"Since his death in 1942, St Ives has become marinated in the spirit of the naIve painter, Alfred Wallis. Naum Gabo, the Russian Constructivist, felt that Wallis's gift as an artist was that he never knew he was one. His unconventional approach and the innocence of his personal method of making art marked Alfred Wallis, even after his death, as a crucial figure in the modernist movement. The art scene in St Ives during World War II is depicted vividly in The Alfred Wallis Factor which illustrates the birth of modernism in the small fishing port in the far south-west of England.

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