ALL H INITY R mina CAMBRIDGE T l Graham - ilhe W of Barns Art ElementalEnergies he T ElementalEnergies:TheArtofWilhelminaBarns-Graham TrinityHall,Cambridge ALL H INITY R CAMBRIDGE T 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, Fife, 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 Edinburgh 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 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 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 St Ives School, as it came to be known, began to form in the period after the war, with Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, 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 Tate St Ives 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 Scotland 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.