One of the central issues in modern art concerns the nature of abstraction. This question still stimulates passionate advocacy and violent hostility on all sides of the argument, even though the mid twentieth-century heyday of 'abstract art' has now passed into history.
The term 'abstract' literally means 'separate' or 'apart'. In art it is often used as the opposite of 'figurative' to describe work that does not seek to portray something that the viewer can immediately recognise in the physical environment. Thus the sun can be shown in a figurative painting as circular and yellow, but a yellow circle on its own would be considered abstract – it could suggest many things to different viewers but does not obviously represent anything other than itself. Similarly, an unbroken blue horizontal line can suggest a horizon, but the viewer would need other clues – boats or wave forms, for example – to know for sure whether the painting was meant to represent the sea.
Western art in particular has been concerned with artists' abilities to create an illusion of real, threedimensional forms in real space. In other traditions this is less important, and intricate decorative motifs, magical symbols and other non-representational images may be given far greater prominence than the attempt to create a replica of what we see around us. Whatever their approach to their work, artists themselves tend to be aware that the very act of creating an image involves a degree of abstraction – of making something that relates to, but is essentially separate from, the outside world.
St Ives is in many ways a very productive place to consider abstraction. In Barbara Hepworth's work, for example, the specific influence of landscape can be increasingly felt even in apparently abstract forms, and it is clear that a powerful consciousness of place played a vital part in her artistic development from the 1940s onwards. In the work of many other St Ives artists the influence of Cornish landscape and sea forms, colours and effects of light, as well as the region's history from its prehistoric megaliths to the tin-mining industry and its post-industrial legacy, can be traced in images that seem at first to be abstract.