Abstraction

Abstraction was grounded in the non-visual experience of emotion or sensation and evolved from ideas formulated by the Post-Impressionists at the end of the nineteenth century. It reflected the scientific and technological developments of the time and was a natural progression in the concept of art as a means of self-expression. It was also influenced by the many spiritualist movements that abounded then, such as Blavatsky's Theosophists. At its extreme, Abstraction describes non-representational painting with no reference to the visible world. Between the extremes of visual representation of the non-visual and the realism of the romantics, however, there are varying degrees and forms of Abstraction, many of which are based on natural objects — landscape, still life, and figurative. Pioneers of Abstraction included James McNeill Whistler and Wassily Kandinsky, and by the outbreak of World War I it had spawned such movements as Fauvism, Cubism and Vorticism.

In the 1930’s the British Abstract artists were led by Ben Nicholson and had their own journal Axis, which was produced by Myfanwy Evans. This was first published in January 1935 with the encouragement of the French Abstract painter Jean Helion and the assistance of John Piper, whom Evans married in 1937. With the onset of World War II, the British Abstractionists, most of whom had been based in Hampstead, London became dispersed. Many of those who became Official War Artists or became involved with the Recording Britain scheme were forced to return to a more traditional style of painting that such work required, but a small nucleus of modernists moved to Cornwall where they settled in the St. Ives area, and it was here that British Abstraction, greatly strengthened and revitalised, re-emerged in the post-war years.