Making Stories: Alfred Wallis

Ben Nicholson OM, 1933 (guitar)  1933

By using an oddly shaped piece of wooden board rather than canvas, Nicholson created a work that lies somewhere between sculpture and painting. The effect is heightened by the texture of the surface, which was prepared with a layer of special plaster that the artist cut into while it was still wet. Though now framed, Nicholson preferred to leave the work unprotected. Photographs show that instead of hanging it on a wall like a conventional painting, he kept his 'scratched surrealist guitar' propped on a mantelpiece in his studio.

Gallery label, August 2004

Peter Lanyon, Porthleven  1951

This work exemplifies Lanyon’s idea of the ‘experiential landscape’, which involved approaching a place from different positions and combining these views with allusions to geology, history, culture and myth. Here he depicts the fishing port of Porthleven from several perspectives, revealing its two harbours and clock tower. Lanyon later identified a human presence in the work, reading the shape on the left as a fisherman with lamp and his wife wrapped in a shawl on the right. Influenced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and his theories of the unconscious, the artist saw these as figures embodying the cultural identity of his home.

Gallery label, May 2007

Ben Nicholson OM, Feb 28-53 (vertical seconds)  1953

This picture exemplifies Nicholson's recurrent practice of using contrasting areas of flat, vibrant colour with a pale ground that has been scrubbed and distressed. The bright patches of red and yellow act as focus points, and perhaps bring to mind late landscapes by J.M.W. Turner, such as those in the next room, which are similarly 'centred' by bright points of the same colours. But Nicholson would primarily have had in mind the grid-like abstracts of Mondrian, whom he greatly admired. There is a remarkable consistency in the way that Nicholson formulated his abstract designs, from his first such exercises in the 1920s (such as the picture displayed elsewhere in this room)though to the 1950s and '60s.

Gallery label, August 2004

Alfred Wallis, Schooner under the Moon  ?c.1935–6

William Scott, White, Sand and Ochre  1960–1

Shortly after he completed this painting, the artist said he hesitated to comment on it, beyond relating it to his other paintings from the same time. He did say, however, that a source of inspiration may have been his strong liking for Egyptian painted art. Although Scott had not visited Egypt at the time, he described a number of his paintings as having Egyptian references and titled some of them accordingly. While this work is obviously related to the earlier 'Ochre Still Life', also on view in this gallery, its shapes are even more flattened out and abstract and the surface texture resembles a plastered wall.

Gallery label, September 2004

Christopher Wood, Boat in Harbour, Brittany  1929

Though in Brittany, this scene is similar to many works painted by Wood in Cornwall. Towards the end of his short life, Wood spent periods working in both places in pursuit of a ‘naïve’ style of painting. In 1928 he visited Cornwall with his friends Ben and Winifred Nicholson. In St Ives the two men came across Alfred Wallis, whose ‘primitive’, child-like paintings made a deep impression on their subsequent work. For them, adopting Wallis’s instinctive style allowed them to reject the artificiality of established painting for a more authentic mode of expression.

Gallery label, July 2007

Denis Mitchell, Praze  1964

Denis Mitchell moved to Cornwall in 1930. He played an important role in the artistic development of St Ives following the Second World War. He was a founder member of the Penwith Society and was an assistant to Barbara Hepworth from 1949-59, working on many of her sculptures. In 1959 he began to make abstract sculptures in bronze using a local sand-casting foundry. Simple shapes can be cast by this method and the casts were initially rough, enabling him to use his manual skills to perfect and purify the surfaces. 'Praze' is a fine example of his streamlined single sculptural forms. It is a variation on a theme that he had begun to develop some years earlier. The title, 'Praze' is a Cornish place name.

Gallery label, August 2004

Alfred Wallis, ‘The Hold House Port Mear Square Island Port Mear Beach’  ?c.1932

John Wells, Relief Construction  1941

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Red Form  1954

Born in St Andrews, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham visited Paris and Rouen as a teenager. She studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art between 1932 and 1936, and in 1940 moved to St Ives in Cornwall, on the recommendation of an artist friend, Margaret Mellis. There she got to know Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Bernard Leach and Naum Gabo. The economy of Gabo's sculptural shapes and the transluency of the modern materials he used had a great impact on her. 'Red Form' was painted in her St Ives studio by Porthmeor beach, and reflects the interest she took at the time in the Golden Section.

Gallery label, September 2004

Patrick Heron, Harbour Window with Two Figures : St Ives : July 1950  1950

Peter Lanyon, White Track  1939–40

Margaret Mellis, Sobranie Collage  1942

Margaret Mellis, Number Thirty Five  1983

Mellis trained as an artist in Edinburgh and Paris. Between 1939 and 1946 she became part of the community of avant-garde artists living and working in and around St Ives. This included Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, who lived briefly with Mellis and her husband Adrian Stokes in 1939. Impressed by the work of Nicholson and Naum Gabo she became a constructivist. This work comprises pieces of driftwood, including mahogany, pine and plywood, which she collected from the beach at Southwold, where she moved in 1976. Some of the pieces of wood were already painted when found, others were painted by the artist. She refers to her walk on the beach as a hunt and the driftwood collected as her trophies.

Gallery label, August 2004

Naum Gabo, Kinetic Stone Carving  1936–44

When Gabo first set down his ideas on constructive sculpture in his ‘Realistic Manifesto’ in 1920, he dismissed the traditional carving of solid mass. Instead, he asserted sculpture’s description of space through construction. However, in the mid–1930s, he modified this view with a number of carved works in which he sought to convey space through a massive object. In works such as this he used the curling edges to articulate the space around the solid stone from which the work was made.

Gallery label, May 2007

Bernard Leach, Spherical Vase  c.1927

The 1920s saw a revival in traditional crafts. The potter Bernard Leach mixed a revival of pre-industrial English designs with similarly traditional styles from Japan, where he had studied. He exhibited his pots alongside painters like Ben and Winifred Nicholson. A resurgence in craft practice in painting and sculpture, as well as pottery and other crafts, had its roots in the anti-industrialism of the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement. It was given more urgency in the wake of the mechanised destruction of the First World War.

Gallery label, September 2016

Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie, Small Bottle  1927

Christopher Wood, Porthmeor Beach, St Ives  1928

Porthmeor Beach, St Ives 1928 depicts a small section of Porthmeor beach, a long sandy strip on the Atlantic coast of St Ives in south-west Cornwall. Less than half of the picture’s surface portrays the sand itself, the rest of the composition being devoted to houses, pathways and people on the streets behind, beneath a small portion of sky. The view shows Wood turning his back on the coast and sea. Instead it depicts everyday life on the bordering pathways which connect the beach to the town. Large grey rocks occupy the sandy terrain in the foreground. The sand especially has been painted in broad, dynamic brushstrokes of thickly applied paint, evocative of the malleability of sand. In the middle-ground a small figure wearing a black hat crosses the back of the beach, walking towards stone steps to the street above. Other figures populate the streets above, so that the scene seems to show quiet everyday activity. Two female figures are shown walking along the top of the wall on a pathway between the beach and a grassy bank that would lead them towards the town and harbour. Another female figure walks on a further raised path in front of some houses. A bright cream house has been painted with two black squares for windows, a black rectangle for a door and a triangular roof outlined with thick red lines. To a side of this house another smaller figure in black sits on a horse-led vehicle which seems to move towards an opening in the brown wall on the right-hand edge of the painting to the streets behind. Chimneys high in the distance also set this scene within the wider town. The sky of the scene is painted in a light blue-green characteristic of depictions of St Ives.

Andrew Lanyon, The discovery of Alfred Wallis by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood on a visit to St Ives in 1928 ~ 50 years after ~  1978–9

This is an oil painting on a landscape board support, made on an intimate scale. It merges two scenes or spaces: on the left two small figures – which the work’s title tells us are the painters Ben Nicholson (1894–1982) and Christopher Wood (1901–1930) – are crossing The Island, a headland in St Ives, Cornwall; on the right a figure in black with a black cap – identified by the title as retired mariner and untutored painter Alfred Wallis (1855–1942) – stands in his St Ives house at a table. The white triangle in his hands probably refers to the variously shaped pieces of cardboard Wallis used as supports for his paintings (see, for example, St Ives c.1928, Tate T00881). Unlike Nicholson and Wood, Wallis does not seem to look to the coast. A wall of his house is absent, which permits the viewer to look in and creates a configuration reminiscent of a theatre stage. This is a surreal and theatrical evocation of a moment well known within histories of modern art in St Ives, when Nicholson and Wood first encountered Wallis painting on boards at his table during a visit to St Ives in the summer of 1928. Wallis became for them an important example of the power of naïve expression, an untutored artist who could help artists and audiences to see the world afresh. The work is titled to suggest that it marks the moment of encounter between these men fifty years later, a symbol itself of the ongoing legacy of such an event.