Total Immersion

Ruth Guilding reflects on the significance of the painter’s oeuvre as an exhibition and the launch of a first catalogue raisonne mark his centenary

- Ruth Guilding

OriginaLity was the issue confronting the post-Second World War generation of artists in St ives. an ambitious younger set was pondering how best to handle the problem of abstraction and distinguish themselves from the others. Patrick Heron was changing from art critic to painter, Terry Frost was teaching and working as Barbara Hepworth’s studio assistant and Roger Hilton, the last to arrive, was struggling with the validity of the whole painting project.

The landscape painter Peter Lanyon (1918–64) was perhaps the most conflicted of them all. in 1950, he resigned from the Penwith—St ives’s premier exhibiting society—when its founders, Hepworth and her husband, Ben Nicholson, insisted that its members must now classify themselves as traditionalists, Modernists or Craftsmen.

Lanyon was prone to describe the process of painting as ‘a big mental fight’. Unlike most of his peers, he was from a very wealthy local family. a traditional art education had been followed in 1939 by private lessons from Ben Nicholson, who had fled wartime London with his family and remained ensconced above Carbis Bay.