Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Exhibition Guide

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004) was a leading figure in twentieth-century British art. Born in St Andrews, Scotland, she moved to St Ives in 1940. Here, she played a major role in the development of abstraction after the Second World War.

Working primarily as a painter, while also experimenting with drawing, printmaking and collage, Barns-Graham sought to interpret her sensory and emotional perceptions of the world. She distilled her experiences into a distinctive visual language of colour, line and rhythm.

Landscape provided a constant source of inspiration and renewal. From the rocky terrains of Cornwall to the flows of glaciers in Switzerland and Lanzarote’s undulating lava fields, she explored the structures, patterns and forces underlying the natural world. Equally, she engaged with broader post-war philosophical and aesthetic ideas on perception, universal form and the relationship between order and spontaneity.

Underpinning these varied approaches was a fascination with inner perception and external reality, a dynamic Barns-Graham described as ‘looking in / looking out’. Abstraction was not, for Barns-Graham, a purely formal process, but a means of moving between what is felt and what is seen.

This exhibition charts Barns-Graham’s sustained exploration of this concept over eight decades. The first retrospective to span her full career, it traces her development as she moved through phases of nature-based abstraction, hard-edged geometry and gestural expression. It begins with early studio interiors and landscapes made in Scotland and St Ives, exploring the spaces and places where she first evolved her artistic vision.

Studios

As a space in which Barns-Graham could experiment and test new ideas, the studio was at the heart of her practice. Although at various moments in her career she worked outdoors, she made most of her drawings and paintings in the studio.

The paintings shown here offer glimpses of the spaces in which she developed her early practice. She rented her first independent studio while she was a student at Edinburgh College of Art. Her foundational years in St Ives were largely spent at Porthmeor Studios, a complex of former net lofts along Porthmeor Beach. This became both a site of production and an arena for professional exchange as she established herself in the emerging community of modern artists. At the centre of the display, The Blue Studio contrasts the enclosed space of the studio with the expansive sea beyond, creating a dialogue between interior and exterior that anticipates Barns-Graham’s enduring concern with ‘looking in / looking out’.

1930s–1940s

Barns-Graham’s early life in Scotland was formative. Born in St Andrews and living from age twelve in the isolated hamlet of Carbeth, on the edge of the Highlands, she developed a close attentiveness to the natural world.

In 1931, she enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA). Although her training focused on technical and anatomical drawing, living in Edinburgh also exposed her to the legacies of French Impressionism and plein-air painting. The Scottish Colourists, with their use of colour to express emotion and to structure pictorial space, had a lasting impact on her work. She journeyed to remote landscapes across Scotland, working at Carradale on the Kintyre peninsula, the islands of Iona and Arran, and Aviemore in the Cairngorms.

On the advice of her ECA tutors, Barns-Graham moved to St Ives in 1940 after the outbreak of the Second World War. She entered a growing community of modern artists that included Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo. Their experiments with abstraction offered her new ways of thinking about the relationship between art and the world. Responding to Cornwall’s distinctive landscape, she created pared-back compositions that were also deeply psychological. They convey personal responses to place and to the broader atmosphere of uncertainty that characterised Britain during the war and its aftermath.

The St Ives Scene

When Barns-Graham moved to St Ives in 1940, she found herself bridging two artistic factions in West Cornwall. She initially joined the St Ives Society of Artists and the Newlyn Society of Artists, which both promoted marine painting, impressionism and social realism. Yet she also became involved in more progressive collectives such as the Crypt Group and the Penwith Society of Arts. Although she interacted with modernist artists around her, from the 1960s she felt increasingly detached from the predominantly male art scene. She described herself as a ‘lone wolf’ and largely followed her own artistic agenda, though she did look to wider trends in abstraction developing in London and the US.

1949–1952

A major breakthrough in Barns-Graham’s journey towards abstraction came in 1949 when she visited the glaciers at Grindelwald in Switzerland. This commenced a pivotal series focusing on these immense crystalline structures.

Between 1949 and 1952, she produced over sixty paintings, drawings and prints exploring her experience at Grindelwald. Through a process of refinement – a ‘laying bare’ – she reduced that powerful landscape into curvilinear shapes and overlapping, translucent planes. She aimed to capture ‘all angles at once, from above, through and all round, as a bird flies, a total experience’, translating her emotional, sensory and embodied encounters into visual form. The works offer a painterly equivalent to the constructivist sculptures created by her contemporaries in St Ives.

Barns-Graham’s glacier paintings established her as an important figure in post-war abstraction. They featured in Aspects of British Art at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (1950) and Abstract Paintings, Sculptures and Mobiles at the Artists’ International Association Gallery (1951), landmark exhibitions that signalled new directions in British art. In 1952, a substantial selection was shown at the Redfern Gallery in Barns-Graham’s first London solo exhibition. This room is the largest presentation of glacier works since then.

Grindewald Glaciers

Barns-Graham travelled to Grindelwald by car with the Brotherton family, friends she met in St Ives. Together, they took the various photographs on display here. Rather than painting from direct observation, the many glacier works Barns-Graham made were an imaginative response to her memories of that trip, bolstered by these images and sketches made in situ.

The photographs offer a glimpse of a landscape that can no longer be experienced directly. The Grindelwald glaciers formed over thousands of years as snow built up in mountain basins, became compressed under its own weight into thick ice, and was pulled downhill by gravity to carve valleys below. When Barns-Graham traversed them in 1949, they were already retreating from the maximum extent they had reached around 1850. Since then, the climate emergency has accelerated this decline. The combined ice volume of all Swiss glaciers has more than halved over the past 100 years. The ice flows Barns-Graham encountered nearly 80 years ago would be unrecognisable to her today.

1950s

After her intense focus on the glaciers, Barns-Graham sought new inspiration for her developing abstract language. She explored Cornwall and also travelled to the Isles of Scilly, Italy and the Balearic Islands through the 1950s. Her resulting works trace the contours and structures of these landscapes. The varied use of paint in washes, gestural dabs and rough abrasions shows an interest in the relationship between natural forms and the pictorial surface.

Many of the works in this room employ the golden section proportional system, which Barns-Graham had explored in her glacier pictures. This was informed by biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s book On Growth and Form (1917, reprinted 1942). It offered post-war artists like Barns-Graham a model for understanding order within nature, applying mathematical laws to living organisms and ecosystems.

She lived in Leeds from 1956–7, where she taught at Leeds College of Art. Her overlapping interest in landscape and geometry continued to evolve there, informed and validated by her colleague Harry Thubron’s Basic Design course. Drawing on Bauhaus teaching principles, he emphasised experiments with colour, line, space, form and materials. In works based on the snowy fields of Yorkshire, Barns-Graham increasingly structured nature into geometric systems.

Hidden painting

X-ray analysis of White, Black and Yellow (Composition February) by Tate’s paintings conservation team has revealed a hidden image beneath the upper layers of paint. A photograph of the artist in her studio shows a 1954 painting referred to as Rock Form or Composition February. This, the largest of her rock-inspired paintings from the early 1950s, was presumed lost for many years. Staff at the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust long suspected that she may have reused the canvas in 1957 to make White, Black and Yellow (Composition February), prompted by the work’s size and the subtitle in brackets. The below image, created through a non-invasive examination method using an X-ray light source, clearly shows forms from the original 1954 painting such as a large triangle and two half-moon shapes.

1960s–1980s

After a period living in London between 1960 and 1963, Barns-Graham divided her time between combined living and working spaces at Barnaloft in St Ives and Balmungo House near St Andrews, Fife. She had inherited Balmungo from her aunt and created a studio in the former drawing room. During these years, Barns-Graham described herself as a ‘lone wolf’, but her artistic outlook was anything but isolated. Both in London and on an extended visit to the US in 1965, she encountered new developments of geometric abstraction, including kinetic and op art.

Up to the late 1950s, Barns-Graham had understood the natural world as a self-contained system. She imagined her works reflecting ‘nature in motion working on and changing itself’. Her abstract paintings from the 1960s onwards, by contrast, offer a more active approach. She developed compositions through the process of making itself. Testing colour combinations and disrupting uniform configurations of squares and circles, she explored the dynamic interplay between order and instability.

This systems-based approach enabled Barns-Graham to imagine how natural processes – and even social relationships and spiritual experiences – might be understood through abstraction. While she rejected references to the visible world in these paintings, some of their titles suggest people coming together in protest, assembly or pilgrimage.

Synaesthesia

Barns-Graham’s work was often informed by her synaesthesia, a neurological trait whereby one sense can trigger another. Examples include perceiving the colours of musical notes, the shapes and patterns of time, or the taste of certain sounds. Synaesthesia is different for each person who experiences it. In Barns-Graham’s case, colours became associated with other things around her including people, places and emotions. She even produced a key assigning a colour to each letter of the alphabet. In the mostly abstract works from the 1960s onwards shown in this room, colours may have been chosen based on the specific and private meanings they held for the artist as well as for purely visual reasons.

1980s–1990s

During her later career, prompted by a return to making observational drawings from nature, Barns-Graham moved away from her strict focus on geometric abstraction. Her Small Energy drawings – made with fine, undulating lines – capture wave patterns, tidal movements and wind eddies. Many were inspired by the seas around her homes in Cornwall and Fife, or memories of Grindelwald.

In the 1980s and 1990s, she spent considerable time on the islands of Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland, and Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands off North Africa. Both places inspired new directions in her practice. In Orkney, she was especially drawn to the flagstone-like formations around Warbeth Beach. In Lanzarote, the volcanic terrains of solidified lava provided inspiration equivalent to the ice masses of the glaciers at Grindelwald.

Through these creative episodes, Barns-Graham stated that she was ‘collecting shapes that become my shapes … To see what is useful, to identify with its rhythm so that, again, later I can express myself in my own language’.

1990s–2000s

Towards the end of her career, Barns-Graham reflected on her role as an artist in the face of consumerism, environmental damage and disruptive social forces. She described living ‘in the most appalling time of abuse of living things … Man is making the most awful disorder, breaking things down without thought, destroying.’ Against this destruction, Barns-Graham emphasised art’s capacity to raise awareness and sharpen perception. ‘I want to stimulate and excite people, give them an enthusiasm for looking’.

Barns-Graham’s dynamic Scorpio paintings, along with her innovative screenprints made with printmakers Carol Robertson and Robert Adam, encapsulate this sense of restless creativity. They are built up from layers of sweeping, calligraphic brushstrokes, intense colour combinations and simple symbolic forms. These late works distil years of observing, sensing and remembering into a succinct abstract language.

Barns-Graham gave some of these works titles hinting at a link with a place, concept or emotion. Yet she resisted the idea that her works were ‘conceived from the landscape or narrative’. Instead, they represented an ‘expression of joy through colour, form and texture’. This celebration of life offered a powerful counterpoint to the destruction and disorder she perceived in the world around her.