International Exchanges: Modern Art and St Ives 1915–1965 explores the wider national and international contexts which shaped art in St Ives in the 1940s, 1950s and 60s. As part of a series of exhibitions exploring the histories and legacies of art in St Ives leading up to the opening of the new display galleries in 2016, the exhibition positions St Ives art within wider aesthetic concerns and broader critical perspectives than the more familiar ideas of landscape and place that shape our view of the artists colony.

The exhibition will show how the art of post-war St Ives drew upon two trajectories of modern art: one the utopian ideals of constructivism from Moscow in the 1910s through Berlin and Paris between the wars; and the other a tradition of craft and the handmade that unites the carvings of Brancusi and the ceramics of Bernard Leach and others. Major works by Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and others will also been seen alongside that of their contemporaries from elsewhere in Europe, North America and beyond to position their art within wider formal, technical and philosophical debates.

The exhibition will include significant loans from public and private collections in the UK and abroad. In re-evaluating particular dialogues between these key British modernists and their contemporaries in Europe, North America and Japan, the aim is not to disregard the commonly held importance of the location and artistic network of St Ives, but to situate artists’ engagement with that place within wider, global artistic and aesthetic concerns.

The project will be led by Chris Stephens, Lead Curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain and curated by Sara Matson, Curator at Tate St Ives and Rachel Smith, Doctoral Student, Tate Research Centre for Creative Communities. It will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue published by Tate St Ives and a series of Tate Papers published in association with Tate’s Research Centre for Creative Communities.

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/search?f[]=im_vid_45:1808

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Ceramics

    Clay based products produced from non-metallic material and fired at high temperature. The term covers all objects made of fired clay, including earthenware, porcelain, stoneware and terra cotta.

  • Craft

    The creation of handmade objects intended to be both useful and decorative.

  • Curator

    A person who creates exhibitions or who is employed to look after and research museum objects.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.