Art
... or whited sepulchre?
Giles Auty sees the gallery as a shrine to a narrow and short-lived art movement
tisses,' commented the young man cleaning railway carriages at St Ives station, spitting ostentatiously towards the back of a retreating, Norfolk-jacketed figure carry- ing a sketching easel, who had just come in on the train. 'I call 'un artisses and we do hate they,' he added, as explanation to me for his action. The year was 1960 and I had a summer job driving one of Warren's radio taxis from a booth by the station. It seemed tactless to mention that when not so engaged I was an `artiss' myself.
The widely reported opening of the new Tate Gallery, St Ives, might be a good time to remember that relations between the local community and artists have not always been ideal, and to work for a more genuine liaison in the future. The famous St Ives primitive Alfred Wallis who, in 1928, provided the initial inspiration for a second major influx of foreigners with easels died nevertheless largely unlauded in Madron Workhouse in 1942. Too many artists who came to Cornwall then and sub- sequently did so simply for the furtherance of their own careers, often with little heed for the customs and culture of the county. Some, even among the more famous, were selfish and manipulative in their dealings with others — a fact commented on with passion by the one outstanding artist of the post-war era who was born locally: Peter Lanyon. I lived in West Cornwall myself in 1959-66 and 1972-79 and witnessed a good deal of what went on in the local artistic community at first hand. I hope this experi- ence may provide hitherto unrecorded Insights for the book I am writing on the town and its art during the years 1939-79.
The new Tate Gallery, St Ives, occupies the site filled formerly by a gasholder of unusual design lying roughly between the cemetery where Alfred Wallis and many other former local fishermen were buried and one of the big, sandy beaches which, as a magnet to tourists, underwrites the town's present economy. From inside, the
Ar new gallery functions well on the whole, with imaginative use of space and of cer- tain recurrent motifs. From the beach, the building is less edifying. Thankfully, the architects Eldred Evans and David Shalev have taken the building's functions very much to heart rather than indulging to excess in the kind of architectural whimsi- calities encountered in a number of other famous art galleries of recent design. So far so good. But what of the spirit and raison d'être of the whole, costly enterprise? For a moment, between 30 and 40 years ago, a small town of roughly 10,000 souls became a focus for worldwide artistic attention. But what is the town's real significance now and what is it likely to become in the future?
To wish to preserve for posterity the products of a fairly brief flowering may be admirable, but surely this is the function of a museum rather than of a gallery of living art. The reservations I feel about the whole enterprise are much the same now as those expressed formerly by others: the focus of the art effectively enshrined is too narrow. Abstractions based on constructivist and expressionist principles represent merely one way of looking and thinking about the world and both, the latter especially, lay themselves open too readily to pastiche.
By odd coincidence, perhaps, virtually every fortune-seeking young artist who arrived in West Cornwall during the halcy- on days there of abstract expressionism quickly picked up the 'house style'. Many were rather good at this, as their more famous predecessors had been also in bor- rowing from each other: Ben Nicholson from Alfred Wallis, Barbara Hepworth from Naum Gabo and so forth. But with the formation of the Penwith Society the industry in pastiche attained new heights or depths. The short route to gain influ- ence, an exhibition, a fellowship or a rare and valuable teaching post — or more or less anything else — was for artists to show themselves as obvious disciples of a major figure, blatant imitation being looked on as the sincerest form of flattery.
Those who once virtually ran modern art in Cornwall accepted such sycophancy too readily, while any dissent was punished View through the whitewashed galleries to Roger Hilton's 'January 1957' where possible by the withholding of pro- fessional opportunity of any kind. The Pen- with Society, the activities of which form the effective core of the ethos of the new Tate Gallery, St Ives, was an outstanding example of the nastiness and pettiness of local art politics in action. The bitterness and jealousies felt still by artists who remain is simply a relic of what went before.
How much will the average visitor under- stand of any of this? Very little, I suppose. What he or she will see is successive dis- plays in five galleries of art by those who contributed to the town's temporary fame: Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, Bernard Leach, John Wells, Denis Mitchell, Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Bryan Wynter, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton and a number of others. The permanent works specially commissioned so far for the gallery are among the less successful: Patrick Heron's stained glass window and Terry Frost's vertical banner. To these two will be added shortly a work by Alison Wilding, a fashionable artist with no con- nections of which I am aware with the area.
As an outpost — or mere tentacle — of the Tate in London, I fear greatly for the new offspring's autonomy. Very strong, individualistic vision is vital to prevent the new whited sepulchre becoming in time merely a white elephant. As the gallery's glittering façades pick up their first splat- terings from passing gulls, I leave predic- tions of what may or may not ultimately occur to necromancers on the nearby moors. I just hope feelings in my own digestive tract turn out to be unfounded.
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