W. Barns-Graham

This is the first book devoted to the significant British abstract painter, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. Born in 1912, in Fife, Scotland, for over sixty years she has lived and worked in St Ives, at the heart of the avant-garde group of artists who made the town internationally famous.In an engaging and lively narrative, Lynne Green documents more than six decades of a prodigiously inventive and productive career, and traces the evolution of the artist's strikingly individual vision.Arriving in Cornwall just months after the modernists Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, Barns-Graham was quickly absorbed into their inner circle. She was subsequently one of the Crypt Group of young moderns, and a founder member of the breakaway Penwith Society of Arts.Barns-Graham is a remarkable artist who today continues to work with the energy and enthusiasm usually associated with the young. In recent years her art has attracted the attention it deserves, but this was not always the case. In what is an important contribution to the history of British art, Green examines the importance of Barns-Graham's national tradition and of her teachers at Edinburgh School of Art, particularly the Scottish Colourists William Gillies and John Maxwell. Her developing commitment to abstraction is discussed in detail: never afraid to experiment, Barns-Graham's work is revealed as embodying many of the issues central to post-war abstract art.In this long-awaited examination of her work, Lynne Green restores Wilhelmina Barns-Graham to her rightful place in the story of the St Ives School, establishes her personal achievement as a painter, and by implication, the importance of her wider contribution to twentieth-century art.