Sven Berlin

1911-1999

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The sculptor, painter and writer Sven Berlin was born 14th September, 1911 in Sydenham, London.  

He was a self taught-artist with an interest initially in the 1930s music hall stage and he used his knowledge of dance movement and posture to good effect later in figurative sculpture. He went to Cornwall in 1938 where he met and joined Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Margaret Mellis, Naum Gabo and the potter Bernard Leach - the main protagonisits of the St Ives group, a colony of Modernist artists; they established the movement as being abstract and constructivist where the Cornish landscape played a large part.

Berlin’s work was graphically bold and flamboyantly coloured and his subjects focused on animals, harbour life, fishermen and labourers.  He also worked as a book illustrator, biographer, and poet and was associated with the Zennor Moors poets and collaborated with the post-war Crypt Group venture with Peter Lanyon and Patrick Heron amongst others. 

Berlin's work was more romantic than that of his formal, abstractionist peers and encouraged by Augustus John he left Cornwall in 1953 in order to pursue an interest in the gypsies of the New Forest where he settled until the 1970s.  Here he painted travellers, horse-dealers, huntsmen and country dwellers.  When his barely fictionalised account of the St Ives years, ‘The Park Monarch’ (1962), was withdrawn after four successful libel actions by members of the extended St Ives family he moved to the Isle of Wight and his direct and tactiile painting there reflects the shipping, mainly oil tankers, ploughing across the Solent.

His final 20 years were spent quietly in Dorset where he continued his writing. An autobiography, ‘A Coat of Many Colours’, was published in 1994 followed, in 1996, by a second volume, ‘Virgo in Exile’. The title refers to Berlin's self imposed life in exile, for it is his role within the inimitable legend of the St Ives movement during the 1940s upon which his historical importance is assuredly based.   He was its last surviving member and died in Wimborne, Dorset 14th December 1999.