St Ives School

St Ives School. A loosely structured group of artists, flourishing particularly from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, who concentrated their activities in the Cornish fishing port of St Ives. Like Newlyn, St Ives had been popular with artists long before this: in the winter of 1883–4 Whistler had spent several weeks painting there with two of his disciples, Menpes and Sickert; Helene Schjerfbeck and Anders Zorn spent the winter there in 1887–8; the St Ives Arts Club had been founded in 1888, the St Ives Society of Artists in 1927 (it had its own sales gallery to cater for the tourist trade), and the St Ives School of Painting in 1938. In 1920 Bernard Leach (1887–1979), probably the most famous British ceramicist of the 20th century, established a pottery there. However, St Ives did not become of more than local importance in painting and sculpture until Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson moved there in 1939, two weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War. They were anxious that their children should be safely outside London, and their friend Adrian Stokes, who lived at Carbis Bay (virtually a suburb of St Ives), invited the family to stay with him. Hepworth lived in St Ives for the rest of her life (her studio is now a museum of her work) and Nicholson (who had discovered Alfred Wallis on a day-trip to St Ives in 1928) lived there until 1958. They formed the nucleus of a group of avant-garde artists who made the town an internationally recognized centre of abstract art, and it is to these artists that the term ‘St Ives School’ is usually applied, even though many of them had little in common stylistically, apart from an interest in portraying the local landscape in abstract terms. The one with the greatest international prestige was Naum Gabo, who lived in St Ives from 1939 to 1946.

After the war a number of abstract painters settled in or near the town or made regular visits. The residents included Bryan Wynter, who moved there in 1945 and settled at Zennor, about five miles away, Terry Frost, who lived there intermittently (at first in a caravan) from 1946 to 1963, and Patrick Heron, who rented a cottage in St Ives every summer from 1947 to 1955 and then bought a house at Zennor; the visitors included Roger Hilton (who eventually settled in Cornwall in 1965), Adrian Heath, and Victor Pasmore. Peter Lanyon was the only notable abstract artist to be born in St Ives.

Many of the avant-garde artists became members of the St Ives Society of Artists, and there was some antagonism between them and the traditionalists. In 1946 the modernists showed their work separately in the crypt of the Mariners' Chapel in St Ives and were consequently known as the Crypt Group. The group held two more exhibitions, in 1947 and 1948, but in 1949 the Penwith Society was formed in an attempt to reconcile traditionalists and abstractionists (the name comes from the district of Cornwall in which St Ives is situated). It was intended as a tribute to Borlase Smart (1881–1947), a leading light of the St Ives Society of Artists, who was a traditionalist himself but sympathetic to modern ideas. It became more associated with the modernists, however ( Herbert Read was the first President), and organized Britain's first post-war exhibitions of abstract art. It was largely thanks to its activities that St Ives attracted so much attention in the 1950s and early 1960s from artists, critics, and dealers (American visitors included the abstract painters Larry Rivers, Mark Rothko, and Mark Tobey, and the critic Clement Greenberg).

The heyday of the St Ives School was over by the mid-1960s, but the town continued to be an artistic centre. In 1993 the Tate Gallery opened a branch museum there (the Tate Gallery, St Ives), housing changing displays of the work of 20th-century artists associated with the town. The building includes a stained-glass window commissioned from Patrick Heron.