W. Barns-Graham

British abstract painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) played a key role in the development of modern abstract art in Britain. This new paperback edition of Lynne Green's classic monograph completes the story of the artist's life and work with a new coda covering Barns-Graham's final years, drawing for the first time on the artist's personal diaries and notebooks.Born in Fife, Scotland, for over sixty years Barns-Graham lived and worked in St Ives, at the heart of the avant-garde group of artists who made the town internationally famous. Lynne Green's insightful text restores Wilhelmina Barns-Graham to her rightful place in the story of the St Ives School, establishes her personal achievement as a painter, and by implication the importance of her wider contribution to twentieth-century art.Despite the increased attention given to Barns-Graham's work over the last decade, this book remains the only in-depth study of an artist who had the courage and determination to pursue her own path, and with spectacular success. As this new edition demonstrates, in the last decade of her life Barns-Graham's creative invention blossomed and her output increased dramatically, not least because of her enthusiastic adoption of cutting-edge contemporary screenprinting techniques. In these years she worked with a new sense of urgency and creative freedom, in which risk-taking became a central theme. The result was some of the most exhilarating, joyful, and life-affirming work ever produced by a British artist.

Lynne Green is an art historian whose specialist fields are British modernism and contemporary art. She was the co-founder and former editor of Contemporary Art (now Contemporary) magazine and was formerly an exhibition organiser at the Hayward Gallery before becoming curator of Southampton City Art Gallery. Her previous publications include Painting with Smoke: David Roberts Raku Potter (2000, revised edition 2009) and Yorkshire Sculpture Park: Landscape for Art (2008), as well as numerous exhibition catalogues and substantial essays. In 2007 she founded Greendrake Press.