Wilhelmina Barns-Graham A Scottish artist in St Ives

The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust W

ilhelmina Barns-Graham

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Scottish

artist in S

t IvesThe B

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Charitable Trust

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Wilhelmina Barns-Graham A Scottish artist in St Ives

The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

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W. Barns-Graham: A Scottish artist in St IvesLynne Green

Published by The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust, in association with the 2012 exhibition W. Barns-Graham: A Scottish artist in St Ives curated by Lynne Greenat The Fleming Collection, London and the City Art Centre, Edinburgh

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and the publishers.

W. Barns-Graham: A Scottish artist in St Ives © 2012 Trustees of The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

Text © 2012 Lynne Green

All works by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham © 2012 Trustees of The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

Photography: Bruce Pert except Plates Scorpio Series No.1, The Blue Studio, Warm Up, Cool Down, Red Playing Games I, Autumn Series No.5 Balmungo and Warbeth I by Coline Russelle

Designed by Flit and Briony Andersonflitlondon.co.uk | info@flitlondon.co.ukTypeset in Plantin and Grotesque MTPrinted by Empress Litho

ISBN: 978-0-9571050-0-3

The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust Balmungo HouseBalmungoSt AndrewsFifeKY16 8LW

www.barns-grahamtrust.org.uk

Cover image: View of St Ives, 1940 (detail), oil on canvas, 63.5x76.5cm

Author Acknowledgements

I should like to extend my sincere thanks to: The Trustees of The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust for their invitation to propose and select this exhibition; Geoffrey Bertram, Chairman of The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust; Selina Skipwith, Keeper of Art at The Fleming Collection; Briony Anderson of The Fleming Collection who designed and coordinated this publication and whose tireless good humour has made working with her a delight; Dr Helen E Scott, The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust Manager who has supported this project in so many practical ways from its inception, but in particular for her aid in the selection of the works of art. Lynne Green October 2011

T h e F l e m i n g C o l l e C T i o n

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What I most remember of my first real encounter (by which I mean it stopped me in my tracks) with work by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham is the energy and vitality of her line, together with her bold command of colour. My interest,

initially at least, was as an art historian engaged with British post-war modernism. Yet Barns-Graham hardly figured in that story, despite having lived and worked (when I first encountered her) for over four decades at the heart of the community of artists associated with it, in St Ives. But there was another dimension to this first encounter. I ‘recognised’ this art, was instinctively drawn to it because I both saw and felt reflections of a common cultural heritage. Barns-Graham was clearly a consummate draftswoman and colourist. I had no doubt that these and other aspects of her art belonged to, were expressive of, her native artistic traditions and experience. Later we met, and subsequently worked together over a number of years on different projects. As I grew to know the artist and her work (with the intentions and motivations that lay at its heart), I became convinced that my first response had been correct. In the catalogue essay to the Tate St Ives exhibition Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: An Enduring Image, I suggested that any one exhibition, with its inevitable focus, could only provide a partial view of an artist’s work. (This view got me into trouble with at least one senior art critic – but I still think that it is essentially true.) Having explained the raison d’être of the St Ives exhibition (the obvious one of location and shared interests with colleagues), I observed that: ‘As a fellow Scot I might have chosen differently, had the intention been to explore the root of her art in her native tradition. There seems to me no doubt of the artist’s close and continuous relationship, for example, with an approach to the application of paint and to the use of colour epitomised by the Scottish Colourists.’2 Now, some thirteen years later, in the focus of this exhibition and the consequent selection of work, this theme is explored. I am grateful to the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust for their invitation to select an exhibition for the Fleming Collection, London and for the City Art Centre, Edinburgh in celebration of the artist’s centenary year. An exploration of the Scottish connections in the artist’s work seems particularly apposite. The title of this exhibition, stating a simple fact of origin, does not simply indicate a desire to pin down what might be identified as ‘Scottish’ in inclination or national character in the artist’s work: although these will emerge if, as I believe, they are there. It is clear that where many artists, art historians and exhibition

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: A Scot t ish ar t is t in St Ives1

Lynne Green

Scorpio Series No.I, 1995, acrylic on paper, 56x76cm BGT948

This painting belongs to one of three extended sequences of works on paper from the latter half of the 1990s that carry the generic title, Scorpio. Diverse in formal rhythm and colour range, these are flamboyant, joyful paintings, where Barns-Graham stripped from her painterly language all but the vibrancy of colour and her own gestural vigour conveyed through her brush-marks. The mastery and assurance of the three Scorpio series is evident here, in the precision of judgement – in the placement of a stroke, a line, or dribble of paint – as well as in the artist’s acute colour sensibility that made her one of the great British colourists of the late twentieth century.

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selectors are able to identify particular preoccupations and qualities that distinguish ‘Scottish’ art, there is a context for discussing the work of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in relation to her native traditions. While once identified as ‘one of Britain’s most senior abstract painters’ (in response to an exhibition of her work in Edinburgh), 3 her early close association with Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, and later with figures such as Roger Hilton, has been seen in her native country as providing ‘a historic link between Scotland and St Ives’.4 Her work has regularly been included in publications and exhibitions specifically concerned with Scottish art: wherever her physical location, she has been claimed by her country of birth as one of its own, while also being identified outside that country as belonging to its lineage. The artist herself, while always determined to retain her position within the art history of St Ives and its contribution to British modernism, was proud of that Scottish lineage and comfortable to be identified as belonging to it. This is, however, the first exhibition to specifically address the nature and extent of Barns-Graham’s debt to her training in Edinburgh, the continuing inspirational resource she found in Scotland and its creative importance throughout her life. It has been inspired by the belief that awareness of these, and of her own ‘distinctive cultural background’5 can only enrich the understanding and enjoyment of the artist’s work.

A life of continuities and symmetry

Barns-Graham lived a long and productive life, creating an almost continuous flow of inventive, often courageous work throughout her professional career as a painter. There were times when she and her art were critically neglected or dismissed as of little importance in the narrative of British art, but she never, ever gave up. That today her reputation is established and her art recognised for its seriousness and stature, is in no small part due to this personal tenacity. In the wake of the London Tate Gallery’s major exhibition St Ives: 1939-64 of 1985, the artist’s work and that of her colleagues, who lived and worked in the Cornish town, began to receive long-overdue reassessment. While the Tate show tended to reflect received notions of individual contribution and innovation, from the mid nineteen eighties onwards, Barns-Graham found her work to be increasingly in demand, the subject of growing critical and public acclaim. Major international interest in the artistic phenomena of St Ives as an enclave of British modernist art began in earnest after the opening of the Tate Gallery St Ives in 1993. As a consequence of all of this, in her last two decades Barns-Graham at last won her place as a senior figure in both St Ives modernism and British post-war art. Eventually, as one of the last survivors of the first wave of modernists to settle in Cornwall, she found herself with some amusement tinged with sadness, much sought after by art historians and art critics, gallery owners and collectors, as well as members of the wider media. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was born in 1912 at her parental home in St Andrews, Fife and died in her ninety second year just a few miles from that city, at Balmungo House, where her grandparents had lived when she was a child. There is a literal as well as emotional sense of continuity – of a circle completed – in this symmetry. She had lived for most of her adult working life at the heart of a community of artists in the southwest tip of England. Yet she never severed her familial, emotional and cultural links with her native country. She never lost a deep, heart-felt attachment to her roots. Throughout her years in St Ives she retained the ties of family and friends in both the east and west of Scotland, with St Andrews

and the Balmungo estate in particular providing rest and inspiration. Despite having made her home in Cornwall, from the first Barns-Graham regularly returned to Scotland, initially for short visits, later for prolonged periods. From her first submissions, of the mid nineteen thirties, to the Society of Scottish Artists and The Royal Scottish Academy open exhibitions, the pattern of her exhibiting presence in Scotland while occasionally sporadic, was a thread of connection with the north that was never broken.6 After her first solo exhibition in 1956 with Aitken Dott’s ‘The Scottish Gallery’ in Edinburgh, they became her representative dealer in Scotland; she continued to exhibit regularly with them until her death. The year before joining Aitken Dott she had been included in a ‘Contemporary Scottish Painting’ exhibition in London, and this perception of her as retaining her national identity while working as a resident in St Ives, was to continue. Taken as a whole Barns-Graham’s body of work reveals an inventive, creative artist that was constantly challenging herself, restless in her desire to push at her own boundaries and to find new ways of expressing her creative idea. She has been criticised for the diversity of the language she used during a career that spanned some seventy years; but to expect uniformity and repetition in an artist, is to misunderstand the searching, inquiring nature of art itself. The work that Barns-Graham will perhaps be most loved and admired for is that done in the latter period of her life, when age eased the need for pleasing anyone other than herself, and in which she allowed herself to ‘let rip’. In the last fifteen or so years of her career (she was working almost to the last) there was an astonishing outpouring of energy and invention in which she pared her vocabulary to the essentials of brushstroke, line and colour. Essentially an artist who chose to both revel in and celebrate her experience of the world, her late work in both paint and screenprint media is a joyous coda. And as a coda should, this work provides a dramatic, emotionally charged finale to a life fully lived, in which the courage to take risks became increasingly central to the artist’s credo. In many ways extraordinary, Barns-Graham’s life in a very real sense echoed the wider struggle of women during the twentieth century for self-determination and equality. Prone to life-long bronchial illnesses, she was considered a delicate child. This, together with a traditional Scottish Presbyterian upbringing that frowned on the notion of a girl taking up any profession, leave alone that of an artist, made it inevitable that she would incur parental opposition to her chosen career. But Wilhelmina (always know as ‘Willie’) was nothing if not a fighter. Having at the age of eight determined that she would be a painter, a long and often painful struggle as a young adult led finally to her parents acceptance of her entering Edinburgh College of Art as a Diploma student. Possessing a level of enthusiasm for her training given only to those who have achieved a goal in the face of adversity, she embraced the world of art that opened to her there. After graduation and Post-Diploma studies pursued within Scotland, a Scholarship award prompted a brave and life-changing decision. Proposed ostensibly for health reasons, but driven by the need for a degree of freedom essential to establishing a career, Barns-Graham moved to St Ives, Cornwall in 1940, just as the period of the ‘phoney war’ was coming to an end. By a matter of months, she was preceded by her college friend Margaret Mellis with her new husband, the critic Adrian Stokes and by the three artists who formed the nucleus of what was to become St Ives modernism: Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo. Although the latter’s presence in St Ives was relatively short-lived, his influence was profound, particularly for those who like Barns-Graham, encountered him personally.

Island Factory St Ives (Camouflage No.2), 1944 - Page 26

Geoff and Scruffy, 1956 - Page 35

Expanding Forms (Entrance No.2) Touchpoint Series, 1981 - Page 45

Untitled (April), 2001 - Page 55

Afghanistan, 2000 - Page 52

White Circle Series I, 2003 - Page 56

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Towards a definition of a ‘Scottish Artist’

Scots are famous – and sometimes are ridiculed – for their deep emotional attachment to their native soil that is maintained wherever they may make their home. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was no exception. Her sense of history and tradition, her feeling for the land from which she came, her fiercely-held work ethic and deep sense of purpose (that drove her to make art even when unwell), also her (often wicked) sense of humour, were all, it seemed to me indicative of the national character. Perhaps above all her independence of spirit, her grit and feistiness, marked her out as belonging to our small, argumentative but determined nation. In his small, idiosyncratic, book Modern Scottish Painting of 1943, the painter J D Fergusson seeks a definition of a ‘Scottish artist’ in the courageous and independent spirit of the Declaration of Arbroath, addressed by the Scots Parliament to the Pope in 1320. ‘Put the same thing [he writes] into painting and you’ve got what I’d call Scottish painting’. Thus the desire of the Scots is for ‘liberty; to express themselves freely, which in art means honestly’ (the emphasis is mine). The qualities of this native art include, ‘vigor, colour and particularly quality of paint, which means paint that is living’, where the artist has a ‘feeling for substance and quality in paint’. Crucially, Fergusson is discussing ‘modern’ or ‘progressive’ painting (with links to European art developments), rather than ‘official art [that] does not represent the art… of a country with an independent art spirit’. So, the Scottish character in art emerges in a discernible independence of spirit, expressed with honesty: the inference of integrity and moral courage being deliberate. National character is evident too in an energy and intensity conveyed and made visible via technique, approach to colour, and in a use of paint that celebrates its intrinsic material and expressive qualities – that in turn results in a painted surface both vivid and alive. This characterisation by Fergusson is useful to an understanding of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (and indeed the training she underwent as a student), for her strengths as an artist belong to those he identifies as particular to her native tradition. His description of national tendencies and motivations offers insight into the forces that informed the narrative of her personal artistic journey, as well as into the intrinsic qualities of her work. In his earlier, magisterial Scottish Painting, J L Caw, as Director of the National Galleries of Scotland, also appeals to the importance of ‘native independence’ and individualism when describing the ‘the inflection of nationality’ in ‘the subjective, emotional and technical characteristics of Scottish painting’.7 The country’s artists are gifted ‘with dramatic instinct, imaginative insight, pictorial power’ and ‘sincerity’ (what Fergusson calls ‘honesty’). Having an ‘intense love of Nature’, Scottish artists are content ‘with the world about them’, and are less interested in ‘invention’– by which I take Caw to mean embellishment (for effect) or lack of ‘sincerity’. In defining this further, he makes a crucial distinction between invention and imagination, and between the subject and its significance. Imagination (the strength of the Scot) apprehends and is concerned with the meaning of a subject rather than with its ostensible character. Interestingly, Caw sees evidence of the tendency to abstraction associated with Scottish philosophy, theology, and argument, also in the country’s art: where ‘abstraction’ means ‘those qualities of selection, concentration, and arrangement’ that are crucial to all ‘really fine’ painting. Defined by Caw as particularly Scottish, these direct, emotional as well as factual, responses to the world are characteristic of both the life and art of Barns-

Graham. Her personal and professional engagement with life was both profound and passionate: she was captivated by its factual realities and surface beauty, and also by her apprehension of underlying meaning. Her imaginative response to the world – to the forces that animate it, as well as to the detail of its appearance – was expressed in a personal vocabulary that encompassed both the representational and the abstract: each as capable as the other of conveying the essence (the truth) of her vision. However abstract her language as a painter became, her work was always grounded in her sensual experience of, and great joy in, the world. The centrality of colour in Scottish painting has its origin, Caw believes, in ‘a racial instinct [for its] appreciation’. In turn this ‘love of colour’ – and I would argue, also the acute sensitivity to it – is rooted in the ‘exceptional chromatic qualities’ of Scotland itself, where ‘the finer modulations of colour’ are accentuated by the particularities of the light. Scottish painters’ colour, ‘like that of their country, combines softness with intensity, and is rich, varied, beautiful’. The latter is a lovely description into which Barns-Graham’s use and control of colour fits perfectly. Moreover, Caw’s reference to the subtle qualities and effects of the northern light on tone and hue, suggests another element in her native experience that was crucial to an artist who had an exceptional and innate sensitivity to the atmospherics of colour. In her acute sensitivity to its nuances and in her technical command of it, Barns-Graham shared with her fellow Scots their ‘special gifts as colourists’.8 Her particularly acute colour sensibility was made the more intense by her having synesthesia: the automatic association of (in her case) all sensory information with colour. For some a source of tribulation, Barns-Graham delighted in an interior world where people, events, places, letters of the alphabet, etc., were anchored in memory by the intuitive assignment of colour. Trained by men known collectively as ‘The Scottish Colourists’, her exploration of this aspect of painting was a constant refrain in her work. At certain periods the power of colour to convey emotion and meaning was deliberately exploited, as was at other times, the optical effects of progressive and measured changes in hue of a limited number of colours. While it played a central role in her art, for most of her career colour was contained and controlled by form. In the last decades of her career bold and free (independent) use of it became a dominant feature of her art. Colour was to have its most free and joyous expression in the work produced in her final years.

A sound foundation in art

The predominant reading of Barns-Graham’s art begins in 1940, with her arrival in St Ives. As a consequence it is assumed that her exemplars were those artists she initially encountered there: in particular Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo and the Cornishman, Alfred Wallis. The aesthetic of these artists undoubtedly appealed to someone already experimenting with the simplification of form, and with achieving as direct as possible a translation into paint of her response to her subject. However it is inadequate to interpret the subsequent development of her work exclusively in relation to the ‘influence’ of these and other artists who were already, or who would become, associated with St Ives. In this context Barns-Graham is often, even now, regarded as a satellite on the British modernist star map. There has been little consideration of the particular and individual in her work, nor of from where these attributes may stem. Seen solely in the context of ‘group activity’ in St Ives, her independent career – one in which from 1960 until her death in 2004, she

Torcello, 1954 - Page 36

Warm Up, Cool Down, 1979 - Page 41

Scorpio Series No.1,1995 - Page 4

The Blue Studio, c.1947-8 - Page 27

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divided her time between Cornwall and Fife – has received scant attention, and thus neither her personal achievement, nor her consequent wider contribution, have been explored. While her evolving preoccupations reflected many of the key issues with which artists engaged in the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the next, she pursued these concerns with her own unique strengths and aptitudes as an artist. The principles upon which Barns-Graham relied throughout her long career, and the unique combination of qualities in her art, have their origin in the practical and aesthetic education she received in Edinburgh. This training was in turn informed by a pan-European cultural tradition and philosophical independence of thought rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment. Barns-Graham did not, as it were, arrive in Cornwall as a blank canvas. She could not have left Edinburgh College of Art unaffected by the traditions and concerns embodied in the teaching there. Nor could she have been entirely indifferent to the artistic lineage and wider cultural heritage of her native country: a heritage through which her own family, as modest landed gentry, were defined. When the artist alighted from the train in St Ives in March 1940, the example of her tutors and through them of Scottish – as well as recent and contemporary European, largely French – painting, were in her baggage together with the materials and tools of her craft. Not only were these the foundations upon which her mature practice was built, they continued to provide structure and support for her life-long exploration as a painter and draftswoman. Close by the Old Town and thus not far from Castle Rock that dominates the City’s skyline and history, the College of Art (ECA) lies at the heart of Edinburgh. By way of steep cobbled streets it is close to the National Gallery, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Scottish Museum: all bastions of both Scottish and international culture, each a destination and resource for art students. In her eighties Barns-Graham recalled her years in Edinburgh (1931-37) as amongst her happiest. This was palpably an exciting decade to be at ECA, producing as it did many artists who were to become leading figures of their generation. Under its inspirational Principal Hubert Lindsay Wellington, it was a period of increased confidence and influence for the College, both at home and abroad. In the curriculum Wellington promoted breadth of knowledge in the ‘cultural and historical values of Art’ as well as intensive, focused study, believing that too much of the latter, with none of the former did students a disservice.9 Wellington’s personal ‘insight and sympathy’ in his dealings with students and staff, were of particular importance for Barns-Graham, as she struggled during her years at ECA equally against ill health and a domineering father.10 The Principal’s support and advice were crucial to her momentous decision to establish her professional, independent life as an artist, not in Scotland but in the Cornish St Ives. The energy and liveliness of the College Barns-Graham so much enjoyed, was due also to the quality of the teaching staff Wellington led, who were themselves the cream of an earlier generation trained at Edinburgh. She and her fellows were taught by some of the greatest painters Scotland produced in the twentieth century, who provided students with a broad introduction to not only historical, but to modern art movements and their central figures. In this they were supported by Scottish art’s traditional links with the studios of Europe, in particular of Paris. The world of art was revealed in the diversity of the tutors’ own work and enthusiasms, as well as that of fellow students, in argument and discussion, and not least through lectures by leading figures in the arts. Among these was Herbert Read, art critic and champion

of British Modernism, and for two years (1931-3) Professor of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh. Barns-Graham – who was to meet Read again in St Ives – attended his series of lectures on historical European art and current developments in Continental art and architecture. To a degree these followed the format of his seminal book The Meaning of Art published shortly after he arrived in Edinburgh, which includes discussion of principal twentieth-century artists such as Picasso, Paul Klee and Henry Moore. In his lectures Read illustrated work by among others, the sculptors Constantin Brancusi (who Barns-Graham was to meet in the 1950s) and Barbara Hepworth, later to become a key figure in both the St Ives community of artists and in the life of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. The teaching at ECA was predicated on the belief that ‘Art is the power of expressing emotion or feeling through representation – not necessarily imitative representation, although real training or study must begin there. To be able to express an emotion by means of form or colour may be said to be the foundation of all Art… and such achievement rests principally on Drawing.’11 The motivational principles that underlay Barns-Graham’s practice throughout her career could hardly be better expressed. Her Diploma foundation course was ‘arranged solely with the object of training the eye and hand to work in perfect unison, and incidentally so that the student may begin to understand the wide scope of expression possible through drawing’. The intention was to train the students to really see (the emphasis is mine), to thus grasp the significance and meaning of ‘the beautiful in Nature’. Pleasure in the world, and the ability to translate it into line and paint, resulted from the practice of accurate observation.12 In her keen eye and acute awareness of the world, her adherence to this discipline never waivered throughout Barns-Graham’s life. Her career was marked by a constant return to the natural world, by a continuing pleasure in the forms, colours and movement she discovered there. She found the intricacies of a mussel shell as captivating as the contours of a landscape, or the rise and fall of sea waves. Her eye for detail was extraordinary, her close examination of the geometry of a frozen puddle, or the wind-conjured patterning of sand, were sources of both lyrical representational drawings and uncompromisingly abstract forms. Both languages embody the nature and quality of her experience. From close attention came a desire not for elaboration, but for simplicity: to capture the complex character of her subject in a few swift lines, in a process of distillation, of recognising the essence of form, the essential nature of which was taught at ECA by Donald Moodie, whose virtuosity and fluency of line made his Life Drawing classes memorable. Students were introduced to the values of art’s history through painting tutor David Foggie, for whom painting after Degas had gone down hill (and whose own drawings, Barns-Graham felt, had the quality of his hero), and through David Alison, portrait painter and Head of the School of Drawing and Painting, who looked to the example of Velasquez, Manet and the Scot, Henry Raeburn. Although he taught Life Painting for only four terms during 1933-4, S J Peploe left a lasting impression on Barns-Graham. Like the other Scottish Colourists who were ECA tutors, he loved the qualities of the painted surface. This feeling for the physical properties of the media is undoubtedly a characteristic of Barns-Graham’s art. In her first childhood paintings, her love of colour is already evident, but it was her teachers who introduced her to the pleasures of the medium itself. The tutor’s who lived most vividly in the artist’s memory were (Sir) William Gillies and his close friend John (Johnny) Maxwell. Gillies, whose own interests as a painter encompassed André Derain, Pierre Bonnard and Matisse was a charismatic

Composition (Sea), 1954 - Page 33

Portrait of Allan Barns-Graham, 1932-3Page 18

Drawing from the Antique (Head), April 1932 - Page 19

[Still Life, Yellow] c.1936 - Page 22

Portrait of Henry Crowe, 1939 - Page 23

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tutor of Life Painting, Life Drawing and Still Life. Whatever the subject, he taught the sensitive use of pigment and ‘the love of rich colour and the tactile handling of paint’.13 More than any other, he inspired Barns-Graham’s deep commitment to her craft and to its meaning. She found his conviction as an artist, as well as his gentleness as a teacher quite ‘wonderful’. He spoke of the pleasure of painting, never of the struggle. He believed art and life to be indivisible, the former simply a heightened form of the latter. These were lessons Barns-Graham carried with her all her life. She certainly shared Gillies’ delight in the visible world, his acute powers of observation, and confidence to select and simplify. As she grew older the latter process became more and more central to her art. Of Gillies Edward Gage has said, that the ‘principal elements in his mode of expression were line and colour. The line is sinuous, taut, decisive, full of truth and grace’.14 This might be a description of the mature work of Barns-Graham. Johnny Maxwell, one the youngest members of staff in the Painting School, was like many colleagues, a former student. A teacher of general drawing and still life, he was remembered for his technical mastery and, like Gillies, for his openness and generosity. Barns-Graham and her fellows valued them both as particularly good teachers. Interested in the art of Marc Chagall, Klee and Miró, Maxwell was a visionary in his own work, whose particular contribution was in providing ‘a model to younger artists of a function for the imagination for once not dependent on the concrete’.15 He was a key influence on Barns-Graham’s friend and fellow student William Gear, and also on Alan Davie, who registered as a student in the autumn of 1937. Barns-Graham had graduated that summer, but their paths would cross at Leeds College of Art in the 1950s, and in Cornwall where Davie was to have a second home. The independence of the imagination was of course crucial to the whole modernist enterprise. Barns-Graham’s confidence in the ability of her imagination to convey meaning through an increasingly abstract language, blossomed in the freedom of life in St Ives and in the company of those artists she worked alongside. But it was in the Edinburgh studios that she first encountered the idea, under the guidance of tutors who were themselves engaged with art’s changing agenda since Cézanne, and with the new directions in European and British modernism. Among the group of artists with whom Barns-Graham would later associate in St Ives, a full academic art training was rare, and occasionally the fact of her academic background was held against her. Yet ECA provided a solid foundation on which to construct her achievement as an artist. Throughout her career, drawing remained the backbone of her art. Critics have consistently remarked upon the quality and inventiveness of her line. During even the most uncompromisingly abstract periods of her work Barns-Graham never neglected the observable world as her primary inspiration, nor the most immediate means of translating it, through drawing. The most lyrical of figurative drawings were created in parallel with rigorous abstract paintings. Drawing, taught as the rock on which all else rested, was her anchor in the observable world, always a source of refreshment and renewal.

St Ives

Influences on Barns-Graham’s approach to landscape in the first years of her being in St Ives are often credited to the example of painters Christopher Wood (who had died in 1930) and Ben Nicholson. Certainly the direct, child-like approach to drawing, limited palette and flattening of the picture plane, employed by them, are

relevant to Barns-Graham’s first mature work in Cornwall. As a student she was familiar with their art and was undoubtedly drawn to their example, as indeed she was to that of others associated with the two men, including Nicholson’s first wife Winifred (who Barns-Graham came to know later, as a friend). However, the work of Johnny Maxwell and William Gillies calls into question how direct this ‘influence’ may have been. Eclectic in their enthusiasms, the two Scots responded to the art of their English contemporaries. In not just the simplicity of drawing and the flattened picture space, but also in the relationship of interior to external view, there are paintings by Maxwell from the mid 1930s reminiscent of work by both Wood and Nicholson. But of more interest here, there are echoes of these same paintings by Maxwell in the work of Barns-Graham from the 1940s. Moreover, there are striking similarities in his ex-student’s first views of St Ives, to paintings of small fishing ports by Gillies from the 1920s. In the work of tutor and student, the shallow picture space and rendering of form as flat planes of colour, serve to give emphasis to the painting’s own structure. What is of importance to both is the reality of the painted (constructed) equivalent of their experience of the subject, rather than formal verisimilitude. In her first childhood paintings Barns-Graham had flattened space and reduced form to simple blocks of colour, but this was the response of an untutored eye. Her mature sophisticated construction of pictorial space and the use of colour to delineate form were developed in her years at Edinburgh. What Barns-Graham took to St Ives, was an aesthetic in part influenced by the English painters, but which was mediated through the work of her most valued tutors, Gillies and Maxwell. In 1940, at the age of twenty-seven, Barns-Graham was on the threshold of independent experimentation, and had already begun to move her work towards a pared language of abstract forms. She was interested in painting for its own sake, in the exploration of the characteristics, qualities and potentials of ‘pure’ line, form and colour. In St Ives she became part of a loosely knit group of artists working at the heart of avant-garde practice, and she was not judged by them to be out of place. Ben Nicholson in particular became a close friend and artistic ally. She was welcomed too by the (largely older) traditional painters, long established in St Ives. Armed with a sound art education, her first years in St Ives were spent in absorbing something of the lessons both groups had to offer. In a process common to all young artists, the example of others was filtered and assimilated: made her own through the light of her personal vision and the strengths of her own aptitudes, which had been honed in the studios of Edinburgh College of Art. Some forty years later, on the occasion of a solo exhibition in Edinburgh, Barns-Graham was acknowledged as one of the few Scottish artists of her generation to favour abstraction, and to have embraced in particular, ‘Constructivist ways of thinking’.16 More than one critic traced her interest in non-objective art to her childhood: a reference to her early abstract compositions, or ‘secret rooms’, of squares and triangles, outlined in primary colours and then coloured in. While some reviewers drew attention to her native strength as a colourist, Barns-Graham was understood by others to have had a predisposition to abstraction long before her settling in St Ives. The solo exhibition also sparked a debate concerning the dilemma of Scottish artists who felt migration south to be necessary in the pursuit of recognition and success. Barns-Graham however, was perceived as not having had to make this choice: moving as she did with ease, back and forth across not only the geographic border, but also an aesthetic one. In her work she incorporated the disciplines of abstraction (associated with English artists such as Ben Nicholson),

West Sands (St Andrews) July, 1981Page 44

White Cottage, Carbeth, c.1930sPage 20

Sleeping Town, 1948 - Page 29

Composition (Sea), 1954 - Page 33

View of St Ives, 1940 - Page 25

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with the ‘lyrical comprehension of nature and its dynamics, …that empathy with the natural order of things’ associated with the Scottish tradition.17 Barns-Graham had achieved not only a personal synthesis of styles and traditions in her art, but had also attained stature as an artist of distinction in both Scotland and beyond its borders.

A Return to Scotland

Having been a regular visitor for the previous twenty years, Barns-Graham inherited the family estate of Balmungo from her Aunt in 1960. At first uncertain of her ability to retain the house and estate while resident in Cornwall, she found it impossible to part with it and its life-long associations. This decision was to have a profound effect on both her private and professional life. Thereafter, work would be pursued at both ends of the country, with Scotland and its landscape now more consistently (and at times insistently), proffering new inspiration. Despite the logistical problems, it was clear from the beginning that Balmungo offered Barns-Graham respite and refreshment from the intensity of life in a busy, competitive, artistic community. Perhaps as importantly it re-established a tangible link with her roots and a refreshment of the Scottish dimension of her character – the importance of which would emerge only gradually. The renewal of her connection with St Andrews, where as a child she had lived and gone to school, re-awakened her emotional bonds with Scotland. Her regular residency there also led to the strengthening of professional links and to the re-establishment of her presence in the Scottish art scene. In the same year that Barns-Graham inherited Balmungo, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art opened in Edinburgh. With an initial collection of little more than a handful of works transferred from the main collections of the Scottish National Gallery, its first Keeper Douglas Hall undertook, almost single handedly, the task of assembling a collection of international modern and contemporary art for Scotland’s capital. A crucial element in this was the acquisition of work by senior contemporary Scottish artists. To this end, Hall (who was to become a close friend and supporter of the artist) visited Barns-Graham in St Ives. This was an important, official recognition of her native status that together with regular exhibitions at The Scottish Gallery and (a little later) the Richard Demarco Gallery (also in Edinburgh), and coinciding as it did with an emerging pattern of partial residence, strengthened the artist’s professional profile in Scotland. Throughout her years in St Ives Barns-Graham had regularly contributed to group exhibitions by Scottish artists, both north and south of the border. From now on, close ties with her native country were to become as important to her career as was her position among the artists of St Ives. In 1977, while acknowledging Barns-Graham’s partial return to Scotland, Edward Gage also recognised hers as the ‘singular Scottish contribution to the international language of Constructivist painting [with her] dynamic groupings of geometrical forms’.18 The private, tranquil environment of Balmungo, its substantial stone house set in formal grounds surrounded by woodland, provided a dramatic contrast to the busy narrow stone streets of St Ives, and to her newly built Barnaloft Piazza Studio on the very edge of Porthmeor Beach. On the other hand the sharp intensity and clarity of light, seemed to Barns-Graham to have the same quality in St Andrews as it did in St Ives. She delighted equally in the differences and the similarities: the interconnections made what might otherwise have seemed a disjointed life feel like a continuum. The ownership of a second home in Fife imposed a new rhythm on

the artist’s life, in which a regular pattern emerged of dividing her time between the southwest and the northeast – with working studios in both. Drawings and canvases moved up and down the country with her, themes and ideas begun in one location being pursued and developed in the other. There is little doubt that without these twin creative centres Barns-Graham’s work would have developed differently: that without her Scottish base important themes might never have emerged. Her fertile imagination was informed by her experience at both ends of the country: they each fed into the other. Fife proved to be a rich source of inspiration and creative renewal, broadening her sources and, in response to them, the expressive language with which she explored them. At Balmungo the artist returned to the drawing of landscape: her attention caught also by seasonal changes in the garden, by the detail of toadstools or farm-track puddles turned to ice. The latter, sparked a productive return to the theme of the geometry of ice and its internal structure, first encountered in Switzerland in the late 1940s. Drawings of specimen trees planted by her grandfather, and of the plant life of the estate, led to abstract meditations on formations, patterning and colour, first observed in nature. While this process was not unique to work done in Fife, Balmungo and its immediate surroundings presented Barns-Graham with a greater variety of both cultivated and woodland forms that proved imaginatively fertile, as did subjects such as the aerial view of the garden from her bedroom window, or the trajectory of vapour trails across the skies left by aircraft based at RAF Leuchars. Nor was her mature experience of Scotland and its impact upon her art restricted to Fife. Extended visits to Orkney brought a new toughness and clarity to her work, as well as a tonal range that encompassed rich burnt orange and muted sea-rock greens. Initially inspired by the ‘pavement’ strata of certain Orcadian costal rock formations, prolonged multiple series of relief paintings followed constructed and painted in both studios.

Late Collaboration

In the last five years of her life Scotland provided Barns-Graham with an unexpected opportunity for a late flowering of astonishingly inventive work. Remarkably quickly she developed a highly successful working partnership in the making of screenprints, with artist-printmakers Carol Robertson and Robert Adam, who together are Graal Press, of Roslin in Midlothian. Their technical invention and expertise made it possible for Barns-Graham to set down her ideas with her brush as directly and spontaneously as she would on paper or canvas; enabling the creation of a sequence of print series which are bold in their application of colour, dynamic in gestural form, vibrant as well as stunningly beautiful. The vitality and inventiveness of the printmaking process extended into the artist’s work on paper and canvas too, unlocking it seems an ultimate freedom to paint some of the most daring works of her entire career: encompassing the lyrical, the joyous, the meditative and the profoundly moving. These late works are in a very real sense a culmination, where driven by an increasing sense of urgency, Barns-Graham achieved an acute level of creative invention, intensely felt, deliberately risk-taking in nature. They reveal her recurring concern with gesture and with a process of distillation: in which all but a core vocabulary is relinquished in order that her creative idea may be set down in bold simple form. It is possible to see them too in relation to her identity as a colourist:

Warbeth 7, 1985 - Page 47

St Regulus Tower (St Andrews Cathedral Series), 1979Page 42

Deodar Tree I, 1980 - Page 43

Variation on a Theme, Splintered Ice No.1 1987 - Page 49

Red Playing Games I, 2000 - Page 54

16 17

evident not only in her profound understanding of the qualities and substance of colour, but also in her highly developed sensitivity to its tonal subtleties that made her handling and control of it masterly. These essential and characteristic elements of her art – brought into such dramatic focus in the work of her final years – were first articulated and explored within the teaching programme of Edinburgh School of Art. In his survey of Scottish painting since 1945, Edward Gage describes Barns-Graham as reducing ‘matters to terms of mechanistic austerity more often palatable to English than Scottish temperaments’.19 That individual works in the artist’s extensive Things of a Kind series – one in which the language depends upon the repetition of geometric forms (the square or circle) – were made in direct reaction to and expression of personal experiences (the break up of her marriage) or events in the wider world (the assassination of Martin Luther King) belies this reading. The language may be abstract, but the artist’s emotional imperative and aesthetic intention was nearer to the symbolic and metaphoric. Far from being mechanistic, I would argue that however extreme her formal abstractions, they were always anchored firmly in her felt, as well as aesthetic, response to the world. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham profoundly believed that within the bewildering variety of life there is purpose: an underlying principle, which manifests unity within apparent diversity. In this as in so much else, she was in reality a profoundly romantic artist; and as such deeply connected to her native consciousness, artistic heritage, and to the Scottish temperament.

1 The ideas expressed in this essay were first articulated in W. Barns-Graham: a studio life, Lund Humphries, 2001; a new, expanded edition of which was published in 20112 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: An Enduring Image, Tate Galley St Ives, November 1999-May 20003 ‘Architectural Design’, vol. XXVI, July 1956, unsigned review of W. Barns-Graham: An Exhibition of Paintings from Sicily, Italy and South-west Cornwall, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, July 19564 The Scottish Gallery: The First 150 Years, Aitken Dott, 19925 Timothy Clifford et al., Foreword, The Scottish Colourists 1900-1930 exhibition catalogue, National Galleries of Scotland /Royal Academy of Arts, 20006 Indeed there was only a short period in the late 1940s when Barns-Graham did not show in Scotland on a fairly regular basis.7 James L Caw, Scottish Painting Past and Present, 1620-1908, First published 1908 (Kingsmead Reprints, Bath 1975) p.470 ff. Caw was Director of the National Galleries of Scotland, 1907-30 8 all quotes ibid9 Wellington used the quoted phrase in his first report as Principal; ECA Report of the Board of Management, 1932-310 The description of Wellington is by Sir William Rothenstein, in Men and Memories, vol. 2, Faber & Faber, London 1932, p.38111 Edinburgh College of Art Prospectus 1935-612 ECA Prospectus 1935-6, ibid13 Joanna Soden and Victoria Keller, William Gillies, Canongate, Edinburgh 1998, p.14914 Edward Gage The Eye in the Wind: Contemporary Scottish Painting since 1945, Collins 1977, p.2815 Duncan Macmillan Scottish Art in the 20th Century, Mainstream, Edinburgh 1994, p.6816 Edward Gage in The Scotsman, 22 August 198117 Felix McCullough in Arts Review, August 198118 Edward Gage, The Eye in the Wind: ibid19 Edward Gage, The Eye in the Wind: ibid

A Song of Night, 2003 - Page 54

Wait, 2003 - Page 53

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Portrait of Allan Barns-Graham, 1932-3, charcoal on paper, 48.5x31.6cm BGT2301

Done when she was around twenty, a year or so after enrolling at Edinburgh College of Art, this is a confident and penetrating study of Barns-Graham’s father. Although their relationship was never an easy one, there is a tenderness in the line with which she models the face and records the bone structure beneath an ageing skin.

Life Class (multi-layered figure drawing) (Sheets A1 & A3), 1930s, pencil on tracing paper, 56.3x38.2cm BGT2744-G

Drawing from the Antique (Head), April 1932, pencil on paper, 56.2x38cm BGT2713

20 21

White Cottage, Carbeth, c.1930s, oil on canvas, 41x51cm BGT1118

This work from Barns-Graham’s student portfolio shows all the hallmarks of the teaching at Edinburgh School of Art, in particular the approach to pictorial form and space she learnt in its studios. The expressive approach to painting (and to landscape in particular) of her much-loved tutor William Gillies, is evident in this apparently simple, yet confident and poetic evocation of the estate landscape at her paternal family home near Blanefield, Stirlingshire. The flattening out of the picture space, simplification of form, and constructional nature of her brushstrokes were all to become central elements in the artist’s mature abstract work.

Old Mill, 1938, pen, ink and mixed media on paper, 27x38cm BGT9459

22 23

[Still Life, Yellow], c.1936, oil on hardboard, 52x74.8cm BGT1063

This painting appears in photographs of Barns-Graham’s Diploma Exhibition. It is an entirely competent and rather lovely treatment of a subject central to the College curriculum: with the pattern of fruit and vegetables and their colour uniting the composition.

Portrait of Henry Crowe, 1939, oil on board, 46x38cm BGT296

Paintings from this period show the degree of experimentation Barns-Graham was engaged in prior to her departure for St Ives. Continuing to paint portraits for some years after leaving Edinburgh, they reveal as here, the impact of a post-graduate study visit to the galleries of Paris, and in particular an exhibition of work by Vincent van Gogh. Encouraged by her tutors, she spent time too at the International Exhibition hosted by the City, the French section of which presented major works by Matisse, Renoir, Corot, Courbet and Cézanne. The artist’s interest in building form through the rhythmic patterning of individual, structural brushstrokes suggests an engagement with Post Impressionist techniques first encountered in the teaching at Edinburgh.

24 25

View of St Ives, 1940, oil on canvas, 63.5x76.5cm BGT3271

Recently discovered and restored, this painting of St Ives rooftops with the harbour and ‘The Island’ beyond is a wonderful, early evocation of the central feature of her new home. Barns-Graham would again and again draw and paint the harbour and its environs. Contemporary photographs record her working at her easel in the streets of St Ives. Here, her vantage point was Tregenna Terrace, high above the town. The simplification of form and textural approach to mark making, together with the paleness of palette in the foreground, darkening in The Island and the sea, suggest the sharp penetrating light of Cornwall, so reminiscent of that of her native St Andrews.

26 27

Island Factory St Ives (Camouflage No.2), 1944, pastel on coloured paper, 38.4x56.2cm BGT1642

From Barns-Graham’s brief involvement in war work, come a small series of fine pastel and charcoal drawings of the interior of a factory making camouflage nets, of which this is one. While appearing to have been done in situ, the sophisticated structure of the drawing belies this initial impression. It is difficult to believe that so studied and constructed an image could have been achieved in the bustle of a factory. Small, quickly executed sketches (hardly more than notations) in the artist’s archive confirm that this drawing and its fellows are studio-based.

The configuration of the elements closely parallels the measured divisions of the Golden Section or golden ratio, which was later to become central in the artist’s work. A revised edition of Professor D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form in 1942 introduced a new generation of artists to this method of (apparently harmonious, aesthetically satisfying) mathematical proportion first elaborated by the Ancient Greeks. Barns-Graham had known the Professor (of Natural History at St Andrews University) since her childhood.

The Blue Studio, c.1947-8, oil on canvas, 92x122.2cm BGT3281

Although this recently re-discovered canvas is undated the relationship to other work from the late 1940s suggests that it was painted around this time, when Barns-Graham was experimenting with a number of different approaches to the treatment of form and pictorial space. Here the artist has moved on from the more formal structure and treatment of the still life subject in the student work, [Still Life, Yellow] c.1936 (Page 22).

In The Blue Studio, with direct and fluid brushstrokes in the delineation of her subject, she creates a cubist sense of space, where the contents of the studio are tipped towards the picture plane, and thus towards us the viewer – the better to emphasise the flatness of the painted surface (rather than it as the conveyor of perspectival, illusionistic space) and the objects as compositional elements, linked through formal construction, rhythm and colour. Increasingly, objects such as the red table, liberated from the confines of their original character, through simplification and abstraction, were to feature in the artist’s work as entirely independent formal elements.

28 29

Sleeping Town, 1948, oil on canvas, 56x76cm BGT711

When this painting was first exhibited in the summer of 1948 a reviewer in ‘The St Ives Times’ was prompted to say of Barns-Graham that she ‘paints [Cornwall] without compromise or fuss. She has found the foam lipped breakers, that grey light, nearly crumbling walls and rusted junk, she has found the soul of St Ives in her visionary Sleeping Town.’

This is a haunting, poetic evocation of St Ives, asleep because of the time of day and also in the silence of empty boats, waiting for the fishermen to return. One thinks of a fishing industry increasingly in decline that might ‘sleep’ forever. If the painting’s meaning is layered, so too is the artist’s activity. Through the surface paint ghostly images appear of a previous painting, or earlier stages of this. It is a confident palimpsest of impressions, a composite of a number of individual images the artist had explored before in drawings and paintings. The boats drawn up on the sand in the middle distance are no longer individual or specific: they have become signs, which represent the generic object and its form. Barns-Graham has evolved her own language of symbols that together signify her response not simply to the visible town, but to its physical character, its history and contemporary life. Her ability to identify with, and capture the essence of her subject led fellow artist and writer Sven Berlin, to hope that she would more often ‘allow her self to merge into Cornwall ... For when she does this she creates a poetry that is moving and unpretentious. The world of her Sleeping Town with its gold and black, its ghostly white and shifting transparent forms, rehabilitates our belief in the fantasy of paint ... and its potentiality of invention.’

30 31

Glacier Study, 1948-9, mixed media on paper, 40.1x58cm BGT2304

Two visits to Switzerland in the late 1940s produced a marked and profound change in the direction of Barns-Graham’s work. While there, and in particular in response to the Glaciers of Grindelwald, she did a number of drawings and watercolours. Upon her return to St Ives there followed an outpouring of work inspired by the transparency and multi-faced formations of ancient ice. Over the next decade she produced a series of meditations on the glacier theme, in which natural structure became more and more abstracted. While the expanse of the ice field was breathtaking, it was its crystalline heart that enthralled her. Glacier Study and Study For Large Shelf I [Glacier] of 1951 (page 31) are powerful evocations of the layered geometry of glacial form: the drama of sweeping curves and abrupt angles, of sharp contours and smooth-sided fissures, and of the contrast between brightly lit surfaces and deeply shadowed declivities.

Study For Large Shelf I [Glacier], 1951, offset drawing and wash on paper, 48x62.7cm BGT7072

32 33

Composition (Sea), 1954, oil on canvas, 46x61cm BGT6407

Always anchored in the pattern, colour and textures, of natural form – in the natural rhythms of sea and rock as here – the essential subject of Barns-Graham’s move into abstraction in the 1950s is the formal relationship of each shape, angle, directional trajectory, one to another, and of the individual to the whole. This is a painting concerned to evoke not depict. It records very directly too the artist’s engagement with the painting’s construction: broad brushstrokes are visible, as is the activity of scraping and abrasion that create an equivalent of the surfaces of observed form. Composition (Sea) is kin to a substantial Rock Form series in which the artist achieved a tough, uncompromising abstract language. Its sharply defined geometry, in which depth is implied, led to a series of small relief-paintings carved in hardboard where depth became actual. The colour palette here, subdued and restrained as it may be, is none the less dramatic, conjuring the chill of a winter sea and its rocky coastline.

34 35

Geoff and Scruffy, 1956, oil on canvas, 76x63cm BGT568

Named for a friend and his dog – the latter being so large as to obscure the former when sitting on his master’s knee – a number of works bear this generic title: most being horizontal, with the lower ‘half circle’ form of this paint-ing positioned to the left. There is no visual reference here to the initial inspiration, for the artist’s interest is in the building of a composition through the interrelation of geometric form and colour hue. The repetition of outlined form implies the possibility of layering, of movement and of something (like Geoff), hidden. However the origin of the two central geometric forms, in a table and chair has been revealed in two small paintings from the early 1950s included in the exhibition (not illustrated). In a process of upending both tabletop and curved chair seat, and of reducing the table’s legs to a pair of strong verticals, where the resultant elements sit flat against the picture plane (in a manner influenced by Cubism), Barns-Graham invented a dynamic and creatively fertile set of abstract characters.

36 37

Porticello (Cape Zafferano & Rocks Sicily), 1955, gouache and pencil on paper, 46.8x58.1cm BGT1682

Torcello, 1954, pencil and wash on paper, 45.7x55.5cm BGT6210

The lyricism of this drawing – one of a number done on the spot – testifies to Barns-Graham’s intoxication with the landscape, architecture and light of Italy. Much has been made of the similarities between the artist’s drawing style (in particular the use of a pre-prepared ground wash of colour) and that of her close friend and colleague in St Ives, Ben Nicholson. Close comparison reveals however that the nature of their line is quite different in character and intention: as one would expect of artists from different generations and with different degrees of formal training. Barns-Graham was rare in the St Ives community of artists in having completed a formal art training in which drawing was both the foundation and touchstone.

38 39

Spanish Coast No.3 [Spanish Island Series], 1958-9, oil on canvas, 67x84.5cm BGT6406

It was Barns-Graham’s great strength to intuitively recognise the significance for her art of a particular landscape and to embrace the potential for change and development that it offered. Like her visits to Switzerland in the late 1940s, a short stay in Spain in 1958 had a profound effect on both her formal vocabulary and her palette. (See also page 39) This painting in particular would prove to be a significant departure. The juxtaposition of circle with simple, direct brushstrokes and the urgent freehand line over a solid block of colour to the right, were to become part of an established repertoire, which would re-emerge with enormous vitality and bravura in the Scorpio Series of the 1990s (page 4) and beyond. The rich palette Barns-Graham employs in Spanish Coast No.3 is redolent of a sun-baked landscape, its brooding quality almost elegiac. If more evidence of her consummate command as a colourist is needed, then one need look no further.

Untitled [Terragona], 1960, gouache on paper, 58.3x91cm BGT3035

40 41

Assembly of Nine, 1964, oil on hardboard, 58.5x91.5cm BGT558

Byzantine in its glowing colour, this painting belongs to a prolonged and meditative series of paintings, Things of a Kind in Order and Disorder that had as their focus the translation of experience and emotion into a reduced formal vocabulary of repeated squares or circles and their subdivision. Each individual element’s interaction with immediate neighbours and with the assemblage as a whole is the result of Barns-Graham having (literally) nudged an orderly sequence of cardboard forms: to expose the changes that occur in relational dynamics as the result of a specific event. The consequent patterning of interlocking energies is given emphasis and held together in unity or opposition by subtle manipulation of colour relationships. The title is a play on both the number of squares per line, and on the symbolic number of adherents that constitute a devotional meeting of the Baha’i faith, to which Barns-Graham had been introduced by the potter Bernard Leach, her friend and neighbour in St Ives.

Warm Up, Cool Down, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 122x92.5cm BGT383

Part of her Meditation Series in which a tight grid of precise squares carry complex essays in colour sensation, in paintings such as this Barns-Graham engaged with the essence of the colourist’s enterprise. In ranks of carefully calculated colour gradations she exploits the combined effect of individual colour or hue, its brightness (tone) and saturation (intensity) – as well as its apparent ‘temperature’ ‘weight’ and ‘energy’. Her skill in the manipulation of colour as an expressive vehicle, which can convey not only visual sensation, but also mood and emotion, is clear.

42 43

St Regulus Tower (St Andrews Cathedral Series), 1979, pencil and oil on board, 39x53cm BGT583Deodar Tree I, 1980, pencil on paper, 55.2x76.3cm BGT655

Planted, family tradition has it by her great uncle, this exotic tree dominates the driveway at Barns-Graham’s Fife home. A species of cedar native to the western Himalayas, it is sacred to the Hindu religion: its spiritual association pleased her. Throughout her life the artist continually returned to the natural world for refreshment and solace, and to drawing as the foundation of her vision of the forms, movement and colours around her. Here she captures both the core strength of the tree and its ability to bend and dance at the behest of a strong wind.

44 45

West Sands (St Andrews) July 1981, acrylic and pencil on card, 27x38cm BGT760

Expanding Forms (Entrance No.2), Touchpoint Series, 1981, oil on hardboard, 59.7x59.2cm BGT598

46 47

Warbeth I, 1985, collage: acrylic on card on hardboard, 78.1x25.4cm BGT754

Warbeth 7, 1985, collage: acrylic on paper on hardboard, 25.6x25.5cm BGT6163

In the mid-1980s Barns-Graham visited Orkney and subsequently spent some time working from a studio in Stromness. Once more a new and dramatically different landscape engaged her attention and led to a sequence of paintings and three-dimensional collages. Shoreline slabs of geological geometry led to a cooling of her palette which here is given a rich texture by abrasion and fluid brushstrokes. Jewel-like passages of penetrating blue animate the collage and give a sensation of solid form potentially in movement. Elsewhere the tapestry of fields on the Orkney Islands lent a warmer, ruddier hue to the artist’s colour (page 46).

48 49

Variation on a Theme, Splintered Ice No.1, 1987, oil on canvas, 91.5x122cm BGT6463

50 51

Quarry Nr Teseguite, Lanzarote, 1989, acrylic on paper, 55.6x75.2cm BGT621

From the first of four enormously productive visits Barns-Graham made to Lanzarote, in which she ‘drew everything’ from lava flows to houses. Here we see her perennial engagement with the interior /exterior formation of landscape: with the relationship between geological form and its outer skin, that she first explored in her famous Glacier Series and later in the pencil and tempera wash drawings of Italy done in the 1950s.

St Nicholas Chapel, St Ives 1993, chalk on black paper, 35.1x50.2cm BGT1080

The artist’s adoption of black paper as a ground on which to draw, first used in response to the black sands of Lanzarote, led to a series of images in which she exploited the drama of white against black, in the on-going exploration of the formation and rhythms of her native landscapes.

52 53

Afghanistan, 2000, acrylic on canvas, 122x91.5cm BGT410

Wait, 2003, acrylic on canvas, 76.5x101cm BGT1020

This is one of the most dramatic and daring statements of the artist’s career. Its spatial design, in which three brushstroke forms occupy barely a third of the cobalt-blue ground, bears a meaningful relationship to Expanding Forms (Entrance No.2) Touchpoint Series 1981 (page 45). In the earlier painting Barns-Graham conveys the energy of motion through measured and tightly drawn expanding forms. Here, however, she is confident that the dynamic is manifest in the immediacy of the free forms of her own gesture. In its decisive and spare formality this is a brave work of art, startling and deeply moving – no doubt in part because we know it to be among the last works of a painter who had assiduously pursued her craft for seventy years.

54 55

Red Playing Games I, 2000, screenprint, fifteen colours on paper, edition of 75 by Graal Press, 29.5x40cm

Untitled (April), 2001, acrylic on paper, 56x76cm BGT523

56 57

White Circle Series I, 2003, screenprint, six colours on paper, edition of 70 by Graal Press, 56x56cm

During her final three years Barns-Graham created a remarkable and varied body of work, at the centre of which was a collaboration in the making of screen prints, with Carol Robertson and Robert Adam of the Midlothian-based Graal Press. (See also page 54) Her life-long habit of exploring a particular idea or theme in different media – in this case a moon form in unlimited, intangible space, inspired by the full moon rising in Cornwall and by its eclipse observed in Fife – produced a sequence of evocative images on canvas and on paper. In the White Circle Series of screenprints, of which this is one, powerful images were achieved with a minimum of formal elements and a restricted, yet rich palette. Who but an artist supremely at ease with colour and its capacity to communicate an idea, convey a sensation, carry an association, or evoke an emotion would have been so bold.

A Song of Night, 2003, acrylic on paper, 25.4x38.2cm BGT3322

58 59

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, known as Willie, was born in St Andrews, Fife, on 8 June 1912. Determining while at school that she wanted to be an artist she set

her sights on Edinburgh College of Art where, after some dispute with her father, she enrolled in 1931 and after periods of illness from which she graduated with her diploma in 1937. At the suggestion of the College’s principal Hubert Wellington, she moved to St Ives in 1940. This was a pivotal moment in her life. Early on she met Borlase Smart, Alfred Wallis and Bernard Leach, as well as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo who were living locally at Carbis Bay. She became a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists and St Ives Society of Artists but was to leave the latter in 1949 when she became one of the founding members of the breakaway Penwith Society of Arts. She was one of the exhibitors of the significant Crypt Group. Barns-Graham’s history is bound up with St Ives where she lived throughout her life, and it is the place where she experienced her first great successes as an artist. Following her travels to the Grindelwald Glacier, Switzerland in 1949 she embarked on a series of paintings and drawings which caught the attention of some of the most significant critics and curators of the day. In 1951 she won the Painting Prize in the Penwith Society of Arts in Cornwall Festival of Britain Exhibition and went on to have her first London solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in 1952. She was included in many of the important exhibitions on pioneering British abstract art that took place in the 1950s. In 1957 her life took a difficult turn with the breakdown of her marriage to David Lewis. The following years were hard. In 1960 Barns-Graham inherited a family home near St Andrews which initiated a new phase in her life. From this moment she divided her time between the two coastal communities, simultaneously establishing herself as much as a Scottish artist as a St Ives one. Balmungo House was to become the heart of her professional life, as it continues to be as the centre for the charitable trust which she established in 1987. Barns-Graham exhibited consistently throughout her career, both in private and public galleries. Though not short of exposure throughout the 1960s and 1970s, her next greatest successes did not come until the last decade of her life. Important exhibitions of her work at the Tate St Ives in 1999/2000 and 2005 and the publication of the first monograph on her life and work, Lynne Green’s ‘W. Barns-Graham: a studio life’, 2001, did much to change critical and public perceptions of her achievements and confirmed her as one of the key contributors of the St Ives School, and as a significant British modernist. She was made CBE in 2001, and received four honorary doctorates (St Andrews 1992, Plymouth 2000, Exeter 2001 and Heriot Watt Universities 2003). Her work is found in all major public collections within the UK. She died in St Andrews on 26 January 2004.

Further information about Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s life and work is located at www.barns-grahamtrust.org.uk. A new, revised and expanded edition of ‘a studio life’ has been published to coincide with her centenary.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE HRSA HRSW

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham drawing on the beach, Fife 1982 | Photo: ©Antonia Reeve, Edinburgh

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