The move to Camden Town was both literal and symbolic. Sickert chose to live and paint amongst the working people of North London as a demonstration of his theory of aesthetics. The smoke and grime of Camden Town enabled Sickert both to imbibe and to express the spirit of working-class, industrial Britain. La Hollandaise – a large, partly clothed woman sitting inelegantly in an old chair, painted in 1906 – came to epitomise the ‘iron bedstead’ movement. Then, in 1907, fate provided Sickert with the ideal subject for his work. Emily ‘Phyllis’ Dimmock, a Camden Town resident, was found dead. Her throat was cut from ‘ear to ear’. For the next two years Sickert constantly returned to the theme. In his pictures the woman was always naked and the man clothed, adding to the squalor of the painting. By 1911 Spencer Gore, Gilman, Ginner and Lucien Pissarro (son of Camille) were following in the same tradition. Romance had given way to reality.
In a different sense it had arrived, at least in Chipping Camden, at the turn of the century. In 1902, Charles Ashbee, a craftsman as well as an architect and town planner, had set up a company to finance the Guild of Arts and Handicrafts which he had established in the unsuspecting Gloucestershire town. It produced goods of every sort, united only by a high level of design and quality. In his testament, Craftsmanship in Competitive Industry, he set out what he hoped to achieve. The Arts and Crafts movement was not …
… what the public has thought it to be or is seeking to make it: a nursery for luxuries, a hothouse for the production of mere trivialities and useless things for the rich. It is a movement for the stamping out of such things by sound production on one hand and the inevitable regulation of machinery and cheap labour production on the other … The Arts and Crafts movement then, if it means anything, means Standard whether of work or life.18
The Arts and Crafts Movement had no doubt that artistic decline would follow mass production – it was visionary as well as revolutionary. It anticipated, and hoped at least to alleviate, the mistakes of the new age.
The Chipping Camden experiment collapsed through lack of capital in 1907. Neither the general public not the artistic Establishment had realised by then that times were changing. Initially they rejected Chipping Camden, and they were slow to recognise Camden Town. Their rejection of fine art’s most significant development was just as negative and far more violent.
During the winter of 1904–5, Durand-Ruel, the French art dealer, brought an exhibition of Monets, Renoirs and Seurats to London. Frank Rutter, the art critic of the Sunday Times, opened a subscription list in his newspaper with the object of buying some of the Impressionists for the nation. The National Gallery announced that Boudin (1824–98) was the most modern artist whose work it would accept. ‘The ironic consequence of this insular resistance is that Impressionism was old-fashioned before it was fashionable in England.’19
Slow as Britain undoubtedly was to accept the importance of Impressionism, the notion of Post-Impressionism was born in London. Roger Fry, one day to become Slade Professor of Fine Art in the University of Cambridge, supplemented his Edwardian earnings by advising galleries on what was available for exhibitions and what would sell. ‘Learning that the Grafton Galleries had no show between their usual London Season and the New Year, [he] proceeded to convince them that they might do worse than hold a stop-gap exhibition of foreign artists.’20 It was almost a casual suggestion, for he had been preoccupied with other business. He had just returned from Poland where he had made a purchase on behalf of Frick, the American industrialist whose private collection now makes up New York’s most sumptuous gallery.
Fry lost enthusiasm for the venture before it began. He wrote to his mother, ‘I’ve perhaps foolishly been the instigator of an Exhibition of modern French art at the Grafton Gallery this winter and, although I am not responsible and have no post in regard to it, I’m bound to do a great deal of advertising and supervising.’ He decided to recruit help. Desmond MacCarthy, literary and dramatic critic, was made exhibition secretary. The gallery director offered MacCarthy a fee of £100 and ‘added – and here he threw in a pitying smile – that if there were any profits, Desmond would receive half of them. His attitude implied that few people were likely to be interested in such art, let alone want to buy it … MacCarthy walked off with his share of the profits – £400 – a lump sum larger than any other he ever earned.’21
The exhibition was a commercial success because it caused what Duncan Grant – painter, critic and Bloomsbury friend of the organisers – called an ‘art-quake’. Almost a century on, Manet, Gauguin, Cézanne and Matisse are universally accepted as artists of undisputed genius. In 1910, their names were known only to experts and their painting was thought to be alien to the spirit of the time. The novelty of their work is illustrated by the organisers’ difficulty in finding a name for the exhibition that explained the style of their work. Discussing this problem with MacCarthy and the gallery owners, Fry lost patience. ‘Oh’, he is reported as saying, ‘let’s call them post-impressionists’, a term which he went on to point out was at the very least chronologically accurate.22
Press day was 5 November. MacCarthy had realised that some newspapers would go to the exhibition looking for – and, if necessary, would be prepared to create – a sensation. Nudity, which might be described as erotic, was excluded. A few minutes before the doors opened two pictures were removed from view. Roger Fry’s introduction to the catalogue explained that the artists whose work was on display aimed to reveal ‘the emotional significance which lives in things’. The critics did not accept his interpretation of pictures which they regarded as the crude work of brash amateurs. They also looked for, and therefore thought that they detected, gross impropriety. The result was a basically cynical press, hiding its prurience behind the pretence of outrage. Desmond MacCarthy described the scene: ‘Soon after ten the Press began to arrive. Now anything new in art is apt to provoke the same kind of indignation as immoral conduct, and vice is detected in perfectly innocent pictures … Anyhow, as I walked about among the tittering newspaper critics busily taking notes … I kept overhearing such remarks as “Pure pornography”, “Admirably indecent”. Not a word of truth in this of course …’23
The Times led the assault. It anticipated, and attempted to refute, the favourable judgements which it suspected that Bloomsbury and its followers would publish.
It is to be feared that when Roger Fry lends his authority to an exhibition of this kind, and gives it to be understood that he regards the work of Gauguin and Matisse as the last word in art, other writers of lesser sincerity will follow suit and try to persuade people that Post-Impressionists are fine fellows and that their art is a thing to be admired. They will even declare all who do not agree with them to be reactionaries of the worst type.
It is lawful to anticipate these critics and declare our belief that this art is itself a flagrant example of reaction. It professes to simplify, and to gain simplicity it throws away all that the long-developed skill of past artists has acquired and perpetuated.24
Robert Ross, art critic and faithful friend of Oscar Wilde to the last, expressed ‘a certain feeling of sadness that distinguished critics … should be found to welcome pretension and imposture’.25 T. P. Hyslop, a qualified medical practitioner, delivered a learned paper which argued that the Post-Impressionists were clinically insane.26
Wilfred Scawen Blunt, writing in his diary, was barely less dismissive. ‘15 November. To the Grafton Gallery to look at what are called the Post-Impressionist pictures sent over from Paris. The exhibition is either an extremely bad joke or a swindle. I am inclined to think the latter, for there is no trace of humour in it.’ He expressed the strongly held view of most of those patrons of the arts who claimed no particular expertise or knowledge but could recognise ‘a good picture’ when they saw one. There were resignations from the Grafton Gallery’s committee. Scribbles claiming to be superior works of art were sent through the post. Eric Gill wrote to William Rothenstein in India to tell him that he was ‘missing a
n awful excitement’. Gill, insisting that he was neither part of the movement which the Post-Impressionists hoped to supersede nor the new style which they hoped to establish, claimed ‘the right to feel superior to Matisse’. Rothenstein replied that he had seen a Matisse sculpture and ‘was not impressed’.27
Post-Impressionism was more than a vulgar sensation. It was the subject of discussion in the most elevated society. A feature of the Edwardian upper class – or at least the intellectuals within it – was an interest in ideas which transcend political differences. Roger Fry himself carried the message of Post-Impressionism to house parties with guests from a wide variety of political positions. ‘A. J. Balfour and Lord Morley are both here’, he wrote to his mother from Lady Curzon’s country house in December 1912, ‘so we have some delightful discussions. As I hoped, Balfour tumbled to my idea about Post-Impressionism tho’ he has not liked the pictures hitherto … but he sees how logical the theory is. Lord C denounces it as pure humbug. So we have very heated discussions.’28
Thanks to the ‘heated discussion’ among the opinion-forming classes and what Desmond MacCarthy called ‘press notices … calculated to rouse curiosity … the public flocked in and the big rooms echoed with explosions of laughter and indignation’. Four hundred visitors attended the exhibition every day. Most of them were offended, outraged or merely contemptuous. Fry watched from the Palladian heights of understanding, knowing that he was right and his assailants were wrong.
At least, they were wrong in their artistic judgement. They were right to judge – or subconsciously feel – that the Post-Impressionists were somehow connected with changes in society which the sort of people who patronised private galleries both hated and feared: ‘threats and anxieties were accumulating that made for an underlying nervousness. Industrial unrest had erupted in the Welsh coal miners’ strike, which was broken up that month by troops. The Irish were demanding Home Rule and the Suffragettes were gaining strength. Only a few days after the show opened at the Grafton Gallery, the Suffragettes marched on the House of Commons.’29 It was not only the nervous middle classes who saw a connection between an artistic and social upheaval. Frank Rutter published a pamphlet in support of the Post-Impressionists. It was called Revolution in Art and it called for support from ‘Rebels of either sex all the world over who are in any way fighting for freedom of any kind.’ Quentin Bell judged that the Grafton Galleries had ‘destroyed the whole tissue of comfortable deceit on which that age based its views of beauty, propriety and decorum’.30 The philistines were right to be anxious.
Much to its credit, the Grafton Galleries, undeterred by the furore of 1910, mounted a second Post-Impressionist exhibition two years later. British artists – Clive and Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry himself – joined Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. ‘The Red Studio’ by Matisse, described by Fry as possessing ‘a purity and force which has rarely been seen equalled in European art’ was the sensation of the collection. Fifty thousand visitors seemed to confirm that Post-Impressionism was no longer rejected and derided by the informed public – even if the artistic Establishment was slow to learn. Sargent, who had refused to endorse the 1910 exhibition, remained unreconciled. Fry described him as ‘as gentle a man as he was striking and undistinguished as an illustrator and non-existent as an artist’.31
Fry went on to set out the principle which, he believed, more than vindicated his two Post-Impressionist exhibitions – his theory of aesthetics which united artistic time and space and firmly established the criteria by which all future schools and styles should be judged. The Edwardian world was moving on.
What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to San Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto’s frescoes at Padua and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca and Cézanne? Only one answer seems possible – significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of form stir aesthetic emotions.32
Although the Post-Impressionists dominated the 1912 headlines, another exhibition in that year pointed a more revolutionary path to the future. While the Whistler Retrospective at the Tate reflected established values, the Sackville Gallery exhibited the work of the Italian Futurists. The meaning of Futurism had been set out – not to everybody’s satisfaction – in an article published by Filippo Marinetti (an Italian poet and novelist) in Le Figaro during 1909. It demanded the renunciation of traditional aesthetic criteria and cultural values and the replacement of ‘old art’ with painting, sculpture and poetry which depicted the machinery and violence, the manifestations of the modern world. The second Futurist manifesto, published in 1910, illustrated the ideas of the movement by using a cubist style to represent motion. It took two years for their ideas to gain enough support in Britain to produce a London exhibition. It might have stimulated more interest had the newspapers discovered that, in the same year, the Russian Futurists had defined their movement as ‘A Slap in the Face for Public Taste’.
Futurism could be associated with whichever extreme ideology its individual adherents chose. The Russian Futurists supported the Revolution of 1916 but were subsequently suppressed by the Soviet government because of their innate fascism. The Vorticist group – an entirely British art movement, which followed the Futurists in both time and their preoccupation with technology and the accelerating pace of modern life – was essentially associated with the philosophy of the far right.
The Vorticists were led by Wyndham Lewis, an American by birth who was brought up in England and studied under Augustus John at the Slade. John, the great romantic who later lived in a caravan on Dartmoor with his wife, his mistress and the children of the ménage, was more inspired by the Celtic Twilight than by a rejection of the so-called failures of liberal civilisation. That was the constant theme of Blast, the magazine of the Vorticist group which Wyndham Lewis edited. The magazine took its name from the lists of the ‘blasted’ and the ‘blessed’ which it published from time to time. The Bloomsbury Group was blasted more often and with greater venom than any of the other objects of scorn and hatred. Its crime, according to Wyndham Lewis, was decadence – the sin held against every sort of opponent by the British Fascist Party which he came to support.
Yet, in their different ways, Futurists, Vorticists and Post-Impressionists (for whose emergence Bloomsbury must be given much credit) occupied common ground. They were all dissatisfied with a view of art that believed painting and sculpture to be the exclusive preserve of a complacent elite. And in that they represented the restless energy of the new century.
The Vorticists and Futurists were impatient with the old artistic order in a way which had little in common with Bloomsbury’s criticism of the Establishment. Not for Blast the benign notion that an innate sense of aesthetics existed in every human being. Its readers held a harder view of art and believed that it ought to represent the ruthless march of unsentimental progress. But every school of painting shared one common view. The Edwardian age was not the end of an old era but the beginning of a new. That was perhaps best illustrated by the artistic progress of the man who personified Victorian painting, John Singer Sargent. During the two decades which preceded Queen Victoria’s death, he painted as many as twenty-five life-size portraits each year. The undertones of impressionism had always been there. So had the interest in a wider view of life and art. Then came 1914. His painting, ‘Gassed’, hangs in the Imperial War Museum.
PART FIVE
‘Full of Energy and Purpose’
The uncertainty with which the Edwardian era began did not last for long. The louche sections of society buried their insecurity in pleasure. The self-confident cultural elite saw how the world was changing around them and decided that, during the new century, man would become the undisputed master of the universe.
The Churches witnessed the beginning of the new enlightenment with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Bec
ause of science, men would learn to live like gods. But the ‘higher man’ would only be led to God himself through science, not faith. In the age of modern miracles, the mysteries of the Church were becoming hard to accept.
Thanks to the wireless, telephone and telegraph, good news was travelling faster than ever before. So were men, on sea and land and in the air. The timeless dream of flight came true. Turbine-powered ships crossed every ocean in record time. The motor car evolved from a curiosity into a commonplace. An increasingly educated people, fascinated by the wonders of the modern world, bought and believed newspapers which spoke their language.
The old certainties were challenged, one by one. The discovery that the atom was not a single, indivisible entity combined with a new definition of energy to revolutionise understanding of the nature of matter itself. Philosophers proposed new ways of thinking as well as new directions in which thoughts about morality ought to be guided.
Everything seemed to be changing – except man’s contained capacity to strive for greatness. The ‘higher man’ struggled to chart what was left of the unknown world. And even when he failed to reach his goal and complete his task, he proved – by his determination and endurance – that nothing was beyond him. Even Charles Masterman, the apprehensive author of The Condition of England, had no doubt that Britain faced the new century ‘full of energy and purpose’.
CHAPTER 17
Would You Believe It?
On 7 October 1903 John Maynard Keynes, a twenty-year-old scholar of King’s College, Cambridge, wrote to his ‘best friend’ Bernard Swithinbank at Balliol College, Oxford, in unusually effusive language. ‘I have just been reading Moore’s Principia Ethica which has been out for a few days – a stupendous and entrancing work, the greatest on the subject.’1 Most professional philosophers were at least as impressed with Moore’s Refutation of Idealism, a paper which had been published in Mind a few months earlier. All in all, 1903 was a good year for epistemology. It ended with the publication of Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics.
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