I Am Spain

When writing a book there's always material that has to be cut - sometimes that's a good thing: it just might not be right for the place you want it to go; or it might just be self-indulgent, and you know it ought to go. I wanted to include the following as an opening scene-setter for my 2012 book, I Am Spain. It is almost entirely taken from Claud Cockburn's 1936 book, Reporter in Spain (written under the pseudonym Frank Pitcairn). This blog seems like a good place to publish it. The accompanying photo of Cockburn with Fred Copeman of the British Battalion of the International Brigades was taken at the battle of Brunete in the summer of 1937 by Gerda Taro, very shortly before her death. For a while she was the lover of Robert Capa, and in my opinion was (or could have been) the greater war reporter.

Early on a warm July morning in 1936 a young British reporter sat down for breakfast in the station café at Cerbère. Nestling on the coastline where the Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean, this was the last railway stop in southern France before the Spanish border.

Claud Cockburn was no ordinary journalist. Though he possessed a lax attitude to facts, his old school friend the novelist Graham Greene would call him one of the greatest journalists of the twentieth century. Perhaps more accurately, the British secret service considered him a ‘professional mischief maker’ whose ‘intelligence’, ‘capability’ and ‘unscrupulous nature’ made him ‘a formidable factor with which to reckon’. Born in Peking in 1904, Cockburn had been educated at public school and Oxford. A heavy drinker and smoker, he was ever in a hurry (his wife would describe him as being like a rag-doll, his elongated arms and dangling legs ever in vigorous motion).

In the late 1920s he had worked for that most establishment of British newspapers, The Times – first in Berlin, then in America. Arriving in New York City in 1929 it had soon become apparent that what was happening on Wall Street was everything. ‘You could talk about prohibition, or Hemingway, or air conditioning, or music, or horses,’ he later wrote, ‘but in the end you had to talk about the stock market, and that was where the conversation became serious.’ If the Great War had been the first global disaster of the twentieth century, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was the second. After the Crash, the Depression descended upon the world (to use George Orwell’s apt phrase) ‘like an ice age’. It was no exaggeration to say that many liberal thinkers saw Western civilization as on the brink of collapse.

Claud Cockburn and Fred Copeman, Brunete, July 1937.

Having read Karl Marx in Germany, Cockburn was already a convinced Communist, believing that ‘the Party’ was the one organization that could combat the rising tide of Fascism, and that the communists alone could save the disposed from capitalist oppression. Quitting The Times in 1932, Cockburn had launched his own political paper, The Week. Sources were plentiful, for ‘under the frightful overhanging menace of Hitlerism,’ he observed, ‘there roamed through the capitals of Western Europe people who were half saint and half bandit – the sort of people who would commit a murder for twenty pounds and suicide for a good idea.’ Relying on a network of sometimes brave, sometimes unscrupulous fellow journalists, inside informers, disaffected civil servants, tip-off merchants and whistle-blowers, on three pages of foolscap Cockburn published stories of international rumour, supposed plots, libellous gossip, plausible intrigues and assertive opinions (largely his own). He would later boast that readers of his scurrilous periodical included the foreign ministers of eleven nations, the staff of all the embassies in London, a dozen US Senators, fifty MPs, the King of England and the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

As if The Week was not enough work for one man, Cockburn

was also a special correspondent for The Daily Worker. It was on behalf of this Communist Party newspaper that he found himself in Cerbère that July in 1936, en route to Catalonia to report on the Workers’ Olympiad that was due to open in Barcelona in a few days’ time.

When the sea air smelt suddenly of violets, Cockburn looked up and watched as a tall, fattish gentleman in expensive clothes and carrying a perfumed handkerchief walked in. Two men followed him – dressed in tight-cut Palm Beach suits like prohibition-era gangsters, they hardly bothered to conceal the pistols at their hips.

            When the noise came of a train rolling through the tunnel from Spain the fat man and his bodyguards rose from their chairs and left.

            ‘Somebody in particular? Cockburn asked the waiter.

            ‘They say so.’

            ‘Well, and …?’

            ‘A Colonel or something or other from Madrid’, said the waiter. ‘Big shot. Has an aeroplane up in Perpignan. Colonel of aviation I think. Lives at the Grand Hotel. Very swell.’

            ‘So what?’

            ‘So nothing. Except that they say – I’m just telling you what they say – that he isn’t there for nothing, so to speak. Possibly you understand something of the situation in Spain.’

            ‘Well?’

            ‘Well a fortnight ago this fellow comes hell for leather over the frontier at Le Perthus, by car of course, and goes up to Perpignan at the Grand Hotel. He was mixed up some way in killing the miners in Asturias last year and the year before or whenever it was. That’s why he had to beat it after the elections. They say he has a mission.’

            ‘Such as?’

            ‘How should I know? I suppose you and I think the rich are going to sit quiet and – what’s the phrase? – “accept the verdict of the pee-pull?” Like hell they are.’

            ‘This is the twelfth of July. Five months after the elections.’

            ‘All the longer to get ready.’

            ‘So the Colonel, what is he doing down here on the frontier?’

            ‘Well, I should say, and our Spanish comrades here say that he is, so to speak, listening for something.’

            ‘Listening?’

            The waiter made a gesture, indicating a man putting his ear to the ground.

            ‘You think he’ll hear something soon?’

            The waiter grimaced. Cockburn stood up – it was time to catch the Barcelona train.

From his carriage Cockburn watched the fascist Colonel standing on the opposite platform, expensive and perfumed with his sleek bodyguards, listening for news of a steadily thickening plot against his country. It would not be long now.

            And it occurred to Cockburn that if you wanted 1936’s equivalent for those symbolic figures of Death that appear in medieval wall paintings – well, that Spanish Colonel … he would do.

Edgar Astaire's collection at Christie's, London

 In June 2015 Christie's in London sold some of Edgar Astaire's outstanding collection of twentieth-century British art, including Gertler's painting The Violinist,  which made a record price for the artist, realising £542,500 on the night. This is the short essay that they invited me to write to accompany the catalogue:

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.