Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: The Glaciers review: 'a eureka moment'

A year of celebrating the life of Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham concludes with a new book about her pivotal 1949 visit to Switzerland’s Grindelwald Glacier​, writes Roger Cox

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (second left) on the Grindelwald Glacier, Switzerland, 1949 | Photograph courtesy of the Brotherton Family

In 1949, while visiting the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland, the Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham experienced something of a eureka moment. Up until this point, she had been struggling to find much to inspire her in the Swiss mountains, writing home to her parents that “I don’t alas see anything I want to draw. I know Switzerland is grand, beautiful and exciting, but as an artist, to me anyway, it has no appeal.”

On the glacier, however, everything suddenly seemed to fall into place. Describing this pivotal experience many years later, Barns-Graham wrote “[The] likeness to glass and transparency, combined with solid rough ridges made me wish to combine in a work all angles at once, from above, through and all round, as a bird flies, a total experience.”

She went on to devote the next three years of her life to making groundbreaking glacier-inspired work, and it was a theme she was to return to again and again throughout her career. As the curator and writer Virginia Button puts it: “Her experience [on the glacier] transformed her understanding of nature as a living force in constant flux. Through a subsequent body of work, she developed a post-cubist idiom to describe space and explored the potential of abstract art to reveal the hidden dynamics of nature.”

2024 has also been an important year for Barns-Graham. To mark the 20th anniversary of her death, the British Museum held an exhibition titled A Scot in St Ives from January to May; the Saatchi Gallery put on a special exhibition of her work at the British Art Fair in September; the critic and filmmaker Mark Cousins released the documentary A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things in October (premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival), with extracts from the the artist’s diaries and letters narrated by Tilda Swinton; and now Lund Humphries have published a new book, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: The Glaciers, dealing specifically with the moment in 1949 when she first came into contact with the Grindelwald Glacier, and the glacier paintings, drawings and prints she produced thereafter.

Edited by Rob Airey, director of the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust, the book contains various essays which speak to the significance of this moment in her career.

The modern and contemporary art specialist (and former senior curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art) Alice Strang calls Barns-Graham’s glacier visit “an epiphany”. Mark Cousins, meanwhile, characterises it as a moment of explosive creative lift-off: “She was primed to love the glacier,” he writes. “Her brain was ready for ignition.”

Detail from Glacier Vortex, 1950, by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham | Southampton City Art Gallery

There is something inherently appealing about the idea of the eureka moment, whether it’s Archimedes in the bath, Newton and his apple or Paul McCartney hearing the melody for Yesterday in a dream. Part of what makes the thought of these moments so seductive is the sense that they could happen at any time, without warning. Archimedes, Newton and McCartney weren't expecting to make their respective discoveries – in all three cases, these bolts from the blue came as a shock.

But, of course, while the timing may be random when inspiration strikes, the targets are often less-so. Eureka moments tend to come to those who have already been putting in the intellectual spadework, and this was certainly the case with Barns-Graham.

As Strang explains in her essay “Into the Vortex: The Glacier in Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s Work”, after moving to St Ives in 1940 the artist was soon absorbed into the avant-garde group that included Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo. During the 1940s she “built on the practice of highly tuned observational drawing instilled in her [at Edinburgh College of Art] to apply a sense of geometry to a simplified and imaginative rendering of local scenes”. Still a long way away from abstraction, perhaps, but on the road nevertheless.

The next part of Barns-Graham’s creative journey is expertly explained by Strang and backed up by a well-curated catalogue of images, so that it is possible to flick easily from the text to the images and back again to understand how her art evolved. The great abstract swirls of dramatic oil paintings like and Glacier Vortex and Glacier Bone, both made in 1950, or Ice Cavern of 1951 didn’t simply emerge fully formed – they were the products of a period of intense visual thinking that began with more figurative works.

As Strang puts it: “Barns-Graham appears to have begun processing her immersive experience by way of works on paper, in which she mapped out key structural features... [then] a series of offset drawings, to which wash was sometimes applied, allowed Barns-Graham to use her accomplished drawing skills to progress from simplified representation to the introduction of a frontal plane [and in these works] a ‘glacier vocabulary’ begins to emerge.”

Barns-Graham’s brain may well have been “primed” by 1949, but it took her visit to the glacier – and a subsequent period of hard yakka – for her to achieve her artistic breakthrough.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: The Glaciers, is published by Lund Humphries, price £19.99