A London Mosaic

by Walter Lionel George

But what if it were not obvious? Many of the modern men, such as Mr Wadsworth, Mr McKnight Kauffer, Mr Wyndham Lewis, do not aspire to represent anything at all. What they want to do is to sketch or paint an interesting pattern. Mr Ezra Pound has put the attitude clearly in his book, Gaudier Brzeska, where he says, more or less: ‘When you hear a sonata played, you do not say, “Oh, what an eloquent reproduction of the waves upon the shore!” or, “This is where the sheep begin to baa.” What you do is to ask yourself whether this combination of sounds is pleasant or moving. That is the freedom we wish to find in painting or sculpture. We are not interested in painting the Mayor of Leeds in such a way as to make it clear that he is a mayor, possibly of Leeds, but we are interested in setting together lines and coloured surfaces, irrespective of any meaning, and to be judged on that, according to whether these lines and colours produce a pleasant sensation.’

This position appears to me above attack. The technical improvements in painting, which began in the seventeenth century, producing Rembrandt, Raphael, Velasquez, and, in due course, Sir Edward Poynter, seem to have set a heavy yoke upon the painter’s neck, for the painter grew enthralled by technique, became more and more inclined to represent a baby so life-like that everybody expected it to howl; he grew liable to lose sight of the one thing that matters, namely, that to represent a baby is nothing, and to represent the artist through the baby, everything. (If I am wrong, consider a picture by Mr Clausen and a photograph by Mr Park; Mr Clausen knows how to paint, but Mr Park will far more exactly reproduce the sitter, do it quicker, and much more cheaply.) The thesis of the modern artist, of which I am trying to give an impression, therefore involves that while we bow to the undeniable greatness of men such as Rembrandt, Botticelli, Leonardo, we wonder whether a greater emancipation from their technique might not have allowed them to soar higher into the abstract region where none save an artist can breathe. The plea is that in a more abstract field they might have been still greater.

Undeniably, the modern forms of art have emancipated themselves too much from technical restrictions. It is dangerous to have too much technique; it is dangerous to have too little, and I could not say who suavely broods in the golden mean. Still, when we consider what a dead and damnable thing technique alone can be, when we consider the annual mortuary at Burlington House, when we stand awhile before a work of Mr Frank Dicksee, and stare incredulously at Sir Luke Fildes’s ‘The Doctor,’ or attempt to solve the Hon. John Collier’s psycho-pictorial mysteries, we are indeed assured that though technique may exclude a man both from heaven and from hell, it shall, for certain, land him in purgatory.

I remember very well the first ‘advanced’ pictures I ever saw. They were twelve impressions of a bridge over a brook by Claude Monet. That must have been nearly twenty years ago, and I thought them very beautiful. It is strange that nowadays they seem so tame. But it does not matter to me that I thought them beautiful then, just as when I first saw a Matisse I thought it interesting, that my first Gauguin, with its queer brown figures stirred me; it matters to me that when the futurists came to town, Mr Marinetti did not strike me as a marionette, and that later all the others, cubists, boulists, imagists, vorticists, were taken by me as honest men. You may call me a fool; you may even think worse of me and say that I was so anxious to be in the movement that I liked every movement; I prefer to say that I was always ready to try to understand a new pictorial convention. When I cease to be able to do that, when I cease to see in painting that Mr Wadsworth is deeply interesting, in literature, that Mr James Joyce is strikingly individual, when I am Philistine enough to hang a painter because I won’t hang his picture, then, indeed, shall I be middle-aged and take to meals.

The years between 1908 or so and 1914 were some of the most important English art has passed through. In those six or seven years, for the first time, London saw the post-impressionists, not only Matisse, but also Cézanne and Picasso; she saw the futurists, the singular pictures of views from a moving train which, faulty as they were, were well worth painting, because from a moving train one does see things, therefore material for art. She saw Severini’s ‘Pan-Pan Dance,’ where colour and surface dance rather than men and women; she saw the coming of Mr Epstein, first in the statues outside the British Medical Association, which were said to be indecent and became famous; she also saw reproductions of Mr Epstein’s Oscar Wilde monument, which went to Paris and was said to be indecent and became kilted. The cubists came in the train of Mr Metzinger. The non-representational movement extended, radiating round Mr Wyndham Lewis, impressing many men and women, among whom, in those days, was found true ability. It was a breathless and beautiful period, where everybody was under thirty and many were under twenty, when people painted not for art’s sake, but consciously for the expression of self. When that self was feeble, the painting was feeble. But it was not always so. Many ridiculous things were done; many ridiculous things were said in the Café Royal and out of it, but, as Miss May Sinclair puts it very well, these young men had not come to destroy the pictorial glories of the past; they had come to destroy their imitators. Conscious of their period, they wanted to express it.

Some have suggested that the modern forms of painting were merely outbreaks of youth, that these movements had severed the continuity which should exist between one period and another. Now the modern young man is generally arrogant, and if you talked to him of continuity would say, perhaps: ‘I don’t want any ancestors; I am an ancestor.’ But he would be wrong. From Monet to Matisse, from Matisse to the early Nevinson, from the early Nevinson to the modern Wyndham Lewis, the link is close. No doubt a pen better versed than mine could link Monet with Giotto. I cannot; for I find it difficult to think back further than fifty years.

THE GOOD INTENT
CHELSEA

There have been reactions. One of the most notable is that of Mr Nevinson, who is to-day the most popular of the young men, the one who has been most completely recognised by a broad public. Certainly he has become more recognisable, though I am not of those who think that his work has thereby lost. A man may be great and esoteric, or he may be great and lucid. It all depends on the way in which the dice fall. The several exhibitions of Mr Nevinson’s work, during the war, have shown him more and more gaining independence. He began by adopting one of the cubist conventions; he is still able to do so when he wishes, but he is also able to use other conventions, even the most stereotyped, when his subject seems to demand it. He paints pattern, or subject, or idea, but an interesting sidelight on his attitude is hatred of all cliques. In the preface of his last exhibition, he bitterly assails the people who seek ‘pure form through nothing but still life, endless green apples, saucepans, and oranges, picasized and cezanned with a ponderous and self-conscious sub-consciousness.’ He hates what he calls the child-like antics and the gambolling of the elect of Bloomsbury. He may not be quite fair, but when I remember the various cliques to which I had occasional access, the Rhythm clique, for whom nobody existed except Anne Estelle Rice, J. D. Fergusson, Jessie Dismorr, and George Banks ... until the review changed its name, when most of these people ceased to exist and nobody but Mr Albert Rutherston was granted physical likelihood, when I reflect how Mr Nevinson used to cluster with many others in a cosy cube, only to be driven out at last at the point of a cone, when I reflect upon the sombre mystery that surrounds the adepts of Mr Roger Fry (a mystery recently grown less sombre with success), I am assured that cliques are the necessary breeding-ground of talent because they fortify its members against the cackling Philistine. But they are also the thing which keeps talent small and parochial once they have helped it to grow. The clique is the nursery, and the test of a man is whether he knows when he is grown up. The art clique is like journalism, which can lead you anywhere provided you forsake it.

Most of the cliques have their being in Chelsea, though Fitzroy Square and the Garden City occasionally put forward claims, and Bedford Park asserts itself. I suspect that the movement is nowadays away from Chelsea. King’s Road grows every day more mercantile; nothing in it recalls the arts except a slight excess of shops which sell artists’ materials. One does meet the Chelsea girl, no longer in a jibbah, but more likely in an eloquent sweater, with her hair cut short and her feet brogued, but then the Chelsea style has crept into many circles. You can go into the Chenil Gallery, where you will always find works by Mr Augustus John and Mr Gill; you can even go and have lunch at the Good Intent, but somehow Chelsea will not seem to you very Chelsea-ish. Indeed, there are rows and rows of studios near Glebe Place, Church Street, Redcliffe Square, in all sorts of odd back-yards and shanties, but the whole thing does not hold together. At the Good Intent, for instance, you will find a small, quiet restaurant, decorated with old furniture, pictures that may have been advanced once upon a time, a jolly old pug, very fat and wheezing, its portraits on the wall, grossly flattered, with a mauve ribbon round its neck; you will see at the tables mainly women who live at local diggings, rather tired and lonely looking, as women grow when they live in diggings and toast muffins on the gas stove.