Artquake, 1910: The show that shocked London.

From Ridicule to Respect:
How Post-Impressionism altered national  perceptions of art. 

Modern artists are no strangers to controversy. So many boundaries have been pushed and pulled, so many dimensions explored and taboos broken that we’ve come to expect our art to be provoking. In fact, we expect nothing less; such works command thousands, millions. But it wasn’t always the way. In London, just over a century ago, the biggest storm in the history of English art was about to break, with our most famous and cherished artists of today relegated to the status of a freak show.

Virginia Woolf’s often quoted comment that “on or about December 1910 human character changed”, reminds us of the impact the first Post-Impressionist exhibition had upon public consciousness. England had barely been touched by the artistic revolution raging across the Channel, with middle class tastes set by the traditional teaching of the Royal Academy. At the time it would not have been possible to predict the “artquake” that was about to drag England unexpectedly and belatedly into the modernist era. Significantly, the newly powerful Edwardian Press were to play a key role in the fervent dialogue that sprung up in the show’s wake.  Public responses would range from disbelief to the hysterical and those involved were to find themselves the targets of censure and hostility for challenging the very definition of art and national identity. For better or worse, Post-Impressionism was about to seize the public imagination.

                                                                       Roger Fry, self portrait

The show was the brainchild of Bloomsbury artist and critic Roger Fry, although until shortly before, even he had remained unconvinced by the new art and firmly wedded to tradition. Since 1906, Fry had been Curator of Paintings in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and envisaged an Anglo-American future for the arts, rather than with his European contemporaries.  He was first impressed by Cezanne’s work at an International Society exhibition in 1906, although damned it with faint praise, admitting they were at least “complete” and had “power.” By 1908, he was writing in the Burlington Magazine that Cezanne’s position was assured and that the art of Gauguin, Denis and Signac also offered an “expressive alternative to the Impressionists’.” However, he could still not accept the European use of bright colours, reacting in bafflement to the colours in a work by Moreau, whilst admitting that it “must be possessed of a quite astonishing artistic intelligence…yet for the present, I do not quite see it. I can suppose myself capable of seeing it; I can argue that I ought to; but I still fail.” His own 1909 one man show at the Carfax Gallery presented a typically English palette of browns, blues and greys, gently criticised in the Times for its colours:” “a land of everlasting twilight would be a dreary place” and the Morning Post for inaccessibility: “people will have to be under its influence for a time to appreciate its beauty.”

Something changed though. The following year saw Fry’s focus shift from past to present and a desire to breathe new life into the modern art movement; writing to William Rothenstein in January 1910, he announced “I feel a new hope altogether about art…all those who care and are not fossilized must get together and produce something.” A chance meeting on a railway station platform that month provided the opportunity.

                                                    Vanessa Bell by Roger Fry

At Cambridge Station, awaiting the London train, Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell introduced herself and her husband to Fry, in a move that was to have immense repercussions for the impact of European avant-garde art upon London. Clive Bell had developed an interest in art independent of his wealthy “hunting, shooting, fishing” family who had made their fortune in coal; Cambridge friends had been impressed by a reproduction Degas hanging in his room: in 1904 he had visited Paris ostensibly to research a paper, yet spent all his time at the Louvre. Vanessa, the elder sister of Virginia Woolf, had received some formal training at South Kensington Art School, the Slade and the Royal Academy School but social ties gave her wider connections, including radicals like Walter Sickert and society portraitist John Singer Sargent.

 Towards the end of that year, when Fry was asked to organise an exhibition for the Grafton galleries, he “seized the opportunity to bring before the English public a selection of works conforming to the new direction.” Part of the problem was the wide range covered by these artists; no coherent style united them, it was simply their simultaneity that prompted Fry to choose their name. “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” included two hundred and twenty eight catalogued items, of which twenty-one were Cezannes, twenty-two Van Goghs, forty-six Gauguins, a few Vlamincks, Derains and Frieszs and twenty-two Matisses, covering painting, drawing and sculpture.

Helping Fry organise the event, art critic Desmond MacCarthy had some inkling of the potential public explosion that was to follow and welcomed it, expecting “howls of derision,” as “the cat has been let out of the bag” and “the more it jumps the better.” Critic Frank Rutter had already used the term “Post-Impressionist” about the work of Othon Friesz in that October’s Art News and pressure from the media forced a quick decision regarding the exhibition’s name; in fact the whole show was put together in haste, with preparations lasting until four in the morning of Press day, to which MacCarthy walked as if to “the gallows.”

                                                      Matisse's portrait of his wife

Then they simply had to wait and see what the reactions would be. The first rumblings came from the show’s eminent patrons: Sir Charles Holroyd, director of the National Gallery asked that his name be removed from publicity on seeing the paintings and the Duchess of Rutland wrote to MacCarthy that she was “horrified” at being associated with the exhibition. A slightly less extreme reaction came from Charles Holmes, Slade Professor at Oxford, whose lukewarm guide went on sale at the exhibition, vaguely praising Cezanne and granting “in the arts, I am inclined to think that a stimulus of any kind is healthy.”  Chasing a sensational headline, critic Robert Ross misidentified “a wide-spread plot to destroy the whole fabric of European painting,” another commented that “the exhibition is either an extremely bad joke or a swindle” and at the Slade, Professor Frederick Brown broke off his long standing friendship with Fry and students were warned to stay away for fear of contamination. The anonymous critic of the Connoisseur regretted that “men of talent…should waste their lives in spoiling good acres of canvas when they would have been better employed in stone breaking for the roads.”

But there was no going back now. Londoners were let loose with howls of derision upon works that a century later would be recognised and loved world-wide.  The spectacle of art was treated much like any of the sensational shows to be visited at Olympia or Alexandra Palace as the critics recognised: “the British public will flock to the new sensation and laugh, marvel or rage…” for their amusement. Their behaviour was not unlike that of the stalls at a music hall. One critic used the analogy of dogs and music, “it makes them howl but they can’t keep away.” He had overheard the paintings described as “nightmares” and the “ceaseless hee-haw” of laughter, while the Observer described “the majority of the pictures…are not things to live with.” The Illustrated London News tried to capture the range of public responses: “some who point the finger of scorn, some who are in blank amazement or stifle the loud guffaw; some who are angry; some who sleep.”

                                                 Gauguin's controversial yellow Christ

Whilst some still persisted in seeing these new works as “post-savages…apaches of art” whose work belongs “on the pavement,” according to one letter sent into the New Age magazine, reactions did mellow after the initial weeks. By January 1911, the Daily Graphic was able to report “the general attitude was one of admiration and of regret that an exhibition which has furnished so much food for discussion must close.” V.H.Mottram attended the exhibition “as unbiased as anyone could…owing to the newspapers” and expecting to “be made to laugh,” which he did, “at the stupidity of the comments made in my presence by the other visitors.” Douglas Fox Pitt reminded readers that “all art movements have grown out of difference” and the inability to see the beauty in Cezanne indicated “a defective aesthetic sense.”

The public’s reactions had not been a surprise. Stirred by the comments and cartoons in the National Press, Londoners of all classes had gone along to the Grafton Galleries expecting to be amused and were not disappointed. With artistic tastes dictated by the Royal Academy and favouring the representational and heroic, it is not surprising that the subject matter and brush work of artists like Van Gogh and the colours of Gauguin and Cezanne were not instantly accepted. Works that appeared to be simplistic, immediate and rule-breaking threatened the powerful Edwardian hierarchy that was already crumbling and tapped into middle and upper class fears about the blurring of social boundaries. Teaching in London’s art schools had favoured the “draw for seven years – learn anatomy and chemistry and the use of the stump,” approach derided by Vanessa Bell. Once the masses had seen the Post-Impressionists, the message was spreading that an expensive education and social connections were not necessary in order to paint. What was needed instead was passion and creativity.

                                                                Van Gogh

The furore died down as quickly as it had arisen. Some new scandal came along in the papers and some other taboo of Edwardian society was being threatened. By the time Fry bravely mounted his follow up exhibition in October 1912, the participants and public had a far better idea of what to expect. Still, Londoners of all classes had not changed their views significantly. Cutting his honeymoon with Virginia short, Leonard Woolf hurried home to help as nine out of ten visitors were still roaring with laughter at the Matisses, Picassos and Cezannes. Fifty years later, Woolf particularly recalled that “every now and then some red-faced gentleman, oozing the undercut of the best beef and the most succulent of chops, carrying his top hat and grey suede gloves, would come up to my table and abuse the pictures and me with the greatest rudeness.”

Initial reactions might have been extreme but for Londoners, Fry’s exhibition was the start of an immense change. Today the influence of artists like Picasso and Gauguin, Matisse and Cezanne is impossible to underestimate: their challenge to the artistic conventions has infiltrated all aspects of design and injected colour and freedom into the stagnating Edwardian art world. Our world is one of bright colours, broached boundaries, immediacy and multi-dimensional media. Without them, the achievements of modern leaders in the field such as Richard Wright and Rachel Whiteread, Mark Leckey and Tracey Emin would not have been possible. In 1910, Virginia Woolf was right to describe the experience as provoking a change in “human character”; a century on, with the popularity and accessibility of the capital’s galleries and the incredible range of works on display, Fry’s legacy can be felt daily by Londoners in the Twenty-First Century. If only Fry were able to come and take a walk around the Royal Academy today

An homage to Tom Thomson

A decade ago, I found myself in Canada on a Sunday morning with a few hours to spare. At that time of the day, in that season, Edmonton, Alberta, was a silent, sleepy city. The sky seemed endless and freezing; the next day, the first snows of the season would fall and cloak the place in a blanket of white. That last Sunday in October, it was a city of pealing church bells and hise rise blocks, where a lone, nonchalent moose walked slowly down the highway. Wooden porches were deocrated with carved pumpkins and muddy boots. I set off, looking to kill some time, finding the place practically deserted and most of the shops closed. One building promised warmth and comfort; the doors of the art gallery stood open and invited me inside.

I had never heard of Tom Thomson before that day. As I entered, he stuck me at once; large, post-impressionistic canvases full of loose vivid brushwork in deep, generous colours. The images of autumnal trees and snowy rivers, of the wild and beautiful wilderness of Algonquin park faced me as I crossed the hall to read about this artist whose name was new to me. Slowly, I unravelled the facts. In fact, this was no straightforward exhibition, but the imaginings of a later artist, resurrecting Thomson and filling in his "missing" years. The mystery of his life unfolded before me; his importance, isolation and unsolved death.

Thomson was born in 1877 near Ontario. His attempts to enlist in both the Boer War and Great War were refused due to an underlying medical condition and abortive attempts to work as a fire ranger and study business betrayed his true calling. He blossomed late; in 1907, he joined a firm called Grip Ltd, an artistic design firm where he would meet many of the other artists who later came to be known as the Gang of Seven. Together they travelled into the countryside, inspired by the loneliness and beauty of the Saskatchewan river and its surroundings. On long camping trips between 1914 and 1917, he produced many of the images for which he is now famous, his style rapidly maturing as he became increasingly focused on his work. In July 1917, he disappeared on a canoeing trip to Algonquin park, his body being found a week later in the lake. Even today, theories about the circumstances of his death encompass accident and murder and have spawned their own novels romanticising his life.

The truth of Thomson's death may never be known but the vivid, brilliant legacy of his work will continue to move those who see it today. Influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau, whilst combining the plein air elements of Impressionism with the freedom of Post-Impressionism, his pictures contain a vibrancy and life comparable to Cezanne and Van Gogh; like the latter, he died mysteriously at the peak of his self-taught genuis, after a flourishing of his creativity. When I left the gallery that Sunday morning, suprised at the impact upon of this chance encounter, I knew I had to find out more about Thomson. Later, battling through the snow, I had the opportunity to scour Edmonton's bookshops for a suitable tome, which I struggled to fit into my already-stuffed  suitcase. In those pre-Amazon, early days of the internet, I knew I would not easily find such a work in England. Having been an habitue of book shops of all varieties, I had never before seen any study dedicated to Thomson. But the book and the memory came back with me. A decade later, these images continue to have a profound effect on me, as does the conviction that his oeuvre still lacks the UK following that it deserves.

Victorian Girls on the Loose in Paris.

An Adventure in the art capital of Europe.

                                         A class at the Ecole des Beaux Arts

The significance of artistic Paris in the last decade of the nineteenth century is difficult to overestimate. Writers and painters flocked there from all over Europe in search of greater freedom and opportunity; the launch of the Salon de Refusés and proliferation of dealers and smaller galleries offered a tantalising glimpse of avant-garde success unthinkable at home.

The 1880s and 90s had seen the star of Impressionism eclipsed by the likes of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne; new techniques were being explored by Symbolists, Synthetists, Primitivists and Expressionists. Anything seemed possible in artistic terms. The exciting experiments of the Fauves and Cubists lay in the future. Others were drawn by depictions of Bohemian life by popular authors such as George Du Maurier, Eugene Sue and Emile Zola as well as the comparatively low prices of studios, alcohol and café meals. This was the absinthe era. A spell in one of the Parisian art schools was seen as the way to develop skills in paint and colour and learn from the masters long before Roger Fry’s 1910 “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” exhibition at the Grafton Galleries brought them to the attention of a broader section of English society.

 The lure of fin-de-siecle Paris for young English women, was that of employment, love and artistic experience in a city where they could escape the strictures of the parental home. Three such girls who went off in search of adventure were recent Slade school graduates, Ida Nettleship, Gwen John and Gwen Salmond. Yet in 1898, they were the lucky ones. While Ida’s parents were supportive of her artistic endeavours and Gwen Salmond’s financial support eased the passage for them all, Gwen John had to fight to join her friends, falling out with her father in the process. Many women with Parisian ambitions met with initial resistance as their Victorian parents saw the trip as little more than an opportunity to misbehave. Kathleen Bruce, a sculptor who visited the city in 1901, wrote “…to say that a lass perhaps not out of her teens had gone prancing off to Paris to study art was to say that she had gone irretrievably to hell” and the undeniable freedoms encouraged by the relaxed atmosphere of late café hours was equally as attractive as the opportunity to study at one of the academies. There were understandable fears that the great masters might corrupt their students, leading at best to heartbreak in the case of Gwen John and Auguste Rodin; and at the worst, ruin.

                      Female arts students drawing from life at the Slade, London

First, they took rooms in a cheap hotel while they searched for lodgings but quickly moved on to rooms on the outskirts of the Latin Quarter at 226 Boulevard Raspail, which Ida wrote to reassure her mother was “a very old lady style of pension…looking down on a boulevard with rather brown rustling plane trees and cafes” on the “delightful” side of the river. However, they then found what they were looking for on the fifth floor of 12 rue Froidvaux; a wide leafy avenue in the cheaper Montparnasse district, which they mis-spelt as Froidveau and mis-translated as “cold beef”. The ground floor was a café but a separate side door gave them a degree of privacy and quiet, the balcony with “good views” overlooked the cemetery and the toilet was of the old variety, which required water being thrown down it. The elderly female concierge was “very high in character” and strict about visitors; “les dames, oui, mais les monsieurs? Non ! Jamais,” information which Ida was keen to pass on again to her mother: “all this is rather amusing but it will show you it is a respectable place.” It cost 900 francs, but Ida worked out their combined finances, planned for basic living expenses and decided they could afford it for three months. What finally swung them in its favour was its proximity to the Louvre and Julian’s Academy.

Their studio was basic and had clearly seen better days but the girls had great plans; “half the wall is covered with brown paper, and when we have spare time and energy we are going to cover the other half,” Ida wrote, but spare time was lacking amid their busy schedule of gallery visits, sketches and exploring the narrow streets for shops selling art supplies. They ate at an anarchists’ restaurant, from which some of the waitresses became their models; at breakfast they read Shakespeare’s history plays and out in the street, kept an eye on Parisian fashions; evenings often became dressmaking sessions, based on what they had seen in the department stores. Gwen John produced an “Interior with Figures” which shows Ida in an historically-inspired creations, wrapped in a heavy pink shawl and full, ruffled skirt. When her father Edwin John visited, he took exception to a dress of Gwen’s, modelled on a picture by Manet, which he claimed made her look like a prostitute.

Gwen John's Interior with figures, showing Ida in the pink dress

Next, they had to enrol in an art school. The nearby Julian’s run by Benjamin Constant, was the girls’ first choice but it was very expensive and with thirty pounds remaining in her budget for fees, Ida considered the cheaper Académies Colarossi or Delécluse. However, she soon heard of the new Académie Carmen, which had opened up near the Luxembourg gardens at 6, passage Stanislas. It was run by Carmen Rossi, a model of Whistler, who would be undertaking some of the teaching: originally Rossi charged the female students twice the amount as the men, but Whistler soon discovered this and put a stop to it. At first, only Gwen Salmond with her sixty pounds for fees, could afford to enrol but she generously paid for Gwen John to attend as an afternoon student, while Ida enrolled under Laurent at Colarossi’s. Writing a pamphlet on the lure of the city in 1902, Clive Holland reflected the popularity of their choices; “a year or two at Julian’s, the Beaux-Arts or Colarossi’s is worth a cycle of South Kensington with its ‘correctness;’" by 1900, one in three students of the Beaux-Arts was a foreigner.

Perhaps the artistic highlight of the girls’ Paris sojourn was their contact with Whistler. He was coming to the end of a distinguished career (he died in 1903) and his reputation was sufficient to cause a stir among the students when the new Académie Carmen opened the autumn of 1898. The school rules were strict, even more than those of the Slade; the sexes were segregated into different studios, there was to be no drawing on the walls, no smoking, no singing, even no talking, which made it very unpopular with male students who soon rebelled against what they considered an unnecessarily draconian stance. A head student, the massier or massiere, was appointed to handle student matters and maintain the list of rules pinned to the wall: during part of 1899, this post was held by an English girl, Inez Bate who had achieved favour by painting exactly as Whistler taught. Taking orders from a young woman only irritated some of the male students further though and the class became predominantly female. Largely, the girls were happy to be presided over as part of a dedicated band; Gwen Salmond explained “Whistler is worth living for,” a “first rate master who knows how to teach,” “very beautiful and just right” and even Ida rushed to his defence, rebutting attacks on his teaching as “stupid and unkind.” In his later autobiography, her husband reminded Whistler of Ida when the two men met again in London; “I mentioned Ida Nettleship, who had been his pupil in Paris, had posed for him and was now my wife. Mr Whistler spoke of her with much sympathy, asking me to make her his compliments. Influenced by Whistler, Paris and a new found freedom, that autumn was a “most promising time,” full of inspiration and hope; in her letters home, Ida describes them as almost intoxicated with the possibilities of art; “we all go suddenly daft with lovely pictures we can see or imagine and want to do."

Whistler at work

Yet the fees were expensive and the girls were not making any money. All too soon, the dream had to come to an end. Reality beckoned. The Parisian interlude was never meant to be permanent, rather a glorious finishing process before the real business of life began. Returning to England, Ida was forced to confront the question of her future. Within the year, she would marry the flamboyant Augustus John, yet the marriage would be a troubled one. Paris would remain, for her, as an image of a better time, to which she longed to return. When she did go back and try to make a life for herself, a few years later, it was not with her husband, but with his other mistress and their combined brood of children.

England's Green and Pleasant Lands: Edwardian artists react to Futurism.

                                "Speeding Automobile,"  Giacomo Balla, 1912

                               Prampolini's portrait of Filippo Marinetti, 1924-5

In the years immediately preceding the Great War, the vanguard of European art strove to depict the new century’s potential in startling new images. In March 1912, 40,000 people attended an exhibition of the Italian Futurists in London’s Sackville Gallery, encouraged by the inflammatory reviews of a national press who understood its readers’ traditional, bucolic tastes. Broadly, the Futurist intention was to liberate art from tradition, including the destruction of libraries and museums as institutions guilty of ossifying taste and preventing the advancement of the modern: it favoured war, machines, movement and masculine energy. English mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell conceded that “the modern world calls for such a philosophy,” in which, according to the Bergson theory, the dynamic sensation was itself made eternal, establishing the Futurist preoccupation with the innovations in transport that typified their decade. However, as when presented with most artistic innovations, the great British public were less than enthusiastic.

                                                                      

                               
                                    "Expansion centrifuge de la luminere"                               
                                                Gino Severini 1913-14

                          (This sold for £157,750 at Christie's in December 2000)

To the Pall Mall Gazette, the experience was a “nightmare;” the Daily Express concurred in the view that Futurism was “the new terror,” filing its response under the heading “Picture Gallery of a Madhouse: Crazy Dreams put on Canvas.” The Morning Post refused to allow its critics even to review it, as “an immorality (which) must not be chronicled,” while the Manchester Evening News saw a connection between the “anarchic” paintings and a recent attempt at royal assassination in Rome. The Times reacted to perceived ugliness in the works: “the more intelligible the pictures, the more commonplace they appear…a perfectly commonplace picture of a very ugly woman” and Frank Rutter in the Sunday supplement wrote that “all London is talking of the Italian artists at the Sackville Gallery” even though “all their little novelties have already been paraded in Paris by men as able and abler than themselves.” Sir Philip Burne Jones, child of Pre-Raphaelitism, was “outraged by these ludicrous productions …outside the place of art altogether." Despite the hostile reaction, Futurist leader Marinetti felt he had found the ideal location for the new movement, claiming in interviews that “London is a futurist city…(with) a totally new idea of motion, of speed.” Some English artists agreed.

However, in others, this savage machine-age art elicited a very different response. The pre-war work of Slade students Paul Nash, Dora Carrington and their circle, drew inspiration from the English landscape, work and rural life, as the setting for biblical or mythological narratives. Seeing the mysteries of ancient Britain in the modern landscape, they “Cezannified” an existing tradition in order to forge a real national alternative to European Post-Impressionism; not avant-garde but modern, vibrant and capturing the Edwardian zeitgeist. The contemporary nostalgia and tendency to define “connection between land, countryside and nation as somehow innately English” had been fed by the establishment of the National Trust in 1895 and launch of the magazine “Country Life” two years later. With the increasing urbanisation of the population and spread of suburban living, a wide range of books were published on rural activities, aimed at “the villa residents and the more numerous others living in London.” Camden artist Spencer Gore’s beautiful images of Letchworth celebrated the town’s establishment as the first Garden City. The Slade students were following the tradition of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the proliferation after 1905, of fashionable, pastoralist “back to nature” movements.

                                         Letchworth, Spencer Gore, 1912

The works of Nash and Carrington went beyond simply capturing the popular mood, though. Their primitive, expressionistic elements ensured them a place in the Post-Impressionist canon and provoked strong responses among friends and rivals alike. Nash’s stunning 1912 “The Pyramids in the Sea,” employs a dark, intense palette that retains the sombriety of Sickertian tones but substitutes a grey-blueness, capturing a sense of sinister, nocturnal drama. The simple but startling presence of surreal forms rising from the waves is resonant of a Blakean nightmare, sublime in beauty and terror, foreshadowing Nash’s post-war symbolic and emotional landscapes. A similar palette and style marks the early works of his associates: curved, womanly, idyllic landscapes in light airy blue, russet, yellow and green. In order to capture Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory” they looked to classical English landscape, eighteenth century poetry, romantic artists and the Pre-Raphaelites as well as other influences closer to home. The landscapes produced by Paul and John Nash, Dora Carrington, Stanley Spencer and their friends Gwen Darwin and Christine Kuhlenthal between 1912 and 1914 epitomised the traditional English love of the land, whilst introducing a new national palette, abstraction of patterns and an almost surreal interpretation of the artist’s emotional connection with the land.

                                     Paul Nash's Pyramids in the Sea, 1912

Carrington’s 1912 fresco panel “Picking vegetables” captured an idyllic symbolism and rhythm of rural life, with a mass of fluid Cezannish trees placed behind an almost Van Gogh-yellow curve of fields and pointillist trees. Two men are engaged in hoeing, bent at the waist, their motion echoed by the boy picking a cabbage, monolithic in quality and representing the harmony between mankind and the fertile landscape. Carrington contrasts the cultivated and the wild: abundant crops sit beside wild flowers, open fields contrast with dense woodland. Varieties of land use are portrayed in a pleasing, non-threatening vision of unity, while the waiting mother holds an empty basket, ready to take the produce to the kitchen or market stall. Similar fresco panels, “Hay Making” and “Sheep Shearing,” on which Carrington collaborated with Constance Lane in 1913, present the beauty and harmony of men engaged in rural tasks, in a light, airy palette. Writing to John Nash during her stay with Constance’s mother outside Hemel Hempstead, her belief in the function of art as expressive of a deep seated, passionate appreciation for the countryside is evident:

       “…it is a most wonderful country. You and Paul should just see the trees and

           green fields like lettuces, you could eat them, they are so luscious. And black

           sheep making patterns on the green fields…I (did)…some amazing landscapes

          …the best was a long-shaped upright panel with a moon on a sky glazed with

       many colours…green, blue-pink, dull mauve…what good shapes the trees make

           in this light.”

                           A later (1924) work by Carrington of Spanish hills.

However, there is very definitely the sense that Carrington’s enjoyment of the countryside was as an artist rather than a participant in rural life:

        “…about six workmen are running about…Lane and I feel like great masters

              controlling this band of men”
It is difficult to escape the “Marie Antoinette plays shepherdess” response to Carrington’s bucolic idylls, where art divides people along class lines into creators and workers, idealised through her portrayal. Her later, war-time landscapes of the hills around her home, would present a maturer vision, infused with emotional symbolism and hints of the surreal.

Symbolic landscape was the most preferable alternative for many young artists who rejected the more avant garde aspects of Post-Impressionism. Furthermore, its synonymity with Englishness made it more relevant and attractive, particularly among the Slade graduates. John Nash’s wife, Christine Kuhlenthal’s “The Picnic” of 1914 is heavy with nationalistic iconography. The neat lawn, enclosed by white picket fence protects and gives access onto a gentle rolling landscape of cultivated and uncultivated fields. Tall, white lilies soften the harsh line of the fence, exotic, elegant and protected within the garden. A distant lake lies silver and tranquil before misty blue-mauve hills and glimmers of gold in the west suggest the approach of sunset. Beneath the apple tree’s peeling bark, a man and woman face a second seated woman in bright golden dress, balancing an apple upon her head, suggestive of the William Tell legend, although there is no one to displace it. Apples are visible still growing on the tree and on the grass to the woman’s right, half red, half green, paradoxically symbolic of national identity and temptation. More subtle symbolism is at work here than in Nash or Spencer; the idyllically tranquil scene, with harmonious figures and colours, presents a protected environment that develops Arts and Crafts traditions. However, the picture contains the possibility of biting the apple, opening the gate and pursuing the path down towards the lake. This landscape is troubled by the subtle possibility of disharmony.

                                         John Nash, The Cornfield, 1912

The new English landscapes aimed to capture the spirit of ancient Britain and explore man’s relationship with the countryside as a specific function of nationality. In the search for a modern British art, such images capture a new artistic spirit emerging beyond the Edwardian era, invigorated by personal response to recent French developments but retaining reverence for the past. Additionally, woodgraver Gwen Darwin, sculptor Eric Gill, landscape painter J.D.Innes and allegorical artist Stanley Spencer’s responses to their rural environment prove the spread and depth of this era’s veneration of a world that was about to vanish. Now, the pathos of these scenes lies in our hindsight of the approach of war that would transform the Nash brothers' landscapes and curtail the glorious Edwardian flourish of artistic experiment.

Instances of the colour yellow #1

A bit of shameless indulgence in my favourite colour

Wheat field with reaper and sun, Van Gogh 1889

Charleston Farmhouse, a living sketchbook.

Hidden away at the foot of the Sussex downs, Charleston farmhouse remains an enduring design icon. Surrounded by rambling, quintessentially English gardens, it lies set back from a track off the busy A27 between Brighton and Eastbourne, a haven of a bygone era. Thirty years after the death of its last long-term resident, artist Duncan Grant, the house’s popularity is still as strong with the visiting public as ever, as attested by the annual festivals, courses and thriving gift and tea shops but it is Charleston’s unique blend of shabby gentility and spontaneous charm that has ensured the affection in which it is held.

That style was largely the work of Vanessa Bell, who first leased the farmhouse during the First World War, in order to find work for Duncan Grant and his lover David (Bunny) Garnett. With her two boisterous sons in tow, Vanessa had initial reservations about the scale of the project, for although it had previously operated as a guest house (metal numbers are still screwed to the doors of the bedrooms,) there was no electricity or telephone. Water had to be pumped from an outside tap and only after the wood had been chopped, could the stoves be lit. Vanessa’s sister Virginia Woolf wrote to reassure her that “if you lived there, you could make it absolutely divine,” so from 1916, the living sketchbook of Charleston began.

There was no grand style scheme, nor much of a sense of finish or polish. Initial decorations were made on a spontaneous, ad-hoc basis, designed to make the place more inhabitable and it is this vibrant, raw feel that makes the house feel like a home. On occasion, décor was determined by family life, when the boys’ rowdy games broke a mirror in what is now the garden room, Grant left the ornate frame on the wall and painted a frieze within it; similarly when Clive Bell’s study was the schoolroom, a foot through a door panel necessitated a new work of art. Vanessa, her husband Clive and Duncan, later her lover, were profoundly influenced by Parisian avant-garde art of the early Twentieth Century, paying frequent visits to the studios, galleries and collecting works by Cezanne, Derain and Matisse. Before the move to Charleston, Vanessa’s love affair with critic Roger Fry drew them into close involvement with his controversial Post-Impressionist exhibitions and establishment of the Omega workshops. These influences are felt all through the house.

The predominant palette is a Post-Impressionist blend of what could easily have become jarring colours; muted greys, pinks, red, and moss green, punctuated with intense yellow, orange and black, of which Grant’s “Lily Pond” table is typical. Vanessa daubed the walls with a free hand, favouring feminine curves and circular patterns, flowers and fruit, alongside Grant’s acrobats, nudes and caryatids. Nor was the paint confined to walls. Vibrant decoration was applied to any surface, in keeping with the Omega gallery practice; wood boxes, screens, tables, beds, chairs; even the bath panels are painted with folksy-style still lifes or natural forms. The artists designed fabrics which replaced old upholstery, or were worked in needlepoint by Grant’s mother; the later addition of Quentin Bell’s (son of Vanessa and Clive) pottery produced a range of ceramic tableware as well as the distinctive lampshades and pots in most rooms.

But there are surprises at Charleston. A number of items from Vanessa’s childhood home in Hyde Park Gate are mixed among the hand crafted, home-spun items. Alongside the delightful circles and flowers painted around the window of the spare bedroom, stands the dressing table which belonged to her mother, now a little foxed and on the mantelpiece beside a small clay figurine shaped by hand, is part of the old family Staffordshire collection. It is this very eclectic contrast, between high Victoriana and informal personal expression, which makes Charleston farmhouse unusual. It does not feel like a museum; instead the sense of vibrancy and exuberance remains a lasting testimony to the lives that were lived in it. In 1919, Virginia Woolf wrote in tribute: “Vanessa presides over the most astonishing ménage; Belgian hares, governesses, children, gardeners, hens, ducks, painting all the time, till every inch of the house is a different colour.”

Vanessa Bell remained at Charleston, making it a warm centre for friends and family, as photographs of the era attest. She died in 1961, Clive in 1964 and following Duncan’s death, the process of regeneration began, led by Deborah Gage and Angelica Bell (daughter of Vanessa and Duncan.) Today, visitors still make the pilgrimage down the rambling lane and attend the many events held at the house: a large number of publications have made its charm accessible to a wider audience, with a lasting influence on late Twentieth century Bohemian-style interiors.


Visit:
Charleston Farmhouse is open to the public from April-October.
Wednesday- Sunday and bank holiday Monday 2-6pm. Last entry 5.30pm.
01323 811265.
The Charleston festival is held annually at the end of May; the Short Wonder Story Writing Course runs in September.
Look out for the brown sign one mile East of Firle, along the A27 between Eastbourne and Brighton.