Page 17 - Studio International - November 1973

school, which was one of our main ambitions, seriously. we simply ignored. I think it is true that the
and Louis recalls occasions when we bowled But the most important thing for us was the people through whom we drew this inspiration -
hoops round the court at Marlborough and discovery of what was then Modern Art. And did the same; Picasso and Braque were also only
interrupted the rather serious games of rounders Modern Art in 1923 meant Cezanne first and the interested in the formal qualities, and it is
on Saturday evening by playing with an other Post-Impressionists, who were still typical that they were never interested in the
enormous, highly coloured baby's rubber ball regarded in this country as dangerous more savage kinds of primitive art, say Oceanic
which we bounced across the pitch. revolutionaries. Secondly the Fauves, art, which were later to inspire the
We hated everything which we thought was particularly Matisse, though we also admired Surrealists. So we were getting a good many of
on the side of the Establishment. Tennyson was Derain, and even minor painters like Marquet our wrong ideas from the wrong ideas of the
the great bugbear, and on the artistic side, it and Marchand who at that time still looked artists whom we rightly very much admired.
may surprise you to know, the whole of the serious, artists because they had been carried, We were extremely snooty about all English
Italian Renaissance; but I'll come back to that up to the war of 1914-18, by the enthusiasm and att which we thought was either literary, as
later. Among contemporary, what were then energy of the Fauve period and we had no - indeed a great deal of it was, or derivative. We
`modern' authors, we read the Sitwells with means of telling how bad they were going to, had occasionally to defend it, because when for
great enthusiasm, genuinely admiring Edith become in the following years. Thirdly we instance Epstein's relief of Rima was set up in
as a poet and getting great enjoyment out of greatly admired the Cubists, particularly, Hyde Park in 1924 or '25, and there was a
Sachie as a prose writer, and also from his rather naturally, early Picasso and Braque, but also tremendous outcry at the indecency and
lush poetry. Osbert we read, but less and mainly very strongly, Léger, who was one of our gods. hideousness and brutality of what now looks a
for his travel books. Strachey on the Victorians In this, of course, we were inspired by the rather sissy little relief, we had to stand up and
justified our hatred of the Establishment and the writings of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, which defend it because it was Modern Art. But I
pomposity of the 19th century. were then incidentally quite few; and we remember even at the time that we had
We read Gertrude Stein, though we had a believed without any qualification in Pure Form. qualifications and said that on the whole
slight suspicion even at the time that she was not In fact it was really the only thing in art that Epstein was not really such a good sculptor
as good as we pretended to think; but she was we did believe in. Anything else but Pure Form as Bourdelle, who was the obvious French
admirable to read up and down the dormitories was out. Anything to do with literary content parallel.-
to exasperate our neighbours. Early Joyce was wrong or rather irrelevant, and naturalism We carried our Pure Form doctrine to such
(Ulysses had not come out) and early Eliot up as was in itself evil. This led to a perfectly simple a point that certain of the obvious gods came
far as The Waste Land, and early Virginia Woolf. scheme for art history which I once put down in under criticism. We suspected Gauguin as an
In the years between 1923 and 1926 these were, a paper of which I may, I believe, somewhere artist because his life was too romantic and that
at least as far as we could see in our rather still have the notes. Art began very well indeed was a bad thing; and we were doubtful about
limited view, the most important figures. in Egypt, a highly stylized art; it continued van Gogh because of his statements in his
I was-even more concerned with the visual through archaic Greek art and then it went into letters about what he wanted to do, his almost
arts, and there we did make a certain number of a terrible decline in 5th and 4th century. Greece religious urge and the literary qualities in his
discoveries for ourselves, largely again under the when naturalism swept it away. It was revived paintings, and of course there was the fact that
influence of my brother — things that were in in the Byzantine period, and one was just he admired artists like Millet whom we thought
fact being discovered elsewhere but we did not allowed to admire Giotto and Masaccio because were worthless on account of their literary
know it. One was Baroque art, in which I they were still formally 'pure', and stylized ' content.
developed a great interest which I still have. but after that came another decline, right We were also very limited in our view. First
That was partly stimulated by the Sitwells who through the Renaissance and really till the 19th we were limited really to France. In my own
had written the only things that existed in century, with of course certain freak exceptions : case this was partly due to my particular
English at that date on the Baroque, but we also there were certain sports like El Greco and, circumstances, but there was also a quite general
studied it fairly carefully ourselves. We also surprisingly perhaps, Bruegel; whom we tendency among people interested in art at that
discovered Blake, who though appreciated as a admired very much; but we were, I think, quite time — certainly with Fry and Bell — to be
lyric poet was still very little studied as an artist unaware of the degree to which we totally_ completely focussed on Paris. We were not quite
at that time. Even Chesterton in his book on misunderstood these artists. As we did not unaware of Futurism in Italy and we knew about
Blake published in 192o still argued that Blake believe in the importance of literary, religious or Expressionism in Germany, but we had no
was mad. philosophical content we argued that the understanding of them and we regarded them as
And then again we went from the serious to symbolical side in Bruegel was irrelevant — in rather wrong-headed and insensitive variants of
the frivolous. The half-frivolous interests — and fact we tried to deny its existence; in El Greco French Cubism. Paris was the standard by which
here I think we got into a tremendous muddle — the religious elements, which were very everything else was judged. And of course about
were for things like the Gothic Revival. I had a distasteful, couldn't be ignored, but they had of Russian painting, about Suprematism and so on,
genuine admiration for the early Gothic course no bearing at all on his qualities as an we knew nothing.
Revival, particularly Fonthill and everything artist. We were greatly encouraged in our There were many other things 'about which
round Beckford and a rather less serious admiration for El Greco by the fact that . we knew nothing, and thai was not entirely our
admiration for Strawberry Hill. John Cezanne had admired him so much, and that fault, because I think it is sometimes rather
Betjeman, who was really the person who gave him a sort of cachet that we could accept. difficult to realize nowadays how
started all this, had a wilful passion — again he We were also totally blind to the fact that extraordinarily few books there were at that
would not like me to say it — for high Victorian Renaissance painting had underneath what we time. Thinking rapidly I could only remember
Gothic and Pugin and also for Methodist chapel thought its dangerous naturalism great formal three books on Cezanne — Fry's vas not
architecture, but this at the time was all done qualities. We required our formal qualities to be published until 1927. There was a short French
almost entirely as a joke. It's one of the strange more obvious, to be more geometrical, to be book on Picasso and a little pamphlet on him by
things about his career that this joke then got the more like Cubism, in fact, for them to be Cocteau, and there were two books in German
better of him and became, as you know, a very acceptable. We were equally blind about Negro on Cubism. But there was nothing in English
serious pursuit; but his first paper which he art. We admired it because it had been used by at all, except Fry and Bell, and a book by a man
read to the Anonymous Society in 1924 on Picasso and Braque, but we viewed it only from called Jan Gordon, now I imagine long
Victorian art and architecture was a hilarious the point of view of its formal qualities, and all forgotten, which had a rather useful summary
performance, not, I think, intended to'be taken the elements of magic or other ritual significance of Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Fauvism.
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