Mezzanine exhibition: Artists from Land’s End

“Land's End” - is the westernmost point of England on the Cornish Peninsula. The land there is forestless, sharply crowned by cliffs and open toward the sea.

The history of the art colony founded in St Ives and its key figures can be discovered through archival documents preserved in the open collection of art emphera founded by British art critic Jasia Reichardt, as well as in the archives of the Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz. 

In the summer of 1939, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth - British artists associated with the 1930s avant-garde and the Paris-based Abstraction-Création group - arrived by car from London to the fishing settlement of St Ives, located about 30 km from the tip of the peninsula. They fled the city to escape the bombings. On the eve of the outbreak of war, sculptor Naum Gabo, who in 1937 co-edited “Circle” with Ben Nicholson - a key publication promoting abstract and constructivist art in Britain - also headed for Cornwall. One of the documents presented at the exhibition is a black and white photograph taken in 1936. The photograph shows a section of the first international exhibition of abstract art in Britain, “Abstract and Concrete,” which featured the works of the three artists mentioned above alongside those of Piet Mondrian, Alexandre Calder and Jean Hélion. 

In the same year Margaret Mellis settled in St Ives - a painter and sculptor creating geometric abstractions, using found materials in her compositions, such as packaging and labels, or fragments of driftwood. The folder of her exhibition refers to a review of the artist's works organized in 1969 at a gallery in London founded by Mateusz Grabowski.

 The mastery of local craftsmanship is demonstrated by a pamphlet featuring a vessel created in a ceramic studio operating on the outskirts of the port town, founded in 1920 by Bernard Leach together with Japanese ceramicist Shōji Hamada. Dishes were made there by hand without the support of any mechanical equipment. They experimented with baking and natural glazes. The ceramics combined local form with the raw aesthetics of the Far East.

Reproductions of works by Alfred Wallis from the catalogue of an exhibition at the Crane Kalman Gallery in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s introduce the figure of the village-living fisherman, who was associated with the sea for most of his life and began painting at the age of 70. The subjects of his simplified paintings were scenes related to port life, ships and seascapes. He did not follow the rules of perspective, and painted on random materials such as cardboard, wood and tea wrappers. His paintings were two-dimensional, synthetic and naive, but resulted from the direct relationship between man and nature surrounding him. The simplicity and intuition of the works by Wallis, who died in 1942, acted as incantations for newcomer artists seeking authentic forms of expression and spiritual rebirth after the collapse of pre-war utopias.

After the end of World War II, artists of the younger generation, including Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Bryan Wynter, and Terry Frost, found their asylum in St Ives. They combined abstract compositions with a personal relationship with nature and the local community. They brought a new energy and experimental approach to the works. Geometric shapes were filled with light, rhythm and the Cornish landscape. Peter Lanyon had been flying gliders since the 1950s, and tried to capture the perspective of flight over cliffs and bays in his paintings. In his paintings he expressed not only the topography of the place and its history, but also his personal experiences.

The St Ives community operated like a dynamic network. Artists shared inspiration, debated on mysticism and abstraction, and held joint exhibitions at local galleries such as Penwith Gallery. They created together for three decades, until the 1960s. By then, the mood on the coast had changed, and the center of art had become swinging London.

Materials covering several decades of British art have been selected by Jasia Reichardt in separate folders beginning with prints from the 1930s to the growing number of invitations and flyers from the 1990s.

The story concludes with clippings from the British press The Independent and The Observer reporting on the opening of the Tate St Ives location in 1993.

The show is a preview of the exhibition entitled. “St Ives and Elsewhere.”

Marta Pierzchała