Page 55 - Studio International - April 1968

this particular discreditable story is quite consonant with Douglas carried a shuffling piece on the Grafton exhibition as a whole, by the
Cooper's narrative of the whole. 5 painter Charles Furse (good, it is said, at horses), who refuses to
1893 was the year of the great Degas row, which broke, not, of reopen the discussion, does pick out the two Degas as being in a
course, without preliminaries, when L'Absinthe (or Au Cqfe) was painterly tradition, but whose whole drift is obviously hostile, harp­
shown at the Grafton Gallery in March. This was one of those ing, as he does, on 'strident garrulity', the 'vanguard of originality',
great crises of the nineties which assumed symbolic status. As I have the conflict of mushroom schools 'who are vibrists today, rosicrucians
written before, such crises came when advance-guard work, or tomorrow, and Turkey-cum-Japan the day after'. But this issue also
stance, which itself actually needed the selling and communications has an essay on 'The Growth of Recent Art' by R. A. M. Stevenson,
media (exhibition, press notices, dealers) clashed with those media: who ranked as an advanced critic, and presumably already had his
in this case the papers. Let us be content to note that Walter Crane Velasquez in mind (1895), which was to offer a definition and gospel
6
asked 'How could one live with it?'. Crane is in the May 1893 issue of Impressionism. It would take long to sort out the perplexities of
of The Studio, immediately followed by D. S. MacColl, a main, if not his survey, with its strange groupings of names, including the followers
the main protagonist on Degas' side, and art critic to The Spectator: of the great originator of modern painting, Manet. Degas turns up in
his article harmlessly general, with an attack on the Royal Academy­ pretty odd company. The English lists are surprising, too, and so is
but anyone was licensed to do that. The invitation to contribute, the optimism about the effects of the French masters on English
however, was surely not fortuitous. The first issue, in April, had painters. And what are we to make, anyway, of a man who chooses, a
little later, to write on the inconceivable Stott of Oldham, as his
chosen new English Master?
Stevenson and MacColl were both New English Art Club ( 1886) men.
But if their appearance was supposed to mark a Studio alliance with
that 'advanced' body, nothing much came of it. The Studio was going
to put a toe in, and as often as not, take it out again.
Writing about the arts in The Studio is rapid, belle-lettrish, amateur­
ish, and worse: tone and content of those chatty Lay Figure pieces are
alarming. This may be classified as belonging to a circulation prob­
lem, like The Studio's policy, which may be described as eclectic (but
it wasn't), liberal (but it wasn't), open-minded (within decent limits)
or as just confused. But the circulation problem cannot be divorced
from the general cultural problem about the arts. The truth is that
there was no distinguished writing about the arts in England in this
decade, even if The Studio had wanted it. And this I cannot explain.
We can see that the ex�raordinary power of the Pre-Raphaelite
tradition supported 'literary' art; as that tradition itself was sup­
ported by Arts and Crafts, which involved not only what is made but
how (and even where) it was made, and had grown powerful social
affiliations; and we can see that Arts and Crafts became a stumbling
block. We can also see that the New English-so powerful because its
men so soon occupied institutionally powerful places-was rear-guard,
not avant-garde: its Impressionism strictly for the English. I suspect
that conceptions of art as going somehow with gentleman and amateur,
conceptions of roles that are so deep in English social-ideological
structure, and that have been so fatal in so many ways, were fatal in
this context too in this decade. The Studio was not the only victim­
accomplice. There was a way out for the nineties, which Gleeson
White had correctly seen and foreseen; which came through the gap
between Fine and Art and Crafts, and could assume the disguise of
the unimportant. The second passage I have put as epigraph reads
poignantly. D

1 Haldane Macfall, Aubrey Beardsl ey , London, 1928, pp. 35-37
2 C. Lewis Hind, in his Introduction to The Uncollected Work of Aubr ey
Beardsl ey , London, 1925
3 On Gleeson White, see article in Bryant's Dictionary ( 190 I); Thiene-Becker;
The Studio, December 1898; A Catalogue of Books from the Library of the late
Gleeson White prefaced by a tribute to his memory by Prefessor York Powell <if Christ
Church, Oxford, London, 1899; A. J. Symons, The OJ1est for Corvo, chaps.
2 and 3; personal information
4 Gleeson White, A Note on the simplicity of design in furniture for bedrooms with
special reference to some recently produced by Messrs Heal and Son, Heal and Son,
London, 1898
s See Douglas Cooper's Introduction to The Courtauld Collection, London, 1954
s The primary account is in Alfred Thornton, The diary of an art student of the
nineties, London, 1938
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