Modern Conversations
What does it mean to be modern?
Modern Conversations display, Tate St Ives 2021 © Kirstin Prisk
What does it mean to be modern? Modern Conversations explores this question through 100 years of British and international art.
The artworks displayed in these five rooms span the 20th century through to the present day. Throughout this extraordinary ‘modern’ era, industrial growth and technological advancements has transformed daily life. While this rapid globalisation has brought benefits for some, it has also been founded on widespread losses of cultural traditions and rights. The artists raise questions about modern experience, such as: How do we relate to the natural and built environment? What is the experience of inhabiting a human body? What happens when science and technology overturn established beliefs?
Tate St Ives
Level 2, Level 3
Ongoing
Entry to both the display and the gallery is free for Tate Members, Locals' Pass holders and under 18s.
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Dame Barbara Hepworth, Curved Form (Trevalgan) 1956
Hepworth settled in St Ives during the Second World War. Inspired by the local landscape, she began to sculpt her responses to the natural forms around her. Trevalgan is the name of a hill near her home. There, she wrote, ‘the cliffs divide as they touch the sea facing west. At this point, facing the setting sun across the Atlantic, where sky and sea blend with hills and rocks, the forms seem to enfold the watcher and lift him towards the sky.’ The sculpture is not a literal representation of the divided cliffs, but a personal expression of Hepworth’s physical and spiritual encounter with nature.
Gallery label, May 2007
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Christopher Wood, Boat in Harbour, Brittany 1929
Though in Brittany, this scene is similar to many works painted by Wood in Cornwall. Towards the end of his short life, Wood spent periods working in both places in pursuit of a ‘naïve’ style of painting. In 1928 he visited Cornwall with his friends Ben and Winifred Nicholson. In St Ives the two men came across Alfred Wallis, whose ‘primitive’, child-like paintings made a deep impression on their subsequent work. For them, adopting Wallis’s instinctive style allowed them to reject the artificiality of established painting for a more authentic mode of expression.
Gallery label, July 2007
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Patrick Heron, Harbour Window with Two Figures : St Ives : July 1950 1950
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Rasheed Araeen, Lovers 1968
Araeen trained as a civil engineer, and his sculptures are constructed using geometric forms. Lovers combines two structures, each of which consists of a series of triangles that have been rotated and orientated in different ways. The work can be shown in two different configurations: either with the two parts next to each other, or on top of each other. This introduction of alternative possibilities challenges the idea of the artwork as a fixed object conceived by a single individual.
Gallery label, October 2016
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Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, White, Black and Yellow (Composition February) 1957
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Nalini Malani, Untitled I 1970/2017
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Wangechi Mutu, You were always on my mind 2007
Mutu’s elaborate figurative paintings incorporate collaged materials from a variety of sources including medical journals, ethnographic photo-essays, fashion, wildlife and pornographic magazines. In this double profile, the larger, lower, head is mainly in earth tones, and includes collaged images of a begging figure and a jewelled hand. The smaller head is lushly coloured and partly built-up in layers of a moss-like plant substance. The entire construction suggests a conflation between natural and artificial constructions of beauty and plenty.
Gallery label, September 2008
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Francis Bacon, Seated Figure 1961
Bacon’s portraits are explorations of the human condition as much as they are character studies, particularly in works such as Seated Figure, in which the identity of the sitter is not disclosed. They also represent a complex exploration of pictorial space: the figure is simultaneously posed among some elegant items of furniture and confined within a box-like frame. This device, which was one of Bacon’s trademarks, underlines the sense of isolation as well as generating a claustrophobic psychological intensity.
Gallery label, July 2012
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Patrick Heron, Green and Purple Painting with Blue Disc : May 1960 1960
In this work, an irregular blue disc hovers in front of a field of green and purple, seeming to expand and contract within the flat picture plane. Even when he eliminated recognisable subject matter, Heron’s abstractions stemmed from his observations of the visual world. He denied that he consciously painted ‘landscapes’, but affirmed: ‘the enormously powerful rhythmic energies of the granite outcrops beneath my feet transmit certain rhythms straight up through the soles of my shoes every minute of the day.’
Gallery label, May 2007
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Joan Miró, Women and Bird in the Moonlight 1949
This work belongs to a series of paintings that Miró made in 1949–50 in Majorca.
Miró’s use of simple shapes and bright colours constitutes a highly personal visual language, often charged with symbolic meaning. In this case, the women and bird of the title are easily identifiable under the moon and stars. This imagery suggests a harmonious and elemental relationship between man and nature, which the artist felt was threatened by modern civilisation.
Gallery label, August 2013
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Ithell Colquhoun, Attributes of the Moon 1947
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Victor Pasmore, Abstract in White, Black, Indian and Lilac 1957
Pasmore believed that art derived from nature, and specifically from its underlying processes and structures rather than its surface appearance. In his reliefs Pasmore brought ideas of growth and abstract harmony into three dimensions. He rejected tilted elements because they were not organic developments of the rectangles in the way that horizontals and verticals are. He added: Geometry, though subject to the quoi of personal judgment, is a guide to the organic process.
Gallery label, August 2004
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Sandra Blow, Vivace 1988
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