W. Barns-Graham: A Studio Life: Second Edition

by Lynne Green

Overview

British abstract painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) played a key role in the development of modern abstract art in Britain. This new paperback edition of Lynne Green's classic monograph completes the story of the artist's life and work with a new Coda covering Barns-Graham's final years, which draws for the first time on the artist's personal diaries and notebooks.

Born in Fife, Scotland, for over sixty years Barns-Graham lived and worked in St Ives, at the heart of the avant-garde group of artists who made the town internationally famous. Arriving in Cornwall just months after the modernists Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, Barns-Graham was quickly absorbed into their inner circle. She was subsequently one of the Crypt Group of young moderns, and a founder member of the breakaway Penwith Society of Arts.

Green examines the importance of Barns-Graham's national tradition and of her teachers at Edinburgh School of Art, particularly the Scottish Colourists William Gillies and John Maxwell. Barns-Graham's developing commitment to abstraction is discussed in detail: never afraid to experiment, her work is revealed as embodying many of the issues central to post-war abstractart. Barns-Graham continued to work right up to her death with the energy and enthusiasm usually associated with the young. Towards the end of her life her art finally started to attract the attention it deserved.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781848220959
Publisher:	Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd
Publication date:	11/28/2011
Edition description:	Second Edition, Revised edition
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	9.75(w) x 11.38(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Lynne Green is an art historian whose specialist fields are British modernism and contemporary art. She was the co-founder and former editor of Contemporary Art (now Contemporary) magazine and was formerly an exhibition organiser at the Hayward Gallery before becoming curator of Southampton City Art Gallery. Her previous publications include Painting with Smoke: David Roberts Raku Potter (2000, revised edition 2009) and Yorkshire Sculpture Park: Landscape for Art (2008).

Table of Contents

Contents: Editorial Note; Abbreviations; Acknowledgements; Foreword, Martin Kemp; Preface to the Second Edition; Prologue; 1 Childhood and the First Stirrings of Art; 2 Art College and a Wider World; 3 A Cornish Haven : The First Years of Freedom; 4 'Britain's Foremost Woman Abstract Painter'; 5 Variations and Meditations; 6 Completing the Circle; 7 Today is a Gift: Coda; Notes; Chronology; Works in Public and Corporate Collections; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

'...long overdue book...this meticulously researched, sumptuously illustrated publication is really a particular and personal history of British modern art;...This is a welcome addition to the critical writings on 20th-century British art and politics.' Galleries Magazine 

From the Publisher