In the 1890s a couple of hundred paintings were sent up each year by special
train to the Royal Academy exhibition from the artists’ colonies of St Ives
and Newlyn. This year the works from Cornwall numbered 12 – and four of
those were by Sandra Blow, who died last year. Is Cornwall – once pellucid
inspiration to Alfred Wallis, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth – dead as a
haven for artists? I took the train to Penzance to find out.
Even the flagship Tate St Ives is showing signs of panic. Since opening in
1993, it has proudly flown the flag of British Modernism from the tower of
its converted gas works overlooking Porthmeor Beach. But the passing of the
“St Ives Moderns” – Terry Frost in 2003, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in 2004,
Karl Weschke in 2005 and Sandra Blow in 2006 – has hit its programming. Only
Paul Feiler and Trevor Bell remain.
This spring the Tate made a bid to break new ground with an exhibition of
young local talents entitled Art Now Cornwall. But its controversial
selection of 28 artists from a shortlist of just 40 – drawn up by the
outgoing director Susan Daniel-McElroy – was an uneasy mix of experimental
mixed-media work and third generation “St Ives legacy” painting. “Perhaps
that reflects where we’re at,” the gallery’s new executive director Mark
Osterfield suggested. “How much are people looking back, and how much are
they looking forward?”
Wherever people are looking, there’s a lot to see. There are more than 60
commercial galleries in St Ives alone, with a newly refurbished one, the
Wills Lane Gallery, opening on September 17 under the discerning direction
of Petronilla Silver, Weschke’s widow and a former director of the
Contemporary Art Society. Six miles away in Penzance, galleries have been
sprouting like mushrooms in the shadow of The Exchange, the snazzy new
contemporary art space in the town’s converted telephone exchange whose July
opening was attended by more than 2,000 people, including Sir Nicholas
Serota.
In the past year, four new commercial galleries have sprung up within 50
yards. The newest, Hilton Young Fine Art, with a double frontage on historic
Chapel Street, was opened in July by Bo Hilton, son of Roger, and declares
its dynastic St Ives credentials with a painting by Bo’s mother Rose Hilton
in one window and a print by Sandra Blow in the other.
So far, so predictable. But the gallery that has brought me to Chapel Street
is rather special. Occupying modest premises opposite, Goldfish Contemporary
Fine Art was opened three years ago by the self-taught painter Joseph
Clarke, who came to Cornwall “to escape from real life” and has a taste for
like-minded artists who gravitated here in search of asylum.
The work of artists like Andrew Litten, Ray Exworth and Kate Walters stands
outside the St Ives abstract tradition. It is figurative, introspective and
raw: to use Clarke’s favourite adjective, “primitive”. And its collectors
are not all local. At the Goldfish stand at this year’s London Art Fair, the
big-time Scottish collector David Roberts bought a 10ft sculpture of a
priapic Silenus ( left) by the Fowey-based sculptor Tim Shaw.
Clarke’s passion for art is matched by a gift for self-publicity. When Tate St
Ives mounted its exhibition, Art Now Cornwall,Clarke countered with
his alternative, Art Now Cornwall? Next thing he knew, the critic
Brian Sewell had stumbled into his gallery and announced, during a one-man
tirade against the Tate’s show [[ – and St Ives art in general – at the
Acorn Theatre, Penzance, that the work he’d seen at Goldfish knocked the
spots off anything he’d seen in London for years. Sewell will be back in
Cornwall by popular demand for a repeat performance at the St Ives Theatre
on September 22.
Whom to believe? At the New Millennium Gallery, St Ives, which contributed six
artists to the Tate show – including the Penzance-born painter and
transatlantic yachtsman Sax Impey, who is currently exhibiting there – the
local dealer David Falconer feels the Tate mishandled things: “If you call a
show Art Now Cornwall, you have to take greater steps to allow
everyone to submit.”
In the avant-garde camp, there was also resentment at the Tate’s surprised
“discovery” of the thriving independent art scene on its doorstep. For the
past few years, enterprising artist-led groups such as Art Surgery – founded
by Andy Whall, whose underwater video work In an Atlantic Wave featured
in Art Now Cornwall – and More Cornwall have been staging
experimental projects in alternative spaces and meeting with an enthusiastic
reception.
In the county with the highest density of artists in England, one unique
feature of the art scene is the mix. Performance artists like Whall find
themselves “rubbing up against people who are banging on about Cézanne and plein
air painting. It wouldn’t happen in a bar in Hoxton”.
At the Salt Gallery in Hayle, a commercial gallery with a mini-installation
space tacked on, the artist-founders Marilyn Middlemiss and Louise Fox have
had surprising success in attracting a local audience. Their secret is a
down-to-earth approach – “It’s no good putting on stuff that’s up its own
bottom” – coupled with a free-and-easy attitude to presentation. When the
local artist Lucy Willow laid a yellow pigment carpet in their Front Room
for her May show Canaries in the Attic, it was not roped off. In Art
Now Cornwall, Willow’s Celestial Dust Rug – a piece about
impermanence – was placed on a plinth.
Since migrating here from Hackney, East London, eight years ago, Middlemiss
and Fox have noticed a sea change in the contemporary art scene.
James Green, new young director of the redeveloped Newlyn Art Gallery and The
Exchange, agrees. Coming here from the NorthWest, he feels that Cornwall’s
art scene is completely comparable to that of Manchester or Liverpool, and
he generously credits local artist-led groups with preparing the ground for
public galleries such as Newlyn.
He’s open to the idea of exhibiting local artists who operate outside the St
Ives tradition, making “work that could be shown anywhere”, such as Willow
or the young painter Jesse Leroy Smith, a Goldfish artist and one of the few
from Cornwall to get into this year’s RA Summer Exhibition.
Tate St Ives seems warier of local involvement. Its artistic director Martin
Clark speaks in general terms of “repositioning St Ives as a forward-looking
art location”. He is more concerned with bringing national names to Cornish
audiences than Cornish names to national notice. But the Tate is backing a
regional campaign to nominate Cornwall as Europe’s first Region for Culture
in 2012.
Later this month, representatives from Cornwall Arts Marketing go to Brussels
to drum up support. At home, their plans are greeted with a mixture of
scepticism and hope. “A lot of European money has been poured in here,” says
Petronilla Silver. “There’s not a lot of quality control, but if you chuck
money, some of it will stick on stuff that’s interesting or important.”
Others fear the money will go to fatten arts organisations, while the
grassroots starve. Then again, artists who choose to bury themselves in the
depths of the poorest county in England are unlikely to be in it for the
money. I ask Whall what could be the campaign’s worst outcome. “Hot air, I
suppose,” is his reply.
ST IVES: TRIUMPHS AND TAT
Since the Victorian heyday of the Newlyn School, when paintings of fisherfolk
by Stanhope Forbes and his followers sold like hot kippers to London
collectors, the fortunes of Cornwall’s artists have fluctuated. In the
1940s, they crested a second wave under the avant-garde helmsmanship of Ben
Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth ( below), who put St Ives on the
international art map.
To the casual wanderer down Fore Street towards Porthmeor and Back Road West,
once home to the legendary Alfred Wallis, all the tide seems to have left
behind is a line of tourist shops selling cod St Ives School paintings. The
critic Waldemar Januszczak wrote recently: “St Ives today is a momentously
false experience, with only the Tate enclave offering any serious resistance
to the relentless gale of tat.”
Now, perhaps, a fresh wave of change is gathering force.
