Romantic Moderns

English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper

Alexandra Harris

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780500770887
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art moderne

While the battles for modern art and society were being fought in France and Spain, it has seemed a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea-shops. In this multi-awardwinning book, Alexandra Harris tells a different story.

In the 1930s and 1940s, artists and writers explored what it meant to be alive in England. Eclectically, passionately, wittily, they showed that 'the modern' need not be at war with the past. Constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus emigre, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, was beguiled into taking photographs for Betjeman's nostalgic Oxford University Chest. This modern English renaissance was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, tourists and composers. John Piper, Virginia Woolf, Florence White, Christopher Tunnard, Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster and the Sitwells are part of the story, along with Bill Brandt, Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

1

ANCIENT and MODERN

Photographs of the ‘Abstract and Concrete’ exhibition, which was the first showing in England of international abstract art, allow us to enter the world of the avant-garde as it was in February 1936. We are in Oxford. Outside, there is all the usual crush of bicycles, books, gargoyles and ancient stones. Inside at 41 St Giles, things are different. Exquisitely factured constructions by Naum Gabo occupy sober white plinths; wire mobiles by Alexander Calder are suspended expectantly in mid-air, casting slow-moving shadows around the walls. Piet Mondrian’s grid compositions hold us in precarious equilibrium, distilling time and space down to the bare intersection of lines. This may seem a strange starting point for an English pilgrimage, but it was from this silent, emptied-out space that the journey home began – or, at least, this is where it began for a distinctive group of experimental antiquarians, including John Piper, Myfanwy Evans and Nicolete Gray. They were excited and inspired by the whiteness, but they would become increasingly conscious of how much it seemed to be leaving out. With their wide interests and irrepressible love of the English landscape, these like-minded friends would go in search of a newly anglicised modern art.

The lure of abstraction in 1936, however, was extremely strong. The catalogue for the Oxford exhibition was a special number of Axis, England’s most adventurous art magazine. With its gleaming white pages and large reproductions, the magazine, edited by Myfanwy Evans, was in its second successful year. Axis provided a forum for the abstract work that was now the cause of much debate. Though Evans admired each painting for itself and ‘not as an act of faith’, she was sympathetic to the rapturous utopianism that lay behind the work of purist artists:

There is in their whole attitude to painting and sculpture a passionate belief in the power for good of pure abstract work. Pure colours, brilliant contrasts or the delicate clarity of one pale line against another, the absence of human and earthly associations, all mean to them a positive step to perfection.¹

These ideas of purity and abstinence dominated the language of European painting in the 1930s. In fact they were part of a whole modern fantasy of cleanliness.

Modernism asked whether the artist could engineer a tidier world. Could white paint restore our disorderly species to a state of primal clarity? The experiment got underway in revolutionary Russia, where the Suprematists painted white on white. Then, after the Great War, there was the corrosive dirt of the trenches to be washed away. By the 1920s the whiteness was entering people’s homes. Le Corbusier issued strict instructions for purified living: ‘Every citizen’, he wrote, ‘is required to replace his hangings, his damask, his wall-papers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin. His home is made clean.’ This was not merely a case of bold interior decoration but an act of spiritual cleansing, as Le Corbusier explained: ‘There are no more dirty, dark corners. Everything is shown as it is. Then comes inner cleanness’.²

There was little distinction between the living space and the work of art. Both must be emptied and purified. In Paris, Mondrian whitewashed his apartment in the hope of erasing tell-tale signs of his individuality. Again, this was no ordinary process of spring-cleaning: Mondrian pitted his whiteness against the outside world’s colourful profusion by displaying in his hallway a single artificial tulip, whitewashed, in a vase. It was a serious joke, a showdown between the painter’s urge to unify and nature’s determination to fly unruly colours of its own.³ Mondrian did allow some colour in his paintings, but only when contained by the grid system with which he kept his canvases in check. His grids promised a glimpse of a transcendent hidden order; the paraphernalia of daily life was rejected as unwanted distraction from the concentrated inner journey that Mondrian prescribed.

This philosophy crossed the Channel: in British art galleries the new orderliness reigned supreme. The Seven and Five Society (founded in 1919 by seven painters and five sculptors) decided in 1935 that everything in its annual exhibition should be abstract. Still lives and views through windows were no longer acceptable, and members who clung to figuration were unceremoniously asked to leave. Even the group’s name was shorn of any suspicious literariness, and sleekly rebranded ‘7 & 5’. The most prominent young artists in Britain belonged to the 7 & 5. Ben Nicholson, the president, was now producing his white reliefs, carving geometric forms in wood and painting them over with a unifying coat of white. Barbara Hepworth was piercing through sculpted forms. John Piper was making taut constructions and collages of vertical shapes.

This art of purity was messy to make. When Eileen Holding took to constructivism, Piper bemoaned the ‘awful consequences of sawings, chisellings, stacks of wood’ all over their cottage in Betchworth. There was not much room for all this creative expansion, and for his part he tried to confine himself to ‘a little perforated zinc and dainty pots of enamel’.⁴ But in the silence of the gallery, with sawdust swept away, these constructions functioned as antidotes to mess. They announced a newly weightless, untethered existence. In declining to represent anything, abstract art could claim freedom from everything. In this immaculate world there were no armies or class systems, no margins or centre. Its advocates championed an aesthetic liberty that stood for social liberty.

This was the climate in which Evans decided to launch Axis. The inspiration came largely from the Parisian painter Jean Hélion, one of the central figures in the Association Abstraction-Création. This was now the largest exhibiting group in Europe for abstract artists, and it published an annual journal of its work. When Hélion suggested that an English counterpart to Abstraction-Création might be possible, Evans responded not just with a magazine for English ideas, but with a publication that was truly international. Not having any formal art training, she wondered whether she was qualified; was an English degree (special subject: seventeenth century) and an addiction to galleries enough? With instructions from Piper about who to see, she went to visit French artists in their studios. She commissioned articles from Kandinsky, Léger, César Domela, and from Hélion himself, and published them alongside pieces by English critics like Herbert Read and H. S. Ede, the collector who had already accumulated much of the art that would find its permanent home at Kettle’s Yard. The epicentre of all this activity was an unlikely place. In early 1935 Evans and Piper made their home together at Fawley Bottom, a remote, flint-walled farmhouse on the Oxfordshire–Buckinghamshire border. There was no heating, no running water, and no electricity. In the photographs everyone is wearing very thick jumpers. But there, on the kitchen table, avant-garde writing and images converged from all over Europe.⁵

The history of English abstraction, and of the English orientation towards France, was rooted in the work of the Bloomsbury critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell. The Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 had introduced modern French painting to England with extraordinary results. Gauguin’s Tahitians and Matisse’s dancing nudes caused a sensation: duchesses fainted in horror, artists were seized with delight. The charges of debauchery brought an atmosphere of illicit discovery to the arguments that Fry made steadily and confidently all through the hiatus, and which – had the offended parties only believed him – emptied the paintings of sexual provocation by detaching them completely from the human bodies they represented. Fry introduced a more platonic but no less sensual way of looking at these pictures. They were forms, he said (again and again), pure forms.

Fry’s lexicon of purity and ‘significant form’ remained part of the language of the 1920s and 30s; it can still be heard in Axis. Ideas emanating from Bloomsbury were refined or rejected but impossible to ignore. Once you had read Roger Fry there was no way back. Here he is, explaining in the 1912 exhibition catalogue the absolute divide between art and ‘ordinary life’:

All art depends upon cutting off the practical responses to sensations of ordinary life, thereby setting free a pure and as it were disembodied functioning of the spirit; but in so far as the artist relies on the associated ideas of the objects which he represents, his work is not completely free and pure, since romantic associations imply at least an imagined practical activity. The disadvantage of such an art of associated ideas is that its effect really depends on what we bring with us: it adds no entirely new factor to our experience. Consequently, when the first shock of wonder or delight is exhausted the work produces an ever lessening reaction. Classic art, on the other hand, records a positive and disinterestedly passionate state of mind.⁶

It is an astonishing assertion of the extreme formalist position. To cross over into the world of aesthetic experience is to leave everything from life behind. Like a traveller stripped of his belongings as he crosses a border, Fry’s ideal painters and viewers enter the new country as children, without practical anxieties and without the luggage of worldly experience. Much of the art on show at the ‘Abstract and Concrete’ exhibition in 1936 followed Fry in bidding goodbye to its ‘earthly associations’.

The strong line of inheritance is not surprising. Fry worked tirelessly to publicize his ideals, and scores of young artists emerged with a sense that the painter must empty his mind of narratives and ‘associated ideas’. They followed the lead of Bloomsbury by immersing themselves in the play of colours and shapes on the canvas, drawing attention to the act of pure painting. Vision and Design (1920), Fry’s collection of his most radical essays, became, for many, the pattern-book of a new aesthetic; Ivon Hitchens, for example, recalled that Bell’s Art became his ‘Bible’.⁷ The interest in France and in formalist thinking propounded by Fry and Bell took English artists in new directions, away from the sensual paint pots of Bloomsbury and into more austere, placeless realms. What remained constant was the idea of a fundamental split between art and life, insulating pictures from contamination by objects, places, people, pasts. This is why sounds from the street outside do not reach through into the exhibition room at 41 St Giles. The art inside creates its own world. Circles fly, squares float, curving planes embrace each other. The ‘history of art in the thirties’, as it was written by Myfanwy Evans in the mid-1960s, told the story of ‘the gradual penetration of white, o...