Painting the Warmth of the Sun: St Ives Artists 1939-1975

The artists’ community in St Ives is recognised internationally as having played a leading part in the development of one of the most significant art movements of the modern era. Emerging from the influences of the earlier Newlyn and St Ives artists whose numbers included Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes,Walter Langley, Lamorna Birch and Laura Knight, came a new generation of painters and sculptors whose work contributed vividly to the post-war modernist movement. At the outbreak of the SecondWorldWar, St Ives became home for a small group of the most progressive artists and sculptors, including notably Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, already leaders in the advanced art movements of the 1930s, and committed to the principle of abstraction. Their work drew together a group of younger artists who were to make St Ives a centre of avant garde activity in post-war Britain. They included JohnWells, BryanWynter,Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton,Terry Frost, and the potter Bernard Leach. This book was first published in 1984 at a time when the art movement, which we now know as ‘St Ives’, could be described as ’undervalued’. It is based on a series of interviews and discussions with those artists who were still working in and around St Ives in the 1970s and 1980s, and the book, which has become a standard work on the subject, as has its sister publication The Shining Sands – Artists in Newlyn and St Ives 1880–1930, now has added value insofar as these many conversations, formal and informal, can no longer be repeated as sadly few of the artists of that time are still alive.