ÉMIGRÉ ART IN BRITAIN

The book Insiders Outsiders tells the extraordinary story of the contribution made by refugee artists to British culture from the 1930s onwards, most of them fleeing from persecution in Germany and many of them Jewish. The BBC, publishing, music, cinema, art and architecture all benefited from their new perspectives.

Some names were obviously foreign – Freud, Kokoschka, Pevsner, Moholy-Nagy – some, like the BBC head of drama, Martin Esslin, sounded vaguely foreign and others, like Stephen Hearst, the controller of the BBC in the 1970s, didn’t, even though he was born in Budapest.

The central European contribution to the visual arts wasn’t widely appreciated and our slowness in taking to modernism is obscured by the prominence given to innovative work in art histories, which was often disliked at the time. The art schools were in thrall to the Arts and Crafts movement until the late 1940s. It it was only after Picasso’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1960, when he was almost eighty, that he came to be widely regarded in England as anything other than a charlatan. The British took their modernism with a large dash of water. Michael Saler has written a revealing account of how the modernism of Frank Pick’s London Transport was shot though with Ruskinian ideas: Saler called it medieval modernism. And Insiders Outsiders describes the strong opposition to the German Expressionism that émigré artists brought with them and the British preference for a softer French modernism rooted in Post-Impressionism.

Bloomsbury exerted a baneful influence. Vanessa Bell adopted the Post-Impressionist style in the 1910s and painted the same way for forty years. Artistic taste in England was shaped by post-WWI anti-German sentiment, which may be one of the reasons reason why British design was stuck for so long in Arts-and-Crafts mode. There was also, of course, the shade cast by William Morris. His followers were paralysed by admiration for him and they repeated themselves for decades. The design initiative passed from England to Germany, where the state-sponsored Bauhaus and Deutscher Werkbund accommodated to mass production in a way that was anathema to British designers.

The story in architecture, music and the other arts is somewhat different. Lucie Rie, an Austrian Jew, gained considerable respect in the small world of studio pottery, but Greta Marks, who tried to adapt her modernist ceramics to Stoke-on-Trent, had an unhappy career in Britain. Several of the artists in this book fell into obscurity and the influence of continental émigrés was hard-won in Britian.

POST-WAR MODERN

The exhibition Post-War Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-65 at the Barbican highlights the diversity of the period, including Lucien Freud’s, John Bratby’s and Jean Cooke’s figurative paintings, Lynn Chadwick’s and Eduardo Paolozzi’ s angular bronzes (above), John Latham’s, Victor Pasmore’s and Gillian Ayres’ total abstraction and the beginnings of psychedelic art.

Looking at the period from a distance the curators are bound to evaluate it differently from the way it was evaluated at the time. The art world always knew that John Bratby, despite his huge commercial success, was a pretty obnoxious character and controlled his wife, Jean Cooke, who was already suspected of being a better artist than he was. Post-War Modern thrusts their domestic relationship to the fore and Cooke’s 1966 self-portrait, Blast Boadicea, removes any doubts about her excellence. Abstraction reached its high-water mark in 1960. Herbert Read’s Concise History of Modern Painting (1959) narrated the progress of art from Impressionist beginnings to supposedly inevitable resolution in Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning. Now we see that art was always more diverse. In relation to the representational works on show, the notes are bound to discuss content and meaning but, following the decline of interest in the formal properties of art, they say surprisingly little about the appearance of non-representational paintings by Victor Pasmore, Mary Martin, Adrian Heath, Anthony Hill and Robert Adams.

The photos of Bert Hardy, Nigel Henderson and Roger Mayne show a ravaged urban environment with children playing in bombsites and rotting Victorian streets. We’re presented with artists dizzied by war and engaged in a search for meaning in a world without secure values. That was all true. But the post-war decades were also years of optimism and reconstruction. Hardy was good at showing people enjoying life at fairgrounds, dance-halls and the seaside. And against the photos of crumbling cities might be also be placed the Festival of Britain, the New Towns and the schools of the 1944 Education Act. There was full employment and wages were rising. People believed in Science. The best food, they thought, was made in factories and didn’t go stale. Britons were excited by the Space Age, Sputnik and planes like the Avro Vulcan. Those on the Left thought the Soviet Union was harnessing Science for Mankind and promised a prosperous and peaceful future – at least until 1956 when it invaded Hungary.

Today, however, we are pessimists. Science represents danger. The environment is going to kill us. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Left envisages not Utopia but only endless struggle. So we see in post-war art (and probably in all art) anxiety and anomie rather than celebration and hope.

What did create anxiety, of course, was the H-Bomb, which Britain adopted in 1957. Post-War Modern mentions Gustav Metzger, the inventor of auto-destructive art, who was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but the way the Bomb overshadowed the Sixties wasn’t fully brought out. Jeff Nuttall called the art of the decade Bomb Culture.

A case of pottery by Hans Coper and Lucie Rie formed an interesting pendant to the exhibition. They weren’t included in earlier reviews of the period – not, for example, in the Barbican’s Transition: The London Arts Scene in the Fifties (2002) or the Tate’s Art & The Sixties: This Was Tomorrow (2004) These refined ceramics were part of the same movement as Victor Pasmore’s abstract paintings. Rie, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, was of an earlier generation of artists associated with the Weiner Werkstätte. In England she became an inspiring but very demanding teacher at Camberwell School of Art. It’s difficult to say much about her pottery because, in contrast with the other leading potter of the period, Bernard Leach, she not only made pots absolutely of her time but also refused to say anything about them.