Penwith Society of Arts

The Penwith Society of Arts was an association of artists founded in 1949 in the town of St Ives in Cornwall, Britain, by artists working mainly in an abstract style. The society arose from a split within the older St Ives Society of Artists, when a group of progressive, modernist-minded artists broke away to form their own association. Its name derives from the Penwith peninsula, the westernmost part of Cornwall, where St Ives is situated. Among its leading members were Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and the critic Herbert Read, who played an important role in the society's establishment. St Ives had by then become one of the most important centres of British modernist art, attracting artists with its brilliant coastal light, its shoreline scenery and its creative community. The artists of the society developed abstract art, often inspired by natural forms, the landscape and the sea of Cornwall. The Penwith Society of Arts became the central institution of the so-called St Ives School and played a key role in the development of British postwar abstraction. It continues to exist to this day.