Page 48 - Studio International - July August 1975

circumstance. Tarr when the styles were settled by with the people to counteract the
In Arbuthnot's career involvement in Augustus John. In the 192os a rococo Bolshevik menace. Art is represented
vanguard art is revealed as involvement dandyism emerged in that cluster of by a modernist poet, commerce by a
in fashion. The activity of most English artists and writers who followed Glasgow grocer with traditional tastes
photographers was determined by the on from Firbank; comprising Peter in literature, and the people by a troop
market for images, and the capacity and Rose-Pulham, Rex Whistler and Cecil of boy scouts from the Gorbals :
nature of that was gauged by directing Beaton, the style of such a group was together they overwhelm an anonymous
editors or surmised by the photographer close to the surrealist aristocratic style mass of Bolshevik agents landed from
often working on the basis of a foreign of patrons like Peter Watson and Edward the sea. In the process the modernist
prototype. E. 0. Hoppe, whose early James. poet is returned to a safe place in
news career had been spent in the At another level the tension between British culture, his modernism revealed
company of Arbuthnot, is a classic modernism and tradition concerned as a crude overlay on a traditionalist
example of a supremely successful the renovation of society itself. Only for a temperament. The action takes place in
photographer whose entire output brief moment around 1930 does an image a remote, anachronistic country landscape
derived from successful prototypes in of the future emerge with any clarity, and which both poet and grocer have visited
German, French and American even then it is a matter of style borrowed for its restorative power, and their
photography. This sort of alertness from abroad, from Germany and the success is to see it returned to its old
entailed massive alterations in style and United States, appearing in the guise of usage.
subject matter virtually from year to year: the workers' housing estate from the Just as Buchan mobilized his powers
in a case like this the picture-maker is one and in that of the skyscraper from the as a story-teller to deal with the new
nothing more than an efficient function other. This brief utopian moment was unsettling forces abroad in the world, so
of the market. The mutations in a career ended by the onset of Depression and a painter such as Charles Holmes turned
of this sort, or in that of the advertising Totalitarianism and its outcome in towards the subject of the industrial
or fashionable dandy photographer, can Britain was the rediscovery of traditional landscape, which he transformed as well
only be understood as symptomatic of styles, the native landscape and the as presented. As a former editor of the
the evolution of the culture in its sort of cultural pessimism projected by Burlington Magazine and Director of the
broadest sense. Graham Greene in a novel such as National Gallery, Holmes was as much
Throughout this period, from around England Made Me (1935). a member of the dominant culture as was
1905 to 1940, British culture was During the 'twenties the problematic Buchan, and his strategy seems to have
structured on an antagonistic tension of ancient and modern was present in been a similar one, to present an integrated
between modernism and the forces of British culture without being strongly picture of the old and the new Britain
tradition. At one level, that of Arbuthnot felt. Modernism was easily symbolized in which those modern aspects of the
for instance, this appeared as a matter of and caricatured by association with nation were beautified and distanced as
life-style within the coterie conditions of Bolshevism, interpreted by the dominant they were given a pictorial inflection.
the art world. Modern art was a form of culture as exotic and unsavoury, an easy Holmes's procedure was to harmonize the
advanced fancy dress to be 'taken up' target for traditional British virtues. In industrial landscape by the use of a
or parodied. The susceptibility of the a text like John Buchan's Huntingtower, device such as the Golden Section, by
British artist to such role-playing was the a novel of 1922, the prevailing myths the depopulation of his industrial
target of much of Wyndham Lewis's of the next two decades are fully settings and by their rendering in an
writing before the First War in his novel established: art and commerce combine atmospheric monochrome.

(Below) Charles Holmes
Near Greenwoods Mill c. 1928
College Samlesbury Hall, Blackburn
(Top right) Charles Ginner
The TimberYard 1915
Oil on canvas, 3o x 4o in. Bevan collection
(Bottom right) Walter Benington
Among the Housetops c. 1905
Photograph

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