Crosscurrents: Modern Realism 1910-1950

For much of the twentieth century it was the modernist avant garde which claimed the limelight of artistic invention. Its champions and theorists resolutely proposed partial or total abstraction as the only genuine expressions of the authentically modern, and rejected almost anything outside this. Yet with the revisionist hindsight of a new century, this position now seems somewhat contrary and simplistic, and ultimately untenable. It denies the innovation and invention of artists working within a figurative or realist idiom, and it ignores the differing ways in which they too were touched by the modernity of their age, albeit expressed in a highly individual or personal way. To limit what might be accepted as modern seems now highly restrictive and narrow and ignores the plurality of artistic responses to the experience of the twentieth century. In addition these artists commitment to figuration actually allowed them considerable freedom and scope. Utilising a rich variety of approaches they could engage with a wide range of subtle cultural, historical or psychological conerns. Indeed, the expression or creation of indefinable mood is a central element of what we might term modern realism and it is in itself a form of abstraction. For much of the twentieth century modern has often equaled abstract, and abstraction in turn is now understood to mean the freeing of painting and sculpture from representation. Yet earlier in the century artists and critics brought very different and actually more complex and sophisticated meanings to these terms, and they have a much longer heritage and evolution than we tend to recognise. For them a range of figurative artists might also be classed as modern, and their work could also concern the abstract. Ultimately modern art in this country began with Whistler in the 1860s, who attracted both fame and notoriety by arguing for the primacy of purely formal values in judging a work of art. Under the motto Art for Arts Sake, he produced delicate harmonies of tone and colour in which any narrative or moral content was entirely suppressed in favour of a subtle invocation of mood or atmosphere. Whistler titled his pictures Symphony, Harmony and Nocturne to emphasise their abstract qualities, implying that like music these images should affect the viewers emotions directly, without the intervention of any explicit meaning. In effect, this is the essence of all abstract art. The stillness of Whistlers figures was taken up in the early years of the new century by Frederick Cayley Robinson, whose large mural decorations made between 1915 and 1921 for the Middlesex Hospital have been exhibited to acclaim recently at the National Gallery. In Cayley Robinsons work there was a very different alternative to the usual distinctions between traditional and modern. The repetitive rhythms of his static line of young girls in the pair of panels titled Orphans, or the silent group of recovering service men back from the war in The Doctor create an aura of ambiguity where the viewer might struggle to find any definitive meaning, but feels very strongly some indefinable introspective emotion about what it feels to be human. Cayley Robinson repeated this even more pressingly in his long sequence of evocatively-lit domestic interiors made between 1904 and the 1920s - many of them handled by The Fine Art Society - in which figures gather silently around the hearth with a far away look in their eyes, their thoughts turned inwards. Such pictures depict still, contemplative states of mind that we all recognize, and cleverly they throw us into our own reverie of individual mood or emotion. This repeats the direct emotional impact that is the experience of truly abstract art, yet using figurative devices, and so

it is essentially the expression of a very modern idiom. The period that Cayley Robinson was making these paintings saw the birth of a more rigorous form of abstraction in Britain, and an intense struggle in the years between around 1912 and 1914 to define what was meant by the term modern. By its nature, arts concern with the visual and emotional set its expression free from the limits of language. Yet to describe how something appears, the facility with which it has been made or the ideas behind it required not just words but often a whole new vocabulary. Elusive and sometimes contradictory, the semantics of how to describe and categorise the modernity of art remained burdened with histories of ideology and dogma, of competition and conflict. Just what makes a work of art modern and the limits of such a definition were questions that greatly absorbed and bitterly divided the theorists and critical writers of British modernism from its earliest beginnings, starting with Roger Fry and Clive Bell though Wyndham Lewis and T.E. Hulme and on to Herbert Read, all apologists for a purer and more rigorous definition of modernism. When in 1914 the Whitechapel Art Gallery held a monumental survey of what had gone on in the London avant garde in recent years it took a refreshingly plural approach which included figurative art as also being distinctly modern. And it also set the groups out in an almost Darwinian form to represent the differing evolutionary species that consituted British modern art. Its timing had a certain irony for, like the quarrelling European nations on the eve of a catastrophic war, the different factions that made up the progressive factions in London had recently split apart, riven by disagreements over territory and ideology, by violent disagreements about what could - or should - be the limits of radical artistic progress. The political map of modern British art in 1914 was one of broken alliances, rivalry and extremely energetic enmity. The erudite catalogue essay for the exhibition identified four distinct schools in Modern British art. The first group had been influenced by Mr Walter Sickert It treats common or sordid scenes in a sprightly manner and excels in a luminous treatment of landscape. These were the Camden Town painters. The second group shows the influence of Puvis de Chavannes It sacrifices the attempt to get the illusion of three-dimensional space and makes imposing decorative design by the creation of commanding human types and appropriate attitudes and gestures. These were the figurative moderns such as Cayley Robinson, Stanley Spencer, Augustus John and William Strang. The third group was Bloomsbury, which owes its origin to Czanne ... Simplification is noticeable in the work of this group also, but it is designating in volumes. And lastly the fourth group which was the most advanced element in the London avant garde, the Vorticists and others who had abandoned representation almost entirely. Some members of this group have recently established a Rebel Art Centre. It was their work that attracted the majority of negative critical comment in the exhibition. But the Times however found much to praise, and observed shrewdly: Many of these pictures will look hideous or absurd to those who judge a picture by comparing it with reality or their own notion of it. But the artists of the new movement contend that you should look at a picture as you look at reality itself, without asking yourself whether it reminds you of some other real thing A Cubist portrait of a man may look absurd if you think of a real man, but the question is whether it is absurd as an independent creation. The unnamed reviewer went on to state that in their view Lewis and Bomberg were too ascetic and doctrinaire in their rigorous abstraction, and that what was needed was some synthesis with the more sensuousness design of Bloomsbury and the quirky, enquiring native wit of Sickerts

figurative subjects. Again this was the language of Darwinian synthesis and division, and in fact it was an analogy that proved prophetic. After the trauma of the Great War, modern art in Britain developed along two principal and distinct courses genuine full-blown abstraction and a certain form of modern realism that stayed figurative but which expressed mood and emotion through the set and temperament of the figures that were depicted. These two species developed and changed, with genuine abstraction alone seemingly taking on the mantle of the progressive avant garde while the modern figurative artists continued to invoke emotional states or responses using the vocabulary of realism. Under the banner Crosscurrents in Modern British Art this autumn the Fine Art Society has staged a pair of exhibitions which explore these two parallel and competing threads. The first of these tendencies we tend to find easy to recognize and define and Innovation: English Modernism traces the descent of English modernism starting with a rare early still life by Ben Nicholson, Goblets painted in 1924, which charts his initial explorations of the simplified forms, subtle colour harmonies and modulated surface textures which would characterize his subsequent work. Nicholson effectively launched abstraction in Britain, and the exhibition continued with pictures by those that followed after him, from the fully-realised abstraction of geometric designs by the Scot Alastair Morton and Edgar Hubert, through the more painterly landscape of Ivon Hitchens on to the complete freedom of expression and palette of Patrick Heron and Sandra Blow in the later part of the century. The sculptural trajectory of British modernism was represented in considerable strength with carvings by Adrian Allinson and Maurice Lambert; a group of 1960s abstract alluminium pieces by Geoffrey Clarke; Lynn Chadwicks major bronze Watcher XII from 1964; and a 1950s terracotta by Eduardo Paolozzi dating from the time of the Independent Group at the ICA. The second exhibition Counterpoint: Modern Realism 1910-1950 (10th November-2nd December 2010) will examine the alternative figurative strand in twentieth-century British art, which displays that different stamp of modernity. Starting with Cayley Robinson, the exhibition will include a diverse group of figure paintings, landscapes and still life that in their treatment of subject all seem to invoke some specific mood in the viewer in the tradition of Whistlerian abstraction and reverie. Among the many artists included are Stanley Spencer and his brother Gilbert; Victor Moody, whose stylish canvases of classical myth shown at the Royal Academy and the Salon seem somehow suffused with the spirit of art deco; the evocative landscapes of Algernon Newton and Bertram Nicholls; a superb still life by Meredith Frampton from 1927, along with a telling male portrait from 1915; and a group of inter-war landscapes, by Richard Eurich and by James Macintosh Patrick, whose Ramparts, Provence seems to blend realism with an almost cubist pattern-making. Together these two shows present some of the great practitioners of twentiethcentury art, both inheritors of the generation shown at the Whitechapel in 1914 whose art while it evolved in quite different directions nevertheless represent two parallel responses to the experience of the twentieth century. Robert Upstone