Kenneth Clark, while sitting peacefully in Brunelleschi’s cloisters at Santa Croce, Florence, tells the camera that he feels this place is his ‘true centre’. The spirit of place, or genius loci, of those beautifully proportioned renaissance cloisters inspires in Clark emotions of profound clarity and calm, a sense that under those leaping arches the whole world becomes comprehensible. Santa Croce is undoubtedly beautiful, and important in our intellectual history, a hymn to humane art and architecture, but despite this, it has never moved me quite to the extent it clearly moves Clark, this is not my true centre.
To find the place that evokes such feelings in me one must travel west from Italy, to another peninsular cutting into deep blue waters, to Cornwall, and to the ancient fishing port of St. Ives, less than twenty miles from Land’s End. Here, in the winding streets that rise from the harbour, wrapped in a high granite wall, one will find an oasis of the most wondrous nature. I holidayed in this part of Cornwall often as a boy and returned again this February, when the place was emptied of the crowds that are so horribly known as ‘staycationers’ who descend every August, in search of a garden I had visited once many years before.
The sculptor Barbara Hepworth was not Cornish by birth, coming from the Yorkshire city of Wakefield, she only arrived in St. Ives, along with her children and second husband, the painter Ben Nicholson, with the outbreak of war in 1939. Many British artists made the journey down to this most south-westerly tip of the country around this time in an effort to evade the worst of the Nazi bombing and by the end of the 1940s the new Penwith Society of Artists, created by Hepworth and Nicholson for abstracts artists working in the area, boasted members such as Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton, as well as the world-famous ceramicist Bernard Leach. Around this time Hepworth discovered some semi-derelict outbuildings known as Trewyn Studios which he purchased, along with their garden, in 1949. She would live and work there until her death in 1975.
The first decade of her life at Trewyn Studios, the 1950s, was the most important of her career. In 1950 she gained her breakthrough moment of international recognition, representing Britain at the Venice Biennale, followed quickly by major commissions for the Festival of Britain in ‘51. In the following couple of years her relationship with Nicholson broke down and he left St. Ives and her eldest child from her first marriage died in the plane crash over Thailand. This mixture of fame and tragedy resulted in a passionate rededication to her art and some of her greatest years of creativity. By the early ‘60s her fame was enough that a major work was commissioned to sit in the forecourt of the new United Nations headquarters in New York. Whilst the work may have been international, the inspiration came from Cornwall, she wrote, “it was during this time that I discovered the remarkable pagan landscape which lies between St. Ives, Penzance, and Land’s End…it has a very deep effect on me, developing all my ideas about the relationship of the human figure in the landscape-sculpture and landscape.”
Hepworth’s life and work is soaked in the genius loci, so it is no surprise that her garden, with its carefully curated selection of her works, is potent with that magical intangible energy. Wondrously, her studio and garden have been preserved as a museum (run by Tate) exactly as they were left in 1975. The plaster and clay splattered overalls still hang on the back of the door, the rows of chisels lie patiently and unstirred, half-finished sculptures litter the workshop, the potted succulents still bask in the greenhouse. The rich green planting of palms, grasses, and ferns remains as laid out by Hepworth and her friend the composer Priaulx Rainier, and nestled amongst the leaves and fronds sit her own selection of her work as if grown there from the soil under her watchful care…I suppose in many ways they were.
Being that bit elevated above the centre of St. Ives, the only glimpses of the town one is afforded from the garden are the lichen speckled rooftops and, rising amongst them, the solid fifteenth-century tower of the parish church. The odd sound of a car on cobbled streets, or children passing by to the beach, rises over the walls but, late on a bright February afternoon as I sat there alone in the greenhouse, it was the deep calm and peace that made its impression on me the most. Hepworth’s organic, tactile sculptures, with their contrasting smooth and rough surfaces, their liquid forms and entrancing structures, stand totemically around with a mysterious, yet harmonious arrangement that is akin to the neolithic monuments that scatter the landscape of the West Country, particularly Penwith. In her garden, Hepworth made her own menhir, her own quoits, her own henges that carry with them the same time-spanning potency of their prehistoric forebears. And yet they are modern, fresh, and still at times startlingly avant-garde in their abstract credentials. This wonderful temporal harmony between themes and subjects as old as the landscape itself and the mid-twentieth-century style and setting of the studio, sculptures, and garden generates a spirit of place unique, in my experience, to that square half-acre in West Cornwall.
It is cliche to say that a visit to an artist’s studio is like walking through their mind and indeed a trip to any living artist’s place of work is influenced by the conscious efforts of that person to display (or sometimes to obscure) their process as they wish it to be seen. It is, unfortunately, unusual to see inside the studios of great dead artists as they are often lost or sold off piece by piece after the funeral dues are paid. The museum in Rodin’s Paris home is exactly that, a formal museum rather than a time capsule, and Monet’s garden at Giverny is so squarely on the tourist trail that any residual spirit of place is trampled underfoot. I am told that the studio of Cézanne at Aix-en-Provence, preserved in aspic after his death and still full of the possessions that populate his still-lives, is an experience not to be missed and that one only truly begins to comprehend his grand project in paint once one has stood in that room, in that light, with that dust. I hope one day to go, and maybe there I might find a similar feeling of leftover creative energy still humming in the air that I found in Barbara Hepworth’s garden. But right now Cornwall is much closer than the South of France.
This potent atmosphere is increased by the fact that Hepworth died at the studio in an accidental fire, likely caused by one of her ever-burning cigarettes. By the time of her death in 1975 she had been made a Dame, had been the subject of a number of major retrospectives, and was rightly heralded as the Queen of British Art. The story of a life so suddenly ended weaves into the seemingly freshly abandoned tools on the workbench, not in an eerie, ghostly way but rather as if she has just popped down to the beach, leaving her morning’s work unfinished.
Sitting there, against her curved white sun-trap wall, on her old wooden bench, catching the final rays of the cold but bright February sun that afternoon, I was surrounded not only by her physically beautiful sculptures and her luscious planting, but also by a genius loci, a spirit of place, that was partly carefully designed by Hepworth herself and partly the happy coincidence of the passing years. I discovered a place that felt something like my ‘true centre.’ Barbara Hepworth’s garden is more than just another shrine to one of modern art’s dead heroes, it’s something still very much living, part of a landscape that is both real and in the mind, both prehistoric and avant-garde, immensely solid whilst being totally abstract. These creative energies are brought together with a sense of indescribable harmony, peace and beauty that can only be found behind those granite walls and which is more than worth the entrance fee.
Morgan Haigh 