THE studios where Ben Nicholson painted modern abstract masterpieces that changed the art world for a generation are threatened with closure.

Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, Cornwall, were the “centre of the universe” for the movement that revolutionised art in the postwar era.

They were home to abstract Modernists such as Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, whose works still influence artists today.

Fifty years earlier the studios had been the birthplace of the marine and landscape school of art, a radical late-19th-century movement, and they are regarded as the most important of their type.

But structural defects and half a century of decay mean that they are now in danger of closure and collapse. If £3 million cannot be found to refurbish the building housing the studios it is likely that it will be replaced with holiday flats.

Campaigners fighting to save the Grade II listed building, still in use by artists and fishermen, said it represents a unique and important heritage for both art and the fishing industry.

The Porthmeor Studios building was built in 1814 to serve the fishing industry in St Ives, when the town was at the centre of the pilchard trade.

It contains what are thought to be the only surviving purpose-built tanks for salting and preserving pilchards before being packed in casks and shipped to Italy.

Chris Hibbert, leading the campaign to save the studios, said: “It’s such an important building and it encapsulates the history of St Ives.

“It demonstrates what the pilchard industry was about and the movement of artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and again in the 1940s and 1950s with the Modernists.”

A spokeswoman for the Tate, which has a gallery in St Ives and funds a young working artist at the studios, said it was fully behind attempts to save the building. She said that the studios played a key part in 20th-century art history.

Artists arrived in St Ives en masse just as the pilchard industry was floundering. The first to move into the studios was Howard Russell Butler, an American who, in 1886, was won over by the size of the loft space, the quality of light and the sea view.

With two painter friends, Edwards Simmons and Francis Chadwick, he popularised St Ives with pictures that he exhibited in 1887 at the Paris Salon, at the time more prestigious than the Royal Academy.

()Artists from around the world, including Anders Zorn and Helene Schjerfbeck, who are regarded as among Sweden’s and Finland’s greatest painters, began flocking to the town. British artists such as Herbert Draper used Porthmeor Studios and Arthur Wallis was also based there.

For the next 60 years the studios were at the heart of the art colony, with many great painters having their first exhibitions in the building.

St Ives re-established its reputation for art in the postwar era when Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth led the Modernism movement, which revolutionised art internationally.

David Tovey, an art historian, said: “Of all the studios in St Ives the Porthmeor Studios have been the most famous and the most enduring. They are crucial.”

A project called Smart Regeneration has been started in the town to raise the £3 million needed to save the building as a working museum.

John Emmanuel, an artist based in one of the loft studios, said that he desperately hoped the money could be found. “They are prestigious studios,” he said. “I want the studios to continue and not to be a block of flats. That’s the alternative. It would be criminal.”

THE ARTISTS AT ST IVES

Patrick Heron

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