Memories of the future

by Ronald Arbuthnott Knox

Spawn umbellated, coughing, slobbering,

Heckmondwike!

Perhaps it was time the neo-classical school came along to give us a new lead! But of course it was far more of a revolution in Art than it was in letters. I am afraid I am a very poor first-hand witness about the artistic movements of my time, for the old painters used to expect such a lot of you! They exhibited, of course, at the Academy and other accessible places every now and then, but even so it was rather trying to have the artists standing on guard, as they always did, and explaining to the sight-seer, not what their pictures were about, but what sort of emotions they ought to evoke! Some of them went further, and said you must not look at their pictures unless you were fasting, or unless you had recently taken opium. (Opium-smoking was not as common then as it is now, but already you were sometimes offered it in Chelsea.) I was too busy in one way and another to devote my life to picture-inspecting; and indeed, it was only a small group of people who took any interest in painting at all.

But I did once come in close touch with it, when I sat for my own portrait to Sanderson, the great Præteritist. In those days, when chromography gave very little help to the artist, you would often have to “sit” twice or three times before the painter caught what he considered a likeness. It was during the enforced idleness of one of these “sittings” that I had a long conversation with him which interested me so much that I wrote down notes of it afterwards.

We talked of Futurism; he said it was all very well, but the trouble about it was it had no future. He told me (what I did not know) that the term “futurism,” when it was first invented, in the early part of the century (“before you were born, my dear”—waving his brush at me), meant simply a dissatisfaction with present standards in art and a determination to find new methods: it was only with Lennox and Burstall that it took on its new meaning. The old Futurists refused, indeed, to draw the thing as they saw it, but they had not reached the idea of portraying things as one day they would be. It was Lennox’s Ruins of Westminster Cathedral that first heralded this much-criticized departure; and it was Burstall who developed the notion in portrait-painting. He was something of a missionary: unhappily married himself, he maintained that it was one of the functions of Art to show the evanescence of beauty, and when débutantes came to sit to him he represented them as those wrinkled old women whom we still see and admire (he was speaking, of course, in 1960) in his portraits. He was a missionary, and something of a martyr; in consequence of his decision, he had to struggle for a long time with neglect and poverty; and it was only his portrait of Prince Albert, then three years old, as six foot high and a Colonel of Hussars, that drew attention to him once more. He got all the babies after that.

I said I supposed the Futuribilists were a necessary, or at least a logical, sequel to the Futurists. He said no, except in so far as they continued the tradition of drawing anything rather than what you saw in front of you; “and that, after all,” he added, “we Præteritists maintain as strongly as anybody.” The idea of painting what might have been was a quite different inspiration from the idea of painting what probably would be. (The names, he said, were all wrong; the Futurists ought to have been called Futuribilists, and the Futuribilists Potentialists, or something of that sort.) Besides, Futuribilism started in Belgium, and came out of the Electricist school, which we in England had barely heard of; had I ever seen an Electric picture, such as Bavet’s Windmill? I said no. “Well,” he said, “it represents simply a mass of electrons butting in and out. It was a craze that caught on for a bit, but there was a sameness about it. Then there were the Vitalists, but they never mattered much; and then Mosheim and his crowd began the Potentialist movement. It was still life, chiefly, game and so on; and the idea was to represent it not as what it was, but as what it might have become ... well, they weren’t very pleasant pictures, and our modern taste has decided, perhaps rightly, against them. It hardly started in England till Murchison’s Decay of a Leaf was exhibited: and even then it didn’t catch on until they began to treat human subjects, like Moffatt with his Influenza Patient, and Rosenstein with his Triumph of the Red Corpuscles.”

Here he had to get up and readjust the convex lenses, so our conversation was interrupted. When he was back at the easel I asked him why he said Futurism had no future. He said because it lived by innovation; it did not develop gradually, like the mind or the tastes of a man as he grows up, but found its successive inspirations in continual revolt from the latest fashion: “it’s a series of kicks,” he said, “like the old petrol tanks.” That meant that the public simply didn’t care about pictures, because they—the laymen—hadn’t leisure to follow all the latest movements in art criticism. In the old days you took years to learn how to paint a picture, and only a fortnight to learn how to criticize one; now it was the other way about. Only artists looked at pictures, and they chiefly to see how they could invent a new method, and turn the old ones on to the scrap-heap. “They didn’t always succeed,” he explained. “You’d be too young to remember the commotion there was in the early thirties, when nobody would talk about anything but relativity, and Manning Barker suddenly laid it down that there could be no such thing as Truth, even in Art, without velocity. His school would only paint for the screen, and you had to sit for a quarter of an hour to see the portrait of a Cabinet minister. I remember Lady Marrett, who was a beauty in those days, being released in nearly a quarter of a mile of film, and you never saw more than a square inch of her at any given moment. It was hard for the sculptors, you see: they wanted Billing to do an avenue of statues up the old Hammersmith Broadway, but the police wouldn’t allow it on account of the cars having to go forty miles an hour to get the values properly. Some of the movements fail, and some stick, but it can’t go on like this.”

“But what about you?” I asked. “Aren’t you one of the revolts?” I am afraid my question was a tactless one, because he painted for a time in complete silence, and then said, yes, he was only one of the reactions; he was only a fashion: one day people would see no more in him than they saw in Whistler or Pennell. (“Not that I should be surprised if some of those fellows came into vogue again,” he put in. “I was at a smart house the other day where my hostess, who is rather a crank, was thinking of having her house decorated with pictures, as they used to in our young days.”) But he painted in his way because he believed in it. “Every line on your face,” he said, “and every play of movement on your face, was predetermined for it by your smiles and frowns and pouts and fidgetings when you were a baby in arms. I must track Truth to its source, so I see you as a baby still—you must excuse me saying that, but it’s my creed. It will last my time; but you’re young, and you may live to see a reaction. These neo-classical people are attracting a lot of attention: I’m an old fogey, and I can’t see anything in these new ideas, but I daresay your daughters will.” It was a bold prophecy for a man to make in the early sixties; but he was quite right. What would he have said to our neo-romantics!

Talking of Futurism, I noticed in the paper the other day that Dame Beatrice Goodge was criticizing the old Futurists on the ground that they never produced any architecture: she would not be old enough to remember it, but I have actually seen a row of Cubist houses! It was when I was house-hunting, with Juliet Savage, in ’41, and we were trying our luck at the “Garden City” at Welwyn. The architect’s idea was a very simple one, which was to build a series of octagonal passages, just like a honeycomb: after all, bees built like that, and bees ought to know. Juliet said if I were shaped like a bee and spent all my time in the City making honey, one of these would just suit me. Only a very few tenants were ever secured, and these did not last long: profane neighbours, I believe, used to call them the Hivites. What a mad world it is, and how few men and women you will find who have not a blind spot somewhere.

“Men and women”—we still write the words in that order, though the Feminists, at the period of which I am typing, did their best to get it inverted. I cannot say that I sympathized at all with this agitation; I have always been old-fashioned, and felt that the proper sphere of woman is the flat. But I used to see a good deal in those days of Esther Margate, who was one of our most fanatical Feminists; and I think she ought to have her mention in this chapter, because there was a sort of mad consistency about her, which I believe to be a necessary element in all greatness of the reforming kind. She would always say, for example, “I do not suppose there is a woman, man or child in this country ... etc.,” because she maintained that woman was intellectually and morally man’s superior, and ought therefore to have the place of honour. I can still remember her asking Lord Billericay at dinner whether he didn’t think the women and men of London were better dressed now than they used to be: he said he was a bad judge, because he only came up to London once a year, for the Harrow and Eton match (he meant the cricket match, of course), and as a rule only stayed there till the Cambridge and Oxford match. Nobody ever quite knew whether Esther Margate realized what he was getting at. She used to dilate, too, on the unfairness of talking about “Man,” when you meant the human race in general: Archie Lock asked her if we ought to say “The proper study of mankind is Woman”; she answered quite sharply, no, “womankind,” of course. I believe some of her disciples went so far as to change their names; and you certainly do meet people called Goodwoman and Newwoman now, which you never used to. But her attempt to confine the suffrage to women was foredoomed to failure, even if Juliet Savage had not organized her campaign against it. It was conclusively shown that at least 27 per cent. of the men who had votes regularly exercised their right.