EXHIBITION INTRODUCTION by Mark Hudson :

Everyone wants to be first; no one wants to be last. Trevor Bell is often seen as the last of the great St Ives artists. Yet he is in many ways not a St Ives artist at all. A Yorkshireman, Bell first came to Cornwall in 1955, in the middle of St Ives’s great post-war modernist moment, at the suggestion of one of the key artists of the era, Terry Frost. The experience brought him into close contact with all the significant St Ives figures, gave him an umbilical link to pre-war constructivism via Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth – and helped facilitate a meteoric rise through the London gallery circuit, which saw him described, by Patrick Heron, as Britain’s “best non-figurative painter under thirty” in 1958. Yet far from putting down permanent roots in the manner of many incoming artists, Bell soon returned to his home city Leeds, taking up a Gregory Fellowship at the university and becoming involved in radical educational developments at the city’s art college. He subsequently spent twenty-five years teaching and working in America...

Read more/less

Bell’s pivotal early epiphany came not in response to Cornwall’s light or landscape, but on a visit to Paris while a student at Leeds College of Art in the very early 1950s. In the Musee de l’Homme in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, Bell first saw African art: standing in practically the same spot in which Picasso had seen many of the same objects, in a different museum on the same site, forty-five years earlier. Looking into the “dusty cases”, appalled, yet fascinated by the powerful smell of the tropical wood and raffia, Picasso had observed that there was “everything” there. The young Bell, who had had barely any exposure to modern art, was impressed by the “the actual presence, the realness” of these objects – the severely abstracted form of a Dogon figure, for example, or the vital curves of a Basongye mask – by the fact that this art that wasn’t the representation of something, but a thing in its own right: “‘it’, as opposed to the illusion of ‘it’, the god itself, rather than the illusion of a god”.

It was a moment that set Bell’s work on a lifelong dialogue between painting as illusion and painting as object, painting as application and painting as fabrication; a tension which bore fruit in his shaped canvases of the early 1960s, and is still directly apparent in the powerful, yet wonderfully lyrical shaped works in this exhibition. Bell’s use of shaped canvases has been described as the element that most marks him out from the mainstream of St Ives art, that gives him at least as much in common with American post-painterly abstractionists such as Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, as with the likes of Lanyon and Hilton.

But let’s not overstate Bell’s disconnectedness from something to which he is patently connected. Trevor Bell lived in Cornwall from 1955 to 1960. He returned in 1996, and has lived here ever since. While his work is emphatically not of or about landscape, it is powerfully affected by the physical environment in which it is made – just as “what the artist ate for breakfast that morning must affect what he or she paints,” as Bell is fond of observing. “How can you be here in this wind and rain and sunlight, and that not affect your work?”

Trevor Bell is not a “Cornish artist”, but he is very much here in Cornwall.

Mark Hudson, 2016

(Mark Hudson is an internationally published author and regular art and music critic for the Daily Telegraph, and has also written for The Observer, The Mail on Sunday, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times and The Guardian His books include The Last Days of Titian, Our Grandmothers’ Drums, Coming Back Brockens and The Music in my Head.)