Page 34 - Studio International - April 1967

Abstract painting in Britain

in the early 1930s

The years 1930-5 marked the transition in British art from the insularity of the '20s to the
internationalism of the late '30s. During this period abstraction was the cause célèbre.

Charles Harrison

`To talk of modern English painting as though it were out the twenties; Nash— 'a war artist without a war' — was
the rival of modern French is silly. In old racing days, it struggling in the altered climate of peacetime to maintain
used to be held that French form was about seven pounds a reputation which his 'Void of War' paintings had
below English: the winner of the Derby, that is to say, rightly earned him, while Nicholson, retreating from the
could generally give the best French colt about that elegance and refinement of taste which he had inherited
weight and a beating. In painting, English form is nor- from his father, was attempting to re-learn the basic
mally a stone below French. At any given moment the principles of painting in terms of what he had grown to
best painter in England is unlikely to be better than a admire for himself—the more instinctive, more purely
first-rate man in the French second class.' The writer, in formal virtues of the Italian Primitives, of Douanier
characteristic vein, was Clive Bell and the date 1920.1 Rousseau, of Negro sculpture or of recent French paint-
This set-down was aimed primarily at the admirers of ing. The British had had no Van Gogh, Gauguin or
Wyndham Lewis, but its effects were felt equally by Cezanne to revitalize the traditions of painting in this
artists of a slightly younger generation. way, and for painters like Nicholson the first post-war
The decade from 1920-30 must have seemed, for many, decade was a period of re-learning by personal experience.
a disappointing period in British painting. The war The protest which Bell and Fry had made intellectually
appeared to have doused the brightest fires of the preced- against the over-refinement of Edwardian painting, these
ing decade. 'You would think, to listen to them,' Wyndham painters acted out in their own work in conditions of
Lewis had written, 'that the splendid war army of Eng- considerable adversity. So far as there was a market at all
land was fighting to reinstate the tradition of Sir Frederick for contemporary art, the majority of the interested pub-
Leighton, to sweep away the unorthodox splendours of lic admired bad British painting, and the enlightened few
the Russian Ballet, or revive a faded Kiplingesque jingo- admired French painting. Fifteen years after Fry's two
ism.' An attempt to resuscitate the 'English Vortex' great Post-Impressionist Exhibitions, to be farouche and
after the war was bound to fail. The X Group had little French was permissible; to be English and to be thought
of the energy of its precursor and survived only one gauche was to invite ridicule.
exhibition in 1920. Most of the gifted generation of Bell and Roger Fry earned considerable resentment for
painters who had studied at the Slade immediately before their part in creating and perpetuating this situation
the Great War — Roberts, Bomberg, Nevinson, Gertler, from younger artists who were perhaps not aware that
Wadsworth (several of whom were members of the X without the Bloomsbury critics' activities their own situa-
Group) — had indulged, soon after leaving the school, in a tion could only have been more isolated still. Furthermore
period of advanced experiment which resulted in a few many of these younger artists, without necessarily having
cases in near-abstract work, but the experiment was come into direct contact with the theories of Fry or Belle
short-lived. By the early '20s each had returned to repre- benefited from the emphasis which the critics had placed
sentational work in which the structural modelled forms on 'significant form' and on those works of art which were
of the Slade-trained draughtsman came to the fore. illuminated by a formalist analysis. Younger artists who
So far as original work was concerned, the ascendancy had admired Wyndham Lewis for just those qualities
of the Slade was over. The two younger painters who which made him so fiercely anti-Bloomsbury, found in the
came to the fore in the '20s, Paul Nash and Ben Nichol- works of art which Fry admired for their formal virtues,
son, had each spent a brief period at the Slade, but antidotes of their own to the formal lassitude of Edward-
neither had completed a course and their friendship had ian painting. The relevance of this—and it is an important
developed partly out of the discomfort and dissatisfaction point—was that when various artists developed into
which they shared there. For a time, early in the '20s, abstraction in the early '30s the art they evolved was one
their work showed certain similarities— a near-abstract in which the aesthetic content of form played a major
seascape painted by Ben Nicholson while staying with part. Nicholson's white reliefs, Hepworth's abstract carv-
Nash at Dymchurch in 1923 shows him at his closest to ings and Moore's anthropomorphic abstractions seem
Nash—but their basic interests were too divergent for the like 'significant forms' par excellence, however different
similarities to remain. Nash's work during the '20s re- they may be in every way from the work of those British
gained the literary quality which it had had before the artists whom Fry and Bell chose to champion.
war. Nicholson has always been the most unliterary of In an article on Abstract Art in The Listener of 17
painters. Only in the problems that they faced was there August 1932 Paul Nash quoted, in support of abstrac-
some common ground between the two painters through- tion in art, Roger Fry's introduction to the Second Post-