Pip Benveniste 1921 - 2010

by Mark Vaughan OBE

 

Pip Benveniste was a painter, printmaker, photographer, etcher, rug designer and film-maker, with a prolific output across most of the 20th century.

 

It is not surprising therefore, that the full legacy and 60-years’ work of this British modernist painter is known for its use of a fantastic spectrum of colours and a finely crafted, intuitive response to essential forces and elements in the natural world.

 

As a child, she was surrounded by artists, writers and actors, and had a deep-seated engagement with the Cornish environment of coast and rock, fishing villages and the iconic field layout of small farms and hills of this granite peninsula.

 

Benveniste was born in 1921 into the artists’ colony of Newlyn, a centre of British Modernism. Her mother, Kay Earle, was a painter of the Newlyn School and her father, Alec Walker, a Yorkshire mill owner who became a painter after he married Kay and settled in Newlyn in the early 1900s. Benveniste grew up with intimate and important relationships with many of those more closely linked to the Newlyn School; she is the child in Dod Procter’s ‘Kitchen at Myrtle Cottage’ in the Tate Collection after which Procter warmly encouraged her to continue with painting.

 

Together, Walker and Earle established Cryséde, a successful and innovative company producing high quality, wood block, hand printed designs on silk for fine clothing in the 1920s and 1930s. Alec Walker was the sole designer with the business side run by Tom Heron (father of the artist Patrick Heron). Cryséde eventually had 28 retail shops across England and Scotland in its heyday and its products are now museum pieces, with some in the Victoria & Albert in London and the Penlee Museum in Cornwall.

 

As the elder daughter of bohemian parents in the 1920s, Benveniste was allowed to roam freely across the Cornish landscape, absorbing shapes, colours and themes, which would remain part of her artistic sensibility as she moved between figurative and abstract art; she might not have known it at the time but in those early years, she was laying down a matrix of deeply interconnecting themes that would later return time and time again to influence her thinking eye as an adult artist.

 

Throughout her six decades of prolific work, the natural world was a constant companion for Pip Benveniste. Wherever she travelled or lived, it was the key source of inspiration.

 

Shortly before her death in 2010 she wrote, ‘It is the creative energy of the doing that has the value; the finished object is the manifestation of this energy and that is how it acquires a value.’ Benveniste’s art has been favourably compared to the early work of Paul Klee and reviewers have made connections with another of her heroes, Wassily Kandinsky.

 

The landscapes and colours in which she lived shaped her paintings - the mountains behind Menton in Alpes-Maritimes in the 1940s, Kentish farmlands, Tunisian desert towns, craggy English coastlines with granite rock formations, Dorset hills and valleys, and the special quality of the Cornish light. She was intrigued by ‘the mystical line where the sea meets the land.’ The various designs of breakwaters and groins around the UK, which bridge this juncture to help stop land erosion, were the subject of many of her figurative and abstract paintings over the years.

 

Brought up amongst alternative thinking and creative people, including pacifists and conscientious objectors who were seeking a new world order, Benveniste had very little formal education. Radical is a good way to describe her ideas about art, colour, society, education, relationships and work, and it’s a good description of the eclectic range of media she employed in her art.

 

At her memorial, Professor Andrew Dewdney, at London’s South Bank University said: ‘Pip Benveniste needs to be part of the story of 20th Century British art. When we think of Modernist Britain, we think a long list of men such as Lucien Freud, Richard Hamilton, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Victor Pasmore or John Piper. Benveniste was all the more singular within her generation in committing herself to being a full time artist. The price that all artists pay for their singular purpose is, I suspect, visited more painfully upon women artists.

 

‘Britain has yet to fully explore the contribution of women painters such as Sandra Blowe, Prunella Clough, Sylvia Sleigh and Gillian Ayres, who were also contemporaries of Benveniste. In this sense, the male-dominated, post-war art gallery and curating scene didn’t help facilitate a career; though she clearly had a context, and as happens with many good artists after their death, a deeper and more rewarding revisiting of their legacy and struggle reveals refreshed pleasures and new insights that allow us to validate again their journey and their place in history.’

 

Benveniste was a modernist in all senses of the word. She was uncompromising in all things, a secularist and pacifist – she never voted once in any election, except for the Green Party in the year she died - and as an artist always wanting to maximise her sensate as well as cognate relationship to life. Life was for living to the limits in defiance of tradition and convention.

 

It was in the late 1960s that Benveniste added to her working apparatus to make 16mm films, both for herself and for other artists, producing groundbreaking results, which were quite avant-garde at the time. In 2004, her then 40 year old film ‘Eventual’, which included the work of artist John Latham, was honoured in Tate Britain’s exhibition ‘Art and the 60s: This Was Tomorrow’ as well as being shown on BBC television. ‘Eventual’ resurfaced again in a groundbreaking 2012 London art exhibition that looked at the relationship between post-war governments and artists’ collective responses to some of their social, economic and defence policies.

 

In making ‘Poet’ (1966) she filmed ten of the most progressive poets of the day, (ironically they were all male), several of them going on to become internationally recognised. Not before time, her legacy of art films, now restored and digitised are currently being re-assessed with encouraging responses coming from Tate Modern and the British Film Institute in London.

 

Rozemin Keshvani, a London based curator and writer currently researching the artist’s legacy, says: ‘Benveniste’s involvements and collaborations with contemporaries place her among an elite group of avant-garde and often radical British artists searching for new ways of responding to the geopolitical anxieties experienced by the cold-war generation.

 

‘Women artists have contributed immeasurably to the status of British art in the last couple of decades, but for much of the last century they weren’t taken as seriously as their male peers. Galleries, dealers and colleges just did not consider them as capable as male artists of the depth and quality of focus needed for an artistic career. Yet, Benveniste‘s dedication to her craft can be seen at every stage of her long and involved career, spanning every media from paint to printing to her most innovative works in film and even rug design.’

 

Benveniste’s long-standing fascination with several far eastern cultures – particularly Tibet, as well as the ancient philosophies of India and China - steadily deepened over the years. Living in East Anglia in the 1970s, she was able to widen the use she had previously made of the ‘I Ching Book of Changes’ to a meditation/study of all 64 hexagrams in the book, rather than single consultations of just one. On reading about Klee and Kandinsky she declared her own ‘joyous release’ from what she called ‘the seriousness of being a modern painter;’ she felt more able to play with line and colour, and listen to her intuitions more closely.

 

Her paintings at this time were about isolated moments of meditation - staring at reflections on a canal, rolling farmlands, a change of season, the wind across a Yorkshire landscape, or the power of a storm. When she moved back to London in 1978, she felt invigorated and with a powerful energy regarding her work.

 

Benveniste saw each painting as an experiment, minor or major, but necessary, investigating which colours ‘float’ convincingly, or which ‘move and breathe’. Many of her paintings still create a feeling of distance in time and space, as well as looking more locally through different aspects of nature, trees, fields and so on. In the abstract watercolour ‘Travelling Light’ (1987), a large bright yellow shape seems to sit in the centre of a dark blue rock-solid mass, yet Benveniste explained that the ‘yellow light’ was in fact solid, travelling through empty, dark blue space.

 

In an entrancing series titled ‘Near and Far’, viewers might not know if they were looking through a group of trees or around them into the valley beyond. The ground was being laid out for the later explosion of colour and abstract design found in her stunning rug compositions, which the artist completed in the late 1990s.

 

Tony Ward, poet and publisher says: ‘Interestingly, her works from East Anglia and later London always seemed to be touched with a brevity that amounted to genius. She could apply inks, paints or pastels in such a way that was inspired – one could only marvel at the simplicity. Her silkscreen prints at this time were equally creative – again, simplicity being at their core, they reflected her roots and her journey through the political conundrums that often confounded others.

 

Ward said that her move to Dorset in the late 1990s was profoundly important. ‘Her art changed significantly. Maybe she imagined she was back in Cornwall, a place in which, I believe, her heart always resided, as her work made a very brave move back to her own origins in Newlyn, Mousehole, Penzance, St Just and St Ives. In these later watercolour paintings on handmade papers, the colours became translucent and the images more rural, with frequent references to the landscapes of her youth.’

In her youth the Penwith peninsula's fertile mix of fishermen, farmers, tin miners and smugglers, with incoming drifters and artists, fed Benveniste’s romantic imagination and confirmed her decision to paint. During her long life she was to travel extensively in her search to develop her craft – post-war Paris, Morocco, France, California, New York, Italy, Tunisia, as well as homes and studios in Cornwall, Kent, London, Sussex, Norfolk and Dorset.

 

When she was dying she told her three sons that she was ‘... going somewhere else, or nowhere. Whatever, my small residue of carbon will know where to go’.

At her own request she was cremated in a coffin of willow and her ashes scattered at Lambert’s Castle, a favourite ancient, Dorset hill fort which looks out to sea and which she had previously painted many times.

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