Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (June 8, 1912, St Andrews, Fife - January 26, 2004) was one of the foremost British abstract artists, a member of the influential Penwith Society of Arts.

Life

She attended Edinburgh College of Art from 1932 to 1936, and sporadically in 1937. Suffering from ill-health, on the recommendation of her tutor she went to St Ives, Cornwall, in 1940, quickly becoming part of a group of Hampstead-based modernists who had moved to Carbis Bay to escape the war. They included the painter Ben Nicholson and the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo,

In 1949, the St Ives art community suffered an acrimonious split within its main organisation, the St Ives Society of Artists, Barns-Graham becoming a founder member of a breakaway group of abstract artists, the Penwith Society of Arts. In the same year she married the art critic David Lewis (they divorced, amicably, in 1960).

She travelled regularly over the next 20 years - Switzerland, Italy, Paris, and Spain. With the exception of a short teaching term at Leeds School of Art (1956 - 57) and three years in London (1960 - 63), she lived and worked in St Ives. From 1960, on inheriting a house outside St Andrews, she split her time between summers in Cornwall and winters in Scotland.

Post-war, when St Ives had ceased to be a pivotal centre of modernism, her work and importance as an artist was sidelined, in part by an art-historical consensus that she had been only as a minor member of the St Ives school. In old age, however, she received belated recognition, receiving honorary doctorates from the University of St Andrews in 1992 and later from the universities of Plymouth, Exeter and Falmouth . In 1999 she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Scottish Watercolourists, and was awarded a CBE in 2001.

Art

Her work generally lay on the divide between abstract and representational, typically drawing on inspirations from landscape: for instance, Cornish rocks, landscapes and buildings, observation of smashed ice on a puddle, or brilliantly coloured gouaches deriving from the light and landscape of Lanzarote.

See also

* List of St. Ives artists

References

*Obituary: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Peter Davies, "The Independent", London, January 28, 2004
*Wilhelmina Barns-Graham - Obituary, "The Times", London, January 28, 2004
* [http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/obituary/0,,1133740,00.html Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: Radiant and versatile artist active in St Ives and Scotland] , Douglas Hall, "The Guardian", January 29, 2004

External links

* [http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=697&page=1&sole=y&collab=y&attr=y&sort=default&tabview=lightbox Works at the Tate Gallery]