Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Perhaps it was as well in view of another journey that he made later that summer. It was only to Paris to see pictures — he had done that often enough. But on this occasion he went not to buy pictures for a millionaire or for a Museum but in order to choose pictures on his own responsibility for an exhibition that he had been asked to arrange at the Grafton Gallery in the autumn. “I’ve perhaps foolishly been the instigator of an Exhibition of modern French art at the Grafton Gallery this winter,” he told his mother, “and though I am not responsible and have no post in regard to it I’m bound to do a great deal of advising and supervising.” The words are casual enough; they give little notion of the interest that this particular exhibition was exciting in him or of the importance that it was to assume. Ever since 1906, as a letter to his wife explains, he had been becoming more and more absorbed in the work of Cézanne in particular and in modem French painting in general. Now at the invitation of the directors of the Grafton Gallery he had a chance to bring together a representative exhibition of those pictures in London. For reasons that he has given himself, and are too familiar to need repetition, the exhibition seemed to him of the highest importance. But what was remarkable was that he made it seem equally important to other people. His excitement transmitted itself. Everybody must see what he saw in those pictures — must share his sense of revelation.

  There they stood upon chairs — the pictures that were to be shown at the Grafton Gallery — bold, bright, impudent almost, in contrast with the Watts portrait of a beautiful Victorian lady that hung on the wall behind them. And there was Roger Fry, gazing at them, plunging his eyes into them as if he were a humming-bird hawk-moth hanging over a flower, quivering yet still. And then drawing a deep breath of satisfaction, he would turn to whoever it might be, eager for sympathy. Were you puzzled? But why? And he would explain that it was quite easy to make the transition from Watts to Picasso; there was no break, only a continuation. They were only pushing things a little further. He demonstrated; he persuaded; he argued. The argument rose and soared. It vanished into the clouds. Then back it swooped to the picture. And not only to the picture — to the stuffs, to the pots, to the hats. He seemed never to come into a room that autumn without carrying some new trophy in his hands. There were cotton goods from Manchester, made to suit the taste of the negroes. The cotton goods made the chintz curtains look faded and old-fashioned like the Watts portrait. There were hats, enormous hats, boldly decorated and thickly plaited to withstand a tropical sun and delight the untutored taste of negresses. And what magnificent taste the untutored negress had! Under his influence, his pressure, his excitement, pictures, hats, cotton goods, we were connected. Everyone argued. Anyone’s sensation — his cook’s, his housemaid’s — was worth having. Learning did not matter; it was the reality that was all-important. So he talked in that gay crowded room, absorbed in what he was saying, quite unconscious of the impression he was making; fantastic yet reasonable, gentle yet fanatically obstinate, intolerant yet absolutely open-minded, and burning with the conviction that something very important was happening.

  It was in November 1910 that the first exhibition of Post-Impressionist pictures — the name was struck out in talk with a journalist who wanted some convenient label, and the title, to be accurate, was “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” — was opened at the Grafton Galleries. Desmond MacCarthy, snatched from a sick-bed, revived with a bottle of champagne and assured that his real job in life was art criticism, had written an introduction. It reads to-day mildly enough. It has even an apologetic air:

  . - there is no denying”, he remarked, “that the work of the Post-Impressionists is sufficiently disconcerting. It may even appear ridiculous to those who do not recall the fact that a good rocking-horse has often more of the true horse about it than an instantaneous photograph of a Derby winner.” Several people of distinction, “though not responsible for the choice of the pictures”, allowed their names to appear on the Committee, and the opening was conventionally distinguished. Then the hubbub arose.

  It is difficult in 1939, when a great hospital is benefiting from a centenary exhibition of Cezanne’s works, and the gallery is daily crowded with devout and submissive worshippers, to realise what violent emotions those pictures excited less than thirty years ago. The pictures are the same; it is the public that has changed. But there can be no doubt about the feet. The public in 1910 was thrown into paroxysms of rage and laughter. They went from Cézanne to Gauguin and from Gauguin to Van Gogh, they went from. Picasso to Signac, and from Derain to Friesz, and they were infuriated. The pictures were a joke, and a joke at their expense. One great lady asked to have her name removed from the Committee. One gentleman, according to Desmond MacCarthy, laughed so loud at Cézanne’s portrait of his wife that “he had to be taken out and walked up and down in the fresh air for five minutes. Fine ladies went into silvery trills of artificial laughter”. The secretary had to provide a book in which the public wrote down their complaints. Never less than four hundred people visited the gallery daily. And they expressed their opinions not only to the secretary but in letters to the director himself. The pictures were outrageous, anarchistic and childish. They were an insult to the British public and the man who was responsible for the insult was either a fool, an impostor or a knave. Caricatures of a gentleman whose mouth was very wide open and whose hair was very untidy appeared in the papers. Parents sent him childish scribbles which they asserted were far superior to the works of Cézanne. The storm of abuse, Mr MacCarthy says, positively alarmed him.

  The critics themselves were naturally more measured and temperate in their strictures, but they were dubious. Only one of the London critics, Sir Charles Holmes, according to Mr MacCarthy, came out on the side of the Post-Impressionists. The most influential and authoritative of them, the critic of The Times, wrote as follows:

  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 less sincerity will follow suit and try to persuade people that the Post-Impressionists are fine fellows, and that their art is the 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 to declare our belief that this art is in 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 had acquired and perpetuated. It begins all over again — and stops where a child would stop.... Really primitive art is attractive because it is unconscious; but this is deliberate — it is the rejection of all that civilisation has done, the good with the bad.... It is the old story of the days of Théophile Gautier — the aim of the artist should be “Épater le bourgeois” and by no means to please him! Such an aim is most completely realised by the painter Henri Matisse, from whose hand we have a landscape, a portrait, and a statue. We might have had more, but it is understood that nearly all his works belong to one rich family in Paris, who, we suppose, are so enamoured of them that they will not lend. Three are enough to enable us to judge the depth of the fall, in these strange productions, we will not say from the men of long ago, but from three idols of yesterday — from Claude Monet, from Manet, and from Rodin.

  Finally The Times critic concluded by appealing to the verdict of Time— “le seul classificateur impeccable”, which he assumed, somewhat rashly, would be given in his favour.

  Among the artists themselves there was a great division of opinion. The elder artists, to judge from a letter written by Eric Gill to Sir William Rothenstein, were uneasy. “You are missing an awful excitement just now being provided for us in London,” Eric Gill wrote to William Rothenstein in India, “to wit, the exhibition of Post-Impressionists now at the Grafton Galleries. All the critics are tearing one another’s eyes out over it, and the sheep and the goats are inextricably mixed up. T
he show”, he continued, “quite obviously represents a reaction and transition, and so if, like Fry, you are a factor in that reaction and transition, then you like the show. If, like MacColl and Robert Ross, you are too inseparably connected with the things reacted against and the generation from which it is a transition, then you don’t like it. If, on the other hand, you are like me and John, McEvoy and Epstein, then, feeling yourself beyond the reaction and beyond the transition, you have a right to feel superior to Mr Henri Matisse (who is typical of the show — though Gauguin makes the biggest splash and Van Gogh the maddest) and you can say you don’t like it. But have you seen Mr Matisse’s sculpture?...” To which Sir William Rothenstein adds, “Yes, I had seen Matisse’s sculpture in Ms studio in Paris. I could not pretend to like it.” Nor did Mr Ricketts make any bones about his contempt for the pictures. “Why talk of the sincerity of all this rubbish?” he asked. And he proposed, ironically, to start a national subscription “to get Plymouth and Curzon painted by Matisse and Picasso”; and detected definite signs of insanity in the painters. Here he was supported by eminent doctors. Dr Hyslop lectured on the exhibition in Roger Fry’s presence. He gave his opinion before an audience of artists and craftsmen that the pictures were the work of madmen. His conclusions were accepted with enthusiastic applause and Mr Selwyn Image expressed Ms agreement with Dr Hyslop in an appreciative little speech. Privately, Professor Tonks circulated caricatures in which Roger Fry, with Ms mouth very wide open and his hair flying wildly, proclaimed the religion of Cezannah, with Clive Bell in attendance as St Paul. And in his diary Wilfrid Blunt gave expression to the feelings of those who were not painters or critics but patrons and lovers of art:

  15th Nov. — 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. Still less is there a trace of sense or skill or taste, good or bad, or art or cleverness. Nothing but that gross puerility which scrawls indecencies on the walls of a privy. The drawing is on the level of that of an untaught child of seven or eight years old, the sense of colour that of a tea-tray painter, the method that of a schoolboy who wipes his fingers on a slate after spitting on them.... Apart from the frames, the whole collection should not be worth £5, and then only for the pleasure of making a bonfire of them. Yet two or three of our art critics have pronounced in their favour. Roger Fry, a critic of taste, has written an introduction to the catalogue, and Desmond MacCarthy acts as secretary to the show.... They are the works of idleness and impotent stupidity, a pornographic show.

  The “awful excitement”, then, that the Post-Impressionist Exhibition aroused in 1910 seems to have been genuine. The works of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh and Gauguin possessed what now seems an astonishing power to enrage the public, the critics and the artists of established reputation. Roger Fry was to analyse that excitement and his own reactions to it ten years later in the article called “Retrospect” (Vision and Design). At the time he was both amazed and amused. He was surprised at the interest that the pictures excited in a public normally indifferent to pictures. “There has been nothing like this outbreak of militant Philistinism since Whistler’s day”, he wrote to his mother. How had he contrived to spring this mine of emotion in that very phlegmatic body? He was amused to find that his own reputation — the dim portrait that the public had drawn of him as a man of taste and learning — was replaced by a crude caricature of a man who, as the critics implied, probably from base motives, either to advertise himself, to make money, or from mere freakishness, had thrown overboard his culture and deserted his standards. But his childish lesson that “all passions even for red poppies leave one open to ridicule” stood him in good stead. Desmond MacCarthy records that in the midst of the uproar Roger Fry “remained strangely calm and ‘did not give a single damn’”. The pictures themselves, and all that they meant, were of absorbing interest to him, and much of the annoyance that he was causing his respectable colleagues passed over him unnoticed. He never realised, it is safe to say, how from this time onward he obsessed the mind of Professor Tonks, so that that gentleman could scarcely bear to hear his name mentioned and felt at his death that it was for English art “as if a Mussolini, a Hitler, or a Stalin had passed away’3. Professor Tonks did not obsess Roger Fry. He and other of his colleagues tended to recede into the background, and were rather to be pitied than abused for remaining in their little eddy of suburban life instead of risking themselves in the main stream of European art.

  But there was one element in all this hubbub that roused Roger Fry to anger. That was the attitude of the cultivated classes — the attitude expressed by Wilfrid Blunt in his diary. For so many years he had helped to educate the taste of that public. They had attended his lectures upon the Old Masters so devoutly, and had accepted so respectfully his views upon Raphael, Titian, Botticelli and the rest. Now, when he asked them to look also at the work of living artists whom he admired, they turned upon him and denounced him. It seemed to him that the cultivated classes were of the same kidney as Pierpont Morgan. They cared only for what could be labelled and classified “genuine”. Their interest in his lectures had been a pose; art was to them merely a social asset. “I found among the cultured,” to quote his own words, “who had hitherto been my most eager listeners, the most inveterate and exasperated enemies of the new movement.... These people felt instinctively that their special culture was one of their social assets. That to be able to speak glibly of Tang and Ming, of Amico di Sandro and Baldovinetti, gave them a social standing and a distinctive cachet.” They had not the excuse that their sales were hurt, or their pupils corrupted. They were not “inseparably connected”, like the professors, “with the things reacted against”. They should have been disinterested and dispassionate. And yet it was they who attacked the new movement most virulently, and from being their urbane and respected guide, Roger Fry had become “either incredibly flippant, or, for the more charitable explanation was usually adopted, slightly insane.

  Time, twenty-nine years at least, of that judge whom the critic of The Times called, perhaps too confidently, “le seule classificateur impeccable”, has vindicated Roger Fry, if money is any test. Shares in Cezanne have risen immeasurably since 1910. That family, who. according to the same authority, accumulated works by Matisse must to-day be envied even by millionaires. And opinion too is on his side. It would need to-day as much moral courage to denounce Cezanne. Picasso, Seurat, Van Gogh and Gauguin as it needed then to defend them. But such figures and such opinions were not available in 1910, and Roger Fry was left to uphold his own beliefs under a shower of abuse and ridicule.

  But the exhibition had other results that were far more important. Roger Fry may have sacrificed his reputation with the cultivated; but he had made it with the young. “Fry thenceforth”, as Sir William Rothenstein writes, “became the central figure round whom the more advanced of the young English painters grouped themselves.” That position was no sinecure, but, if it allowed room for the central figure to move on, it was the one of all others that Roger Fry would have chosen. So long as the young trusted him, he cared nothing for the enmity of officials. What mattered was that the young English artists were as enthusiastic about the works of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso as he was. The first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, as many of them have testified, was to them a revelation; it was to affect their work profoundly. And to explain and to expound the meaning of the new movement, to help the young English painters to leave the little backwater of provincial art and to take their place in the main stream, became from this time one of Roger Fry’s main preoccupations. In his own words: “I began to discuss the problems of aesthetics that the contemplation of these works forced upon us”. He discussed them in all their aspects with the learned and with the ignorant, in lecture-halls, in drawing-rooms, in studios, in railway trains. And he wrote — often in an omnibus or in the corne
r of a third-class railway carriage. His writing gained a new vigour and depth. He became the most read and the most admired, if also the most abused, of all living art critics.

  But anyone who had followed his criticism from the time when he laid about him so vigorously in the Athenaeum, or had wondered why it was that he was out of touch with his generation as a painter, knew that the importance of the Post-Impressionist movement lay in the fact that it was a continuation and not a break. He had always, as his criticism of the New English Art Club shows (he had resigned his place on the Jury of the New English Art Club in 1908), been dissatisfied with the Impressionist school. He had asserted in 190a that we are “at a dead point in the revolutions of our culture”. One would say, he went on, “that these artists seem paralysed by the fear of failure, and they lack the ambition to attempt those difficult and dangerous feats by which alone they could increase their resources and exercise their powers by straining them to the utmost”. He had lighted with eagerness upon the work of some of the younger artists, like Augustus John, who “by going back to an earlier tradition, carry the analysis further, penetrating through values to the causes in actual form and structure”. Here, in the work of the French artists, he found the very qualities that he had been looking for. To the British public the French painters were ignorant if not insane; even Professor Tonks could write, “If you want to know more of the follies of men, go to the Lefevre Galleries and see the Cézannes”. To Roger Fry, on the other hand, it was obvious that they were masters of their art; he could see “how closely they followed tradition, and how great a familiarity with the Italian primitives was displayed in their work”. The excitement, then, that these pictures gave him was the excitement of finding that what he had dimly hoped for and half foreseen as a possible development was actually in being. The statue that had lam half hidden in the sand was now revealed. He had feared that the art of painting was circling purposelessly among frivolities and was at a dead end. Now he was convinced that it was alive, and that a great age was at hand. He laid himself open with all his sensibility — that sensibility in which, as he said, one’s housemaid “by a mere haphazard gift of providence” might surpass one — to register the sensations that Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and the rest produced in him. But he went on, as his maid could not, to analyse those sensations with an erudition that years of “seeing pictures” had made considerable, and with an honesty and acuteness that his training among the philosophers had made habitual. The results are to be read in the very rich and profound investigations which fill such books as Vision and Design, Transformations, and the masterly essays upon Cézanne and French Art.