E l e m e n t a l E n e r g i e s : T h e A r t o f W i l h e l m i n a B a r n s - G r a h a m

ElementalEnergies TheArtofWilhelmina T r i n i t y

H Barns-Graham a l l , C a m b r i d

TRINITY HALL g TRINITY HALL e CAMBRIDGE CAMBRIDGE ElementalEnergies TheArtof Wilhelmina Barns-Graham ElementalEnergies TheArtof Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Elemental Energies, The Art of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Curated by Mel Gooding

Trinity Hall, Trinity Lane, Cambridge CB2 1TJ

The exhibition is coordinated by Strand Gallery, Aldeburgh and Art First, London in cooperation with The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

The exhibition will be hung from Monday 17th September to Sunday 16th December, 2007

Open on Mondays from 9am–12pm & 2pm–3.30pm Open on Sundays: 2pm–5pm (closed on 18th November) TRINITY HALL For further information please call 01223 332555 during office hours, 9amº–5pm CAMBRIDGE WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM CBE, RSA, RSW

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, known as Willie, was born in St Andrews, , on 8th June 1912. As a child she showed very early signs of creative ability. Determining while at school that she wanted to be an artist she set her sights on College of Art where, after some dispute with her father, she enrolled in 1932, 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 , as well as , , and 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 Artists. She was one of the initial exhibitors of the significant Crypt Group.

Barns-Graham’s history is bound up with St Ives where she lived and worked until her death. The , as it came to be known, began to form in the period after the war, with , , Patrick Heron, Bryan Winter and Roger Hilton all living or staying frequently in St Ives. Barns-Graham more than held her own artistically within this challenging milieu and in recent years her pro-active contribution to the development of St Ives art has been re-assessed. During the early decades of the School, Barns-Graham felt herself to be becoming more and more sidelined by the more ambitious members of the group, which led to her not having the same high profile of those best known today. However, important shows surveying her work at the in 1999/2000 and 2005 have done much to change people’s perceptions of her achievements and repositioned her as one of the key contributors of the St Ives School.

In 1960 Barns-Graham inherited from her aunt a family home, Balmungo, near St Andrews which initiated a new phase in her life. From then she divided her time between the two coastal communi- ties, establishing herself as much as a Scottish artist as a Cornish one. The house became the heart of her business and will continue in the future to be the base for the charitable trust which she estab- lished in 1987. Her Scottish heritage plays a significant part in her art. In her later years the greatest contribution that was to make was through the hugely rewarding working relationship she developed with the printmakers, Graal Press, with whom she collaborated on an extraordinary outpouring of screen prints that are an entire body of work in their own right.

Barns-Graham exhibited consistently throughout her career, both in private and public galleries. Though not short of exposure throughout the 1960s and ’70s, her greatest successes came in the last decade of her life that brought her new audiences and accolades, and the publication of the first monograph published on her life and work, Lynne Green’s W. Barns-Graham–a studio life, now followed by Ann Gunn’s new The Prints of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: AComplete Catalogue.

She was made CBE in 2001, and received four honorary doctorates (St Andrews 1992, Plymouth 2000,

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Exeter 2001, and Heriot Watt Universities 2003). Her work is found in all major public collections Barnaloft studio, St Ives, 1966 within the UK. She died on 26th January 2004. INTRODUCTION BY THE MASTER OF TRINITY HALL

Trinity Hall is delighted to collaborate with the Barns-Graham Caritable Trust and Art First in bringing this exhibition of Wilhelmina’s work to Cambridge. It is a particular pleasure to be hosting this exhibition as part of the second in our programme of contemporary art events and, in this context, I would particularly like to extend my thanks to Ron Howell of Strand Gallery.

Cambridge colleges have a long history of patronage of the arts, stretching back to their foundation in the late middle ages. This patronage has been most notable in the sphere of music, with chapel choirs maintain- ing a round of services and training many of our leading singers. The celebrations of the 75th birthday of Sandy Goehr, a Fellow of Trinity Hall, in November 2007 will be marked by a concert and by his lecture on Serendipity and Intention: the life of a composer in the same room as this exhibition of Wilhelmina Barns- Graham – a bringing together of aural and visual which builds on two recent events. In 2006, Jonathan Clarke’s sculpture show coincided with the inauguration of our new organ; and earlier this year, an installa- tion by the leading ceramicist and Trinity Hall alumnus, Edmund de Waal, was accompanied by a perform- ance of Gesualdo’s Tenebrae. Cambridge also has a highly distinguished literary and dramatic life, with so many actors starting on their careers in student drama. At Trinity Hall, we are proud to have an Oscar winner and the current Director of the National Theatre amongst our alumni.

The colleges have been less active in the visual arts, and it is difficult to think of so many artists as actors, musicians and writers. Perhaps Oxford, with its links with John Ruskin, stole a lead. The University, howev- er, has two important galleries in the shape of the Fitzwilliam Museum and Kettle’s Yard. Trinity Hall is pleased to have on loan several major paintings from the Fitzwilliam – not least the altar-piece in the chapel – and to have worked with Kettle’s Yard on the Edmund de Waal event. The College now wishes to build on and strengthen its links with the visual arts.

The mission of colleges is to encourage learning in its broadest forms – and exposure to creativity in all its manifestations is part of the process. Many years ago, C. P. Snow, a fellow of another Cambridge college, complained that the ‘two cultures’ of arts and sciences were mutually suspicious and hostile. This exhibition shows how wrong he was both historically and in the present. When Michael Faraday showed the forces of electric magnetic induction to the Royal Society in 1831, the lines of force made by scattering iron filings on a sheet of paper placed over a magnet informed Turner’s painting of Snow storm – steam boat off a harbour’s mouth, where the iron ship is similarly at the centre of lines of force of steam, waves and clouds. Here was the thought expressed by the poet Thomas Campbell in 1837, that magnet-like steamships ‘links the viewless with the visible/and pictures things unseen’. Poets continued to reflect on ‘things unseen’, and to respond to modern science. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems drew on recent discoveries in the wave theory of light, and he attended lectures by the leading physicists of the day. Nature, he said, ‘is a Heraclitean fire’, always in a state of flux. Hopkins, like Barns-Graham, was concerned with the physicists’ concept of invisible ener- gies, showing how artists could respond to modern science. In Trinity Hall, science and arts are equally important, and as Mel Gooding indicates in his essay, this exhibition shows the ways in which the mysteries of cosmology can speak to the imagination of artists. Colleges are designed to prevent the two cultures from diverging into incomprehension – and this exhibition forms part of that ambition. Martin Daunton ELEMENTAL ENERGIES

We all want truth; that is reality. Art gets there in the form of poetic or artistic truths, which are the products of the creative imagination. Gillian Ayres

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham came to maturity in a period of British art when the transition from a figu- rative rendering of landscape – whether realist, impressionist or expressionist – to a more or less ‘abstract’ presentation of aspects of the physical world seemed for many artists a kind of imperative. In St Ives where she lived for much of her life, there developed an especially lively visual discourse, conducted through artistic practice rather than through theoretical argument, around a particular problem of artistic truth: how to make paintings (and sculpture) that truly represented nature as a reali- ty, and to bring into that representation something of our complex experience of things, our multi- faceted response to the natural world of objects and energies?

St Ives in the early 1940s, when Barns-Graham first arrived there, was an extraordinary place: this small harbour town at the remote tip of the Cornish peninsula was home in those years to an exiled artist of world stature, the Russian Naum Gabo, and to two of the most intelligent and accomplished British artists of the 20th century, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. All three were deeply engaged with the problem, at once formal and expressive, I have defined. They were each concerned in their own ways to create an abstract imagery that would in formal terms discover – make visible – the relation of natural forms to the rhythms and structures of the forces that determined what they are, and to imbue that revelation of an objective actuality with the visual music of a vividly experi- enced subjectivity. ‘From a sculptor’s point of view’, wrote Barbara Hepworth, ‘one can either be the spectator of the object or the object itself. For a few years I became the object. I was the figure in the landscape and every sculpture contained to a greater or lesser degree the ever-changing forms and contours embodying my own response to a given position in that landscape . . .’

In spite of their highly diverse approaches to the landscape and to the phenomena of the natural world, the remarkable generation of artists that came to live and work in St Ives and nearby in the years after the war – which included Terry Frost, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, and Barns-Graham herself – had inherited in common a deep preoccupation with the dynamic interpene- tration of observation, intuition and feeling in the experience of the phenomenal actualities of space, colour, atmosphere, the look and feel of natural objects, the sensations of stillness and movement in space and time. Each of those named, along with many others, came sooner or later to the conclu- sion that only abstraction, of one kind or another, could convey adequately those complexities of rela- tion between the observer and the observed. , we should remember, came into being concomitant with the great inventions and of things, and her work, too, made a powerful impact on Barns-Graham. Dedicated over the years discoveries that had created what Georgy Kepes called ‘the new landscape in art and science’: those to this intuitive project – on the glacier at Grindelwald in the 1940s, on the volcanic island of Lan- aspects of the world and the universe made newly visible by time-lapse, slow motion and high-speed zarote in 1990, at Porthmeor Bay, over which she looked every day from her St Ives studio – Barns- photography and by technological advances in astronomy and microscopy. From Cubism onward, Graham proved herself a draughtsman of genius, capable of tracing in precisely simple or complex artists worked with a consciousness, however vague, of the dynamics revealed by modern physics, linearity the elemental energies and structures of the natural world. Her drawing is a wonderfully chemistry, biology and perceptual psychology. Of the senior artists who were her friends in St Ives flexible instrument, always alive to the dynamism and rhythm of things: with a responsive versatility it was Gabo, whose own intellectual formations were in science and engineering, who had the most she registered now the monumental mass and magical translucency of a glacier, now her sense of the profound intellectual influence on Barns-Graham. For Gabo, art was an expression of a fundamental inner dynamics of up-rearing solid rock forms, now, with extreme economy, the overlap and repeti- human impulse, manifest also in science and technology, to discover images that realise and make tion of incoming coastal waves. visible an order that is hidden in the contingent forms of nature. The proper purpose of art, he thought, is not to express individual feelings and thoughts, or to propose social or political ideas, but to reveal In 1965 (some years after her journey to the Alps in 1949) Barns-Graham vividly described her experi- the invisible inner reality of things: ‘ . . . [what] we perceive with our five senses is not the only aspect ence of Grindewald and the work she wanted to create out of it: ‘The massive strength and size of the of life and nature to be sung about . . . life and nature conceal an infinite variety of forces, depths and glaciers, the fantastic shapes, the contrast of solidity and transparency, the many reflected colours aspects never seen [and that might be] more concretely felt through some kind of image communica- in the strong light . . . [the] likeness to glass and transparency, combined with solid rough ridges made ble not only to our reason but to our immediate everyday perceptions and feelings of life and nature.’ me wish to combine in a work all angles at once, from above, through, and all round, as a bird flies, a total experience.’ It is clear that what she had responded to so profoundly in those momentous ‘There is nothing in nature that is not in us’ Gabo wrote in 1956. ‘Whatever exists in nature, exists days was the present actuality of elemental forces, her vital intuition of nature’s hidden inner ener- in us in the form of our awareness of its existence. All creative activities of Mankind consist in the gies and simple wonder at its spectacular outer forms. search for an expression of that awareness. The perceptible results of that creative search are the so-called fact findings of science, the conceptions and ideas in philosophy, the inventions in technics In the earlier paintings on this subject, made in 1950, which are still close to a naturalistic account and the images of the visual arts.’ Art is a mode of research and a form of knowledge that takes of natural forms, Barns-Graham had used what she called ‘fairly representational’ colours, snow its place beside science in the picturing of our world, in the finding of meaning in the welter of infor- and ice white, sky as blue etc.’ In a slightly later painting such as Suspended Ice (1951), though it retains mation that the world presents to the senses and to the enquiring and open mind. This was not a new ‘a landscape quality’, she is consciously moving toward a more abstract treatment of her theme, idea. Over a century before, the great John Constable had written: ‘Painting is a science, and should and towards colour that is less ‘literally’ descriptive, more expressively evocative of phenomeno- be pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape be considered logical experience. It is true, however, that throughout her career she returned as her subject required as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?’ to ‘representational colour’, as in Variation on a Theme (Splintered Ice No. 2) (1987) or Untitled (1994). In 1949 she had stated an artistic predisposition which was to shape her work ever after: ‘I seldom do It was within the ambit of these heady ideas in their modern manifestation that Barns-Graham came a purely abstract painting. I am interested in using abstract forms mainly insofar as they are derived to artistic maturity, and developed her own distinctive approach to nature – her enduring subject – directly from natural sources by means of simplification within the movement of the picture itself: and the progression of abstract styles that evolved to serve her own artistic purposes. Even at its most painting is pattern . . .’ extreme, her abstraction is never of the formalist kind that claims a purely non-referential autonomy from nature, and neither is it a species of abstract , fraught with possibilities of emotive In the paintings of Barns-Graham this ‘pattern’ is never static, and it is neither simply geometric, personal meaning. It is, rather, an essentially objective art which seeks to reveal, by vivid resem- nor programmatic, nor decoratively repetitive, though it may have aspects of any of those qualities. blances, both the chaos and the pattern of nature: its visible forms and invisible structures and their It is nothing less than the poetic reduction, ‘within the movement of the picture itself’, of the ele- dynamics of pressure and release, its infinite variety and ceaseless change, its endless movement ments of nature – in their ancient divisions of earth, water, air and fire – to purely pictorial forms in time, its degrees of darkness, its variegations of light. that will quicken our apprehension of their power and sharpen our perception of their evanescent effects. This was the underlying programme of her mature work (from the late 1940s to her death in It was Gabo, too, who by encouragement and example inspired Barns-Graham to develop and disci- 2004). In the present exhibition, drawing on all periods of her creative endeavour, this elemental pline her native gift for drawing. From his work she learnt that drawing could do more than delineate theme is presented without regard to the critical or curatorial tracing of stylistic developments the external aspect of natural objects, but by adopting the device of an imagined transparency, it could or historical affiliations, or to particular periods or series, or to distinctions of media. What is thus propose, in a linear fantasy, visible equivalents for the invisible energies internal to their forms and discovered is the underlying consistency of her thematic preoccupations, the coherence of her determinant of them. The sculpture of Hepworth was similarly concerned with these inner dynamics research over many years. In painting, actuality is refracted through temperament and imagination to become part of our reality. called electrons and protons, out of which atoms were composed; and these units were supposed, for To clarify the distinction: if, as Wittgenstein proposed, ‘the world is everything that is the case’, then a few years, to have the indestructibility formerly attributed to the atoms . . . Unfortunately it seemed what is actual is what is the case, what may be said to exist – whether or not it is hidden from our that protons and electrons could meet and explode, forming, not new matter, but a wave of energy senses (as so much was before the development of the optical and aural technologies); what is real, spreading through the universe with the velocity of light. Energy had to replace matter as what on the other hand, is what the human imagination makes of what exists, whether it be through the is permanent . . . It might be fancifully identified with the Heraclitean fire, but it is the burning, theories of science or the images of art. ‘There is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature’, not what burns. ‘What burns' has disappeared from modern physics’. wrote William Whewell, meaning that scientific reality is the fruit of imaginative hypothesis. ‘Art’, said the American abstract painter Hans Hofmann, ‘is the search for the real.’ And: ‘Reality [is] artisti- That is a vivid metaphor for the physicist’s conception of invisible energies, but for Barns-Graham cally, an awareness.’ the purpose of her art was to make those elemental energies visible in an imaginative recreation of the perceptible world. The fiery particle and the flowing wave, the slow force and pressure that For Barns-Graham the formal elements of painting – design, line, shape, texture and colour – shapes earth, rock and ice, the evanescent brightness of fire, the stellar darkness of the night sky: the are purely pictorial elements whose dynamic relations to each other are analogical signs for the ‘perpetual flux’ that has haunted the ancient scientific imagination was for her, as for the modern elemental realities of the phenomenal world. Consider the thrilling contrasts of Bush Fire (Fire Series scientist, something to be described, pictured, and celebrated with wonder. No.7) to February Painting (Winter Series No.1), both painted in 1994: of fire to ice, furnace heat to aerial cold; of hectic wind and smoke to the crystalline moment of static freeze in the air. As their sub-titles indicate these are parts of a systematic exploration of themes, whose treatment can always be traced Mel Gooding back to earlier work in similar fields: Bush Fire is in some ways a reprise (its music more wildly frag- August 2007 mented, as befits its specific subject) of Red Painting (1957). Consider likewise the subtle differences of emphasis between the cool momentary stasis of the floating bubble-like forms in Mirage (1976) and the irresistible momentum rightwards of the colour chevrons entering left in Advancing Forms (Entrance) (Touch Point Series) painted four years later. Notes & references

Gillian Ayres, the painter and printmaker, is quoted from an interview with the present writer, Above all, colour came to be for Barns-Graham a most vital expressive resource, an essential means in The Experience of Painting: Eight Modern Artists (South Bank Centre, 1989). to that discovery of reality. In her later paintings and prints colour has been completely liberated Barbara Hepworth’s statement is from notes to a catalogue Barbara Hepworth Carvings and Drawings, 1937–54 from the task of naturalistically transcribing what is perceived – ‘snow and ice white, sky as blue . . .’ (Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, 1955). Yet in their rich chromatic colours and in their free forms, their vigorous brush strokes, in the speed Naum Gabo’s ‘Art and Science’ was first published in The New Landscape in Art and Science by Gyorgy Kepes of their linear gesture they refer without question to the elemental energies of air and fire, to the (Paul Theobald and Co., Chicago, 1956). Gabo’s view is elaborated in one of the best books ever written speed of wind and flame. In these late works from the ‘90s – such as Barcelona, Celebration of Fire No. 3 on the relation of art to science: On Divers Arts (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, delivered at the (1992) and in the several series of screenprints – her concerns are not so much with the morphologies of Art, Washington, 1959) (Faber and Faber, London 1962). of the mineral forms of earth and water, and with the stress and pressure within the mass and volume, ‘Painting is a science . . .’ are the concluding sentences of John Constable’s fourth and final lecture given but more with the fast-changing light-and-colour dynamics of air and fire, and with the insubstantial at the Royal Institution, June 16, 1836. transience of clouds and shadows. Barns-Graham’s letter on her experience at Grindelwald is quoted in the Tate Gallery Report 1964–65 (HMSO 1966). Other Barns-Graham quotations are from Lynne Green’s definitive account of the artist, W. Barns-Graham: a studio life It may be fanciful, but not entirely so, to suggest that Barns-Graham’s researches as an artist may (Lund-Humphries, Aldershot, 2001). be seen as a metaphorical parallel to those of modern science. ‘Science’, wrote Bertrand Russell ‘The world is everything that is the case’ is the first proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in a memorable passage,‘. . . sought to escape from the doctrine of perpetual flux by finding some per- (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1922). manent substratum amid changing phenomena. Chemistry seemed to satisfy this desire. It was found that fire, which appears to destroy, only transmutes: elements are recombined, but each atom that An account of William Whewell’s contribution to the development of hypothetico-deductive reasoning in science is to be found in ‘Hypothesis and Imagination’ in P. B. Medawar’s The Art of the Soluble. Whewell, existed before combustion still exists when the process is completed . . . Accordingly it was supposed who invented the terms ‘scientist’ and ‘physicist’, was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1840s. that atoms are indestructible, and that all change in the physical world consists merely in rearrange- ment of persistent elements. This view prevailed until the discovery of radioactivity, when it was Hans Hofmann’s essays were published in The Search for the Real (Andover, Mass. 1963). found that atoms could disintegrate. Nothing daunted, the physicist invented new and smaller units, Bertrand Russell is quoted from A History of Western Philosophy (Allen and Unwin, London, 1946). Glacier Drawing, 1950, offset drawing, 23 x 34.2 cm Volcanic Island (near Montana del Fuego II) Lanzarote, 1989, white crayon and acrylic on paper, 57 x 77 cm Linear Meditation 3, 1991, pen, ink, mixed media on paper, 18.5 x 18 cm Suspended Ice, 1951, oil on canvas, 122 x 91 cm Untitled, 1994, oil on canvas, 61 x 61 cm Variation on a Theme (Splintered Ice No. 2), 1987, oil on canvas, 92 x 122 cm Bush Fire (Fire Series No. 7), 1994, oil on canvas, 69.5 x 89 cm February Painting (Winter Series No. 1), 1994, oil on canvas, 68 x 93 cm Expanding Forms (Entrance) (Touch Point Series No. 1), 1980, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 122 cm Barcelona, Celebration of Fire No3, 1992, gouache on paper, 77 x 56 cm WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM CBE, RSA, RSW

A full curriculum vitae may be seen at www.barns-grahamtrust.org.uk

1912 Born 8th June, St Andrews, Fife

1932–37 , Diploma course (Painting) DAE

1940 Went to with award as recommended by Hubert Wellington. Met , Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Naum and Miriam Gabo,

Herbert Read, Borlase Smart, John and Elizabeth Summerson, Margaret Gardiner, Bernard Leach and Alfred Wallis

1942 Became member of Newlyn Society of Artists and St Ives Society of Artists. Met John Wells

1946 First meetings of Crypt Group in her studio

1947–48 Met David Lewis (married 1949)

1948 Worked on glacier drawings and gouaches in Switzerland

1949 Worked in Paris

Founder member of the Penwith Society of Artists

1951 Worked in Italy and Scilly Isles

1954 Travelled to Venice; met Peggy Guggenheim

Worked in Tuscany

1955 Worked in Tuscany, Calabria, Sicily

Met Poliakoff, Istrati, and Michel Seuphor; visited studios of Brancusi, Arp, Giacometti, and Pevsner

1956–57 On staff of School of Art

1958 Worked in Spain, France and the Balearics

1960 Inherited a house, near St Andrews

1963 Returned to St Ives

1987–04 Working in St Ives and St Andrews

1987 Establishes The Barns-Graham Trust (activated upon her death in 2004)

1992 Received Honorary Doctorate, University of St Andrews

Honorary Member Penwith Society and Newlyn Society

1999 Honorary Member RSA and RSW and Scottish Arts Club

2000 Received Honorary Doctorate, University of Plymouth

2001 Awarded CBE

Awarded Honorary Doctorate, University of Exeter

2003 Awarded Honorary Doctorate, Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh

2004 Died 26th January, St Andrews continues

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham working in her Balmungo studio, c.1995. Photograph: Rowan James solo exhibitions Elemental Energies: the Art of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Gateway Gallery, University of St Andrews

1947/49/54 Downing Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall Evolution: Processes in the Work of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Sherborne House, Sherborne, Dorset

1949/52 Redfern Gallery, London Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: In Prints, Art First Projects, London

1954 Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London A Life in Print, Penwith Galleries, St Ives.

1956/59/60/81 Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh

1957 City Art Gallery, Wakefield s elected group exhibitions: public galleries

1968 Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh 1946 Living Artists, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

1970 Sheviock Gallery, Cornwall 1947/48 Crypt Group, St Ives

Park Square Gallery, Leeds 1949–99* , St Ives

1971 Marjorie Parr Gallery, London 1951 Danish, British and American Abstract Artists, Riverside Museum, New York

1976 Wills Lane Gallery, St Ives 1953 International watercolour exhibition, Brooklyn Museum, New York

1978 The New Art Centre, London 1954 British Painting and Sculpture, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London

1984 The , Orkney Art from the South West, Arts Council touring exhibition

1987 Gillian Jason Gallery, London 1955 Seven Scottish Artists, Scottish Arts Council touring exhibition

1989 Scottish Gallery, London 1960 Painters from Cornwall, Plymouth City Art Gallery

1989–90 W. Barns-Graham Retrospective 1940–1989, touring: Newlyn Art Gallery, ; City Art Centre, Edinburgh; Perth Museum and Art Gallery; Tenth Anniversary of the Penwith Society of Art, Arts Council touring exhibition

Crawford Art Centre, St Andrews; Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr Contemporary Scottish Artists, SAC touring exhibition in Canada

1992 W. Barns-Graham Drawings, Crawford Art Centre, St Andrews and The Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro International exhibition of works in gouache, New York

1992–3 W. Barns-Graham at 80, William Jackson Gallery, London, touring to Lillie Art Gallery, Milngavie; Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal; 1969 Paintings 1940–1949, SAC touring Edinburgh

Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter; Dundee Art Galleries & Museum, Dundee; Wakefield Art Gallery, Wakefield 1971 Helen Sutherland Collection, Arts Council touring exhibition

1995/97/99/01 Art First, London 1972 Plymouth Society of Art, annual exhibition (invited artist)

1996 The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 1977 British Artists of the 60s, The Tate Gallery, London

1996–7 The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh Art from Cornwall, Galerie Artica, Cuxhaven

1999–2000 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: An Enduring Image, Tate Gallery St Ives 1984 Homage to , University of Kent, Canterbury

2001 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 1985 St Ives 1939–64, The Tate Gallery, London

2002–2004 W.Barns-Graham : Painting as Celebration, Crawford Art Centre, St Andrews, travelling to Aberdeen Art Gallery; Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro; 1986 Forty years of Modern Art, The Tate Gallery, London

Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield; City Art Gallery and Museum, York; Peter Scott Gallery, ; Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull; 1987 Looking West, Newlyn Art Gallery & The Royal College of Art, London

Lillie Art Gallery, Milngavie; Hawick Museum. 1988 The Experience of Landscape, Arts Council touring exhibition

2002 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham–A Celebration at 90, Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 1988/89 Freeing the Spirit, Contemporary Scottish Abstraction, Crawford Arts Centre, St Andrews

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham at 90; A Tribute from Art First, London 1989 A Century of Art in Cornwall 1889–1989, The County Museum and Art Gallery, Truro, Cornwall

2004 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 1912–2004 : A Tribute–Recent Paintings and New Prints, Art First, London Song of the Sea, Dundee Museum and Art Gallery

2005 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham : Movement and Light Imag(in)ing Time, Tate St Ives 1989/90 since 1900, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and tour to Barbican Art Gallery, London

2006 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham : Important Works from her Career, Art First, London 1990 Festival of Fifty-One, Arts Council Collection, touring exhibition

2007 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004): Paintings and Drawings 1952–2003, Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 1992 New Beginnings, Postwar British Art, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art continues

* Indicates consecutive annual exhibitions. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

1995 Porthmeor Beach: A Century of Images, Tate St Ives Sheffield Art Gallery

100 Years Context & Continuity, Newlyn Art Gallery: Tate Gallery, London

A Cornish Midsummer, Royal West of Academy in collaboration with the Penwith Society Victoria & Albert Museum, London

William Gear Friends Past & Present, Museum and Art Gallery Wolverhampton City Art Gallery

1997 The 50s works, British Council Collection touring and France

1998 Displays 1997–8, Tate, St Ives s elected bibliography

1998–2004* Royal Scottish Academy (RSA), Edinburgh Barns-Graham, W., statement in catalogue, Homage to Herbert Read, 1984, Canterbury College of Art

1998–2004* Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour (RSW), Edinburgh Barns-Graham, W., statement in catalogue, Freeing the Spirit, Crawford Art Centre, St Andrews

1999 Liberation and Tradition–Scottish Art 1875–1963, Aberdeen Art Gallery and McManus Gallery, Dundee Barns-Graham, W., statement in catalogue ‘Collected Thoughts’, W. Barns-Graham Retrospective 1940–89, City of Edinburgh Museums & Art Gallery, 1989

2001 St Ives in the 60s, Tate St Ives Barns-Graham, W., statement in catalogue, Some Thoughts on Drawing, Crawford Art Centre, 1992

The Colourist Connection, McManus Gallery, Dundee Gooding, Mel, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: Movement and Light Imag(in)ing Time, Tate St Ives exhibition catalogue, 2005

2002 Critic’s Choice (Mel Gooding), Newlyn Art Gallery Gooding, Mel, Elemental Energies: the Art of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 2007

2006 Consider the Lilies–Works from Dundee’s Twentieth Century Art Collection, Dean Gallery, National Galleries of Scotland. Green, Lynne, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham–An Enduring Image, Tate Gallery, St Ives, 1999

2007 Pier Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney Green, Lynne, W. Barns-Graham: a studio life, Lund Humphries, 2002

Gunn, Ann, The Prints of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. A Complete Catalogue, Lund Humphries, 2007

w o rks in selected public collections Hall, Douglas, Introduction to exhibition catalogue, W. Barns-Graham Retrospective 1940–1989, Edinburgh City Art Centre, 1989

Aberdeen Art Gallery Kemp, Prof. Martin, introduction to exhibition catalogue, W. Barns-Graham Drawings, Crawford Art Centre, St Andrews, 1992

Arts Council of Great Britain, London Kemp, Prof. Martin, Singing Nature’s Song, exhibition catalogue, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Art First 1999

Birmingham City Museum & Art Gallery Lewis, David, introduction to catalogue, St Ives 1939–64, The Tate Gallery, London

British Council, London Loppert, Susan, ‘Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in Conversation’, Contemporary Art, Spring 1996, Vol. 3, No. 2

British Museum, London McEwen, John, ‘A Painter on the Edge of Urgency’, The Sunday Telegraph, March 25th, 2001

Dundee Museum and Art Gallery Saunders, Linda, ‘W. Barns-Graham’, Modern Painters, Vol. 2, No. 3, Autumn 1989

Edinburgh City Art Centre Taylor, John Russell, introduction to catalogue, W. Barns-Graham at 80: a New View, William Jackson Gallery, London, 1992

Ferens Art Gallery, Hull Yakir, Nedira, introduction to exhibition catalogue, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham New Paintings, The New Millenium Gallery, St Ives, 1997

Government Art Collection Yakir, Nedira, Women Artists and , edited by Katy Deepwell, Manchester University Press, 1998

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museums, Glasgow

Kettle's Yard, Cambridge

Leeds City Art Gallery

Manchester City Art Gallery

Michigan University Museum, USA

New South Wales Art Gallery, Sydney, Australia

Plymouth City Art Gallery

Portsmouth City Art Gallery

* Indicates consecutive annual exhibitions. The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust was created by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in her lifetime, CharitableTrust and came into effect following her death in January 2004.

The principal aims of the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust are:

B to foster, protect and promote the reputation of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

B to advance the knowledge of the life and work of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham through

exhibitions, research and publications.

B to create an archive of key works of art and papers

B to support and inspire young artists through the provision of grants or bursaries

for art students attending selected art colleges and universities. Published by Trinity Hall, Cambridge and Art First, London

Copyright © 2007 Trinity Hall, Cambridge. All rights reserved relevant web sites No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any www.artfirst.co.uk means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written www.barns-grahamtrust.org.uk permission of Trinity Hall www.strandgallery.co.uk Texts www.trinhall.cam.ac.uk Introduction © Martin Daunton Essay © Mel Gooding Biographic statement © Geoffrey Bertram, Chairman, The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

Photography All images © The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust x Back cover: Confluence, 1984–87, pen, ink, oil on card, 15.5 22 cm Pages 17, 19, and back cover by Antonia Reeve All other works by Colin Ruscoe Portrait of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, 1966, by Ander Gunn Portrait of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, c.1995, by Rowan James Art First Contemporary Art

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