AN AXIS OF ABSTRACTION : ART IN CORNWALL
AND YORKSHIRE – THEN AND NOW
Leeds City Art Gallery. 23rd March 2024 to 23rd March
2025
Reviewed by Jim Burns
An obvious link between Cornwall and Yorkshire is Barbara Hepworth, the
Wakefield-born sculptor who lived for much of her life in St Ives. Another,
is Terry Frost, closely associated with the post-war school of St Ives
abstract art but also spending time in Leeds as a recipient of a Gregory
Fellowship. Both are represented in the current exhibition at Leeds City Art
Gallery, along with a range of other artists whose work has links to
Cornwall.
Frost’s “Brown Verticles” is one of the highlights of the exhibition, its
large size and gleaming surface capturing the attention immediately.
I somehow never think of brown as being one of the most inviting of
colours, but Frost’s canvas invests it with life.
Alongside it are works by Peter Lanyon, Paul Feiler (a small, but
attractive “Winter Cornwall”), Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson,
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, the potter Bernard Leach, Patrick Heron, and the
little-known Marlow Moss, whose “Spatial Construction” is a neat example of
her constructivist activity. Two younger contemporary abstract artists
working in St Ives – Veronica Ryan and Ro Robertson – are also there.
It’s a small but satisfying show, indicating as it does how much talent was
concentrated for a time in a relatively small area, and how much provocative
and vital work was produced.
In an adjoining room there is an exhibition built around the painter John
Tunnard, a now largely-forgotten figure in British art who lived and taught
in Penzance. Histories of post-war St Ives art tend to overlook him. and he
doesn’t rate a mention in Frances Spalding’s
The Real and the Romantic: English
Art Between the Two World Wars (Thames & Hudson, 2022).
He was sometimes associated with the
British surrealists, if a label is necessary.
But artists often slide in and out
of categories and there is sufficient individuality in Tunnard’s work to
indicate that, in Desmond Morris’s words in his
The British Surrealists (Thames &
Hudson, 2022), he always retained a “unique personal vision”. He was an
engaging abstract painter, sometimes influenced by entomology and the
natural world but also by space travel and technology, and an engaging
personality if the stories in Morris’s book are anything to go by.
He turned down an invitation to join
the St Ives Society of Artists because, Morris says, he “seems to have
disliked the bitchy in-fighting that was going on there”.
It’s good to see a number of Tunnard’s paintings given prominence, and to
have them hung alongside those by some of his contemporaries. I was
delighted to see Edward Wadsworth’s “Slump”, a commentary on the economic
situation of the 1930s in his clearly-defined, immediately identifiable
style, and works by, among others, the always-interesting Paul Nash and C.R
W. Nevinson. Viewed together, and with the St Ives artists, they point to
the fascinating but too often neglected history of British modernism.