‘An obsolete romantic’

In 1982 Sven Berlin placed a sealed wallet labelled ‘Testament’ on top of a rafter in his studio with instructions for it not to be opened before his 100th birthday on 14 September 2011. Inside was a key to the identities of the characters in his notorious roman à clef about post-war St Ives, The Dark Monarch, published 20 years earlier and immediately withdrawn after four of those characters sued for libel. None of them was a major artistic figure and by today’s standards the libels were laughable, but Berlin’s exposure of the petty politics behind the St Ives idyll — which he later compared to ‘going for a bathe and swimming into a shoal of barracudas’ — caused permanent damage to his artistic career.

A self-taught sculptor who had dropped out of art school to partner his first wife Helga as an ‘adagio’ dancer on the music-hall circuit, Berlin was more attuned to the Primitivism of early Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska than to the formal abstraction of Nicholson and Hepworth that came to dominate the St Ives School.