Preface

Tickner, Lisa

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Preface

Lisa Tickner

Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century

This book began as The Paul Mellon Lectures for 1996. The original four lectures have grown into five chapters (with the addition of one on David Bomberg) and acquired both an introduction and an extended afterword...

Author

Lisa Tickner

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22895

Preface

Now in contemplating a work of art, we are continually asking why and, if the artist is one with whom we can communicate, we are continually getting answers, and this repeated recognition of the causes of the picture being as it is gives us a succession of moments of pleasure. . .

Roger Fry, Last Lectures (1939)

This book began as The Paul Mellon Lectures for 1996. The original four lectures have grown into five chapters (with the addition of one on David Bomberg) and acquired both an introduction and an extended afterword. With some amendments, chapters 1 to 4 are substantially as given, and chapter 5 is written in the same spirit. I have not otherwise unpicked their format nor blurred the grain of my speaking voice.

My springboard was provided by the catalogue for Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements, the summer exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1914. In his introduction the Director, Gilbert Ramsay, identified four main strands in modern painting: one associated with Augustus John (although John himself did not exhibit); one with Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group; one with Bloomsbury Post-Impressionism; and one with the group around Wyndham Lewis that was just on the verge of calling itself ‘Vorticist’. (The first issue of Blast appeared on 20 June 1914, the day that the exhibition closed.1It has long been noted that references to Vorticism are late additions to Blast, no. 1, 20 June 1914, John Rodker (‘The “New” Movement in Art’, The Dial, vol. 2, May 1914, p. 184) referred to Lewis as ‘one of the leaders in this form of art, and editor of a journal, Blast, which is to be entirely devoted to “Futurism”’.) There was in fact a fifth group, of Jewish artists – selected by David Bomberg and hung in the ‘Small Gallery’ – but the question of how an ethnic category might cut across the broadly stylistic strands of the introduction, or link these artists to the interests of Whitechapel’s Jewish community, was not addressed.

Subsequent histories, grouping Bomberg with the Vorticists, have seen Ramsay’s four categories as a series of staging posts en route to abstraction: Sickert displaces John, Bloomsbury is briefly triumphant around 1910–12, but Vorticism alone emerges as a movement that bears comparison with the continental avant-gardes.2See for example Dennis Farr, English Art 1870–1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), chapter VII. My interests are rather different. I assume that art is both a specific practice and a socially porous one, and that the aesthetic and technical ambitions of the studio were never totally severed from the other relations of everyday life.

This runs contrary to one of the central tenets of modernism itself, to the effect that even if art is rooted in the social matrix, that is not necessarily how, as a special class of artefacts, it is best understood. Certainly, this was the view of Vanessa Bell’s circle at the time. As Clive Bell put it, ‘to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exultation’.3Clive Bell, Art [1914] (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949), p. 25. Something of this is true: art works the materials of life (and other art), to aesthetic effect. But the worlds of production and reception, ‘activity’ and ‘aesthetic exultation’, are ineluctably connected. What moves the artist’s activity (and our response) derives from the pressure of experience – from ‘the residues of the day’ – as well as, or in the form of, ambitions and procedures particular to the studio.4Freud termed ‘the day’s residues’ those elements in the dream derived from the waking experiences of the day before, which are reworked in the dream’s narrative and in the dreamer’s free associations (Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [1900], trans. James Strachey, The Pelican Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), passim). ‘It matters what the materials of a pictorial order are, even if the order is something different from the materials, and in the end more important than they are’.5T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers [1984] (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), p. 78.

Each of the following chapters is devoted to an artist from one of Ramsay’s four categories (or from ‘The Jewish Section’), though not, with the exception of Bomberg and Gertler, to paintings included in the exhibition itself.6Bomberg’s In the Hold and Gertler’s Jewish Family were included. I have focused on these particular works because they seem in their different ways to condense a radical approach to the process of painting with a troubled sensitivity to the defining conditions of modern experience. Erwin Panofsky once famously said that ‘everyone’s “monuments” are everyone else’s “documents” and vice versa’.7Erwin Panofsky, ‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’ [1940], in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), p. 33. Or as Marilyn Strathern put it in relation to her own discipline, anthropology, ‘there is always more beyond the field of vision than one sees, and . . . elements that are part of one system are also in another dimension conceived as parts of others’: After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 188. I have tried to look at them as simultaneously monuments and documents: as both the achievements of self-conscious, professional activity – paintings to have a conversation with in the sense Fry intended – and as documents (or symptoms) in other narratives of modernity (of sexuality, ethnicity, the city or the self). Indeed their power as art derives from this, and if they look quite the same afterwards I shall have failed.

Charles Harrison’s English Art and Modernism 1900–1939 has long been the standard introduction to the period. A crisp and elegant survey, it is nevertheless, and by intent, ‘the history of a history’ – an account of ‘what has been singled out and considered as modern in the English art of the first four decades of this century’. Harrison is scrupulous in his negatives: his is not a comprehensive chronicle, it offers no radical revisions, it is not a social history of art. But there is, he suggests – though his is not that project – ‘a need for a study of this period of art which is not subject to the traditional closures on art-historical writing’.8Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism 1900–1939 (London: Allen Lane in association with Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 6, 7. A second edition with a new introduction was published by Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1994. Harrison offered his reflections on the book in a paper entitled ‘Looking Back and Going On’ at the conference Rethinking Englishness: English Art 1880–1940, University of York, July 1997. This was organised by David Peters Corbett, whose Modernity of English Art 1914–30 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) is an important addition to the literature. Both the heterogeneity and what has been called the ‘ecology’ of modernism have been largely purged from the history of the period, often with the blessing of modernists themselves.9This has long been rectified in the study of French art which remains, with significant exceptions, richer and more interesting than work on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. William C. Wees discusses the ‘ecology’ of pre-war literary and artistic modernisms in Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). Art of any consequence is thought to have emancipated itself into introverted (laboratory, problem-solving) activities or transcendent and metaphysical ones. These were significant ambitions within a messier, more critical, and arguably more interesting spectrum of modernist practice. The chapters that follow are intended as a series of forays into this territory and, as such, as contributions to a study ‘not subject to the traditional closures on art-historical writing’.

Abbreviations

Cornell	Department of Rare Books, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (Wyndham Lewis Collection)
JEAS	Jewish Education Aid Society, London (papers in Southampton University Library)
NLW	National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth (Augustus John Papers)
NYPL	New York Public Library (Berg Collection and John Quinn Memorial Collection)
TGA	Tate Gallery Archive, London (Charleston Papers and papers of David Bomberg)
TH	Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive (Joseph Leftwich’s diary)
WAG	Whitechapel Art Gallery Archive, London (papers relating to summer exhibition of 1914)

1 It has long been noted that references to Vorticism are late additions to Blast, no. 1, 20 June 1914, John Rodker (‘The “New” Movement in Art’, The Dial, vol. 2, May 1914, p. 184) referred to Lewis as ‘one of the leaders in this form of art, and editor of a journal, Blast, which is to be entirely devoted to “Futurism”’. »

2 See for example Dennis Farr, English Art 1870–1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), chapter VII. »

3 Clive Bell, Art [1914] (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949), p. 25. »

4 Freud termed ‘the day’s residues’ those elements in the dream derived from the waking experiences of the day before, which are reworked in the dream’s narrative and in the dreamer’s free associations (Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [1900], trans. James Strachey, The Pelican Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), passim). »

5 T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers [1984] (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), p. 78. »

6 Bomberg’s In the Hold and Gertler’s Jewish Family were included. »

7 Erwin Panofsky, ‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’ [1940], in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), p. 33. Or as Marilyn Strathern put it in relation to her own discipline, anthropology, ‘there is always more beyond the field of vision than one sees, and . . . elements that are part of one system are also in another dimension conceived as parts of others’: After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 188. »

8 Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism 1900–1939 (London: Allen Lane in association with Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 6, 7. A second edition with a new introduction was published by Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1994. Harrison offered his reflections on the book in a paper entitled ‘Looking Back and Going On’ at the conference Rethinking Englishness: English Art 1880–1940, University of York, July 1997. This was organised by David Peters Corbett, whose Modernity of English Art 1914–30 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) is an important addition to the literature. »

9 This has long been rectified in the study of French art which remains, with significant exceptions, richer and more interesting than work on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. William C. Wees discusses the ‘ecology’ of pre-war literary and artistic modernisms in Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). »

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