Fear and Freedom 1940–1965

Peter Lanyon, St Just  1953

Lanyon named this painting for St Just-in- Penwith, the small, grey town that was the historic centre of the west Cornwall tin mining industry. Initially conceived as a crucifixion, Lanyon quickly associated this work with the tragic history of the mining district that runs west of St Ives towards St Just, as well as with mythological symbols of death and renewal. This painting was the culmination of a series of works made from late 1951 to 1954 in which Lanyon layered successive coats of thick paint in complex, tangled compositions that suggest landscapes with a symbolic meaning.

Gallery label, September 2016

Paul Nash, Totes Meer (Dead Sea)  1940–1

This painting, the title of which is German for ‘dead sea’, was made during the first half of the Second World War. It was inspired by a wrecked aircraft dump at Cowley in Oxfordshire. Nash based the image on photographs he took there. The artist described the sight: ‘The thing looked to me suddenly, like a great inundating sea ... the breakers rearing up and crashing on the plain. … nothing moves, it is not water or even ice, it is something static and dead.’ He created an unsettling atmosphere by setting the scene at night and including a solitary owl in flight.

Gallery label, April 2019

Dame Elisabeth Frink, Bird  1952

The prodigious Frink began to show her work in public in 1951 and among her first sculptures was this strong and alert bird, rather like a crow or a raven. The bird theme was to occupy Frink over the next two decades. Of these early sculptures she said that they ‘were really expressionist in feeling - in their emphasis on beak, claws and wings - and they were really vehicles for strong feelings of panic, tension, aggression and predatoriness. They were not, however, symbolic of anything else; they certainly were not surrogates for human beings or ‘states of being.’

Gallery label, September 2016

Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion  1944

The title of this work refers to figures that are often featured in Christian paintings of the death of Jesus. Bacon said the figures in his work represented the Furies, ancient Greek goddesses. They punished human wrongdoing. The work was first shown publicly in April 1945. The Second World War was in its final months, after six years of conflict. The first photographs and film footage of Nazi concentration camps were being released. For some, Bacon’s painting reflected the horror of the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people were murdered. It was also seen to reflect the fear caused by the development of nuclear weapons.

Gallery label, July 2020

Roger Mayne, Group, St Stephen Gardens  1957

Roger Mayne, Girls swinging on a rope, Southam Street  1951

Roger Mayne, West Indians, Southam Street  1956, printed 1998

L.S. Lowry, Industrial Landscape  1955

This picture is typical of the panoramic cityscapes that Lowry painted throughout his career. Although it is an imaginary composition, elements of the view are recognisable as real places. For example, the Stockport Viaduct, which constantly haunted the artist, can be seen in the top left of the picture. But on the whole the image presents a generalised impression of the urban environment, dominated by smoking chimneys, factories, roads, bridges and industrial wasteland. As if to emphasise the human presence in this overwhelming, blackened city, Lowry focuses in on a small street in the foreground, almost inviting the viewer

to join the small group of people going about their business.

Gallery label, September 2004

Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, Cyclops  1957

In classical mythology, the Cyclops was an immensely strong giant with a single eye in the centre of his forehead. The skin of this lumbering bronze figure is imprinted with broken machine-parts and other found debris. Paolozzi made it by pressing pieces of metal into a bed of moist clay, and then pouring molten wax into the clay mould. He constructed the model from these sheets of wax forms and finally cast it in bronze. Its pierced armour and dilapidated state has been seen as an ironic comment on the condition of man in the nuclear age.

Gallery label, September 2016

Frank Auerbach, E.O.W. Nude  1953–4

Auerbach studied with Bomberg longer than anyone else. He started at Borough Polytechnic in January 1947 and went to evening classes there until 1953, while officially attending St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art.

Auerbach said he learnt from Bomberg not technique but ‘a sense of the grand standards of painting.’ He developed a distinctive manner of painting in which thick paint is given an independent reality of its own, as well as being used as a means of representing a physical object.

Gallery label, September 2004

Dame Barbara Hepworth, Pelagos  1946

Pelagos (‘sea’ in Greek) was inspired by a view of the bay at St Ives in Cornwall, where two stretches of land surround the sea on either side. The hollowed-out sculpture has a spiral form resembling a shell, a wave or the roll of a hill. Hepworth wanted the taut strings to express ‘the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills’. She moved to Cornwall with her husband, painter Ben Nicholson in 1939 and produced some of her best-known sculpture inspired by its wild landscape.

Gallery label, April 2019

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Glacier Crystal, Grindelwald  1950

Barns-Graham lived in St Ives and her art combined natural subjects with the influence of older abstract artists Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo. This is one of several works painted following a visit to the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland in 1948 where she had direct experience of the monumental shape of the glacier, its light, and the contrast between solidity and glass-like transparency. This led her to attempt to combine multiple views ‘from above, through and all round, as a bird flies, a total experience’.

Gallery label, September 2016

Nigel Henderson, Head of a Man  1956

Head of a Man is made from roughly layered photographs of vegetables, charred logs, stones, leaves, a shoe and a scratched wall. Henderson described the work as ‘Out of Nature and into Industry’. He began by making a smaller collage, which he photographed and enlarged. He then added more photographic cuttings and paint. Finally, he re-photographed and further enlarged the work to create this densely layered image. It was originally exhibited as part of the collaborative installation, Patio and Pavilion, in 1956.

Gallery label, December 2019

Henry Moore OM, CH, Three Points  1939–40, cast before 1949

Moore kept up with the activities of the Surrealist’s in Paris. He also contributed to the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. Several of his works explore feelings of uncertainty and anxiety that relate to Surrealism. The use of space in Three Points creates a sense of anticipation. Moore commented: ‘This pointing has an emotional or physical action in it where things are just about to touch but don’t... like the points in the sparking plug of a car... the spark has to jump across the gap’.

Gallery label, June 2021

Lynn Chadwick, Conjunction  1953

Chadwick was one of the leading sculptors of the twentieth century. He trained at the Merchant Taylors’ School and worked as an architectural draughtsman before becoming an artist. In 1956 he gained international recognition when he won the International Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. He was awarded the CBE in 1964.

Conjunction is one of Chadwick’s first sculptures of a human couple. It has powdered iron on its surface which has since rusted. This gives the sculpture its distinctive colour.

Gallery label, August 2004

Prunella Clough, Man Hosing Metal Fish Boxes  1951

In the late 1940s and early 1950s the ‘common man’ or labourer was a dominant subject for Clough and some of her contemporaries. During the years 1946 to 1949 Clough often visited the coast of East Anglia and this subject is thought to stem from her time there. Although inspired by a certain locality, Clough’s work usually turns the particular and localised into something more universal. She gives a sense of monumentality to the figure occupied in a menial task, while also suggesting the gritty realism of the life of the working man.

Gallery label, September 2016

F.N. Souza, Crucifixion  1959

At the heart of Souza’s Crucifixion is the body of Christ transformed through suffering. Souza was born in the Catholic province of Goa in western India. In the 1950s, he was among the first of the post-Independence generation of Indian artists to establish a career in Britain. His depiction of the agonised black Christ addresses his own feelings of religious conflict, as well as cultural tensions between black and white, Christian and non-Christian, colonised and colonising societies.

Gallery label, September 2016

Ghisha Koenig, Metal Punchers I  1957

Koenig was interested in the lives of the working class and from the mid-1950s onwards she regularly sketched people working in factories. These drawings were the source material for her sculptures which capture people in all their physical diversity, performing their allotted tasks with varying degrees of enthusiasm. As such they were not idealised visions of the dignity of labour but purported to be truthful records of factory life.

Gallery label, August 2019

Magda Cordell, Figure (Woman)  1956–7

With its highly textured surface and sack-like body, Cordell’s Figure (Woman) shows an affinity with the expressive abstraction of European artists such as Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier. Her depiction of the female figure was seen by contemporary critics as a break with traditional representations of women, embodying the anxieties of a nuclear age. More recently, her paintings have been seen as images of heroic femininity with the distortions signifying the resilience of the human body against injury and change.

Gallery label, October 2016

Lucian Freud, Girl with a Kitten  1947

In 1947 Lucian Freud fell in love with Kitty Garman, daughter of Kathleen Garman and Jacob Epstein, and the subject of eight portraits by Freud that chart their short marriage. In this closely-cropped composition, the kitten - serving as a namesake for Garman - is gripped tightly by the neck as it stares straight ahead, while Garman averts her gaze. Girl with a Kitten shows the way that Freud sought to embody character, rather than just illustrate likeness, and to create a sense of dramatic tension.

Gallery label, September 2016

Aubrey Williams, Death and the Conquistador  1959

Death and the Conquistador demonstrates Williams’s engagement with debates around abstraction in Europe and America, and its subject matter has roots in the memory of his early life in Guyana. Through the depiction of a field of bone-like shapes resembling human or animal forms, he addresses the colonisation of Latin America by the conquistadors (soldiers in the service of Spain and Portugal). Williams stated that ‘the crux of the matter… inherent in my work … has been the human predicament, especially with regard to the Guyanese situation’.

Gallery label, September 2016

Franciszka Themerson, Struggling Figures in a Landscape  1946

This drawing belongs to a series of watercolours and gouaches begun in 1945. At the end of the Second World War, Franciszka Themerson had returned to making paintings. The series depicts townscapes, seashores and refugee figures. The bright colours are a new departure for the artist, but the subject matter continues to allude to the tragedies of the recent past.

Gallery label, October 2019

Franciszka Themerson, Soldiers Marching on a Beach  1946

This drawing belongs to a series of watercolours and gouaches begun in 1945. At the end of the Second World War, Franciszka Themerson had returned to making paintings. The series depicts townscapes, seashores and refugee figures. The bright colours are a new departure for the artist, but the subject matter continues to allude to the tragedies of the recent past.

Gallery label, October 2019

Ronald Moody, The Onlooker  1958–62

Moody moved to Paris in 1938, but was forced to flee in 1940, two days before it fell to Nazi occupation. He returned to Britain in 1941, where he remained until his death in 1984. In the 1950s and 1960s Moody exhibited regularly in London. The Onlooker is a rare work in wood from this period and reveals his view of the artist’s role in society, as observer. In the late 1960s, Moody became an active member of the Caribbean Artists Movement. In 1970, the movement named their journal, Savacou, after his sculpture of a mythical Carib bird for the University of the West Indies, Jamaica.

Gallery label, January 2022

Denis Williams, Moulid el-Nabi  1959

This work on paper dating from 1959, realised in watercolour, ink, pencil and papier collé, represents a complex scene that combines abstraction and figuration. In the centre, a large Islamic archway, or ogee, frames a group of congregated men, draped and turbaned, bowing down before a number of performers, including a drummer and a figure seen in profile with raised hand. The form of the arch echoes that of an imposing building in the background, possibly a mosque with two minarets. The arch and the areas surrounding it at the top and sides of the composition are richly decorated with abstract motifs, predominantly painted in bright primary colours. The patterns, reminiscent of calligraphic ornamentation, include triangular and circular forms as well as patterns relating to celestial objects: stars, planets and crescent moons. On the right of the archway, excluded from the scene taking place in the background, is a group of three veiled women. Only the women’s heads are visible, as their bodies are obstructed by a large reclining torso and head of a male figure lying face-down in the foreground. This monolithic figure or sculpture appears buried beneath the cool blue of the earth’s surface. According to the artist’s daughter and biographer, Evelyn Williams, this painting provides the viewer with a unique and concrete reference to the artist’s recent engagement with archaeology in Sudan where he moved in 1957 (Williams 2012, p.74).

William Turnbull, Hanging Sculpture  1949

Ithell Colquhoun, E.L.A.S.  1945

Kim Lim, Sphinx  1959

Sphinx 1959 is a sculpture made of three found wooden blocks, assembled so that they sit atop each other. The element at the base is the narrowest of the three. The central element is elongated and has two circular metal rings inserted into it. The element at the top is positioned off-centre and, on one of its flat surfaces, it has a deep groove carved out vertically. Cracks along the grain of the wood suggest its history and uneven drying process.

Unknown artist, The Keys; Millwood, New York: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited  1976