While the leading figures of St Ives art in the 1940s and early 1950s can be viewed in the context of developments in and from European modernism, the focus in the later 1950s and 1960s shifted to new art movements in the USA. To some extent this reflects the fact that after the war New York rather than Paris became the capital of the international art world. An important date is 1956, the year of the exhibition Modern Art in the United States at the Tate Gallery in London. This brought a wider British public into contact with Abstract Expressionism, a movement in post-war American art that linked artists as diverse as Mark Rothko and Franz Kline with its emphasis on expressive spontaneity and emotional impact.
At the same time, it is true that European and British artists, including the younger St Ives artists, had helped to create the context for the positive reception, in New York as well as Britain, of the new American painting. Patrick Heron wrote of the charismatic confidence and individuality of the new American work, its sheer 'size, energy, originality, economy and inventive daring' and its radical 'denial of illusionistic depth'. And American audiences were also excited by contemporary British work: among the artists associated with St Ives who had solo exhibitions in New York and elsewhere can be listed Alan Davie, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, John Wells, William Scott, Alexander Mackenzie, Paul Feiler and the sculptor Denis Mitchell.
Over this period many artists connected with St Ives had prominent roles in teaching institutions, for example Feiler at the West of England College of Art and Scott at the Bath Academy of Art. This stimulated wide-ranging contact between artists in Cornwall and elsewhere. Younger artists engaged in the new abstract art who were attracted to St Ives included Sandra Blow, Trevor Bell and Bob Law. In the international art scene St Ives art gained a reputation as a European form of abstraction which remained rooted in the observation of nature, in contrast to the contemporary tendency towards increasingly large-scale and uncompromisingly pure abstraction.
The notion of a close-knit, locally based artistic colony could by this time no longer be applied to St Ives. Some of the foremost 'St Ives artists', such as Frost and Roger Hilton, frequently worked elsewhere, and the work of such artists as Lanyon, Heron and Bryan Wynter, who were more permanent residents in Cornwall, shows the pursuit of distinctive but not necessarily parallel aesthetic aims. The figurative work of Karl Weschke, Alan Lowndes and Patrick Hayman essentially stands outside the dialogue between abstraction and nature that forms the central concern of St Ives art from the 1940s on, yet they too could be considered as belonging to the wider context of modern art in Cornwall.