Both Bomberg and the St Ives artists spent time painting Cornwall. They did not see the same Cornwall. Working within a few years of each other, in the same small corner of West Cornwall and sometimes only a few miles apart, they started from a similar problem: how to make modern landscape painting do more than describe a view. They answered it in very different ways.
The St Ives Background
St Ives had been a working artists' colony since the late nineteenth century, with its own societies, studios and exhibitions. The St Ives Society of Artists was founded in 1927. What changed its artistic character was the arrival of a group of internationally minded modernists just as war broke out. In August 1939 Ben Nicholson and his wife, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, left London for St Ives. Within weeks the Russian Constructivist Naum Gabo and his wife Miriam had settled in nearby Carbis Bay.
All three were already committed abstract artists. During the 1930s Nicholson and Hepworth had built close ties with the international avant-garde, mainly through Nicholson's visits to Paris and their shared engagement with artists including Picasso, Brâncuși and Mondrian. Mondrian had lived near them in Hampstead since 1938. When they moved to Cornwall he stayed in London despite their efforts to persuade him to come, and after the Blitz began he left for New York in 1940. Gabo left Cornwall in 1946, but Nicholson and Hepworth stayed. During and immediately after the war, a wider circle of younger artists grew up around this modernist community, including Peter Lanyon, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost and Bryan Wynter.
But "St Ives" was never really one thing, and scholarship on the colony has become more careful about saying so. The art historian Chris Stephens, writing in Art History in 2012, argues that the real story is a shift between generations rather than a single shared style. In his account, Nicholson's circle carried a pre-war modernist ideal largely intact into post-war reconstruction. Lanyon, the only one of the younger modernists actually born in Cornwall, broke with that inheritance decisively. Other scholarship goes further. David Crouch and Mark Toogood, writing on Lanyon's sense of Cornwall's geology, history and people, and on his gliding, argue that his abstraction was not a retreat from landscape into pure form at all. Instead it was a different way of knowing a place: an attempt to register embodied, lived experience of the land rather than dissolve it into composition for its own sake.
The Borough Group's Landscapes
The Borough Group's relationship to landscape grew out of a very different classroom, but land, stone and place mattered to them too, as our earlier piece on Bomberg and ecology touched on. Bomberg's own Cornwall trip makes the comparison concrete. In August 1947 he spent about six weeks at Trendrine Farm near Zennor in West Penwith, only a few miles from the St Ives community, though he kept somewhat apart from it. The paintings he made there, among them St Ives, Cornwall and Evening in Cornwall, look nothing like the modernism taking shape down the coast. They are thick, structural and physically wrought. They can look closer in spirit to the structural intensity of his Spanish landscapes than to the dominant modernist language developing around St Ives.
The same concern runs through his students' work. Miles Richmond's later Spanish paintings, made after he followed Bomberg to Ronda in the 1950s, wrestle in charcoal and thick paint with the vertiginous scale of the Andalusian gorge country. Dennis Creffield's cathedral drawings bring the same grappling energy to Gothic stone rather than open land. Bomberg's own landscapes range from the Ronda charcoals of the 1930s and the wartime views of bomb-damaged London to the Cornwall paintings. Across all of them he treats place less as a subject to be described than as a problem of mass, structure and force.
The Point of Contrast and Its Limits
St Ives developed increasingly varied forms of abstraction rooted in the experience of the Cornish landscape. The Borough artists kept a more insistently structural and material engagement with place, tethered to Bomberg's idea of "the spirit in the mass." Some St Ives painters made changing light, colour and perception central to their response to place. Bomberg and several of his pupils put more weight on mass, structure, material resistance and the underlying forces of a form.
But Lanyon in particular makes the clean version of this contrast hard to sustain. His abstraction was not a departure from landscape but a way of registering embodied experience of it: its history, its people and its physical dangers, his own gliding among them. If that is right, then neither group was simply choosing between representation and abstraction. Both were trying to get past a description of a landscape's surface toward something they felt was truer underneath it. They disagreed, sometimes sharply, about what that truer thing was. For the St Ives artists at their most serious, it lay closer to perception, memory and lived experience of place. For Bomberg and his students, it was mass, structure and the physical forces holding a form together. These are tendencies rather than opposing camps: two different grammars for the same instinct to get beyond what the eye simply reports.
The Point of Connection
The two communities also developed partly outside London's dominant art-world structures, though in very different ways. St Ives was an established provincial artists' colony whose modernist character was transformed by Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo. It grew through a dense network of artists, studios, societies and informal exchanges, with Nicholson and Hepworth as an important modernist point of reference. The Borough was a London art-school community built around Bomberg's unusually intensive teaching. Former students described it as closer to an apprenticeship with a master than an ordinary art-school course. That classroom's wider community was the social and teaching environment from which the Borough Group later emerged.
Their later reputations diverged sharply. St Ives became one of the canonical narratives of post-war British modernism. Bomberg and the Borough Group remained comparatively marginal to that account, their story told separately and on a smaller scale. That imbalance is worth sitting with. One group now has a well-established place in accounts of post-war British art, while the other remains much less visible outside specialist scholarship.
Set side by side, St Ives and the Borough Group look like two answers to the same post-war question: what can British landscape painting still do once modernism has already happened elsewhere? Neither simply swapped representation for abstraction. Both were trying to get beyond describing what a place looks like, and they disagreed about what lay on the other side of that description. For one it was light, memory and felt experience of a specific coastline. For the other it was mass, structure and the underlying organisation of a form. They were two serious, sustained attempts to build a post-war British modernism through engagement with local ground, and they reached very different conclusions about what that ground was for.
Sources consulted: Chris Stephens, "'The morrow we left behind': Landscape and the Rethinking of Modernism, 1939–53," Art History 35, no. 2 (2012); David Crouch and Mark Toogood, "Everyday abstraction: geographical knowledge in the art of Peter Lanyon," Ecumene 6, no. 1 (1999); Leon G. Betsworth, "David Bomberg (1890–1957) and the Borough: A different class," The British Art Journal 17, no. 2 (2016): 52–57; Kate Aspinall, A Mark of the Times: Charcoal and the Borough Group (Borough Road Gallery, 2016); Tate and Art UK biographical entries for Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Piet Mondrian; Messums gallery records on Miles Richmond.