Sven Berlin: Disturbance in the West. (1934 – 1970) at St Barbe Museum + Art Gallery

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A new exhibition, opening in September 2026 at St Barbe Museum + Art Gallery, Lymington will reveal the provocative impact made by legendary artist Sven Berlin (1911-1999) on both art and social history in Cornwall and the New Forest.

In 1948 Berlin wrote an article entitled Disturbance in the West. The article was enough to raise hackles, talking as it did of how the Cornish landscape had inspired his fellow painters and verging on a critique. Challenging the erstwhile myth surrounding Berlin, this exhibition takes work from his earliest Cornish period in the 1930s, looks at his connections to members of the revolutionary modernist Art Colony in St Ives and onwards to one of his most productive periods in the New Forest.

Featuring many previously unseen works and drawn from a single private collection, the exhibition showcases the determination and diversity of Berlin's talents in these formative periods of his life, including his evocative drawings and watercolours, vibrant oils and engaging sculpture. All the work has been gathered over 30 years by Berlin's friend and patron, Anthony D Green, a former farmer, avid book collector and sports car enthusiast.

Ultimately, Berlin's friendships in St Ives were overshadowed by the writing of what would be the first book on the painter Alfred Wallis (Alfred Wallis Primitive pub. 1949) and his later satirical account of his Cornish friends and fellow artists, The Dark Monarch (pub. 1962). The former put noses out of joint and the latter caused uproar and became the subject of legal action.

Anthony Green, who was brought up in the New Forest, was intrigued by his first glimpses of the charismatic Berlin who, in 1953 had arrived in the woods in a horse-drawn Gypsy wagon with his equally flamboyant second wife Juanita. Since meeting Berlin (to sign his book Dromengro, Man of the Road), Anthony has, with his wife, writer and Berlin's biographer Sonia Aarons-Green, gathered together and curated a major collection and archive charting every aspect of Berlin's life.

The exhibition also includes examples of Berlin's moving wartime drawings made while serving as a Forward Observer with Royal Artillery after the D-Day landings and, after falling outside the canon of abstraction in St Ives, his socially important portrayals of the Gypsies of the New Forest who made Berlin and his family welcome.

Berlin would leave his home in Emery Down, New Forest in 1970 to live on the Isle of Wight until 1975, returning to mainland Wimborne where he lived with his third wife Julia until his death in 1999 at the age of 88.

Image: Sven Berlin – Lamplight, oil on canvas, 1955, private collection copy