Jan Morris
Song of the Earth
Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place
By Philip Marsden
Granta Books 348pp £20 order from our bookshop
Partway through this fascinating work we come across the Cornish painter Peter Lanyon (died 1964), and he seems to me unexpectedly emblematic of the whole. He came home from the Second World War to join the eagerly abstractionist movement of English artists that became known as the St Ives School. He was the one Cornishman among them, and some resented the stoutly Cornish, semi-figurative element to his work. ‘Why don’t you admit you’re an abstract painter,’ demanded one of them, ‘instead of all this stuff about Cornwall?’
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