International Exchanges: Modern Art and St Ives 1915–65 banner

International Exchanges traces some key connections between the art of St Ives and the

rest of the world. This wide-ranging exhibition shows St Ives as part of an international

network of artists and artistic movements, extending from Russian experiments of the

1910s through to the radical breakthroughs of the 1960s.

St Ives in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s was an artistic centre of international importance.

The artists who lived and worked in this small town in the far southwest of Britain have had

many exhibitions and books written about their work, generally focusing on their location

and their use of landscape and nature. This exhibition sets out to view the art of St Ives

from the other end of the telescope, to place it not in relation to where it was made but

in relation to: what was made, how it was made, and its position in a wider

international modern art.

International Exchanges: Modern Art and St Ives 1915–1965 explores the wider national and international contexts which shaped art in St Ives in the 1940s, 1950s and 60s. As part of a series of exhibitions exploring the histories and legacies of art in St Ives, the exhibition positions St Ives art within wider aesthetic concerns and broader critical perspectives than the more familiar ideas of landscape and place that shape our view of the artists colony.

The exhibition will show how the art of post-war St Ives drew upon two trajectories of modern art: one the utopian ideals of constructivism from Moscow in the 1910s through Berlin and Paris between the wars; and the other a tradition of craft and the handmade that unites the carvings of Brancusi and the ceramics of Bernard Leach and others. Major works by Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and others will also been seen alongside that of their contemporaries from elsewhere in Europe, North America and beyond to position their art within wider formal, technical and philosophical debates.

Wreck 1963

Zennor Storm 1958

Lost Mine 1959

Typically for Lanyon's work, Lost Mine combines an apparently abstract idiom with a precise external source. The broad, gestural style reflects the respect Lanyon had for American Abstract Expressionist painters. He had first seen the work of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in Venice in 1950, but the broad black marks also recall the work of Franz Kline, who may have been among the many artists he met in New York in 1957. Unlike the work of the Americans, Lanyon avoided an all-over even treatment, however. Employing a favourite device, he juxtaposes a quiet area on the left with the larger confusion of rapid, twisting and interweaving marks on the right.

As the title indicates, this painting refers to a tin mine that was inundated by the sea and abandoned. Colour operates figuratively and symbolically. The black represents the mine shaft and signifies death, the blues are the sea and sky, the red signals life and danger. Lost Minewas painted in the artist's studio in Carbis Bay, close to the Cornish town of St Ives, and an idea of Cornwall is central to its meaning. Lanyon was a Cornishman and that cultural identity, and the history of Cornwall and its tin mining industry, was a central aspect of his persona and his art. The tragedies of mines driven under the sea in search of more ore, and then flooded, epitomised an idea of the miner exploited by mine-owners from beyond the region. Lanyon had grown up at a time when the mines were in serious decline and there was much hardship and unrest among the remaining miners. Though radical politics were unusual for such an artist, the conception of landscape as a repository of history was a common aspect of contemporary views of the land and of romantic notions of landscape. On a more abstruse level, the process of entering the mine and re-emerging became, for Lanyon, a symbolic rebirth and a metaphor for his own identification with west Cornwall. Thus, this work could reasonably be seen as a political protest at the exploitation of a region, and of an underclass, and as meditation on individual identity.

Lost Mine was made at a moment of transition for Lanyon. In the early 1950s, he had made paintings, such as Porthleven 1951 (Tate N06151), about specific places and their histories and associations. Between 1957 and 1959, his themes were more temporal and less topographically specific, being largely about the weather or events. In the summer of 1959, he went gliding for the first time and the following year he began to make paintings based upon air movements and the sensation of the artist's body suspended, silently, in space. The present work pre-dates the first gliding painting, but was completed after his first flight. While it may be akin to an aerial view, one might also see the contrast of quiet and violent sections as relating to the movement of air around the coast. Referring to the sense of actual depth achieved by the master of landscape painting, Lanyon described his gliding as 'an extension of what Turner was doing'. Such works as Lost Mine were, thus, positioned within a landscape tradition while retaining their formal innovation.

Humanity and the individual were at the centre of Lanyon’s concept of landscape, and throughout his life he remained fascinated with the confrontation between man and nature. This work represents Lanyon’s response to the 1962 wreck of the French trawler, Jeanne Gougy, which ran aground at Land’s End in stormy weather. In the last year of his life, Lanyon moved from a diffused, tonal palette towards one of intense and saturated colours. The layered and gestural surface of the painting invokes the turbulent sea and the interplay of complex natural forces.

May 2007