Drinking With Sven Berlin

"Vanished like the spirit Ariel..."
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St Ives drawing by Sven Berlin showing his studio, the "Tower".

Sven Berlin at the Castle Inn, St Ives 1945

Being surrounded by the work of Sven Berlin ( 1911 – 1999), as one currently can be at Penlee House Museum and Gallery ('Out of the Shadows' until 24 November 2012), is a treat indeed. Many visitors to the exhibition admit to not knowing the name, as is so often the case with many of the painters, including David Haughton, who are now found to be minor players historically, in the story that is art in St Ives. Like Haughton who returned eventually to London for employment, Sven left St Ives too, though for other reasons. However, I should add, not without first making his considerable mark on the town and its story. Full marks to Penlee for reminding people of this colourful character who was at the heart of the St Ives colony in the fifties, and was often singled out by BBC TV documentary makers at the time, to represented the town's "bohemian" aspect. His work does not appeal to all tastes, nor did it back in the fifties, but you cannot ignore the integrity, flair and sheer talent that is on show. Unlike David Haughton's character, Sven's personalty was one that was uniquely self myth-making and he leaves a legacy of absorbing books, autobiographies and letters. Some of these volumes are on sale in the gallery shop and I am reminded that Sven mentions Haughton several times in his writing including this amusing memory of times past from The Coat of Many Colours;

"Drinking in Cornwall was not so fierce [as in Soho] and was regulated by our own discipline of work. I had a rule not to drink and work at the same time in case the two habits became bound together. It was my fear that if I took opium, which I was once offered, like Kit Wood I might come to depend on it. But I do remember doing my best drawing when I was in St Ives. There was a meeting with that fragile refined young painter, David Haughton, at the Crypt Show and somehow with John [Wells] we had spent the evening together talking and drinking beer until the pub closed. I asked them back to my Tower for some strong tea, but we lost David on the way. David who lived in St Just and painted beautiful lonely, domino cottages in which nobody lived, had vanished like the spirit Ariel. Later someone said he was in the sea.
We went down to the beach where great breakers were coming in and showering the sand with phosphorescent light. David was out there towards the Rock, they said, and knowing how strong the currents were I plunged in to get him before he was swept away.
But the great waves coming in picked me up and threw me back on the beach. John, being a man of sea more than I, told me to wait and look across the moonlit surface until we could see where he was. This we did and soon saw a dark form in the glowing surface. It was David. This time I waited for the big breaker to approach and when it was near enough before it broke, dived straight through it like a wall of glass and came out the other side where it was quite calm and swam towards David. He was drunk and sang happily, just keeping himself afloat and not going anywhere.I told him it was dangerous there and he simply fell in with my efforts to bring him back, which I did while he kept on singing the song which I have now forgotten. We took him to the Tower and flung him naked on the little camp bed in the candle light. While someone made the strong tea I had promised I did a direct pen drawing of the sleeping man, my hand guided by the ghost of the moon.
The next day David returned to his cottage at St Just where his curiously patient and quietly beautiful woman waited for him."

Sven Berlin carving outside his Tower, working on a lion's head for St Austell Brewary Company c.1948

NOTE: (On the DARK MONARCH, from Amazon.co.uk on Sven Berlin:)

 "The artistic community of St Ives was in a state of turmoil. The abstractionists were pitted against the more traditional figurative painters. As is so often the case, what should have remained a conceptual debate, degenerated into personal acrimony. The "colonists" polarised around this issue and bodies such as the St Ives Society of Artists fractured, dividing between the newer and older ways of painting and depicting what they saw. Sven Berlin felt deeply about this issue and was much involved in the "politics".

Perhaps for this reason, he decided to leave St Ives and did so, with Juanita and his little family, in a horse-drawn caravan, moving to the New Forest. From his new home, in 1962, he published one of the most contentious books of the time. The Dark Monarch was a roman a clef describing the somewhat zany atmosphere of St Ives, and the eccentric characters who peopled it. Mixing truth with fantasy, we read of the underwater painter (imagined), the man wont to stroll the streets of the town in a suit of armour (true), the "man-eater" and many other eccentrics. Unfortunately for its author, some of these were too easily identifiable and this, together with the defamatory attributes ascribed to them, led to a libel action, with poet Arthur Caddick the driving force behind this. The book was withdrawn only a few weeks after publication, and damages were paid by the author and his publishers. The episode, with writs tumbling through the letterbox, left lasting scars on Berlin himself and on Julie, his new bride...

.... A autobiographical trilogy, described by him as an "autosvenography", chronicles Sven Berlin's life, his thoughts and beliefs and the creative processes which underlay his prodigious output. These are (in chronological order): Coat of Many Colours; Virgo in Exile and The Other Man

Sven Berlin was valued, as a man and a friend, by many other leading artists and creatives including Robert Graves, Augustus John and John Boorman, to name but a few. Arguably, in the often sycophantic world of the arts, he did himself no good, first by implicitly "renouncing" the Lotus-Land of St Ives, and perhaps by pouring scorn, in his Dark Monarch on some of the leading figures in the artistic community there, people who are household names today and who had huge influence on State patronage, some of which Sven Berlin was awarded in his earlier days, but never again after publication of the Monarch." (ATK)

NOTE: (Michael Bird on the Crypt Group:)

"Soon after arriving, Wynter met Sven Berlin, who I think introduced him to Lanyon and Wells. These four artists, with the letterpress printer Guido Morris, staged the first Crypt Group show in September 1946. After the war years, which had almost eaten up their youth, they were all desperate to exhibit, and they put pretty much everything they could into the show from the previous six or seven years.

Outside that particular exhibition (later Crypt Group shows had a different line-up), I don’t think the group in itself had great importance for him – Wynter never felt comfortable with joining groups or teams of any kind. The big thing for him in autumn 1946 was his discovery of Braque, who was being shown in London. Of the other artists, Berlin was a good friend but Wynter found Lanyon’s work more interesting. Wells was a quiet man whose affinity was with Hepworth and Nicholson’s brand of ‘Constructive’ abstract art. Altogether it was a group without much of a shared agenda beyond getting shown and being seen to be modern."