*
The effects of his visit to Nice lingered with Augustus like a bad hangover. ‘I expect he would be less gloomy with just his Family,’ Helen Maitland confided to Lamb. Soon afterwards she left Martigues to join Lamb, having assured herself that Dorelia ‘seems better. She doesn’t get a pain in her side anymore.’
A few weeks later, in the early morning of Monday 1 May, Dorelia gave birth prematurely to a dead child at the Villa Ste-Anne. Throughout that day her life hung agonizingly in the balance. ‘She nearly died afterwards of loss of blood and was really saved by having sea-water injected into her body,’ Augustus wrote to Quinn (5 May 1910). ‘…The child, which was a girl, would have been welcome 3 months hence. It had got displaced somehow.’ Pale and weak, Dorelia kept to her bed for a month. ‘Happily she has more common sense than would be needed to fit out a dozen normal people and doesn’t worry herself at all, now that she is comfortable.’
Augustus was less calm. The hideous threat of puerperal fever which had killed Ida terrified him – ‘I know that demon already too well.’ He was seized with a panic of guilt and helplessness. Now that his family was so scattered – three children in France, three in London, and one, Henry, in Hampshire – he needed more than ever a strong centre to his life. If Dorelia died, everything fell apart. Being ‘totally without help except for the neighbours’, he wired Helen Maitland, who returned bringing with her Henry Lamb. ‘We made an amnesty for these peculiar conditions,’ Lamb explained to Ottoline. With Dorelia and Helen in the house, Lamb assumed a very John-like role, and it was difficult for Augustus to object, though he feared, in Lamb’s wake, tremors of gossip.162 Only when it was clear that Dorelia was ‘on the high road to recovery’ did Lamb leave, after which Helen kept him informed by letter. ‘Her lips are dreadfully pale but I think she’s getting better really’ (19 May 1910). In another letter she observed: ‘Dorelia, you know, doesn’t care for herself and if she thinks she does for other people I am sure it’s a mistake and it’s something else that she minds.’
Though she had brought a packet of tea with which to combat the crisis, Helen was handicapped by being unused to children and cooking.163 Her meals may well have helped to subdue the boys, and they began to tell even on Augustus’s constitution. ‘He is very saintly the way he eats the strange food put before him and even finds ways of pretending to like it,’ she wrote to Lamb.
By 25 May, Augustus reported that Dorelia ‘is getting strong. She is gay to ravishing point.’164 They had emerged at last from their ‘awful adventure’ but, anxious to avoid any possibility of a relapse, Augustus planned to import ‘a sturdy wench’ into the house to do the work as soon as Helen left. ‘We have an abominably pretty housemaid,’ he was able to complain a little later that summer.165
Dorelia’s illness overshadowed the rest of that summer at Martigues. For a time Augustus took a studio in Marseilles – ‘an astonishing town’, he assured Quinn (28 May 1910), ‘probably the dirtiest in Europe’. But he grew ill with a series of stomach disorders cheerfully diagnosed by Dorelia as appendicitis, cancer and ulcers. Personally he blamed the climate, which was too hot, too dry and too windy. By July the other four children arrived – something Augustus strongly welcomed in theory – and their complaints were added in chorus to his own. ‘I have my whole family over here now, and it’s a good deal,’ he conceded.166 Regular cheques from Quinn and Hugh Lane arrived; but he was more resistant to this medicine now. He found himself a martyr, suddenly, to homesickness. ‘There are no green fields here,’ he noticed (5 August 1910), ‘scratch the ground and you come to the rock… a green meadow smells sweet to me… This place doesn’t succeed in making me feel well – but I have intervals of well being.’167 A curious longing for the west of Ireland swept over him, and for the people of Ireland with their wry ramshackle ways, so much more appealing than the complacent natives of Provence. ‘These people are too bavard [talkative],’ he told Ottoline (5 August 1910), ‘too concrete – too academic even. They all look as if they’ve solved the riddle of the universe and lost their souls in the process.’
In this mood he decided to return to London before the end of September and, though he at once regretted this decision, it gave a zest to his last month there. He was working once more against time, and this suited him. Although little finished work had been possible – or so he believed – he had lightened his palette and made many brilliant little studies that would, he calculated, be useful for his Hugh Lane decorations. He felt that he had begun something new ‘with all the lust and keenness of a convalescent’.168
‘What I have been about here is rapid sketching in paint,’ he told Quinn (25 August 1910), ‘and I can say (with some excitement) that it’s only during the last week or two that I have made an absolute technical step… I want to live long!’
That November the fruits of Augustus’s nine months abroad were shown at the Chenil Gallery in a one-man show entitled ‘Provençal Studies and Other Works’. At the same time, a mile away, another exhibition had just opened: Roger Fry’s ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’.
*1 ‘The portrait was painted in 1907 at Coole by Augustus John,’ Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespeare on 13 November 1933, the year after Lady Gregory died. ‘I am using it as a frontispiece for my collected volume of lyrics which you will get in a day or two.’ When the etching was rejected, Yeats had written privately to his publisher A. H. Bullen (March 1908): ‘The Augustus John is a wonderful etching but fanciful as a portrait. But remember that all fine artistic work is received with an outcry, with hatred even. Suspect all work that is not.’
*2 ‘I have recently taken it upon myself (with what share of justification I know not) to confer the title Rai upon a friend of mine – one Percy Wyndham Lewis – whose qualifications – rather historical or anthropological than linguistic viz. – the having coupled and lived in a state of copulation with a wandering Spanish romi in Brittany – seemed to me upon reflection to merit the honourable and distinctive title of our confraternity,’ Augustus informed Scott Macfie (6 November 1908). ‘…I may add that my friend appears fully to appreciate the value of his new dignity. He remarks: “Henceforth, my brother, my seed is implicated with that of Egypt”.’
*3 The words ‘one of them’ have been crossed out, and ‘they’ more accurately substituted.
*4 Yet the words, so failing in gratitude, were more forthcoming in parody. John wrote a number of verses in the Symons style. See Appendix Four.
*5 They turned up in the summer of 1911 at Liverpool and were infiltrated by several members of the Gypsy Lore Society in costume.
*6 Augustus was actually just under six feet, but walked tall.
SIX
Revolution 1910
1
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
‘It is impossible to think that any other single exhibition can ever have had so much effect as did that on the rising generation.’
Vanessa Bell
There can have been few more unfortunate times for a British painter to have been born than in the 1870s. At home, he would have passed his youth in an atmosphere of genteel tranquillity and then, at the onset of middle age, been overtaken by changes unprecedented for their speed and significance. It was difficult for such a painter not to be at some period out of step with his age. For even in 1910 it was still possible to believe one was living in Victorian times. Nothing very much had changed. Victorianism had hardened into a tiny Ice Age, impervious to the intellectual fires that were lighting up the Continent.
Fear was the artificial stimulant that had kept nineteenth-century values alive beyond their natural life span: fear of national decline and the rise of the degenerate lower classes; fear of sex and the desire for birth control; fear that the very implements of fear, poverty and religious superstition, were losing their power; fear of foreigners.
Then, ‘in or about December 1910 human character changed.’ The date was not arbitrary. Announcing1 this change fourteen years later, Virginia
Woolf chose it so as to make Roger Fry’s exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ (which actually opened on 8 November 1910) a symbol of the way in which European ideas invaded English conservatism. For the first time people in Britain saw the pictures of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne, and in or about December 1910 the character of British art changed. The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition which, two years later, admitted British artists, signalled the last opportunity for them to choose the path they would follow and the view posterity would take of them.
The ‘awful excitement’ which erupted after ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ was a journalistic freak diagnosed by Roger Fry as an outbreak of British philistinism, more extreme than anything since Whistler’s day. The Times critic declared a state of anarchy;2 Robert Ross warned readers of the Morning Post3 that the exhibiting artists were lunatics, and Charles Ricketts wrote to congratulate him on his percipience. Doctors were called in to pronounce on the pictures; Philip Burne-Jones saw in the show ‘a huge practical joke organised in Paris at the expense of our countrymen’, though Wilfrid Blunt could detect ‘no trace of humour in it’, only ‘a handful of mud’: and he summed up the exhibits as ‘works of idleness and impotent stupidity, a pornographic show’. It was left to a Royal Academician, the ‘desecrator’ of St Paul’s, Sir William Richmond, to strike a note of pathos: ‘I hope that in the last years of a long life’, he wrote, ‘it will be the last time I shall feel ashamed of being a painter.’4
‘Why do people get so excited about art?’ asked Lytton Strachey. ‘…I must say I should be pleased with myself, if I were Matisse or Picasso – to be able, a humble Frenchman, to perform by means of a canvas and a little paint, the extraordinary feat of making some dozen country gentlemen in England, every day for two months, grow purple in the face!’5
The answer was that, in Frances Spalding’s words, ‘art is a carrier of ideology.’6 Roger Fry succeeded as no one else had done in smoking out British philistinism from its lair. It was especially irritating to find this modern movement heralded by an acknowledged authority on the Old Masters. Fry used his exhibition of foreign artists, with their rearrangements of visual facts, their unconventional structures, their slapdash lack of finish, their provoking incorrectnesses and appalling liberties, to disturb ordinary comfortable ways of seeing things. Their strange relations of form suggested all sorts of exciting new possibilities. ‘Perhaps no one but a painter can understand it and perhaps no one but a painter of a certain age,’ wrote Vanessa Bell. ‘But it was as if one might say things one had always felt instead of trying to say things that other people told one to feel.’7
Reading the newspapers, led by ponderous jokes in The Times, Hugh Blaker predicted the reversal of attitudes to come. ‘Cultured London is composed of clowns who will, by the way, be thoroughly ashamed in twenty years time and pay large sums to possess these things. How insular we are still.’8
This extravaganza of journalism presenting the first draft of art history was to give critics a quick device with which to begin the story of twentieth-century art in Britain. But the two Post-Impressionist shows actually confused the art scene in London dramatically. That Sir William Richmond should find these exhibitions ‘unmanly’ was to be expected. What was unexpected was the reaction of Henry Tonks, who came to recognize in Roger Fry the counterpart of Hitler and Mussolini. Fry, to the irritation of Will Rothenstein and the amusement of Walter Sickert, became the leader of a band of young rebellious painters – before splintering from Wyndham Lewis and his regiment of Vorticists. The repercussions from these shows did not divide the sheep from the goats. As Eric Gill observed to Will Rothenstein: ‘The sheep and the goats are inextricably mixed up.’
In this mix-up Augustus John’s position was perhaps the most difficult of all to define. He had long been someone who said things he felt rather than what was expected of him. Indeed he was part of the change that was happening in human character. He was a pupil of Tonks, Fry’s enemy, yet provoked the same feelings of shame and outrage as Fry did in many Royal Academicians, including Sir William Richmond who called him ‘loathesome’. He admired Cézanne, was already influenced by Gauguin, but agreed with Sickert that Matisse was full of ‘the worst art school tricks’. There seemed to be two opposing views of John’s work during the first dozen years of the twentieth century. Surveying French trends from a British point of view in 1913, the art critic James Bone saw the new movement in English art as being ‘largely influenced by the Pre-Renaissance Italian masters, by archaic Greek, Byzantine, Egyptian, and Assyrian art, and by the art of the Far East.
‘Mr Augustus John, its leader, already occupies a position for which there is no parallel in our history in that his art, which is supported by many of the most fastidious and erudite connoisseurs of the time, has for its content democratic and revolutionary ideals of the most uncompromising kind… [His art] has much in common with the French Post-Impressionists, although Mr John’s development seems to have no connexion with their experiments; but the plastic freedom of Puvis de Chavannes undoubtedly gave importance to both schools. It is noticeable that they have sought in the first place to simplify their technical method as well as their representations. They use tempera, and in their experiments with oil have often reduced their colours to a few tints prepared beforehand… they have stripped art of much that was comfortable and informing, of many graces and charms… and it is natural enough that in the eyes of the older generation the result should have a naked, disquieting look. Mr John’s masterpiece, The Girl on the Cliff, is like nothing else in English painting in the pure keenness of its imaginative invention. The master draughtsman of his time, he has been strong enough to yield up every appearance of skill and of grace, and to limn his idea with the fresh, short-cut directness of a child.
…His poetry is his own… The old men look cunning and tough, the children untamed and fierce, the women deep-breasted, large-bodied, steady-eyed, like mothers of a tribe… John rarely shows a figure at work… He makes you see that his strong men and women in poor clothes, standing with beauty under cold skies, have chosen their part… The distrust of comfort, of cities, of society in its present organisation, even of civilisation, and the desire for a simple life and the recovery of the virtues that lie in a more physical communion with the earth, are all questions of the time [that]… many are putting to the test of experiment.’9
Such was the ideology of John’s art. In 1909, when his pictures appeared along with those of Robert Bevan, J. D. Fergusson, Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore, Kandinsky and Sickert at the second Allied Artists’ Association exhibition, he seemed a focus for all that was most modern in Britain. But Clive and Vanessa Bell who had earlier bought John’s big decoration ‘The Childhood of Pyramus’ were to sell it in 1913. ‘I wish we could get a Cézanne,’ Vanessa wrote to Clive. ‘It would be a great thing to have one in England.’10 Once she had praised John’s influence on Lamb (‘His drawings are much freer than they were and have lost their rather unpleasant hardness’);11 now Lamb’s work appeared to her deadly academic, and John himself somewhat sentimental. Clive Bell was to relegate John, along with Stanley Spencer, into nursery provincialism. Mature European art had ‘jumped the Slade and Pre- Raphaelite puddles’.
‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ divided critics into those who, like Laurence Binyon, felt that ‘none of these paintings could hold a candle to the Smiling Woman of Augustus John,’12 and the art critic of The Times who wrote that, compared to the revolutionary painting in Paris ‘the most extreme works of Mr John are as timid as the opinions of a Fabian Socialist compared with those of a bomb-throwing anarchist.’13
Like the Post-Impressionists, John was simplifying his forms and intensifying his colour. But Post-Impressionism had moved away from a reliance on subject-matter because, Fry explained to Vanessa Bell when he took her round the Grafton Gallery, ‘likeness to nature was irrelevant in art unless it contributed to the idea or emotion expressed.’14 Though John never used story
telling or moral emphasis, he relied on nature – on the non-dramatic theatre of nature – and the ideas and emotions arising from this staged subject-matter. The question was: had he failed to put his talent to the test of painterly experiment, or had he been able to achieve a good deal of what the Post-Impressionists achieved without breaking tradition? In short, was he a ‘Post-Impressionist without knowing it’?
The trouble was, as the art critic Frank Rutter explained, ‘nobody but Mr Roger Fry and Mr Clive Bell can tell us who is a post-impressionist and who not.’15 But Roger Fry and Clive Bell did not inevitably agree. ‘I have always been an enthusiastic admirer of Mr John’s work,’ wrote Fry in the Nation on 24 December 1910. ‘In criticising the very first exhibition which he held in London I said that he had undeniable genius, and I have never wavered in that belief, but I do recognise that Mr John, working to some extent in isolation, without all the fortunate elements of comradeship and rivalry that exist in Paris, has not yet pushed his mode of expression to the same logical completeness, has not yet attained the same perfect subordination of all the means of expression to the idea that some of these artists have. He may be more gifted, and he may, one believes and hopes, go much further than they have done; but I fail to see that his work in any way refutes the attainments of artists whom he himself openly admires.’16
Such isolation, which would eventually be perceived as a strength in Gwen John, was to be an increasingly unhappy and incomplete condition in Augustus, gradually removing him, a prominent but lonely figure, to the margins of the modern movement. What Virginia Woolf had called ‘the age of Augustus John’ was reaching its zenith, and over the next few years would rapidly fade away, leaving an unanswered question hanging in the air: was that legendary reputation of his early years a mirage or was the posthumous decline of that reputation ‘a quirk of our own time’?17
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