All angles at once | Wilhelmina Barns-Graham at British Art Fair 2024
Have we reached peak ‘Wilhelmina-Barns-Graham-is-an-underrated-artist’? This tenet of received art wisdom is so often put forward about the Scottish-born painter, you’ve got to suspect it is no longer true. In fact ‘Willie’, albeit posthumously, is fast becoming something of a national treasure. And rightly so.
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Celebration at 90, 2000, Screenprint, edition of 70, 58 x 76 cm, Image courtesy WBG Trust
Dovecot Studios after Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Glacier Ice Face, 2024, Wool, cotton and linen on cotton warp, 180 x 99 cm. Woven by Louise Trotter, Ben Hymers, and Elaine Wilson
A lot of this is down to the hard work of the Wilhemina Barns-Graham Trust, based in Edinburgh, and set up by the artist in 1987, 17 years before her death. The Trust holds over 700 works by Barns-Graham, and while it has, over the years, donated many paintings and prints to institutions such as the Tate, the National Galleries of Scotland and Pallant House Gallery, it has retained many of her major works and is extremely proactive in lending them to galleries, and in organising exhibitions.
British Art Fair has teamed up with the Trust to organise an exciting new show, on display throughout the weekend at Saatchi Gallery, exhibiting a selection of Barns-Graham paintings, including (affordable) late-career prints and three original works on paper from her ‘Glacier’ series (read on). These will be shown alongside works by contemporary artists supported by the Trust, which awards bursaries and grants and sets up residences for young and emerging artists, including a tapestry representation of her 1951 painting Ice Face.
Undoubtedly Barns-Graham was overshadowed for much of her early-to-mid career. Having graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art in 1940, she was encouraged to move to St Ives in Cornwall by the college principal Hubert Wellington, as a place that would be safe from Luftwaffe bombs, and good for both her health (she had weak lungs) and her artistic development, home as it was to a long-standing artists’ colony.
She quickly became a part of that community, producing stylised representational landscapes, (though coastal access was restricted by the MOD during the war), interiors and portraits influenced by the European Modernist movement. She joined the St Ives Society of Artists and then, in 1949, the breakaway Penwith Society of Arts, dominated by Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and including the likes of Peter Lanyon and Sven Berlin.
Barns-Graham adopted a pivotal shift in style after visiting the Grindelwald Glacier in the Swiss Alps in May of that year, which she returned to several times, producing over 60 works. ‘It’s likeness to glass and transparency, combined with solid and rough edges made me wish to combine in the work all angles at once’, she later wrote, ‘from above, through, and all around, as a bird flies, a total experience.’ From these revelatory works, it was a short hop to the joyful abstraction that defined her subsequent career, as she imaginatively explored form, colour and space.
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, End of the Glacier Upper Grindelwald, I949, gouache and pencil on paper. Image courtesy of WBG Trust
The artist continued painting into her nineties: her oeuvre is defined by exuberant joie de vivre, which can perhaps disguise her work’s technical brilliance and her ability to harness energy within a balanced composition. Barns-Graham never stopped experimenting with abstraction, from her earlier, more graphic period (literally so, she planned her pieces on graph paper) to her later pieces achieved with more fluid, minimalist brushstrokes. In 1997, having entered her ninth decade, she stated: ‘I’m not ready for death yet, there’s still so much I want to do. Life is so exciting; nature is so exciting. Trying to catch the one simple statement about it. That’s what I’m aiming for, I’ll keep on trying.’
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Summer Painting No. 2, 1985, Oil on canvas, 91.3 x 121.4 cm. Image courtesy WBG Trust
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was poorly represented in the Tate Gallery’s 1985 exhibition ‘St Ives, 1939-64’, reflecting the fact she was then considered a minor figure among the feted Cornish community of painters, alive and dead, including the likes of Nicholson, Hepworth, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, William Scott, Alfred Wallis and Christopher Wood. Several subsequent touring exhibitions, and a retrospective at Tate St Ives in 1999, however, introduced her work to a new (and younger) audience and her late-blossoming reputation as a major, influential British painter was recognised with the award of a CBE in 2001. She continued producing work in her 93rd and final year: still pertinent, still experimenting, still deeply engaged in visually expressing how excited she was by life and nature.
A book launch for the new publication ‘Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. The Glaciers’ will be held at 2pm on Saturday 28th September at British Art Fair. Join Art Historian and Curator Alice Strang as she discusses Barns-Graham’s Glacier series and essay ‘Into the Vortex’ included in the new book.