In the
years immediately prior to the outbreak of the First World War the British art
scene exploded in an extraordinary outburst of vitality. This was the arrival
of Modernism, the moment when that now familiar phrase, the avant garde, first entered the English
lexicon. It saw the emergence of a remarkable crop of talents, many of whom are
represented in Edgar Astaire’s outstanding collection. Coincidentally, the majority
of the artists he collected – Walter Sickert, William Rothenstein, Augustus
John, Mark Gertler, C.R.W. Nevinson, David Bomberg, William Roberts and Isaac
Rosenberg– were all linked by their attendance at one particular art school:
the Slade. Founded in 1871 as part of University College London, by the last
decade of the nineteenth century the Slade had become one of the most advanced
places in Britain to study art, fostering under its drawing master, Henry
Tonks, a keen attention to life study and meticulous draughstmanship.
Augustus
John and Mark Gertler (as well as Gertler’s contemporary at the Slade, Stanley
Spencer) were among Tonks’s most talented pupils. Indeed, John Singer Sargent
would remark of John’s student drawings that nothing like them had been seen
since the Renaissance, and he would tell the young David Bomberg that the Slade
‘was the finest School for Draughstmanship in the world’. This was Tonks’s
ambition: to point his students back to the long tradition of Western art
history, to reveal to them the Old Masters, and to encourage them to produce
their finest work within this tradition. The great names Tonks encouraged his
students to study and emulate included Michelangelo, Holbein, Rubens,
Rembrandt, Ingres and Watteau – artists whose work they diligently studied
first hand at the National Gallery, the British Museum and Dulwich Picture
Gallery. Thus we witness John’s exquisite portrait of his mistress and second
wife, Dorothy McNeill (known as Dorelia), as well as Gertler’s startlingly
accomplished drawing of his friend, muse and fellow Slade student, Dora
Carrington, together with his early Renaissance-inspired paintings of
Carrington and the mysterious Violinist.
Isaac Rosenberg’s extraordinary self-portrait reveals these young artists’ remarkable
ability to capture the personality in a face – their own, or another’s. This is
drawing hard won only by looking, from endless hours of labour in the life
class.
Mark Gertler, The Violinist (1912)
This
period was not just about its personalities, however. It was also about the
eruption of a range of movements and manifestoes – the dramatic arrival in
Britain of a series of exciting challenges to Tonks’s long academic tradition.
Roger Fry – the Bloomsbury critic and painter who would so dominate aesthetic
taste and debate in the opening decades of twentieth-century England – called
the continental artists who mounted this challenge to traditionally perceived
representations the Post-Impressionists. They included some of the greatest
names of modern European art: Manet, Van Gogh, Matisse, Gauguin, Cezanne and
Picasso. In two exhibitions held in London in 1910 and 1912, Fry brought their new
vision to a startled and largely unsuspecting British audience. Many of the
critics were appalled. As The Times
observed, such work ‘throws away all that the long-developed skills of past
artists had acquired and bequeathed. It begins all over again – and stops where
a child would stop.’ ‘I cannot teach what I don’t believe in,’ Tonks declared
when it was suggested that he might open up the Slade’s curriculum to these new
influences. ‘I shall resign if this talk about Cubism does not cease; it is
killing me.’
Alongside
the appearance of Post-Impressionists art in England, there was also the
arrival of the Futurists – a group of Italian artists led by the
larger-than-life poet and controversialist, Filippo Marinetti. The Futurists,
as one English critic observed at the time, ‘are young men in revolt at the
worship of the past. They are determined to destroy it, and erect upon its
ashes the Temple of the future. War seems to be the tenet in the gospel of
Futurism: war upon the classical in art, literature and music.’ It sounded
exciting, and though C.R.W. Nevinson became the Futurists’ only English convert,
they inspired other younger generation artists. These converts included David
Bomberg, who embraced the idea of a new, increasingly abstract art that
explored the drama of the urban world around him; by 1914 Bomberg was producing
some of the most dynamic, exciting and unsellable work in London. It was this
fusion of ideas and outpouring of innovative work that helped lead Percy
Wyndham Lewis (himself a Slade graduate) to found the Vorticist movement
shortly before the outbreak of the Great War, with the American sculptor Jacob
Epstein among his young associates. Between them, the work of this group of
young artists marks a pinnacle of British artistic production that was not
really to be repeated until the emergence of the Pop Artists in the 1950s and
‘60s – artists such as Peter Blake and David Hockney, a second wave that is
also represented (albeit on a much smaller scale) in Astaire’s collection.
It was, of
course, the Great War that undermined this dynamism. Nevinson, Bomberg, Roberts
and Rosenberg would all eventually volunteer for military service, with the
latter being killed in action in April 1918. Only Gertler refused to
participate in what he called the ‘wretched, sordid butchery’; he registered as
a conscientious objector, and in 1916 painted his anti-war masterpiece, The Merry-Go-Round. That same
year,Walter Sickert would write of Nevinson’s 1915 painting, La Mitrailleuse that it ‘will probably
remain the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the
history of painting.’ Sickerts judgement has proved accurate, and La Mitrailleuse remains one of the
definitive images of the conflict.
A lifeline
for both art and artists would eventually be offered by the Government’s
official war artists scheme, launched in 1916, and followed later on by a
similar programme of record, propaganda and memorial run by the Canadian
government. Nevinson, Bomberg, Roberts, Rothenstein and Augustus John all saw
service with one of even both of these schemes. As well as keeping many talented
young artists alive, the War Artists scheme also gave them hope at a time when
the future seemed to offer none. ‘There is a good time coming for Art yet in
England,’ Mark Gertler predicted after receiving a commission to paint an
official picture in 1918. ‘I have a feeling that we are going to have good painting, after the War, there are good
times coming if only we can hold out. This War is not the end.’
For a
moment, Gertler’s prediction seemed to hold true. Shortly after the Armistice
the prominent New York collector Albert Eugene Gallatin visited Europe, and was
fascinated by what he saw in London. ‘Pulsating with life and possessing a
distinctly fresh vision,’ he told an interviewer from The Observer in 1921, ‘a movement is now well under way which, in
my opinion, will develop into one of the great epochs of English painting.
Paris and New York cannot in this respect vie with London.’ This new vitality
had its origins immediately before the war. It had then been interrupted by the
war, before being reinvigorated by it. Sadly, its promise was not fully
realized. C.R.W. Nevinson had his moment in New York, when that city seemed to
promise him a way forward, to maintain the momentum from the war, but it was not
to be. David Bomberg was forced abroad, travelling to Palestine, and later to
Spain, to pursue his remarkable vision. Neither John’s nor Gertler’s star ever shone
so bright again, and it would be many decades before London really did vie with
Paris and New York to hold the crown of contemporary art. For a moment,
however, it had seemed that it was here, in England, out of the horrors of war,
that Western art’s future might really lie.
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