Alfred Wallis, Ship in Rough Sea, nd, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London. Picture © The estate of Alfred Wallis
Art of St Ives Comes to York, Main Gallery, York Art Gallery, York, May 2 – September 27 2009
St Ives, at just a glance, is already a picture postcard. Narrow streets twist and turn making a maze out of the fisherman's cottages, sandy shores stretch out in wide yellow lines, the deep blue sea merges with the bright blue sky and the seagulls dip and dive and stop.
Yet the artwork produced by the artists living in and around such idyllic scenery is far from sugary. Contemplating the period between 1930 to 1970, York Art Gallery's summer exhibition showcases the art that turned St Ives from a sleepy fishing port into Britain's centre for the avant-garde.
Appropriately the exhibition begins with Alfred Wallis's Ship in Rough Sea (1925). Peering through an open door, it was Wallis whose untutored simplicity of style originally captivated Ben Nicholson, the husband of Barbara Hepworth.
Ten years later, and five days before World War Two, the famous couple trundled out of London in search of a similarly inspirational St Ives experience.
Peter Lanyon, Soaring Flight (1960). Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London. Picture © Sheila Lanyon, DACS (2009)
Settling into St Ives, Hepworth and Nicholson soon became the central spinning spiders in a web of pioneering painters, potters and sculptors.
The exhibition highlights the sense of community established by the artists - sharing ideas, concepts and techniques and skills were passed down from one painter to another.
It was Peter Lanyon who taught Sir Terry Frost that "to experience landscape…you lay down in the landscape…you looked up into a tree… you walked over the landscape so that you understood its shape."
However Lanyon himself didn't lie down; he took to the skies, opened his bird's eyes and saw the land from above. For Lanyon the air was "a very definite world of activity, as complex and demanding as the sea."
Soaring Flight (1960) captures the complexity of air's sudden, shifting currents. Brush strokes swoop upwards, rushing the colour up and away, until, caught in a dizzying dive of red, they plummet back down.
Terry Frost, Red, Yellow and Blue (1962). Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London, courtesy Beaux Arts and The Terry Frost Estate
Instead of attempting to meticulously detail the landscape, the St Ives artists were more inclined to conjure up a sense of something. Anthony Benjamin's large red canvas, entitled Painting No 1 (1965-66), seems miles away from subtle seaside blues and yet, staring up at it, you feel as if you are exploring a rock pool.
Light shimmers on the surface, seaweed-like shapes drift about in black, and now and again you glimpse the silhouette of a shell.
Interactive elements allow you to become an artist yourself with a small, child sized, light box covered in cutout translucent acetate providing you with the means to create Frost's own Red, Yellow and Blue (1962).
Using the bold primary colours you can compose the primary shapes of the land and the curve of a boat sitting below the round moon and sun.
In one brisk walk around the room you can track the St Ives artists from start to finish. Admire Hepworth's smooth, pebble-ish sculptures, David Leach's speckled, yet handsomely thrown eggcups, and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's sketchy skeleton lines. Anyone keen to explore the evolution of St Ives artistic rise to success should pay a visit to York Art Gallery.
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