Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Langley, as well as female artists Laura Johnson, Dod Procter and Elizabeth Forbes - be-
came highly influential and prized, with many of the artists exhibiting their work in major
London venues such as the Royal Academy and the National Gallery. Collectively they
produced some of the West Country's best-known, and best-loved, works of art.
The St Ives Schools
The next generation of artists reacted powerfully against the figurative concerns of their
predecessors. The advent of modernism in the 1920s opened up the canvas far beyond the
confines of representational painting - soon Cornwall became identified with a much
more radical style of art.
Links between St Ives and the avant-garde go back to the mid-1920s, when the ground-
breaking potter Bernard Leach established his first workshop in St Ives, in partnership
with the Japanese ceramics artist Shoji Hamada. Leach was fascinated with the functions,
shapes and forms of Oriental pottery and went on to develop a highly influential style,
fusing Eastern philosophies with Western materials.
By the mid-1920s, the painters Cedric Morris, Christopher 'Kit' Wood and Ben Nich-
olson had followed in Leach's wake. During one visit to St Ives, Wood and Nicholson
stumbled across the work of an entirely self-taught Cornish fisherman and painter, Alfred
Wallis, whose naive style - which paid little heed to conventional rules of perspective,
scale or composition - proved a powerful influence on the modernist artists, many of
whom were seeking a return to the more primitive style of art that Wallis' work seemed to
embody.
Within a few years Wallis found himself surrounded by a new artistic community that
established itself in St Ives throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. At the forefront of this
new movement were Nicholson and his wife, the young sculptor Barbara Hepworth; soon
they were joined by their friend, the Russian sculptor Naum Gabo, a key figure of the
Constructivist movement.
The three artists began developing experimental abstract work that echoed the post-war
modernist movements and were inspired by West Cornwall's shapes, light and landscapes.
Hepworth, in particular, became fascinated with her adopted home, and her distinctive
combination of stone, metal and sinuous forms was clearly influenced by the rugged
Cornish landscape and its industrial remains and ancient monuments.
Attracted by St Ives' burgeoning reputation as a centre for abstract art, a new wave of
exciting young artists, including Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron,
