£1,750
Contemporary & Post-War Art | 595
Auction: 16 April 2020 at 12:00 BST
Screenprint, 17/70, signed and numbered in pencil
Provenance: The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
Biography: Born in St Andrews in 1912, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's artistic career would span over seven decades, constantly driven by fresh inspiration and an overwhelming creative impulse. During her lifetime she would struggle with the critical eclipse of her work in favour of fellow members of the St Ives School with which her name has become inextricably linked. Undaunted, however, she would continue to produce work of astounding beauty until the last months of her long and full life, and is now recognised as one of the greatest British artists of the 21st century.
Barns-Graham divided her time between Cornwall and Fife, and so too her artistic influences and training were fed both by her training at Edinburgh School of Art, and by the fertile creative atmosphere of St Ives. Here from 1940 she would meet and befriend the leaders of the new School; Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo. Artistic osmosis was inevitable in this small Cornish town which would become renowned internationally as the seat of Modernism in Britain, yet Barns-Graham would soon develop her own clear pictorial vocabulary.
Alongside her later more abstract work, Wilhelmina found constant inspiration in the landscape across Britain. Barns-Graham visited Orkney several times throughout the 1980's, and indeed on an earlier trip she had delighted in the natural geological slab patterns of Warbeth's beach, recreating them in some of her works.
Art historians have seen 1988 as the beginning of a final phase in Barns-Graham's development, a late burst of creativity that would last until the end of her life. Having been reminded of her own mortality by a period of severe illness, her work would attain a higher pitch of urgency and freedom of expression. In these later works, we see the masterly draughtsmanship and skilful manipulation of line for which Barns-Graham had first garnered critical praise.