Kate Day headed across the Scottish capital where she found a little bit of Cornwall to explore for a few hours.
It seems appropriate that the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is holding this exhibition of paintings, prints and sculpture since it already shares its grounds with the work of Barbara Hepworth – wife of Ben Nicholson and a key St Ives sculptor.
Displaying Nicholson’s work alongside that of contemporaries and like-minded thinkers including Patrick Heron, Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham, Terry Frost and Peter Lanyon, this exhibition, on show until June 13, allows its visitors a succinct view of the close-knit group known as the St Ives School.
While Nicholson’s practice forms the backbone of the show it is by no means the focus.
In fact, despite the initial inclusion of two paintings by Nicholson’s mother and father, the St Ives output is shown to have been very much an ensemble effort with no single 'celebrity'.
The informative inclusion of letters, postcards and photographs sent between some of the artists and friends living and working in St Ives offers further insight into their lives.
It is interesting to see how they enthusiastically relied on one another for encouragement, ideas and support.
One letter, written by Nicholson in 1939, explains some of his and Hepworth’s reasons for staying in St Ives:
"I can get some landscape painting out of it as I find this particular country + sea v. stimulating to ideas - + Barbara says its full of sculpture ideas for her – she says perhaps more so than any other part of England etc etc…"
The onset of war was Nicholson’s original reason to move with his family to the relative safety of St Ives. But, as indicated in this letter, it was the exceptional landscape, sea and sky that proved to have the most impact on his and his companions’ work.
The St Ives school of thought focused on the division of form and space and paid particular attention to the visual tension that could be achieved by careful experimentation and diligent craftsmanship. The unique Cornwall landscape provided much inspiration for this.
John Wells’ Collage of 1942 used the simplest of materials (collage, gouache and pencil on card) but its perfection is incredible.
There is an inexplicable 'rightness' to the work and this can be seen to have been a repeated preoccupation for him and other St Ives artists.
Underlying these formalities was a deliberate exploration of naïvety, remarkably demonstrated in this show by the inclusion of Nicholson’s earlier work, a painting of Walton Wood Cottage in 1928.
This painting depicts the cottage that Nicholson and his first wife, Winifred, had bought in Cumberland in 1924. While this whimsical piece appears to be a world away from the flat areas of white and the perfect squares of Nicholson’s later work, an early concern with divisions of space, simple form and line can undeniably be seen.
Upon his move to St Ives and through the influence of other artists such as Piet Mondrian - whose Composition with Double Line and Yellow of 1932 is included in this exhibition – the shift in style, from the naïve and child-like to a simple and severe division of space, is clearly apparent.
This preoccupation with form and space continued when Nicholson moved from Britain to Switzerland.
It was the acutely accurate and intuitive way of dividing space that Nicholson’s contemporaries in Britain and Europe shared.
Hepworth’s fluid forms, Naum Gabo’s Perspex shafts of flat surface and space, and John Tunnard’s painted layers are all fascinatingly pleasing to the eye.
It is this visual interplay that has become synonymous with the St Ives School.
