Exhibitions 2
John Wells: The Fragile Cell (Tate Gallery, St Ives, till 1 November)
Eminent Edwardian
John Spurting
John Wells, the writer and comedian, died in January at the sadly early age of 61. John Wells, the artist, was 91 in July. Almost everyone has heard of the former, but few outside the art world of the latter, who, in spite of being associated from the beginning with the St Ives School and its founders — Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo — has been an artistic hermit for more than 30 years. His last one-man show in a commercial gallery was in 1964 and this is 'Sea Bird Forms', 1951, by John Wells his first ever solo exhibition in a public gallery. If one divides the St Ives School into three generations, born roughly speak- ing in the late Victorian, Edwardian or Georgian periods, he is then the oldest sur- viving Edwardian.
Although his mother was Cornish, Wells was born in London, where he qualified as a medical doctor, while also attending evening classes at St Martin's School of Art. Visiting Cornwall regularly from child- hood on, he studied for a month in 1928 at the Stanhope Forbes School in Newlyn, thus making a link, however slight, with the earlier school of Cornish painting based round Penzance rather than St Ives. That same summer, staying with friends, he met Ben and Winifred Nicholson and Christo- pher Wood, who were fellow guests; and this was the famous August when Ben Nicholson, visiting St Ives for the first time with Christopher Wood, 'discovered' Alfred Wallis, the retired fisherman whose naive paintings of ships and the houses and harbour of St Ives had such a powerful effect on Nicholson and, through him, on the whole school.
Wells, however, was still only a part-time artist. From 1936-45 he was the Scilly Isles' doctor, although during the second world war he often visited St Ives, where Nichol- son and Hepworth had now been joined by Naum Gabo. Gabo's influence on Wells was as profound as his experience of prac- tising medicine in such a literally isolated place, dependent on boats for transport, dominated by the sea. After the war he gave up his medical practice, became a full- time artist and settled in Newlyn, where he has lived and worked ever since. In the Fifties and early Sixties, with three one- man shows at the Durlacher Gallery in New York and two at Waddington's in London, his work was beginning to be known and two paintings were bought by the Tate. But in 1964 — the same year that his friend and close artistic associate Peter Lanyon was killed in a gliding accident — the lack of success of Well's second exhibi- tion in London stopped him in his never particularly self-confident tracks. 'It has left me with a permanent depression which has paralysed me ever since,' he wrote to Ben Nicholson soon afterwards. From then until now, although he was sometimes included in group shows, his work has remained mainly private. Brought together in public at last, inside what must be — with the waves breaking on Porthmeor beach directly below — the most spectacu- lar gallery in England, these 50-odd paint- ings, drawings and constructions, dating mostly from 1940-60, will be a 'discovery' for most visitors almost on a par with Nicholson's of Alfred Wallis exactly 70 years ago.
Except for one dark-brown landscape of the Scilly Isles, with twisting, organic forms in front of low hills and a moon, the war- time works are all rigorously Constructivist. Strongly reminiscent, with their strings, hollows and ovals, of Gabo, Nicholson and Hepworth, they are nonetheless distinctly individual: perhaps partly because of their unemphatic smallness and the intense clari- ty of their criss-crossing lines and bright colours, but partly also because of their closeness to what they derive from. Boat- forms, horizon lines, textured grounds (most are painted on board, not canvas) insist, quietly but firmly, that abstracted as they are they came in from outdoors.
The immediately post-war works, up to about 1951, are larger, several of them exceptionally beautiful and masterly, though their authority comes, like certain Dutch works of the 17th century, not from size or overt energy, but almost the oppo- site: inward concentration, craftsmanship, proportion and design. They are evidently influenced by Paul Klee, both in their exquisitely acrobatic balance and their jew- elled colours. Some are painted on board, some on canvas, with dark textured grounds and complex geometrical combi- nations — ellipses, triangles, circles, cres- cents, rhomboids — though there are still also borrowings from natural forms such as shells and crystals. In the most delicate and delectable of all, 'Painting, 1946', which according to Matthew RoWe's catalogue is 'one of the paintings that the artist values most highly', there is an unmistakable boat keel-deep in an undoubted sea. Some of the titles of this group — 'Nocturne', 'Music in a Garden', 'Le Sacre du Print- emps' — suggest that, again like Klee, Wells finds particular affinities with music.
In the late Forties he stepped art-histori- cally backwards, abandoning abstractions in favour of small, tightly composed land- scapes, replacing the influence of Construe- tivism with that of its stylistic forerunner Cubism. Then, in 'Sea Bird Forms' (1951) and two paintings from 1955, 'Journey' and 'Vista', the forms loosen and lengthen and the colours lighten, as if Wells, led out by his friend Lanyon, were suddenly freshly aware of the light and air beyond his studio and bent on restoring his carefully crafted forms to the elements he had abstracted them from.
There is not enough later work to judge properly what he has been up to since the setback in 1964, but two marvellously light and subtle drawings from 1967 and 1968, as well as a brief visit I made myself to his stu- dio nearly 15 years ago, attest that he has not been idle nor short of new ideas. No one who sees this show — and no one should miss it — will be satisfied without a second, perhaps devoted to drawings, before he gets much older.
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