Sven on show

Really excited to tell you we are very busy creating our next show Sven Berlin: Disturbance in the West which opens on 12 September 2026 and runs until 16 January 2027. Lots of time and a great opportunity to see a really diverse selection from the Collection in the wonderful setting of Lymington's St. Barbe Museum & Gallery. Put it in your diary! Looking forward to seeing lots of you there.

Here's the press release with more information to download or read below - please feel free to share...

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Press release

Sven Berlin: Disturbance in the West 1938 - 1970

12 September 2026 - 16 January 2027

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, 1949) and his later satirical account of his Cornish friends and fellow artists, The Dark Monarch(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 the 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.

Sven Berlin: Disturbance in the West 1938 – 1970 runs from 12 September 2026 –

16 January 2027 at St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery.

ENDS

For more information and images please contact Penny Curry

01590 676969

penny.curry@stbarbe-museum.org.uk