- 7/25/2025
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00:00:01Yet it exerts a magnetic pull on our imaginations.
00:00:13Coincidence, curiosity and crisis drew a string of great artists to this remote region.
00:00:20Responding to each other and the dramatic landscape,
00:00:23they went on to produce some of the most exhilarating art of the 20th century.
00:00:28The history of British painting and sculpture would be redefined in this distant and forbidding place.
00:00:43For it was in Cornwall that against all the odds,
00:00:46a small fishing village was briefly transformed into an international centre of modern art.
00:00:52And that fishing village was St Ives.
00:00:56A series of extraordinary characters was brought together into this unlikely community.
00:01:05Alfred Wallace, the luckless ancient mariner, wholly untutored in art.
00:01:11And his disciple, the brilliant but doomed Christopher Wood.
00:01:14Ben Nicholson, the formidable Svengali of the British avant-garde.
00:01:21And his lover, Barbara Hepworth, the world's first great female sculptor.
00:01:27And two Cornish sons who would revolutionise the way we see both landscape and colour.
00:01:33This film explores the work, lives and relationships of the masters who most helped turn St Ives into a colony of modern art.
00:01:48It's like a whole continent of colour.
00:01:50It seems hard to believe, but for a few dazzling years, this place was as famous as Paris, as exciting as New York and infinitely more progressive than London.
00:02:02So how did this actually happen? And why did it so tragically end?
00:02:11This is an epic tale filled with individual triumphs and disasters, but together it amounts to nothing less than an alternative history of British art.
00:02:20This is the art of Cornwall.
00:02:37Cornwall is not a county. It is a country.
00:02:42For most of its history, it was a desolate outpost at the edge of England.
00:02:46A mysterious Celtic kingdom of tombs, tin mines and fishermen.
00:02:52It boasted its own language, its own legal system, and until only recently was considerably harder to get to than much of mainland Europe.
00:03:01But it was the peculiar quality of the light in St Ives that first caught the world's attention.
00:03:07It's been called the brightest place in Britain.
00:03:10And the reason for that is simple, because the town is completely surrounded by sea.
00:03:16And that sea acts as a giant reflector, bouncing the light back into the town.
00:03:21And if that wasn't enough, there are miles of golden sand that serve only to intensify the effect.
00:03:26It was the arrival of the railways in the 1850s that ended Cornwall's age-old isolation and first brought artists to its shores.
00:03:40St Ives was an established artist colony. It really built up around the railway. The railway giving accessibility to the capital, to the Royal Academy, allowed it to become a colony in the late 19th century and the fashion for harbours and fishermen as subjects.
00:03:56The railways brought growing numbers of gentlemen artists, all attracted by the new talk of a picturesque English Riviera, a paradise bathed in warm Mediterranean light.
00:04:10Over the following decades, these painters formed artist colonies along the Cornish coast and produced thousands of highly marketable paintings.
00:04:19They depicted scenes of hard-working men and God-fearing women, together enduring with stoic fortitude, the trials of Cornish land and sea.
00:04:33They appeared to offer a definitive and authentic image of Cornwall.
00:04:39But this wasn't the real Cornwall. It was a fantasy, a make-believe world, mawkish and patronising, a masterful piece of Victorian myth-making.
00:04:54These painters achieved huge popularity in Victorian Britain.
00:04:59But the 20th century would see a new group of radical artists come to Cornwall, and they would change everything.
00:05:09I'm an art historian at the University of Cambridge.
00:05:25I first came here as a student harbouring an unhealthy teenage obsession with modern art.
00:05:33And Cornwall seemed as far away from that as it was possible to get.
00:05:39To me, its only association was of depressing family holidays in the rain.
00:05:45But that all changed one afternoon, when I discovered a little museum just round the corner from my college.
00:05:51Kettle's Yard is a quirky collection of pebbles, driftwood and pottery.
00:06:05But scattered casually amongst those odds and ends are some masterpieces of modern art.
00:06:10But when I first came here that afternoon, it wasn't these modern masterpieces that captured my imagination.
00:06:20I was transfixed by something altogether less exotic.
00:06:24I discovered the work of three unmistakably British artists, who all shared a profound connection to Cornwall.
00:06:34Modest cardboard paintings of Cornish boats by Alfred Wallace.
00:06:38Graceful and tasteful abstractions by Ben Nicholson.
00:06:45And the quirky paintings of Harbours by Christopher Wood.
00:06:50The chance meeting of these three very different artists would transform the fortunes of St Ives.
00:06:59And it was the ferocious ambition of the youngest of them that sets this story in motion.
00:07:04Christopher, or Kit Wood, is one of the most glamorous and dissolute figures in British art.
00:07:15And his short, explosive life is the stuff that myths are made of.
00:07:20At the age of just 19, this middle class boy from Liverpool made a staggering announcement to his family.
00:07:28He was going to become the greatest painter the world had ever seen.
00:07:32Kit had set himself a virtually impossible task.
00:07:37He knew that if he was to have any chance of success, there was only one place in the world he could be.
00:07:42Kit arrived in Paris in March 1921 with a suitcase in his hand and 14 pounds in his pocket.
00:07:52Beautiful and bisexual, he yearned for both artistic and social liberation.
00:07:55His choice of time and place was perfect.
00:07:56At that time, Paris was the epitome of a human being and his life that was a man in the world.
00:07:58When his life was not alone, his success was never true.
00:07:59...in March 1921, with a suitcase in his hand and £14 in his pocket.
00:08:07Beautiful and bisexual, he yearned for both artistic and social liberation.
00:08:15His choice of time and place was perfect.
00:08:23At that time, Paris was the epitome of everything modern.
00:08:27It was open-minded, risque, provocative, the complete opposite of buttoned-up, insular London.
00:08:33And what's more, it had been the undisputed capital of the art world for generations.
00:08:43It was in Paris that Matisse, Picasso and Braque had torn up and completely rewritten the old artistic rules.
00:08:49And it was in Paris that new radical-isms were pouring out of cafes and bistros with every day that passed.
00:08:58These revolutionary art forms were mechanistic, urban and angular.
00:09:09And at first it seems difficult to see how they could have any connection to Cornwall.
00:09:13But bear with me, because if Paris offered anything, what it offered was freedom.
00:09:17Freedom from all the stifling academic rules and conventions.
00:09:21Freedom from official techniques and correct styles.
00:09:24Freedom in many ways from the past.
00:09:26Paris proved that art could be done in a different way.
00:09:30It wasn't just artistic freedom that Paris offered.
00:09:36Kit was also sucked into the dazzling social maelstrom of the Parisian Beaumont.
00:09:43He even acquired a rich and well-connected playboy lover.
00:09:47He would introduce Kit to some important people, but it also introduced him to some very bad habits.
00:09:56Kit's favourite bad habit was opium.
00:10:00It became an addiction that would soon overshadow his life and his work.
00:10:08Kit's letters home are a poignant record of his state of mind in Paris.
00:10:12They reveal the first signs of a mental turmoil caused by the conflict between his days at the easel and his nights with an opium pipe.
00:10:20And he writes here,
00:10:21My brain is working too hard and I don't know where the end will come.
00:10:25I've worked very hard and produced nothing whatever to satisfy me.
00:10:29Kit's misgivings were not shared by his peers.
00:10:34Jean Cocteau called him the most talented painter he had ever met.
00:10:38And a recommendation from Picasso secured him a dream job.
00:10:47In February 1927, the Russian ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev asked Kit to design the scenery for his new show, Romeo and Juliet,
00:10:55which premiered here at the Theatre du Châtelet.
00:11:01The collaboration, however, ended in disaster.
00:11:04Diaghilev was not impressed by Kit's designs and Kit was in no mood for compromise.
00:11:10After a blazing row, he was sacked.
00:11:16It was a pivotal moment for Kit and in its own way it was a pivotal moment for St Ives and Cornwall too.
00:11:22He'd learnt everything he could learn from Paris.
00:11:24Now what he had to do was take these ideas and find fresh inspiration.
00:11:29And that inspiration would be Cornwall.
00:11:45Cornwall was in Kit's blood.
00:11:48His mother was Cornish and he instantly developed a deep sense of belonging to the place.
00:11:53The region's rugged landscape stirred his overactive imagination.
00:11:59As soon as he arrived he wrote,
00:12:01If I am here long enough, I am going to paint good things.
00:12:06Kit had also found a friend and ally in Ben Nicholson,
00:12:11a man who had spent much of the 1920s bringing the spirit of Paris to Britain.
00:12:17In the summer of 1928, Kit joined Nicholson on a weekend trip to Cornwall.
00:12:25He had actually come down to Falmouth for a house party,
00:12:29but the following day convinced Nicholson to drive to the town of St Ives for a sketching trip.
00:12:42On Sunday the 26th of August, the two men arrived in St Ives.
00:12:47They made their way to Porthmere Beach.
00:12:49This is Kit's painting of the scene.
00:12:57In the evening, they packed up their materials and set off for home.
00:13:02They were strolling happily back into town when something caught their eye.
00:13:06The front door of this little cottage was open, so they knocked and peeked inside.
00:13:14Nothing could have prepared them for what they saw.
00:13:17There were pictures hanging on the walls, piled on the floors, stacked chaotically against the chairs.
00:13:24And in the middle of them all was a little old man painting.
00:13:30His name was Alfred Wallace, a 73-year-old ex-fisherman.
00:13:38And in the pictures around him, Kit and Ben instantly recognised a powerful and uncorrupted vision.
00:13:45This art seemed as radical as anything they had seen in Paris.
00:13:55The encounter with Alfred Wallace as this sort of genuine exemplar of authentic artistic expression,
00:14:03untrained, unsullied by academicism, is really crucial.
00:14:08He's symbolic at that time as a genuine, what's seen as a genuinely naive artist.
00:14:15While Ben returned to London to spread word of their discovery, Kit stayed on in St. Ives for the autumn,
00:14:26renting a cottage across the road from Alfred's home.
00:14:30It seemed he had finally found the inspiration for which he'd been searching.
00:14:36Here's a guy who'd been in Paris.
00:14:38He'd been mixing with all the greatest artistic figures in the world.
00:14:41He'd been mixing with Picasso, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and yet none of that really seemed to count for anything.
00:14:47What actually inspired him was this place.
00:14:49It was Cornwall and it was little old Alfred Wallace.
00:14:52I think somehow Wood finds in Wallace the subject matter, the slightly awkward space and detailing of the paintings,
00:15:05the creaminess of the paint he gets from Wallace.
00:15:07But I wonder if there's also not a sort of certain kind of English landscape,
00:15:11an English spirit that Wallace kind of opens up for Wood.
00:15:15Kit visited Wallace every day and the old man's influence was soon apparent.
00:15:23Scenes of metropolitan life were replaced by more vivid depictions of life by the sea.
00:15:31The dreams of the young man who'd set out to be the world's greatest painter were bearing fruit.
00:15:38But Kit Wood was losing his mind.
00:15:44His addiction to opium had intensified.
00:15:49He started hallucinating.
00:15:52He became paranoid.
00:15:55Opium was driving him to the edge.
00:15:57His inner torment was reflected in the sinister quality of his last works.
00:16:13On 21 August 1930, an exhausted Kit met his mother for lunch in Salisbury.
00:16:19Then, in a fit of panic, he threw himself under a train.
00:16:25He was killed at the age of 29.
00:16:34Although he had only stayed there briefly, Kit had shown that Cornwall could be a natural home for modern art.
00:16:43He had introduced Ben Nicholson to St Ives, and together they had discovered the unique talent of Alfred Wallace.
00:16:50In the 1930s, Wallace was transformed into something of a cult figure, with his remarkable depictions of his seafaring past.
00:17:00His paintings also recorded the demise of one of Cornwall's oldest and most important industries.
00:17:08This is Newlyn. It's pretty much all that's left of the Cornish fishing fleet.
00:17:25But in Wallace's day, it was the hub of a huge and thriving industry, and every harbour along this coast was packed with fishing boats.
00:17:34This painting depicts the whole of Mounts Bay.
00:17:45It shows things which we cannot see, because it is painted from Wallace's memory.
00:17:50But anyway, he's showing off, he's telling us, he's telling us how much he does know about these things.
00:17:54I know more than all those painters who have been trained.
00:17:57Well, how much information he can tell us.
00:18:00Wallace seemed to be painting almost from inside, being untrained.
00:18:05He was free of the conventions that other artists were confined by.
00:18:10He was free from perspective, free from painting, just from observation.
00:18:15He painted, from memory, he painted the knowledge that he had of these places.
00:18:20And that makes it very special.
00:18:22His art was taking a new direction, in this, because of that.
00:18:32Wallace had spent 25 years chasing shoals of herring, mackerel and pilchard across the Atlantic.
00:18:39But in 1890, he retired from the sea, and moved to St. Ives, where he opened a marine supply store.
00:18:49But in the mid-1920s, Alfred's wife died.
00:18:53It was loneliness that drew him to paint.
00:18:58Alfred Wallace didn't paint like any other artist in St. Ives.
00:19:02He didn't have enough money to buy materials, so he painted onto whatever he could find.
00:19:07Cardboard boxes, bits of driftwood, railway timetables, even jam jars.
00:19:12And set about producing his own inimitable alternative to the work of what he called the real artists.
00:19:23But the real artists discerned rich layers of meaning in his deceptively simple pictures.
00:19:29Here's an example.
00:19:35This is a painting of some cottages in St. Ives.
00:19:37And you'll notice that one of the cottages is much, much smaller than all the others.
00:19:42Now, this isn't just bad perspective.
00:19:44It was supposed to be that way.
00:19:45That cottage was lived in by Alfred's brother.
00:19:48And Alfred had just fallen out with him.
00:19:50So by making the cottage really, really small, Alfred was getting his own artistic revenge on his sibling.
00:19:56I just love it, you know, and all of Wallace's paintings.
00:20:01And there is a whole wall full of them here, filled with similarly rich and wonderful meanings.
00:20:09And Kettle's Yard also have a letter that he wrote back in April 1935.
00:20:14And he writes here,
00:20:16What I do mostly is what used to be, out of my own memory, what we may never see again, as things are altered altogether.
00:20:23There is nothing whatever do not look like what it was, since I can remember.
00:20:27What we realise from this letter is these paintings are attempts by him to capture the only certainty he's got left.
00:20:34He's painting the past.
00:20:36Yet it was Ben Nicholson who would now shape the art of the future.
00:20:47In the auction houses, salons and galleries of London, he set about shaking up Britain's conservative art establishment forever.
00:20:55Marks at 47 is by Ben Nicholson, 57, and 54, 56, I've got £56,000 on my left at £58,000, on my right at £58,000.
00:21:07Nicholson was a brilliant and energetic evangelist for the techniques and ideals of European modernism.
00:21:13He was determined to drag British art into the 20th century.
00:21:17And he wasn't going to do it alone.
00:21:20In 1931, he attended a Bohemian house party in Norfolk.
00:21:25Another guest was a gifted young sculptor from Yorkshire, Barbara Hepworth.
00:21:31And although both were married, they began a passionate love affair.
00:21:41From the moment she met Ben Nicholson, Barbara abandoned her figurative style
00:21:46and converted to Ben's modernist cause.
00:21:52Ben soon moved into Barbara's North London studio,
00:21:55and the two artists found they worked harmoniously together.
00:21:59However, in their austere abstractions,
00:22:02they were still ploughing a lonely furrow in British art.
00:22:07But political crisis abroad would change all that.
00:22:11Now, I realise this is not our conventional image of a refugee camp.
00:22:16But in the 1930s, that is what London, and in particular Hampstead, became.
00:22:21With every month that passed, more of Europe's persecuted avant-garde
00:22:25made their way to this genteel and leafy suburb.
00:22:28And they briefly transformed it into the intellectual and artistic centre of the world.
00:22:34Sigmund Freud, the great Austrian psychoanalyst, ended up here.
00:22:47Ernst Gombrich, who wrote the only art book people ever actually read, lived here.
00:22:53The Hungarian architect Erno Goldfinger designed this house for himself in Willow Road.
00:22:57His neighbour Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, was not impressed.
00:23:01And this was the result.
00:23:05Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian settled here at Park Hill Road.
00:23:12And the revolutionary Russian sculptor Naum Gabbo wound up here.
00:23:16But the hub of the community was this block of flats.
00:23:23The Isacon building.
00:23:27The Isacon was the first major modernist building in Britain.
00:23:31And its style and motifs were inspired by Ben's minimalist art.
00:23:35This must have been such a great place to live.
00:23:45No one could have been more pleased to see these new arrivals than Ben,
00:23:50who had spent years tirelessly...
00:23:51The Isacon's basement bar now became the unofficial headquarters of London's free-thinking refugees.
00:24:08And their presence helped Ben and Barbara, whose studio was just around the corner,
00:24:12to establish themselves as the dynamic duo of British modernism.
00:24:21In 1936, their ambition paid off.
00:24:32They organised the first ever exhibition of abstract art in Britain.
00:24:38The show was a sensation.
00:24:41It featured new work by Ben and Barbara,
00:24:44but set in an international context.
00:24:46Alongside works by Piet Mondrian and Naum Gabbo.
00:24:52The works around us represent a moment of British art.
00:24:56The high point, in a way, of that thirties movement to engage,
00:25:00both with abstract values in art and in other things,
00:25:04with spirituality and higher ideals,
00:25:06and also with international artists.
00:25:08It's the focal point, if you like, of an international utopian movement of artists.
00:25:14Ben's contribution was a spare white relief.
00:25:21It was the most audacious and controversial work in the show.
00:25:27There have been so many interpretations of this work.
00:25:30It's been called a protest against the Nazis,
00:25:33a celebration of hygiene, and even a manifesto of Christian science.
00:25:36But I think it's all about Cornwall, those whitewashed walls in St Ives shining in that pure Cornish light.
00:25:45And there's even something of the Alfred Wallace about it,
00:25:48because Ben Nicholson made this out of a mahogany dining table he found in Camden Market,
00:25:53and brought home with him on the number 24 bus.
00:25:56Wallace would have been proud.
00:25:57By 1939 London had been transformed, and it was now challenging Paris at the top table of modern art.
00:26:13And this was in no small part due to Ben Nicholson's talent for networking.
00:26:17But now the very factors that brought this community together conspired to tear it apart.
00:26:28By the summer of 1939, war was imminent.
00:26:34Ben Nicholson wanted to stay in London and keep his beloved modernist colony alive.
00:26:39But Barbara and he were now married, with triplets.
00:26:44And they knew that for their family to be safe, they had to get as far away from the capital as possible.
00:26:50Barbara suggested Norfolk, and momentarily the future of British modern art hung in the balance.
00:26:57But Ben knew exactly where he would take them.
00:27:00He would take them to Cornwall.
00:27:03On the 25th of August 1939, Ben, Barbara and their three young children squeezed into their car and left their hamstered home.
00:27:13As they turned this corner, they saw Mondrian standing in the street.
00:27:18They pleaded with him to jump in and escape with them to the countryside.
00:27:22But Mondrian hated the countryside, he couldn't even stand the colour green.
00:27:26So they waved him goodbye and left London forever.
00:27:29I can't imagine what a terrible journey it must have been.
00:27:35And I think Ben and Barbara knew that with every mile of the past,
00:27:38the life they'd so painstakingly built for themselves in London had disappeared behind them.
00:27:43They had arranged to stay in Carbis Bay, a dowdy suburb of St Ives.
00:28:02And they had arrived here at precisely the same time as a massive thunderstorm.
00:28:06It continued to rain for six days and six nights, and Barbara wrote that Cornwall was sheer, unmitigated hell.
00:28:18Ben at least could work. Within minutes of arriving, he had disappeared into a quiet room, locked the door behind him and started to draw.
00:28:26But she was left to look after the children, clean the house, and prepare the meals.
00:28:33In a schedule like that, she didn't have much time for high-minded abstraction.
00:28:37It wasn't glamorous, I'll grant you, but despite all the miseries and all the hardships and all the anxieties,
00:28:49the outbreak of war in 1939 had brought two of the world's most radical artists to Cornwall.
00:28:54And I really think that if there is any turning point in the art of St Ives, this was it.
00:29:00With Nicholson and Hepworth's arrival, a new outpost of international modernism had been formed here.
00:29:06And that outpost was about to get bigger.
00:29:11Two weeks later, another modernist stepped gingerly off the train from London, Naum Garbo.
00:29:16Garbo was a giant of the European avant-garde.
00:29:24He had participated in the Russian Revolution in 1917 and had also reinvented the history of sculpture
00:29:31with his painstaking and high-tech constructions.
00:29:35Garbo had lived and worked in every major European capital and had even taught at the Bauhaus.
00:29:41But he was doubly at risk from the Nazis being both Jewish and, as a modernist, regarded as a degenerate artist.
00:29:51In 1936, he had fled to Britain and was warmly welcomed into Ben's Hampstead clique.
00:29:58By following him to Cornwall, he would be laying another foundation stone for this new modernist colony.
00:30:04Garbo was an even more unlikely presence in Cornwall than Nicholson and Hepworth.
00:30:10And I still can't get my head around the thought of this exotic Russian genius,
00:30:15a man who'd led the revolutionary avant-garde in Moscow, Berlin and Paris,
00:30:20of him ending up in this rather nondescript house in Carbis Bay.
00:30:25It's like stumbling across Michelangelo doing his weekly shop in Tesco's.
00:30:30He cut an unlikely figure in wartime Cornwall, walking his white Samoyed dog along the beach.
00:30:37He never lost his heavy Russian accent.
00:30:40And when war finally broke out, he was obliged to register as an alien.
00:30:44Garbo was used to crisis. It seemed to follow him wherever he went.
00:30:55And by 1939, he'd had the singular misfortune to have lived through four major wars and revolutions.
00:31:01But he must never have felt more of a fish out of water than here.
00:31:04War changes everything for everybody.
00:31:10I think that the Second World War is the absolutely crucial thing of trying to understand the artisan's eyes and the phenomenon of the colony.
00:31:19Not only would Nicholson, Hepworth and Garbo not have gone there for the war,
00:31:22but I think it's a place where they change their ideas.
00:31:30The utopianism of the 1930s becomes refocused on ideas of community.
00:31:36Garbo did what he could for the British war effort.
00:31:39He and Ben Nicholson formed undoubtedly Cornwall's most ineffectual air raid unit.
00:31:44The two men, one short and plump, the other tall and gangly, patrolled the streets of Carvis Bay.
00:31:51But they spent more time admiring the local pebbles than scrutinising the skies for German bombers.
00:32:01The war distressed Garbo profoundly.
00:32:05But he didn't lose faith in his art.
00:32:08On the contrary, he grew convinced that it was more important than ever.
00:32:15His sculptures had always been inspired by a brave new world of technology.
00:32:20And faith in a brave new world was never more needed than now.
00:32:29But Cornwall cast its spell on Garbo.
00:32:34His daily walks by the sea changed his work.
00:32:36The waves curling onto the sand, the wind spiralling in from the ocean.
00:32:46The sails and rigging of boats, the curves of shells and pebbles.
00:32:50All of these elements are present in his Cornish constructions.
00:33:02This is one of Garbo's wartime masterpieces.
00:33:06It's so delicate I feel that if I even speak too loudly it will fall apart.
00:33:11If anything demonstrates the unique power of Cornwall.
00:33:16This is it.
00:33:20Garbo once left one of these in a taxi.
00:33:23When he called them up, they asked him what he'd lost.
00:33:26And he replied, a construction in space.
00:33:29And that's exactly what these are.
00:33:31The cutting edge materials Garbo liked to work with were hard to come by in wartime Cornwall.
00:33:40But he managed to get the British chemicals giant ICI to send experimental new plastics down to him in St Ives.
00:33:50Garbo clearly found Cornwall a difficult place to work.
00:33:53But this didn't stop him falling in love with it.
00:33:59When he couldn't get hold of his plastics, he collected pebbles from the beach and filed them into elemental, abstract forms.
00:34:14Each day, his walk took him past the door of Alfred Wallace's cottage.
00:34:18Alfred, now well into his 80s, was not well.
00:34:27He grew convinced that the devil was living upstairs in his bedroom.
00:34:31And was often heard screaming through the night.
00:34:37His Victorian upbringing had left him with an intense fear of ending his days in the forbidding workhouse at Madrum.
00:34:44But that is now where he was sent.
00:34:54What strikes me about this place is that when Wallace came here, he was actually something of an artistic celebrity.
00:34:59His pictures were being bought and sold in London galleries.
00:35:02He was being written about in journals and magazines.
00:35:04Yet somehow, in the final analysis, that seemed to count for nothing.
00:35:09Because he still ended up here.
00:35:14Just a few months later, Alfred Wallace was dead.
00:35:18Preparations had been made to bury him in a pauper's grave in Barnoon Cemetery.
00:35:28But once the news reached his friends in St Ives, a proper ceremony was organised.
00:35:35I'm sure Wallace would have been proud to have admirers like Nicholson, Hepworth and Garbo at his funeral.
00:35:46Prouder still to have a tomb made specially for him by the master potter Bernard Leach.
00:35:52These stoneware tiles are really very beautiful indeed.
00:35:59And actually, it's very moving as well.
00:36:01You've got this tiny little figure of Wallace with the enormous lighthouse above him.
00:36:05And these great big waves crashing all around.
00:36:08And underneath, into the hands, oh Lord.
00:36:10There's a very moving letter from Ben Nicholson to his friend Jim Eade on the day of Alfred Wallace's funeral.
00:36:25When he contrasts the funeral and Wallace, this sort of timeless old man, with the German aircraft which has just shot up the high street in St Ives.
00:36:36And Ben concludes by saying the war has made one more aware of the community one lives in.
00:36:42And I think that's really important, that artists' involvement in the place they live in, in this small town, and as a community of artists, is really crucial.
00:36:55The war years were hard for Barbara Hepworth too.
00:36:59At first she found it impossible to do any work.
00:37:02She had no materials and precious little time.
00:37:04She drew at night, but her days were spent looking after the family.
00:37:09She supplemented their rations with salad picked in the hedgerows, and mushrooms collected in the fields.
00:37:16But as the triplets grew, she made more time for her art.
00:37:20And when the work did begin, Cornwall was there too.
00:37:23Now most people think of Barbara Hepworth's sculpture as abstract, but actually it's anything but.
00:37:35Take this work for instance, Pelagos, one of her most famous works from her St Ives period.
00:37:40Barbara said that this wasn't abstract at all, it was actually a landscape of Cornwall.
00:37:45Those curving forms here, what those actually represent is the curve of the whole Bay of St Ives.
00:37:54The white here in the middle, that's the white of the beach of Carbis Bay.
00:38:04And the stringing, that's the lines of wind and waves that are coming in from the Atlantic.
00:38:08So what she's actually done is taken this whole enormous Bay of St Ives, made it smaller, tilted it up and turned it into a sculpture.
00:38:23Barbara may have started with the view from her kitchen window, but as she got to know her new home better, she began to find inspiration everywhere.
00:38:31The moorland along the coast of St Ives is littered with the traces of an ancient and forgotten past.
00:38:45On any walk here you will come across countless prehistoric standing stones, and odd creations like this, Lanyon Coit, whose original function is no longer known.
00:39:01Although Barbara didn't choose to come to Cornwall, this landscape soon started to claim her.
00:39:08She began to feel a profound connection to the place.
00:39:11She said she felt through her feet its geological shape.
00:39:15The rich minerals from which Cornwall was made were apparent on the very surface of things.
00:39:25Half a mile away is another group, Menantol.
00:39:31The meaning of these objects is a mystery, and it was the mystery that appealed to her.
00:39:37These stones are thousands of years old, but Hepworth appropriated their forms and reinvented them for the modern movement.
00:40:01The Cornish landscape was also infiltrating the imagination of her husband, Ben.
00:40:14I always thought the stories were overdone, he wrote to a friend.
00:40:18The drama and the terrific intense colour.
00:40:21But the real thing has been so much more.
00:40:23Bit by bit, Cornwall seduced the evangelical obstructionist.
00:40:34He started painting the landscape.
00:40:36He tried to resist, he excused his behaviour as an economic necessity.
00:40:47He had a family to feed, and no one would buy abstract pictures during the war.
00:40:53He made it plain that these works were not to be regarded as significant in the way his abstracts were,
00:40:58but his protests were in vain. Cornwall had forced its way into his work.
00:41:07Ben's transition from those geometric white abstractions to his lush wartime landscapes reveals an extraordinary artistic journey.
00:41:17In 1945, the Second World War finally ended.
00:41:28Ben celebrated the event in his own whimsical fashion.
00:41:31This painting had been languishing unfinished in Nicholson's studio for two years, when the Nazis surrendered in May 1945.
00:41:44And on hearing the news, Ben added his own distinctive version of a Union flag to the corner here.
00:41:50It's since become a seminal image.
00:41:52But it's difficult to believe that the same man who only ten years earlier was painting those austere white reliefs
00:41:56was now painting a charming collection of crockery.
00:42:00It's a testament to how Cornwall had humanised Ben,
00:42:03and I think that great internationalist would hate me for saying this,
00:42:06but also how it brought out the Britishness in him.
00:42:11Barbara assumed the end of the war would mean a return to normal family life in London.
00:42:18Ben spent a trial period in the capital,
00:42:20and in 1946, Naum Garbo took the first ship out to New York.
00:42:29St Ives's days as a centre of modern art appeared to be numbered.
00:42:34But Ben came back to St Ives, saying he needed to see the sky.
00:42:39Against all the odds, Ben and Barbara decided to stay.
00:42:44The continued presence of these two celebrities soon attracted hundreds of painters and sculptors,
00:42:49all yearning for creative freedom.
00:42:52A wave of young artists now poured into St Ives,
00:42:56and within just months the town's empty pubs, cottages and studios
00:43:00were overrun with a new generation of creatives
00:43:03who had come to the edge of England to rebuild their war-torn lives
00:43:07and rebuild them with art.
00:43:09The end of the war, there's a desire, there's a need amongst artists, as there had been after the First World War,
00:43:18to return to nature, to return to a simpler way of life.
00:43:23Cornwall has a tradition of being a place of escape.
00:43:26You know, it's a place, say, of childhood, with romance, with, you know, the dark spiritualism of the Moors,
00:43:34but always something anti-metropolitan, anti-modern, simple and basic and timeless.
00:43:42And I think, you know, for different reasons the artists tap into aspects of that.
00:43:46A new bohemian mood now swept through the town.
00:43:50This community would draw in artists from all walks of life.
00:43:54Perhaps the most remarkable of them was a working-class lad from the Midlands
00:44:00who'd only just been released from a prisoner of war camp.
00:44:04Terry Frost later recalled the heady excitement of his journey west in 1946.
00:44:09Well, I first came down here on the recommendation of an old friend of mine, Adrian Heath.
00:44:17And I said, well, you know, I can't get on very well at home and paint him,
00:44:21because they expect me to work, because that's what I've always done.
00:44:24Work in the sense of going to the factory.
00:44:26And painting was a daft sissy thing to be doing.
00:44:30So, I said, I've got to get a long way away.
00:44:33So he said, St Ives is a good place.
00:44:34He said, they've got a lot of artists down there, or Newland.
00:44:36And I looked at the map, because I'd never been far in my life except in the Army.
00:44:41And I realised it was 290 miles away, just the spot.
00:44:45So I came down.
00:44:47The liberation for Frost is extraordinary.
00:44:49He's a man who's, you know, grown up expecting to work in factories
00:44:53or in engineering of some sort in the Midlands,
00:44:56who's then spent much of the war in prisoner of war camp,
00:44:59where he encounters this art for the first time.
00:45:02And so the decision, I think, the realisation that the world is different,
00:45:08that he's not going to go back to what was expected of him in 1939,
00:45:12is really crucial.
00:45:14That sort of anti-establishmentarianism becomes very important for him.
00:45:18It was an ambitious move.
00:45:22Terry had a wife and six children to provide for.
00:45:26And when he wasn't painting, he worked as a waiter and a barman.
00:45:30The family squeezed into this tiny cottage by the quay.
00:45:35And though conditions were cramped, they resulted in a seminal painting.
00:45:39So, Anthony, Walk Along the Quay is one of your father's most famous artworks,
00:45:55and one of the most famous paintings to come out of St Ives.
00:45:58What actually led to it happening?
00:46:00Well, it's an interesting story because we used to live at 12 Quay Street,
00:46:03just round the corner up there.
00:46:04And it's a practical reason that my father had to come out every day
00:46:10because, you know, there were eight of us.
00:46:11There were six children and we used to all cry.
00:46:14He'd go on a walk along the quay with, you know, one of us in the pram
00:46:20and holding one by hand sort of thing.
00:46:22So he'd be down this quay every day and he'd be looking at these boats,
00:46:26you know, the wonderful masts and sails that are sort of bobbing about,
00:46:29usually if the tide's in, then they're moving around, you know,
00:46:32so you've got the masts going up and down and going side to side and going all in angles.
00:46:37And what my dad wanted to do was to actually suddenly realise
00:46:40that he wanted to capture the whole walk in the painting.
00:46:44I went back home and I happened to have a stretcher, a long one, that I'd made up.
00:46:51And it was just simple. I thought, well, that's it.
00:46:54I've got to walk up that canvas because that's the same shape as the harbour,
00:46:59or as the quay.
00:47:01So I walked up that canvas and I just put all those shapes in and colours that I'd seen.
00:47:07And that's the walk along the quay, which is owned by Adrian Heath.
00:47:11And that was a sort of time painting, really.
00:47:14It was a bit before its time because I really got through to something I didn't understand.
00:47:20And there's a story about when Ben Nicholson first saw that painting,
00:47:23that he stood in front of it for two hours in silence.
00:47:25Yes, that's quite right. He said, you're onto something here, which is quite true,
00:47:29because he said, this will probably last you the rest of your life.
00:47:31Yes.
00:47:33And in a crazy way, it did. Yes, yes.
00:47:35So it went full circle. He sort of almost came back to that sort of painting.
00:47:39Yeah. Those shapes.
00:47:40Terry may have been onto something, but he still wasn't earning a living as a painter.
00:47:48In 1951, Ben intervened and got him a part-time job as an assistant to Barbara Hepworth.
00:47:54She was not, by all accounts, an easy employer.
00:48:02Barbara didn't want people to know she even had assistance.
00:48:05Whenever visitors arrived, she'd ring a little bell.
00:48:07And on hearing it, her staff obediently dropped their tools and hid in this shed until the coast was clear.
00:48:12On one occasion, the weight proved too much for Terry, and he began to feel nature cooling.
00:48:19He held it in as long as he could, but eventually decided to relieve himself into a geranium pot.
00:48:25Everything seemed to have gone to plan.
00:48:27That was until Terry noticed a stream of urine running from out the pot, under the door, down the garden path and right to the feet of Barbara and her guests.
00:48:35Terry was banned from having biscuits for the rest of the week.
00:48:45The first years of peace saw a surge in demand for culture from a public who had been starved of it during the war.
00:48:52Both Ben and Barbara found a ready market for their work, and their new success meant they needed separate studios.
00:49:06In 1949, Barbara Hepworth took over this studio.
00:49:11It was to become her home for the rest of her life.
00:49:18In the same year, Ben also found a new workspace, in one of the old Fisherman's Lofts by Porthmere Beach.
00:49:35Well, this is Ben Nicholson's studio, and he moved here in 1949, and the space instantly inspired him.
00:49:42And coming in here now, I can completely see how, because not only is it an enormous white space that enabled him to produce all these big paintings,
00:49:50but the key thing for him was that it didn't have a view of the sea like all the other studios did in this complex.
00:49:54It just had this enormous great skylight above him that created this very intense but consistent white light.
00:50:01And he loved it here, and he used to have a ritual where every morning he'd come in, he'd switch on his little radio and listen to jazz to drown out the sound of the sea.
00:50:09But initially, it was Barbara who found international fame, representing Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1950, and hogging the limelight a year later at the Festival of Britain.
00:50:26The Festival of Britain was a blueprint for the world of tomorrow, and the nation's artists were all asked to contribute.
00:50:32None, however, had quite the impact of Barbara's monumental work, contrapuntal forms.
00:50:39At three metres in height, it was the most ambitious thing she had ever made.
00:50:44And for the festival's duration, it became the place for photo opportunities, rendezvous, and ice cream breaks.
00:50:53It seemed that Britain was finally ready for modernism, and it looked to Cornwall to supply it.
00:50:58Barbara was surfing this national mood of optimism, and everyone was pleased.
00:51:07Well, almost everyone.
00:51:09Ben Nicholson was notoriously competitive, and he liked nothing better in life than beating his friends at table tennis.
00:51:17And he was infamous for changing the rules midway through matches if things weren't going his way.
00:51:22So you can imagine how he felt about his wife becoming suddenly more successful than him.
00:51:29He was insanely jealous.
00:51:34Spurred on by this, the mid-1950s became a prolific period for Ben too.
00:51:40He exhibited around the world, his work was snapped up by the best museums, and he won virtually every international prize going.
00:51:47Critics even dubbed him the British Picasso.
00:51:55If you wanted to understand Picasso's paintings, you might go to a bullfight.
00:52:00But if you wanted to understand Ben Nicholson's work, you would go to a golf course.
00:52:04Nicholson felt that to be a good artist, you first and foremost had to be able to draw.
00:52:13And all the skills you needed to draw well, confidence, grace and economy of movement,
00:52:18all of these were contained within the simple swing of a golf club.
00:52:22There was the elegant parabola described by the ball in flight like a line on paper.
00:52:42You had to be constantly aware of the light, colour and rhythm of the world around you.
00:52:47And then of course, there was texture. The interplay of rough and smooth, concave and convex.
00:52:57The curve of the fairway, the treacherous slope into the bunker.
00:53:04You'd have to have a good eye and good touch.
00:53:06There was so much about golf that appealed to Ben.
00:53:11He felt immediately at home playing a game with such a rigid and exacting set of rules.
00:53:16And it gave him a much needed break from the family home.
00:53:19By now, he wasn't just jealous of Barbara, he was bored of her too.
00:53:24Complaining that she'd put stones before people, he started an affair with a young woman he'd met on the golf course.
00:53:38The break with Ben was the most traumatic event in Barbara's life.
00:53:42Despite his behaviour towards her, she still looked up to him and sought his good opinion about her work.
00:53:50But now, having been deserted by the love of her life, her relationship with Cornwall grew stronger.
00:53:57It took a long time for me to find my own personal way of making sculpture.
00:54:07A long time to discover the purest forms which would exactly evoke my own sensations.
00:54:14And to visualise images which would express the timelessness of primitive forces which I felt.
00:54:21And the constant urges towards survival and growth.
00:54:34This is Hepworth's workshop.
00:54:36And being here, surrounded by all these bits of metal and stone and tools and even unfinished sculptures,
00:54:42makes so clear how unique her achievement actually was.
00:54:46Sculpture is such a masculine profession.
00:54:48And yet by sheer creativity, skill and gritty determination, she had become as successful as any male artist.
00:54:57It may be that the sensation of being a woman presents another emphasis in art.
00:55:04And particularly in terms of sculpture, for there is a whole range of perception belonging to feminine experience.
00:55:13So many ideas spring from an inside response to form.
00:55:20The scale of Barbara's sculptures grew exponentially.
00:55:24They almost overwhelmed the capacity of her studio and the narrow streets around it.
00:55:29She created a series of colossal works like Winged Figure, destined for the new John Lewis store in Oxford Street.
00:55:36I found her a marvellous person. She had an incredible brain. I mean, she really, really, really knew what she was doing.
00:55:44And she really, really was a very, very intelligent person.
00:55:47And I got an enormous amount out of working for her. You know, I mean, here was, you know, really a tremendous, you know, a genius.
00:55:57And you've really got an understanding, which was great for me as a young man, what it takes, what you really, really have to do to be an artist.
00:56:11You know, that it's a 24 hour job, you know, and not too much should stand in the way.
00:56:16You should, you know, you have to do what's in front of you.
00:56:18Ben and Barbara's marriage was over.
00:56:31But although they lived separate lives and worked in separate studios, they still dominated the flourishing art community in St. Ives like a king and queen.
00:56:41But they ruled in very different ways.
00:56:44Ben was always impeccably dressed and marched through the narrow streets like he owned them.
00:56:52And to avoid being trapped in conversations with the locals, he bounced a ball as he went.
00:56:58And if anyone actually approached him, he'd raise an imperious hand, shout, working, and march briskly on.
00:57:05Barbara, however, was the invisible monarch.
00:57:15She hardly ever left her secluded palace, preferring to survey her dominion from on high.
00:57:20And while Ben ruled through arrogance, Barbara ruled through fear.
00:57:24Many locals called her the witch of St. Ives.
00:57:27And rumours even circulated the statues in her gardens were actually herosified victims.
00:57:33But Ben and Barbara's dominion would not go unchallenged.
00:57:52As the 1950s unfolded, this new generation would fight them for supremacy.
00:57:57The chief pretender to their throne was Peter Lanyon.
00:58:03Mercurial, passionate and rebellious, Lanyon saw himself as the true artistic leader of his own land.
00:58:12Lanyon was born and bred in St. Ives.
00:58:15During the war, he had served overseas as an RAF mechanic, but had returned with burning ambition, both for his art and his homeland.
00:58:26Lanyon, I think, is a really complex character, because at the end of the war, it is undoubtedly crucial to his art, this recognition of the importance to him of his identity as a Cornishman, his association with this place, with the landscape around St. Ives, which he knows intimately.
00:58:41Lanyon was prepared to turn the world upside down in his relentless search for the real Cornwall, the Cornwall only a native could understand.
00:58:54Lanyon decided there was only one way to make a proper landscape painting. It was simple. You had to get outdoors, let go of your inhibitions and experience the countryside in every possible way.
00:59:07You'd have to get right to the edge of a cliff until you're sick with vertigo.
00:59:16You'd have to get as close to nature as possible.
00:59:20Sometimes you had to get wet. You'd have to go rock climbing.
00:59:24You'd have to run up a hill and catch the view by surprise.
00:59:31Now this all might seem a bit childish, but it's central to Lanyon's artistic philosophy, because Lanyon isn't trying to paint what Cornwall looks like.
00:59:41He's trying to paint what it feels like.
00:59:55With these complicated images now of underwater, coast, landscape, sky and so on like that, I have so many things being introduced that either I'm letting myself into a madhouse or I shall solve it.
01:00:08One never knows as a painter, because you throw yourself off the cliff every time you start and you've got to fly or swim or duck or something and come out the other end.
01:00:19Lanyon's risk-taking rebelliousness didn't just result in great art.
01:00:25In the years after the war, it also motivated violent infighting among the artists of St Ives.
01:00:31In February 1949, St Ives' large artistic community held a packed and noisy meeting here at the Castle Inn.
01:00:40They founded a new exhibiting society with bold and democratic aims.
01:00:44But Ben and Barbara were still running the show.
01:00:47They proposed dividing the membership into three categories.
01:00:49A. Abstract, B. Figurative and C. Craftsman.
01:00:55They were all starting up showing at Penwith Galleries and there was this big thing of are you in category A or are you in category B?
01:01:05There were falling outs and people did sort of almost punch each other in those days over it.
01:01:09And it was big stuff, you know, big stuff, because you were moving into the world of abstract painting.
01:01:15You know, people would have fights about the kind of paintings they made, you know.
01:01:19I'm not saying bring them back, but the idea that you could actually thump somebody because they made an abstract painting and they might thump you because you made a figurative one.
01:01:26I think is...
01:01:28That's extraordinary, isn't it? For a little Cornish town.
01:01:31I think there's a lot of alcohol there. That kind of explains it.
01:01:34Peter Lanyon did fall out with the rest, like Dad and other people, over the fact that you had category A and category B.
01:01:42Because I think Peter didn't want any category, you know, he just wanted it to be straight.
01:01:45He'd gone to war to fight fascism and here it was on his doorstep.
01:01:49He disliked their stranglehold.
01:01:51He used to work for Barbara for a bit, so he'd go into her studio.
01:01:54Or with Ben, you see, he knew Ben.
01:01:57So, in a sense, they were the sacred cows.
01:02:00And this was very important that he could, with his rebellious nature, actually be inspired by their awfulness to do scurrilous things.
01:02:14And that was very much a part of his art.
01:02:17He was restless and always finding a new way of painting.
01:02:20In 1950, he has this important split from Nicholson and Hepworth.
01:02:26And he, in his mind at least, and in his writing, he combines that with a change in direction in his art.
01:02:32And he talks about his art becoming more concerned with actual places.
01:02:36And he talks about place, not just about landscape.
01:02:38Place for him combines a certain location with its social history, with its population, with its past activities.
01:02:52So, he goes to fishing villages, he goes to the farming country outside St. Eyes, and crucially, he goes along the coast west of St. Eyes, which is a mining district.
01:03:10And he makes these paintings which, for him, explore the associations of that place, the political history of Cornwall.
01:03:23But crucially, he makes paintings which, you know, can stand alongside the best paintings made anywhere in the world.
01:03:30One morning in 1951, Lanyon packed a bag and set off on a gruelling and emotional pilgrimage to the hidden heart of Cornwall.
01:03:55And I'm going to follow in his footsteps.
01:03:57Leaving St. Ives heading west, his path crossed the remote moors of Xena, the inhospitable region of ancient remains that had so inspired Barbara Hepworth before him.
01:04:16But while she was exploring an exotic country, Lanyon felt he was coming home.
01:04:22Because he had it in his bones, he knew stuff.
01:04:28You don't know that there are people under the ground, you know, actually hacking out metal.
01:04:35And you don't know what it's like to be a fisherman.
01:04:39Mm.
01:04:40It's those kind of experiences that made him paint.
01:04:46He felt that he was the host.
01:04:50You know, having been born here and having been completely Cornish.
01:04:54You know, I mean, he was more a St. Ives local than Wallace was.
01:04:58Wallace was an outsider.
01:04:59For me, the painter is a kind of beachcomber.
01:05:04I live in a country which has been changed by man over many centuries of civilization.
01:05:10It's impossible for me to make a painting which has no reference to the very powerful environment in which I live.
01:05:16I have to refer back continually to what is under my feet, to what is over my back, and to what I see in front of me.
01:05:25When Peter Lanyon was here, this was a working mine.
01:05:39In those days, there was 300 people working here.
01:05:42And people who weren't working here were working underground beneath us.
01:05:47Probably Cornwall was one of the first post-industrial landscapes in Europe, really.
01:05:51Yes.
01:05:52When I first came here, when the mines were still working, they were leeching into the sea.
01:05:56And there was a red tide every day.
01:05:59Around the coast, there was this red, pink, frothy tide.
01:06:01Really? For the mines?
01:06:02Yeah, all around this part of the thinnest coast.
01:06:05And what gives Lanyon his punch from my point of view is the fact that he's referring to something out there in the real world.
01:06:16The mine is extinct now.
01:06:17The land has been hacked about and plundered by miners searching for tin.
01:06:23And the cliff is still tinted with iron oxide, which makes it a brilliant red.
01:06:34This is the Levant mine, the scene of one of Cornwall's worst mining disasters,
01:06:39and the inspiration for perhaps Lanyon's greatest painting.
01:06:48At 2.45 on the afternoon of the 20th of October, 1919, the old mineshaft lift, which was known rather ominously as the man engine,
01:06:58shattered into pieces and sent its passengers tumbling deep into the mineshaft.
01:07:0231 men died that day, leaving 19 women widowed and 47 children fatherless.
01:07:16Peter Lanyon was just a baby when the man engine broke, but he was haunted by the event throughout his life,
01:07:27and the thought of dead bodies being shovelled up from the ground with spades.
01:07:31He may also have felt some guilt. His family had managed these mines for generations.
01:07:37But whatever the reason, his visit here had convinced him that he had to make some kind of memorial to the victims.
01:07:43This is Lanyon's memorial to the miners, and it's called St Just after the town from which most of them came.
01:08:03I think it's one of the great paintings of the 20th century, and I'm going to tell you why.
01:08:08First, this big black stripe that runs all the way through the painting from top to bottom.
01:08:11That is the mineshaft, the fatal mineshaft, in which those 31 men lost their lives.
01:08:16And these wires and pulleys at the top are the wires and pulleys of the man engine.
01:08:21And I think this might be even an indication of it plummeting to the very base of the shaft.
01:08:25So at first sight is a rather literal cross-section of the mineshaft seen from the ground within.
01:08:31It's a kind of diagram of disaster.
01:08:33But Lanyon insisted that there was a second level of meaning to this painting.
01:08:37He claimed it was also a crucifixion.
01:08:39And when you look at it with that light, you can actually see that this black line coming down with the two arms across.
01:08:46It does indeed resemble an old-fashioned religious crucifixion.
01:08:50There aren't just two levels of meaning to this painting. There's actually a third level.
01:08:54And that third level of meaning can only be understood when the painting is tilted to its side.
01:08:57And when you look at the painting from this angle, you realise it's not just a picture of the mine shaft seen from under the ground.
01:09:06It's a picture of the whole region seen from above the ground, looking down from a bird's eye view.
01:09:11This black line becomes a scar that has run all the way through the county.
01:09:15This becomes the far western corner. You can see the sea there of Cornwall.
01:09:21These are the fields and the walls and the houses and the roads of this region of Cornwall.
01:09:26And I realise it's not pretty, but then nor is being crushed to death in a mine shaft.
01:09:31But it's the searing ambition of this painting that really strikes me.
01:09:36In this monumental picture, Lanyon has combined religion and society and history and myth and landscape
01:09:44into one ferocious indictment of industrial exploitation.
01:09:48This is the Cornwall of work, of tragedy.
01:09:52This is the Cornwall that no one else, no one but Lanyon, had the bravery to paint.
01:10:01Peter Lanyon's reputation soared in the mid-1950s.
01:10:08But he was not the only star of this new generation.
01:10:13Another artist who shared the limelight was his school boyfriend, Patrick Heron.
01:10:20In the late 1940s, early 1950s, Heron's known primarily as a critic.
01:10:24He's the art critic of the New Statesman and very influential as such.
01:10:28And therefore, a really important person in the communication of this phenomenon of St. Ives.
01:10:35Fascinatingly, Heron writes an article in the New Statesman called The School of London.
01:10:42Where he recognises that in the wake of the war, Paris's status as the capital of modern art is insecure.
01:10:52New York is not yet established.
01:10:53And Heron proposes that maybe London could become the new centre for modernism.
01:10:59But when he talks about London, he means St. Ives.
01:11:02The artists he cites are all working in Cornwall.
01:11:04London is the place where their art is shown, but Cornwall is the place where it's made.
01:11:08In 1956, Heron returned to Cornwall, to the very house in which he had spent part of his childhood, Eagle's Nest.
01:11:18He wrote,
01:11:21To find it one must, from St. Ives, go still further, further west.
01:11:27One must crawl up, down, around and along.
01:11:31That incredible last lap of coast, where the lonely road slips, folds and slides around rocks.
01:11:37Eagle's Nest is one of the most spectacular homes in Britain, but perched on a rocky bluff set four square to the Atlantic, overlooking a primeval coastal plain.
01:11:51It was not an easy place to live.
01:11:55Normally, this house is just vibrating with pretty violent winds.
01:12:01Until I owned this house, I'd enjoyed gales, you know, but I lie in bed just waiting for some frightful crash, which has, of course, occurred.
01:12:10Great slabs of the roof just come off.
01:12:11This life dictated by the elements inspired Heron to turn from writing about art to creating it himself.
01:12:20In 1956, he began to paint full time.
01:12:24I don't think anybody comes to Cornwall without having this extraordinary kind of visual hit, because it's such an extraordinary landscape.
01:12:33These fantastic windows with the extraordinary view behind and the way that the windows are divided up into little squares
01:12:39and the patches of colour through them, they remind me of your father's paintings.
01:12:45And I wonder whether that, looking through the window at this landscape, helped generate those paintings in some way.
01:12:52I'm sure it did.
01:12:55And of course, the window in paintings used sort of brilliantly, you know, from Matisse, there are very obvious examples.
01:13:01So it becomes a framing device, and I think he must have used that, and just as the window is a framing device, so he used doors as framing devices.
01:13:11And they're not dissimilar from some of the proportions of some of his paintings.
01:13:17I think it's another thing to do with Patrick being deeply rooted in modernism, I mean English modernism, which is that when the spaces he wanted to both live in and for his art to be seen in had absolute white walls, clear floors, simple modernist furniture.
01:13:33But the effect of having it all white is, it brings, it makes the view through the windows come forward as though it's all, the view is almost hanging on the wall, like a painting.
01:13:42Well it bounces the light around as well, walls become reflective.
01:13:46Patrick used to talk about how you could look at something and make it flat, and therefore make it into a painting.
01:13:55And it involved a rather elaborate thing of closing one eye and imagining in your head that what you know to be a deep view landscape has become something completely flat, and therefore could be on the surface of a canvas.
01:14:12And you can do that with these windows, if you take the frame of the window and just abstract the shape that's outside and the colour that's outside.
01:14:19And that's one of his sort of ways of helping people understand what then people found very difficult to understand was the nature of abstraction.
01:14:26All figurative art is abstract, all art is abstract.
01:14:29We are savouring these abstract elements of spatial reality, of colour reality, of formal reality, whatever great painting of whatever period in the world we're looking at.
01:14:49Everyone knows about Claude Monet's garden at Givigny, the one with the water lilies and the Japanese footbridge, but Patrick Heron's garden here at Eagle's Nest, while less famous, is just as exciting.
01:15:07The overpowering effect of colour in this garden was to find dramatic expression in Heron's paintings, and he wrote passionately about his growing obsession.
01:15:19You are in a world of viridian greens, of a multitude of greys, soft cerulean blue, indigo, black, khaki, and venetian red.
01:15:29A worn, asymmetric rectangle, a lopsided disc, an uneven triangle of smooth stone inlaid in the field path at your feet, are echoed precisely, it seems, in the boulders of the hedge by the stile, in the wall of the ancient church tower,
01:15:44in the configuration half a mile away, of pale giant rocks balanced in an intricate chaos on the dark bracken slopes above you.
01:15:52For Heron, colour was the means and end, the form and content, the image and the meaning of his work. It was everything.
01:16:05To understand what he really meant by this, I've come to see a very special painting that's hidden away in the Tate Gallery stores.
01:16:18Wow!
01:16:19Ah!
01:16:20It's absolutely huge, it's like a whole continent of colour.
01:16:33Come and have a look a little bit closer, because it's at the edges where the picture really comes to life. It's where one colour touches the other.
01:16:44That's where Heron detonates the image like a kind of explosive device. It's where he finds, along this line, what he called the colour of colour.
01:16:52And his very favourite part was filling in the last patch of white. And he said that when he did this, the whole world would suddenly pulse.
01:16:59And as you're standing here in front of this colossal coloured canvas, you can completely understand it. The whole thing radiates light.
01:17:22While Patrick Heron was exploring an abstract world of colour, Peter Lanyon had stumbled across an exciting new way to see and experience the landscape.
01:17:35I have always watched birds in flight, exploring the landscape, moving more freely than man. But in the glider, I had the same freedom.
01:17:46I am now able to get away from a very familiar countryside, one of stone and grass and very treeless, for instance, a rough, harsh countryside.
01:18:15Into the air, and to see it in conditions which I never expected I'd find, conditions of solitude.
01:18:26In 1960, Lanyon obtained his solo flying licence. His experience of gliding inspired a remarkable series of paintings.
01:18:36But you can't properly understand them unless you take to the skies yourself.
01:18:41It's just a matter of not doing paintings which are visual paintings so much. It's paintings which are related to some physical experience.
01:18:52You know, when you're up here in this glider and you're looking down over Cornwall from high up, you realise that every other landscape painter in history missed a trick.
01:19:10This is the most incredible way to see the most incredible way to see the landscape. Incredible.
01:19:17People say that Peter Lanyon's paintings are abstract. But when you're up here, you can see Peter Lanyon's everywhere you look.
01:19:26From up here, Lanyon's saw the sea, beaches, cliffs, moors, fields and villages of Cornwall combine into one glorious vista beneath it.
01:19:37I am detached, actually, from this very rough and harsh country below me, but not entirely detached.
01:19:53In fact, this whole thing of flying is giving me a better understanding, I think, of the coast and the country underneath me than I would have had by continuously walking over it.
01:20:06I think that this may be important for the future of painting. I don't know. As far as I'm concerned, I think it's led me into something which is very important for just not landscape, but for painting problems of time and of distance.
01:20:23As I hovered on those West Country thermals, I suddenly understood what Lanyon's art was all about. It wasn't about modernism or nationalism or history or myth. It was actually about pure, unadulterated joy.
01:20:43The joy of feeling the sun on your face and the wind in your hair. The joy of being in a world that you love.
01:20:50As an art historian, I spend most of my time in libraries and lecture rooms. I never, in a million years, thought I'd be going up in a glider and seeing Cornwall below me.
01:21:00And I have one person to thank for that, and that's Peter Lanyon.
01:21:07I believe that these aerial paintings are the culmination of 200 years of British landscape art, and with them, Lanyon was on his way to becoming the Turner of the 20th century.
01:21:20I believe that he was on his way.
01:21:21I believe that he was on his way.
01:21:22Peter Lanyon and Patrick Heron were now the torch-bearers of the St. Ives movement.
01:21:37A movement that had gained national and international fame for combining the hard-edged abstraction of the 1930s with a love for the natural world.
01:21:48Ben Nicholson left St. Ives for Switzerland in 1957, but the momentum was now unstoppable. Even the Americans were beginning to take notice.
01:22:07For a few brief years, Cornish artists were going shoulder to shoulder with the Americans. People were genuinely speaking of New York and St. Ives in the same breath.
01:22:19And the Americans were glancing nervously across the Atlantic, not to see what was happening in London, Paris or Berlin, but to see what was happening here.
01:22:29In the years either side of 1960, many American artists and critics even made the long journey to St. Ives to see what was going on.
01:22:41Mark Rothko, a giant of abstract expressionism, was just one of them. A creative dialogue and at times a vitriolic rivalry had been opened up between these two artistic centres.
01:22:54But the transatlantic cultural currents were not just one way. Between 1957 and 1965, Peter Lanyon and Patrick Herron together had eight one-man shows in America.
01:23:11And in 1964, St. Ives triumphed again when Barbara Hepworth unveiled a monumental sculpture of the United Nations in New York City.
01:23:26No one then could possibly have predicted that the glory years of St. Ives were over.
01:23:36The trigger for this unexpected decline came out of the blue.
01:23:44On Thursday, the 27th of August, 1964, Peter Lanyon was on a gliding course.
01:23:50For a few glorious moments, he circled high above the fields.
01:23:57But as he came into land, something went terribly wrong.
01:24:02Maybe it was a momentary lapse in concentration.
01:24:06Perhaps a freak gust of wind.
01:24:09Whatever the reason, Lanyon's glider plummeted to the ground.
01:24:13And he was catapulted from his cockpit.
01:24:20Four days later, he was dead.
01:24:30Lanyon's death was the beginning of the end for the St. Ives movement.
01:24:35The times had changed.
01:24:38Its celebration of nature was suddenly out of date.
01:24:42Pop art was now the movement of the moment.
01:24:46And there was one final tragedy to come.
01:24:53In May 1975, Barbara Hepworth died in a tragic fire at her studio in St. Ives.
01:25:00It was over.
01:25:11Forty years on, and Cornwall is still drawing artists and tourists.
01:25:17The arrival of Tate St. Ives in 1994 has helped to encourage contemporary art
01:25:23and reaffirm the reputations of these past masters.
01:25:27I don't know, I think there must have been a pioneering spirit that people were making paintings
01:25:33to sort of break new ground, and they really thought they'd found a new language
01:25:37and they were speaking in it, and the world was listening.
01:25:40I think that the work that was made here by these artists is the real thing.
01:25:47And so I think people should seek it out.
01:25:48The important thing about all great art is that it is timeless.
01:25:55You know, it achieves a value because of its relevance to its moment,
01:26:00but it also embodies timeless values and it can speak to different generations,
01:26:06but in different ways.
01:26:07And I think the exciting thing about looking at the art of St. Ives now is that we can look at that work in ways different to the ways that it was looked at at the time and has been subsequently.
01:26:19From the perspective of a new century, the achievements of the St. Ives colony look grossly undervalued.
01:26:28In our consumer world, their art remains unfashionable, but I marvel at their bravery, dedication and the sheer range and quality of work that spanned more than half a century.
01:26:42It is their passion for nature, their defiant radicalism, and more than anything, their unyielding optimism that defines the art of Cornwall as a high watermark in 20th century art.
01:27:03Britain doesn't figure much in the history of modern art.
01:27:06When we think of modernism, we think of Paris and New York, but the artists who lived and worked here are an integral part of that story.
01:27:15They abstracted this Cornish landscape. They turned space and rhythm into sculpture.
01:27:21They turned its light and warmth into paint, but we've forgotten how important their work is simply because it came from such an unlikely place.
01:27:29But I think it's about time we look again at the art and artists of Cornwall.
01:27:40There's another chance to see this week's Masterpiece of Vienna here on BBC Four this Sunday at half past eight.
01:27:46And coming up next this evening, stay with us for movie drama with The Diving Bell and The Butterfly.
01:28:06You
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