Page 21 - Studio International - September 1974

THE ORIGINS OF MODERNISM

IN ENGLAND

CHARLES HARRISON

The following is the introductory and first `art for civilization's sake' (where the will to attention of all but a very few from the
section of a study of the origins of modernism in civilization was seen as being beyond the unresolved problems which lay at the root of the
trade-unionist'1
English art. Subsequent sections dealing with capacities alike of 'profiteer' and ` major controversies in the art and aesthetics of
Post-Impressionism and the New Movement' and the nineteenth century. It is important to
`Cubism, Vorticism and the War' will be Predictably Morris was forcefully opposed to recognize that these problems thus remained
published in the near future. the aestheticism of his own day, and as unresolved. There was a spectre at the feast
predictably its later proponents were disposed to of early twentieth-century British art; an
Introduction: the turn of the century dismiss, to parody or to ignore views such as untied loose end of that tradition of care for
At the close of the nineteenth century, although his. The following comparison perhaps gives the representativeness of art's concerns which
the work of an advanced minority of British the measure of the gulf between Morris and is often supposed to have been cut clean in
designers and architects commanded attention Bloomsbury. Britain in the four years immediately preceding
abroad, there was little native vitality in British `Unless something or other is done to give the First World War.2
painting or sculpture. It is significant that all men some pleasure for the eyes and rest There is a popular misconception that the
William Morris, perhaps the most broadly for the mind in the aspect of their own and main twentieth-century controversy in art has
influential individual among those concerned their neighbours' houses, until the contrast is been one of 'representation' versus
at first hand in the arts of the period, deserves less disgraceful between the fields where `abstraction'. I don't believe that those were
best to be remembered for his work as a critic of beasts live and the streets where men live, really seen as significantly antithetical until
society. Morris saw the degraded condition I suppose that the practice of the arts must be a comparatively advanced stage of development
of the majority of contemporary art and design kept mainly in the hands of a few highly of the European modern movement (in
as a symptom of the degradation of personal and cultivated men, who can go often to beautiful England not until as late as the early 193os); and
interpersonal values in nineteenth-century places, whose education enables them, in the anyway that issue was always trivial. The
industrial society, and he believed that there contemplation of the past glories of the world, important question was one concerning the
was no prospect for the flourishing of an to shut out from their view the everyday status and nature of subject matter in art.
affirmative and non-exclusive art without a squalors that the most of men move in. Sirs, Impressionism did not so much answer this
revolution in society. The same technology I believe that art has such sympathy with question as disarm it. That is to say that the
which stimulated the development of design cheerful freedom, open-heartedness and only significantly controversial aspect of the
and architecture in the Modern Movement was reality, so much she sickens under selfishness subject matter of the typical French
seen by Morris and a few of his contemporaries and luxury, that she will not live thus isolated Impressionist painting in, say, the 187os —
as an over-riding factor in the alienation of the and exclusive. I will go further than this and apart from aesthetic arguments about
artist from the world of values within which he say that on such terms I do not wish her to suitability and good manners — was the
had traditionally operated. Not that Morris live. I protest that it would be a shame to an technique by means of which it was purveyed.
regretted the technology; he regretted rather honest artist to enjoy what he had huddled up It was of importance that the subjects should
the development of a social and economic to himself of such art, as it would be for a be relatively neutral in order that sufficient
structure within which the effect of rich man to sit and eat dainty food among emphasis might be placed, and might be seen to
industrialization was to demean relationships of starving soldiers in a beleaguered fort' (Morris, be placed, upon the novelty of types of
all kinds. from a lecture on 'The Lesser Arts' delivered representation.
Morris' own 'medievalism' was in part in 1878). By the 188os, among those in England who
an affirmation of the need for dignity in the `The artist and the saint do what they have favoured the art of James McNeill Whistler
labours of art; it was also a reflection of his to do, not to make a living, but in obedience over the representative art of the Royal
desire to establish a context in which the to some mysterious necessity. They do not Academy, there was already a tendency to
artist's contribution might be seen in terms produce to live — they live to produce. There is minimize the 'factual' origins of subject-matter
relevant to the criticism of social life and of no place for them in a social system based and to stress the importance of technique.
conditions of labour in general. Art, by its on the theory that what men desire is prolonged By this date the Academy was already serving
example, was to provide each man with a sense and pleasant existence. You cannot fit them into as the negative of ambition for the more
of the value of that to which all men are entitled. the machine, you must make them extraneous `advanced' painters. The art of the Academy
Among those more concerned than was to it. You must make pariahs of them, since artists plainly suffered from the unrealistic
Morris for the protection of privilege in the they are not a part of society but the salt of nature of their subject matter. The influence
artist's existence, there was a similar, if the earth. of Impressionism in England was received by
differently weighted, conviction, a parallel `In saying that the mass of mankind will the majority of those who had been impressed
sense of the impossibility for the artist of a never be capable of making delicate aesthetic by Whistler as confirmation of the notion that
total commitment to the stratified life of judgments, I have said no more than the the art of the future was to be one in which
contemporary society. The same circumstances obvious truth . . (Clive Bell, 'Art' 1914). a preoccupation with the relative significance
as had prompted Morris' criticisms gave rise In the early 1900s and for the rest of the of subject-matter would give way to
among these less disinterested men to a first third of this century the successive waves preoccupation with technique and with the
different kind of isolationism. This was the of influence from contemporary French expressive potential of surface. (The
Aesthetic Movement of the later nineteenth painting brought to the surface compatibility of Whistler's aesthetic with that
and early twentieth centuries, with its principle matters of vital interest to other artists, of the Symbolists and Nabis3 was also perhaps
of 'art for art's sake' and its more insidious, specialists involved in the development of the in part responsible for the early ascendancy of
more sophisticated Bloomsbury derivative, technology of oil painting, and distracted the these among the possible influences of French

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