Above: PZ Fishing Boat by Kit Barker
St Ives
Stephen writes; When I ventured to West Penwith as a 2nd Year art student, on my own, with a borrowed tent, some sketchbooks and a bread knife, and inadvertently followed in the footsteps of David Haughton, who I hadn't quite got to know yet (he was not my assigned tutor), St Ives was a very different place.
No Tate, of course, and a town practically
closed-down between holidaymaker seasons. On subsequent visits thereafter, when in quick succession I met John Wells, Karl Weschke, Peter Lanyon's widow Sheila and her
children (for afternoon tea), Hilton's newly widowed Rose, and was given space
to roam Patrick Heron's home at Eagles Nest, the town of St Ives was quaintly
silent when off-season, apart from the hammering and sawing of shop-fitters
preparing stores and galleries for the coming season.
There were fewer galleries then, and the opportunities that
now exist for acquainting oneself with the history of the modern art that is
unique to St Ives, hardly existed at all. You were lucky to find a postcard
other than those produced for Bryan Pearce.
How things have changed. Now it seems, every nook and cranny
of the St Ives art story has been investigated, detailed, researched and
researched again. Monographs fill the heaving bookshelves at the Tate shop, and
general art history volumes abound. Chris Stephens in his magisterial St Ives The Art and The Artists (pub
2018) admits, "This is not the first account of 'St Ives', though the
literature is surprisingly scant...". Stephens approaches this huge and
complex subject via the four W's (What? When? Who? and Why?) and adds an
additional So What?
David Haughton gets a mention here and there in Stephens' book and just one painting by DH (the familiar Carne Bosaverne the first (1948) can be seen in a slightly out of focus photograph of a 1952 Penwith Society exhibition. And yet sadly it appears that David would not get a mention at all if it were not for the availability to researchers of Kit Barker Cornwall 1947-1948 Recollections of Painters and Writers by Kathrine Talbot (The Book Gallery 1993).
Kathrine Talbot (researchers seem to insist upon Katherine) was of course the pen-name of Kit Barker's wife Ilse. "In 1947," Alison Oldham tells us in her obituary of Ilse Eva Louise Gross Barker, "on learning that her parents had been murdered in the Terezin and Auschwitz camps, Ilse moved to Cornwall to write a novel, never published. The choice of Mevagissey, then home to two writers she had met, Frank Baker and Derek Savage, led to knowing other writers congregating there, including Scots poets WS Graham and Nessie Dunsmuir, pacifist poet Louis Adeane, and her future brother-in-law George Barker. Her monograph Kit Barker, Cornwall, 1947-1948, published by the Book Gallery, St Ives, in 1993, is a rare record of this creative colony. It lists visitors to whom she became close - the deaf South African poet David Wright, first seen "rising out of the harbour like some sea-creature" and, vitally, Kit, then living in a sail-loft in Newlyn, soon to be their first home. The second, Noon Veor, a decrepit cottage above Zennor, made a miserable venue for a fruitless visit by the British Council to see Kit's paintings. Engineered by painters Bryan Wynter and David Haughton, close friends and distant neighbours in other moorland cottages, nothing memorable was said. "It was not as it would have been in a novel."
Kit and Ilse married in London in July 1948. She adopted a pen name because she felt Ilse was too foreign in the post-war era and was reluctant to use Barker because she wanted a literary identity independent of George Barker. The couple moved to America but returned in 1953, when they bought a Tudor cottage on Bexley Hill in West Sussex, becoming for 25 years part of the rural community she described in her monograph A Shared Prospect (2000). It was at their home on Bexley Hill that I enjoyed a wonderful sun-filled visit to Kit and Ilse, enjoying their warm hospitality (and playing the fool in the sun-filled garden - see photo)
"From the gate we looked down the valley to Zennor church tower and a triangle of sea. On the hill to the right (blue with bluebells in the spring, purple with heather in summer and then tawny with bracken), twenty minutes walk across the moors, was Zennor carn and Bryan Wynter's Carn Cottage. More or less the same distance, but in the other direction, going south, was Nancledra and David and Lali's 'Croftpool.' It took us half an hour to walk up from Zennor and the bus."
The internet informs us: Kit Barker (1916 - 1988) was a
British painter born in London on 1916, the younger brother of the poet George
Barker. In 1948 he married the writer Ilse Gross (1921 - 2006), who wrote under
the pen name Katherine Talbot. Barker served in the British Army from 1942 to
1945.
He lived in Cornwall from 1947 to 1948, where he and Ilse were involved with
the artists' colony in St Ives. In 1949 Kit and Ilse Barker they travelled to
the USA where Kit lectured at Skidmore College in New York. Kit later taught
with Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff and David Park at the California School of
Fine Arts in San Francisco (1951 - 1952). During their time in the USA, Kit and
Ilse Barker stayed at Yaddo artists' community in Saratoga Springs, New York.
From 1953 Barker lived on Bexley hill, Sussex and travelled extensively in
Europe and the US. Kit and Ilse Barker had one son, Thomas (born 1962). Kit
Barker died in West Sussex in 1988.
St Just:
If you are lucky to be in St Just on a clear blue and sun
filled day with the sea glittering in the distance, (early May is a good time)
you will see how the light bounces off the pavement and the granite walls
bringing a clarity to the eye and a stillness, on quiet days, to the scene that
somehow almost wraps around you.
This was the experience of David Haughton visiting St Just for the first time
in the spring of 1948, by bicycle from Nancledra with his friend and fellow
painter Kit Barker.
"I discovered St Just, by taking a bicycle trip with
Kit Barker," David related to me in 1980, "he lived in a cottage half
way between Bryan Wynter and myself; he had come down at my invitation or
recommendation, just as I had come down at Bryan's... We didn't get the whole
way, because it was a long distance we cycled over. We got as far as Levant
Mine. But I felt an extraordinary sort of quickening feeling that something
really was beginning to happen, like seeing a girl over the other side of a
room, and thinking that's the one for me. It was either the next day, or a day
or two after, that I got my bicycle out very early in the morning and cycled in
that direction, all along the coast road... But it wasn't just like finding a
girl that you know is important to you, something else happened..."
David's 'discovery' of St Just was a dramatic "turning
point" for him, one he could only explain in terms of the
"divine" and of transcendence. The experience was akin to what
mystics have found; "It was what is called a mystical or religious
experience,” David explained to me, “Which is quite unlike anything else in the
world. It was as though the whole place had become a kind of living being and
that the universe was totally harmonious."
Since that spring day St Just became the source of almost
all of David's work and preoccupied him for the next forty three years.
In her poem Cornwall 1947 Ilsa Barker wrote;
Out of the drowning waters of the war
the painters climbed, their palettes dark with hope,
eyes on the jetsam of the sands...
Victorious derelicts of peace.
they fought the khaki nightmares of their past,
alive to the beginning of their own time...
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