There's been a few changes at the Penwith Gallery recently. Shall we talk about them?

Yes. We're basically trying to turn a very old building into a functioning, contemporary gallery. And thanks to the generosity of our Vice Chair, sculptor Tom Leaper, we've been able to update the lighting, sculpture garden and to afford to put a new glass roof in the main gallery.

This bookshop space has always been here, but it certainly looks cleaner and brighter than it used to be.

This is the sort of 'bread and milk aisles'. This is the stuff that ticks over and gets the money. The Tate's bookshop is n't what it use to be...
 

Yes. It's become rather generic.

They won't stock Margaret Gardiner's book on Barbara Hepworth because it mentions that she joined the Communist Party! It's crazy. We're going to get rid of the kitchen area and basically turn it into a bookshop, with pottery and jewellery and the crafts. Just so people can get something different.


Coming on to The Hepworth Room, which is a newish exhibition space (picture below). Presumably it has a gradually changing historical exhibition?

Yes. This is the area me and Julia, my wife, are in control of. What we do is beg borrow and steal - though not so much steal these days - but we go to people like The Belgrave Gallery, Porthminster Gallery and other individuals and ask to show their art works alongside our own collection.

So you've got a nice Bryan Wynter in here (picture below right)...

This was actually found in two inches of water by myself. I unwrapped it and I saw this little corner here and I thought 'oh my God I know that's a Bryan Wynter because of the colours and the frame', and my knees started to knock together!

We've also got a Victor Pasmore. We had our eyes on this for quite a while. The only downside was that I had to carry it from Porthminster Gallery, through St. Ives, to here on my shoulders!


The big Hepworth sculpture, 'Magic Stone' (above), was near the front door for a while wasn't it?

It was in the foyer. It's Seravezza stone. It was given to the gallery for purposes of promotion on the understanding that if we ever didn't want it it would revert to the estate. But it never will be returned to the estate because we love it! It costs us six grand insurance a year, but it's well worth it and it's the only 'Magic Stone' that doesn't have a hole in it.


That's interesting.

And for Barbara to be given the honour of using the marble from Michelangelo's quarry is quite important.

The base of 'Magic Stone' is made of guarea wood which is a North African wood. Many of Barbara's bases are made from guarea wood. She gave some to John Milne and Denis Mitchell. The story goes that Margaret Gardiner went on holiday with her to North Africa and the Mediterranean, Barbara saw the wood and said 'this would make nice carvings'. And Margaret goes 'oh, don't worry, darling. I'll get you some'. Anyway, Barbara got a phone call from Portsmouth docks about six months later to say 'your wood's here'. Turned out it was still a tree! So she had to send a tree surgeon to chop it up, and the delivery was so big it blocked the roads for hours in St Ives...

We also get donations, like the Sven Berlin and the Borlase Smart (below). Borlase Smart died in 1947, and that's when all the trouble started. Bradshaw said that he ran with the foxes and the hounds.


He helped keep the St Ives Society together during the war.

But after he died the in-fighting started...Bradshaw and Rowntree and Ninnes didn't like the way the society was going. Bradshaw hadn't been chosen for an exhibition and I think Ben Nicholson had been chosen, and Bradshaw didn't appreciate that. And he thought that the chairman Leonard Fuller, and David Cox, the secretary were basically pushing towards a more modernist ideology. And so they called a meeting, and that's when the split happened.
 

People think that the Penwith Society is a modernist society, but nothing could be further from the truth. It did have modernists in it, but of the first 19 that left the St Ives Society to form the Penwith Society, in February 1949, only 8 were modernist. The other 11 were just sympathisers. And at the first meeting Peter Lanyon insisted that the society be a catholic society - not big 'C', like David Cox wrote, but a small 'c' - so there was a broad spectrum of artists. There was no segregation whatsoever.

But that only lasted a couple of months. After the first show the hang committee hadn't done a very good job and certain people said, 'we've got to segregate'. So it became A) traditional B) modernist and C) craft. Basically, from that moment on, the society struggled. Poor old Karl Weschke was put into group B). And in his notes, he asks 'do I have to always be abstract now?' Looking through the minutes, it's like watching a slow train crash! The system of segregation lasted until the late '70s.
 

The Penwith Gallery now has two main spaces, were'nt they car parks originally?

If the main gallery opened in '61, that means that there was a period of more than ten years when the Penwith Gallery was in the centre of St Ives, in Fore Street.

It was in two places in Fore Street. First of all, in '49 when they met in the Castle Inn, the Labour Party were vacating their space, the meeting hall, which was above the Castle Inn so that was their first venue for exhibitions. It was quite small.

But then they moved to 36, Fore Street which is a Joules shop now, opposite a camera shop.

Tony Shiels had his gallery, the Steps Gallery, above there.

There were a lot of galleries around, and basically if a shop had a bit of space there'd be an exhibition. The first opportunities for Bryan Wynter and Peter Lanyon were in Downing's bookshop.

Moving to the back of the 1971 gallery space, there are two new locked rooms.

Last year we made a study room (picture above) for the academics and students who come to us, and we have meetings in here as well. And again, we put little exhibitions of the Penwith's archive collection in here, which is nice because you do see some lesser known names.

We found an absolute ton of artworks in the room where there was a lot of water damage. We found a Bryan Pearce (picture below), and this is a Rose Hilton. Rose hadn't signed it or dated it. When she came into the gallery I went up to her and said. 'Rose I think this is yours. Is it?' She said 'Oh yes, I painted it in '73'. These were all in plastic bags in two inches of water in a dumping room out the back. Fortunately Cathy Watkins didn't throw anything away. The problem is we have to put up with about 25 recipes for coronation chicken!

If I could set the scene. It was pitch darkness. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. I was wearing flip-flops and I already had wet feet. I put my hands into the first bag, pulled out a piece of paper, took it outside, and started reading it. It was a letter from Wilhelmina Barns-Graham saying how cold it was in Scotland and how she wished she was back in Cornwall. And she'd done a little drawing of her trudging through the snow with her scarf waving behind. I thought 'that's precious. That's nice'. Anyway, I went back, put my hand in the same bag and pulled out a telegram from Peter Lanyon. And it said 'sorry, I can't make Saturday's meeting. Could David Haughton, please proxy for me. And if David can't do it, anybody but Barbara or Ben?' and the hairs on the back of my head shot up. My knees started quaking again and I thought, oh my god, what have I found?
 

Amazing. But it sounds like it was all very jumbled up. So basically what you've done is to sort them into boxes to keep them safely in the archive room.

Yes. I contacted the National Archives and I said to my wife 'let's see how long it takes them to respond and see how important this is'. Within 20 minutes we got an eight page reply, with lots of advice. Then they sent two of the most fantastic people down and we basically moved all the stuff out of the water into a studio.

 

Now its here, in this tighter, more enclosed space. And you've got two dehumidifiers going...

The humidity in here ran at 86%. Now, anything over mid 50s and mould will start to appear. I personally paid for the first dehumidifier, the shelving units and the boxes, basically. I knew the stuff that was here could eventually be of interest to academics, and to students and families that have been here.

So do you think the oldest materials are the minutes of the Society, going back to the 40s and 50s?

Yes. Here's the first meeting of the Penwith Society in 1949. And these are the 19 that started (picture below). So if anybody says 'oh yeah, I was a founding member' we can check because we've got the list! Garlick Barnes used to think that she was a founding member, but sadly not, though she was a member within the month.

That meeting would have been in The Castle because Denis Mitchell's brother was the landlord and so it was the perfect place to go, even though Ben Nicholson was teetotal. He didn't really want to meet up in any establishment that sold alcohol. Before they rented out the hall above the Castle Inn, they went to St. Christopher's which was a restaurant on Porthmeor Road. Just around the corner here.

The Val Baker's place.

Yes, but they came a bit later, after the Keeley's had it.

Ben felt quite righteous that there was no alcohol. Much to the annoyance everybody else, probably! 
 

Regarding your other activities at the gallery, I noticed recently that an Art History Club has started up.

Alice Ellis Bray. Fantastic artist and fantastic person and she works with us. The sun was shining when she decided to join us! She's set up this art history club.

The thing is we're completely unfunded. The Tate and Leach take everything in St. Ives and nobody wants to give grants to us, which is why I had to buy all the storage material myself.

You've got an Instagram account running for the archive, but presumably only a very small fraction of the archive has gone onto that.

Yes. There are seventy boxes and each piece of paper, apart from the coronation chicken, is extremely relevant. Recently Matt Retallack, art historian, came in researching the sale of St Peters Loft, with Peter Lanyon's school above, for example.

And now your book is in the archive too.

I feel honoured.

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