The International Context of the Art of St Ives 1948-60

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This collaborative PhD takes as its focus the encounters between British artists associated with the artists' colony in St Ives and the abstract art being produced internationally in the period 1948-60. This is the period when a new generation of artists shaped by the war emerged from the shadow of the masters of the pre-war period such as Picasso, Braque and Matisse, and before the dominance of American Abstract Expressionism was secured as the hegemonic movement of post-war painting.While there are many different types of encounter on which the research might focus, its essential ingredient is the empirical investigation of the direct experience of British artists of the work of their counterparts in mainland Europe or America, whether that be in the form of the actual presence in Britain of certain artists and their work, the availability of publications in which they were discussed or British artists' travels to particular sites of encounter, such as the Venice Biennale.The necessity of this study is to counteract the prevailing tendency to isolate the practice of St Ives artists within national boundaries and position it as derivative of American painting. The influence of American Abstract Expressionism and anxieties thereof are well established components in accounts of St Ives, not least because of the high-profile attacks on American critics' supposed nationalistic bias launched in the early 1970s by Patrick Heron, a St Ives protagonist. However, little research has ever been done on exactly what contact there was between St Ives artists and the work of the Americans.The context for the research project is the refurbishment of Tate St Ives which will be relaunched in 2014 with an exhibition on the art of St Ives curated by Chris Stephens, Head of Displays at Tate Britain and leading scholar in the field. The exhibition will also be shown at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. The PhD project will feed directly into the exhibition by establishing new connections and contexts for the art on display. The conceptual configuration of the exhibition is still very much in the making and the aspiration is for the student to help devise themes for particular rooms, take part in the selection of works, write for the catalogue and contribute to the interpretation of the exhibition more widely.While Abstract Expressionism has come to dominate histories of post-war painting, at the time it was not recognised as significantly distinct from continental European practice which was better and more immediately known in Britain. After the war, British artists inevitably looked to developments in Paris. At the same time, emerging Parisian artists were exhibited in London. Similarly, British artists would have seen new forms of painting developing in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, Spain and Germany. 'L'art autre', 'art informel' and the work of CoBrA artists were known before that of the Americans. Yet, there are still few Anglophone studies of post-war European painting and none examining its profile among and impact upon British artists. The PhD student will be able to utilise the wealth of resources at Tate, both visual and written to rectify this situation. Tate Archive holds extensive collections of papers of the leading St Ives figures, such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Terry Frost, as well as those of British artists more commonly known to have associated with the European avant-garde such as William Gear and Stephen Gilbert and leading historians and critics of the period. In addition, Tate Library has unrivalled holdings of relevant exhibition catalogues, journals and ephemera. At stake in the research project is not simply the status of British art in the post-war period but a proper understanding of the cultural connections and dynamics of art production in th