The late flowering of Rose Hilton

By Michael Watts

It’s hard to believe now, but in the mid-20th century, west Cornwall incubated Britain’s answer to the modernism of New York and Paris. First to arrive there, in 1928, were the painters Christopher Wood and Ben Nicholson; then came Nicholson’s second wife, Barbara Hepworth, and Naum Gabo, a Russian sculptor. By the early 1950s, a community of largely abstract artists had gathered in the seaside town of St Ives. They revelled in the warm Cornish light and colour, the shapes of the land and coast, and argued that they, and not Americans like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, were the true inventors of abstract expressionism.