Beaches, Beatles and a broken marriage: how Wilhelmina Barns-Graham became a radical art icon

The artist who was inspired by Swiss glaciers, the Vietnam war and her own divorce was sidelined from St Ives’ art history – but finally has a major retrospective at Tate

At the centre of Tate St Ives’ newly opened retrospective of the British modernist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, her monumental altar-piece Glacier (Blue Cave) pulls viewers into its frozen tendons of turquoise and white. Its mouth is agape and the blue slit of its eye casts downwards to the rest of its body. The glacier feels human: a vivisection of rock, ice and snow that brings to mind the fragmented facial features of Picasso’s Weeping Woman.

Standing in front of this glassy colossus, the exhibition’s curator, Katy Norris, talks about these “mangled” and “twisted” forms – so alive on the canvas. “Barns-Graham was so distinct in her approach,” Norris says. “There are always questions of: what am I seeing? What is in front of me really? And how does that relate to what I feel inside?”