“On or about December 1910, human character changed.” This assertion, often quoted or paraphrased in accounts of British modernism, is found in the opening paragraphs of Virginia Woolf’s 1924 essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, a piece originally delivered as a talk to The Heretics Society at Cambridge. The statement is both sweeping and puzzlingly specific. That Woolf speaks grandly of human, as opposed to Western or European character, can be attributed to the Eurocentrism for which critics in the era of compulsory anti-colonialism have taken this ostensibly progressive novelist to task. The specificity of “December 1910” is harder to explain, at least without knowledge of the period. It’s likely Woolf was alluding to Manet and the Post-Impressionists, the notorious and seminal exhibition put on, from November that year to January, by her fellow Bloomsbury luminary Roger Fry, the painter and renowned critic about whom she would publish a biography in 1940, six years after his death aged 67. As she noted in that book, “It is difficult in 1939, when a great hospital is benefiting from a centenary exhibition of Cezanne’s works, and the gallery is daily crowded with devout and submissive worshippers, to realise what violent emotions those pictures excited less than thirty years ago.”
Of the storm of derision that had greeted Roger Fry’s exhibition, some among Woolf’s audience of young Heretics must surely have been aware; her mention of December 1910 may well have elicited knowing smiles and guffaws. As Woolf recalled of the much-mythologised event, “The public in 1910 was thrown into paroxysms of rage and laughter”. The critics, too, had been almost unanimous in their condemnation. Confronted by what art historian David Boyd Haycock describes as “seemingly crude and gaudy… anti-naturalistic, anti-narrative works” from the Continent, the Pall Mall Gazette’s critic dismissed them as “the output of a lunatic asylum”. So did he judge such paintings as Matisse’s Fille aux Yeux Verts, Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies-Bergères and Picasso’s Portrait of Clovis Sagot. The Morning Post’s Robert Ross, noting that Van Gogh had not only painted like a lunatic but had actually been one, went on to declare the exhibition “of no interest except to the student of pathology and the specialist in abnormality”. As Haycock observes in A Crisis of Brilliance, his 2009 book about young British artists of the period, “Given the fate of Fry’s schizophrenic wife (she had recently been committed to an asylum), these accusations must have been particularly hurtful.”
Although many of Fry’s selected paintings were 20 or even 30 years old, almost nothing like them had been seen in London before. Only the work of Whistler and Sickert came close — for the latter’s sexual frankness and the impressionistic style of both. A J Finberg, who would go to establish himself as an authority on Turner, was scathing in his review for The Star. Not only did he call many of the Post-Impressionists’ pictures “abortions”, he complained the exhibition hall was “uncomfortably crowded with a horde of giggling and laughing women” for whom this anti-art could prove dangerously seductive. Other critics were even more alarmed: “[the exhibition reveals] a widespread plot to destroy the whole fabric of European painting”; “[such work] throws away all that the long-developed skills of past artists had acquired and bequeathed”. One of the young painters who attended, Paul Nash, later recalled the memorable reaction of The Telegraph’s critic, “the most honest and uncompromising of them all”. After leaving the gallery, Sir Claude Philips had hurled his catalogue to the ground and stamped on it.
Roger Fry, of course, held quite different opinions on this art’s merits. Woolf had vivid memories of him at the Grafton Galleries, stood before the paintings, “plunging his eyes into them as if he were a humming-bird Hawkmoth hanging over a flower, quivering yet still. And then drawing a deep breath of satisfaction, he would turn to whoever it might be, eager for sympathy.”
“Post-Impressionists” was a term Fry had coined himself to describe these innovative continental artists who enthralled him. The coinage would gain rapid acceptance, soon appearing in novels by H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett.
It was as a student at Paris’s prestigious Académie Julian in the early 1890s that Fry had first discovered these painters. For anyone interested in this newfangled, “modern” art, the French capital had been (and in 1910, still was) the place to be. By the time of Fry’s arrival, Paris had been the epicentre of a radical cultural ferment for thirty years, ever since the scandals occasioned by Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Olympia (1865). Also key had been Baudelaire’s luminous writings on art. In his essay Le Héroïsme de la vie moderne, first published as far back as 1846, the poet had argued contemporary existence had a beauty its own, and was just as fit a subject for art as the history and mythology prescribed by the Académie des Beaux Arts. In Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863), which became his most famous essay, Baudelaire declared, “Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent. It is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immoveable.” This conception of modernity brings to mind the efforts of the Impressionists to quickly capture the particular quality of light and the weather in the scene before them, before these changed.
Of course, when it came to Manet’s many innovative pictures, and the similarly radical works by painters inspired by him, the Académie and its allies were not to be dissuaded from variously ignoring, condemning and mocking them. Nevertheless, these bold works found plenty of admirers and buyers. For connoisseurs of the avant-garde like Fry, these paintings were examples of an exciting new experimental form.
Why did Paris produce so many daring and dynamic innovators, like Manet and Baudelaire? Though they’ve differed in their emphases, theorists of art such as Walter Benjamin, T. J. Clark and Peter Bürger have been in broad agreement regarding, firstly, the causes of the early modernist ferment, and secondly, its role in Paris’s becoming what Benjamin called “the capital of the nineteenth century”. A powerful current of anti-establishment revolt was part of the legacy of the Revolution, and the mixture of that with the conditions in the city resulting from Napoleon III’s ambitious, 17-year programme of urban renewal — enacted by controversial Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann — had proved explosive. It was the need to give expression to the political, economic, sensory, chemical-biological, mental and spiritual upheavals of the rapidly modernising capital that had produced those convulsive waves of innovation in the visual arts and in literature. In his well-regarded, Baudelaire-influenced theoretical text The Painting of Modern Life (1985), T. J. Clark offers this summation: ”Something decisive happened in the history of art around Manet which set painting and the other arts upon a new course. Perhaps the change can be described as a kind of scepticism, or at least unsureness, as to the nature of representation in art.”
By the time of the fin-de-siècle period, typically dated 1880 to 1900, this unsureness with regard to representation had been joined by other pressing doubts as to the reality of progress, and even whether a world which seemed so weary, and apparently in such cultural, moral and even biological decline, had a future at all (for the most pessimistic, fin-de-siècle meant fin-du-monde). Modern art expressed both this deepening sense of crisis (a crisis of which it was a morbid symptom, according to its detractors) and hopes for overcoming, transformation and renewal.
It may well be asked why a similarly vigorous avant-garde had not arisen in Britain, the later, proto-Impressionist Turner aside. After all, the same modernising forces and pressures had long been felt here. If anything, the march toward modernity had begun earlier in Britain, with the initial phase of the Industrial Revolution in 1760-80.
Arguably the relative lack of a radical British art movement is attributable, at least in part, to our then-stronger conservative institutions, which didn’t have the legacy of a relatively recent political revolution to contend with. Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian periods these institutions, foremost among them the Royal Academy, had maintained a firmer grip on art production and discourse than their counterparts in France, preventing the likes of Whistler and Sickert from having the sort of impact and influence in Britain that Manet and Cézanne had across the Channel.
This helps explain the vituperative critical and public reaction to Manet and the Post-Impressionists. Another factor may well have been the mood of acute crisis in Britain in 1910. Violent Suffragette protests, miners’ strikes and riots in the South Wales Valleys (which Churchill, as Home Secretary, sent troops to quell), the ongoing fallout from Chancellor David Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909 (which included tentative moves toward a welfare state, fiercely opposed by the Lords), the nationalist push for Home Rule in Ireland: there were reasons aplenty for the establishment to be on its guard. And these developments certainly did nothing to alleviate the decades-old sense of civilisational crisis. Something akin to the fin-de-siecle mood lingered on beyond the nineteenth century.
Had the times been calm, tranquil, perhaps British critics would’ve been more open to the claims of modernists like Roger Fry. But amidst crisis the avant-garde was seen as yet another serious threat. The radicals insisted that modernity demanded its own forms and subject matter, because only through and with these could the present be truthfully represented and better understood: clearly a dangerous ideology. For the traditionalists of the British art establishment, as for the French, classical forms and subjects were simply better, nobler, more fitting. All artists should return to them for the good of Civilisation. Whatever delusions Roger Fry might be labouring under, these ghastly “Post-Impressionists” were incapable of Beauty. And furthermore, they had nothing valuable to say about much of anything; certainly nothing about the deep truths of life, which after all were eternal.
In his 1920 essay collection Vision and Design, Fry recalled the response to the “new” aesthetic movement he’d drawn so much attention to, noting how “the accusation of anarchism was constantly made”. A little naively, he believed “this was, of course, the exact opposite of the truth, and I was for long puzzled to find the explanation of so paradoxical an opinion and so violent an enemy.” However, Fry was arguably correct in thinking the hostility was linked to class and snobbery. An expensive education and ample free time were needed to become an authority on the Old Masters, “but to admire a Matisse required only a certain sensibility. One could feel fairly sure that one’s maid could not rival one in the former case, but might by a mere haphazard gift of Providence surpass one in the second.”
If Roger Fry and modern art were not on Britain’s cultural map before the 1910 exhibition, they certainly were after. From the 1910s onward the now-notorious critic was a dominant figure in British art, promoting modernism and helping it achieve that measure of mainstream acceptance Virginia Woolf would note in her biography. In 1913 Fry and fellow Bloomsbury artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (Woolf’s elder sister) founded the Omega Workshops, focusing on furniture, textiles and other household items. Also briefly involved was the highly energetic painter and writer Wyndham Lewis, another visitor at Manet and the Post-Impressionists. A personality clash with Fry led him to leave and found his own group of dynamic artists and writers, the Vorticists, the output of which drew inspiration from Cubism and Futurism.
Their example gives the lie to the conservative notion that the undeniable political radicalism of modern art is always, and must necessarily be, left-wing
Unlike the left-leaning Bloomsbury Group, Lewis and his partner in Vorticism Ezra Pound were markedly right-wing, promoting nationalism, celebrating the violent energy of the machine age, and agitating against “effeminacy”. Their example gives the lie to the conservative notion that the undeniable political radicalism of modern art is always, and must necessarily be, left-wing.
Paul Nash and his fellow art student Dora Carrington had attended the 1910 exhibition against the wishes of their tutor, Henry Tonks. One of the dominant personalities at the Slade School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture in London, Tonks had gathered his students together and called on them to listen to their “sporting instincts” and stay away. As Haycock relates, some teachers at the Slade felt the school had to adopt the new modern style to stay competitive, but Tonks was having none of it: “I cannot teach what I don’t believe in. I shall resign if this talk about Cubism does not cease; it is killing me.”
In the event, Nash did not change his style following his visit to the Grafton Galleries. As he recalled in his unfinished autobiography Outline (published posthumously in 1949), he left the exhibition “untouched”, continuing to paint and draw in the Romantic idiom he’d developed under the influence of Blake, Palmer and Rossetti. However, within a few years he was to be drawn decisively into modernism: the new styles visibly influenced his attempts, in his capacity as an official war artist, to express the horror and futility of the trenches, and the sense of “unreality” he felt at the front. Nash’s commitment to modernism only deepened after the war, and he was to become a central figure of British Surrealism.
Late 1910 had served up a watershed moment for art and aesthetics in Britain
Dora Carrington was the Slade artist most immediately impacted by modern art’s “arrival” in London in 1910. Not only did she transform her appearance, dispensing with her long hair to sport a defiantly short bob, the painters she revered changed completely: Victorians like Herkomer and Lord Leighton were out, Sickert, Augustus John, and above all Cézanne were in. Her brother Noel remembered that for their mother, an art lover, these sudden changes were “rather humiliating”. She “now hardly dared to talk on the subject for fear of mispronouncing these strange names”.
As became apparent in the immediate pre-war years, when British modernism finally got out of its starting blocks, late 1910 had served up a watershed moment for art and aesthetics in Britain. The strange foreign names were here to stay. But yet more incongruously, to this radical new art movement were now being attached unmistakably British ones.
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