‘The morrow we left behind’: Landscape and the Rethinking of Modernism, 1939–53

© Association of Art Historians 2012 217

‘The morrow we left behind’:Landscape and the Rethinking of Modernism, 1939–53Chris Stephens

If younger art historians have paid little attention to post-war British art, this neglect

might be explained in simple terms by two historical conditions the residue of

which still underlies that art’s historical construction.1 First, just as by the 1960s

British art appeared subjugated to a triumphant America, so anglophonic histories

of post-war art in Britain seem to continue to accept that hegemony.2 When Max

Kozloff came to Europe in 1962 to research the European reception of abstract

expressionism, he was shocked by the degree to which British artists and critics

accepted Clement Greenberg’s formalist aesthetic and assertion of American artistic

dominance.3 Ever since, a challenge for the historian of this period has been

to describe histories of an art original and pertinent, outside of that dominant

American history, without seeming parochial. As Serge Guilbaut has commented:

‘since the “triumph” of American painting in the 1960s, it has been diffi cult to

discuss anything in the art culture of the 1950s but Abstract Expressionism.’4

Attitudes to post-war British art are still infl ected by American values, elevating, for

example, the Independent Group as a precursor of pop, while casting 1950s abstract

painters as, necessarily, derivative.

Secondly, between 1945 and 1960 – a period of massive political, social and

cultural change amid a crisis of national identity set against a backdrop of wartime

destruction and the Cold War – British art was riven by debates over art’s purpose

and what, now, might constitute the modern in art. Modern art and artists were

divided by factionalism and historians have often tended to remain within the

theoretical confi nes of their chosen subject and loyal to their subjects’ positions in

these fractious ideological and aesthetic debates. While the literature is dominated

by studies of single artists, certain groups and movements have also been the focus

of individual volumes, with particular attention paid to the Independent Group

and the art of the 1960s, most especially pop.5 James Hyman has documented

the variety of modern-minded fi gurative art and the different factions laying

claim to the term ‘realism’. In contrast to them, the abstract painters of St Ives

sought a certain radical marginality by defi ning themselves in opposition to what

they saw as a reactionary fi guration; at the same time, in response to a revival of

constructivism, Patrick Heron proposed a ‘Post-Abstract Group’ that would adhere

to the ‘central tradition of representational art (that is permeated by abstract force

but not dominated by it)’.6 Both the constructionists and, later, the ‘Situation’

painters distanced themselves from St Ives artists because of the latter’s retention of

subject matter. This was the line taken by Lawrence Alloway – despite his interest

Detail from Peter Lanyon, St Just, 1953 (plate 2).

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2011.00883.xArt History | ISSN 0141-679035 | 2 | April 2012 | pages 216-233


Landscape and the Rethinking of Modernism, 1939–53

in Dubuffet and CoBrA – who was associated with both the Independent Group and

Situation. Alloway’s ‘long front of culture’ was anathema to artists like Heron who

retained a traditional view of aesthetic value and resisted the idea that generational

rejection was a modernist necessity. If the emergent and divergent groupings of the

post-war generation demonstrate the fragmentary nature of artistic production, the

uncertainty of direction and progress is also indicated by the continued dominance

of such senior fi gures as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and, in particular,

Henry Moore.

After the Second World War, art made in Britain that could make any claim

to modernity, and the small world of British art, were fragmented and resistant to

any dominant narrative. In remaining within the lines of division set out in those

debates, historians have become advocates for their particular fi elds of study, risking

a loss of critical distance. We also risk debasing the object of study by imposing a

parochialism and degree of introspection upon it. We need to locate post-war British

art, artists and their ideas better, in contexts wider than their immediate factions, in

order to understand them more fully and set them within larger histories in positions

that are more subtle than simply peripheral and derivative.

My own historical domain has largely been that of ‘St Ives’, a place in Cornwall

and a group of artists especially vulnerable to the charge of parochialism because of

their geographical distance and containment. One of the interesting things about

the work of some of those artists is that it encapsulates many of the wider issues

pertaining to post-war art while affording the focus that comes from their close

proximity. At stake in the years following the War was the issue of what might now

constitute the modern in art. Could the progressive ideals of the 1930s survive the

horrors of the early 1940s? For some they could and were, perhaps, all the more

urgent in the context of reconstruction. For others, formal aesthetic values were

universal and autonomous and so not subject to change. For many, however, the issue

was not if but how art should change to refl ect, address or simply absorb recent events

and the collapse of the pre-war movements. In St Ives, emergent artists whose careers

had been interrupted by the War could engage in such debates with the protagonists

of that earlier modernist moment.

In this essay, I look at the way in which, in contrast to dominant constructions of

wartime British art as predominantly an amalgam of neo-romanticism and offi cial

war art, the modernist project was continued and developed in Cornwall during the

War. I consider its fate in the reconstructive moment of the post-war period and then

look at the way in which Peter Lanyon, specifi cally, developed an innovative form of

art with the intention of renewing that project through an idea of landscape painting.

The contrasting of Lanyon’s work around 1953 with Ben Nicholson’s involvement

in the politics of reconstruction, and the drawing of connections between Lanyon’s

art and other practices might demonstrate how different meanings and patterns of

intention can be opened out when we evade the constraints of established factional

boundaries.

To consider ‘St Ives’ as a late manifestation of neo-romanticism is to over-simplify

both its ambitions and achievements. We cannot accept without question Alloway’s

proposal that in Cornwall ‘the landscape is so nice nobody can quite bring themselves

to leave it out of their art’.7 Such accusations were strategically made, weapons

deployed in the promotion of a different kind of art and a different idea of modernity

and modernism. At the same time, I would not want to align myself simply with

Charles Harrison’s view that the location of St Ives,


Chris Stephens

… may only accidentally have been the site of the artistic developments we

associate with it; that those developments may have been strongly enough

determined by other tendencies and mechanisms to have imposed their

aesthetic character on an alternative world of motifs.8

Different artists positioned themselves in a marginal, rural location for a variety of

reasons and used the subject of their environment to different artistic and strategic

ends. Landscape and ideas of nature and of community were all issues for some of the

artists active in Cornwall during and after the Second World War. In exploring some

of its subtleties and differences, a study of St Ives should also draw out connections

with practice beyond that place and explore relations between the local and that

wider context. The landscape motifs of Peter Lanyon, for example, are neither the

inevitable results of his location nor simply neutral tools in the development of an art

concerned purely with formal issues.

It is important that the history of art in St Ives of the 1940s and 1950s

encompasses two generations of artists. A focus on St Ives offers an especially visible

example of generational revision. What we see played out there is an attempt to

preserve the spirit of modernism and, across two generations, a renegotiation of that

project for the post-war world. For some, as I shall discuss, this led to the replacement

of pre-war idealism with a Cold War melancholy that seemed to acknowledge the

horrors of the early 1940s and a new vision of human behaviour. One of the key

issues at the heart of that renegotiation is the question of subject matter. What should

be the relationship between the work of art and the world beyond it? For some within

the orbit of St Ives this was primarily an aesthetic issue; for others it was an ethical

and political one. For the signifi cant artists of St Ives, this question is explored and

debated around the subject of landscape, a construct itself under rapid redefi nition in

the wake of the War.

When Graham Sutherland visited west Cornwall as an Offi cial War Artist in 1942 he

wrote back to Sir Kenneth Clark, ‘down here we have had contact with Nicholsonia’.9

The comment is revealing of the way in which the isolation of the painter who, a few

years earlier, had been widely accepted as the leader of the modernist movement in

Britain, was perceived. For Sutherland, the world of Nicholson is like some distant

country. In fact, there is a strong sense of the modernist fl ame being kept alight,

relatively remote from the War, in Cornwall. In the late summer of 1939, in the

unlikely surroundings of the suburban holiday resort of Carbis Bay, outside St Ives,

Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and then Naum Gabo, had settled. There

is something especially poignant about the image of Gabo exiled once again and

struggling to make his constructions in the incongruous setting of a sub-art deco

seaside bungalow. Later in the War he would write of his sense of protecting the

ideals of a better time:

I try to guard in my work the image of the morrow we left behind us in our

memories and foregone aspirations and to remind us that the world can be

different.10

Especially emotive is Gabo’s development of his Spiral Theme shortly after he had

recorded in his diary, on 21 April 1941, his observation in the night sky of the

pulsating glow from the bombing of Plymouth ninety miles away.



The glow was enormous and explosions of the bombs and the red rockets of

the defending guns were all visible … I observed these hellish fi reworks for

a long time but I didn’t wait for the end. I went to sleep trying to forget what

I had seen, trying not to think or imagine what was happening to the people

under those lights in that blazing and bombarded city.11

Within the year, claims would be made for a resurgent modernism in which Spiral Theme held a central position.

Protecting the modernist cause during wartime, Nicholson sought to build a

school of ‘constructive’ artists. The establishment and maintenance of networks of

sympathetic artists and thinkers had been an important part of his practice before

the War. Under his leadership and with Gabo and Hepworth as fellow senior fi gures,

Peter Lanyon, John Wells and Margaret Mellis came to constitute a group in Cornwall

– augmented with one or two from elsewhere – and Nicholson sought to promote

them whenever possible. His faith in proselytizing and propaganda was undimmed.

So, early on in the War, in May 1940, he, Hepworth and Gabo determined to produce

a ‘wartime Chronicle’ of art, poetry and architecture, co-edited with Leslie Martin

and Herbert Read.12 That the editorial team almost matched that of Circle in 1937

is not coincidental and Nicholson would not abandon hope of a second volume

of Circle until some time after the War. In the meantime, he arranged for the art

1 Naum Gabo, Spiral Theme, 1941. Cellulose acetate and perspex, 140 x 244 x 244 mm. London: Tate. © Nina & Graham Williams/Tate London, 2011.


Chris Stephens

of his ‘movement’ to be published – not least in the United States, where work by

Lanyon, Wells and others appeared in Partisan Review with a brief commentary from

the art editor G. L. K. Morris, part of Nicholson’s international network of abstract

artists.13 He worked also to secure their inclusion in exhibitions, most signifi cantly

New Movements in Art which was shown at the London Museum in Lancaster House

in March 1942. In what was clearly designed as a demonstration of continuity, the

exhibition brought together the major modernist groupings of the 1930s. While it

was organized by the London Museum’s Margot Eates and her partner, the critic E.

H. Ramsden, Nicholson strongly infl uenced the constructivist section, though Eates

resisted his suggestion that the show be restricted to wartime work.14

For some, the exhibition was highly signifi cant. Hepworth believed it was,

… of great social importance … the only opportunity there has been for

artists to bridge the gap between pre-war and present day thought. It will

make it possible to bring about a collective solution to the all important

questions of artist & the state & post war or present planning.15

Hailing Gabo’s Spiral Theme (plate 1) as ‘the highest point ever reached by the aesthetic

intuition of man’, Herbert Read presented his review of New Movements in Art as a

‘speculation on the present state of the arts’ and wrote, in surprisingly militaristic

language,

So far as constructivism is concerned, let it be said at once that the column

is advancing … and there are new recruits to the movement (Peter Lanyon,

John Wells, Alastair Morton and J.C. Stephenson).16

The bellicose imagery refl ected, perhaps, a sense of embattlement or at least of struggle

against a known enemy. In the early months of the War, Read had believed that

reactionary forces were grabbing an opportunity to realign art production in Britain.

As in other areas of political and social life, from 1941 eyes were on the War’s

aftermath. The enemy for embattled modernists like Read was not just totalitarianism

in Europe but the opportunity that the War provided for what they saw as a

reactionary insurgency within British art championed by Sir Kenneth Clark. With

the advent of war, Clark – probably the largest collector of contemporary British art –

moved from the National Gallery to the Ministry of Information where he established

the War Artists Advisory Committee. But, ‘don’t place too much hope on him’, Read

had warned Nicholson at the end of 1939:

I was present at a lunch the other day at which he gave it as his opinion, – that

abstract art, functional architecture ‘and all that sort of thing’ was dead and

a damn good job too … We are in for a revival of ‘the picture with a story’.

Nice clean healthy nature, the Coldstream Guards forming fours behind

their Fuhrer. … all we represent and have fought for is threatened by a most

appalling reaction. And especially if, as seems inevitable, we win the War. We

shall only win it by putting into power the same kind of people who rule in

Germany. The new kind of world they want is a world safe for mediocrity.17

Hepworth agreed: ‘I know wartime offers the perfect opportunity for rounding up

the rebels but still I’m surprised at the gathering intensity of the attacks on all of us’,

she wrote in February 1940.18



In fact, it is possible to argue that the ideas that underlay the modernism of Read,

Nicholson and their circle were in the ascendant and becoming more infl uential

than they had ever been. It was precisely their values that, from early 1941, started

to infl uence the thinking that would underpin the planning for post-war Britain.

In her uncomfortably earnest way, Hepworth wrote of the discussions being held

when visitors travelled to Carbis Bay. There is a sense in which she and Nicholson

participated in a kind of ‘think-tank’ despite – perhaps aided by – their isolation.

In October 1941, Nicholson seemed to re-emerge from that isolation with an

uncompromising statement of abstract aesthetic values.

About ‘abstract’ art: I have not yet seen it pointed out that this liberation of

form and colour is closely linked with all the other liberations one hears

about. I think it ought, perhaps, to come into one of our lists of war aims.19

The elevation of formal artistic values to an equivalence with strategic and political

ambitions is, at the least, audacious, as is the nonchalant appearance of detachment.

But Nicholson sought to stress that his was not a position of high-brow removal and

that his proposal had a social dimension.

So far from ‘abstract’ art being the withdrawal of the artist from reality (into

an ‘ivory tower’) it has brought art once again into common every-day life. …

But like all the more profound religious, poetic, scientifi c, musical or artistic

ideas its deepest meaning is only understood by a few and the process seems to

be that these interpret it to a few more who pass it on to the rest of the world.

The role of the expert as a kind of elitist originator was important to Nicholson and

echoed a statement of intent from Herbert Read of a few months earlier.

In the journal World Review, Read introduced a series of articles entitled ‘This

Changing World’. His introduction captured the tone of the whole series. He wrote:

The individuals in whom the spirit of modernism is embodied still survive,

still work, still create – however obscurely and intermittently. When the

cloud of war has passed, they will re-emerge, eager to rebuild the shattered

world. They will say: our world is in ruins, it needs not only hard work and

perseverance to rebuild it, but also skill and vision. We are scientists and we

believe we have the skill; we are artists and we believe we have the vision. Let

us direct your work and we promise you that out of the ruins a better world

will emerge.20

The series of articles, ‘This Changing World’, was edited by Marcus Brumwell, an art

collector and the director of Stuart’s advertising agency, for whom, before the War,

Nicholson and Hepworth had made designs. Brumwell had been commissioned to

edit the series of articles in World Review by its owner Edward Hulton and drew upon

Nicholson’s ideas and knowledge in the selection of authors.

Nicholson had already, at the beginning of 1941, written admiringly of ‘A Plan for

Britain’, published in Hulton’s Picture Post, in which, he told Cecil Stephenson, authors

such as Maxwell Fry and Julian Huxley dealt with ‘planning, health, education etc

etc’.21 Hulton was a key fi gure in the reconstruction movement. He was a member of

the 1941 Committee, a group of left-leaning politicians and intellectuals calling for

the defi nition of a plan for post-war Britain. The Committee met at Hulton’s home


Chris Stephens

and among their number was, for example, the author of Guilty Men, an attack on the

Nazi-sympathizers and appeasers of the inter-war period.22 Hulton’s own book, The New Age, set out to remind readers that contrary to much wartime comment, 1939

had not been ‘the Good Life’ because, in his words, life then was ‘chaotic and evil …

obviously and palpably bad’.23 Faced with social disintegration, Hulton proposed that

his ‘new age’ would require the pursuit of spiritual ‘truth’, the embracing of the rapid

change in art and science, and universal, regularized education. Hulton called for

more social planning but stopped short of advocating nationalization.

In the same vein, World Review addressed the latest cultural and political trends

as a form of education for a popular audience. Through it Hulton presented

the intellectual frame for an anticipated post-war world of social planning and

reconstruction. Nicholson’s correspondence with Brumwell reveals how eager

and industrious he was in the advice he gave for ‘This Changing World’. Many

of the authors he proposed, and whom Brumwell commissioned, were regular

correspondents if not visitors to Carbis Bay. Several had written for Circle and it is clear

that the ethos of Circle runs through ‘This Changing World’. Nicholson’s degree of

infl uence on the series is refl ected, perhaps, in the fact that Brumwell had not even

heard of Lewis Mumford until Nicholson put him forward as an author. ‘What’s the

use’, asked an exasperated Nicholson, ‘of our getting hold of these Johnnys such as

Mumford to write for us in “Circle” if you don’t read them?’24

As well as Read and Mumford, following Nicholson’s advice, J. D. Bernal, John

Summerson, Kathleen Raine, C. H. Waddington, Karl Mannheim, Gabo and others

were lined up to articulate in World Review a modernist vision for the post-war world.

Some of these had been directly involved in discussions going on in Cornwall; in

the summer of 1941, for example, Mannheim went to stay with the Hepworth-

Nicholsons where he led a ‘debate’ about planning.25 Two themes seem to recur

through the articles, which cover a diversity of subjects. First, in every discipline, the

authors claim to be in the midst of a period of unprecedented change. For example,

Bernal maintains that ‘more has been found out at large and in detail about nature

and man in the last thirty years than in the whole of history’.26 These new forms

and new knowledge all have the potential to improve life though it often seems

that the rapidity of change also contributes to the chaos of a world at war with

fascism. Secondly, there are recurrent parallels drawn between different disciplines.

Mannheim observes, for example, that modern sociology follows modern biology

in that ‘both seem to focus their attention on structure and organisation, and

to recognise the signifi cance of these for the behaviour of the cell as well as the

human.’27 Order and coordination are the recurring patterns, and education and

understanding the requisites for a cooperative society that can harness the potential

of these parallel revolutions. Education and knowledge are posited, deliberately,

as alternatives to Nazism: ‘Hitler hates fl at roofs’, John Summerson observes at the

opening of his essay on architecture.28

While the War raged, there were networks of left-leaning intellectuals debating

and laying the ground for a radical political repositioning after the War. With the

prospect of a national physical fabric half-destroyed and the memory of social failure

in the 1930s, a socialist understanding of the state came to the fore. The ideology

of planning, of greater state intervention and protection, was at the centre of this

political shift. The networks that developed such ideals included those who had been

at the heart of the utopian modernist project of the pre-war years. Many of their ideas

did come to fruition in the policies of the post-war Labour government and in the

application of planning to the economy, society and the environment. Ironically,



however, it was not their abstract art that became associated with that political

agenda. Nor was it the realism of Coldstream that they had feared. Instead, it was the

modern-ish fi guration of Moore’s Family Groups. Though she had been horrifi ed by

Moore’s Madonna and Child, 1943–44, which preceded the Family Groups, Hepworth

also seemed to seek to square the circle and to address overtly the subject of the

politics of the welfare state. In her pictures of surgical operations of 1947 and 1948 she

celebrated shared human endeavour just at the moment that a socialist government

introduced universal health care. For Hepworth, the establishment of a welfare state

represented the achievement of long-held ambitions for better social cooperation and

for the integration of art, design, science and society. It was an achievement based, in

part, on ideas generated and nurtured through the network of contacts that Nicholson

had maintained even from the far west of Cornwall. He might have appeared ‘isolated’

to Robin Ironside but in fact the ideas and ideals of Nicholson’s circle were embedded

in the post-war political settlement, in theory at least.29

A touching symbol of an impassioned defence of modernist values in wartime is the

young Peter Lanyon, serving with the RAF, carrying with him through the invasion

of Italy a photograph of Gabo’s Spiral Theme. By the end of the War, the hope which that

talismanic presence symbolized had become less confi dent. Writing home just after

VE Day, Lanyon observed:

We are either the fathers of a new hopeful but austere and courageous world

or we are the lost generation.30

In response, on his return to Cornwall, he tried to use constructivist ideas and

aesthetics to express the experience of homecoming. The landscape of Cornwall

became a symbol of that homecoming as the process of return and re-acquaintance

made Lanyon aware of his identity as a Cornishman.

During 1946 and 1947 Lanyon produced what he called his ‘generation’ series.

Most of the paintings are clearly landscapes but landscapes with an evident symbolic

level of signifi cation. In Yellow Runner he depicted a horse secured in a stockade which

is shown as if beneath the ground and the sea, that inner space linked umbilically to

the surface of the ground.31 The artist identifi ed the horse as a symbol of his personal

heritage and so the distinctive Cornish landscape becomes a protective structure

for his own identity. A similar inner, subterranean space is suggested in Prelude in

which thin glazes and a process of scraping derived from Nicholson are employed

to create a sequence of overlapping curving surfaces reminiscent of the forms of

Gabo’s paintings as well as his constructions. The title refers to the imminent birth

of Lanyon’s fi rst child and so the image becomes one associated with birth and

generation. Semi-transparent enclosures, uterine and seed-pod-like, synthesizing the

formal language of Gabo with the theme of nature and landscape, became common

images in the art of St Ives in the late 1940s. The return from the War, the land and

notions of regeneration are synthesized.

The association of the English landscape and the end of the War was common.

With reference to Moore, Penelope Curtis and Fiona Russell have suggested that

the threatened landscape was itself memorialized in post-war sculpture.32 As it

had during the War, the landscape continued to provide a powerful symbol of

permanence and British nationhood. Leon Underwood proposed a memorial to the

War that would have been carved into the top of the coastal cliffs, drawing together

ancient British artistic traditions and a more recently resonant symbol of Britain’s


Chris Stephens

identity and separateness from continental Europe. If the rural landscape was,

once again, invoked to represent the nation, there were moves to ensure that it was

owned by the nation as well. There is a sense in which radical change in the political

management of the landscape was considered as a social pay-off for the sacrifi ces of

the War. The country itself would become the memorial.

The English countryside had been the subject of one of the great wartime

governmental reports that came to shape the welfare state.33 This was in response,

primarily, to anxieties around the impact of modernity in terms of the suburb, the

motor car and the road. There was perceived to be a contest between the idea of

the countryside as an amenity for those beyond the immediate area and its local

occupation and use, and it was an issue of both national and regional identity. The

newly established state reinforced the idea of a national community, and, as the

nationalism of the War years was extended into ideas of citizenship and entitlement,

the issue of equal access to amenities became more pressing. The point was made in

a popular critique of pre-war suburban development in Picture Post which published

a dramatic photograph of the cliffs east of St Ives with the caption, ‘This is the sea

coast – beloved birthright of every Briton’.34 As this might have anticipated, a tension

between national rights and local needs was an inevitable consequence which was all

the more fraught in places associated with recreation such as St Ives.

The 1930s had seen a powerful drive for the establishment of National Parks.

The campaigners had two key priorities: the preservation of the landscape and its

protection from modernization, and the provision of an amenity for the population

at large, an imperative based on a belief in the physical and spiritual benefi ts to be

gained from rural places.35 As a consequence, discussions of National Parks tended

to insist on accessibility and to focus on those areas that offered ‘unenclosed country’

where ‘the natural character is still intact’.36 Out of this campaigning sprung two

wartime reports: those of the Scott Committee on Land Utilization in Rural Areas

(July 1942), and the Uthwatt Report (August 1942) which included a proposal for the

compulsory purchase of land.37 Underlying both was a belief in the idea of a ‘natural’

state in which the landscape remained untouched by human intervention and it was

perhaps the prioritizing of this idea of a natural, pre-civilized realm that emboldened

both committees to at least consider the possibility of nationalizing the countryside

in a radical assertion not only of the greater social good but also of an idea of a natural

state that took precedence over land ownership.

Lanyon would have been against such an appropriation of the landscape by the

state. He had already written of his fear of Planning: ‘life itself permits of no plan’,

he wrote; ‘“Planning” is the last resort of suburbia gone scientifi c.’38 The gathering

pace of legislation for National Parks posed a specifi c problem. Following the end

of the War, two further reports looked exclusively at the issue of National Parks.

The 1945 Dower Report proposed ten National Parks, one of which would be the

Cornish coastline. The Hobhouse Report of two years later, however, removed it as too

extended to be workable.39 These reports reaffi rmed the dual priorities of preservation

of ‘the characteristic beauty of the landscape’ and the provision of an amenity.40 All

the reports adhered to the idea that the countryside ‘should be a national playground

for air and exercise’.41 To this end, Hobhouse asserted that every major population

centre in Britain should have a National Park within reach. Each would, therefore,

require satisfactory transport links and, as well as ‘ample access’, each should offer

‘facilities within it for open-air recreation’, including the provision of interpretation

and explanation and the removal of ‘eyesores’.42 This then was not just a question of

preservation but also one of improvement, management and mediation.



The debates around whom and what the countryside was for were especially

resonant in Cornwall. St Ives was, of course, a major resort at a time when over 70 per

cent of British holidaymakers took their vacation at the British seaside.43 The apparent

sacrifi ce of local values for the tourist industry had been a concern for Lanyon, and

others, since the 1930s. The apparent displacement of traditional local industries such

as fi shing by the vulgar entertainments demanded by the holiday trade developed

into a polarization of local and in-comer. In 1949, Lanyon announced a new

departure in his art, rejecting abstract and symbolic imagery for an engagement with

more specifi c external references. He explicitly tied this change of direction to his

rejection of Nicholson and Hepworth on ‘moral and aesthetic’ grounds. He asserted

the importance of subject matter, writing of an art in which he developed external

references that had previously been considered ‘impurities’. One might see in this

shift in direction the rejection of the arch-modernists for an art that was not just

more solidly rooted in a specifi c locale but more rooted in the world beyond art in a

broader sense.

Disagreements over landscape and its uses in Cornwall also came to refl ect wider

issues in post-war Britain and to reveal ideological differences amongst artists. In

1961, there was a proposal to open a new tin mine at Carnelloe, close to the village of

Zennor, west of St Ives. The campaign against the mine was led by the painter Patrick

Heron, whose home overlooked the affected area. Heron’s insistence on the need to

preserve the beauty and natural character of the landscape was countered by Lanyon,

the sole supporter for the scheme, arguing for the value of local jobs, and pride, over

that of the preservation of a visual amenity. He wrote,

When the new arrived see the revenge of time creep up on their door steps,

they wail out that we destroy the beauty of their views. What view do they

think the Cornishman has, who desires above all to make his own riches, but

is barred by some concept of beauty that denies him the honour of his labour.44

While Heron’s attitude to the landscape was, primarily, as a visual amenity, he also

revealed anxieties about the relationship between the place and its population. In a

letter to Ben Nicholson about the battle, he observed that there were no native miners

left in Cornwall; the last time a mine was reopened, labour had to be brought in from

Eastern Europe. ‘Just imagine 100 council houses in Zennor’, he wrote, ‘imagine

importing West Indians and building a housing estate at Zennor, and then the mine

going bust.’45 The Heron–Lanyon stand-off both exposed a signifi cant disagreement

over the politics of place and echoed a disagreement over art’s autonomy or

commitment. At the same time, Heron’s letter shows how underlying such local

events could be wider anxieties about British identity and the tension between

indigenous and immigrant populations.

The turning point for Lanyon had come around the same time that Henry Moore

reacted against the humanitarian optimism that seemed to inhabit his work of the

post-war moment and recuperated the tensions and anxieties of the late 1930s. With

Helmet Head No.1, 1950, Moore seems to have returned to the ambiguous theme of

protection and aggression of The Helmet, 1939–40, which he had made at the outbreak

of World War Two. His lonely humanoid and Lanyon’s striving for an art attached

to a real place both emerge from a moment of disillusion and anxiety, as the post-

war world settled into the new threat of the Cold War, which deepened in June

1950 when war broke out between North and South Korea with the United Nations

sending troops shortly afterwards.


Chris Stephens

2 Peter Lanyon, St Just, 1953. Oil on board, 2438 x 1219 mm. Private Collection. © Estate of Peter Lanyon.



War seems not to have been far from Peter Lanyon’s mind when, at the beginning

of 1952, dramatically changing his style and practice again, he set out to paint what

he called ‘a Crucifi xion’. His correspondence through the rest of that year documents

the progress of the work until, believing it to be complete, he wrote ‘I have just

constructed and executed Christ and the result is like the residue of a napalm bomb.’46

Subsequently, after his return from four months in Italy in May 1953, Lanyon deemed

the painting unresolved and repainted it. It was, eventually, named after the Cornish

mining town of St Just-in-Penwith when it was exhibited in Patrick Heron’s Space in Colour exhibition in July 1953. Thus, the black vertical form that dominates the image

is both the cross and a reference to the many mines that pepper the land around St

Just.47 As I have argued elsewhere, the association of St Just with ritualized sacrifi ce

had deeper meanings for the artist.

Physically, St Just could lay claim to being the most original painting made in

Britain in this period (plate 2). Though aspects and areas of it may be compared with

contemporary painting in the United States and in Europe it is, equally, distinct from

both abstract expressionist and tachiste paintings. The image has been achieved

through the successive layering of oil-rich coats of paint. While the predominant

colours are the acidic and olive greens and cold greys that suggest the landscape to

which its title refers, these seem to have resulted from Lanyon’s late, clearly fervid,

reworking of it in the early summer of 1953.48 Under-lying strata of paint can

be glimpsed through these upper layers and have been revealed by the repeated

scratching, scraping back and possible abrasion of the surface. Though the overall

image coheres, on close inspection the composition is strangely fragmentary. The

delicate balance between areas of strong colour, layers of thick paint and suggestive

linear elements leads to the painting appearing sub-divided, as if broken down into

zones. It never fragments but it is possible to understand why Lanyon was horrifi ed

when he fi rst saw it in a gallery, fearing ‘it was all bits of string and disconnected

happenings’.49

Lanyon’s correspondence reveals a struggle over meaning that might have

predisposed him to fi nding the work fragmentary and unresolved. His letters reveal

both his initial intention and the layering in his mind of different readings. He

seems to have conceived it, originally, as ‘a Crucifi xion’. As the work developed, his

commentary fused mythic associations, variations of Christian iconography, local

history and a sense of his own identity. He associated the image with a disaster at the

Levant tin mine, near St Just. Associating a personal psychological process with that

historical event, he wrote of being on,

… a pilgrimage from inside the ground, as if I were the only one saved from

the Levant disaster and as if I moved, the unlucky mourner, along the gale-

ridden coast to St Just trying to adjust the bones of the miners shovelled into

coffi ns to represent beings.50

If this suggests a process of personal psychic reparation as much as a symbolic

historic one, Lanyon at the same time confl ates the imagery with more traditional

iconography. He draws comparisons between the pharaonic myth of Osiris, who is

murdered and his body dismembered and scattered abroad, and the broken bodies

of the miners. The numerous dogs of St Just suggest Anoubis, the jackal-headed

deity who helps Osiris’s wife Isis gather and reassemble his fragmented corpse. That

Isis had recurred in several of Lanyon’s post-war paintings suggests the subject had

an abiding relevance. Lanyon was a disciple of Adrian Stokes – much more so than

3 Peter Lanyon, Corsham Summer, 1952. Oil on board, 1828 x 620 mm. Private Collection. © Estate of Peter Lanyon.


Chris Stephens

of Gabo and Nicholson – and it is hard to believe that

Stokes’s association with Melanie Klein’s theories of art

as a process of psychic reparation for fantasized infantile

damage had not left its mark on Lanyon’s own theory of

creativity and informed his engagement with myths of

rebirth.

The imagery that Lanyon’s commentaries suggest

also associates the painting with recent artistic practice

and historic events. An iconography of broken bodies

and bare bones calls to mind Picasso’s Charnel House, 1944–45, and the prone, skeletal fi gures of Henry

Moore which had themselves been associated with

memories of photographs of the concentration camps.

Graham Sutherland had referred to such photographs

when he addressed the Crucifi xion in 1946; Lanyon could

not have approached the subject without having in mind

that work and recent paintings by Francis Bacon around

the same theme. Indeed, Lanyon associated St Just with

Bacon when he described its fi rst state as ‘all gossip and

mocking and Napalm burning but without the Francis

Bacon illustrative obsession’.51

The comparison with Bacon is important. Lanyon’s

confl ation of the Crucifi xion with the victims sacrifi ced

in pursuit of Cornwall’s mineral wealth resonated with

Baconian associations. ‘Then those bits of miners’, he

wrote, ‘so much meat hanging from the man-engine

collected up into shovel-fulls and processed to St Just.’52

There are obvious echoes in Lanyon’s rhetoric of Bacon’s

profaning of the Crucifi xion by associating it with the

butcher’s shop, as seen for example in his Painting 1946

in which a demonic dictator is surrounded by joints of

meat in what appears to be Hitler’s Chancellery.53 There

is no suggestion of salvation in Bacon’s crucifi xions

and, for all his use of mythic images of reparation and

reconstruction, there is little optimism in Lanyon’s

either. Bacon’s art was portrayed by critics as an

articulation of the human condition, of existential crisis,

in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust. We cannot

understand Lanyon’s attitude to landscape if we fail to

recognize in it similar goals.

Lanyon used place or landscape as Bacon used the

fi gure as a vehicle for expressions of states of being:

of unease, of apprehension, of being in the world.

Implicitly – or otherwise – the works and these themes

are historically specifi c. Alongside his Crucifi xion,

during 1952 Lanyon painted two tall, thin canvases.

Their format and composition lend them a fi gurative

quality so that they become like sentinels. Later, in

retrospect, Lanyon suggested they might have served as

the wings of a triptych with St Just as the central panel;



as martyred saints, perhaps. The titles of the pair allude to landscape and the seasons:

Harvest Festival and Corsham Summer (plate 3). While the former may lead one to think

of procreation and growth, nature and fecundity, the other refers, most obviously,

to Corsham Court where Lanyon taught at the Bath Academy of Art. The verticality

may suggest the representation of landscape as experienced in time. An unpublished

text by Lanyon on the Capability Brown landscape at Corsham also reveals a quite

different idea of landscape.

At Corsham Court there is a device called the ha ha, it is a ditch which

divides the foreground from the distance between an avenue of trees. This

is artifi cial, a part of landscape gardening. It is also the edge of the plateau

which at other times supported the Pietas and Annunciations of renaissance

painters and also made a platform for the partners in Giorgione’s ‘Fete

Champetre’. Today standing on the edge of the ha ha (on the middle distance

of this contrived landscape) with back to foreground, modern man is less

aware of gentle perambulations than of apprehension, a feeling that the back

is not guarded. His is the situation of the condemned man who like millions

in the last twenty years have faced similar ditches.54

With this extraordinary statement the artist projects onto a classic landscape not just

a personal sense of apprehension but one that he associates explicitly with the victims

of totalitarianism. Like Bacon’s fi gures, Lanyon’s landscapes come to stand for more

than simply the ostensible subject indicated by the title.

Lanyon recognized a need to reappraise the modernist project in light of the

War, shifting from being a follower of the constructivism of Nicholson and Gabo

to an artist engaged explicitly with landscape and place. Through those themes, he

struggled to synthesize historical injustice and suffering, ideas of restitution and

redemption, the mythic and the particular, the universal condition of man and the

specifi c historical events of the recent past. In this, he occupied common ground with

such artists as Francis Bacon. Where he differed was in the way his paintings were

made and how they look, and these aspects too mark his distinctiveness from the

generation with which he had been associated previously. His paintings of 1952–54

secure Lanyon as one of the most profi cient of those artists who exploited the material

qualities of the paint itself as an expressive and descriptive device. Though the images

are abstract, the paint of which they are made not only suggests landscapes, rocks,

and perhaps the dung of the farmyard but also conjures a less specifi c sense of the

visceral, of the body as fl uid, and of violence and abjection.

In his commentaries on the painting that would eventually be called St Just, Lanyon twice referred to napalm. Though fi rst used by the British air force during

the bombing of Dresden in February 1945, this new technology was in the

common consciousness through its deployment during the Korean War (1950–53)

and it had been the subject of considerable controversy during 1952 in particular.55

Napalm does not pierce or break the body like traditional weaponry but rather

smothers the fi gure and burns, obscuring if not obliterating the body. In this

way, one might see Lanyon’s language of layered and damaged paint forming a

disjointed, all-over composition as to some degree descriptive of this phenomenon.

The body ‘is nowhere’ because it has been erased through an act of aggression as if

prosecuted by contemporary technologies of war.56 Thus a physical characteristic

of the painting takes on a pertinent signifying function, embodying an idea of the

vapourized body.


Chris Stephens

Lanyon’s use of new techniques and styles is inextricably wound together with a

shift in focus and ideology. The depth of the artist’s achievement lies in his perceptive

recognition in 1945 that the world had changed and that what he did in art would

need to change too if it were to be relevant. The adaptation of his inheritance from

Gabo, especially, is perhaps best seen in the sculpture related to St Just (plate 4). While

he retained the term ‘construction’ for all of his three-dimensional works, the work

seems fl uently – and perhaps consciously – to articulate the distance travelled from

the idealism of his masters. The sculpture is made simply from broken shards of thin

glass, tenuously held together with glue, with lines and patches of dry black paint

4 Peter Lanyon, Construction for ‘St Just’, 1952. Oil paint and Bostik on glass, 653 x 284 x 255 mm. London: Tate. © Estate of Peter Lanyon.



Biography of Place and Time, London, 2008; Alex Seago, Burning the Box of Beautiful Things: The Development of a Postmodern Sensibility, Oxford, 1995;

Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture 1945–59,

Manchester and New York, 1995; David Robbins, ed., The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, Cambridge, MA and

London, 1990; Hal Foster and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, The Independent Group: A Special Issue of October, 94, Fall 2000; David Alan Mellor followed

his A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935–55, London,

1987, with The Sixties Art Scene in London, London, 1993; Thomas Crow,

The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent 1955–69,

London, 1996; British ‘pop’ artists tend to be included in most surveys

of this much-surveyed movement but most recently it was the subject

of exhibitions curated by Marco Livingstone, Pop Art UK: British Pop Art 1956–1972, Modena, 2004 and British Pop, Bilbao, 2005; the most

thorough comparison of British pop with its American sibling is

Pop Art: US/UK Connections 1956–1966, Houston, TX, 2001. Naturally,

in addition to these citations there have been numerous articles on

different aspects of British art of the period.

6 Patrick Heron letter to Bryan Wynter, 19 May 1951, estate of Bryan

Wynter, Penzance.

7 Lawrence Alloway, Nine Abstract Artists: Their Work and Theory, London,

1954, 12.

8 Charles Harrison, ‘The place of St Ives’, Art Monthly, 84, March 1985, 9.

9 Graham Sutherland letter to Kenneth Clark, nd [summer 1942], Tate

Archive 8812/1/3.

10 Naum Gabo, ‘Letter from Naum Gabo to Herbert Read’, Horizon, 10: 53,

July 1944.

11 Quoted in Bird, The St Ives Artists, 2008, 57. Martin Hammer and

Notes1 There have, of course, been a number of signifi cant contributions to

the writing of histories of post-war British art. For example, Margaret

Garlake, New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society, New Haven and

London, 1998; James Hyman, The Battle for Realism, New Haven and

London, 2001; collections of essays including Margaret Garlake, ed.,

Artists and Patrons in Post-War Britain, Aldershot, 2001; Serge Guilbaut,

ed., Collapse: The View from Here #1: Ideologies of Britishness in Post-War Art and Culture, Vancouver, 1995; Simon Faulkner and Anandi Ramamurthy,

Visual Culture and Decolonisation in Britain, Aldershot, 2006; A Very British Issue: Third Text, 22: 91, March 2008, and exhibitions and catalogues

including Blast to Freeze: British Art in the Twentieth Century, Kunstmuseum

Wolfsburg, 2002; Martin Harrison, Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties, London, 2002; Let Us Face the Future: Art britànica 1945–1968,

Barcelona, 2010.

2 One might cite as a typical but far from unique example, Hal Foster,

Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, eds,

Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, London and

New York, 2004. The point was also reinforced by the numerous

submissions of papers on the Independent Group to the conference

from which this publication originates, as noted by David Peters

Corbett in his opening remarks.

3 Max Kozloff letter to the author, 6 April 1995.

4 Serge Guilbaut, ‘Introduction’, in Serge Guilbaut, ed., Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1945–1964, Cambridge, MA

and London 1990, xiii.

5 Alastair Grieve, Constructed Abstract Art in England: A Neglected Avant-Garde, New Haven and London, 2005; Michael Bird, The St Ives Artists: A

smeared across the surfaces of the glass and the joints. The bits of glass are, for the

most part, rough-edged, as if broken and recovered; that they are recycled detritus

is confi rmed by dried putty along the edge of at least one element, indicating that it

came from an old window or greenhouse. This is an awkward and fragile structure,

like a house of cards in both appearance and its contingent vulnerability. It seems

like a dark and sardonic parody of the elegant, cohesive and coherent assembly of

transparent Perspex that is Gabo’s Spiral Theme, the image of hope that Lanyon had

clung on to during wartime.

Lanyon’s development is one episode in the transition of modernist art in Britain

from a pre-war mode to that of the post-war moment. The focus provided by

his context within the grouping of St Ives reinforces the important genealogical

progression from pre-war constructivism to post-war pessimism that his art

represents. We only fully understand that art, however, when we step outside the

confi nes of the historical construct of ‘St Ives’ and start to consider it beyond simply

the rubric of landscape and to position it in relation to other forms of art and to

artists with apparently different intentions. Then we might see Lanyon and his

contribution alongside not only British but also continental European and American

contemporaries. That is not to claim a place for Lanyon in a dominant canon but to

suggest a more complex, layered, multi-locational idea of artistic modernism. This

may be true of all periods of history, of course, but there is an argument to say that

cultural production was especially fragmented in the west in the years immediately

following the Second World War as the possibility and location of modernism – as

well as its purposes and the forms which the art might take – were evidently up

for negotiation. The challenge for historians is to identify and describe patterns in

this fragmented history without denying the multiplicity of intentions, forms and

meanings at issue.


Chris Stephens

Christina Lodder suggest that work on Spiral Theme probably started in

early summer 1941: Constructing Modernity: The Art and Career of Naum Gabo, New Haven and London, 2000, 280.

12 Barbara Hepworth letter to Herbert Read, 8 May [1940], Herbert Read

Archive, McPherson Library of the University of Victoria, BC

[HR/BH – 30].

13 G. L. K. Morris, ‘Art chronicle: English abstract painting’, Partisan Review, 10: 3, May–June 1943, 226.

14 Margot Eates letter to Ben Nicholson 27 January 1941, Tate Archive

8717.1.2.801.

15 Barbara Hepworth letter to Herbert Read, nd [March/April 1942],

Herbert Read Archive.

16 Herbert Read, ‘Vulgarity and impotence: Speculations on the present

state of the arts’, Horizon, 5: 28, April 1942, 267.

17 Herbert Read letter to Ben Nicholson, nd [Xmas 1939], Tate Archive

8717.1.2.3652.

18 Barbara Hepworth letter to Herbert Read, 7 February [1940], Herbert

Read Archive.

19 Ben Nicholson ‘Notes on “abstract” art’, Horizon, 4: 22, October 1941,

272.

20 Herbert Read, ‘This changing world I: Threshold of a new age –

Renaissance of decadence?’, World Review, June 1941.

21 Nicholson letter to Cecil Stephenson, 12 January 1941, Tate Archive

200324.19. The Picture Post under discussion was the issue for 4 January

1941.

22 ‘Cato’. Guilty Men, London, 1941.

23 Edward Hulton, The New Age, London, 1943, 8.

24 Ben Nicholson letter to J. R. M. Brumwell, 20 February 1941, copy in

Nicholson archive Tate Archive 8717.1.3.3.

25 Hepworth to Read, 8 April [1942], [HR/BH – 45]; Hepworth letter to

E. H. Ramsden, nd [August? 1941] Tate Archive 9310 (uncatalogued).

26 J. R. M. Brumwell, ed., This Changing World, 2nd edn, London, 1945, 15.

27 Brumwell, This Changing World, 77.

28 John Summerson, ‘This changing world 5: The new groundwork for

architecture’, World Review, October 1941, 25.

29 Robin Ironside, Painting since 1939, London, 1947, 23.

30 Peter Lanyon, letter to Mary Schofi eld, 16 May 1945, Schofi eld family

Papers, Cornwall.

31 This subject has been addressed in the recent literature on Lanyon:

Margaret Garlake, Peter Lanyon, London, 1998; Chris Stephens, Peter Lanyon: At the Edge of Landscape, London, 2000; Andrew Causey, Peter Lanyon: Modernism and the Land, London, 2006.

32 Penelope Curtis and Fiona Russell, ‘Henry Moore and the post-war

British landscape: Monuments ancient and modern’, in Jane Beckett

and Fiona Russell, eds, Henry Moore: Critical Essays, Aldershot, 2003,

125–41.

33 Scott Committee on Land Utilization in Rural Areas, appointed in

October 1941 and reporting in July 1942.

34 Clough Williams-Ellis, ‘What have we done to our country?’, Picture Post, 14: 1, 3 January 1942.

35 See, for example, G. M. Trevelyan in CPRE Standing Committee on

National Parks, The Case for National Parks in Great Britain, London, July

1938.

36 Vaughan Cornish, National Parks and the Heritage of Scenery, London, 1930,

viii.

37 Royal Commission on the Distribution of Industrial Population, Town and Country Planning: As portrayed in the Reports of the Barlow Commission and the Scott and Uthwatt Committees, being No.1 of the Staples ‘Reconstruction’ Digest, London, 1942. See also Sir Gwilym Gibbon, Reconstruction and Town and Country Planning – with an examination of the Uthwatt and Scott Reports, London,

1942.

38 Peter Lanyon letter to Ben Nicholson, 22 September 1944, Tate

Archive 8717.1.2.2167.

39 Report of the National Parks Committee (Hobhouse), Ministry of Town and

Country Planning, London, 1947.

40 Harold M. Abrahams, ed., Britain’s National Parks, London, 1959.

41 Norman Browning, National Parks and Access to the Countryside, London,

1950.

42 Abrahams, Britain’s National Parks.43 David Lowenthal and Hugh C. Prince, ‘The English landscape’, The

Geographical Review, 54: 3, New York, April 1964, 320.

44 Draft letter to Cornishman, 1961, quoted in Stephens, 2000, 92.

45 Patrick Heron letter to Ben Nicholson, 24 May 1962, Tate Archive

8717.1.2.1633.

46 Peter Lanyon, letter to Ivon Hitchens, nd [late 1952, beginning 1953].

Copy in Peter Lanyon Archive, Newlyn.

47 It has been suggested that the synthesis of themes may derive from

the fact that the town was associated with the Crucifi xion through its

cycle of Medieval Passion Plays with Golgotha relocated to the green

in the town centre: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The religious

theme: Stephen Laird refl ects, 50 years on from the...-a0188584137.

48 For a more extensive analysis of the painting’s physical make-up see

Margaret Garlake, ‘Making St Just’, in Chris Stephens, ed., Peter Lanyon, exh. cat., Tate St Ives, 2010, 106–15.

49 Peter Lanyon letter to Roland Bowden, nd [14 July 1953]. Tate Archive

942.30.

50 Peter Lanyon letter to Roland Bowden, 20 April 1952, Tate Archive

942.1.

51 Peter Lanyon letter to Roland Bowden 16 December 1952, Tate

Archive 942.22.

52 Peter Lanyon letter to Lady Mander, 17 March 1952, copy in Peter

Lanyon Archive.

53 For a discussion of Bacon’s sources amongst the visual culture of Nazi

Germany see Martin Hammer and Chris Stephens, ‘“Seeing the story

of one’s time”: Appropriations from Nazi photography in the work

of Francis Bacon’, in David Alan Mellor and Ysanne Holt, eds, Bacon Reframed a themed issue of Visual Culture in Britain, 10: 3, November 2009,

315–51.

54 Untitled MS, nd [1952–7?], Peter Lanyon Archive.

55 Callum MacDonald, Britain and the Korean War, Oxford, 1990, 81–2.

56 I am extremely grateful to Anne Wagner for suggesting the possibility

of this reading of Lanyon’s style as a metaphor.

‘The morrow we left behind’: Landscape and the Rethinking of Modernism, 1939–53

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