Wilhelmina Barns-Graham a Scottish Artist in St Ives

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Wilhelmina Barns-Graham A Scottish artist in St Ives

A Scottish artist in St Ives artist A Scottish The Barns-Graham Charitable TrustThe Barns-Graham

The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust Wilhelmina Barns-Graham A Scottish artist in St Ives

The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

1 W. Barns-Graham: A Scottish artist in St Ives Lynne 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 Green at The Fleming Collection, London and the City Art Centre, Edinburgh

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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 Anderson flitlondon.co.uk | [email protected] Typeset in Plantin and Grotesque MT Printed by Empress Litho

ISBN: 978-0-9571050-0-3

The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust Balmungo House Balmungo St Andrews Fife KY16 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

The Fleming Collection

2 3 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: A Scottish artist in St Ives1 Lynne Green

hat 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 Wvitality 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

Scorpio Series No.I, 1995, acrylic on paper, 56x76cm BGT948 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 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 connections in the artist’s work seems particularly apposite. 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 The title of this exhibition, stating a simple fact of origin, does not simply 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 indicate a desire to pin down what might be identified as ‘Scottish’ in inclination colourists of the late twentieth century. 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

4 5 selectors are able to identify particular preoccupations and qualities that distinguish and the Balmungo estate in particular providing rest and inspiration. Despite ‘Scottish’ art, there is a context for discussing the work of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham having made her home in Cornwall, from the first Barns-Graham regularly returned in relation to her native traditions. While once identified as ‘one of Britain’s most to Scotland, initially for short visits, later for prolonged periods. From her first senior abstract painters’ (in response to an exhibition of her work in Edinburgh), 3 submissions, of the mid nineteen thirties, to the Society of Scottish Artists and The her early close association with Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, Royal Scottish Academy open exhibitions, the pattern of her exhibiting presence in and later with figures such as Roger Hilton, has been seen in her native country as Scotland while occasionally sporadic, was a thread of connection with the north that providing ‘a historic link between Scotland and St Ives’.4 Her work has regularly was never broken.6 After her first solo exhibition in 1956 with Aitken Dott’s ‘The

Island Factory St Ives (Camouflage No.2), been included in publications and exhibitions specifically concerned with Scottish Scottish Gallery’ in Edinburgh, they became her representative dealer in Scotland; 1944 - Page 26 art: wherever her physical location, she has been claimed by her country of birth as she continued to exhibit regularly with them until her death. The year before joining one of its own, while also being identified outside that country as belonging to its Aitken Dott she had been included in a ‘Contemporary Scottish Painting’ exhibition lineage. The artist herself, while always determined to retain her position within the in London, and this perception of her as retaining her national identity while working art history of St Ives and its contribution to British modernism, was proud of that as a resident in St Ives, was to continue. Scottish lineage and comfortable to be identified as belonging to it. This is, however, Taken as a whole Barns-Graham’s body of work reveals an inventive, the first exhibition to specifically address the nature and extent of Barns-Graham’s creative artist that was constantly challenging herself, restless in her desire to push Afghanistan, 2000 - Page 52 debt to her training in Edinburgh, the continuing inspirational resource she found in at her own boundaries and to find new ways of expressing her creative idea. She Scotland and its creative importance throughout her life. It has been inspired by the has been criticised for the diversity of the language she used during a career that belief that awareness of these, and of her own ‘distinctive cultural background’5 can spanned some seventy years; but to expect uniformity and repetition in an artist, is only enrich the understanding and enjoyment of the artist’s work. 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 A life of continuities and symmetry 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 Barns-Graham lived a long and productive life, creating an almost continuous flow was working almost to the last) there was an astonishing outpouring of energy and Geoff and Scruffy, 1956 - Page 35 of inventive, often courageous work throughout her professional career as a painter. invention in which she pared her vocabulary to the essentials of brushstroke, line and There were times when she and her art were critically neglected or dismissed as colour. Essentially an artist who chose to both revel in and celebrate her experience of little importance in the narrative of British art, but she never, ever gave up. of the world, her late work in both paint and screenprint media is a joyous coda. That today her reputation is established and her art recognised for its seriousness And as a coda should, this work provides a dramatic, emotionally charged finale to a and stature, is in no small part due to this personal tenacity. In the wake of the life fully lived, in which the courage to take risks became increasingly central to the Untitled (April), 2001 - Page 55 London Tate Gallery’s major exhibition St Ives: 1939-64 of 1985, the artist’s work artist’s credo. and that of her colleagues, who lived and worked in the Cornish town, began to In many ways extraordinary, Barns-Graham’s life in a very real sense echoed receive long-overdue reassessment. While the Tate show tended to reflect received the wider struggle of women during the twentieth century for self-determination notions of individual contribution and innovation, from the mid nineteen eighties and equality. Prone to life-long bronchial illnesses, she was considered a delicate onwards, Barns-Graham found her work to be increasingly in demand, the subject child. This, together with a traditional Scottish Presbyterian upbringing that frowned of growing critical and public acclaim. Major international interest in the artistic on the notion of a girl taking up any profession, leave alone that of an artist, made phenomena of St Ives as an enclave of British modernist art began in earnest after it inevitable that she would incur parental opposition to her chosen career. But Expanding Forms (Entrance No.2) the opening of the Tate Gallery St Ives in 1993. As a consequence of all of this, in Wilhelmina (always know as ‘Willie’) was nothing if not a fighter. Having at the age Touchpoint Series, 1981 - Page 45 her last two decades Barns-Graham at last won her place as a senior figure in both of eight determined that she would be a painter, a long and often painful struggle as St Ives modernism and British post-war art. Eventually, as one of the last survivors a young adult led finally to her parents acceptance of her entering Edinburgh College of the first wave of modernists to settle in Cornwall, she found herself with some of Art as a Diploma student. Possessing a level of enthusiasm for her training given amusement tinged with sadness, much sought after by art historians and art critics, only to those who have achieved a goal in the face of adversity, she embraced the gallery owners and collectors, as well as members of the wider media. world of art that opened to her there. After graduation and Post-Diploma studies Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was born in 1912 at her parental home in St pursued within Scotland, a Scholarship award prompted a brave and life-changing Andrews, Fife and died in her ninety second year just a few miles from that city, at decision. Proposed ostensibly for health reasons, but driven by the need for a degree Balmungo House, where her grandparents had lived when she was a child. There of freedom essential to establishing a career, Barns-Graham moved to St Ives, White Circle Series I, 2003 - Page 56 is a literal as well as emotional sense of continuity – of a circle completed – in Cornwall in 1940, just as the period of the ‘phoney war’ was coming to an end. By this symmetry. She had lived for most of her adult working life at the heart of a a matter of months, she was preceded by her college friend Margaret Mellis with community of artists in the southwest tip of England. Yet she never severed her her new husband, the critic Adrian Stokes and by the three artists who formed the familial, emotional and cultural links with her native country. She never lost a deep, nucleus of what was to become St Ives modernism: Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo. heart-felt attachment to her roots. Throughout her years in St Ives she retained the Although the latter’s presence in St Ives was relatively short-lived, his influence was ties of family and friends in both the east and west of Scotland, with St Andrews profound, particularly for those who like Barns-Graham, encountered him personally.

6 7 Towards a definition of a ‘Scottish Artist’ 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 Scots are famous – and sometimes are ridiculed – for their deep emotional her apprehension of underlying meaning. Her imaginative response to the world – to attachment to their native soil that is maintained wherever they may make their the forces that animate it, as well as to the detail of its appearance – was expressed in home. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was no exception. Her sense of history and a personal vocabulary that encompassed both the representational and the abstract: tradition, her feeling for the land from which she came, her fiercely-held work ethic each as capable as the other of conveying the essence (the truth) of her vision. and deep sense of purpose (that drove her to make art even when unwell), also her However abstract her language as a painter became, her work was always grounded in (often wicked) sense of humour, were all, it seemed to me indicative of the national her sensual experience of, and great joy in, the world. character. Perhaps above all her independence of spirit, her grit and feistiness, The centrality of colour in Scottish painting has its origin, Caw believes, marked her out as belonging to our small, argumentative but determined nation. in ‘a racial instinct [for its] appreciation’. In turn this ‘love of colour’ – and I would In his small, idiosyncratic, book Modern Scottish Painting of 1943, the argue, also the acute sensitivity to it – is rooted in the ‘exceptional chromatic painter J D Fergusson seeks a definition of a ‘Scottish artist’ in the courageous and qualities’ of Scotland itself, where ‘the finer modulations of colour’ are accentuated independent spirit of the Declaration of Arbroath, addressed by the Scots Parliament by the particularities of the light. Scottish painters’ colour, ‘like that of their country, to the Pope in 1320. ‘Put the same thing [he writes] into painting and you’ve got combines softness with intensity, and is rich, varied, beautiful’. The latter is a lovely what I’d call Scottish painting’. Thus the desire of the Scots is for ‘liberty; to express description into which Barns-Graham’s use and control of colour fits perfectly. themselves freely, which in art means honestly’ (the emphasis is mine). The qualities of Moreover, Caw’s reference to the subtle qualities and effects of the northern light this native art include, ‘vigor, colour and particularly quality of paint, which means on tone and hue, suggests another element in her native experience that was crucial paint that is living’, where the artist has a ‘feeling for substance and quality in paint’. to an artist who had an exceptional and innate sensitivity to the atmospherics of Crucially, Fergusson is discussing ‘modern’ or ‘progressive’ painting (with links to colour. In her acute sensitivity to its nuances and in her technical command of European art developments), rather than ‘official art [that] does not represent the it, Barns-Graham shared with her fellow Scots their ‘special gifts as colourists’.8 art… of a country with an independent art spirit’. Her particularly acute colour sensibility was made the more intense by her having So, the Scottish character in art emerges in a discernible independence of synesthesia: the automatic association of (in her case) all sensory information with Warm Up, Cool Down, 1979 - Page 41 spirit, expressed with honesty: the inference of integrity and moral courage being colour. For some a source of tribulation, Barns-Graham delighted in an interior deliberate. National character is evident too in an energy and intensity conveyed and world where people, events, places, letters of the alphabet, etc., were anchored in made visible via technique, approach to colour, and in a use of paint that celebrates memory by the intuitive assignment of colour. Trained by men known collectively as its intrinsic material and expressive qualities – that in turn results in a painted surface ‘The Scottish Colourists’, her exploration of this aspect of painting was a constant both vivid and alive. This characterisation by Fergusson is useful to an understanding refrain in her work. At certain periods the power of colour to convey emotion and of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (and indeed the training she underwent as a student), meaning was deliberately exploited, as was at other times, the optical effects of for her strengths as an artist belong to those he identifies as particular to her native progressive and measured changes in hue of a limited number of colours. While it tradition. His description of national tendencies and motivations offers insight into played a central role in her art, for most of her career colour was contained and the forces that informed the narrative of her personal artistic journey, as well as into controlled by form. In the last decades of her career bold and free (independent) the intrinsic qualities of her work. use of it became a dominant feature of her art. Colour was to have its most free and Scorpio Series No.1,1995 - Page 4 In his earlier, magisterial Scottish Painting, J L Caw, as Director of joyous expression in the work produced in her final years. the National Galleries of Scotland, also appeals to the importance of ‘native independence’ and individualism when describing the ‘the inflection of nationality’ A sound foundation in art in ‘the subjective, emotional and technical characteristics of Scottish painting’.7 The country’s artists are gifted ‘with dramatic instinct, imaginative insight, pictorial The predominant reading of Barns-Graham’s art begins in 1940, with her arrival power’ and ‘sincerity’ (what Fergusson calls ‘honesty’). Having an ‘intense love in St Ives. As a consequence it is assumed that her exemplars were those artists of Nature’, Scottish artists are content ‘with the world about them’, and are less she initially encountered there: in particular Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo and the interested in ‘invention’– by which I take Caw to mean embellishment (for effect) Cornishman, Alfred Wallis. The aesthetic of these artists undoubtedly appealed to or lack of ‘sincerity’. In defining this further, he makes a crucial distinction between someone already experimenting with the simplification of form, and with achieving invention and imagination, and between the subject and its significance. Imagination as direct as possible a translation into paint of her response to her subject. However (the strength of the Scot) apprehends and is concerned with the meaning of a subject it is inadequate to interpret the subsequent development of her work exclusively rather than with its ostensible character. Interestingly, Caw sees evidence of the in relation to the ‘influence’ of these and other artists who were already, or who The Blue Studio, c.1947-8 - Page 27 tendency to abstraction associated with Scottish philosophy, theology, and argument, would become, associated with St Ives. In this context Barns-Graham is often, also in the country’s art: where ‘abstraction’ means ‘those qualities of selection, even now, regarded as a satellite on the British modernist star map. There has been Torcello, 1954 - Page 36 concentration, and arrangement’ that are crucial to all ‘really fine’ painting. little consideration of the particular and individual in her work, nor of from where Defined by Caw as particularly Scottish, these direct, emotional as well as these attributes may stem. Seen solely in the context of ‘group activity’ in St Ives, factual, responses to the world are characteristic of both the life and art of Barns- her independent career – one in which from 1960 until her death in 2004, she

8 9 divided her time between Cornwall and Fife – has received scant attention, and thus of British Modernism, and for two years (1931-3) Professor of Fine Art at the neither her personal achievement, nor her consequent wider contribution, have been University of Edinburgh. Barns-Graham – who was to meet Read again in St Ives – explored. While her evolving preoccupations reflected many of the key issues with attended his series of lectures on historical European art and current developments which artists engaged in the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of in Continental art and architecture. To a degree these followed the format of his the next, she pursued these concerns with her own unique strengths and aptitudes seminal book The Meaning of Art published shortly after he arrived in Edinburgh, as an artist. The principles upon which Barns-Graham relied throughout her long which includes discussion of principal twentieth-century artists such as Picasso, Paul career, and the unique combination of qualities in her art, have their origin in the Klee and Henry Moore. In his lectures Read illustrated work by among others, the Composition (Sea), 1954 - Page 33 practical and aesthetic education she received in Edinburgh. This training was in turn sculptors Constantin Brancusi (who Barns-Graham was to meet in the 1950s) and informed by a pan-European cultural tradition and philosophical independence of Barbara Hepworth, later to become a key figure in both the St Ives community of thought rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment. artists and in the life of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. Barns-Graham did not, as it were, arrive in Cornwall as a blank canvas. The teaching at ECA was predicated on the belief that ‘Art is the power of She could not have left Edinburgh College of Art unaffected by the traditions expressing emotion or feeling through representation – not necessarily imitative and concerns embodied in the teaching there. Nor could she have been entirely representation, although real training or study must begin there. To be able to express indifferent to the artistic lineage and wider cultural heritage of her native country: a an emotion by means of form or colour may be said to be the foundation of all Art… heritage through which her own family, as modest landed gentry, were defined. When and such achievement rests principally on Drawing.’11 The motivational principles

the artist alighted from the train in St Ives in March 1940, the example of her tutors that underlay Barns-Graham’s practice throughout her career could hardly be better Drawing from the Antique (Head), April and through them of Scottish – as well as recent and contemporary European, largely expressed. Her Diploma foundation course was ‘arranged solely with the object of 1932 - Page 19 French – painting, were in her baggage together with the materials and tools of her training the eye and hand to work in perfect unison, and incidentally so that the craft. Not only were these the foundations upon which her mature practice was built, student may begin to understand the wide scope of expression possible through they continued to provide structure and support for her life-long exploration as a drawing’. The intention was to train the students to really see (the emphasis is mine), painter and draftswoman. to thus grasp the significance and meaning of ‘the beautiful in Nature’. Pleasure in Close by the Old Town and thus not far from Castle Rock that dominates the world, and the ability to translate it into line and paint, resulted from the practice the City’s skyline and history, the College of Art (ECA) lies at the heart of of accurate observation.12 In her keen eye and acute awareness of the world, her Edinburgh. By way of steep cobbled streets it is close to the National Gallery, adherence to this discipline never waivered throughout Barns-Graham’s life. Her the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Scottish Museum: all bastions of both career was marked by a constant return to the natural world, by a continuing pleasure Scottish and international culture, each a destination and resource for art students. in the forms, colours and movement she discovered there. She found the intricacies In her eighties Barns-Graham recalled her years in Edinburgh (1931-37) as amongst of a mussel shell as captivating as the contours of a landscape, or the rise and fall [Still Life, Yellow] c.1936 - Page 22 her happiest. This was palpably an exciting decade to be at ECA, producing as it of sea waves. Her eye for detail was extraordinary, her close examination of the did many artists who were to become leading figures of their generation. Under geometry of a frozen puddle, or the wind-conjured patterning of sand, were sources its inspirational Principal Hubert Lindsay Wellington, it was a period of increased of both lyrical representational drawings and uncompromisingly abstract forms. Both confidence and influence for the College, both at home and abroad. In the languages embody the nature and quality of her experience. From close attention curriculum Wellington promoted breadth of knowledge in the ‘cultural and historical came a desire not for elaboration, but for simplicity: to capture the complex character values of Art’ as well as intensive, focused study, believing that too much of the latter, of her subject in a few swift lines, in a process of distillation, of recognising the with none of the former did students a disservice.9 Wellington’s personal ‘insight and essence of form, the essential nature of which was taught at ECA by Donald Moodie, sympathy’ in his dealings with students and staff, were of particular importance for whose virtuosity and fluency of line made his Life Drawing classes memorable. Barns-Graham, as she struggled during her years at ECA equally against ill health Students were introduced to the values of art’s history through painting tutor and a domineering father.10 The Principal’s support and advice were crucial to her David Foggie, for whom painting after Degas had gone down hill (and whose own Portrait of Allan Barns-Graham, 1932-3 momentous decision to establish her professional, independent life as an artist, not in drawings, Barns-Graham felt, had the quality of his hero), and through David Alison, Page 18 Scotland but in the Cornish St Ives. portrait painter and Head of the School of Drawing and Painting, who looked to the The energy and liveliness of the College Barns-Graham so much enjoyed, was example of Velasquez, Manet and the Scot, Henry Raeburn. Although he taught Life due also to the quality of the teaching staff Wellington led, who were themselves the Painting for only four terms during 1933-4, S J Peploe left a lasting impression on cream of an earlier generation trained at Edinburgh. She and her fellows were taught Barns-Graham. Like the other Scottish Colourists who were ECA tutors, he loved the Portrait of Henry Crowe, 1939 - Page 23 by some of the greatest painters Scotland produced in the twentieth century, who qualities of the painted surface. This feeling for the physical properties of the media is provided students with a broad introduction to not only historical, but to modern undoubtedly a characteristic of Barns-Graham’s art. In her first childhood paintings, art movements and their central figures. In this they were supported by Scottish art’s her love of colour is already evident, but it was her teachers who introduced her to traditional links with the studios of Europe, in particular of Paris. The world of art the pleasures of the medium itself. was revealed in the diversity of the tutors’ own work and enthusiasms, as well as that The tutor’s who lived most vividly in the artist’s memory were (Sir) William of fellow students, in argument and discussion, and not least through lectures by Gillies and his close friend John (Johnny) Maxwell. Gillies, whose own interests as a leading figures in the arts. Among these was Herbert Read, art critic and champion painter encompassed André Derain, Pierre Bonnard and Matisse was a charismatic

10 11 tutor of Life Painting, Life Drawing and Still Life. Whatever the subject, he taught relevant to Barns-Graham’s first mature work in Cornwall. As a student she was the sensitive use of pigment and ‘the love of rich colour and the tactile handling familiar with their art and was undoubtedly drawn to their example, as indeed she of paint’.13 More than any other, he inspired Barns-Graham’s deep commitment was to that of others associated with the two men, including Nicholson’s first wife to her craft and to its meaning. She found his conviction as an artist, as well as his Winifred (who Barns-Graham came to know later, as a friend). However, the work gentleness as a teacher quite ‘wonderful’. He spoke of the pleasure of painting, of Johnny Maxwell and William Gillies calls into question how direct this ‘influence’ never of the struggle. He believed art and life to be indivisible, the former simply a may have been. Eclectic in their enthusiasms, the two Scots responded to the art of heightened form of the latter. These were lessons Barns-Graham carried with her all their English contemporaries. In not just the simplicity of drawing and the flattened

West Sands (St Andrews) July, 1981 her life. She certainly shared Gillies’ delight in the visible world, his acute powers picture space, but also in the relationship of interior to external view, there are Page 44 of observation, and confidence to select and simplify. As she grew older the latter paintings by Maxwell from the mid 1930s reminiscent of work by both Wood and process became more and more central to her art. Of Gillies Edward Gage has said, Nicholson. But of more interest here, there are echoes of these same paintings by View of St Ives, 1940 - Page 25 that the ‘principal elements in his mode of expression were line and colour. The line Maxwell in the work of Barns-Graham from the 1940s. Moreover, there are striking is sinuous, taut, decisive, full of truth and grace’.14 This might be a description of the similarities in his ex-student’s first views of St Ives, to paintings of small fishing mature work of Barns-Graham. ports by Gillies from the 1920s. In the work of tutor and student, the shallow Johnny Maxwell, one the youngest members of staff in the Painting School, picture space and rendering of form as flat planes of colour, serve to give emphasis was like many colleagues, a former student. A teacher of general drawing and still to the painting’s own structure. What is of importance to both is the reality of the life, he was remembered for his technical mastery and, like Gillies, for his openness painted (constructed) equivalent of their experience of the subject, rather than formal and generosity. Barns-Graham and her fellows valued them both as particularly verisimilitude. In her first childhood paintings Barns-Graham had flattened space and good teachers. Interested in the art of Marc Chagall, Klee and Miró, Maxwell was a reduced form to simple blocks of colour, but this was the response of an untutored visionary in his own work, whose particular contribution was in providing ‘a model eye. Her mature sophisticated construction of pictorial space and the use of colour to to younger artists of a function for the imagination for once not dependent on the delineate form were developed in her years at Edinburgh. What Barns-Graham took concrete’.15 He was a key influence on Barns-Graham’s friend and fellow student to St Ives, was an aesthetic in part influenced by the English painters, but which was William Gear, and also on Alan Davie, who registered as a student in the autumn mediated through the work of her most valued tutors, Gillies and Maxwell. White Cottage, Carbeth, c.1930s Page 20 of 1937. Barns-Graham had graduated that summer, but their paths would cross at In 1940, at the age of twenty-seven, Barns-Graham was on the threshold of Leeds College of Art in the 1950s, and in Cornwall where Davie was to have a second independent experimentation, and had already begun to move her work towards a home. The independence of the imagination was of course crucial to the whole pared language of abstract forms. She was interested in painting for its own sake, in modernist enterprise. Barns-Graham’s confidence in the ability of her imagination to the exploration of the characteristics, qualities and potentials of ‘pure’ line, form and convey meaning through an increasingly abstract language, blossomed in the freedom colour. In St Ives she became part of a loosely knit group of artists working at the of life in St Ives and in the company of those artists she worked alongside. But it was heart of avant-garde practice, and she was not judged by them to be out of place. Ben in the Edinburgh studios that she first encountered the idea, under the guidance of Nicholson in particular became a close friend and artistic ally. She was welcomed too Sleeping Town, 1948 - Page 29 tutors who were themselves engaged with art’s changing agenda since Cézanne, and by the (largely older) traditional painters, long established in St Ives. Armed with a with the new directions in European and British modernism. sound art education, her first years in St Ives were spent in absorbing something of Among the group of artists with whom Barns-Graham would later associate the lessons both groups had to offer. In a process common to all young artists, the in St Ives, a full academic art training was rare, and occasionally the fact of her example of others was filtered and assimilated: made her own through the light of her academic background was held against her. Yet ECA provided a solid foundation personal vision and the strengths of her own aptitudes, which had been honed in the on which to construct her achievement as an artist. Throughout her career, drawing studios of Edinburgh College of Art. remained the backbone of her art. Critics have consistently remarked upon the Some forty years later, on the occasion of a solo exhibition in Edinburgh, quality and inventiveness of her line. During even the most uncompromisingly Barns-Graham was acknowledged as one of the few Scottish artists of her generation abstract periods of her work Barns-Graham never neglected the observable world to favour abstraction, and to have embraced in particular, ‘Constructivist ways as her primary inspiration, nor the most immediate means of translating it, through of thinking’.16 More than one critic traced her interest in non-objective art to her drawing. The most lyrical of figurative drawings were created in parallel with rigorous childhood: a reference to her early abstract compositions, or ‘secret rooms’, of abstract paintings. Drawing, taught as the rock on which all else rested, was her squares and triangles, outlined in primary colours and then coloured in. While

anchor in the observable world, always a source of refreshment and renewal. some reviewers drew attention to her native strength as a colourist, Barns-Graham Composition (Sea), 1954 - Page 33 was understood by others to have had a predisposition to abstraction long before St Ives 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 Influences on Barns-Graham’s approach to landscape in the first years of her being of recognition and success. Barns-Graham however, was perceived as not having in St Ives are often credited to the example of painters Christopher Wood (who had to make this choice: moving as she did with ease, back and forth across not only had died in 1930) and Ben Nicholson. Certainly the direct, child-like approach to the geographic border, but also an aesthetic one. In her work she incorporated the drawing, limited palette and flattening of the picture plane, employed by them, are disciplines of abstraction (associated with English artists such as Ben Nicholson),

12 13 with the ‘lyrical comprehension of nature and its dynamics, …that empathy with the the artist’s life, in which a regular pattern emerged of dividing her time between the natural order of things’ associated with the Scottish tradition.17 Barns-Graham had southwest and the northeast – with working studios in both. Drawings and canvases achieved not only a personal synthesis of styles and traditions in her art, but had also moved up and down the country with her, themes and ideas begun in one location attained stature as an artist of distinction in both Scotland and beyond its borders. 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 A Return to Scotland 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 Having been a regular visitor for the previous twenty years, Barns-Graham inherited fed into the other. Variation on a Theme, Splintered Ice No.1 the family estate of Balmungo from her Aunt in 1960. At first uncertain of her ability Fife proved to be a rich source of inspiration and creative renewal, 1987 - Page 49 to retain the house and estate while resident in Cornwall, she found it impossible broadening her sources and, in response to them, the expressive language with to part with it and its life-long associations. This decision was to have a profound which she explored them. At Balmungo the artist returned to the drawing of effect on both her private and professional life. Thereafter, work would be pursued landscape: her attention caught also by seasonal changes in the garden, by the at both ends of the country, with Scotland and its landscape now more consistently detail of toadstools or farm-track puddles turned to ice. The latter, sparked a (and at times insistently), proffering new inspiration. Despite the logistical problems, productive return to the theme of the geometry of ice and its internal structure, first it was clear from the beginning that Balmungo offered Barns-Graham respite and encountered in Switzerland in the late 1940s. Drawings of specimen trees planted St Regulus Tower refreshment from the intensity of life in a busy, competitive, artistic community. by her grandfather, and of the plant life of the estate, led to abstract meditations (St Andrews Cathedral Series), 1979 Page 42 Perhaps as importantly it re-established a tangible link with her roots and a on formations, patterning and colour, first observed in nature. While this process refreshment of the Scottish dimension of her character – the importance of which was not unique to work done in Fife, Balmungo and its immediate surroundings would emerge only gradually. The renewal of her connection with St Andrews, where presented Barns-Graham with a greater variety of both cultivated and woodland as a child she had lived and gone to school, re-awakened her emotional bonds with forms that proved imaginatively fertile, as did subjects such as the aerial view of the Scotland. Her regular residency there also led to the strengthening of professional garden from her bedroom window, or the trajectory of vapour trails across the skies links and to the re-establishment of her presence in the Scottish art scene. left by aircraft based at RAF Leuchars. Nor was her mature experience of Scotland In the same year that Barns-Graham inherited Balmungo, the Scottish and its impact upon her art restricted to Fife. Extended visits to Orkney brought a Warbeth 7, 1985 - Page 47 National Gallery of Modern Art opened in Edinburgh. With an initial collection new toughness and clarity to her work, as well as a tonal range that encompassed rich of little more than a handful of works transferred from the main collections of burnt orange and muted sea-rock greens. Initially inspired by the ‘pavement’ strata of the Scottish National Gallery, its first Keeper Douglas Hall undertook, almost certain Orcadian costal rock formations, prolonged multiple series of relief paintings single handedly, the task of assembling a collection of international modern and followed constructed and painted in both studios. 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 Late Collaboration 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 In the last five years of her life Scotland provided Barns-Graham with an unexpected regular exhibitions at The Scottish Gallery and (a little later) the Richard Demarco opportunity for a late flowering of astonishingly inventive work. Remarkably quickly Gallery (also in Edinburgh), and coinciding as it did with an emerging pattern she developed a highly successful working partnership in the making of screenprints, of partial residence, strengthened the artist’s professional profile in Scotland. with artist-printmakers Carol Robertson and Robert Adam, who together are Graal Throughout her years in St Ives Barns-Graham had regularly contributed to group Press, of Roslin in Midlothian. Their technical invention and expertise made it Deodar Tree I, 1980 - Page 43 exhibitions by Scottish artists, both north and south of the border. From now possible for Barns-Graham to set down her ideas with her brush as directly and on, close ties with her native country were to become as important to her career spontaneously as she would on paper or canvas; enabling the creation of a sequence

as was her position among the artists of St Ives. In 1977, while acknowledging of print series which are bold in their application of colour, dynamic in gestural Red Playing Games I, 2000 - Page 54 Barns-Graham’s partial return to Scotland, Edward Gage also recognised hers as form, vibrant as well as stunningly beautiful. The vitality and inventiveness of the ‘singular Scottish contribution to the international language of Constructivist the printmaking process extended into the artist’s work on paper and canvas too, painting [with her] dynamic groupings of geometrical forms’.18 unlocking it seems an ultimate freedom to paint some of the most daring works of The private, tranquil environment of Balmungo, its substantial stone house her entire career: encompassing the lyrical, the joyous, the meditative and the set in formal grounds surrounded by woodland, provided a dramatic contrast to the profoundly moving. busy narrow stone streets of St Ives, and to her newly built Barnaloft Piazza Studio These late works are in a very real sense a culmination, where driven by on the very edge of Porthmeor Beach. On the other hand the sharp intensity and an increasing sense of urgency, Barns-Graham achieved an acute level of creative clarity of light, seemed to Barns-Graham to have the same quality in St Andrews invention, intensely felt, deliberately risk-taking in nature. They reveal her recurring as it did in St Ives. She delighted equally in the differences and the similarities: the concern with gesture and with a process of distillation: in which all but a core interconnections made what might otherwise have seemed a disjointed life feel like vocabulary is relinquished in order that her creative idea may be set down in bold a continuum. The ownership of a second home in Fife imposed a new rhythm on simple form. It is possible to see them too in relation to her identity as a colourist:

14 15 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 A Song of Night, 2003 - Page 54 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 Wait, 2003 - Page 53 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 2011 2 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: An Enduring Image, Tate Galley St Ives, November 1999-May 2000 3 ‘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 1956 4 The Scottish Gallery: The First 150 Years, Aitken Dott, 1992 5 Timothy Clifford et al., Foreword, The Scottish Colourists 1900-1930 exhibition catalogue, National Galleries of Scotland /Royal Academy of Arts, 2000 6 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 ibid 9 Wellington used the quoted phrase in his first report as Principal; ECA Report of the Board of Management, 1932-3 10 The description of Wellington is by Sir William Rothenstein, in Men and Memories, vol. 2, Faber & Faber, London 1932, p.381 11 Edinburgh College of Art Prospectus 1935-6 12 ECA Prospectus 1935-6, ibid 13 Joanna Soden and Victoria Keller, William Gillies, Canongate, Edinburgh 1998, p.149 14 Edward Gage The Eye in the Wind: Contemporary Scottish Painting since 1945, Collins 1977, p.28 15 Duncan Macmillan Scottish Art in the 20th Century, Mainstream, Edinburgh 1994, p.68 16 Edward Gage in The Scotsman, 22 August 1981 17 Felix McCullough in Arts Review, August 1981 18 Edward Gage, The Eye in the Wind: ibid 19 Edward Gage, The Eye in the Wind: ibid

16 17 Life Class (multi-layered figure drawing) (Sheets A1 & A3), Drawing from the Antique (Head), April 1932, pencil on paper, 1930s, pencil on tracing paper, 56.3x38.2cm BGT2744-G 56.2x38cm BGT2713

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.

18 19 Old Mill, 1938, pen, ink and mixed media on paper, 27x38cm BGT9459

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.

20 21 [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.

22 23 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.

24 25 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 The Blue Studio, c.1947-8, oil on canvas, 92x122.2cm BGT3281 artists to this method of (apparently harmonious, aesthetically satisfying) mathematical proportion first elaborated by the Ancient Greeks. 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 had known the Professor (of Natural History at St Andrews University) since her childhood. 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.

26 27 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.’

28 29 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 Study For Large Shelf I [Glacier], 1951, offset drawing and wash on paper, 48x62.7cm BGT7072 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.

30 31 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.

32 33 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 painting 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.

34 35 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.

36 37 Untitled [Terragona], 1960, gouache on paper, 58.3x91cm BGT3035

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.

38 39 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 Assembly of Nine, 1964, oil on hardboard, 58.5x91.5cm BGT558 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 Byzantine in its glowing colour, this painting belongs to a prolonged and combined effect of individual colour or hue, its brightness (tone) and saturation (intensity) meditative series of paintings, Things of a Kind in Order and Disorder that had – as well as its apparent ‘temperature’ ‘weight’ and ‘energy’. Her skill in the manipulation of as their focus the translation of experience and emotion into a reduced formal colour as an expressive vehicle, which can convey not only visual sensation, but also mood and vocabulary of repeated squares or circles and their subdivision. Each individual emotion, is clear. 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.

40 41 Deodar Tree I, 1980, pencil on paper, 55.2x76.3cm BGT655 St Regulus Tower (St Andrews Cathedral Series), 1979, pencil and oil on board, 39x53cm BGT583 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.

42 43 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

44 45 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).

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

46 47 Variation on a Theme, Splintered Ice No.1, 1987, oil on canvas, 91.5x122cm BGT6463

48 49 St Nicholas Chapel, St Ives 1993, chalk on black paper, 35.1x50.2cm BGT1080

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

50 51 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.

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

52 53 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

54 55 A Song of Night, 2003, acrylic on paper, 25.4x38.2cm BGT3322

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.

56 57 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE HRSA HRSW

ilhelmina Barns-Graham, known as Willie, was born in St Andrews, Fife, on W8 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.

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