War-pictures at Burlington House
ONE would have hesitated to predict success for a set of commissioned war pictures: meaning success in the sense of excellence. In commissioning any painting or piece of sculpture with a dictated subject there is always the danger that the subject will be uncongenial to the artist, that it may have no connection with his own intimate experience. This is one of the disadvantages of portrait painting. The artist is supposed to be capable and desirous of depicting all kinds of characters, not to speak of flattering them. The novelist and dramatist are more fortunate. People are anxious to avoid and also tired of their revelations. But Mr. Horatio Bottomley still expects the Poet Laureate to boom out the appropriate ode.
Besides the general objection there was the further feeling that the war was a sufficient preoccupation in itself, and a disagreeable one of such a kind that deliberately to set out to make contemporaneous art about it would be not only superfluous but almost profane. It would amount to gloating. The war was a foul and dirty job that had to be gone through with, and the experience of concentrating on this was enough. It was not without good reason that immediately following the war the most popular forms of art were the Revue and the Russian Ballet.
Again, one rather grudges the large sums of State money spent on war-pictures when one thinks of the comparatively small expenditure on art in peace-time. And those two rich and influential patrons who started the ball rolling with large contributions, did they before the war, will they now after the war, patronise art extensively and seriously? The motive may have been sound, but it was in all probability very mixed.
But doubt and scepticism tend to be quashed by the result, which must be admitted to be a very considerable success. The field appears to have been so wide that the artists have been able to select the themes which had most significance for them, and there is a direct continuity in their present with their past work. Even pure landscapes have not been ruled out. It is, in fact, far the best modern exhibition that has graced the walls of the Academy for some time, and the memory of it will still be fresh in the spring.
It is not meant, however, that the Exhibition is full of masterpieces. It contains work that is representative of much of the best English art of to-day, but the keynote of that art is talent, accomplishment, and not genius. And this judgment does not exclude such well-known painters as Sargent, Cameron, Muirhead Bone, Francis Dodd, Clausen, Orpen, Lavery.
I shall, no doubt, be accused of iconoclasm, of indulging in easy destructive criticism; and the term Futurist will be hurled at me with such a lot of prejudicial glue on it that, although it is inapplicable, it will inevitably stick. And I shall be asked if I would consign the whole of the past to the rubbish-heap and abolish all tradition, and so on. The answer is, emphatically and vehemently, no! It is precisely because the past looms so imposing and ever watchful that the late twentieth-century English painters are dwarfed. Place a Muirhead Bone beside a Meryon (the comparison is not irrelevant, because there are definite similarities between the two) and the Muirhead Bone will disappear into the Meryon. Two possible exceptions in the present Exhibition are The Great Crater, Athies (280) and Deniecourt Chateau, Estrées(284). Place a Sargent beside a Manet, Courbet or Velazquez and Sargent's horses beside those of Géricault, and the Sargent loses all vitality. Or, again, neither Steer nor Clausen will stand very prolonged comparison with Constable or even Monet. Practically the whole of English late twentieth-century art is derived from Constable and from the French Barbizon and Impressionist schools, and is inferior to it. The latter is the significant point. This may sound too sweeping, and indeed it probably does leave out of account the few gems which a complete collection would reveal. Still, the fact of it being necessary to hunt for these few gems and not rather to eliminate the few failures would confirm the general judgment. We have never had anything like the great constellation of French nineteenth-century art.
In reaction against the tendency of English Impressionism to degenerate into the pleasant but slipshod æstheticism of a Lavery there is the crude Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis and W. P. Roberts. It had once a negative, destructive, rebellious value, but as a permanent constructive effort it surely is a cul-de-sac, a mere mechanical formula. Before any theory comes into play the primary test is whether a picture really moves us, appeals to us. If Vorticist or Futurist art did this, then no amount of argument refuting their abstract theory could condemn the actual art. But, at any rate, so far as I am concerned, this art has no appeal to me in a picture-frame. Indeed, it seems to me to be becoming increasingly stereotyped, and it is amazing that Mr. Wyndham Lewis should honestly believe in it himself. Mr. Wadsworth's Vorticist design for a house, which was recently exhibited by the Arts League of Service, absurdly unpractical though it was, had far larger possibilities in it.
The most interesting work exhibited by the younger painters is that painted in the more traditional manner—that is to say it is not abstractionist. It is possible that on seeing for the first time the pictures of the Nash brothers, Meninsky, Schwabe, Elliott Seabrooke, one might mistake them for "Futurist" efforts. This is, however, not owing to any distortion or abstraction, but to the fact that they have in common with the abstractionists a certain restlessness of design. Even when allied to absolute truth in representation, this trait might at first sight appear novel and revolutionary. It is, or tends to be, expressive of a new outlook.
Paul Nash's large picture, The Menin Road, is a distinct achievement. It grips one's attention. Yet it is overloaded, the incident, the drama of the landscape is piled on too thickly. John Nash's Over the Top, on the other hand, attracts attention because of its very bareness and simplicity. On a small section of a snow-covered front men are stumbling out of a jagged muddy trench into rolling fog cloud. Yet in spite of its success in convincing us that that is exactly how it was, the picture lacks intensity and depth. We are grateful to Mr. Nash, as also to Mr. Sargent, for having spared us the harassing agonies of the typical old-fashioned Academy war-picture. But neither has altogether succeeded in providing the real substitute. What such a picture would be like still remains to be seen. For it has not yet been painted.
The distinctive characteristics of the younger school, its sense of actuality, of lively conflicting movement, its combination of realism with rhythm, are summed up in Stanley Spencer's Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smoll, in Macedonia. In spite of certain possible faults of perspective, this is a thoroughly good picture. But although about a scene in the war, it is not of the war. It contains an inner civilian joyfulness expressed in unhampered, rhythmical activity. Equal praise must be bestowed on Henry Lamb's Irish Troops in the Judaean Hills Surprised by a Turkish Bombardment, which possesses the same sense of concrete (not abstract) dynamic form.