British Painters and Post-Impressionism

Out of respect for the beams that hold up my flat, I don’t often buy hardback books. Only occasionally something comes along which I must have hot off the press. I can’t honestly say that David Boyd Haycock’s book, A Crisis of Brilliance, about six painters who attended the Slade School of Art before the First World War, is in that category – it is not a brilliant book – but I was very glad to receive it as a Christmas present. It cleared up lots of loose ends for me, the relationships of these painters with the Bloomsbury group and the role that Edward Marsh, Churchill’s private secretary played as a patron to them. Then there are the details of their tortured lives: Dora Carrington shot herself; Mark Gertler stuck his head in a gas oven; John Currie murdered his empty-headed mistress and then turned the gun on himself.

Aside from personal agonies two events shaped their lives. In 1910 and 1912 Roger Fry mounted his exhibitions of Post-Impressionist art. Their Slade drawing teacher, Henry Tonks, advised a boycott but like any students worth their salt they paid no heed. The second notable influence on their careers was the Great War.

It is interesting to compare this group with a roughly contemporary Scottish group. The Slade painters were born anything from ten to twenty years later than the Scottish Colourists but things didn’t move so fast in those days and both lots of artists had to position themselves with regard to the innovations of painters across the Channel.

If you subscribe to a Manichean duality about the history of the arts, always judging in terms of the progressive and the conservative, the significant and the non-significant, in other words always seeing an obligatory trajectory, the Scottish painters win hands down. They were much more like the French big beasts. One of them, J.D. Fergusson, even exhibited in Paris with the Fauves. But there can be a danger in following what appears to be the progressive lead : the prompted works may only give a local variant of what is done much better by the original producers.

The Slade artists were much more circumspect. All were a bit influenced at first by the new art of France but when Stanley Spencer was asked about Picasso, he replied that ‘he hadn’t got past Piero della Francesca.’ Yet he never did anything that didn’t look as if it belonged to the twentieth century. Paul Nash took what he wanted from the European modernists but never lost in his best work his essential Englishness.

Nash and Spencer who are the only artists of the Slade group to be in the first rank of British painters, saw action in the Great War and became involved with the Official War Artists scheme. Both lived to be War Artists also during the Second Word War. Arguably Nash’s best works are from the two conflicts while Spencer’s 1941 series Shipbuilders on the Clyde is the culminating triumph of his career.

In some ways Richard Nevinson who was also a soldier and War Artist, was more like the Scottish painters, clinging more adhesively to continental influences. Today, his cubist efforts seem on the crude side and don’t challenge his French and Italian models. However, I rather like a painting of his entitled The Road from Arras to Bapaume, reproduced on a CD I have of the music of the Scottish composer Cecil Coles, who was killed in the Great War. It is almost a brown monochrome work and has something of the character of those empty seascapes by L.S. Lowry. In a work like this Nevinson too, preserves what Pevsner called ‘the Englishness of English art.'