Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

The Artist, by whom bequeathed to the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust in January 2004

Cambridge, Trinity Hall, Elemental Energise: the Art of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, 2007, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue pl.4.

Original canvas. There are a few tiny minor scuffs to one or two places along the very outer edges, including a very faint diagonal line along the left edge in the lower left quadrant. There are a few tiny media marks and very minor spots of staining. Generally the work is in excellent original condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a few specks of fluorescence which correspond to the aforementioned media marks and specks of staining, but no apparent signs of retouching. Held in a simple stained wood frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Barns-Graham visited Switzerland in May 1949. Formally a holiday in the company of her friends the Brotherton family, it became an opportunity to work in a new environment which was to have a profound effect upon her art. The most informative encounter was her experience upon the Grindelwald Glacier, under the towering North Face of the Eiger. On her return to England, the memories led to an outpouring of drawing and paintings over the next decade known as her 'Glacier Abstractions', the works of which are among her most celebrated. In retrospect, they are viewed as a turning point in her career, providing a fertile source of inspiration for invention that intensified her interest in the geometry of natural form and led to innovative developments in her abstract vocabulary.

Barns-Graham had an overwhelming affiliation to the landscape that resounds in her paintings, which the landscape of Cornwall nurtured and stimulated. Her experiences of the extraordinary visual landscape of the Grindelwald Glacier, unlike anything Barns-Graham had encountered before, was thus transformational. The sensation of the forces at work - the powerful shifting and shaping of the ice - the brilliant prismatic light and translucency deepened her draw to and understanding of the natural world. Barns-Graham explains it best herself in a letter she wrote to the Tate Gallery in 1965:

At Grindelwald I was climbing on the two glaciers 'Upper' and 'Lower'. The massive strength and size of the glaciers, the fantastic shapes, the contrast of solidity and transparency, the many reflected colours in the strong light...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 around, as a bird flies, a total experience.

In Suspended Ice, Barns-Graham superbly translates such impressions onto canvas. A palette of blues and grey-greens with intervening blocks of purple, yellow and orange evokes the refraction of light amongst the ice. The abstracted shapes conjure the glacial forms which, semi-translucent, suggest their luminosity. Equally, the intersecting, jostling forms convey a sense of the energy at work in the ice - of the fragmentation, friction and slide.

Some years later, Barns-Graham recalled that the evocative phrase 'as a bird flies, a total experience' was a quotation she had heard reported from Naum Gabo. Gabo was one of Barns-Graham's greatest mentors and the realisation of inner energy and external form in her glacier paintings appropriately invokes the spirit of Gabo. Her understanding of form and feeling, exemplified in Suspended Ice and other works from the Glacier series, irrefutably demonstrates Barns-Grahams central role and innovative contribution to that unique creative and intellectual landscape of the St Ives artistic community.