By Jeremy Miles
A sad letter arrived recently telling us that Julia Berlin, the lovely widow of my old friend the sculptor, painter and writer Sven Berlin, died last summer. It came from a firm of solicitors who had found our last Christmas card to her while preparing to wrap up the Berlin estate.
I felt guilty and shocked that we had no idea that Julia was no longer with us but I suppose that was the nature of our relationship. Back in the late 80s and 90s my photographer wife, Hattie, and I interviewed and photographed him for several newspaper and magazine articles. We stayed in touch.
Sven loved nothing more than talking about his fascinating life as a rising star in St Ives during its heyday as Britain’s leading art colony. He was colourful, charismatic and self-obsessed and had a wealth of stories to tell. Not only had he rubbed shoulders and occasionally exchanged blows with the big names in Cornwall in the years immediately before, during and after the Second World War but had gone on to count everyone from Augustus John and Robert Graves to the film director John Boorman and Swedish movie star Mai Zetterling among his friends and confidantes.
Despite the glittering cast of characters who populated his tales, Sven’s favourite subject remained himself. Over the years he painted, sketched and sculpted literally hundreds, possibly thousands, of self-portraits as well as penning a three-part ‘Svenography’. There were many other books too including his award-winning 1949 study of Alfred Wallis the semi-literate fisherman and artist, feted in St Ives and beyond for his primitive paintings.
Tellingly though most of Sven’s writings were auto-biographical and also works of self-analysis. He was a wise and sensitive soul, extremely well-read, steeped in the classics and exceptionally good company. His extraordinary background - he had been an adagio dancer on the music hall circuit, a vital figure in St Ives art circles, had lived with the gypsies of the New Forest and for a while had even run a zoo - kept him in compelling stories. He loved spinning an unlikely yarn knowing that he had no need to exaggerate. The truth was truly extraordinary.
But once you got to know him, it was clear that what Sven really hankered after was security. For a man who so admired the gypsy life and even wrote a book about it called Dromengro: Man of the Road, Sven was never happier than when rooted to one place.
He often invited us back to see Julia and himself at their home at Old Keeper’s Cottage tucked deep in the countryside outside Wimborne in Dorset. As Sven held court in his garden-studio Julia would busy herself in the cottage rustling up cups of tea or glasses of lemonade. She made it abundantly clear that she saw her role as an enabler, supporting Sven and nurturing his creativity. Although she was wonderfully friendly and an interesting woman in her own right Julia never sought to take centre stage. After Sven’s death in 1999 we stayed in touch, exchanged annual Christmas cards and sometimes visited her at Old Keeper’s. Somehow though, just as she had always viewed herself principally as Sven’s wife she now regarded herself as Sven’s widow and keeper of his legacy. It would have been lovely to sit down and just chat to Julia about Julia but that was never going to happen.
We sometimes spoke on the phone but the visits became less frequent. Lockdown and the covid restrictions made things more difficult and when there was no card from Julia last Christmas it seemed like just one of those things. We now of course know that there will be no more fascinating and fun chats over tea with the Berlins but we will always treasure memories of their friendship.
Sven and Julia really were an extraordinary couple, a pair of bohemians from another age. She was his third wife and 31 years his junior. When they first met back in the early 1960s they turned heads and set tongues wagging with their unconventional lifestyle, colourful clothes and free-living attitudes. By the time they arrived in Wimborne in the mid-1970s, Sven was already both famous and controversial as a writer, painter and sculptor.
He was still best known for having been a leading and sometimes mercurial figure in the immediate pre and post-war art world of St Ives in Cornwall. He made many friends but also rather too many enemies, There were clashes with some big egos, not least those artistic king-pins of the era, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.
The main bone of contention was the friction that built between the abstractionists and the more figurative painters. Sven, an instinctively brilliant sculptor and a painter for whom colour was of prime importance, found his works out of step with the modernists. The politics of painting were anathema to him and he took some the sleights very personally. He was in a fragile state having had a breakdown as the result of horrific wartime experiences he had returned home from the carnage of the battlefield to separation and divorce from his first wife Helga.
He was also distressed about facing eviction from the simple and rather ugly concrete building overlooking Porthgwidden Beach that as a near-penniless artist he had made his home and studio. He called it The Tower and though in reality, it was a drab two-storey fisherman’s store, in Sven’s fertile imagination it was a magical refuge where he could work, rest and recover his equilibrium. He carved a primitive mask and placed it on the door to ward off evil spirits. Everyone knew it as Sven’s Tower and he could often be seen working outside, stripped to the waist, chiselling stone.
The local council had other plans for the building though and, despite his protests, forced him out eventually converting the Tower into a public lavatory. The final indignity. Sven was angry and hurt and things finally came to a head in the early 1950s when, seeing no way forward, he dramatically gathered his then-wife, Juanita, and children together and left town aboard a horse-drawn gypsy wagon heading for a new life, first among the Romany communities of the New Forest and later with Julia on the Isle of Wight before they finally settled in Dorset.
During his final years, Sven, still stubborn and proud, would speak with enormous fondness of his time in St Ives and his friendship with painters like Bryan Wynter and John Wells. But he also expressed sadness and anger about his clashes with small-town busy-bodies and what he saw as the powerful and controlling presence of Nicholson and Hepworth. He didn’t forgive easily and it was clear that a sense of injustice gnawed away for years after he left Cornwall.
His uncompromising nature eventually led to a disastrous error of judgement when, a decade on from his self-imposed exile, Sven decided to vent his spleen in a book. It was called The Dark Monarch and reinvented St Ives as ‘Cuckoo Town’ where no one could live without “being gutted like a herring and spread out in the sun...for all to see.” It was a roman à clef, a barely fictionalised account of a community populated by those he saw as small-minded and mean-spirited.
Originally published in 1962, The Dark Monarch was withdrawn from circulation within weeks of publication amid a hail of writs. Little had been done to disguise the identity of the characters. For instance, the hard-drinking poet Arthur Caddick was presented as an even harder drinking Eldred Haddock. Several of those involved were so outraged by their portrayal that they took legal action. Sven refused to make even minor changes. It cost him a small fortune. He was left, in his own inimitable words: “bleeding from every pocket”. Ironically the book that caused so much trouble would, with the passage of time, also become the focus of the major exhibition at Tate St Ives in 2009 that finally,10 years after his death, showed that Sven Berlin would always be regarded as a key figure in the history of the famous Cornish art colony. With special permission from Julia, they even republished The Dark Monarch complete with a key to exactly who was who. This rather jumped the gun on Sven’s original intentions.
A year before his death in 1999 the 87-year-old artist announced: “I have sealed between two boards the names of folk I knew in Cornwall.” It should be opened he said on his 100th birthday, September 14th 2011’. I have since heard that in accordance with his wishes, the envelope containing the key remained sealed until that date when it was opened with a flourish at a centenary exhibition at the St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery in Lymington. I find that quite strange as much of the key had already been published revealing the true identity of many of the characters. While the real names of other figures that appeared in the book had long been correctly guessed.
With all the main litigants dead, it frankly couldn’t have caused much of a stir. Poor Sven, I suspect he would have been rather disappointed. Though he would also undoubtedly have been delighted that, finally, his extraordinary contribution to the mid-20th-century art world was being reviewed and recognised.
Sven and Julia’s art collection came up for auction last month in a two-day sale in Cornwall. I was pleased to see that many of the paintings, sculptures and other items familiar from the happily chaotic little Dorset cottage attracted keen interest. Collectors, anxious to preserve the unique history that Sven Berlin was so much a part of, bid well above estimated prices and Penzance-based David Lay Auctioneers now say a further auction will follow at a date to be announced.
For more information go to www.davidlay.co.uk