ART-QUAKE, 1910 : THE MANET AND THE POST-IMPRESSIONISTS
EXHIBITION
By David Boyd Haycock
Old Street Publishing. 116 pages. £12.99. ISBN
978-1-91308-391-5
Reviewed by Jim Burns
It was Virginia Woolf who coined what David Boyd Haycock
refers to as “the oft-repeated observation” that “on or about December 1910
human character changed”. In fact,
Woolf did not specify December 1910 as an exact date and, as Haycock points out,
she was talking about developments in the novel when, after emphasising that the
“change was not sudden and definite”, she said “ But a change there was,
nevertheless, and since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year
1910”. Still, as Haycock makes clear with regard to the subject of his book,
“Woolf’s memorable words have loaded Fry’s exhibition with a significance that
has sunk it deep into cultural consciousness”.
The “Fry” that he refers to is, of course, Roger Fry, the
master-mind behind the 1910 exhibition of French art that, for one reason or
another, created something of a sensation. It may not have been the cause of a
change in “human character”, but it certainly seems to have affected how people
looked at paintings and what they were, or were not, prepared to accept as art.
Haycock does a neat job of outlining where the country
stood in terms of its attitude towards painting and its practitioners. Artists
were admired if they were
successful and made money, otherwise they tended to be viewed as somewhat shady
characters you wouldn’t want your daughter to marry. As for what they produced,
the words of someone who spoke to Fry at a dinner party might sum up the general
attitude of the British public : “What I demand in a picture is that it shall
represent something to me which I can recognise at once, and if it doesn’t do
that I maintain it is a bad picture”.
In order to guide us to the exhibition Haycock provides a
brisk outline of developments in French art in the late-nineteenth and early
twentieth century. Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Cubism and more,
including a fascination with painting and sculpture from Japanese, African, and
other non-European cultures. And Paris was where all these elements could be
found, often blending to make a heady brew of artistic experimentation. British
artists did go to Paris, and Fry himself had enrolled at the Académie Julian in
1892, though Haycock says that he “admired Monet, but preferred the Old Masters
of the Italian Renaissance to anything radically new that he saw in France”.
Haycock also remarks that “Of the British artists who studied in, or visited,
Paris in the 1890s or early 1900s only two – Walter Sickert and Augustus John -
made any meaningful response to French modernism before the Post-Impressionism
exhibition of 1910”. Without
wanting to be provocative by referring to it, Charlotte De Mille, in her essay,
“On the Periphery? British Artists and the European Avant-garde, 1886-1914” in
After Impressionism : Inventing Modern Art (National Gallery Global,
London, 2023) claimed that “it was Scottish artists who
most fully integrated with the Parisian avant-garde in these early
years”, and she cited the names of Robert Weir Allan, Alexander Mann, Arthur
Melville, and Thomas Millie Dow as examples. I’d be inclined to add John Duncan
Ferguson to the list.
Fry’s response to what had been taking place in Paris began
to change, and he made what Haycock refers to as “a significant new group of
friends” when he met the artist Vanessa Bell and her husband, the critic and
writer Clive Bell. I’m moving quickly through the background to the 1910
exhibition but Haycock provides more details, as he does when he discusses Fry’s
activities generally and his personal life. He told his mother that he had
“taken on responsibility for an Exhibition of modern French art at the Grafton
Galleries”. And, despite being known mostly as an expert on the Italian
Renaissance, and that his own
painting “still largely emulated the techniques of the Old Masters”, he began to
assemble the work that, in the view of those who, like the landscape painter
Ebenezer Wake Cook contemptuously
dismissed it, represented “anarchical characteristics, negating all the
qualities hitherto considered essential to works of fine art”, and was
“distinguished by “slap dash blatant brush work and suggestive smudges” which
had more to do with haphazard experimenting rather than serious purpose”.
It shouldn’t be assumed that everyone in Britain felt that
way. Haycock mentions the critics Frank Rutter and Claude Phillips, both of whom
had written favourably about Matisse and Cézanne. And there had been an
exhibition of contemporary French art at Brighton Public Art Galleries in the
summer of 1910 which included work
by Gauguin, Matisse, Cézanne, Rouault,
Bonnard, Signac and Vlaminck. But Haycock suggests that it did not attract wide
attention, of either the positive or negative kind, probably because it took
place outside London, and also because, leaving aside the names mentioned, many
of the artists were fairly minor and “are little known today”.
The real reaction to what French artists had been doing
came when the Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition opened at the
Grafton Galleries in London on the 8th November 1910. The
arrangements for bringing together the various works had been somewhat hurried,
with Desmond McCarthy going to Holland to arrange for paintings by Van Gogh to
be transported to London, and Fry trying to balance the display between having
too many Gauguin paintings but not enough by Picasso: “Altogether there were
eighteen artists with 206 paintings, plus twenty-two bronzes and a few pieces of
pottery”. Some items on display
were not listed in the catalogue, and some additional items appeared while the
exhibition was in progress. As well as those already mentioned, the artists
included Cézanne, Matisse, Maurice Denis, Signac, and Seurat.
It’s not possible to mention all the responses that Haycock
includes, but Oscar Wilde’s old friend, Robert Ross, talked of “a widespread
plot to destroy the whole fabric of European painting” and dismissed some of the
painters as no more than “pavement artists”. A writer for the Daily Express
was of the opinion that the Gauguins were “bizarre, morbid, and horrible. In
a typical canvas hideous brown women, with purple hair and vitriolic faces,
squat in the midst of a nightmare landscape of drunken palm trees, crude green
grass, vermilion rocks, and numerous glaringly coloured excrescences impossible
to identify”. And Sir William Blake
Richmond, “a former Slade Professor of Fine Art and a Fellow of the Royal
Academy”, wrote in a letter to the Morning Post of “hysterical
daubs…These incompetents neither could not draw, paint, or design, they do not
possess the first faculty of a painter, power to observe”. He wasn’t alone in
the vehemence of his opinions. There were also the usual cartoonists, with
drawings of crowds laughing at what was on the walls, or gaping at the paintings
with puzzled expressions. And Laurence Binyon, “future keeper of prints and
drawings at the British Museum”, declared his caution when it came to French art
movements, and said, “My insular prejudice distrusts these ‘ists’ and ‘isms’ “.
It was very much an English response.
There was, perhaps inevitably, talk of degeneracy and the
decline of Western civilisation. Ebenezer Cook, author of Anarchism in Art,
said that “The Post-Impressionists present a case for historical, psychological
and pathological analysis rather than art criticism”. Haycock adds that for Cook
and others like him,” ‘making and exhibiting ‘degenerate’ art, reading
‘degenerate’ literature, listening to ‘degenerate music’ all threatened to
further undermine civilisation”. He quotes from the English eugenicist Karl
Pearson, who wrote of the need to “carry out the purification of the state and
race” and “to produce a nation healthy alike in mind and body must become a
fixed idea”. Haycock comments, “Art, politics, people, and nations were
intimately linked. The fiercest expression of this belief would be seen two
decades later in Nazi Germany”.
There were defenders of the exhibition, among them the
novelist Arnold Bennett who stated that the attitudes expressed by many people
were “humiliating to any Englishman who has made an effort to cure himself of
insularity. It is one more proof that the negligent disdain of Continental
artists for English artists is fairly well founded”.
Charles Lewis Hind, ”critic and co- founder of the influential monthly
magazine, The Studio”, likewise spoke up in favour of the
Post-Impressionists, as did the critics Frank Rutter and Charles Holmes.
The exhibition didn’t have an obvious effect in terms of
raising much curiosity and excitement in art establishments: “At the Slade
School of Art, Henry Tonks refused to have anything to do with Modernism”, and
said, “I shall resign if this talk of Cubism does not cease; it is killing me”.
Haycock points to the interesting fact that there was “little immediate impact
on that crop of his students who would go on to become some of the most
important British Modernists of the first half of the Twentieth Century – that
is, David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer,
and Edward Wadsworth, among others”.
Haycock does assert that Vanessa Bell was influenced and he
refers to her “freer approach to painting”. And he says that “Other English
artists who showed a rapid response to ‘Post-Impressionism’ were Harold Gilman,
Spencer Gore, Charles Ginner and James Dickson Innes”. The latter was, in fact,
Welsh. They were all members of what became known as the Camden Town Group, and
Haycock quotes a spokesman for them as saying “We have broken away from
convention, and recognise no laws
of art…..You might describe us as art anarchists”. But then he adds a few lines
from a review by Frank Rutter of a 1911 exhibition by the Group : “Yet, compared
to exhibitions of advanced painting which may commonly be seen in Paris or
Munich, the first impression one receives of the work of the Camden Town Group
is of its sanity, its irreproachable sobriety, almost, I would say, of its
typically British conservatism”.
A 1911 exhibition of work by Cézanne and Gauguin passed
without any of the furore that had greeted Fry’s 1910 show, and Haycock uses a
review by the critic P. Konody in The Observer to show how things had
changed: “Scarcely a year – but the battle is over and won, and
Post-Impressionism has taken firm root among us”. A second Post-Impressionist
exhibition in 1912 and a Post-Impressionism and Futurism exhibition in 1913 both
went ahead without arousing extreme reactions, at least not on the level of
those in 1910.
Art-Quake 1910 is a splendidly concise little book,
and David Boyd Haycock has managed to pack a great deal of information into its
115 pages. His account of the build-up to the exhibition, its impact and effect
on the British art scene, and its aftermath, is clear and direct, and free of
art-jargon. He at one point makes the observation that “The concept of
“Post-Impressionism”, therefore, should be taken loosely. It is critics and
historians who create these umbrella terms, seeking to place order, meaning, and
structure on the past and present. They are convenient catch-alls. As we saw,
Van Gogh was consciously trying to give art a new direction – but he never tried
to give it a name”.