A triumph on the Cornish coast
Rebecca Warren: All That Heaven Allows Tate St Ives, Cornwall
What a difference a room makes. Five years and £20million in the making, Tate St Ives’s long-awaited new extension adds only one new space. Admittedly it’s a handsome, sky-lit 500sq m room that can be divided into smaller spaces. But it has made such a difference to the whole experience, and goes a long way towards resolving tensions that have dogged the gallery since it opened in 1993.
The original Tate St Ives simply wasn’t big enough to cater to its two competing functions: to tell the story of St Ives as a mid-20th-century modernist mecca (as most seemed to want), and to provide a worldbeating showcase for cutting-edge contemporary art (as the curators want). Hence the need for the new extension, and it succeeds far better than I’d dared hope.
The danger was that the new space, catering to temporary exhibitions, would dominate attention, while the “art that made St Ives famous” in the old galleries would feel a tired add-on.
In fact, the St Ives story has been given a shot in the arm by new permanent displays, Modern Art and
St Ives. Rather than wheeling out its greatest hits again – the iconic works by the likes of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth plus Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon and their fellows – the town’s development as an artistic centre, with many artists arriving in flight from the Second World War, is expertly linked to developments in the rest of the world, giving a much broader sense of the town’s artistic significance.
The myth of St Ives’s uniqueness, a place where the Cornish light and craggy landscape generate art almost of their own accord, is debunked in favour of a more international story, in which Hepworth and Nicholson brought modernism with them in the form of Naum Gabo, the great Russian constructivist, and great Europeans such as Piet Mondrian. The succeeding generation threw out feelers to abstract expressionist New York. So we see much-loved St Ives works such as Lanyon’s furiously gestural Porthleven and Roger Hilton’s exuberant nude
Oi Yoi Yoi alongside Picasso, Matisse, Rothko and de Kooning in a way that feels completely convincing.
This revamped narrative leads organically into Rebecca Warren’s monstrous gloopy totems that provide the first exhibition in the new space. Warren drew attention in the Nineties, with messy, handcrafted sculptures that looked abstract, but were full of voluptuous female body parts – a centrefold mash-up view of the female body, with playful digs at sex-obsessed male artists such as Helmut Newton.
The works here, all exhibited for the first time, are less obviously figurative. Clay cast in bronze and painted looks, at a glance, like children’s pottery blown up 9ft high. The human resonance in their haphazard masses brings to mind great alpha male artists, which presumably creates the link to the humanistic modernism of the St Ives tradition. Yet these quasi-figures sport whimsical pink bows moulded into their surfaces, puncturing the pomposity of the heroic male view.
If Warren’s work might sound like a clever but slightly facile satire on male artistic vanity, there’s a vigorous, sensuous handling of materials, and a mystery and humour to her work that demands further exploration. All of which makes her show a more than worthy element in the triumphant reinvention of Tate St Ives.