Display
Modern Conversations
What does it mean to be modern?
Modern Conversations display, Tate St Ives 2021 © Kirstin Prisk
What does it mean to be modern? Modern Conversations explores this question through 100 years of British and international art.
The artworks displayed in these three rooms span the 20th century through to the present day. Throughout this extraordinary ‘modern’ era, industrial growth and technological advancements has transformed daily life. While this rapid globalisation has brought benefits for some, it has also been founded on widespread losses of cultural traditions and rights. The artists raise questions about modern experience, such as: How do we relate to the natural and built environment? What is the experience of inhabiting a human body? What happens when science and technology overturn established beliefs?
Tate St Ives
Level 2, Level 3
Ongoing
Gallery admission required
Entry to both the display and the gallery is free for Tate Members, Locals' Pass holders and under 18s.
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3 rooms in Modern Conversations
Dame Barbara Hepworth, Curved Form (Trevalgan) 1956
Hepworth settled in St Ives during the Second World War. Inspired by the local landscape, she began to sculpt her responses to the natural forms around her. Trevalgan is the name of a hill near her home. There, she wrote, ‘the cliffs divide as they touch the sea facing west. At this point, facing the setting sun across the Atlantic, where sky and sea blend with hills and rocks, the forms seem to enfold the watcher and lift him towards the sky.’ The sculpture is not a literal representation of the divided cliffs, but a personal expression of Hepworth’s physical and spiritual encounter with nature.
Gallery label, May 2007
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Wassily Kandinsky, Swinging 1925
The title ‘Swinging’ captures this work’s sense of movement. Kandinsky believed painting should aim to be as abstract as music. He worked to create art that was free from all references to the material world. For him, colour in particular was essential for liberating art from representing the visible world.
Gallery label, August 2019
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Bryan Wynter, Green Confluence 1974
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Sandra Blow, Vivace 1988
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Marc Chagall, Bouquet with Flying Lovers c.1934–47
According to the artist, this picture was begun in the mid-1930s, when he was living in Paris and painting a number of still lifes of flowers. He worked on it at intervals over a period of many years, and the present composition is the final state of three or four. In it two lovers hover behind the dominating vase of flowers, while an angel flies in through the window. To the right is a glimpse of the village of Vitebsk in modern day Belarus, where the artist was born. The painting appears to evoke an atmosphere of happiness, but the artist said that it expressed feelings of loss and nostalgia: his wife Bella had died shortly before the final repainting of the work, and he was passing through a period of mourning.
Gallery label, March 2023
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Wassily Kandinsky, Swinging 1925
The title ‘Swinging’ captures this work’s sense of movement. Kandinsky believed painting should aim to be as abstract as music. He worked to create art that was free from all references to the material world. For him, colour in particular was essential for liberating art from representing the visible world.
Gallery label, August 2019
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Peter Lanyon, Lost Mine 1959
The broad, gestural style of Lost Mine reflects the impact of American Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, whose work Lanyon first encountered in the early 1950s. Typically for Lanyon, however, its seeming abstraction is combined with a precise external source: a tin mine in his native Cornwall that had been flooded by the sea and abandoned. The colours are both representational and symbolic. The black stands for the mine shaft and seems to signify death, the blues are the sea and sky, the red signals life and danger.
Gallery label, June 2011
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Patrick Heron, Horizontal Stripe Painting : November 1957 - January 1958 1957–8
Heron was a critic and painter who championed an approach to painting that assessed quality according to such formal values as the flatness of a composition and colour. Of his stripe paintings he wrote, ‘The reason why the stripes sufficed ... was precisely that they were so very uncomplicated as shapes ... the emptier the general format was, the more exclusive the concentration upon the experiences of colour itself.’ Heron resisted the total abandoning of subject matter and even such works as this have been seen in relation to landscape, the horizontal bands and colours perhaps suggesting the horizon at sunset.
Gallery label, February 2010
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Highlights
Dame Barbara Hepworth
Curved Form (Trevalgan)
1956
Wassily Kandinsky
Swinging
1925
Bryan Wynter
Green Confluence
1974
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