Though the diaries of the Scottish painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912 – 2004) remain unpublished, they are available through the Barns-Graham Trust in Edinburgh, within an archive assembled by the artist and her studio manager, Rowan James. Together, they curated the repository in 1987 as a way to introduce her work to new audiences and support emerging artists with funding similar to the kind she received from the Edinburgh College of Art. Once somewhat overlooked, her work is now gaining renewed attention. Last year Hatton Gallery in Newcastle hosted a major retrospective, Paths to Abstraction, and two new books about her are set to be published this year. While her personal writings are not yet widely available, whispers appear in online art texts, in articles and exhibition guides.
Courtesy of the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust
One passage that recurs is of Barns-Graham arriving in Cornwall alone, aged 27, towards the end of World War II. As she steps off the train, it is raining, and she is disappointed by the bleak first impression of St Ives, where many of the early modernists had settled during the war. She arrived shortly after Barbara Hepworth and Margaret Mellis, who she lived with for a while. The latter was a friend of hers from Edinburgh, who had also hosted Hepworth, unlocking a network of connections that she became a part of soon after her arrival. Immersed within the avant-garde enclaves of the town, her diaries tell of friendships with Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson and attending sherry parties with guests of honour like the critic Herbert Reed.
In his latest film, A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, Mark Cousins crafts a timely profile of the artist. Heavily researched, the documentary draws on excerpts from her diaries read aloud by Tilda Swinton and audio recordings of her interviews which show her to be a prominent member of the post-war St Ives School. While conversations with art historians such as Lynne Green – who authored the artist’s monograph in 2001 – reveal how, despite her engagement, she was excluded from major shows and critically overlooked. By the 1960s, she had largely been written out of the art historical narrative, with none of her prolific work was included in the Royal Academy’s landmark exhibition British Painting 1952 – 1977. As Cousins expresses, in a highly competitive, male-dominated art world, it was not easy for artists who were women to be recognised on their terms. Barbara Hepworth held much of the limited space available for female artists to gain recognition and wasn’t lowering the drawbridge after her.
Glacier (Blue Cave) (1950)
Examine Glacier (Blue Cave) (1950), part of a life-long series that occupied Barns-Graham’s thinking. She seems to see past the white exterior of the glacier to the geological formation of the environment; its slow, obstinate erosion. Under its own weight, ice cracks, splitting into thick glossy sheets, an endless process that continues sculpting the earth. Light filters through, producing a spectrum of blues, like cracking open Kyanite. History is contained here. It feels like glimpsing the secrets of the world. Plainly this is a spiritual experience for Barns-Graham. Her iterations of geological formations show an artist continually reaching for ways to articulate this experience within a landscape. It is easy, therefore, to see how the ecological focus of her work was aligned with Hepworth. Cousins explains how critics assumed she’d taken these forms from her contemporary. We know she was influenced by her crystal drawings from her diaries – and what of those Hepworth-esque elliptical slices repeating throughout Glacier (Blue Cave)?
Ice Cavern (1950)
Cousins looks acutely at the way Barns-Graham worked and illustrates that her influences extended beyond art. There were core instincts at play. She was mathematically inclined and fascinated with the idea that nature had a grid and a form. She studied Darcy Wentworth Thompson’s Growth and Form and sought to articulate natural formations within her practice. Whereas Hepworth’s attraction was prehistoric: the history of sculpture, its social function and parallels to ancient stones, Barns-Graham’s work with the glacier is grounded in an experience of the physical environment. These are the forms she sought to create. A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things traces her trip out of St Ives and into Grindelwald Switzerland, where she was confronted with the formidable 300-metre-high rock face and the incredible power of glacier gorge bear. This experience infected her brain argues Cousins, who enlarges her tiny glacier etching on the big screen, bringing them into cinematic focus.
Cousins shows that Barns-Graham worked prolifically, with absolute focus. A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is a vital piece of renewed critical attention for the artist. But, there is another side to the reappraisal of her work that the film brings to the fore: that of the networks and connections within the art world that have forged the extension of her reach in recent years. Alone, she faced issues with self-representation. She was renowned for speaking her mind and expressing her dissatisfaction in gallery contexts. Additionally, as a woman, she faced discrimination from collectors who assumed female artists would have children and, therefore, short careers. It would take meeting Rowan James, in 1973 for this to change. James had a different kind of genius; she was business-minded and a great advocator. She became Wilhelmina’s business manager and confidante. She negotiated with institutions to exhibit Barns-Graham’s work to the highest standards and supported the cataloguing and preserving of her art at Balmungo House within the Trust which she helped to establish.
It was James who organised for the publication of Green’s memoir of Barns-Graham A Studio Life. Green is another central art world figure who showed a real interest in her work. Cousins draws on Green’s insights in the film, along with other art historians and curators from the Trust, situating her within a broader art historical context and acknowledging these connections to be the foundation for sustaining a legacy.
Courtesy of KVIFF
Coinciding with the cinematic release of A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things (in cinemas from October 18th), there is an exhibition dedicated to her life at Pallant House (until 20th October), and an exhibition of her screenprints are also at Gallery East, Woodbridge (from 20th September). An illustrated children’s book, An Introduction to the Life of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham With Activities by Annabel Wright and Kate Temple and a new collection which considers the impact of the artist’s visit to the Grindelwald Glacier on her subsequent work (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: The Glaciers) will also be published this year.
Agnès Houghton-Boyle is a critic and programmer based in London. Her writing features in Talking Shorts Magazine and Fetch London.
