Wilhelmina Barns-Graham by Virginia Button

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's contribution to the story of ‘St Ives’ modernism has been relatively overlooked. This book provides an opportunity to assess her work as a woman artist in an overtly masculine post-war art world milieu, and tells how, following early promise and success, she overcame personal and professional challenges mid-career to achieve recognition at the end of her life. Through developing her own abstract vocabulary of line, form and colour, Barns-Graham was able to capture her total experience of nature, and transform her outer perceptions of the world through the filter of her inner feelings, memories and emotions. With growing critical and commercial success in her eighties, Barns-Graham's contribution to British art was further recognised with a CBE in 2001. She died having succeeded in her ambition to visualise the world as perceived through her eye, hand and heart.