Bojewyan Farms.
Title |
Bojewyan Farms. |
Creator |
Lanyon, Peter (British painter, 1918-1964) |
Date |
1951-1952 |
Cultural Context |
British English European |
Subject |
Abstract paintings Abstract works Agriculture Agricultural productivity Croplands Farms Farming Economics Economic & social conditions Landscapes (Representations) Villages Coastlines Animals |
Description |
"Bojewyan is a small village near St. Just in Cornwall, England. At the time of the painting local farmsteads were falling empty because they were uneconomic. Lanyon saw this as a serious threat to the region. His painting contains hints of a symbolic revival of fortunes. Several animal images and womb-like shapes are incorporated into the design. The Cornish landscape is suggested through rugged interlocking forms. (At the top left the curve of the coastline is legible.)" (Caption, p.30); "In Britain, the postwar atmosphere of austerity in London, presided over by a new, guardedly optimistic, Labour government, created the conditions for the emergence of an existentially tinged figuration […]. However, away from the metropolis, a group of its former residents - Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and the Russian émigré Naum Gabo - had weathered the war years in and around St. Ives in Cornwall, already a well-established artists' center. Their geometric abstraction, which had won international recognition in the 1930s, had a decisive effect after the war on the painter Peter Lanyon. He began to reformulate his basic commitment to the Cornish landscape in terms of the post-Cubist space and interpenetration of interior and exterior volumes derived from their painting and sculpture respectively. […] By the early 1950s Lanyon's work managed to reconcile the rural nostalgia typical of 'Neo-Romanticism' (an important phenomenon of the war years encompassing painters such as Graham Sutherland and John Piper) with an expressionist handling and acknowledgement of the picture plane in line with Abstract Expressionism." (Excerpt, pp.30-31) |
Location Depicted |
Cornwall (England : County) England Great Britain United Kingdom |
Material |
Oil on Masonite Oil paint (pigmented coating) Paint Masonite (TM) |
Work Type |
Paintings Oil paintings Abstract paintings Abstract works |
Repository |
British Council (London, England, United Kingdom) |
Source |
Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford History of Art. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000. (p.30. fig.14) |
Rights |
Photograph reproduced in Hopkins courtesy: Mrs. S. Lanyon. |
Digital Publisher |
University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center |
Format |
image/jpeg |
Digital File Name |
VRC 826-27.jpg |
Rating |
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