Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: The Glaciers, edited by Rob Airey, Lund Humphries, £19.99

There is a drawing made in 1986 by the artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004). Chalk-on-paper, it is called Eight Lines, Porthmeor. Barns-Graham was a founder-member of the Penwith Society of Arts, the artists’ colony led by Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson in the light-saturated town of St Ives, which juts out into the ocean from the wild north coast of Cornwall, where the sand is fine, as opposed to the more sheltered south, where the sand is coarse. Across the paper are stretched eight lines. Two are straight. Six are wavy. The wavy lines interweave, like the lacing on a corset. The straight lines do not touch each other. There is nothing else in the picture.

The two parts of the title are separated by a comma, and on that comma pivot the point and glory of the drawing. It is of eight lines, two straight, six wavy. It is also of Porthmeor Beach at St Ives, a landscape of sand and sea and sky. The drawing exists at the still point between abstraction and representation, between stillness and motion (TS Eliot: ‘at the still point, there the dance is, but neither arrest nor movement…’). It shows its working almost brazenly, displaying the raw material from which it is built, yet has no visible means of support. It is, at one and the same time, a depiction of a place, and a discussion of how that place might be drawn: reduced, through the clarity of the painter’s eye, to a formula of lines and spaces.

This miraculous drawing alone should long ago have established Barns-Graham as the equal of her St Ives contemporaries, but she is rarely mentioned in the same breath, or sold for the same prices, as Nicholson or Hepworth. A recent feature documentary about her, A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, hails a ‘forgotten visionary’; its existence and passion should  bolster her reputation (as will the voiceover by Tilda Swinton).

That Barns-Graham is a notch or two below the most famous artists of her time may be a result of artistic and geographical nomadism; in art as in life, she was rarely content to settle and cannot be easily filed. Born to Scottish gentry, and eventually inheriting a house in Scotland, she divided her time between two seaside saints, spending summers at St Ives and winters at St Andrews, in Fife. Her catalogue is one of infinite variety, moving freely between worlds: ‘naïve’ landscapes typical of St Ives art and inspired by Alfred Wallis; line drawings of sea and sky; Cézanne-like portraits, made during the war; a late sequence of vibrant abstracts.

She first went to Cornwall in 1940, a time of blackout and rationing, which made artists crave the late Cornish sunsets and the famed quality and cleanness of light and air. In May 1949, already an established painter and in her late thirties, she travelled to Switzerland to holiday with friends. Her destination was the Grindelwald Glacier near Bern. It was her sole trip to Switzerland, but she lived within that landscape for much of her career, producing over 100 glacier works, a first group between 1949 and 1952, and a second, stylistically more diffuse, series begun in 1976 and continuing until 1994, nearly half-a-century after she had gone up onto the ice, ‘with our boots and our tools and things’, thinking ‘this is where I want to work’.

The Glaciers is the first catalogue raisonné of these kaleidoscopic and obsessional paintings and drawings. Its focus on this long and important thread of her artistic life illumines the concerns and impulses that defined her career. The artists among whom she moved in Cornwall split into two groups between which she had to navigate, fleet-footed; helped and welcomed by the conservative St Ives Society of Artists, she was most drawn to the experiments of the breakaway faction led by Nicholson and Hepworth, finding herself caught between tradition and modernity, figuration and abstraction, painting and sculpture. The glacier works wrestle with these quandaries, and gain their vivacity by refusing any neat solution. They rebel against the restrictions of such overneat and inexact terminology.

Taking the Alps as muse like any Romantic, and perfectly able, a skilled draughtsman, to produce an accurate landscape, Barns-Graham dragged her subject into the artistic currents of her own era. Blocks and shards of mountain or ice are laid out in patches of colour like any abstract, reminiscent of the uncanny collation of objects in Paul Nash’s most Surrealist canvases. Figuration is never fully abandoned; stretches of navy sky or the hint of a moon nudge the painting towards landscape, anchoring the view and the viewer. Scale is uncertain: are these mountain ranges or ice under a microscope? Most striking of all are the 1970s works in pen and ink, with water, ice and wind rendered in a patterning of slender black lines, closely packed, washed in vivid colour, and swirling or gyrating like the whorls of a fingerprint, the contour lines on a map, or the growth rings of a tree. They place Barns-Graham firmly in a European tradition: see Louise Bourgeois’s Throbbing Pulse from 1944, although the common influence may be Paul Klee’s line drawings, in which, he said, he simply took dots for a walk.

These are paintings that wear their influences on their sleeve while remaining entirely individual. Barns-Graham was deeply affected by the sculptures of Naum Gabo, which often used ice-like materials such as glass and perspex. The glassy glacier images are a sculpture-park, with holes bored into the flats and slabs of ice and rock like any Hepworth bronze; the layering of transparent shapes and her crystalline precision bespeak Nicholson, although it was he who, in titling one of his artworks WBG, conceded that, unlike melting ice, influence flows in two directions. Considered in the cold fierce light of the glacier paintings, Hepworth’s sculptures seem Barns-Grahamish, made not of abstract forms but of mountains and moulins (the wells of meltwater that form circular holes in the ice).

Barns-Graham’s intensity and subtlety of colour, alternately muted and dazzling, is her own. Through some alchemy, especially in the later works, there seems to be a transubstantiation of paint, whereby the deep blue-green gouache takes on the qualities of the ice it depicts, transparent and reflective. As Patrick Heron put it, Barns-Graham achieved a ‘perpetual sliding from transparency to opacity’. A group from the late 1980s looks cold to the touch, a post-Cubist shattering of coloured glass. Her aim, she wrote, was to ‘combine in a work all angles at once, from above, through and all round, as a bird flies, a total experience’. She splinters her landscape into myriad angles and perspectives; these are paintings that look through, at, and down upon the glacier simultaneously. The viewer sees the permafrost as if from an aeroplane while looking up at it from beneath, a landscape opened out like unfurled origami, the creases and folds still visible. The effect, a kind of magic trick whereby the painting exists in several places at once, is of an image in perpetual motion, which creates its own stillness (‘neither arrest nor movement’): a cycle of freeze and thaw, with vigorous lines and brushstrokes implying eruptions of energy, but measured in epic stretches of geologic time.

This book appropriately views its subject and her art from every side, and is of unusual editorial imagination. The catalogue of the paintings is preceded by six chapters. Alice Strang contributes a solid art-historical contextual essay; there is then a section, curated by Tilly Heydon, of archival photographs and documents, including valuable transcriptions of Barns-Graham’s letters from Switzerland. So much for the romance of art: ‘The weather is really very disappointing… The shops are an agonising temptation – nylons – oh just everything… Had to buy darker face powder yesterday!!!’ Peter Niemow, a glaciologist at Edinburgh University, considers the paintings from a scientific and environmentalist perspective, for the volume of Swiss glaciers has halved since Barns-Graham’s visit and, as he laments, ‘the product of her Alpine epiphany is in increasing danger of becoming a historical artefact recording a previously stunning but now lost landscape’. Mark Cousins, director of the Barns-Graham documentary, who has one of her artworks tattooed on his left shoulder, writes of travelling to Switzerland in her footsteps, and of standing in the glacier’s reflection, where the sky is beneath your feet. And two poets (Holly Corfield Carr and Alyson Hallett) have been commissioned to respond, often very beautifully, to the paintings. I particularly liked Corfield Carr’s poem ‘in a few days a thinness’, which riffs on a line from the letters, its words full of reflections and patterns, and fashioned, like a verse by George Herbert, into a word-sculpture of jutting promontories and round holes.

The book manages to be a coffee-table compendium (of some 150 images, mostly in colour), a scholarly catalogue, a work of art history, a selected letters, a poetry volume, a scientific study, and an environmental requiem. There are a very few hairs caught in the paint: more than one contributor uses ‘enormity’ to mean ‘vastness’ (a sense at which even the OED raises an eyebrow) and here and there needful information is buried in notes rather than included in the main text. Aperçus excavated from the small print are delightful: one of her techniques, ‘offset drawing’, involved transferring an image onto an intermediate surface before printing it on the final sheet using knitting needles, nails and safety pins, a nicely grounded answer to the wide-eyed query these paintings inspire: ‘how is it done’?

There were further experiments to come in Barns-Graham’s long life, though she had to wait for recognition, which arrived in old age with the usual array of honours and monographs; she died at 91, while working on a retrospective at Tate St Ives. Her ninth decade had led to some of her most beautiful work, a series of abstracts ringing with a vibrancy and economy that surely resulted from total confidence and the consequent freedom. As luminous as anything by Howard Hodgkin, they are built from a jostle of stripes and circles dancing as if in a sea-wind or the mountain air. The afterglow of her one visit to Grindelwald continued to shine in her work, even after the last official glacier painting. Her art was achieved in many styles but in one voice, found within the meltwater between figuration and abstraction, between eight lines and Porthmeor beach.

A former owner of Eight Lines, Porthmeor told me that, gazing enraptured at the drawing in a private gallery, she heard a sceptical male voice behind her huffing ‘well, anyone could do that’. Being the woman she was, my friend found a pencil and paper. ‘Go on then’, she said. Try as he might, he could not reproduce those eight lines, nor work out the magic whereby they had rendered with such simplicity the point where the land meets the sea, and the sea the sky.