Born in 1918, Peter Lanyon created exhilaratingly airy abstract paintings, underpinned by a sense of something dark and primal beneath the surface of things – images that may have influenced the abstract expressionism of Pollock and de Kooning – before his death in a gliding accident in 1964. His son Andrew has taken a very different path with quirkily surreal paintings and sculptures that make ironic comment on St Ives’s role as art capital, informed both by his own childhood at the centre of the Cornish art world, with the likes of Mark Rothko stopping over at the weekends, and a deep knowledge of the town’s other history as fishing port and mining centre.
In Von Ribbentrop in St Ives: Art & War in the Last Resort, showing at the recently opened Kestle Barton gallery on the Lizard, Andrew Lanyon looks at the Nazi ambassador’s visits to St Ives in the late 1930s. Was he there for rest and relaxation? To collect picture postcards as intelligence for a German invasion? Or to conspire with local landowners to turn St Michael’s Mount into his private palace after the establishment of the Reich in Britain?
Through Lanyon’s cranky and often very funny automata and collages, constructed from junk and vintage photographs, this unlikely scenario becomes a metaphor for the workings of the imagination, in which the legendary naive painter Alfred Wallis keeps watch on the modernist "colonialists" Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood. Artists are forced to turn to abstraction when representational painting of the Cornish coastline is banned as a wartime security threat – an improbable idea based on plain historical truth.
Two exhibitions providing excellent excuses – if any were needed – for taking that train to Cornwall.
Von Ribbentrop in St Ives: Art & War in the Last Resort is at Kestle Barton, near Helston until 30 October.
Peter Lanyon is at Tate St Ives from 9 October to 23 January.
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