Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

It is unnatural to artists creative in whatever medium to combine in the pretence of a common purpose. This exercise, involving a probable dissipation of nervous energy, better expended on their own work, alarms them but at the same time offers a fascinating escape from the ruthless demands of their inhabitants. This was well understood by Lady Gregory, who locked up her writers in their rooms after breakfast to prevent conversation and denied them further sustenance until they had produced something for posterity on paper. Nonetheless, in certain circumstances a grouping among artists becomes necessary and history here has shown that the result in terms of dynamism and impetus has generally had a far-reaching influence on the art of this country.

     These special circumstances existed in the years immediately before the First World War. A rich and privileged society was crumbling. The kind of art then favoured, because it was comfortable and occasioned no exhausting thought, was academic pastiche and metaphorically roses-round-the-door, and new ideas, if they got an airing at all, were received with massive indifference. Certain squibs such as the exhibition of the Allied Artists’ Association at the Albert Hall or the diatribes of the critic, Rutter, merely singed the traditional Guy and it was left to Roger Fry in 1910 with his exhibition ‘Manet and the Post Impressionists’ at the Grafton Galleries to provide the really significant feu d’artifice by showing that there existed, hitherto unknown to the majority of the English art world, such painters as Seurat and Signac, Matisse, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne, and by pointing out that Impressionism, already explored to its exquisite limits, was spent, drowned with Monet’s cathedrals under a late shimmer of water-lilies. In the conflagration that followed this exhibition and the bright light thrown on the toppling and burning Impressionist idols, the most disparate band of seventeen artists came together under the banner and title of the Camden Town Group.

     Time, and a reassessment helped by the series of Arts Council exhibitions devoted to the work of this Group, have shown that as far as the most vital and lasting Post-Impressionist influence in this country is concerned — the painting of Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin — it is necessary to consider here no more than three artists, Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore and Robert Bevan. Ginner is the nearest runner-up in terms of the same influence but the others, at least the already established members who joined the Group, settled back after the first flush of excitement and discovery on their original Impressionist course or flirted with pointillisme and forms of Cubism, paths whose end was already inherent in their beginnings and not often to the cautious English taste. Gilman, Gore and Bevan, however, became, as their later painting clearly shows, the channel through which this country came to an understanding of the passion of Van Gogh’s vision and colour, of Cézanne’s miraculously intuitive realization of form beneath the surface of things, and of Gauguin’s orchestration of the primary simplicities. Each was an artist already technically accomplished and with a certain flavour before the turning point in 1911, from which year dates the period now seen to have been so valuable to us; and it is rewarding to note in their earlier work the qualities which remained constant through and after the great change that took place in their approach to painting.

     Of the three, Gilman is perhaps the most interesting in the relationship of character and work. He was also probably the best painter. Not so consistent as Gore and lacking the range of Bevan, when he did hit the high spots he found a level that the two others seldom, if ever, attained. At the other end of the scale he could, in his bunkered pursuit of Van Gogh, produce paintings where colour was used so much only for colour’s sake that the result resembled Hyde Park rhetoric of the most off-putting variety. Fortunately these lapses were rare; he was an extremely disciplined character: it must be remembered that he came from a country vicarage, a background that on the whole in those days produced a high percentage of integrity and only very occasionally extreme raffishness. He travelled early also to Spain, that last resort of dignity, and was at once en rapport with the paintings of Velasquez. This was a crucial period in the marshalling of those basic qualities of directness and draughtsmanship which later were to discipline the blaze of colour derived from Van Gogh. ‘The White Handkerchief’, a work of this date, is a perfect exposition of his early potentialities and in its monumentality as a portrait foreshadows the Mrs Mounters of his last years. But it is sober. The majority of the portraits and interiors before 1910 are sombre, reserved, sometimes on the verge of primness; it is as if a painter in a moment of love for Vuillard had suddenly been handed a tract.

     This sobriety, however, began to wane with his introduction to Lucien Pissarro and a gayer palette, and disappeared finally when Ginner took him, still reeling from the effects of ‘Manet and the Post Impressionists’, to Paris. The result we see first of all in two remarkable paintings of 1911, ‘Woman Combing Her Hair’ and ‘Nude Against a Window’, both extravagantly Parma violet contre-jour and splendid in their freedom and panache. After that he gave himself up entirely to the worship of Van Gogh and to an intensity of colour that almost set fire to his canvasses — ’The Eating House’, ‘Leeds Market’, ‘The Canal Bridge’, ‘Portrait of Mrs Robert Bevan’ — and during this period of his career reached its highest point in the portrait, at Liverpool, of Mrs Mounter, that queen of ‘chars’ who once reigned in the Louvre and was not, even then, defeated by the quality of her neighbours. Never until this time had paintings of such uninhibited iridescence been flung by a native artist in the face of the English public. It is unnecessary to add that they were almost invariably flung back again. But they did pave the way here for the eventual acceptance of Van Gogh.

     In Spencer Gore, a gentler personality than Gilman and temperamentally incapable of the other’s sudden volte-face, we see the assimilation of Cézanne as a gradual process but in its final result none the less definite for being reached through caution. The early delicate evocations of the Edwardian era at Hertingfordbury, where life was always afternoon, show him to be the most English of Impressionists. But unlike most of his contemporaries he was accustomed to long visits for painting to Dieppe and Neuville and was familiar with Matisse and the Parisian avant-garde, so that he did not share the feeling of shock when Roger Fry introduced these painters to England. The most he allowed himself was a certain pointillisme in the manner of Pissarro and even in 1911, when art critics in London were torn with controversy, he remained tranquilly faithful to Impressionism in the series of paintings of Mornington Crescent and Houghton Place, which to many are still the authentic Gore. The heavy lilac London summer with a hint of thunder in the air presaged at once the coming disaster of war for mankind and for one artist a flowering that was to last for so short a time but caused repercussions which in painting were evident long after his early death.

     In 1912 a strange painting, ‘Flying at Hendon’, appeared followed by ‘The Icknield Way’. These showed an obvious capitulation to Cézanne and from that moment the London scenes and landscapes of Letchworth and Richmond gained in construction and power while losing nothing of the lyricism and innocent sensibility that marked the whole of his oeuvre. This change was not achieved without heart-burning, since it involved a complete break on a question of artistic principle with friends for whom he had a personal affection but who refused to see any good in Cézanne or his works. Nevertheless it was made, and new dimensions were given to a conception of landscape that had been obsessed hitherto by subtleties of light and tone-relationship and largely ignored any idea of form. The time was ripe to say goodbye to all this; there was in the air a general feeling that a little healthy iconoclasm would not come amiss. In this atmosphere Spencer Gore, the least likely individual to be cut out as a prophet, established by his enthusiasm, persuasion and infinitely skilled example the ideas and beliefs of a Master than whom no other has been so pervasive an influence on succeeding generations of English artists.

     If Gilman was the most vivid and Gore the most consistent, Bevan was easily the most questing and varied painter. He did not need to be stirred by the discoveries and controversies of the London of 1910-11 because he had for years travelled abroad, painted in such diverse places as Tangier, Brittany and Poland and was perfectly aware of the movements in art on the continent. In his earlier painting, that is to say before 1911, he is an artist very difficult to place. There is no evidence in the Bevan family records that he ever met Van Gogh but it is obvious in his drawings of Brittany that this must have happened. What is certain is that he knew Gauguin during the two years he spent painting at Pont Aven and the impact, though not immediately evident in his work, is clear for all to see in his paintings from 1912 onwards. Before that he had attempted with success the pointillisme of Pissarro expressed in high, singing, arbitrary colour that might have been developed at the same time as O’Conor. In Poland the influence of Gauguin began, in his watercolours at least, to be apparent, though the oils of this period alternate between pure Impressionism and canvases so wild and brilliant in colour and execution that a suspicion enters in that he must somewhere, in Warsaw perhaps, have seen Munch. These last must have been a shock to an England knowing little if anything of the Fauves.

     In 1912, after the series of Cab Yards, a unique contribution to painting in this country, he abandoned all earlier ideas and took Gauguin as his absolute and ideal model. In all his paintings from that date, the Horse Sales, the uncompromising views of London, the landscapes and farms of Devon, can be seen Gauguin’s simplification and deliberate organization of spaces and masses. The colour translated in a northern light was less brilliant than his earlier fauve work but full, considered and never timid. Sometimes in his extreme angularity and planning he went beyond the precepts of Pont Aven and arrived at a certain aridity. But on the whole he brought to England an ordered richness, a hard sense of form and pattern and a direct simplicity of approach to all subjects which he had learned in Brittany and which remained the hall-mark of his painting until he died.

     We cannot for ever be induced to believe that Camden Town painting is only an English variant of the French Impressionists, or swallow without a pang of indigestion the idea, still prevalent in a woolly way, that Sickert was the be-all and end-all of the Group. Wit he may have been and certainly the most considerable artist of his generation in this country, but he always stood apart from the ideals if not the practicalities that were the raison d’être of his entourage. At that time a great change was in the air in living as well as in art and he was unwilling, perhaps unable, to adapt himself to it. When the currents of Post Impressionism set for England he was, as an influence, no more than a Canute and suffered a like fate. It was left to the others immediately surrounding him, and whose work was unreasonably overshadowed by his vivid personality, respectfully but firmly to step over the body and direct the new flow from the continent into the fertilization of a field too long lain fallow.