns-Graham not completely fitting in
with a specific movement in art. She sets up two approaches to art in the 1950s,
naming them as “Constructivism” and “Action Painting”, with Barns-Graham being
identified with the former. But she was “alive to the possibilities in both,
gleaning insights and useful pointers from each but never embracing the extremes
of either”. Green goes on to observe that this “is not the country for tightly
knit artistic groups pursuing a collective agenda. Where they exist such
groupings tend to be short lived; the British artist is essentially independent,
even maverick by nature”. And Barns-Graham “has always encompassed at any one
time a number of different preoccupations, and therefore, apparent ‘styles’ “,
something which, Green adds, “has been levelled as a criticism against her”.
In 1985
a large exhibition at Tate Britain focused on St Ives 1939-1964, key
years in the post-war history of the town and its artists. I remember visiting
the Tate and still have the catalogue. Discussing the exhibition, Green
observes: “For a community of artists that had always been emotionally volatile,
the process of selection for this exhibition was inevitably traumatic. The Tate
Gallery itself was not immune to the disputes and disagreements about who should
be included and who left out. The first count of more than 250 exhibited works
by over sixty artists who had lived in, or were closely associated with, the
town was never going to please everyone”. And Green, considering Barns-Graham’s
contributions, says they did her “a disservice” in terms of what was chosen and
how it was displayed. Barns-Graham herself thought that “her relatively low-key
presence in the exhibition was a continuation of the – to her mind deliberate,
ingrained – sidelining and neglect she had been conscious of for a number of
years”.
I’ve
concentrated in this review on Barns-Graham’s activities in the 1940s and 1950s.
Green notes that, in the early 1960s, her work moved away “from hard-edged
geometrical abstraction in favour of a freer more gestural approach to both form
and the application of paint”, with naturally enough, a distinct change in what
the viewer looked at. I’m stating my own personal preference when I say that the
earlier work engaged me more. But there are paintings from later that I find
interesting –“Ascending Squares of Equal Amount” is an example, along with
“Zoom”, both from the 1970s. And from later in that decade, “Kite Series 4”, and
the attractive “Sea Poem”.
Barns-Graham’s Aunt Mary died in 1960 and left her house near St Andrews to her
niece. She began to spend more time there, which may have led to her neglect
when the subject of St Ives arose among art critics and historians. And she
travelled to America and Amsterdam. She had health problems but continued to
paint, and “Yellow Disk with White on Black”, from 2003, is a first-rate
abstract. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham died on the 26th January 2004.
There
is so much more in Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: A Studio Life that I would
have liked to include in this review. She had friendships with many artists like
Prunella Clough, Roger Hilton and Sandra Blow. And she exhibited widely.
Lynne Green’s accounts of Barns-Graham’s working practices are always
informative. And her book is profusely illustrated. It has notes, a chronology,
and a bibliography. With a major Barns-Graham exhibition at Tate St Ives later
this year its reappearance is to be welcomed.