The story of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Art Fund
The story of one of Britain’s leading 20th-century abstract artists and the works by her that Art Fund has helped UK museums to acquire.
A version of this article first appeared in the winter 2024 issue of Art Quarterly, the membership magazine of Art Fund.
In 1949 Scottish-born artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham climbed the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland. The experience changed her life. Seventy-five years on, and 20 years after her death, a flurry of cultural activity this year has put Barns-Graham back in the spotlight. In June a commemorative plaque was unveiled at her birthplace in St Andrews; two books – one exploring her groundbreaking series of abstract paintings and works on paper inspired by glacial landscapes, the other introducing her to young readers – have recently been published; and Mark Cousins’ documentary A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things (2024), featuring Tilda Swinton as the voice of Barns-Graham, received its UK cinematic release in October. Since 2002, Art Fund has helped 15 public museums and galleries acquire 20 of her works, largely by facilitating gifts from the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust, which was established to enhance her reputation and enable young people to fulfil their artistic potential.
Barns-Graham was born on 8 June 1912 into a family that belonged to the Scottish landed gentry. Thanks to a ‘marvellous teacher’ at primary school, she set her sights on becoming an artist at the age of eight. ‘Amongst my earliest memories are my pencil and crayon drawings, abstract irregular or rectangular shapes, usually outlined in blue and filled with a single colour,’ she recounted.
Her parents, however, were not encouraging. Later, she reflected this might have been due to the respiratory conditions – tuberculosis, pneumonia, pleurisy, bronchitis – that plagued her all her life and the perceived instability of her chosen career. Nevertheless, with financial support from an aunt, she enrolled at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1931, and a series of scholarships kept her there until 1937, though her studies were disrupted by recurrent bouts of ill health.
One such crisis in 1938 forced her to delay a six-month travelling scholarship in Europe, which the outbreak of war then rendered impossible. Instead, Hubert Wellington, then principal at Edinburgh College of Art, orchestrated a move to St Ives, where she would be relatively safe and immersed in the artistic community that included Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, Naum and Miriam Gabo, Margaret Mellis and Adrian Stokes, Bernard Leach, and Alfred Wallis.
She arrived by train on the wet and windy evening of 16 March 1940. ‘The stars were too near the moon last night,’ she heard a porter say, scribbling the local expression (denoting poor weather) in her diary. When the rain cleared, she found the light similar to that in St Andrews. She soon moved into a studio overlooking Porthmeor Beach and made connections with traditional and Modern artists alike, joining the St Ives Society of Artists and Newlyn Society of Artists in 1942 and co-founding the Crypt Group (more interested in modern abstract forms) in 1946. During the war, artists were restricted from drawing and painting outside, so she worked mainly on portraits and interiors, also volunteering at a factory making camouflage nets and as an air-raid warden.
After the war, Barns-Graham was able to explore more fully the landscapes around St Ives, producing scenes such as Gurnard’s Head (1947). The painting depicts a notable outcrop along the Cornish coastline and a nearby pub of the same name, popular with the St Ives group. Described by the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust as a ‘very good example of the artist’s early work’, it was acquired at auction earlier this year by Penlee House Gallery & Museum with Art Fund support. Penlee was keen to add this work to its collection as a link between the realist style of the Newlyn, Lamorna and St Ives artists of the late-19th and early-20th centuries and the more abstract style that later developed in west Cornwall.
Barns-Graham’s significant contribution to this nature-based abstraction followed her life-changing trip to Grindelwald in May and June 1949. ‘The massive strength and size of the glaciers, the fantastic shapes, the contrast of solidity and transparency, the many reflected colours in strong light, the warmth of the sun melting and changing the forms, in a few days a thinness could become a hole… It seemed to breathe!’ she later wrote. ‘This likeness to glass and transparency, combined with solid rough ridges made me wish to combine in a work all angles at once, from above, through and all round, as a bird flies, a total experience.’
The St Ives group was deeply engaged with theories of natural geometry found in writings such as On Growth and Form (1917) by the Scottish biologist, mathematician and classicist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, which describe the relationship between mathematical formulae, including the Golden Section, and the development, structure and patterns of organic phenomena such as shells and leaves. Barns-Graham explored these ideas in her Glacier series, which she worked on first from 1949 to 1952, producing 60 or so paintings and drawings, and returned to in the mid-1970s and then finally in 1994, creating a further 40 works. Glacier Chasm (1951) was the first work gifted by the Trust through Art Fund, joining the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland in 2012. Six years later, it gifted Glacier (1951-77), along with Green Skull Form I (1951), to the Hepworth Wakefield.
From Swiss glaciers, Barns-Graham progressed to Cornwall’s geology and ancient megaliths, and deeper into abstraction. For example, in Rock Theme, St Just (1953), gifted to Tate in 2018, along with White, Black and Yellow (Composition February) (1957), she combines a slim representational view of the coastline of West Penwith with an imposing arrangement of planes and colours, employing thin washes and scraping to mimic the tactility of the stone.
By the time she painted White, Black and Yellow, she was living in Leeds, where her husband, David Lewis, whom she had married in October 1949, was studying architecture. The move was an attempt to fix their troubled relationship. While an exploration of space in the canvas, unmoored from a specific place, the work, through its title and wintry palette, nevertheless evokes the snow-blanketed fields of North Yorkshire. In this respect it relates to Snow at Wharfedale II (1957), gifted to Pallant House Gallery in 2015.
In the late 1950s, Barns-Graham was at the height of her professional success, but the move to Leeds didn’t have the desired effect on her personal life. Still, she developed her application of the Golden Section to image-making, in paintings such as Untitled (Geoff and Scruffy Series) (1956), gifted to Abbot Hall, Kendal, in 2015. The characteristic semicircle and pentagon do not depict, however abstractedly, a man and his dog; the title, rather, is associative, naming the company in which Barns-Graham found herself while working out the initial composition.
In 1957 she returned to St Ives for what she thought was a six-month separation from Lewis. They never reunited. Some have suggested the hot colours in works such as Untitled (1957), gifted to the Stanley & Aubrey Burton Gallery in Leeds in 2019, reflect her emotional state at the time. Travels in Spain and the Balearics in 1958 show up in the warm earthy palette of works such as Untitled (Strung Forms Series)(c1958-59), gifted to Aberdeen Art Gallery in 2017, and its advancing blocks of colour foreshadow the more radical abstraction she embarked on in the early 1960s.
Barns-Graham spent the first years of that decade in London, before returning to St Ives in 1963, the year her marriage was finally annulled, and into a new home and workspace at Barnaloft Studios, further along Porthmeor Beach. From then on, she split her time between there and Balmungo, a family property near St Andrews that she inherited in 1960. For the next 20 years, as her critical reputation waned, she remained a studio-based artist, leaving observed landscapes behind and turning her attention primarily to hard-edged geometric arrangements of first squares and then circles.
Olive Green Squares on Vermillion (1968), gifted to the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich in 2021, is a major work from the series Things of a Kind in Order and Disorder, made between 1963 and 1973. Other examples include Progression (1965), gifted to Leeds Art Gallery in 2019, and Untitled (c1968), gifted to Lillie Art Gallery in Milngavie in 2017. Barns-Graham’s creative impetus for the series came from arranging rows of card squares on the floor and disturbing them with her foot. After studying the random accidental results, she developed complex constructions, often informed by mathematical calculations. Likewise, she meticulously planned on graph paper the composition of works such as Expanding Forms (Touch Point Series) No. 1 Entrance (1980), gifted to Pallant House Gallery in 2015, before painting on canvas.
From the mid-1970s, Barns-Graham also worked on a series of pen-and-ink drawings, her Small Energy series. The works, including Overflow (1980), acquired by the University of Dundee with Art Fund support in 2012, consist of many fine black lines, drawn over base colours, that capture the movement of nature’s flow, in wind, water, sand, sound and ice. Between August and December 2023, the university loaned Overflow to the Pier Arts Centre in Orkney for the exhibition ‘The Growth of New Ideas – The Legacy of D’Arcy Thompson in Modern and Contemporary Art’.
Barns-Graham herself travelled to Orkney in 1984 and 1985, initially for an exhibition of her work at Pier. It was the first time since the 1950s she had visited somewhere and felt truly inspired. Wreck, Warbeth (1986), gifted to Pier in 2013, and Birsay II (1986), gifted in 2022, retain a blocky geometric quality, albeit informed by the unique geology of the islands, while August in Orkney (1987), also gifted in 2022, is more obviously rooted in the landscape, the undulating fields marked out in finely perceived shards of colour. Five trips to Lanzarote between 1989 and 1993 resulted in another series of landscape works, focused on its lava flows.
Barns-Graham worked throughout the last decade of her life, until a few days before her death, producing a phenomenal number of paintings and prints, using bold expressive colours, a process she described as ‘letting rip’. ‘Now I am at the state of urgency,’ she said in 2001. ‘My theme is celebration of life, joy, the importance of colour, form, space and texture.’
Untitled – Firth of Forth Series (1996-97), gifted to the City Art Centre, Edinburgh, in 2013, conveys the sensation of crossing the Forth Bridge, while Surprise Series No. 4 (2000), acquired by the McManus in Dundee with Art Fund support in 2002, employs the primary colours, distinctive lines and elongated circle favoured by Barns-Graham in her final works. She died in St Andrews on 26 January 2004.
Glaciers are sites where the escalating pace of manmade climate change cannot fail to be seen. Those at Grindelwald, it is estimated, have retreated two kilometres since the 1970s. On 22 April 2024 the National Galleries of Scotland posted an image of Glacier Chasm across its social media channels to mark Earth Day, drawing attention not only to the fragility of glacial landscapes, but also to a highlight of its collection and the creative potential of one artist’s engagement with the natural world.
‘Life is so exciting; nature is so exciting,’ Barns-Graham wrote. ‘Trying to catch the one simple statement about it, that’s what I’m aiming for. I’ll keep on trying.’
Visiting list
Aberdeen Art Gallery, free to all
National Galleries of Scotland, Modern, Edinburgh, 50% off exhibitions with National Art Pass
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, free entry and 50% off exhibitions with National Art Pass
Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, free to all
Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, pay if and what you can
Tate St Ives, 50% off entry and exhibitions with National Art Pass
The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds, free to all, 20% off in shop with National Art Pass
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