Godson  &  Coles

Robert Adams (1917-1984) studied at the Northampton School of Art from 1933 to 1944. He participated in various group exhibitions during the war and had his first one-man show, of sculpture, at Gimpel Fils in London in 1947. His early sculpture of this period consisted of forms abstracted from natural objects, made in wood, plaster and stone. After his one-man show he made several extended trips to Paris, where he became interested in the work of Brancusi and Julio González.

In 1949 Adams began to work with metal and undertook a teaching post in industrial design at the Central School of Art and Design in London, which he held until 1960. While there he came into contact with Victor Pasmore and artists such as Kenneth Martin and Mary Martin who were pursuing the development of Constructivist ideas in Britain. He was interested in the link between art and architecture, as reflected in a large wall based relief he made in 1959 from reinforced concrete for the Municipal Theatre at Gelsenkirchen in Germany. In 1962, together with Hubert Dalwood (1924-76), Adams represented British sculpture at the Venice Biennale. His work of the 1960s often used welded steel sheets, sometimes perforated, as in Large Screen Form (1962; London, Tate). In the 1970s and until his death Adams' sculptural works, often made in bronze or stainless steel, remained abstract but of a less geometrical nature than his earlier work. Among his later public works was the large steel sculpture for Kingswell in Hampstead (1973), designed from a simple, Minimalist form.
 

Gillian Ayres (b. 1930) was born in London where she studied at the Camberwell School of art between 1946 – 1950. She was one of the first British painters to be influenced by American Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting. Ayres was among the artists who achieved prominence at the situation exhibition in 1960. Some of her work in the 50’s made use of Pollocks drip technique and in the 60’s she did some lushously coloured stain paintings. In the 70’s she introduced suggestions of floral motifs, creating some of the most sensuous images in recent British art. Ayres taught at the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham 1959 –66, St Martin School of Art, 1966 – 1978 and Winchester School of Art (as head of painting), 1979 – 81. She then moved to Wales and devoted herself fulltime to painting. Ayres was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Art in 1982, and in 1986 she was awarded the Order of the British Empire, and moved to Cornwall in 1987.

Venues her work was exhibited at include The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, Serpentine Gallery, London, and the Royal Academy of Art, London. In addition her work has been shown in various exhibitions of 20 th century British Art all over the world. Ayres has also won various prizes including the Blackstone Prize twice at the RA Summer Exhibition and the Gold Medal at the 7 th Triennale in India.

Trevor Bell (b. 1930) in Leeds, Yorkshire. He studied at the Leeds College of Arts between 1947 and 1952, where he met Terry Frost who directed him to St. Ives. Bell rented a cottage Tregerthen, Zennor, next door to Karl Weschke. He shared studio space with Brian Wall, the sculptor, at the Seamen’s Mission, now the St Ives Museum. Later he moved to a house in Nancledra, which was eventually bought by Roger Hilton. His works reflected the sculpture of waves and fields and were abstract based. He left St Ives in 1960, and became a Gregory Fellow at Leeds University, and taught briefly at Ravensbourne, Bradford and Winchester Schools of Art. Trevor Bell is now living and teaching in America.

In 1959 he won a prize at the Paris Biennale. Paintings of his are in the collections of the Tate Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum and the Museum of Art, Ft Lauderdale, Florida.

He has had many exhibitions since 1957 at, amongst others, Waddington Gallery, London, who held his first solo show, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany and the Institute for Contemporary Art, Florida. He has also exhibited his work in Taiwan, Slovenia and extensively in the United States of America, mainly in Florida.
 

Sandra Blow (1925 - 2006) was born in London and studied at the St Martins School of Art under Ruskin Spear from 1942 – 1946 and at the Academy in Rome from 1947-1948. In 1961 she won second prize for painting at the John Moores Liverpool exhibition and in the same year began teaching at the Royal College of Art. She has worked in a number of abstract styles, including gestural abstraction and Colour Field Painting, and she has experimented with adding various substances and or objects to the canvas. Sandra Blow considered herself an ‘academic abstract painter’, primarily concerned with such problems as balance and proportion – ‘issues that have been important since art began’ She has exhibited extensively all over the world, notably at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Tate Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, Gulbenkian Hall - Royal College of Art, The Hayward Gallery (London), The Royal Institute of Fine Arts (Glasgow), The Tate Gallery St Ives, The Newlyn Art Gallery (Cornwall), Galleria Origine, The Art Foundation (Rome), Palazzo Grassi (Venice), The Art Club (Chicago), Saidenburg Gallery, Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo (New York), North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (N. Carolina), The Carnegie Institute (Pittsburg), British Council Travelling Exhibitions to Canada, Australia & New Zealand and in The Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). In 1995 her international profile was raised still further when she completed a major commission to produce large screens for the Departure Lounge of London's Heathrow Airport.

Her work is included in many public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Albright-Knox Gallery - Buffalo, New York (USA), The Felton Bequest, Melbourne (Australia), The Tate Gallery (large work purchase, 1994), The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, The Peter Stuyvesant Collection, The Department of The Environment, The Department of Education and Science, Liverpool University, etc. (Great Britain).

Denis Bowen (1921-2006) was one of the most widely respected abstract painters of the post war period in London. Born in Kimberly, South Africa in 1921 he was brought up and educated in England, studying at Huddersfield School of Art, and following war service in the Navy, attended the Royal College of Art. Bowen emerged as one of the chief proponents of the 'Tachiste' movement in Britain, developing the influences of European ‘art informel’ painters like Soulanges and Mathieu. He was committed to gestural informal painting and ‘mark making’ which exploited chance and accident as part of an imaginative manipulation of paint. His approach was connected with the idea of ‘action painting’ for which Jackson Pollock is famous. It is something like free form or improvised jazz whereby no set pattern or preconception is planned out before the creation of the work itself. A great sense of mystery and excitement emerges. “Your mind needs to be empty when you paint – only then can you become active. I go into a state of hyperconsciousness when I’m working. I always know when paint reaches a point that satisfies my sensitivities.”

He used the chemical interaction between oil paint, pigment, and turpentine which produces an amorphous quality. The drying time between different chemical qualities results in his paintings resembling an imprint of time. A painting thus should look almost alive: “I call it freezing time” Bowen founded the New Vision Centre Gallery in 1956, taught at the Royal College of Art and has been an influential member of the ‘International Association of Art Critics’. He has exhibited widely since the 1950’s including the Redfern Gallery in 1958, the AIA and the Barbican and his works are in numerous public collections including three recent purchases by the Tate Gallery. Denis Bowen died 23 rd March 2006.

John Copnall (1928-2007), Painter and teacher, is the son of the sculptor Bainbridge Copnall. He studied under Henry Rushbury at the Royal Academy Schools during the early 1950's, winning the Turner Gold Medal in 1954 for landscape painting.

Living in Spain from 1955 to 1958, by the time he returned to England he was committed to abstraction exhibiting in a group show at Wildensteins in 1958.

He continued to teach and exhibit winning Arts Council Awards 1972-3, British Council Award 1979,and in 1989 was elected a member of the London Group.

Colour is the life force of John Copnall's work: “Painting is colour and colour is painting," this is the belief that Copnall continues to embrace with as much passion and enthusiasm as he ever has during his main stay of fifty years as a serious British artist.

The Arts Council, Aberdeen and Bristol public galleries and other notable collections hold examples.

Alan Davie (b. 1920) trained as a painter at Edinburgh College of Art from 1938 to 1940. For a while earned his living as a jeweler and jazz musician and also wrote poetry in the1940’s before returning to painting. He traveled widely in Europe, studying a wide range of modern art, including Jackson Pollock’s which he saw at the Guggenheim in Venice. This led Davie to adopt mythic imagery and forceful painterly gestures. From this time his pictures concentrated on themes of organic generation and sinister ritual, fluctuating between turbulent paintwork, animate presences and more geometric forms, sometimes in the same work. From 1953 to 1956 Davie taught in London at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where he became interested in African and Pacific art. As early as 1958 Davie emphasized the importance in his work of intuition, as expressed in the form of enigmatic signs. During the 1960s he represented such images with increasing clarity at the expense of gestural handling. In 1971 he made his first visit to the island of St Lucia, where he began to spend half of each year and which brought Caribbean influences to bear on his suggestive imagery.

In 1948 he held solo exhibitions in Florence and Venice and had work purchased by Peggy Guggenheim. In 1950 he had his first solo exhibition at the Gimpel Fils Gallery in London, where he exhibited frequently throughout his career, including including three further exhibition in the 1950’s and a solo show in 1961, in which the present painting was included. In 1957 he showed work at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 1958 he was part of the Critics Choice Exhibition selected by David Sylvester and also that year he had his work included in the Venice Biennale. In 1993 Davie was given a major retrospective at the Barbican Gallery in London.

Alan Davie's work has been widely exhibited and is included in numerous international public and private collections. Tate Britain, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Foundation Maeght and the Museum of Modern Art New York are some key examples.

Francis Davison (1919-84) was the son of George Davison, who made his fortune as a managing director of Kodak in the early 20th century. The Davison’s left England for the South of France when Francis was a small boy, partly for health reasons and partly for political reasons as George Davison had been widely criticized in the British press for his philanthropic gestures such as opening a house for the education of slum children from Liverpool and Welsh miners. A Cambridge graduate, Francis Davison began as a poet but turned to painting after Patrick Heron (a friend from St George’s school, Harpenden) had invited him to St Ives in Cornwall. Heron, who was already setting out on a career as a painter when they met, introduced Davison to fellow artist Margaret Mellis in 1946. Both Davison and Mellis were in wounded states at the time, recuperating from failed first marriages, but Heron’s hunch that they would get along proved correct and they married in 1948. They left St Ives shortly thereafter for Davison’s father’s place in the South of France but returned to England in 1950 and settled in Suffolk. It was not until then that Davison’s artistic career began in earnest.

Davison’s early paintings use unmodulated areas of colour, they are relatively small and generally worked on cardboard with artists oil paint. They confess their Cornish roots and in the beginning Davison followed Alfred Wallis’s advice not to use too many colours. But, progressively, colour took over and, while a strong sense of landscape remained, any hint of depiction was dismissed. In 1952 Davison started translating his paintings into collages and he never returned to the brush again.

His first showing was at Roland, Browse and Delbanco in 1955 at which nothing sold. He thereafter worked almost invisibly for 25 years before having a one-man show at the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, in 1981, and another one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, in 1982. Davison was also included in several group shows and his works have been exhibited regularly at the Redfern Gallery, London, which held a retrospective of his collages in 1986.

Davison died in 1984 at the age of 65, a few months after a major one-man exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1983, which deeply impressed the young Damien Hirst. By choice an outsider, working in isolation, Francis Davison has still to be fully acknowledged as one of the major British abstract artists and colourists of the 20th century.
 

Robyn Denny (b. 1930) was born in Abinger, Surrey, and studied at St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art from 1951-1957. In 1960 he helped to organize the first Situation Exhibition, an important landmark in British abstract art. In 1958 he had his first one man exhibition at Gallery One. He was a Principal Lecturer at the Slade School University of London between 1965 and 1972, and Visiting Professor at the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Art.

Exhibitions include one man shows at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Waddington Galleries and in 1973 a retrospective at the Tate Gallery. More recently his work was included in ‘ Art and the 60s: This was Tomorrow’ at Tate Britian, London.

Denny’s work can be found in many public collections, including the Tate Gallery, Liverpool; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

Terry Frost (1915-2003) is amongst the most important contemporary British artists today. He paints largely abstract works in acrylics, oils, collage and a wide range of other media, influenced by the Cornish environment, and counts amongst the figurative expressionists. He was originally encouraged to paint by Adrian Heath while a POW during WWII. He studied at the Camberwell and St. Ives schools of art and in 1951 worked as an assistant to Barbara Hepworth. After living in St. Ives, he moved to Newlyn in 1974.

He has exhibited at many of the major London galleries, including the Leicester Galleries, Waddington Gallery, and the Austin/Desmond and Mayor Gallery. Retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held at the Laing Gallery in Newcastle, the Serpentine in London, and more recently at the Royal Academy of Arts (October-November 2000) and he is well known in USA and UK. From 1964 to 1981 he taught at Reading University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy and was knighted in 1998. Terry Frost died on Monday, 1 st September 2003.

Adrian Heath (1920-1992) was born in Mamyo, Burma. He lived, until 1936, in a country house filled, appropriately, with paintings and engravings by the likes of Gainsborough, Romney and Leighton. In 1938, as a private pupil of Stanhope Forbes, he began producing elegant Academy-style nudes. During the war, in a POW camp, he discovered Emmons’ book on Sickert and subsequent study at the Slade School of Fine Art (1945 – 1947) encouraged the depiction of modern life. But greater exposure to modern painting (Matisse and Picasso at the V & A in 1946; the discovery of Villon in 1947) and friendship with Pasmore developed in him interest in abstraction, an interest that led to Heath’s Fifties paintings with their indebtedness to geometry, golden sections and root rectangles. In 1949 and 1951 he visited St Ives, where he met Ben Nicholson , and he formed a link between the St Ives School and London-based Constructivists such as Victor Pasmore and Kenneth and Mary Martin . During the early 1950s he was a significant figure in promoting abstract art--by organizing collective exhibitions at his London studio (at 22 Fitzroy Street) in 1951, 1952, and 1953, and by writing a short popular book on the subject, Abstract Painting: Its Origin and Meaning (1953), which begins with the sentence: 'There seems to be little understanding of the values of abstract painting and consequently no general appreciation of its qualities.' The exhibitions helped to inspire Lawrence Alloway 's book Nine Abstract Artists (1954). Heath's paintings of this time featured large, block-like slabs of colour, heavily brushed. He also made a few constructions. Later his paintings became freer and more dynamic.

The strongest paintings achieve something remarkable. Their roots may be in the visible, experienced world, but they combine a sense of presence with one of absence. Often concentrated around a central form, they frequently leave it unresolved, as though the subject had just left, but not before animating the surrounding space. Heath, in his Fifties abstractions, appeared to work his way inwards from the extremities of the canvas but these new paintings suggest the reverse. Their energy comes from a central, dramatically elusive, presence. Furthermore, through a sophisticated synthesis of the visible and the visual, the rooted and the constructed, Heath reconciles his twin interests to produce paintings that are, at best, metaphoric rather than literal. Adrain Heath continued to paint into his seventies. His last exhibition, a retrospective to commemorate his 70 th birthday was a combined effort by Austin/Desmond and the Redfern Gallery. He died in 1992 in France.

Ewen Henderson (1934-2000) was born in Staffordshire in 1934. He became interested in painting and sculpture over a period of seven years spent working for a timber company in Cardiff, South Wales. He left Wales in 1964 to join Goldsmith's College, London, and went on to study pottery under Hans Coper and Lucie Rie at the Camberwell School of Art, taking his diploma there in 1968. He then remained in London, teaching at Camberwell, Goldsmith's and the North London Collegiate School, whilst building up an international reputation as a potter.

Henderson is internationally respected for his highly original constructions - vessels and other sculptural work, variously coloured and with richly textured surfaces. His unique voice allowed him to examine the very meaning of existence, indeed many of his works give one an accute awareness of being caught in a web of time.

Henderson's continued fascination with primative tribal art and geological forms is evedent in his many of his works, which are suggestive of dark smoulderings of ancient, monolithis and pagan origins.

Ewen Henderson has exhibited extensively all over the world, for example at Galerie Besson, London , the Garth Clark Gallery, New York and the National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden.

Examples of his work can also be found in the permanent collections of some of the world’s major museums such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan and the Metropolitan Museum, New York.
 

Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1903, and studied at Leeds College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. She learned to carve stone while in Rome in 1925-6, together with her first husband, the sculptor John Skeaping. This was not part of the sculptor's normal training at that time, but considered the work of a stonemason. Hepworth thus aligned herself to the direct carving movement championed by modernist sculptors such as Brancusi, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska. After their return to London, Hepworth and Skeaping held their first important exhibition, showing mainly stone carvings of figures and animals, at the Beaux Arts Gallery in June 1928. A second joint exhibition followed at the gallery of Arthur Tooth & Sons, London, in October 1930. Hepworth's early carvings were well received and sold for substantial sums. Hepworth and Skeaping's relationship deteriorated, however, and the marriage was dissolved in 1933.

In 1931 Hepworth had met the painter Ben Nicholson (1894-1982), and they began to work in very close association from the spring of 1932. The forms in Hepworth's sculptures became more and more simplified. By the end of 1934 Hepworth was making totally abstract sculpture - not simplifications (or abstractions) of human or organic forms, as was the case with her contemporaries Brancusi and Arp. These works by Hepworth can be regarded as the first completely abstract sculptures made anywhere in the world, the equivalent of the carved White Reliefs that Ben Nicholson was making simultaneously. She also became a member of several forward-looking groups, such as the 7 & 5 Society, Unit One and Abstraction-Creation. In 1939, Hepworth and Nicholson moved to St Ives, Cornwall, where she became an influential member of the artistic community, being a founder member of the Penwyth Society in 1949.

Although Hepworth's marriage to Ben Nicholson was dissolved in 1951 he remained in St Ives until 1958, and the mutually beneficial influence of painter and sculptor on each other's work persisted. They gradually regained their international reputation after the hiatus of the Second World War and its aftermath. Hepworth had important retrospective exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1954 and 1962, at the São Paulo biennale, Brazil, in 1959 (where she was awarded the grand prix), and at the Tate Gallery in 1968. She exhibited regularly in London, New York, and Zurich, and was shown throughout Europe and the United States, in Japan, and in Australia.

She became Dame Barbara Hepworth in 1965. After a long battle with cancer, she died on 20 May 1975 in a horrific fire at her home. Her studio was designated the Barbara Hepworth Museum in the following year and, on coming under the Tate's aegis in 1980, secured an unrivalled collection of her work for the Gallery.
 

John Hoyland (b. 1934) trained at Sheffield College of Art (1951–6) and the Royal Academy Schools (1956–60). Under the influence of Nicholas de Staël he began by 1954 to paint Sheffield landscapes and abstractions from still-life subjects. His devotion to colour began with experiments at a Scarborough summer school (1957), where tuition was provided by Victor Pasmore among others. At the Situation exhibitions of 1960–61 he showed some of his earliest fully abstract paintings, in which he used bands of colour to explore perceptual effects such as the relationship of image to background or to create the illusion of buckling the picture-plane. This geometric character soon gave way to sinuous lines enclosing discs of colour, and eventually to a freer and more fluid application of paint. Hoyland's visit to New York in 1964 on a Peter Stuyvesant bursary brought him into contact with painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski and with the critic Clement Greenberg. Elements from these American developments, especially from colour field painting and Post-painterly Abstraction, feature prominently in subsequent canvases by Hoyland in the use of staining techniques and acrylic paint, the interaction of unmixed colours, and an emphasis on the material weight of paint. Despite these influences, however, Hoyland came to reject the American tendency to reductivism, concentrating in later paintings on the approach exemplified by Hofmann and de Staël, with varied and tactile paint surfaces and a disposition of blocks of different colours to create sensations of advancing and receding space.

Janet Leach (1918-1997), nee Darnell, was born in Texas, USA. She made stoneware and porcelain pots, thrown, coiled or slab built, with minimal decoration and glaze. She enrolled in sculpture classes in New York (1938) and worked as a sculptor's assistant on the Federal Art Project and for Robert Cronback on architectural commissions. Following war work as a welder on ships on Staten Island (1939-1945), her interest in pottery began in 1947 and she trained at Inwood Pottery and Alfred University, USA. She met Bernard Leach, Soetsu Yanagi and Shoji Hamada at Black Mountain College, when they toured America (1952). It was then that she became interested in the Japanese technique and the philosophy of pottery. She went to Japan where she spent two years studying under Hamada, whom she always considered her principal mentor (1954). She was the first foreign woman to study pottery in Japan and only the second westerner.

In 1956, she settled in Britain after her marriage to Bernard Leach and together they ran the Leach Pottery in St. Ives, Cornwall. Her pots are highly influenced by Japanese and Korean culture, yet have a quite distinctive style of their own, merging the Leach tradition with sculptural uniqueness. After Bernard Leach died in 1979, Janet continued potting, throwing individual pieces in a variety of clays and using different firing techniques. She exhibited widely and held regular one-person shows in England and Japan. Her work can be found in many public collections in the UK and abroad.
 

Alexander Mackenzie (1923-2002) was born in Liverpool on 9 th April 1923. He studied at Liverpool School of Art before moving permanently to Newlyn, Cornwall in 1950, where he became one of the St. Ives group of artists and a member of the Penwith Society. He taught art in Penzance from 1951 to 1964. Mackenzie then was made Head of Department of Fine Art at the Plymouth Art College until 1984. In 1986 he moved to Penzance where he lived and worked until his death in 2002.

Alexander Mackenzie had three one-man exhibitions at the Waddington Gallery ( London) in 1959, 1961 and 1963 and two at Durlacher Fine Art ( New York) in 1960 and 1962, City Art Gallery, Plymouth, 1965, Newlyn Art Gallery, 1985 and Festival Gallery, Bath, 1982. A recent exhibition at Austin/Desmond Fine Art ( London) was a great success. He was also included in many group exhibitions all over the world, including at the Whitechappel Art Gallery 1959, 21 st Watercolour Biennial, Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1969; Premio Marzotto International Exhibition, Rome, 1962, St Ives 1939 – 1964, Tate Gallery, 1985 and Saint Ives, Montpelier Sandelson, 1995.

Alexander Mackenzie work is included in many public collections including the Tate Gallery ( London) and the Arts Council.

Margaret Mellis (1914-2009) was born in Wu-Kung-Fu, China, of Scottish parents. They moved to Britain when she was a baby. She was educated in Edinburgh and attended the college of Art there between 1929-33. Her teachers included Hubert Wellington and S J Peploe. A postgraduate award and scholarship enabled her to study and travel on the continent, where she was taught in Paris by Andre Lhote.

From 1935-7 she held a fellowship at Edinburgh College of Art. Then Margaret Mellis studied at Euston Road School and in 1939 she moved to St.Ives with her first husband, Adrian Stokes (she later married Francis Davison), where they became key figures in the artist’s colony. There she was influenced by Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo and adopted a Constructivist style, making reliefs. She returned to painting after the war, when she lived for two years from 1948 in the south of France. On her return to England in 1950 she went to live in Suffolk, settling in Southwold, where found objects and driftwood were employed in her work.

Margaret Mellis exhibited widely in group shows and had many solo exhibitions, including at AIA Gallery, Bear Gallery in Oxford, Redfern Gallery and a retrospective at City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 1997. The Victoria & Albert Museum and the Tate Gallery in London, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, among other public galleries, hold examples of her work.

John Milne (1931 – 1978) was born in Lancashire. He first studied electrical engineering at Salford Royal Technical College in 1945, transferring to the art school at the College, specialising in Sculpture, until 1951. In the following year he attended the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, in Paris. For two years he was then a pupil of Barbara Hepworth as well as her assistant.

He is regarded as one of the most interesting and sophisticated of the sculptors associated with St. Ives, the English post-war avant-garde movement. His work of the fifties owed much to the St. Ives milieu in which he lived. Later, however, Milne was greatly influenced by the landscape and architecture of Greece, Persia and North Africa so that his mature work assumed a more international flavour.

He participated in many solo and group shows during his career, most notably at Newlyn Society, Plymouth City Art Gallery (including a retrospective in 1971) and Genesis Galleries, New York. His work is held by the Tate Gallery, London. Tragically Milne died in 1978 at the age of 47.

 

Denis Mitchell (1912-1993) was born in Wealdstone, Middlesex on 30th June 1912. He took evening classes at the Swansea College of Art in 1930 before moving to Barnoon, St Ives. After various jobs such as tin minor and fisherman in the subsequent years, Mitchell was an assistant to Barbara Hepworth from 1949 to 1959, during which time he started to sculpt himself, first only in wood. In 1949 he co-founded the Penwith Society. In 1959 he executed his first bronze sculptures. In 1960 he became a part-time teacher at both the Penzance Grammar School and Redruth School of Art, but he stopped teaching again in 1967 in order to sculpt full-time.

Denis Mitchell won the Arts Council Award in 1966. He moved to Newlyn in 1969, where he lived until his death in 1996. He was made a member of the Board of Governors, Plymouth Art College in 1973 and of the Falmouth School of Art 1977.

Between 1957 and 1993 various exhibitions of Denis Mitchell's work were held at the Waddington Galleries, London, Bianchini Gallery New York, Deborah Sherman Gallery, Chicago and the Penwith Gallery, St Ives, among others. His work was also included in the Tate Gallery St Ives' opening Exhibition in 1993, where examples of his work can still be found.

Victor Pasmore (1908 – 1998) was born in Chelsham, Surrey, the son of a well-known physician and mental specialist and an amateur painter. He was educated at Harrow School where he first became seriously interested in painting. Following the sudden death of his father he had to abandon his studies at the Central School of Arts and Crafts where he had studied under A. S. Hartrick, an artist who had worked in France and who knew van Gogh. Pasmore, who had expected to go Oxford and then on to The Slade School of Art, now had to find employment as a clerk in the Public Health Department in London instead, a job he held until 1937.

During this time he joined the London Artists’ Association and had his first solo exhibition at their Cooling Galleries on Bond Street in 1933. In 1937 Pasmore left the Public Health Department and formed an independent art school with fellow artists Claude Rogers, Graham Bell and William Coldstream in Fitzroy Street. The school’s first show in 1938 coincided with its move to 316 Euston Road which led to the art critic Raymond Mortimer to identify them as the Euston Road Group. Pasmore himself moved to a studio at 8 Fitzroy Street, formerly occupied by Sickert and Whistler, and spent his time teaching and painting.

Pasmore was Director of Painting at Camberwell School of Art from 1941 to 1949 when he moved on to The London County Council Central School of Arts and Crafts where he introduced a basic form course. He went on to teach art at Durham University, Leeds College and Newcastle University until 1960 when he decided to finish his teaching career and take up full time painting.

Pasmore abandoned visual representation and developed a purely abstract style in 1947. His work, often in collage and construction of reliefs, pioneered the use of new materials and was sometimes on a large architectural scale. He held his first abstract solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, London, in 1948. Herbert Read, an important art critic of the time, described Pasmore's new style as 'The most revolutionary event in post-war British art'. In the summer of 1950 he visited St Ives where he became associated with Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth and joined the Penwyth Society, the local exhibiting group.

Pasmore was a trustee of the Tate Gallery, donating a number of works to the collection. He gave a lecture on J.M.W.Turner as 'first of the moderns' to the Turner Society, of which he was elected a vice-president in 1975. His work has been exhibited widely all over the world including representing Britain in the Venice Biennale in 1960 and the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1965, the International Art Exhibition in Tokyo, Documenta II in Kassel, Germany and the travelling exhibition “British Art Today” in the U S A. In more recent years retrospectives have been held at Marlborough Fine Arts in London and at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1991. Victor Pasmore has also had paintings included in the “Changing the Process of Painting” Exhibition at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool in 1999.
 

Paul Philp (b. 1941) studied ceramics at Cardiff College of Art. In the seventies he was a visiting lecturer at Central School of Art in London and Bath School of Art in Corsham. For the last twenty-five years he has lived in the countryside growing his own produce and cultivating gardens of rare plants. He finds that a reclusive lifestyle helps him to concentrate on his work. As well as developing his skills and ideas as a potter, he has spent much of his time learning traditional building methods.
 

John Piper (1903-1992) was born in Epsom, Surrey, the son of a solicitor. He first joined his father’s legal firm as an articled clerk, but after his father’s death in 1926 he studied at the Richmond School of Art and the Royal College of Art from 1926 – 1928. From 1928 to 1922 he wrote art criticism for the Listener and the Nation. He became a member of the London Group in 1933 and of the Seven & Five Society in 1934. During that year he also met the writer Myfanwy Evans and soon afterwards began assisting her on the avant-garde quarterly Axis, which was launched in 1935. Evans became Piper’s second wife in 1937. At this time he was one of the leading British abstract artists, but by the end of the decade he had become disillusioned with non-representational art and reverted to naturalism. He concentrated on landscape and architectural views in a subjective, emotionally charged style that continued the English Romantic Tradition. Some of his most memorable works in this vein were done during the Second World War when he made pictures, both watercolours and oils, of bomb damaged buildings for the “Recording Britain” scheme and for the War Artists Advisory Committee.

In 1944 He was appointed and Official War Artist. Piper painted a series of views of country houses during the same period, either for himself or on commission. Amongst the commission were a series of paintings of Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire, for Sir Osbert Sitwell, and watercolours of Windsor Castle for the Queen. Piper’s work diversified in the 1950s and he became recognised as one of the most versatile artists of his generation. He worked as a designer of stained glass (notable for Coventry Cathedral) and also designed stage sets among which were several Benjamin Britten operas. In addition Piper made book illustrations and designed pottery and textiles. As a writer he is best known for his book British Romantic Artists (1942). He also compiled several architectural guidebooks to English counties. Piper’s work is extensively represented in the Tate Gallery, London and had exhibitions at the Marlborough Gallery, among others, and a retrospective at the Museum Of Modern Art, Oxford.

Lucie Gomperz (1902-1995) was born in Vienna on the 16th March 1902. She started studying at the Kunstgewerbeschule under Michael Powolny in 1922 and had her first pots exhibited a year later at the Palais Stoclet in Brussels. In 1926 she graduated from the Kunstgewerbeschule and married Hans Rie. She won gold medals at both the Brussels International Exhibition and Milan Triennale, and a silver medal at the Paris International Exhibition for her pots from 1935 to 1937. In 1938 Lucie Rie left for England due to the political situation in Austria and first moved to Hampstead then into Albion Mews, a workshop with a limited living space, which she rented from the Church Commissioners and where she lived until her death in 1995. She met Bernard Leach in 1939 at the Little Gallery Chelsea, who proved to be a major influence on her life, both personally and professional.

After divorcing her husband who had moved to the USA in 1940, Lucie Rie, encouraged by Fritz Lampl, who had a glass button business, opened her own ceramic button-making workshop where she produced pottery buttons for haute couture and jewellery. The small endeavour was closed down by the government as not essential to the war effort and was only re-opened in 1945. It was because of this workshop Lucie met Hans Coper in 1946 and took him on as assistant. Her subsequent friendship with Hans Coper proved to be the most important of her life.

Lucie was invited by Bernard Leach to the International Conference of Craftsmen at Dartington Hall in 1952, and she took Hans Coper with her, both of them displaying their work in the exhibition. It was there she met Shoji Hamada, the Japanese potter who was generally understood as being the greatest of the century. In 1960 Lucie started to teach at the Camberwell School of Art. She was also on the selection committee of the Design Council and a visiting lecturer at the Bristol College of Art. The most important joint exhibition in Lucie Rie’s career, was at the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam in 1967, together with Hans Coper. At the same time she was given the accolade of a one-man exhibition by the Arts Council held at their premises at No 4 St James Square, which travelled around Britain. In 1968, she was given the OBE. This period and the following decade were described by herself as her most important work, and she took part in many exhibitions. She continued to be an active potter until September 1990, when a serious stroke brought her career to an end.

She was created a Dame in the following New Years Honours. In 1992 a very comprehensive exhibition of her life’s work was organized by the Crafts Council, which she was just able to visit. After two further strokes Lucie Rie was housebound until her death in 1995.
 

William Scott (1913 – 1989) was born at Greenock, Scotland, of Irish and Scottish parents and was brought up in Ulster. He studied at Belfast College of Art between 1928 and 1931 and at the Royal Academy in 1931 – 1935. Between 1937 and 1939 he lived in France, mainly Pont-Aven and St-Tropez. Scott said that he picked up from the tradition of painting that he felt most kinship with – the still-life tradition of Chardin and Braque, leading to a certain kind of abstraction, which comes directly from that tradition.His work continued to be based on still-lifes, although from the 1950’s he bagan painting pure abstracts. They featured forms such as squares and circles, but were not geometrically excact and were bounded by sensitive painterly lines. In the late 1960’s and 70’s his style became more austere.

Scott is regarded as one of the leading British artists of his generation. He won several awards including first price at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition. His work is represented in the Tate Gallery, London, and many other collections in Britain and elsewhere. He lived mainly in London and Somerset.

Joe Tilson (b. 1928) studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London from 1949 to 1952 and at the Royal College of Art, London from 1952 to 1955 where he received the Rome Prize, taking him to live in Italy in 1955. He returned to London in 1957, and from 1958 to 1963 he taught at St Martin’s School of Art, and subsequently at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, Kings College, Newcastle upon Tyne, The School of Visual Arts, New York and the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste, Hamburg.

Tilson’s first one-man shows were held at the Marlborough Gallery, London in 1962 and at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool in 1963. His work first gained international exposure at the XXXII Venice Biennale, leading to his first retrospective at the Boyman’s Museum, Rotterdam in 1964. Further retrospective exhibitions were held at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1979 and at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol in 1984. He has continued to exhibit regularly in solo shows throughout the world and a major retrospective, ‘Joe Tilson: Pop to Present’ was held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Among Tilson’s awards are the Gulbenkian Foundation Prize in 1960 and the Grand Prix d’Honneur, Biennale of Ljubljana in 1996, the year in which he was invited to paint the banner for the Palio, Siena. He was elected Royal Academician in 1991 and lives and works in London and Cortona, Tuscany.

The present work was painted in 1959 when Tilson was working in St Ives.

Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) was born at Selsey Bill, Sussex.

He worked in the Lintas advertising agency from 1931-9, painting in his spare time. In 1939 he left the agency to pursue a full time career as an artist. Having had no formal art training, he was self-taught as an artist, and was influenced by Colquhoun, Craxton, Sutherland and Minton, the latter two he met when working as an interpreter in a POW camp in Yorkshire. Vaughan taught at Camberwell from 1946-8, the Central School between 1948-57, and the Slade School from 1959.

In 1959 he was Resident Painter, State University of Iowa. He served on the Arts Council Advisory panel, became an Honorary Fellow of the RCA in 1964, and CBE in 1965. Commissions include murals for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and a series of lithographs for Une Saison en Enfer.

His first solo exhibition was at the Red & Lefevre Gallery in 1944, where he continued to exhibit until 1952, thereafter showing at leading London galleries, in the provinces and abroad. Retrospective exhibitions include those at the Whitechapel in 1962, and the University of York in 1970. He was represented in many group exhibitions and is in many public collections, including the Tate Gallery.

Vaughan's artistic themewas constant: the male nude in the landscape, although, the images can be highly abstracted, such as in the present example; the palette is unmistakeable, however. Vaughan's journals, which have been published, give a graphic insight into his often vulnerable, obsessive and sad private life.

John Clayworth Spencer Wells (1907-2000) was born in London on the 27 th July 1907. He went on to study medicine at the University College and Hospital, from which he graduated in 1930. During his student years he also took evening art classes at St Martins. In 1927 he exhibited a painting in the Daily Express Young Artists exhibition at the Royal Society of British Artists. Wells also briefly attended Stanhope Forbes Newly School of Painting and at the same was introduced to Ben and Winifred Nicholson by a cousin. John Wells worked as a doctor on the Isles of Scilly for nine years before deciding to paint on a full time basis after the Second World War, which he spent as a Admiralty Surgeon and Agent to the islands. This allowed him to make periodic visits to Nicholson and Hepworth who introduced Wells to Naum Gabo. Gabo was to become a major influence on his output. Even before his decision to give up medicine in favour of painting and move to mainland Cornwall, Wells was included in the exhibition New Movement in Art: Contemporary Work in England held at the London Museum in 1942. 1945 to 1955 was without doubt his most prolific period and he was at the centre of artistic development in St Ives, co-founding the Crypt Group in 1946 and the Penworth Society of Arts in 1949, and worked alongside Terry Frost, Peter Lanyon and Barbara Hepworth, whose assistant he was in 1949 – 1951. After meeting Naum Gabo in 1940, Wells developed an interest in contructive work, producing mainly 3 dimensional constructions and Collages.

He was attracted to the scientific approach of Constructivism, in which he was able to incorporate his knowledge gained from his medical practise. His paintings developed slowly from experimenting with collages and are of modest proportions.He was also influenced by his immediate surroundings. After deciding to pursue art as a full time carreer he renewed his study of geometry and mathematical systems of proportion. Many paintings of this period are characterised by a strict division of the canvas into sections, which formed the basic structure of his composition. He was also influenced by classical music and took inspiration from natural forms like shells and crystals. From 1948 onwards Wells increasingly spent time exploring the landscape and his painting reflect his interest in the forms that make up his environment, especially the geology of west Cornwall and his fascination with the flight of birds and their relationship with the static landscape. Towards the end of the 1950s John Wells loosened his style and executed a series of larger works. He was apparently dissatisfied with the coherence of those paintings and by the end of 1960 he abandoned his immediate attachment to landscape and returned to strict geometrical structures. John Wells took part in many group exhibitions, for example at the Lefevre Gallery in London. The Tate Gallery St Ives held a retrospective of his work in 1998. Other examples of his work can be found in many museums and galleries around the world, including the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Musem in London, Columbia University, New York, and the Othenberg Museum in Sweden.