I think I had better start by admitting that, until recently, I harboured an unthinking prejudice against much mid-century art from St Ives. Ever since I saw a small Arts Council touring show of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture in the late 1960s, her work has meant a great deal to me. And we have filmed on a host of occasions in St Ives (of which more below). But the canvases of Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron, Bryan Wynter, Terry Frost et al have too often merged for me into a sort of undifferentiated splodge. Today, my friends, I want to say how wrong I was.

If I thought about it at all, my sense of the work of those artists most strongly associated with the place aligned with the way in which Michael Bird -- in his recently-published The St Ives Artists: A Biography of Place and Time -- characterises the attitude in the late 1950s of London-based critic and curator Lawrence Alloway: ‘indecisive, outdated semi-abstract painting that took refuge from the modern world in soothing pastoral shapes and landscapey colours’. Bird’s suggestive and enjoyable book, however, has contributed significantly to my change of heart.

As its title suggests, The St Ives Artists (which is published by Lund Humphries) aims to be a collective biography. It brings together the Cornish town (together with the surrounding landscape), the artists and the art created there, or under its influence, between the mid-1930s and the annus horribilis of 1975, during which Wynter, Hilton and Hepworth died. Bird writes well about individual artworks (although frustratingly there are no colour plates) but he is also successful in placing St Ives within the wider social and cultural history of post-war Britain and especially against parallel developments in the writings of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and W.S. Graham.

The last few years have seen the publication of several excellent volumes of post-war history, including those by Dominic Sandbrook, Peter Hennessy and David Kynaston. (Kynaston’s Austerity Britain: 1945-51, published last year, is really exceptional, and I’m looking forward to the volumes that are to follow.) But in a footnote Bird makes the point that for all the interest in music and literature in this new social history, ‘modern visual artists are notable by their absence’.

Mixing gossip and analysis, Michael Bird explores what we might think of as the pre-histories of St Ives art in, successively, the gentlemen seafront painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the discovery in the town of the naïf painter Alfred Wallis by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood in 1928, and then in the community of artists and émigrés in Hampstead in the 1930s.

He then traces the stories of Hepworth and Nicholson, who came to the town in 1939 to escape the imminent war in London, and of Naum Gabo, who joined them there a year later. The painter Peter Lanyon was born there and Peter Heron’s father had run Bernard Leach’s pottery in the 1920s, but new arrivals after 1945 included Terry Frost and Bryan Wynter. Roger Hilton, whose pugnacious, alcohol-fuelled character is vividly evoked, only arrived much later. Rivalries and romances are recounted, along with journeys of each of these artists through the currents of realism and abstraction, influence and internationalism that shaped the art world of the 1950s.

Forms in Movement (Pavan), 1956 -59, cast 1967, by Barbara Hepworth

I knew fragments of the story but I found Bird’s way of drawing it together fascinating – and just as good critical writing should -- it has unquestionably sent me back to look at paintings that previously I have dismissed or ignored. Not that, the work of Hepworth and Nicholson aside, it's currently that easy to see the canvases. Tate has good collections of many of the key artists but at present (apart from a handful of drawings) there's little on show.

There is, however, a good Roger Hilton selling show at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London's Cork Street (until 19 December). It's cluttered up with too many of the childish gouaches that Hilton made in his final, sad years, but there are too a handful of terrific earlier works. Untitled (Composition in Blue), 1951, fascinates the eye, both suggesting and refusing a seascape, and I would be very happy to have the small, intense Venetian Red and Black, 1952, hanging on my wall at home. This latter can be yours for £60,000, the former £40,000. My favourite, however, is Untitled (Black on White), 1967 (£70,000), in which form and colour (or its absence) are reduced to fundamentals of great beauty. And if you go, don't miss the edgy, somehow tentative Self-portrait in pencil from the late 1930s hanging above the stairs.

There are two other relevant exhibitions around at the moment. The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill on Sea has A Continuous Line: Ben Nicholson in England (until 4 January) which then travels to Tate St Ives. (I'll do a future blog entry on this.) And in Bath the Victoria Art Gallery has Porthmeor: A Peter Lanyon Mural Rediscovered, centred on a large mural commissioned from Lanyon by an American collector in 1962.

Our encounters with St Ives as producers have focussed mostly on the work of Barbara Hepworth – and our richly illustrated film The Art of Barbara Hepworth, produced for the centenary of her birth in 2002, remains one of my favourites (and it continues to sell steadily). We also filmed exhibitions by Antony Gormley and Richard Deacon at Tate St Ives for their profiles in the EYE series, and we also made EYEs with two artists who lived and worked in St Ives for many years. Sadly, both Sandra Blow and Karl Weschke have died since we completed the documentaries, and in both cases the films are precious records of their work and ideas at the end of their lives.