Paris, Berlin, Moscow… These vital Metropolitan centres recur on New York curator Alfred Barr’s well-known diagram demonstrating the seemingly inevitable development of Modern Art towards Abstraction.
Yet a recently discovered revision of the so-called Barr Chart shows an unexpected, if belated, acknowledgment of the role of the Kentish villages and sea-side towns in the story of Modern Art.
Vincent van Gogh lived in Ramsgate in 1876, while Marcel Duchamp visited Herne Bay in 1913. Mere coincidence? Or an unconscious gravitation towards the source? Henry Moore lived in Jasmine Cottage at Bafreston in 1931, moving to Burcroft at Kingston in 1937. Graham Sutherland made Trottiscliffe his home from 1937. Both modernist innovators benefitted from the quiet of Kent’s countryside to achieve greater focus in their work. Cobra group member William Gear relocated to Littlebourne in 1953, and it was in this village near Canterbury that John Blackburn reconciled geometrical and non-geometrical abstraction in his reworking of Malevich’s Black Square.