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Ancient and mysterious. | 0:00:03 | 0:00:06 | |
Romantic and remote. | 0:00:06 | 0:00:09 | |
Cornwall stands at the very edge of our world. | 0:00:09 | 0:00:12 | |
Yet it exerts a magnetic pull on our imaginations. | 0:00:12 | 0:00:17 | |
Coincidence, curiosity | 0:00:24 | 0:00:26 | |
and crisis drew a string of great artists to this remote region. | 0:00:26 | 0:00:31 | |
In responding to each other and to the dramatic landscape, they went on | 0:00:31 | 0:00:35 | |
to produce some of the most exhilarating art of the 20th century. | 0:00:35 | 0:00:39 | |
The history of British painting and sculpture would be redefined | 0:00:39 | 0:00:44 | |
in this distant and forbidding place. | 0:00:44 | 0:00:46 | |
For it was in Cornwall that against all the odds, a small fishing village | 0:00:54 | 0:00:59 | |
was briefly transformed into an international centre of modern art. | 0:00:59 | 0:01:03 | |
And that fishing village was St Ives. | 0:01:03 | 0:01:07 | |
A series of extraordinary characters was brought together into this unlikely community. | 0:01:08 | 0:01:14 | |
Alfred Wallace, the luckless ancient mariner, wholly untutored in art. | 0:01:16 | 0:01:22 | |
And his disciple, the brilliant but doomed Christopher Wood. | 0:01:22 | 0:01:27 | |
Ben Nicholson, the formidable Svengali of the British avant-garde. | 0:01:27 | 0:01:33 | |
And his lover, Barbara Hepworth, who was the world's first great female sculptor. | 0:01:33 | 0:01:39 | |
And two Cornish sons, who would revolutionise the way we see both landscape and colour. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:47 | |
This film explores the work, lives and relationships of | 0:01:48 | 0:01:53 | |
the masters who most helped turn St Ives into a colony of modern art. | 0:01:53 | 0:01:58 | |
It's like a whole continent of colour. | 0:02:00 | 0:02:03 | |
It seems hard to believe, but for a few dazzling years, this place was as famous as Paris, as exciting | 0:02:03 | 0:02:10 | |
as New York, and infinitely more progressive than London. | 0:02:10 | 0:02:14 | |
So how did this actually happen, and why did it so tragically end? | 0:02:16 | 0:02:20 | |
This is an epic tale, filled with individual triumphs and disasters. | 0:02:22 | 0:02:25 | |
But together, it amounts to nothing less | 0:02:25 | 0:02:28 | |
than an alternative history of British art. | 0:02:28 | 0:02:32 | |
This is The Art Of Cornwall. | 0:02:32 | 0:02:34 | |
Cornwall is not a county, it is a country. | 0:02:48 | 0:02:54 | |
For most of its history, it was a desolate outpost at the edge of | 0:02:54 | 0:02:58 | |
England, a mysterious Celtic kingdom of tombs, tin mines and fishermen. | 0:02:58 | 0:03:03 | |
It boasted its own language, its own legal system, and until only | 0:03:03 | 0:03:08 | |
recently was considerably harder to get to than much of mainland Europe. | 0:03:08 | 0:03:13 | |
But it was the peculiar quality of the light in St Ives that first caught the world's attention. | 0:03:13 | 0:03:19 | |
It's been called the brightest place in Britain, and the reason for that | 0:03:19 | 0:03:23 | |
is simple - because the town is completely surrounded by sea, and that sea acts as a giant reflector, | 0:03:23 | 0:03:30 | |
bouncing the light back into the town. | 0:03:30 | 0:03:32 | |
And if that wasn't enough, there are miles of golden sand that only serve to intensify the effect. | 0:03:32 | 0:03:38 | |
It was the arrival of the railways in the 1850s that ended | 0:03:43 | 0:03:47 | |
Cornwall's age-old isolation, and first brought artists to its shores. | 0:03:47 | 0:03:53 | |
St Ives was an established artists' colony, | 0:03:53 | 0:03:55 | |
it really built up around the railway, which gave accessibility | 0:03:55 | 0:03:59 | |
to the capital, to the Royal Academy, | 0:03:59 | 0:04:01 | |
allowing it to become a colony in the late | 0:04:01 | 0:04:03 | |
19th century - and the fashion for harbours and fishermen as subjects. | 0:04:03 | 0:04:08 | |
The railways brought growing numbers of gentleman artists, all attracted | 0:04:10 | 0:04:14 | |
by the new talk, of a picturesque English Riviera, a paradise bathed in warm, Mediterranean light. | 0:04:14 | 0:04:22 | |
Over the following decades, these painters formed artists' colonies | 0:04:22 | 0:04:26 | |
along the Cornish coast and produced thousands of highly marketable paintings. | 0:04:26 | 0:04:34 | |
They depicted scenes of hardworking men and God-fearing women, together | 0:04:34 | 0:04:39 | |
enduring, with stoic fortitude, the trials of Cornish land and sea. | 0:04:39 | 0:04:45 | |
They appeared to offer a definitive and authentic image of Cornwall. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:51 | |
But this wasn't the real Cornwall, it was a fantasy, a make-believe world, | 0:04:54 | 0:04:58 | |
mawkish and patronising, a masterful piece of Victorian myth-making. | 0:04:58 | 0:05:05 | |
These painters achieved huge popularity in Victorian Britain, but the 20th century | 0:05:06 | 0:05:11 | |
would see a new group of radical artists come to Cornwall, | 0:05:11 | 0:05:16 | |
and they would change everything. | 0:05:16 | 0:05:18 | |
I'm an art historian at the University of Cambridge. | 0:05:33 | 0:05:36 | |
I first came here as a student harbouring an unhealthy teenage obsession with modern art. | 0:05:36 | 0:05:42 | |
And Cornwall seemed as far away from that as it was possible to get. | 0:05:44 | 0:05:48 | |
To me, its only association was of depressing family holidays in the rain. | 0:05:51 | 0:05:56 | |
But that all changed one afternoon when I discovered a little museum | 0:05:56 | 0:06:00 | |
just around the corner from my college. | 0:06:00 | 0:06:03 | |
Kettle's Yard is a quirky collection of pebbles, driftwood and pottery, | 0:06:11 | 0:06:17 | |
but scattered casually amongst those odds and ends are some masterpieces of modern art. | 0:06:17 | 0:06:22 | |
But when I first came here that afternoon, it wasn't these | 0:06:26 | 0:06:28 | |
modern masterpieces that captured my imagination - I was transfixed by something altogether less exotic. | 0:06:28 | 0:06:36 | |
I discovered the work of three unmistakably British artists, | 0:06:38 | 0:06:42 | |
who all shared a profound connection to Cornwall. | 0:06:42 | 0:06:46 | |
Modest, cardboard paintings of Cornish boats by Alfred Wallis. | 0:06:46 | 0:06:51 | |
Graceful and tasteful abstractions by Ben Nicholson. | 0:06:51 | 0:06:56 | |
And the quirky paintings of harbours by Christopher Wood. | 0:06:57 | 0:07:03 | |
The chance meeting of these three very different artists would transform the fortunes of St Ives, | 0:07:03 | 0:07:11 | |
and it was the ferocious ambition of the youngest of them that sets this story in motion. | 0:07:11 | 0:07:16 | |
Christopher, or Kit, Wood is one of the most glamorous and dissolute figures in British art. | 0:07:18 | 0:07:26 | |
And his short, explosive life, is the stuff that myths are made of. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:31 | |
At the age of just 19, this middle-class boy from Liverpool | 0:07:33 | 0:07:36 | |
made a staggering announcement to his family. | 0:07:36 | 0:07:39 | |
He was going to become the greatest painter the world had ever seen. | 0:07:39 | 0:07:44 | |
Kit had set himself a virtually impossible task. | 0:07:44 | 0:07:48 | |
He knew that if he was to have any chance of success, there was only one place in the world he could be. | 0:07:48 | 0:07:55 | |
Kit arrived in Paris in March 1921 | 0:08:08 | 0:08:12 | |
with a suitcase in his hand and £14 in his pocket. | 0:08:12 | 0:08:17 | |
Beautiful and bisexual, he yearned for both artistic and social liberation. | 0:08:19 | 0:08:25 | |
His choice of time and place was perfect. | 0:08:27 | 0:08:30 | |
At that time, Paris was the epitome of everything modern - | 0:08:34 | 0:08:39 | |
it was open-minded, risque, | 0:08:39 | 0:08:41 | |
provocative, the complete opposite of buttoned-up, insular London. | 0:08:41 | 0:08:45 | |
And what's more, it had been the undisputed capital of the art world for generations. | 0:08:45 | 0:08:50 | |
It was in Paris that Matisse, Picasso and Brecht had | 0:08:54 | 0:08:57 | |
torn up and completely re-written the old artistic rules. | 0:08:57 | 0:09:01 | |
And it was in Paris that new, radical isms were pouring out | 0:09:01 | 0:09:05 | |
of cafes and bistros with every day that passed. | 0:09:05 | 0:09:10 | |
These revolutionary art forms were mechanistic, urban and angular, | 0:09:17 | 0:09:20 | |
and at first it seems difficult | 0:09:20 | 0:09:22 | |
to see how they could have any connection to Cornwall. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:25 | |
But bear with me, because if Paris offered anything, what it offered | 0:09:25 | 0:09:28 | |
was freedom, freedom from all the stifling academic rules and | 0:09:28 | 0:09:32 | |
conventions, freedom from official techniques and correct styles, | 0:09:32 | 0:09:36 | |
freedom in many ways from the past. | 0:09:36 | 0:09:38 | |
Paris proved that art could be done in a different way. | 0:09:38 | 0:09:42 | |
It wasn't just artistic freedom that Paris offered. | 0:09:45 | 0:09:48 | |
Kit was also sucked in to the dazzling social maelstrom | 0:09:48 | 0:09:53 | |
of the Parisian beau monde - | 0:09:53 | 0:09:55 | |
he even acquired a rich and well-connected playboy lover. | 0:09:55 | 0:09:59 | |
He would introduce Kit to some important people, | 0:09:59 | 0:10:02 | |
but it also introduced him to some very bad habits. | 0:10:02 | 0:10:05 | |
Kit's favourite bad habit was opium. | 0:10:08 | 0:10:12 | |
It became an addiction that would soon overshadow his life and his work. | 0:10:12 | 0:10:18 | |
Kit's letters home are a poignant record of his state of mind in Paris. | 0:10:20 | 0:10:25 | |
They reveal the first signs of a mental turmoil caused by the conflict between | 0:10:25 | 0:10:28 | |
his days at the easel and his nights with an opium pipe. | 0:10:28 | 0:10:32 | |
He writes here, "My brain is working too hard and I don't know where the end will come. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:37 | |
"I've worked very hard and produced nothing whatever to satisfy me." | 0:10:37 | 0:10:41 | |
Kit's misgivings were not shared by his peers. | 0:10:43 | 0:10:46 | |
Jean Cocteau called him the most talented painter he had ever met, | 0:10:46 | 0:10:50 | |
and a recommendation from Picasso secured him a dream job. | 0:10:50 | 0:10:55 | |
In February 1927, the Russian ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev asked Kit to design the scenery | 0:10:58 | 0:11:04 | |
for his new show, Romeo and Juliet, which premiered here at the Theatre Du Chatalet. | 0:11:04 | 0:11:09 | |
The collaboration, however, ended in disaster. | 0:11:12 | 0:11:16 | |
Diaghilev was not impressed by Kit's designs, and Kit was in no mood for compromise. | 0:11:16 | 0:11:22 | |
After a blazing row, he was sacked. | 0:11:22 | 0:11:26 | |
It was a pivotal moment for Kit, and in its own way, it was | 0:11:28 | 0:11:31 | |
a pivotal moment for St Ives and Cornwall, too. | 0:11:31 | 0:11:34 | |
He'd learnt everything he could learn from Paris - now what | 0:11:34 | 0:11:36 | |
he had to do was take these ideas and find fresh inspiration, and that inspiration would be Cornwall. | 0:11:36 | 0:11:44 | |
Cornwall was in Kit's blood. | 0:11:56 | 0:11:59 | |
His mother was Cornish and he instantly developed a deep sense of belonging to the place. | 0:11:59 | 0:12:05 | |
The region's rugged landscape stirred his overactive imagination. | 0:12:05 | 0:12:10 | |
As soon as he arrived he wrote, "If I am here long enough, I'm going to paint good things." | 0:12:12 | 0:12:18 | |
Kit had also found a friend and ally in Ben Nicholson, a man who had | 0:12:18 | 0:12:24 | |
spent much of the 1920s bringing the spirit of Paris to Britain. | 0:12:24 | 0:12:30 | |
In the summer of 1928, | 0:12:30 | 0:12:32 | |
Kit joined Nicholson on a weekend trip to Cornwall. | 0:12:32 | 0:12:37 | |
He'd actually come down to Falmouth for a house party, | 0:12:37 | 0:12:41 | |
but the following day, he convinced Nicholson to drive to the town of St Ives for a sketching trip. | 0:12:41 | 0:12:47 | |
On Sunday 26th August, the two men arrived in St Ives. | 0:12:54 | 0:12:59 | |
They made their way to Porthmeor Beach. | 0:12:59 | 0:13:01 | |
This is Kit's painting of the scene. | 0:13:01 | 0:13:05 | |
In the evening, they packed up their materials and set off for home. | 0:13:10 | 0:13:15 | |
They were strolling happily back into town when something caught their eye. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:19 | |
The front door of this little cottage was open, so they knocked and peeked inside. | 0:13:19 | 0:13:25 | |
Nothing could have prepared them for what they saw. | 0:13:25 | 0:13:28 | |
There were pictures hanging on the walls, piled on the floors, stacked | 0:13:28 | 0:13:33 | |
chaotically against the chairs, | 0:13:33 | 0:13:36 | |
and in the middle of them all was a little old man, painting. | 0:13:36 | 0:13:39 | |
His name was Alfred Wallis, a 73-year-old ex-fisherman. | 0:13:41 | 0:13:47 | |
And in the pictures around him, | 0:13:50 | 0:13:51 | |
Kit and Ben instantly recognised a powerful and uncorrupted vision. | 0:13:51 | 0:13:57 | |
This art seemed as radical as anything they had seen in Paris. | 0:13:59 | 0:14:04 | |
The encounter with Alfred Wallis as this | 0:14:06 | 0:14:09 | |
genuine exemplar of authentic artistic expression, untrained, | 0:14:09 | 0:14:16 | |
unsullied by academicism, is really crucial. | 0:14:16 | 0:14:19 | |
He's symbolic at that time as a genuine, | 0:14:19 | 0:14:22 | |
what's seen as a genuinely naive artist. | 0:14:22 | 0:14:25 | |
While Ben returned to London to spread word of their discovery, | 0:14:31 | 0:14:35 | |
Kit stayed on in St Ives for the autumn, | 0:14:35 | 0:14:38 | |
renting a cottage across the road from Alfred's home. | 0:14:38 | 0:14:42 | |
It seemed he had finally found the inspiration for which he'd been searching. | 0:14:42 | 0:14:48 | |
Here's a guy who'd been in Paris, he'd been mixing with | 0:14:48 | 0:14:50 | |
all the greatest artistic figures in the world - mixing with Picasso, Cocteau, Stravinsky, | 0:14:50 | 0:14:56 | |
Diaghilev, and yet none of that really seemed to count for anything. | 0:14:56 | 0:14:59 | |
What actually inspired him was this place, it was Cornwall, and it was little old Alfred Wallis. | 0:14:59 | 0:15:04 | |
I think somehow | 0:15:06 | 0:15:09 | |
Wood finds in Wallis, erm... | 0:15:09 | 0:15:11 | |
The subject matter, the slightly awkward space and detailing of | 0:15:11 | 0:15:16 | |
the paintings, the creaminess of the paint, he gets from Wallis. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:19 | |
But I wonder if there's also not a certain kind of English landscape, | 0:15:19 | 0:15:22 | |
an English spirit that Wallis kind of opens up for Wood. | 0:15:22 | 0:15:27 | |
Kit visited Wallis every day, | 0:15:28 | 0:15:31 | |
and the old man's influence was soon apparent. | 0:15:31 | 0:15:35 | |
Scenes of metropolitan life were replaced by more vivid depictions of life by the sea. | 0:15:35 | 0:15:43 | |
The dreams of the young man who'd set out to be the world's greatest painter were bearing fruit. | 0:15:44 | 0:15:51 | |
But Kit Wood was losing his mind. | 0:15:51 | 0:15:54 | |
His addiction to opium had intensified. | 0:15:55 | 0:16:00 | |
He started hallucinating. | 0:16:00 | 0:16:03 | |
He became paranoid. | 0:16:03 | 0:16:06 | |
Opium was driving him to the edge. | 0:16:06 | 0:16:09 | |
His inner torment was reflected | 0:16:14 | 0:16:17 | |
in the sinister quality of his last works. | 0:16:17 | 0:16:21 | |
On 21st August 1930, | 0:16:25 | 0:16:27 | |
an exhausted Kit met his mother for lunch in Salisbury. | 0:16:27 | 0:16:31 | |
Then, in a fit of panic, | 0:16:31 | 0:16:33 | |
he threw himself under a train. | 0:16:33 | 0:16:37 | |
He was killed, at the age of 29. | 0:16:37 | 0:16:41 | |
Although he had only stayed there briefly, | 0:16:46 | 0:16:48 | |
Kit had shown that Cornwall could be a natural home for modern art. | 0:16:48 | 0:16:52 | |
He had introduced Ben Nicholson to St Ives, and together, they had | 0:16:55 | 0:16:58 | |
discovered the unique talent of Alfred Wallis. | 0:16:58 | 0:17:02 | |
During the 1930s, Wallis was transformed into something of | 0:17:02 | 0:17:07 | |
a cult figure, with his remarkable depictions of his seafaring past. | 0:17:07 | 0:17:12 | |
His paintings also recorded the demise of one of Cornwall's | 0:17:14 | 0:17:19 | |
oldest and most important industries. | 0:17:19 | 0:17:22 | |
This is Newlyn - it's pretty much all that's left of the Cornish fishing fleet. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:39 | |
But in Wallace's day, it was the hub of a huge and thriving industry, | 0:17:39 | 0:17:43 | |
and every harbour along this coast was packed with fishing boats. | 0:17:43 | 0:17:47 | |
This painting depicts the whole of Mount Spelley. | 0:17:54 | 0:17:57 | |
It shows things which we cannot see, | 0:17:57 | 0:18:00 | |
because it is painted from Wallis's memory. | 0:18:00 | 0:18:02 | |
Anyway, he's showing off, he's telling us | 0:18:02 | 0:18:05 | |
how much he does know about these things. | 0:18:05 | 0:18:06 | |
I know more than all those painters who've been trained! | 0:18:06 | 0:18:09 | |
Well, how much information he can tell us. | 0:18:09 | 0:18:12 | |
Wallis seemed to be painting almost from inside. | 0:18:12 | 0:18:15 | |
Being untrained, he was free of the conventions that other artists were confined by. | 0:18:15 | 0:18:21 | |
He was free from perspective and free from painting | 0:18:21 | 0:18:25 | |
just from observation. He painted from memory, he painted the knowledge that he had of these places. | 0:18:25 | 0:18:32 | |
And that makes it very special - his art... | 0:18:32 | 0:18:35 | |
Art was taking a new direction almost | 0:18:35 | 0:18:38 | |
because of that. | 0:18:38 | 0:18:39 | |
Wallis had spent 25 years chasing shoals of herring, mackerel | 0:18:44 | 0:18:48 | |
and pilchard across the Atlantic. | 0:18:48 | 0:18:51 | |
But in 1890, | 0:18:51 | 0:18:54 | |
he retired from the sea and moved to St Ives, | 0:18:54 | 0:18:57 | |
where he opened a marine supply store. | 0:18:57 | 0:19:00 | |
But in the mid-1920s, Alfred's wife died. | 0:19:00 | 0:19:05 | |
It was loneliness that drew him to paint. | 0:19:05 | 0:19:09 | |
Alfred Wallis didn't paint like any other artist in St Ives. | 0:19:09 | 0:19:13 | |
He didn't have enough money to buy materials, so he painted onto whatever he could find - | 0:19:13 | 0:19:18 | |
cardboard boxes, bits of driftwood, | 0:19:18 | 0:19:21 | |
railway timetables, even jam jars, and set about producing his own, | 0:19:21 | 0:19:26 | |
inimitable alternative to the work of what he called the real artists. | 0:19:26 | 0:19:32 | |
But the real artists | 0:19:34 | 0:19:36 | |
discerned rich layers of meaning in his deceptively simple pictures. | 0:19:36 | 0:19:41 | |
Here's an example. This is a painting of some cottages in St Ives. | 0:19:45 | 0:19:49 | |
You'll notice one of the cottages is much, much smaller than the others. | 0:19:49 | 0:19:53 | |
This isn't just bad perspective, it was supposed to be that way. | 0:19:53 | 0:19:57 | |
That cottage was lived in by Alfred's brother, and Alfred had just fallen out with him. | 0:19:57 | 0:20:02 | |
So by making the cottage really small, Alfred was getting his own artistic revenge on his sibling. | 0:20:02 | 0:20:09 | |
I just love it. All of Wallis's paintings - and there is | 0:20:09 | 0:20:12 | |
a whole wall full of them here - are filled with similarly rich and wonderful meanings. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:18 | |
And Kettle's Yard also have a letter that he wrote back in April 1935. | 0:20:21 | 0:20:26 | |
He writes here, "What I do mostly is what used to be, out of my own | 0:20:26 | 0:20:31 | |
"memory, what we may never see again, as things are altered altogether. | 0:20:31 | 0:20:35 | |
"There is nothing whatever do not look like what it was since I can remember." | 0:20:35 | 0:20:39 | |
What we realise from this letter is these paintings | 0:20:39 | 0:20:41 | |
are attempts by him to capture the only certainty he's got left. | 0:20:41 | 0:20:46 | |
He's painting the past. | 0:20:46 | 0:20:48 | |
Yet it was Ben Nicholson who would now shape the art of the future. | 0:20:55 | 0:20:59 | |
In the auction houses, salons and galleries of London, he set about shaking up | 0:20:59 | 0:21:03 | |
the Britain's conservative art establishment forever. | 0:21:03 | 0:21:07 | |
Lot 47 is by Ben Nicholson. 54. 56. | 0:21:07 | 0:21:11 | |
I've got £56,000. On my left for 58. | 0:21:11 | 0:21:14 | |
On my right at £58,000. | 0:21:14 | 0:21:18 | |
Nicholson was a brilliant and energetic | 0:21:18 | 0:21:20 | |
evangelist for the techniques and ideals of European modernism. | 0:21:20 | 0:21:25 | |
He was determined to drag British art into the 20th century. | 0:21:25 | 0:21:29 | |
And he wasn't going to do it alone. | 0:21:29 | 0:21:32 | |
In 1931 he attended a bohemian house party in Norfolk. | 0:21:32 | 0:21:37 | |
Another guest was a gifted young sculptor from Yorkshire, Barbara Hepworth. | 0:21:37 | 0:21:42 | |
And although both were married, they began a passionate love affair. | 0:21:42 | 0:21:47 | |
From the moment she met Ben Nicholson, Barbara | 0:21:53 | 0:21:56 | |
abandoned her figurative style and converted to Ben's Modernist cause. | 0:21:56 | 0:22:01 | |
Ben soon moved into Barbara's North London studio | 0:22:04 | 0:22:08 | |
and the two artists found they worked harmoniously together. | 0:22:08 | 0:22:12 | |
However, in their austere abstractions, | 0:22:12 | 0:22:15 | |
they were still ploughing a lonely furrow in British art. | 0:22:15 | 0:22:18 | |
But political crisis abroad would change all that. | 0:22:19 | 0:22:24 | |
I realise this is not our conventional image of a refugee camp, | 0:22:24 | 0:22:28 | |
but in the 1930s, that is what London, | 0:22:28 | 0:22:31 | |
and in particular Hampstead, became. With every month that passed, | 0:22:31 | 0:22:35 | |
more of Europe's persecuted avant garde | 0:22:35 | 0:22:37 | |
made their way to this genteel and leafy suburb. | 0:22:37 | 0:22:41 | |
And they briefly transformed it into the intellectual and artistic centre of the world. | 0:22:41 | 0:22:46 | |
Sigmund Freud, the great Austrian psychoanalyst, ended up here. | 0:22:53 | 0:22:57 | |
Ernst Gombrich, who wrote the only art book people ever actually read, lived here. | 0:22:59 | 0:23:04 | |
A Hungarian architect, Erno Goldfinger, designed this house for himself in Willow Road. | 0:23:04 | 0:23:09 | |
His neighbour, Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, was not impressed, | 0:23:09 | 0:23:13 | |
and this was the result. | 0:23:13 | 0:23:16 | |
Dutch abstract painter, Piet Mondrian, | 0:23:16 | 0:23:20 | |
settled here at Parkhill Road. | 0:23:20 | 0:23:22 | |
And the revolutionary Russian sculptor, Naum Gabo, wound up here. | 0:23:22 | 0:23:29 | |
But the hub of the community was this block of flats - | 0:23:31 | 0:23:34 | |
the Isokon building. | 0:23:34 | 0:23:37 | |
The Isokon was the first major modernist building in Britain, | 0:23:37 | 0:23:42 | |
and its style and motifs were inspired by Ben's minimalist art. | 0:23:42 | 0:23:47 | |
This must have been such a great place to live. | 0:23:53 | 0:23:57 | |
No-one could have been more pleased to see these new arrivals than Ben, | 0:23:57 | 0:24:01 | |
who had spent years tirelessly forging links with his artistic heroes abroad. | 0:24:01 | 0:24:06 | |
And now Adolf Hitler had delivered them right to his doorstep. | 0:24:06 | 0:24:10 | |
The Isokon's basement bar now became | 0:24:12 | 0:24:14 | |
the unofficial headquarters of London's free-thinking refugees. | 0:24:14 | 0:24:20 | |
And their presence helped Ben and Barbara, whose studio was just around the corner, | 0:24:20 | 0:24:24 | |
to establish themselves as the dynamic duo of British modernism. | 0:24:24 | 0:24:29 | |
In 1936, their ambition paid off. | 0:24:39 | 0:24:44 | |
They organised the first ever exhibition of abstract art in Britain. | 0:24:44 | 0:24:50 | |
The show was a sensation. | 0:24:50 | 0:24:52 | |
It featured new work by Ben and Barbara, | 0:24:52 | 0:24:56 | |
but set in an international context. | 0:24:56 | 0:25:00 | |
Alongside works by Piet Mondrian and Naum Gabo. | 0:25:00 | 0:25:04 | |
The works around us represent a moment of British art, | 0:25:04 | 0:25:08 | |
the high point in a way of that '30s movement to engage | 0:25:08 | 0:25:12 | |
both with abstract values in art and in other things, | 0:25:12 | 0:25:15 | |
with spirituality and higher ideals, and also with international artists. | 0:25:15 | 0:25:20 | |
It's the focal point, if you like, of an international utopian movement of artists. | 0:25:20 | 0:25:26 | |
Ben's contribution was a spare white relief. | 0:25:28 | 0:25:34 | |
It was the most audacious and controversial work in the show. | 0:25:34 | 0:25:39 | |
There have been so many interpretations of this work. | 0:25:39 | 0:25:42 | |
It's been called a protest against the Nazis, a celebration of hygiene | 0:25:42 | 0:25:46 | |
and even a manifesto of Christian Science. | 0:25:46 | 0:25:50 | |
But I think it's all about Cornwall. | 0:25:50 | 0:25:52 | |
Those whitewashed walls in St Ives shining in that pure Cornish light. | 0:25:52 | 0:25:57 | |
There's even something of the Alfred Wallis about it, | 0:25:57 | 0:26:00 | |
because Ben Nicholson made this out of a mahogany dining-table he found in Camden Market | 0:26:00 | 0:26:05 | |
and brought home with him on the number 24 bus. | 0:26:05 | 0:26:07 | |
Wallis would have been proud. | 0:26:07 | 0:26:10 | |
By 1939, London had been transformed, | 0:26:18 | 0:26:21 | |
and it was now challenging Paris at the top table of modern art. | 0:26:21 | 0:26:25 | |
And this was in no small part due to Ben Nicholson's talent for networking. | 0:26:25 | 0:26:29 | |
But now the very factors that brought this community together conspired to tear it apart. | 0:26:29 | 0:26:35 | |
By the summer of 1939, war was imminent. | 0:26:40 | 0:26:46 | |
Ben Nicholson wanted to stay in London and keep his beloved modernist colony alive. | 0:26:46 | 0:26:52 | |
But Barbara and he were now married with triplets. | 0:26:52 | 0:26:56 | |
And they knew that, for their family to be safe, | 0:26:56 | 0:26:59 | |
they had to get as far away from the capital as possible. | 0:26:59 | 0:27:03 | |
Barbara suggested Norfolk and, momentarily, the future of British modern art hung in the balance. | 0:27:03 | 0:27:09 | |
But Ben knew exactly where he would take them. | 0:27:09 | 0:27:12 | |
He would take them to Cornwall. | 0:27:12 | 0:27:15 | |
On 25th August, 1939, Ben, Barbara and their three young children | 0:27:15 | 0:27:21 | |
squeezed into their car and left their Hampstead home. | 0:27:21 | 0:27:25 | |
As they turned this corner, they saw Mondrian standing in the street. | 0:27:25 | 0:27:30 | |
They pleaded with him to jump in and escape with them to the countryside, | 0:27:30 | 0:27:33 | |
but Mondrian hated the countryside, he couldn't even stand the colour green. | 0:27:33 | 0:27:37 | |
So they waved him goodbye and left London forever. | 0:27:37 | 0:27:41 | |
I can't imagine what a terrible journey it must have been. | 0:27:43 | 0:27:47 | |
I think Ben and Barbara knew that, with every mile that passed, | 0:27:47 | 0:27:50 | |
the life they'd so painstakingly built for themselves in London had disappeared behind them. | 0:27:50 | 0:27:56 | |
They had arranged to stay in Carbis Bay, a dowdy suburb of St Ives. | 0:28:08 | 0:28:14 | |
And they had arrived here at precisely the same time as a massive thunderstorm. | 0:28:14 | 0:28:18 | |
It continued to rain for six days and six nights | 0:28:22 | 0:28:26 | |
and Barbara wrote that Cornwall was sheer unmitigated hell. | 0:28:26 | 0:28:30 | |
Ben at least could work. | 0:28:30 | 0:28:32 | |
Within minutes of arriving, he had disappeared into a quiet room, | 0:28:32 | 0:28:35 | |
locked the door behind him and started to draw. | 0:28:35 | 0:28:39 | |
But she was left to look after the children, clean the house and prepare the meals. | 0:28:39 | 0:28:45 | |
In a schedule like that, she didn't have much time for high-minded abstraction. | 0:28:45 | 0:28:50 | |
It wasn't glamorous, I'll grant you, | 0:28:53 | 0:28:56 | |
but despite all the miseries and the hardships and anxieties, | 0:28:56 | 0:29:00 | |
the outbreak of war in 1939 had brought two of the world's most radical artists to Cornwall. | 0:29:00 | 0:29:07 | |
And I really think that, if there was any turning point in the art of St Ives, this was it. | 0:29:07 | 0:29:12 | |
With Nicholson and Hepworth's arrival, | 0:29:12 | 0:29:14 | |
a new outpost of international modernism had been formed here | 0:29:14 | 0:29:18 | |
and that outpost was about to get bigger. | 0:29:18 | 0:29:20 | |
Two weeks later, another modernist stepped gingerly off the train from London. | 0:29:23 | 0:29:27 | |
Naum Gabo. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:29 | |
Gabo was a giant of the European avant garde. | 0:29:31 | 0:29:35 | |
He had participated in the Russian Revolution in 1917 | 0:29:35 | 0:29:40 | |
and had also reinvented the history of sculpture | 0:29:40 | 0:29:42 | |
with his painstaking and high-tech constructions. | 0:29:42 | 0:29:47 | |
Gabo had lived and worked in every major European capital | 0:29:47 | 0:29:51 | |
and had even taught at the Bauhaus. | 0:29:51 | 0:29:54 | |
But he was doubly at risk from the Nazis, being both Jewish | 0:29:54 | 0:29:58 | |
and, as a modernist, regarded as a degenerate artist. | 0:29:58 | 0:30:02 | |
In 1936, he had fled to Britain and was warmly welcomed into Ben's Hampstead clique. | 0:30:03 | 0:30:09 | |
By following him to Cornwall, he would be laying another | 0:30:09 | 0:30:12 | |
foundation stone for this new, modernist colony. | 0:30:12 | 0:30:16 | |
Gabo was an even more unlikely presence in Cornwall than Nicholson and Hepworth. | 0:30:17 | 0:30:22 | |
And I still can't get my head around the thought of this exotic | 0:30:22 | 0:30:26 | |
Russian genius, a man who'd led the revolutionary avant gardes in Moscow, Berlin and Paris, | 0:30:26 | 0:30:32 | |
of him ending up in this rather nondescript house in Carbis Bay. | 0:30:32 | 0:30:37 | |
It's like stumbling across Michelangelo doing his weekly shop in Tesco's. | 0:30:37 | 0:30:42 | |
He cut an unlikely figure in wartime Cornwall, | 0:30:42 | 0:30:45 | |
walking his white samoyed dog along the beach. | 0:30:45 | 0:30:49 | |
He never lost his heavy Russian accent. | 0:30:49 | 0:30:51 | |
And, when war finally broke out, he was obliged to register as an alien. | 0:30:51 | 0:30:58 | |
Gabo was used to crisis. It seemed to follow him wherever he went. | 0:31:02 | 0:31:06 | |
By 1939, he'd had the singular misfortune to have lived through four major wars and revolutions. | 0:31:06 | 0:31:13 | |
But he must never have felt more of a fish out of water than here. | 0:31:13 | 0:31:17 | |
War changes everything for everybody. | 0:31:19 | 0:31:22 | |
I think that the Second World War is the absolutely crucial thing of trying to understand | 0:31:22 | 0:31:27 | |
the art of St Ives and the phenomenon of the colony. | 0:31:27 | 0:31:30 | |
Not only would Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo not have gone there but for the war, | 0:31:30 | 0:31:35 | |
but I think, um... | 0:31:35 | 0:31:37 | |
it's a place where they, um... changed their ideas, | 0:31:37 | 0:31:42 | |
the utopianism of the 1930s becomes refocused on ideas of community. | 0:31:42 | 0:31:47 | |
Gabo did what he could for the British war effort. | 0:31:47 | 0:31:51 | |
He and Ben Nicholson formed undoubtedly Cornwall's most ineffectual air raid unit. | 0:31:51 | 0:31:56 | |
The two men - one short and plump, the other tall and gangly - patrolled the streets of Carbis Bay. | 0:31:56 | 0:32:03 | |
But they spent more time admiring the local pebbles than scrutinising the skies for German bombers. | 0:32:03 | 0:32:10 | |
The war distressed Gabo profoundly. | 0:32:13 | 0:32:16 | |
But he didn't lose faith in his art. | 0:32:16 | 0:32:20 | |
On the contrary, | 0:32:20 | 0:32:21 | |
he grew convinced that it was more important than ever. | 0:32:21 | 0:32:25 | |
His sculptures had always been inspired by a brave new world of technology, | 0:32:27 | 0:32:31 | |
and faith in a brave new world was never more needed than now. | 0:32:31 | 0:32:36 | |
But Cornwall cast its spell on Gabo. | 0:32:41 | 0:32:43 | |
His daily walks by the sea changed his work. | 0:32:45 | 0:32:49 | |
The waves curling onto the sand, the wind spiralling in from the ocean. | 0:32:52 | 0:32:56 | |
The sails and rigging of boats, the curves of shells and pebbles. | 0:32:58 | 0:33:03 | |
All of these elements are present in his Cornish constructions. | 0:33:03 | 0:33:07 | |
This is one of Gabo's wartime masterpieces. | 0:33:13 | 0:33:18 | |
It's so delicate, I feel that, if I even speak too loudly, it will fall apart. | 0:33:18 | 0:33:24 | |
If anything demonstrates the unique power of Cornwall, this is it. | 0:33:24 | 0:33:29 | |
Gabo once left one of these in a taxi. | 0:33:31 | 0:33:34 | |
When he called them up, they asked him what he'd lost. | 0:33:34 | 0:33:37 | |
He replied, "A construction in space." | 0:33:37 | 0:33:41 | |
And that's exactly what these are. | 0:33:41 | 0:33:44 | |
The cutting edge materials Gabo liked to work with were hard to come by in wartime Cornwall. | 0:33:45 | 0:33:51 | |
But he managed to get the British chemicals giant ICI | 0:33:51 | 0:33:55 | |
to send experimental new plastics down to him in St Ives. | 0:33:55 | 0:33:59 | |
Gabo clearly found Cornwall a difficult place to work. | 0:34:01 | 0:34:06 | |
But this didn't stop him falling in love with it. | 0:34:06 | 0:34:08 | |
When he couldn't get hold of his plastics, he collected | 0:34:11 | 0:34:15 | |
pebbles from the beach and filed them into elemental abstract forms. | 0:34:15 | 0:34:20 | |
Each day, his walk took him past the door of Alfred Wallis' cottage. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:31 | |
Alfred, now well into his 80s, was not well. | 0:34:33 | 0:34:37 | |
He grew convinced that the devil was living upstairs in his bedroom. | 0:34:39 | 0:34:44 | |
and was often heard screaming through the night. | 0:34:44 | 0:34:47 | |
His Victorian upbringing had left him with an intense fear | 0:34:50 | 0:34:53 | |
of ending his days in the forbidding workhouse at Madron. | 0:34:53 | 0:34:57 | |
But that is now where he was sent. | 0:34:57 | 0:35:00 | |
What strikes me about this place is, when Wallis came here, | 0:35:05 | 0:35:08 | |
he was actually something of an artistic celebrity. | 0:35:08 | 0:35:11 | |
His pictures were being bought and sold in London galleries. | 0:35:11 | 0:35:14 | |
He was being written about in journals and magazines. | 0:35:14 | 0:35:17 | |
Yet somehow, in the final analysis, that seemed to count for nothing, because he still ended up here. | 0:35:17 | 0:35:24 | |
Just a few months later, Alfred Wallis was dead. | 0:35:26 | 0:35:30 | |
Preparations had been made to bury him in a pauper's grave in Barnoon Cemetery. | 0:35:35 | 0:35:40 | |
But once the news reached his friends in St Ives, a proper ceremony was organised. | 0:35:43 | 0:35:49 | |
I'm sure Wallis would've been proud to have admirers | 0:35:51 | 0:35:55 | |
like Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo at his funeral. | 0:35:55 | 0:35:59 | |
Prouder still to have a tomb made specially for him | 0:35:59 | 0:36:02 | |
by the master potter Bernard Leach. | 0:36:02 | 0:36:05 | |
These stoneware tiles are really very beautiful indeed. | 0:36:07 | 0:36:11 | |
Actually, it's very moving as well. You've got this tiny little figure | 0:36:11 | 0:36:14 | |
of Wallis with the enormous lighthouse above him, | 0:36:14 | 0:36:17 | |
and these great big waves crashing all around. And underneath, | 0:36:17 | 0:36:22 | |
"Into Thy hands, O Lord". | 0:36:22 | 0:36:25 | |
There's a very moving letter from Ben Nicholson | 0:36:30 | 0:36:33 | |
to his friend Jim Ede on the day of Alfred Wallis's funeral, | 0:36:33 | 0:36:37 | |
when he contrasts the funeral and Wallis, | 0:36:37 | 0:36:40 | |
the sort of timeless old man, with a German aircraft | 0:36:40 | 0:36:44 | |
which has just shot up the High Street in St Ives, | 0:36:44 | 0:36:48 | |
and then concludes by saying, "The war has made one more aware of the community one lives in." | 0:36:48 | 0:36:54 | |
And I think that's really important - the artists' involvement in the place they live in, | 0:36:54 | 0:36:59 | |
in the small town, and as a community of artists, is really crucial. | 0:36:59 | 0:37:03 | |
The war years were hard for Barbara Hepworth too. | 0:37:07 | 0:37:10 | |
At first, she found it impossible to do any work. | 0:37:10 | 0:37:14 | |
She had no materials and precious little time. | 0:37:14 | 0:37:17 | |
She drew at night, but her days were spent looking after the family. | 0:37:17 | 0:37:21 | |
She supplemented their rations with salad picked in the hedgerows and mushrooms collected in the fields. | 0:37:21 | 0:37:28 | |
As the triplets grew, she made more time for her art. | 0:37:28 | 0:37:32 | |
And when the work did begin, Cornwall was there too. | 0:37:32 | 0:37:36 | |
Most people think of Barbara Hepworth's sculpture as abstract, but it's anything but. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:47 | |
Take this work, for instance, Pelagos, | 0:37:47 | 0:37:49 | |
one of her most famous works from her St Ives period. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:52 | |
Barbara said that this wasn't abstract at all, it was actually a landscape of Cornwall. | 0:37:52 | 0:37:57 | |
Those curving forms here, what those actually represent | 0:38:00 | 0:38:03 | |
is the curve of the whole bay of St Ives. | 0:38:03 | 0:38:07 | |
The white here in the middle is the white of the beach of Carbis Bay. | 0:38:12 | 0:38:15 | |
The stringing is the lines of wind and waves coming from the Atlantic. | 0:38:15 | 0:38:20 | |
So what she's actually done is taken this whole enormous bay of St Ives, | 0:38:23 | 0:38:27 | |
made it smaller, tilted it up, and turned it into a sculpture. | 0:38:27 | 0:38:31 | |
Barbara may have started with the view from her kitchen window, | 0:38:34 | 0:38:38 | |
but as she got to know her new home better, she began to find inspiration everywhere. | 0:38:38 | 0:38:43 | |
The moorland along the coast from St Ives is littered with the traces of an ancient and forgotten past. | 0:38:46 | 0:38:53 | |
On any walk here, you'll come across countless prehistoric standing stones, and odd creations like this, | 0:38:58 | 0:39:04 | |
Lanyon Quoit, whose original function is no longer known. | 0:39:04 | 0:39:09 | |
Although Barbara didn't choose to come to Cornwall, this landscape soon started to claim her. | 0:39:12 | 0:39:18 | |
She began to feel a profound connection to the place. | 0:39:20 | 0:39:23 | |
She said she felt through her feet its geological shape. | 0:39:23 | 0:39:26 | |
The rich minerals from which Cornwall was made | 0:39:26 | 0:39:29 | |
were apparent on the very surface of things. | 0:39:29 | 0:39:33 | |
Half a mile away is another group, Men-an-Tol. | 0:39:37 | 0:39:41 | |
The meaning of these objects is a mystery. | 0:39:43 | 0:39:46 | |
And it was the mystery that appealed to her. | 0:39:46 | 0:39:49 | |
These stones are thousands of years old, | 0:39:49 | 0:39:51 | |
but Hepworth appropriated their forms | 0:39:51 | 0:39:54 | |
and reinvented them for the modern movement. | 0:39:54 | 0:39:57 | |
The Cornish landscape was also infiltrating the imagination of her husband Ben. | 0:40:18 | 0:40:23 | |
"I always thought the stories were overdone," he wrote to a friend, | 0:40:26 | 0:40:30 | |
"The drama and the terrific, intense colour, but the real thing has been so much more." | 0:40:30 | 0:40:36 | |
Bit by bit, Cornwall seduced the evangelical obstructionist. | 0:40:40 | 0:40:45 | |
He started painting the landscape. | 0:40:45 | 0:40:49 | |
He tried to resist. | 0:40:53 | 0:40:55 | |
He exude his behaviour as "an economic necessity". | 0:40:55 | 0:40:59 | |
He had a family to feed | 0:40:59 | 0:41:01 | |
and no-one would buy abstract pictures during the war. | 0:41:01 | 0:41:05 | |
He made it plain that these works were not to be regarded | 0:41:05 | 0:41:08 | |
as significant in the way his abstracts were. | 0:41:08 | 0:41:11 | |
But his protests were in vain - | 0:41:11 | 0:41:13 | |
Cornwall had forced its way into his work. | 0:41:13 | 0:41:17 | |
Ben's transition from those geometric white abstractions to | 0:41:19 | 0:41:23 | |
his lush wartime landscapes reveals an extraordinary artistic journey. | 0:41:23 | 0:41:29 | |
In 1945, the Second World War finally ended. | 0:41:35 | 0:41:40 | |
Ben celebrated the event in his own whimsical fashion. | 0:41:40 | 0:41:45 | |
This painting had been languishing unfinished in Nicholson's studio | 0:41:48 | 0:41:51 | |
for two years when the Nazis surrendered in May 1945. | 0:41:51 | 0:41:56 | |
On hearing the news, Ben added | 0:41:56 | 0:41:58 | |
his own distinctive version of a Union flag to the corner here. | 0:41:58 | 0:42:01 | |
It's since become a seminal image, but it's difficult to believe | 0:42:01 | 0:42:05 | |
the same man who, 10 years earlier, was painting austere white reliefs | 0:42:05 | 0:42:08 | |
was now painting a charming collection of crockery. | 0:42:08 | 0:42:12 | |
It's a testament to how Cornwall had humanised Ben. | 0:42:12 | 0:42:15 | |
I think that great internationalist would hate me for saying this, | 0:42:15 | 0:42:18 | |
but also how it brought out the Britishness in him. | 0:42:18 | 0:42:21 | |
Barbara assumed the end of the war would mean a return to normal family life in London. | 0:42:22 | 0:42:29 | |
Ben spent a trial period in the capital | 0:42:29 | 0:42:33 | |
and, in 1946, Naum Gabo took the first ship out to New York. | 0:42:33 | 0:42:37 | |
St Ives' days as a centre of modern art appeared to be numbered, | 0:42:41 | 0:42:46 | |
but Ben came back to St Ives, saying he needed to see the sky. | 0:42:46 | 0:42:51 | |
Against all the odds, Ben and Barbara decided to stay. | 0:42:51 | 0:42:56 | |
The continued presence of these two celebrities soon attracted | 0:42:56 | 0:43:00 | |
hundreds of painters and sculptors, all yearning for creative freedom. | 0:43:00 | 0:43:04 | |
A wave of young artists now poured into St Ives | 0:43:04 | 0:43:08 | |
and, within just months, the town's empty pubs, cottages and studios | 0:43:08 | 0:43:12 | |
were overrun with a new generation of creatives, who had come | 0:43:12 | 0:43:16 | |
to the edge of England to rebuild their war-torn lives and rebuild them with art. | 0:43:16 | 0:43:21 | |
The end of the war, there's a desire, | 0:43:24 | 0:43:26 | |
there's a need amongst artists, as there had been after the First World War, | 0:43:26 | 0:43:30 | |
to return to nature, to return to a simpler way of life. | 0:43:30 | 0:43:35 | |
Cornwall has a tradition of being a place of escape. | 0:43:36 | 0:43:39 | |
It's a place associated with childhood, with romance, | 0:43:39 | 0:43:43 | |
with the dark spiritualism of the moors. | 0:43:43 | 0:43:45 | |
But always something, um, anti-metropolitan, anti-modern, | 0:43:45 | 0:43:51 | |
simple and basic and timeless. | 0:43:51 | 0:43:54 | |
I think, for different reasons, the artists tap in to aspects of that. | 0:43:54 | 0:43:57 | |
A new, bohemian mood now swept through the town. | 0:43:57 | 0:44:02 | |
This community would draw in artists from all walks of life. | 0:44:02 | 0:44:07 | |
Perhaps the most remarkable of them | 0:44:07 | 0:44:09 | |
was a working-class lad from the Midlands | 0:44:09 | 0:44:11 | |
who had only just been released from a prisoner-of-war camp. | 0:44:11 | 0:44:15 | |
Terry Frost later recalled the heady excitement of his journey west in 1946. | 0:44:15 | 0:44:21 | |
Well, I first came down here on the recommendation of an old friend of mine, Adrian Heath. | 0:44:23 | 0:44:28 | |
And I said, "Well, you know, I can't get on very well at home, painting, because they expect me to work, | 0:44:28 | 0:44:34 | |
"because that's what I've always done - work in the sense of going to the factory. | 0:44:34 | 0:44:39 | |
"And painting was a daft, sissy thing to be doing." | 0:44:39 | 0:44:42 | |
So I said, "I've got to get a long way away. | 0:44:42 | 0:44:44 | |
So he said, "St Ives is a good place," he said, "They've got a lot of artists down there, or Newlyn." | 0:44:44 | 0:44:49 | |
And I looked at a map - of course I'd never been far in my life, | 0:44:49 | 0:44:52 | |
except in the army - and I realised, it was, 290 miles away, just the spot. | 0:44:52 | 0:44:56 | |
So I came down. | 0:44:56 | 0:44:59 | |
The liberation for Frost is extraordinary. | 0:44:59 | 0:45:01 | |
Here's a man who's grown up expecting to work in factories | 0:45:01 | 0:45:04 | |
or in engineering of some sort in the Midlands, who's then spent much of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp, | 0:45:04 | 0:45:10 | |
where he encounters this "art" for the first time. | 0:45:10 | 0:45:15 | |
And so the decision, I think, the realisation that the world is different, | 0:45:15 | 0:45:19 | |
that he's not going to get back to what was expected of him in 1939, is really crucial. | 0:45:19 | 0:45:24 | |
And that sort of anti-establishmentarianism becomes very important for him. | 0:45:24 | 0:45:30 | |
It was an ambitious move - Terry had a wife and six children to provide for. | 0:45:33 | 0:45:37 | |
And when he wasn't painting, he worked as a waiter and a barman. | 0:45:37 | 0:45:43 | |
The family squeezed into this tiny cottage by the quay, | 0:45:43 | 0:45:47 | |
and though conditions were cramped, they resulted in a seminal painting. | 0:45:47 | 0:45:52 | |
Walk Along The Quay is one of your father's most famous art works, | 0:46:03 | 0:46:06 | |
and one of the most famous paintings to come out of St Ives - | 0:46:06 | 0:46:09 | |
what actually led to it happening? | 0:46:09 | 0:46:11 | |
Well, it's an interesting story, | 0:46:11 | 0:46:12 | |
because we used to live at 12 Quay Street, | 0:46:12 | 0:46:15 | |
just round the corner, up there. | 0:46:15 | 0:46:16 | |
And it's a practical reason, that my father had to come out every day, | 0:46:16 | 0:46:21 | |
because there were eight of us, six children, and we used to all cry. | 0:46:21 | 0:46:25 | |
He'd go on a walk along the quay, | 0:46:26 | 0:46:30 | |
with, you know, one of us in the pram and holding one by hand | 0:46:30 | 0:46:33 | |
So he'd be down this quay every day, | 0:46:33 | 0:46:36 | |
and he'd be looking at these boats, with the wonderful masts and sails, bobbing about. | 0:46:36 | 0:46:41 | |
Usually, if the tide's in, then they're moving around, | 0:46:41 | 0:46:44 | |
so you've got the mast going up and down, and side to side, all the angles. | 0:46:44 | 0:46:49 | |
What my dad wanted to do, he suddenly realised that he wanted to capture the whole walk in the painting. | 0:46:49 | 0:46:55 | |
I went back home, and I happened to have a stretcher, | 0:46:55 | 0:46:59 | |
a long one, that I'd made up. | 0:46:59 | 0:47:03 | |
And it was just simple, I thought, "Well, that's it. | 0:47:03 | 0:47:06 | |
"I've got to walk up that canvas, because that's the same shape as the harbour, or as the quay." | 0:47:06 | 0:47:12 | |
So I walked up that canvas, and I just put all those shapes in, and colours, that I'd seen. | 0:47:13 | 0:47:19 | |
And that's the Walk Along The Quay which is owned by Adrian Heath. | 0:47:19 | 0:47:23 | |
And that was a sort of time painting, really. | 0:47:23 | 0:47:25 | |
-It was a bit before its time, because I really got through to something -I -didn't understand. | 0:47:25 | 0:47:30 | |
And there's a story about when Ben Nicholson first saw that painting, | 0:47:31 | 0:47:35 | |
that he stood in front of it for two hours, in silence. | 0:47:35 | 0:47:37 | |
Yes, that's quite right - he said, "You're on to something here, | 0:47:37 | 0:47:40 | |
which is quite true, because he said, "This will probably last you the rest of your life." | 0:47:40 | 0:47:44 | |
And in a crazy way, it did, yes. It went full circle, | 0:47:44 | 0:47:47 | |
-he almost came back to that sort of painting, those shapes. -Yes. | 0:47:47 | 0:47:52 | |
Terry may have been on to something, but he still wasn't earning a living as a painter. | 0:47:53 | 0:47:58 | |
In 1951, Ben intervened and got him a part-time job as an assistant to Barbara Hepworth. | 0:48:01 | 0:48:06 | |
She was not, by all accounts, an easy employer. | 0:48:06 | 0:48:11 | |
Barbara didn't want people to know she even had assistants. | 0:48:13 | 0:48:16 | |
Whenever visitors arrived, she'd ring a little bell, | 0:48:16 | 0:48:19 | |
and on hearing it, her staff obediently dropped their tools | 0:48:19 | 0:48:22 | |
and hid in this shed until the coast was clear. | 0:48:22 | 0:48:24 | |
On one occasion, the wait proved too much for Terry, and he began to feel nature calling. | 0:48:24 | 0:48:31 | |
He held it in as long as he could, but eventually decided to relieve himself into a geranium pot. | 0:48:31 | 0:48:36 | |
Everything seemed to have gone to plan - that was until Terry noticed a stream of urine running | 0:48:36 | 0:48:43 | |
from out the pot, under the door, down the garden path and right to the feet of Barbara and her guests. | 0:48:43 | 0:48:48 | |
Terry was banned from having biscuits for the rest of the week. | 0:48:48 | 0:48:51 | |
The first years of peace saw a surge in demand for culture | 0:48:57 | 0:49:00 | |
from a public who had been starved of it during the war. | 0:49:00 | 0:49:04 | |
Both Ben and Barbara found a ready market for their work, | 0:49:04 | 0:49:07 | |
and their new success meant they needed separate studios. | 0:49:07 | 0:49:11 | |
In 1949, Barbara Hepworth took over this studio. | 0:49:18 | 0:49:21 | |
It was to become her home for the rest of her life. | 0:49:23 | 0:49:26 | |
In the same year, Ben also found a new workspace - | 0:49:28 | 0:49:32 | |
in one of the old fishermen's lofts by Porthmeor Beach. | 0:49:32 | 0:49:36 | |
This is Ben Nicholson's studio, and he moved here in 1949. | 0:49:46 | 0:49:51 | |
And the space instantly inspired him, and coming in here now I can completely see how, | 0:49:51 | 0:49:56 | |
because, not only is it an enormous white space, that enabled him | 0:49:56 | 0:49:59 | |
to produce all these big paintings, but the key thing for him | 0:49:59 | 0:50:02 | |
was that it didn't have a view of the sea, like all of the other studios did in this complex. | 0:50:02 | 0:50:07 | |
It just had this enormous great skylight above him, | 0:50:07 | 0:50:10 | |
that created this very intense but consistent white light. | 0:50:10 | 0:50:13 | |
He loved it here and he used to have a ritual where every morning he'd come in, | 0:50:13 | 0:50:17 | |
he'd switch on his little radio and listen to jazz to drown out the sound of the sea. | 0:50:17 | 0:50:21 | |
But initially it was Barbara who found international fame, | 0:50:21 | 0:50:26 | |
representing Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1950, | 0:50:26 | 0:50:29 | |
and hogging the limelight a year later at the Festival of Britain. | 0:50:29 | 0:50:34 | |
The Festival of Britain was a blueprint for the world of tomorrow | 0:50:38 | 0:50:41 | |
and the nation's artists were all asked to contribute. | 0:50:41 | 0:50:45 | |
None, however, had quite the impact of Barbara's monumental work Contrapuntal Forms. | 0:50:45 | 0:50:50 | |
At three metres in height, it was the most ambitious thing she had ever made, | 0:50:52 | 0:50:56 | |
and for the Festival's duration, it became THE place | 0:50:56 | 0:51:00 | |
for photo-opportunities, rendezvous and ice-cream breaks. | 0:51:00 | 0:51:05 | |
It seemed that Britain was finally ready for modernism, and it looked to Cornwall to supply it. | 0:51:05 | 0:51:10 | |
Barbara was surfing this national mood of optimism, | 0:51:13 | 0:51:16 | |
and everyone was pleased - well, almost everyone. | 0:51:16 | 0:51:22 | |
Ben Nicholson was notoriously competitive, | 0:51:22 | 0:51:25 | |
and he liked nothing better in life | 0:51:25 | 0:51:27 | |
than beating his friends at table tennis. | 0:51:27 | 0:51:29 | |
And he was infamous for changing the rules midway through matches if things weren't going his way. | 0:51:29 | 0:51:35 | |
So you can imagine how he felt about his wife becoming suddenly more successful than him. | 0:51:35 | 0:51:40 | |
He was insanely jealous. | 0:51:42 | 0:51:43 | |
Spurred on by this, the mid-1950s became a prolific period for Ben, too. | 0:51:46 | 0:51:52 | |
He exhibited around the world. | 0:51:52 | 0:51:54 | |
His work was snapped up by the best museums, and he won virtually every international prize going. | 0:51:54 | 0:52:00 | |
Critics even dubbed him the British Picasso. | 0:52:00 | 0:52:03 | |
If you wanted to understand Picasso's paintings, you might go to a bull fight. | 0:52:07 | 0:52:12 | |
But if you wanted to understand Ben Nicholson's work, you would go to a golf course. | 0:52:12 | 0:52:18 | |
Nicholson felt that to be a good artist, you first and foremost had to be able to draw. | 0:52:20 | 0:52:25 | |
And all the skills you needed to draw well - confidence, | 0:52:25 | 0:52:28 | |
grace and economy of movement - all of these were contained within the simple swing of a golf club. | 0:52:28 | 0:52:34 | |
There was the elegant parabola described by the ball in flight, like a line on paper. | 0:52:48 | 0:52:54 | |
You had to be constantly aware of the light, colour and rhythm of the world around you. | 0:52:54 | 0:53:01 | |
And then, of course, there was texture - the interplay of rough and smooth, concave and convex, | 0:53:01 | 0:53:09 | |
the curve of the fairway, the treacherous slope into the bunker. | 0:53:09 | 0:53:13 | |
You'd have to have a good eye and good touch. | 0:53:16 | 0:53:19 | |
There was so much about golf that appealed to Ben. | 0:53:19 | 0:53:23 | |
He felt immediately at home playing a game with such a rigid and exacting set of rules, | 0:53:23 | 0:53:27 | |
and it gave him a much-needed break from the family home. | 0:53:27 | 0:53:31 | |
By now he wasn't just jealous of Barbara, he was bored of her, too. | 0:53:31 | 0:53:37 | |
Complaining that she put stones before people, | 0:53:40 | 0:53:44 | |
he started an affair with a young woman he'd met on the golf course. | 0:53:44 | 0:53:48 | |
The break with Ben was the most traumatic event in Barbara's life. | 0:53:50 | 0:53:54 | |
Despite his behaviour towards her, she still looked up to him, | 0:53:54 | 0:53:58 | |
and sought his good opinion about her work. | 0:53:58 | 0:54:01 | |
But now, having been deserted by the love of her life, | 0:54:01 | 0:54:05 | |
her relationship with Cornwall grew stronger. | 0:54:05 | 0:54:09 | |
It took a long time for me to find my own personal way of making sculpture, | 0:54:13 | 0:54:18 | |
a long time to discover the purest forms which would exactly evoke my own sensations, | 0:54:18 | 0:54:26 | |
and to visualise images which would express the timelessness of primitive forces, which I felt, | 0:54:26 | 0:54:34 | |
and the constant urges towards survival and growth. | 0:54:34 | 0:54:38 | |
This is Hepworth's workshop, and being here, surrounded by all these bits of metal and stone and tools, | 0:54:46 | 0:54:52 | |
and even unfinished sculptures, makes so clear how unique her achievement actually was. | 0:54:52 | 0:54:58 | |
Sculpture is such a masculine profession, | 0:54:58 | 0:55:00 | |
and yet by sheer creativity, skill and gritty determination, | 0:55:00 | 0:55:05 | |
she had become as successful as any male artist. | 0:55:05 | 0:55:08 | |
It may be that the sensation of being a woman presents another emphasis in art, | 0:55:09 | 0:55:16 | |
and particularly in terms of sculpture, | 0:55:16 | 0:55:19 | |
for there is a whole range of perception belonging to feminine experience. | 0:55:19 | 0:55:25 | |
So many ideas spring from an inside response to form. | 0:55:27 | 0:55:32 | |
The scale of Barbara's sculptures grew exponentially. | 0:55:32 | 0:55:36 | |
They almost overwhelmed the capacity of her studio and the narrow streets around it. | 0:55:36 | 0:55:41 | |
She created a series of colossal works, like Winged Figure, | 0:55:41 | 0:55:45 | |
destined for the new John Lewis store in Oxford Street. | 0:55:45 | 0:55:49 | |
I found her a marvellous person, she had an incredible brain. | 0:55:49 | 0:55:52 | |
I mean, she really, really, really knew what she was doing, | 0:55:52 | 0:55:55 | |
and she really, really was a very intelligent person. | 0:55:55 | 0:55:59 | |
And I got an enormous amount out of working for her. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:04 | |
Here was really a tremendous, you know, a genius. | 0:56:04 | 0:56:09 | |
And you really got an understanding, | 0:56:09 | 0:56:14 | |
which was great for me as a young man... | 0:56:14 | 0:56:18 | |
what it takes, what you really, really have to do to be an artist, | 0:56:18 | 0:56:22 | |
that it's a 24-hour job, and not too much should stand in the way. | 0:56:22 | 0:56:28 | |
You have to do what's in front of you. | 0:56:28 | 0:56:31 | |
Ben and Barbara's marriage was over. | 0:56:39 | 0:56:42 | |
But although they lived separate lives and worked in separate studios, | 0:56:42 | 0:56:47 | |
they still dominated the flourishing art community in St Ives like a king and queen. | 0:56:47 | 0:56:53 | |
But they ruled in very different ways. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:56 | |
Ben was always impeccably dressed, and marched through the narrow streets like he owned them. | 0:56:57 | 0:57:04 | |
To avoid being trapped in conversations with the locals, he bounced a ball as he went. | 0:57:04 | 0:57:09 | |
And if anyone actually approached him, he'd raise an imperious hand, | 0:57:09 | 0:57:14 | |
shout, "working!", and march briskly on. | 0:57:14 | 0:57:17 | |
Barbara, however, was the invisible monarch. | 0:57:24 | 0:57:27 | |
She hardly ever left her secluded palace, preferring to survey her dominion from on high. | 0:57:27 | 0:57:32 | |
And while Ben ruled through arrogance, Barbara ruled through fear. | 0:57:32 | 0:57:36 | |
Many locals called her the Witch of St Ives, | 0:57:36 | 0:57:39 | |
and rumours even circulated that the statues in her gardens were actually her ossified victims. | 0:57:39 | 0:57:46 | |
# ..Freedom, liberty and stuff like that... # | 0:57:51 | 0:57:57 | |
But Ben and Barbara's dominion would not go unchallenged. | 0:57:59 | 0:58:04 | |
As the 1950s unfolded, this new generation would fight them for supremacy. | 0:58:04 | 0:58:11 | |
The chief pretender to their throne was Peter Lanyon. | 0:58:11 | 0:58:14 | |
Mercurial, passionate and rebellious, Lanyon saw himself | 0:58:16 | 0:58:20 | |
as the true artistic leader of his own land. | 0:58:20 | 0:58:23 | |
Lanyon was born and bred in St Ives. | 0:58:25 | 0:58:28 | |
During the war he had served overseas as an RAF mechanic, | 0:58:28 | 0:58:32 | |
but had returned with burning ambition, | 0:58:32 | 0:58:35 | |
both for his art and his homeland. | 0:58:35 | 0:58:38 | |
Lanyon, I think, is a really complex character, | 0:58:38 | 0:58:41 | |
because, at the end of the war, it is undoubtedly crucial to his art, | 0:58:41 | 0:58:44 | |
this recognition of the importance to him of his identity as a Cornishman, | 0:58:44 | 0:58:49 | |
his association with this place, with the landscape around St Ives, | 0:58:49 | 0:58:52 | |
which he knows intimately. | 0:58:52 | 0:58:54 | |
Lanyon was prepared to turn the world upside down in his relentless search for the real Cornwall, | 0:58:56 | 0:59:02 | |
the Cornwall only a native could understand. | 0:59:02 | 0:59:06 | |
Lanyon decided there was only one way to make a proper landscape painting. | 0:59:07 | 0:59:11 | |
It was simple, you had to get out of doors, let go of your inhibitions | 0:59:11 | 0:59:15 | |
and experience the countryside in every possible way. | 0:59:15 | 0:59:19 | |
You'd have to get right to the edge of a cliff, until you're sick with vertigo. | 0:59:23 | 0:59:27 | |
You'd have to get as close to nature as possible. | 0:59:28 | 0:59:31 | |
Sometimes you had to get wet! | 0:59:33 | 0:59:35 | |
You'd have to go rock-climbing. | 0:59:35 | 0:59:37 | |
You'd have to run up a hill and catch the view by surprise. | 0:59:40 | 0:59:45 | |
Now this all might seem a bit childish, but it's central to Lanyon's artistic philosophy. | 0:59:45 | 0:59:50 | |
Because Lanyon isn't trying to paint what Cornwall looks like, he's trying to paint what it feels like. | 0:59:50 | 0:59:57 | |
With these complicated images now | 1:00:07 | 1:00:10 | |
of underwater coast and landscape, sky and so on like that, | 1:00:10 | 1:00:14 | |
I have so many things being introduced, | 1:00:14 | 1:00:17 | |
that either I'm letting myself into a mad house, or I shall solve it. | 1:00:17 | 1:00:20 | |
One never knows as a painter, cos you throw yourself off the cliff every time you start, | 1:00:20 | 1:00:24 | |
and you've got to fly or swim or duck or something, and come out the other end. | 1:00:24 | 1:00:28 | |
Lanyon's risk-taking rebelliousness didn't just result in great art. | 1:00:31 | 1:00:36 | |
In the years after the war, it also motivated violent infighting among the artists of St Ives. | 1:00:36 | 1:00:43 | |
In February 1949, St Ives' large artistic community | 1:00:43 | 1:00:47 | |
held a packed and noisy meeting here at the Castle Inn. | 1:00:47 | 1:00:51 | |
They founded a new exhibiting society, with bold and democratic aims. | 1:00:51 | 1:00:56 | |
But Ben and Barbara were still running the show. | 1:00:56 | 1:00:58 | |
They proposed dividing the membership into three categories - | 1:00:58 | 1:01:02 | |
A - abstract, B - figurative and C - craftsmen. | 1:01:02 | 1:01:06 | |
They were all starting up showing at Penwith Galleries, | 1:01:06 | 1:01:11 | |
and there was this big thing of, are you in Category A, | 1:01:11 | 1:01:15 | |
or are you in a Category B? | 1:01:15 | 1:01:16 | |
There were falling-outs, and people did almost punch each other in those days over it, you know. | 1:01:16 | 1:01:22 | |
And it was big stuff, because you were moving into the world of abstract painting. | 1:01:22 | 1:01:27 | |
People would have fights about the kind of paintings they made. | 1:01:27 | 1:01:30 | |
I'm not saying, "Bring them back", but the idea | 1:01:30 | 1:01:32 | |
that you could actually thump somebody cos they made an abstract painting, | 1:01:32 | 1:01:36 | |
and they might thump you because you made a figurative one, I think is... | 1:01:36 | 1:01:39 | |
It's extraordinary, isn't it, for a little Cornish town? | 1:01:39 | 1:01:42 | |
I think there was a lot of alcohol there, that kind of explains it! | 1:01:42 | 1:01:44 | |
Peter Lanyon did fall out with the rest, like Dad and other people, | 1:01:46 | 1:01:49 | |
over the fact that you had Category A and Category B, | 1:01:49 | 1:01:52 | |
because I think Peter didn't want any categories, he just wanted it to be straight. | 1:01:52 | 1:01:57 | |
He'd gone to war to fight fascism and here it was on his doorstep. He disliked their stranglehold. | 1:01:57 | 1:02:02 | |
He used to work for Barbara for a bit, so he'd go into the studio. | 1:02:02 | 1:02:05 | |
Or, erm, with Ben, you see, he knew Ben. | 1:02:05 | 1:02:09 | |
So in a sense, they were the sacred cows, | 1:02:09 | 1:02:12 | |
and this was very important, that he could, | 1:02:12 | 1:02:16 | |
with his rebellious nature, actually be inspired by their awfulness | 1:02:16 | 1:02:22 | |
to do scurrilous things, and that was very much a part of his art. | 1:02:22 | 1:02:28 | |
He was restless, and always finding a new way of painting. | 1:02:28 | 1:02:32 | |
In 1950, he has this important split from Nicholson and Hepworth, | 1:02:32 | 1:02:38 | |
and he, in his mind and in his writing, he combines that with a change in direction in his art, | 1:02:38 | 1:02:43 | |
and he talks about his art becoming more concerned with actual places. | 1:02:43 | 1:02:48 | |
And he talks about place, not just about landscape. | 1:02:48 | 1:02:50 | |
Place, for him, combines a certain location with its social history, | 1:03:06 | 1:03:14 | |
with its population, with its past activities. | 1:03:14 | 1:03:17 | |
So he goes to fishing villages, he goes to the farming country outside St Ives, and, crucially, | 1:03:17 | 1:03:22 | |
he goes along the coast west of St Ives, which is a mining district, | 1:03:22 | 1:03:26 | |
and he makes these paintings which, for him, explore the associations of that place, | 1:03:26 | 1:03:32 | |
the political history of Cornwall. | 1:03:32 | 1:03:35 | |
But, crucially, he makes paintings which can stand alongside the best paintings made anywhere in the world. | 1:03:35 | 1:03:43 | |
One morning in 1951, Lanyon packed a bag | 1:03:57 | 1:04:01 | |
and set off on a gruelling and emotional pilgrimage to the hidden heart of Cornwall. | 1:04:01 | 1:04:07 | |
And I'm going to follow in his footsteps. | 1:04:07 | 1:04:09 | |
Leaving St Ives heading west, his path crossed the remote moors of Zennor, | 1:04:10 | 1:04:16 | |
the inhospitable region of ancient remains that had so inspired Barbara Hepworth before him. | 1:04:16 | 1:04:21 | |
But while she was exploring an exotic country, Lanyon felt he was coming home. | 1:04:28 | 1:04:35 | |
Because he had it in his bones, erm, he knew stuff. | 1:04:35 | 1:04:40 | |
You don't know that there are people under the ground actually hacking out metal, | 1:04:40 | 1:04:46 | |
and you don't know what it's like to be, erm, a fisherman. | 1:04:46 | 1:04:51 | |
It's those kinds of experiences that made him paint. | 1:04:53 | 1:04:59 | |
He felt that he was the host, having been born here and having been completely Cornish. | 1:04:59 | 1:05:07 | |
He was more a St Ives local than Wallace was. Wallace was an outsider. | 1:05:07 | 1:05:11 | |
For me, the painter is a kind of beachcomber. | 1:05:13 | 1:05:16 | |
I live in a country which has been changed by man over many centuries of civilisation. | 1:05:16 | 1:05:22 | |
It's impossible for me to make a painting which has no reference | 1:05:22 | 1:05:26 | |
to the very powerful environment in which I live. | 1:05:26 | 1:05:29 | |
I have to refer back continually to what is under my feet, | 1:05:29 | 1:05:33 | |
to what is over my back, and to what I see in front of me. | 1:05:33 | 1:05:37 | |
When Peter Lanyon was here, this was a working mine. | 1:05:47 | 1:05:50 | |
In those days there were 300 people working here, | 1:05:50 | 1:05:54 | |
and people who weren't working here were working underground, beneath us. | 1:05:54 | 1:05:58 | |
Probably Cornwall was one of the first post-industrial landscapes in Europe, really. | 1:05:58 | 1:06:04 | |
When I first came here, when the mines were still working, | 1:06:04 | 1:06:07 | |
they were leaching into the sea and there was a red tide every day. | 1:06:07 | 1:06:10 | |
-Around the coast, there was this red, pink, frothy tide. -Really? | 1:06:10 | 1:06:14 | |
All around this part of the coast. | 1:06:14 | 1:06:16 | |
And what's gives Lanyon his punch, from my point of view, | 1:06:16 | 1:06:19 | |
is that he's referring to something out there in the real world. | 1:06:19 | 1:06:23 | |
The mine is extinct now. | 1:06:27 | 1:06:29 | |
The land has been hacked about and plundered by miners searching for tin. | 1:06:29 | 1:06:35 | |
The cliff is still tinted with iron oxide, which makes it a brilliant red. | 1:06:35 | 1:06:39 | |
This is the Levant mine, the scene of one of Cornwall's worst mining disasters, | 1:06:45 | 1:06:52 | |
and the inspiration for perhaps Lanyon's greatest painting. | 1:06:52 | 1:06:55 | |
At 2:45 on the afternoon of 20th October, 1919, the old mineshaft lift, | 1:06:59 | 1:07:05 | |
known rather ominously as the Man Engine, shattered into pieces | 1:07:05 | 1:07:10 | |
and sent its passengers tumbling deep into the mine shaft. | 1:07:10 | 1:07:15 | |
31 men died that day, leaving 19 women widowed and 47 children fatherless. | 1:07:20 | 1:07:28 | |
Peter Lanyon was just a baby when the Man Engine broke, but he was haunted by the event | 1:07:32 | 1:07:37 | |
throughout his life and the thought of dead bodies being shovelled up from the ground with spades. | 1:07:37 | 1:07:43 | |
He may also have felt some guilt. | 1:07:43 | 1:07:45 | |
His family had managed these mines for generations. | 1:07:45 | 1:07:49 | |
But, whatever the reason, his visit here had convinced him | 1:07:49 | 1:07:52 | |
he had to make some kind of memorial to the victims. | 1:07:52 | 1:07:56 | |
This is Lanyon's memorial to the miners. | 1:08:09 | 1:08:11 | |
It's called St Just after the town from which most of them came. | 1:08:11 | 1:08:15 | |
I think it's one of the great paintings of the 20th century, and I'm going to tell you why. | 1:08:15 | 1:08:19 | |
First, this big black stripe that runs through the painting from top to bottom. | 1:08:19 | 1:08:23 | |
That's the fatal mineshaft in which those 31 men lost their lives. | 1:08:23 | 1:08:28 | |
These wires and pulleys at the top are the wires and pulleys of the Man Engine. | 1:08:28 | 1:08:32 | |
I think this might be an indication of it plummeting to the very base of the shaft. | 1:08:32 | 1:08:37 | |
So at first sight it's a rather literal cross section | 1:08:37 | 1:08:40 | |
of the mineshaft seen from the ground within. | 1:08:40 | 1:08:42 | |
It's a kind of diagram of disaster. | 1:08:42 | 1:08:44 | |
But Lanyon insisted there was a second level of meaning to this painting. | 1:08:44 | 1:08:48 | |
He claimed it was also a crucifixion. | 1:08:48 | 1:08:51 | |
When you look at it in that light, you can see | 1:08:51 | 1:08:54 | |
this black line coming down with the two arms across, | 1:08:54 | 1:08:58 | |
does resemble an old-fashioned religious crucifixion. | 1:08:58 | 1:09:01 | |
There aren't just two levels of meaning to this painting. | 1:09:01 | 1:09:04 | |
There's a third level. That third level can only be understood when the painting is tilted to the side. | 1:09:04 | 1:09:10 | |
When you look at the painting from this angle, you realise it's not | 1:09:11 | 1:09:14 | |
just a picture of the mineshaft seen from under the ground, | 1:09:14 | 1:09:17 | |
but a picture of the whole region from above the ground, | 1:09:17 | 1:09:20 | |
looking down from a bird's-eye view. | 1:09:20 | 1:09:23 | |
This back line becomes a scar that has run all the way through the county. | 1:09:23 | 1:09:28 | |
This becomes the far western corner. | 1:09:28 | 1:09:30 | |
You can see the sea there of Cornwall. | 1:09:30 | 1:09:32 | |
These are the fields and the walls and houses and the roads of this region of Cornwall. | 1:09:32 | 1:09:37 | |
I realise it's not pretty, but then nor is being crushed to death in a mineshaft. | 1:09:37 | 1:09:43 | |
But it's the searing ambition of this painting that really strikes me. | 1:09:43 | 1:09:47 | |
In this monumental picture, Lanyon has combined religion and society and history and myth and landscape | 1:09:47 | 1:09:55 | |
into one ferocious indictment of industrial exploitation. | 1:09:55 | 1:09:59 | |
This is the Cornwall of work, of tragedy. | 1:09:59 | 1:10:03 | |
This is the Cornwall that no-one but Lanyon had the bravery to paint. | 1:10:03 | 1:10:08 | |
Peter Lanyon's reputation soared in the mid-1950s. | 1:10:14 | 1:10:18 | |
But he wasn't the only star of this new generation. | 1:10:20 | 1:10:23 | |
Another artist who shared the limelight was his schoolboy friend, Patrick Heron. | 1:10:25 | 1:10:31 | |
In the late 1940s, early 1950s, Heron is known primarily as a critic. | 1:10:31 | 1:10:36 | |
He's the art critic of the New Statesman, and very influential as such. | 1:10:36 | 1:10:41 | |
Therefore he's a really important person in the communication of this phenomenon of St Ives. | 1:10:41 | 1:10:47 | |
Fascinatingly, Heron writes an article in the New Statesman called The School Of London, | 1:10:47 | 1:10:53 | |
where he recognises that, in the wake of the war, | 1:10:53 | 1:10:58 | |
Paris's status as the capital of modern art is insecure. | 1:10:58 | 1:11:03 | |
New York is not yet established. | 1:11:03 | 1:11:06 | |
Heron proposes that maybe London can become the new centre for modernism. | 1:11:06 | 1:11:11 | |
But when he talks about London, he means St Ives, and the artists he cites are all working in Cornwall. | 1:11:11 | 1:11:17 | |
London is where there art is shown but Cornwall is the place where it's made. | 1:11:17 | 1:11:20 | |
In 1956, Heron returned to Cornwall, to the very house in which | 1:11:22 | 1:11:27 | |
he'd spent part of his childhood, Eagle's Nest. | 1:11:27 | 1:11:32 | |
He wrote, "To find it one must from St Ives go still further, further west. | 1:11:32 | 1:11:38 | |
"One must crawl up, down, around and along that incredible last lap | 1:11:38 | 1:11:44 | |
"of coast where the lonely road slips, | 1:11:44 | 1:11:47 | |
"folds and slides around rocks." | 1:11:47 | 1:11:49 | |
Eagle's Nest is one of the most spectacular homes in Britain. | 1:11:52 | 1:11:57 | |
But, perched on a rocky bluff set four-square to the Atlantic, | 1:11:57 | 1:12:01 | |
overlooking a primeval coastal plain, it wasn't an easy place to live. | 1:12:01 | 1:12:07 | |
Normally this house is just vibrating | 1:12:07 | 1:12:10 | |
with pretty violent winds. | 1:12:10 | 1:12:13 | |
Until I owned this house, I enjoyed gales, but I lie in bed there, | 1:12:13 | 1:12:17 | |
just waiting for some frightful crash, which has of course occurred. | 1:12:17 | 1:12:21 | |
Great slabs of the roof just came off. | 1:12:21 | 1:12:24 | |
This life, dictated by the elements, | 1:12:24 | 1:12:27 | |
inspired Heron to turn from writing about art to creating it himself. | 1:12:27 | 1:12:33 | |
In 1956, he began to paint full-time. | 1:12:33 | 1:12:37 | |
I don't think anybody can come to Cornwall without having this | 1:12:37 | 1:12:41 | |
extraordinary visual hit, because it's such an extraordinary landscape. | 1:12:41 | 1:12:45 | |
These fantastic windows with the extraordinary view behind, | 1:12:45 | 1:12:49 | |
and the way the windows are divided up into little squares | 1:12:49 | 1:12:52 | |
and the patches of colour through them. | 1:12:52 | 1:12:54 | |
They remind me of your father's paintings. | 1:12:54 | 1:12:56 | |
I wonder whether that, | 1:12:56 | 1:12:58 | |
looking through the window at this landscape, | 1:12:58 | 1:13:01 | |
helped generate those paintings in some way. | 1:13:01 | 1:13:04 | |
I'm sure that it did. | 1:13:04 | 1:13:06 | |
Of course a window in painting is used brilliantly. | 1:13:06 | 1:13:11 | |
From Matisse, there are very obvious examples. | 1:13:11 | 1:13:13 | |
It becomes a framing device. I think he must have used that. | 1:13:13 | 1:13:17 | |
Just as the windows are a framing device, so he used doors as framing devices. | 1:13:17 | 1:13:23 | |
They're not dissimilar from some of the proportions of some of his paintings. | 1:13:23 | 1:13:30 | |
I think it's another thing to do with Patrick being deeply rooted in modernism, English modernism, | 1:13:30 | 1:13:36 | |
which is when the spaces he wanted to both live in | 1:13:36 | 1:13:39 | |
and for his art to be seen in had absolutely white walls, | 1:13:39 | 1:13:42 | |
clear floors, simple modernist furniture. | 1:13:42 | 1:13:45 | |
The effect of having it all white is that it makes the view through | 1:13:45 | 1:13:49 | |
the windows come forward, as if the view is almost hanging on the wall, like a painting. | 1:13:49 | 1:13:54 | |
It bounces the light around as well. | 1:13:54 | 1:13:56 | |
The walls become reflectors. | 1:13:56 | 1:13:59 | |
Patrick used to talk about how you could look at something and make it flat, | 1:13:59 | 1:14:04 | |
um, and therefore make it into a painting. | 1:14:04 | 1:14:08 | |
It involved a rather elaborate thing of closing one eye | 1:14:08 | 1:14:12 | |
and imagining in your head that what you know to be a deep view, | 1:14:12 | 1:14:16 | |
landscape, has become something completely flat and therefore could be on the surface of a canvas. | 1:14:16 | 1:14:23 | |
You can do that with these windows, if you take the frame of the window | 1:14:23 | 1:14:27 | |
and just abstract the shape that's outside and the colour that's outside. | 1:14:27 | 1:14:31 | |
That's one of his ways of helping people understand. | 1:14:31 | 1:14:33 | |
What then people found very difficult to understand was the nature of abstraction. | 1:14:33 | 1:14:37 | |
All figurative art is abstract. | 1:14:37 | 1:14:40 | |
All art is abstract. We're savouring these abstract elements of spatial reality, of colour reality, | 1:14:40 | 1:14:47 | |
of formal reality, whatever great painting of whatever period in the world we're looking at. | 1:14:47 | 1:14:52 | |
Everyone knows about Claude Monet's garden at Giverny, | 1:15:00 | 1:15:03 | |
the one with the water lilies and the Japanese footbridge. | 1:15:03 | 1:15:07 | |
But Patrick Heron's garden here at Eagle's Nest, while less famous, is just as exciting. | 1:15:07 | 1:15:13 | |
The overpowering effect of colour in this garden was to find dramatic expression in Heron's paintings. | 1:15:18 | 1:15:26 | |
He wrote passionately about his growing obsession. | 1:15:26 | 1:15:29 | |
"You're in a world of viridian greens, of a multitude of greys, | 1:15:31 | 1:15:36 | |
"soft cerulean blue, indigo, black, khaki and Venetian red. | 1:15:36 | 1:15:41 | |
"A worn asymmetric rectangle, a lopsided disc, | 1:15:41 | 1:15:44 | |
"an uneven triangle of smooth stone inlaid in the field path at your feet, | 1:15:44 | 1:15:49 | |
"are echoed precisely, it seems, in the boulders of the hedge by the stile, | 1:15:49 | 1:15:54 | |
"in the wall of the ancient church tower, in the configuration half-a-mile away | 1:15:54 | 1:15:59 | |
"of pale giant rocks balanced in an intricate chaos of the dark bracken slopes above you." | 1:15:59 | 1:16:04 | |
For Heron, colour was the means and end, the form and content, the image and the meaning of his work. | 1:16:09 | 1:16:16 | |
It was everything. | 1:16:16 | 1:16:18 | |
To understand what he really meant by this, I've come to see a very | 1:16:22 | 1:16:26 | |
special painting that's hidden away in the Tate Gallery stores. | 1:16:26 | 1:16:30 | |
Wow! | 1:16:33 | 1:16:35 | |
It's absolutely huge, it's like a whole continent of colour. | 1:16:39 | 1:16:42 | |
Come and have a look a little bit closer because it's at the edges | 1:16:48 | 1:16:52 | |
where the picture really comes to life. It's where one colour touches another, that's where Heron | 1:16:52 | 1:16:56 | |
detonates the image like a kind of explosive device. | 1:16:56 | 1:16:59 | |
It's where he finds, along this line, what he called the colour of colour. | 1:16:59 | 1:17:04 | |
His very favourite part was filling in the last patch of white. | 1:17:04 | 1:17:07 | |
He said that when he did this the whole world would suddenly pulse. | 1:17:07 | 1:17:11 | |
As you're standing here in front of this colossal coloured canvas, you completely understand it. | 1:17:11 | 1:17:16 | |
The whole thing radiates light. | 1:17:16 | 1:17:18 | |
While Patrick Heron was exploring an abstract world of colour, Peter Lanyon had stumbled across | 1:17:35 | 1:17:42 | |
an exciting new way to see and experience the landscape. | 1:17:42 | 1:17:48 | |
I have always watched birds in flight exploring the landscape, moving more freely than man. | 1:17:48 | 1:17:55 | |
But in a glider, I had the same freedom. | 1:17:55 | 1:17:59 | |
I'm now able to get away from the very familiar countryside, | 1:18:18 | 1:18:23 | |
one of stone and grass and very treeless for instance, | 1:18:23 | 1:18:27 | |
a rough, harsh countryside, into the air and to see it | 1:18:27 | 1:18:32 | |
in conditions which I never expected I'd find. Conditions of solitude. | 1:18:32 | 1:18:36 | |
In 1960, Lanyon obtained his solo flying licence. | 1:18:38 | 1:18:43 | |
His experience of gliding inspired a remarkable series of paintings. | 1:18:43 | 1:18:48 | |
But you can't properly understand them unless you take to the skies yourself. | 1:18:48 | 1:18:52 | |
It's just a matter of not doing paintings which are visual paintings | 1:18:56 | 1:19:00 | |
so much, it's paintings which are related to some physical experience. | 1:19:00 | 1:19:04 | |
You know, when you're up here in this glider and you're looking down over Cornwall from high up, | 1:19:12 | 1:19:17 | |
you realise that every other landscape painter in history missed a trick. | 1:19:17 | 1:19:21 | |
This is the most incredible way to see the landscape, incredible! | 1:19:21 | 1:19:26 | |
People say that Peter Lanyon's paintings are abstract. | 1:19:30 | 1:19:34 | |
When you're up here, you can see Peter Lanyon's everywhere you look. | 1:19:34 | 1:19:38 | |
From up here, Lanyon saw the sea, beaches, cliffs, moors, fields | 1:19:38 | 1:19:43 | |
and villages of Cornwall combined into one glorious vista beneath him. | 1:19:43 | 1:19:50 | |
I am detached, actually, | 1:19:56 | 1:19:58 | |
from this very rough and harsh country below me, | 1:19:58 | 1:20:03 | |
but not entirely detached. | 1:20:03 | 1:20:05 | |
In fact this whole thing of flying is giving me a better understanding, | 1:20:05 | 1:20:11 | |
I think, of the coast and the country underneath me | 1:20:11 | 1:20:15 | |
than I'd have had by continuously walking over it. | 1:20:15 | 1:20:18 | |
I think that... | 1:20:18 | 1:20:21 | |
this may be important for the future of painting, I don't know. | 1:20:21 | 1:20:25 | |
As far as I'm concerned, I think it's led me into something that's very important | 1:20:25 | 1:20:30 | |
for just not landscape but for painting problems of time and of distance. | 1:20:30 | 1:20:35 | |
As I hovered on those West Country thermals, I suddenly understood what Lanyon's art was all about. | 1:20:37 | 1:20:45 | |
It wasn't about modernism or nationalism, or history or myth, | 1:20:45 | 1:20:50 | |
it was actually about pure unadulterated joy. | 1:20:50 | 1:20:55 | |
The joy of feeling the sun on your face and the wind in your hair. | 1:20:55 | 1:20:58 | |
The joy of being in a world that you love. | 1:20:58 | 1:21:02 | |
As an art historian, I spend most of my time in libraries and lecture rooms. | 1:21:04 | 1:21:07 | |
I never thought in a million years I'd be going up in a glider and seeing Cornwall below me, | 1:21:07 | 1:21:12 | |
and I have one person to thank for that, and that's Peter Lanyon. | 1:21:12 | 1:21:16 | |
I believe that these aerial paintings are the culmination of 200 years of British landscape art, | 1:21:18 | 1:21:25 | |
and with them, Lanyon was on his way to becoming the Turner of the 20th century. | 1:21:25 | 1:21:32 | |
Peter Lanyon and Patrick Heron were now the torch bearers of the St Ives movement. | 1:21:43 | 1:21:50 | |
A movement that had gained national and international fame | 1:21:50 | 1:21:54 | |
for combining the hard-edged abstraction of the 1930s | 1:21:54 | 1:21:57 | |
with a love for the natural world. | 1:21:57 | 1:22:00 | |
Ben Nicholson left St Ives for Switzerland in 1957, | 1:22:06 | 1:22:12 | |
but the momentum was now unstoppable. | 1:22:12 | 1:22:16 | |
Even the Americans were beginning to take notice. | 1:22:16 | 1:22:20 | |
For a few brief years, Cornish artists were going shoulder to shoulder with the Americans. | 1:22:20 | 1:22:26 | |
People were genuinely speaking of New York and St Ives in the same breath, | 1:22:26 | 1:22:31 | |
and the Americans were glancing nervously across the Atlantic, | 1:22:31 | 1:22:35 | |
not to see what was happening in London, Paris or Berlin, | 1:22:35 | 1:22:38 | |
but to see what was happening here. | 1:22:38 | 1:22:40 | |
In the years either side of 1960, many American artists and critics | 1:22:43 | 1:22:49 | |
even made the long journey to St Ives to see what was going on. | 1:22:49 | 1:22:54 | |
Mark Rothko, a giant of abstract expressionism was just one of them. | 1:22:54 | 1:22:59 | |
A creative dialogue and, at times, a vitriolic rivalry | 1:22:59 | 1:23:03 | |
have been opened up between these two artistic centres. | 1:23:03 | 1:23:07 | |
But the transatlantic cultural currents weren't just one way. | 1:23:07 | 1:23:12 | |
Between 1957 and 1965, Peter Lanyon and Patrick Heron together | 1:23:12 | 1:23:17 | |
had eight one-man shows in America. | 1:23:17 | 1:23:21 | |
And in 1964, St Ives triumphed again when Barbara Hepworth unveiled | 1:23:22 | 1:23:28 | |
a monumental sculpture at the United Nations in New York City. | 1:23:28 | 1:23:34 | |
No one then could possibly have predicted that the glory years of St Ives were over. | 1:23:37 | 1:23:45 | |
The trigger for this unexpected decline came out of the blue. | 1:23:48 | 1:23:52 | |
On Thursday 27th August 1964, | 1:23:56 | 1:24:00 | |
Peter Lanyon was on a gliding course. | 1:24:00 | 1:24:03 | |
For a few glorious moments he circled high above the fields, | 1:24:04 | 1:24:09 | |
but as he came in to land, something went terribly wrong. | 1:24:09 | 1:24:15 | |
Maybe it was a momentary lapse in concentration, | 1:24:15 | 1:24:18 | |
perhaps a freak gust of wind. | 1:24:18 | 1:24:22 | |
Whatever the reason, his glider plummeted to the ground | 1:24:22 | 1:24:27 | |
and he was catapulted from his cockpit. | 1:24:27 | 1:24:30 | |
Four days later, | 1:24:31 | 1:24:33 | |
he was dead. | 1:24:33 | 1:24:34 | |
Lanyon's death was the beginning of the end for the St Ives movement. | 1:24:41 | 1:24:47 | |
The times had changed, its celebration of nature was suddenly out of date. | 1:24:47 | 1:24:54 | |
Pop art was now the movement of the moment. | 1:24:54 | 1:24:57 | |
There was one final tragedy to come. | 1:24:57 | 1:25:00 | |
In May 1975, Barbara Hepworth died | 1:25:04 | 1:25:08 | |
in a tragic fire at her studio in St Ives. | 1:25:08 | 1:25:13 | |
It was over. | 1:25:13 | 1:25:14 | |
40 years on, and Cornwall is still drawing artists and tourists. | 1:25:22 | 1:25:29 | |
The arrival of Tate St Ives in 1994 has helped to encouraged | 1:25:29 | 1:25:34 | |
contemporary art and reaffirm the reputations of these past masters. | 1:25:34 | 1:25:41 | |
I think there must have been a pioneering spirit that people making paintings to break new ground, | 1:25:41 | 1:25:45 | |
and they really thought they had found a new language | 1:25:45 | 1:25:48 | |
and they were speaking in it, and the world was listening. | 1:25:48 | 1:25:51 | |
I think that the work that was made here by those artists | 1:25:53 | 1:25:57 | |
is the real thing, and so I think people should seek it out. | 1:25:57 | 1:26:01 | |
The important thing about all great art is that it's timeless. | 1:26:02 | 1:26:06 | |
You know, it achieves a value because of its relevance to its moment, | 1:26:06 | 1:26:11 | |
but it also embodies timeless values | 1:26:11 | 1:26:14 | |
and it can speak to different generations, but in different ways. | 1:26:14 | 1:26:18 | |
I think the exciting thing about looking at the art of St Ives now | 1:26:18 | 1:26:23 | |
is that we can look at that work in ways different to the ways | 1:26:23 | 1:26:27 | |
it was looked at at the time and has been subsequently. | 1:26:27 | 1:26:30 | |
From the perspective of a new century, the achievements | 1:26:33 | 1:26:36 | |
of the St Ives colony look grossly undervalued. | 1:26:36 | 1:26:40 | |
In our consumer world, their art remains unfashionable, but I marvel at their bravery, | 1:26:42 | 1:26:49 | |
dedication, and the sheer range of quality of work that spanned more than half-a-century. | 1:26:49 | 1:26:55 | |
It's their passion for nature, their defiant radicalism and, more than anything, | 1:26:55 | 1:27:01 | |
their unyielding optimism that defines the art of Cornwall as a high watermark in 20th century art. | 1:27:01 | 1:27:08 | |
Britain doesn't figure much in the history of modern art. | 1:27:15 | 1:27:18 | |
When we think of modernism, we think of Paris and New York, | 1:27:18 | 1:27:22 | |
but the artists who lived and worked here | 1:27:22 | 1:27:24 | |
are an integral part of that story. | 1:27:24 | 1:27:26 | |
They abstracted this Cornish landscape, they turned space and rhythm into sculpture. | 1:27:26 | 1:27:33 | |
They turned its light and warmth into paint. | 1:27:33 | 1:27:36 | |
But we've forgotten how important their work is, | 1:27:36 | 1:27:39 | |
simply because it came from such an unlikely place. | 1:27:39 | 1:27:42 | |
But I think it's about time we look again at the art and artists of Cornwall. | 1:27:42 | 1:27:48 | |
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