Modernism/modernity

Concentrating on the prewar avant-gardes of the early 1910s and the 1930s, Charles Harrison surveys the English painting, sculpture, and ideas on art which were affected by modernism during the first four decades of the twentieth century. A historical materialist, Harrison opposes the modernist assertion of the autonomy of art and argues that art should be rooted in society. One unifying principle governs the entirety of Harrison’s history and judgments: “vividness in representation must entail the reconciliation of technical concerns for expressive form and surface on the one hand with the requirements of realistic description on the other. . . . The more the activity of art tends toward the pursuit of the one at the expense of the other, the smaller the value is to be attached to either.”

What may be taken as the climax of the book comes near the beginning, when Harrison finds his exemplars in the Camden Town Group. The paintings of, especially, Walter Sickert from the decade before World War I and Harold Gilman best embody Harrison’s evaluative criteria, since they reconcile “the concern for a vivid surface and the concern for a vivid subject.”

Harrison finds much not to like in the period’s other modernist art, which he sees as often provincial, looking to France for guidance when not turning inward. The villains of the first half of the book are Roger Fry and Clive Bell, who advocate the autonomy of art. Heirs to the art-for-art’s-sake theory of Whistler, these Francophile critics dominated “advanced” English art, beginning with the post-Impressionist exhibitions that they organized at the Grafton Gallery in 1910 and 1911. With Cézanne as model, and backed by a superficial understanding of contemporary French art, these formalist dictators promoted English post-Impressionism and “significant form” at the expense of other considerations [End Page 113]and declared art to be above material reality. Harrison’s dry wit, which makes the book such a delight to read, is often directed contemptuously at Bell.

Until the rise of abstraction in the 1930s, the only serious challenge to the post-Impressionist hegemony over the English avant-garde came from Wyndham Lewis and the vorticists. Harrison usefully distinguishes the “Traditional Modernism” of English post-Impressionism from the “Radical Modernism” of vorticism. Traditional modernism considered art as innate and self-justifying, while radical modernism regarded art as willful and expressive of value in modern life, in modern terms. The Great War quelled any immediate potential competition to Bloomsbury by decimating the ranks of the vorticists and Camden Town. Harrison assesses the work of Paul Nash and others before turning to the insular art of the 1920s, which was preoccupied with technical progress via the neutral subjects of still life and landscape.

Harrison devotes a chapter to modernism in sculpture before probing the art and ideologies of the 1930s. In that decade, English modernism finally transcended its provincialism and its deference to Bloomsbury critics, and moved briefly to the forefront of international modernism with the formation of a new avant-garde. The growth of the 7 & 5 Society spawned this second phase of English modernism, which centered on Unit One artists such as Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, and Barbara Hepworth, with critical support from Herbert Read and others. Foreign exiles like Naum Gabo and Mondrian later joined this Hampstead-based group, whose interest in recent European art supplanted the earlier preoccupation with French post-Impressionism. Nicholson and Hepworth assumed the leadership of abstraction/constructivism, and Harrison recognizes Nicholson’s white reliefs as the greatest contribution by an English artist to European modernism in the first half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Harrison laments the disregard for material reality in abstraction’s antiseptic purity, and he renounces abstraction’s idealism, which spoke of freedom and foresaw a society rebuilt according to the intuitive order and harmony of the artist. According to Harrison, history makes art rather than vice-versa.

The...