End of the Glacier, Upper Grindelwald

I recently read this lovely new book about the glacier pictures of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. I've written about these before: the 1949 trip to Grindelwald features in the new Mark Cousins film I wrote about last October (he has an essay in The Glaciers); prior to that, in 2018, I went to see some of the paintings and sketches in an exhibition at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings. Here, as a special treat for the geographers amongst you, I am going to highlight the glacial features identified by Peter Nienow in his essay 'Art and Ice Loss: A Glaciologist's look at Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's Glaciers.'

Blue Ice

'Dense, clean glacier light absorbs the long (red) wavelengths of light while at the same time scattering the the short wave blue-light.' You can see this in her most famous glacier painting, the Tate's Glacier Crystal, Grindelwald (1950). Nienow wonders whether Barns-Graham visited one of those tourist glacier tunnels where you can enter and marvel at this blue light. I imagine none of these will be left soon, but we visited the one they have at Titlis in Switzerland back in 2017.  

Moulins and Dolines

Many of her paintings have 'blue circular swirls and holes in the ice, clearly visible in for example Glacier Vortex (1950', the image you can see above. Meltwater ponds develop at the start of summer and then drain away leaving the depressions in ice called dolines. Water flowing down through the glacier creates vertical moulins and Nienow tells us that 'in the Alps, I have plumbed these precipitous pipes.' He mentions the unnervingly large examples they have on the Greenland glacier, which reminded my of the chapter in Robert MacFarlane's Underland where he is let down into one on a rope and balances himself on a spear-like blade of ice before being pulled to safety. 

Crevasses

The much-produced photograph of Barns-Graham and the Brotherton family on holiday in May 1949 climbing the Upper Grindelwald Glacier shows them threading their way upwards joined by a rope, with crevasses visible on either side. The two Brotherton boys look as if they are still wearing their school uniform of shorts and long socks and their father has a tweed jacket on. Crevasses feature in the dramatic paintings of Romantic artists like Thomas Fearnley, but Barns-Graham wasn't interested in panoramic views. She was more concerned with geometry and form, and several of her 1949 glacier studies show patterns of crevasses separating irregular blocks of ice.

Superglacial debris

Her paintings are dominated by greys, blues and white but there are sometimes patches of brown which represent the colours of rock that has fallen onto the surface of the glacier. Nienow reproduces Glacier, Rock Forms (1950 which has 'possible evidence of iron-oxide-stained rock debris' in it. Some of these fallen boulders eventually end up perched on pedestals of ice like natural sculptures, resembling the work of her contemporaries in St. Ives.  

Foliation

Foliation is the process by which fine lines in the ice are created, marking summer periods when dust, pollen and insects collect on the surface of the snow. Once these layers become ice and start moving downhill, they can get folded and fractured, creating patterns that Barns-Graham reproduced in sketches like End of the Glacier, Upper Grindelwald. I'm sure she would have loved the glacier we visited in Iceland, where the ice was covered in black volcanic dust.

Peter Nienow's essay ends on an elegiac note with statistics on glacial retreat in Switzerland. He says they lost 10% of their ice volume between 2021 and 2023. Wow. That is such a short period - it only seems like yesterday I was reporting here on our visit to the Swiss mountains in 2017. Sadly, nobody now can see what Wilhelmina Barns-Graham saw. 'The stunning ice fall that she explored and drew inspiration from as it tumbled down towards the outskirts of Grindelwald village is no more.'

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things

Last weekend we went to The Garden Cinema to see the new Wilhelmina-Barns Graham film A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things. There was an interview afterwards with director Mark Cousins which has been uploaded to YouTube (I can see myself in the audience!) The documentary turns on an epiphany she had at Grindelwald Glacier, while holidaying in Switzerland in 1949. Tilda Swinton reads the quote about her 'terrifying desire' to roll down the mountain that I included in a post about Barns-Graham I wrote here six years ago. I've always thought of her glacier paintings as a facet of modernist landscape painting but perhaps I shouldn't really be talking about her at all on this blog, because as Cousins points out she wasn't looking up at the Alpine landscape, she was looking down at the ice. Numerous paintings and drawing examine the structure, light and translucent colours of the glacier and a new book edited by Rob Airey has just been published dedicated to these. The variations she found over the years are shown in one of the highlights of the film, a long sequence that just just puts these glacier pictures on screen one after the other in an old fashioned slide show, accompanied by Linda Buckley's music.

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things won top prize at the Karlovy Vary film festival this year and I would love to have asked Mark Cousins about it, because earlier this year we visited this extraordinary old spa town on holiday. But we were actually there on a Grand Budapest Hotel pilgrimage and I'm sure he would have had no interest in talking about award ceremonies and a place that has nothing to do with Wilhelmina Barns-Graham! Another place he didn't talk much about was St. Ives and the art colony she's always been associated with - as he says in a BFI interview, this is limiting for a painter who saw herself as an independent 'lone wolf'. Cousins thinks there are three particular reasons why 21st century audiences may be interested in her art: climate change (so evident at Grindelwald), the contemporary focus on relatively neglected female figures and her neurodiversity. This last aspect is really his central theme - A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is a portrait of the artist's 'brain'. It includes some beautifully shot footage of her obsessively compiled notebooks, where she explored the mathematics of colour combinations. All in all I think it's an excellent film that sidesteps the familiar approaches of an arts documentary. Peter Bradshaw gave it a four star review in The Guardian yesterday. His article starts with a photograph of Barns-Graham out sketching in the landscape, so maybe it's not too inappropriate to talk about her again here. 

From the official trailer for A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things

End of the Glacier

We enjoyed a family day trip to Hastings at the weekend, where I am pleased to say I was victorious at crazy golf.  As a child I always imagined designing my own courses and on the way round I was daydreaming about one based on the great works of land art, where golf balls have to be putted through models of Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels and Michael Heizer's Double Negative, round the Spiral Jetty, through the Lightning Field and into Roden Crater... 

I was thinking about art because we had just been to the Jerwood Gallery, which is currently showing exhibitions by Mark Wallinger and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. The Wallinger includes Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (2007), which refers back to the great painting by Bruegel but is just a video installation with You've Been Framed clips. He also had some photographs of the local Birdman competition and a room with a wall of mirrors and an Eadward Muybridge grid, with encouragement to take photographs (my sons were happy to oblige). Here, I will focus on Barns-Graham, who I've only ever mentioned once before on this blog.

The Jerwood's display, Sea, Rock, Earth and Ice, is described on The Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust website.

'The Jerwood Gallery takes their own Barns-Graham painting Winter Landscape, 1952 as the rationale for the display. The starting point is a strong group of glaciers that includes Glacier Painting, Green and Brown, 1951 from Sheffield Museums (the show travels to the Graves Gallery, opening 8 December) before showing how the series developed away from having direct glacier references to one of rock forms...'

The sketchbooks and texts displayed alongside the paintings show the artist trying to uncover the shapes of the mountains' steep rock faces and curving ice fields.  I noted down part of a quote, next to End of the Glacier, Upper Grindelwald (1949), which conveys a strong sense of the Sublime.

"Once while working against the evening light rapidly fading, I experienced a terrifying desire to roll myself down the mountain side.  Calmly as I could I came down the wood steps cut in the ice, Grindelwald far below. ... I heard the awful roar of an avalanche and seeing what looked like a trickle of salt in the distant heights.  All this and the many moods beautiful and frightening fascinated me."

I have always loved Barns-Graham's glacier paintings, in particular Glacier Crystal, Grindelwald (1950) - not in this show, but reproduced (above) on the front of the Tate's 2005 exhibition catalogue.  Maybe this is partly because they resemble frozen air.  The Grindelwald glacier, she wrote, seemed to breath. "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..."

Sea, Rock, Earth and Ice took in other work from Barns-Graham's long career, and was a reminder of the abiding interest she showed in other naturally abstract landforms, from the quarries she sketched in the late fifties to the lava she drew in the early nineties.  The waves of the Lanzarote lava field were conveyed in white chalk and pastel on black paper, reminding me of the Tacita Dean drawings I saw recently in London. The fact that for a decade or so these artists were contemporaries is rather amazing.  When Barns-Graham died in 2004 at the age of 91, her 'radiant' late work was evidently as highly regarded by critics as anything else she had painted.

St Ives... tomfoolery about scenery

I have just read Michael Bird’s book The St Ives Artists; A Biography of Place and Time (2008) and found it hard to put down. You can get a sense of why this is from an entertaining interview he conducted with Anthony Frost, Andrew Lanyon and Rose Hilton in Tate Magazine. There are some droll anecdotes – Peter Lanyon sneaking into the Leach pottery and making rude pots, Terry Frost urinating in Barbara Hepworth’s garden, mammoth drinking sessions with Roger Hilton and Sydney (W.S.) Graham. But as Michael Bird says, “if you want to understand the art, then the social side is crucial. It's not just a string of stories that are a sort of background to the art”. Discussions in pubs, studios and out in the landscape shaped the paintings - Andrew Lanyon (Peter’s son) points out: ‘artists have the desire to communicate. That's why you had these long sessions with Sydney and Roger. It was not just social, it was helping the work.’

Here are some observations from Michael Bird’s book on the different attitudes to landscape in the work of St Ives artists:

• In 1928 Ben Nicolson and Christopher Wood made the trip to St Ives where they famously ‘discovered’ Alfred Wallis in his cottage by Porthmeor beach. Both artists made paintings called Porthmeor which resemble modernist stage sets. They stayed at Pill Creek, the subject for another painting by Nicholson, described by his wife Winifred as a ‘sleeping beauty landscape’. Michael Bird links these works to the contemporary verse of Auden ‘in which a distinctly modern sense of dislocation infuses a traditional landscape setting with hints of some encounter yet to be enacted.

• The influx of contemporary artists to St Ives began ten years later with the arrival of Adrian Stokes, Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. By 1950 the work of artists like Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter and Terry Frost had all developed into a kind of abstract landscape painting. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s beautiful Crystal, Grindelwald (1950) is seen by Bird as demonstrating ‘the fusion of the Constructivist spirit with a revivial of landscape art for which the town was becoming known.’

• Peter Lanyon drew on Constructivism for his dynamic engagement with space and form in the landscape – exploring by foot, travelling at speed round the coast roads and eventually taking to the air in his glider. This physicality was reflected in the paintings, which fused images of the body with natural forms. Lanyon was also highly conscious of his Cornishness - an artist of place [Bird makes a connection between Lanyon and W.G. Hoskins; space vs. place in art was raised in an earlier posting here].

• Bird describes a review of Lanyon’s paintings written by Patrick Heron: ‘what started out as Lanyon’s landscape – ‘cromlech-studded, rock-infested,’ ‘riddled by mines’, metamorphosed into Heron’s own, defined not by the much-hyphenated residue of history but by the ‘quality of light’ – more, in other words, by space than place.’ Heron was echoing the views of another artist-critic, Adrian Stokes who had bought the house Little Park Owles in Carbis Bay 1939 (built as the servant’s wing to the house of Frances Horne, benefactress of the Bernard Leach pottery, it was later owned by Peter Lanyon). Stokes, a lover of Italian art, had described the effect of Cornish light in Colour and Form (1937). Heron ‘poured into his vision of the Cornish landscape all his passion for Bonnard and Matisse.’ The garden Heron created at his Zennor home, Eagle’s Nest, was like a further expression of this, a living painting surrounded by grey crags, wild grass and sea.

• Barbara Hepworth also created a garden (the photograph here is from my last visit in June). Bird writes that ‘apart from collecting Brancusi-shaped beach stones, Hepworth was not particularly fond of outdoor pursuits. She was never to be seen clambering around the cliffs, looking upside down at horizons or waving her arms around in a Force 8 gale in the Lanyon manner. Yet she was capable of rhapsodising on Cornwall’s wind-scoured beauty and chthonic, art-generating power...: “The sea, a flat diminishing plane, held within itself the capacity to radiate an infinity of blues, greens and even pinks of strange hues, the lighthouse and its strange rocky island was the eye, the Island of St Ives an arm, a hand, a face. The rock formation of the great bay had a withinness of form that led my imagination straight to the country of West Penwith behind me...”’

• The idea of Cornwall also attracted writers - Bird describes the influx of poets to Zennor after the war: ‘with its Lawrentian associations and air of immemorial continuities, the landscape of Zennor was the kind of outsider country you’d expect a real poet to retreat to.’ Among these writers were W.S. Graham, David Lewis, David Wright, Michael Hamburger, John Fairfax, George Barker and the near-blind John Heath-Stubbs, whose ‘sight of the landscape around Zennor was limited (friends frequently had to retrieve him from the brambles and ditches into which he strode while out walking); unbeguiled by its dramatic contours or Mediterranean light, he was convinced that its real nature was anything but benign.’

• ‘The real landscape overflows into the unconscious and the unconscious wells up peopling the real landscape with its own images,’ wrote Bryan Wynter in 1945, after moving to Zennor Carn. The result was a ‘fusion of robust, literal landscape and angst-sharpened dreamscape that was peculiarly his own.’ Terry Frost’s abstract paintings also drew on emotion and memory. I’ve already described here the genesis of his painting Moon Quay (and since writing about it have experienced, like him, an early morning walk along St Ives quay to quieten a crying baby).

• Finally, there’s Roger Hilton who first rented a studio in St Ives in 1956 and joined in those creative discussions with his fellow artists, listening to Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon ‘extol the mysterious creative power the Cornish landscape. At the same time, as his first wife Ruth, recalled, Hilton perceived that it was ‘dangerous provincial nonsense. “It’s all here”, I remember him saying once, tapping his head. “All this tomfoolery about scenery.”’