The problem with St Ives, noted the painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, was that it was ‘very difficult to draw without having a hint of Ben Nicholson about it’. Barns-Graham was one of a second wave of painters who gravitated to the Cornish fishing town from about 1940 onwards, lured by the utopian modernists who had colonised it in the years before the war.
Taking inspiration from the Cornish landscape, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo experimented with a rigorous mix of Constructivism and Primitivism, developing a new spatial abstract language in the process.
For those who followed — later known as the second or middle generation because they came between those early modernists and Pop art — the challenge was to amplify that abstraction without appearing derivative. The results were remarkable: the painters attacked the subject head on, creating an art that was bold and visceral and expressed the drama of the Cornish coastline in vibrant colour.
Many of the second-generation artists had fought in the Second World War, and they brought some of that trauma to their work. Sven Berlin had been in the D-Day landings; Peter Lanyon had served in the RAF; Terry Frost, Adrian Heath, Karl Weschke and Roger Hilton had been prisoners of war; and the German-born Paul Feiler had been interned as an enemy alien.
Having lived through the horrors and been spared, they harnessed a terrific desire to get on with life. They pursued their calling with an undeviating single-mindedness. As the group’s unofficial poet, W.S. Graham, wrote: ‘The poet or painter steers his life to maim / Himself somehow for the job.’
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