St Ives
A gay time by the sea
In the winter of 1952 the 21-year-old sculptor John Milne travelled to St Ives in Cornwall to take up a…
Chiselled beauty
‘To see a world in a grain of sand’, to attain the mystical perception that Blake advocated, requires a concentrated,…
A menu for the emmets
Tate St Ives is a pale 1980s block, with a fat rounded porte cochère and sea-stained walls. It is the…
The only art is Essex
When I went to visit Edward Bawden he vigorously denied that there were any modern painters in Essex. That may…
A touch of Frost
Is there any such thing as abstract art? Narratives and coherent harmonies seem to me always to emerge from the…
A long hard look
My wife says you can always tell a self-portrait by the quality of its self-regard. There’s something about the eyes…
