Trevor Bell
Last of the St Ives artists whose Cornish abstract paintings evolved into vibrant ‘shaped canvases’
TREVOR BELL, who has died aged 87, was the last of the radical generation of St Ives painters that included older artists such Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Patrick Heron.
It was on the encouragement of one of the key abstract artists of the era, Terry (later Sir Terry) Frost, who was teaching in Leeds at the time, that in 1955 the Yorkshire-born Bell decided to go to St Ives in west Cornwall, which was at the heart of the burgeoning post-war modernist movement. With his wife on board Bell rode his motorcycle to Zennor, where Karl Weschke was his neighbour, and he later rented a cottage at Nancledra, which would subsequently be Roger Hilton’s home.
Bell’s work in this early period was abstract but usually retained a thematic link to the Cornish landscape, and showed a clear debt to Hilton. It culminated in a successful solo show at the Waddington gallery in 1958, in the catalogue of which Patrick Heron described Bell as “the best nonfigurative painter under 30 in this country”.
Bell would later move to Florida, where he experimented with massive, intensely coloured “shaped-canvas” paintings.
The son of a sales rep for a chemicals firm, Harold, and a teacher, Elizabeth, Trevor Bell was born in Leeds on October 18 1930 and from Roundhay School gained a scholarship to Leeds art college. In Paris during the 1950s he was affected by seeing the African art at the Musée de l’homme – “primitive” pieces which half a century earlier had influenced Picasso and Matisse.
He experienced meteoric success in Cornwall: the 1958 Waddington Gallery show had sold out by the opening night, and soon afterwards he was awarded the Paris Biennale International Painting Prize and an Italian Government Scholarship. But in 1960 he returned to Leeds to take up an appointment for three years as Gregory Fellow in Painting at the university. This time the Yorkshire hills and weather inspired his painting. Writing about Overcast, from this period, he described wanting “to re-create a strangeness and power of imagery I find in the North”.
Through the decade there were three more shows at Waddington and in 1970 a touring retrospective starting at the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh. By now he was drawn to American developments in modernism and had broken away from the smallerscale St Ives work, with results that did not meet universal approval. Writing in The Daily Telegraph in 1963, the critic Edwin Mullins compared Bell’s experiments in “the geometry of atmosphere” enthusiastically with the work of Turner, but complained that “the further his paintings move from a direct experience of landscape the duller they are apt to become (Turner never lost this contact)”.
After a big one-man show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1973 and several American exhibitions, in 1976 Bell was invited to become Professor for Master (Graduate) Painting at the Florida State University in Tallahassee. Here he made use of a vast studio to concentrate on large, shaped canvases, angular and vibrantly coloured. He returned to Cornwall in 1996, setting up his studios at a farmhouse just inland from Newlyn.
In 1985 examples of Bell’s work were featured in the Tate Gallery’s St Ives 1939-64 , and in 1993 he was included in the opening show of Tate St Ives. His later work was the subject of a solo show at Tate St Ives in 2004.
Trevor Bell married, first, in 1952, Dee Hobdell (dissolved); secondly, in 1970, Eirian Edwards (dissolved); and in the mid-1970s he married Harriet Corder, who survives him with a son from the first marriage and a son from the second.
Asked in 2014 what motivated him, Bell replied: “It’s not to do with money, although I like that to occur. But my work isn’t the sort of thing you put over the mantelpiece.”
Trevor Bell, born October 18 1930, died November 3 2017