Tate St Ives has opened a retrospective that, according to its director, is the first to span the whole career of Scottish-born modernist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, who was long sidelined in the story of the St Ives school.
Tate St Ives has opened a major retrospective of the British modernist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, which gallery director Anne Barlow describes as the first to span the painter's full career and a "long-overdue celebration", according to a Guardian report. Born in St Andrews in 1912, Barns-Graham moved to the Cornish fishing town in 1940 and became a key figure in the St Ives school, working until her death in 2004 aged 91. The show is centred on her monumental 1950 canvas Glacier (Blue Cave), and it runs until 3 May.
The exhibition traces how her work moved from landscape toward abstraction. Curator Katy Norris points to the glacier paintings that followed a 1949 hike at Grindelwald in Switzerland, and to the 1960s and 1970s series Things of a Kind in Order and Disorder, in which small cardboard squares were laid in rows on her studio floor and nudged by chance. Later works include the thumbprint ink lines of the 1980s Small Energy Drawings. The report says she linked colours with people, places and emotions, and cites her own comparison of one 1968 painting to a broken marriage, which ended in divorce in 1963, and the 1967 work Protest, made during the Vietnam war.
The Guardian notes that the art historian Virginia Button wrote that Barns-Graham felt she had been unfairly sidelined as a woman in a St Ives story focused on Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and Patrick Heron. Her fame in the 1950s faded in the following decade as her work became harder-edged and less commercial. Film-maker Mark Cousins, who made a 2024 film about her, argues she should be seen as a singular imaginative artist rather than one of many St Ives painters. These views come from a single published account, and visitors should check Tate St Ives for opening times and ticket details.
