Category: 1900s

AFTER IMPRESSIONISM

The National Gallery offers an excellent review of the making of modernism between the last Impressionist exhibition and the First World War, focusing on developments in Paris and their spread through other important cities – Vienna, Berlin, Brussels and Barcelona – but there was nothing from Milan, unless one counts the single exhibit by Medardo Rosso, who was included because he moved to Paris.

Many important works were included and artists like Cezanne, Gaugin and Van Gogh were well represented and I was interested to see the ceramic made by Gaugin with Ernest Chaplet, an aspect of his work I was unaware of, and early representational paintings by Mondrian, which never fail to please.

And there were arresting exhibits by lesser-known artists, like Seated Girl with a White shirt and Standing Nude Girl (1906) (above) by Paula Modersohn-Becker, who developed her artistic language in Paris from influences including Puvis de Chavannes, the Nabis, Henri Rousseau and Picasso and used it to depict a world of private, predominantly female experience when she returned to Bremen.

Space is always limited but it could be said that Milan was no less important than Bremen. Cities defined as peripheral are rarely shown in London, despite their wealth of wonderful art. My first visit to the National Gallery of Budapest was a revelation of a rich artistic tradition closed off by forty years of Communism and well worth exploring.

The scant regard paid to Italian modernism, which centred on Futurism in Milan, was unfortunately part of a pattern. Tate Modern marked the centenary of the Futurist Manifesto with an exhibition in 2009 and the Estorick Gallery gallantly promotes 20th century Italian art and design but the Severini exhibition never came to Britain. It could of course be said that Futurism before 1914 was in thrall to Paris and had no style of its own, borrowing from Pointillism and Cubism, but that misses the point that in its embrace of the machine and urbanism it was the most modernist of modern art. One can’t avoid the suspicion that it is ignored not for artistic reasons but because of its later association with Fascism.

SHAW’S CORNER

Bernard Shaw bequeathed his house at Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire to the National Trust in 1950. He was fifty when he moved in in 1906 and already successful. He became rich but remained a socialist of a peculiar kind, at first wedded to Fabian gradualism but from the 1920s onwards preferring dictatorship and admiring Lenin, Stalin and Mussolini. We went on a tour the other day.

Shaw’s study with a portrait of William Morris above the desk and Morris & Co. curtains. The little monogrammed pot on the right of the typewiter was made by Louise Powell.

When I moved to Hertfordshire in the 1980s, old people remembered him driving through the lanes either in his Rolls Royce or on his tricycle. The tricycle bore witness to his passion for healthy living, including vegetarianism, wool next to the skin, sleeping with the windows open and opposition to vaccination, but it also bore witness to socialist principles.

Bare boards and an electric fire. On the mantleshelf, a Staffordshire figure of Shaw’s chosen rival, Shakespeare, and his 1938 Oscar for the screenplay of ‘Pygmalion’. The portrait is of his wife, Charlotte.

Shaw’s Corner is modestly furnished in the style of a clerk or a schoolteacher and doesn’t look like the house of a wealthy man. The house had servants’ bells but Shaw refused to use them, going down to the kitchen and knocking on the door if he wanted to talk to the cook. Shaw liked the quiet villlage without a train station or a bus service.

The sunny veranda, which Shaw called ‘The Riviera’. The house was built without running water or electricity but Shaw was quick to adopt technical innovations.

It has Arts and Crafts connections. Shaw was a follower of Ruskin and Morris, greater influences on progressive thinkers in England than Marx, and a portrait of Morris hangs above his desk. He was part of the Morris circle. He preached socialism in street-corner meetings with Morris. He flirted with May Morris, she fell in love with him and Morris might have liked him as a son-in-law.

May Morris, her fiancé Henry Halliday Sparling, Emery Walker and Bernard Shaw.

Like every advanced middle-class house of the period, Shaw’s Corner has Arts and Crafts touches throughout: Morris & Co. furniture and fabrics, a piano designed by Walter Cave, secretary of the Art Workers Guild, pottery by Alfred and Louise Powell and a sense of The Simple Life.

A patterned vessel by Alfred and Louise Powell, china and varied reading.

JUDD STREET, BLOOMSBURY

Walking back from the Art Workers Guild to St Pancras Station I stopped to look at this pretty shop at 63 Judd Street and was curious about the sculpture above the window of putti with a corncupia overflowing with grapes, which suggests it was once the premises of a wine merchant. (Next door, at No. 61, by the way, Alexander Herzen operated the Free Russian Press between 1854 and 1856.)

Anthony Trollope’s description of the street, from Phineas Finn, 1874, is still surprisingly accurate: “Judd Street runs into the New [Euston] Road near the great stations of the Midlands and Northern Railways, and is a highly respectable street. But it can hardly be called fashionable, as is Piccadilly; or central, as is Charing Cross; or commercial, as is the neighbourhood of St. Paul’s. Men seeking the shelter of an hotel in Judd Street most probably prefer decent and respectable obscurity to other advantages.”

Theodore Lane, ‘A Wooden Substitute’, 1821 © National Portrait Gallery London

Judd Street used to be part of the Skinners Estate. The Skinners Arms nearby and a couple of other pubs still belong to them, but nearly everything else has been sold now. One of the earliest residents of No. 63 (then numbered 79) was the artist Theodore Lane, who was well-known for caricatures of George IV and Queen Caroline. By the age of 19 he was exhibiting at the Royal Academy but his promising career was cut short by his falling through a skylight in 1828. After his death, for about twelve years, the house belonged to a tallow chandler called Paul Biddle.

Emma Biddle, the daughter of the tallow chandler Paul Biddle, who lived at 63 Judd Street, was baptised in 1829.

From the 1850s to the 1880s the shop belonged to an undertaker, then in the 1890s a tobacconist. As the population of St Pancras increased at the end of the century, the house went into multiple occupation and it’s difficult to tell from all the names in the Census who exactly is running the shop. But in 1911 Paolo Cagno, who came from Genoa, and his English wife Annie had a confectioner’s there.

So the motif of the putti with grapes is quite misleading and the shop never had anything to do with alcohol.

WALTER CRANE AT THE RCA

Walter Crane with students and teachers of the Royal College of Art, c.1900
Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

The National Portrait Gallery have this rather nice photo showing students and staff of the Royal College of Art in around 1900. Walter Crane (in the white hat) is in the centre. The man on his left in the bowler hat is Beresford Pite, the professor of architecture, and on the far right in the front row is Edouard Lanteri, the professor of sculpture.

Photos like this were taken every summer at the RCA in what is now the John Madejski Garden of the V&A. Crane was College principal from 1898-9, when he made major changes to the curriculum, introducing more practical courses in place of pettifogging detailed drawing, copying from casts and designing on paper.

He wrote of his time there, “As far as the existing constitution of the school and its relation to the Board of Education would allow, I endeavoured to expand the range of studies, especially in the direction of Design and Handicraft; and in order to give the students some insight into the relation between design and material, I was fortunate enough to obtain the services of accomplished artists to give lectures, and demonstrations where possible, in their special crafts.” But he didn’t like all the form-filling that a government post demanded and a bout of flu sapped his energy.

The interesting thing about this photo is that all the students are women. About half the enrolled students were women and about half the graduates became full-time teachers. But why this group was taken isn’t clear.