Edwardian Reflections (I)John Singer Sargent, Self-Portrait I (1907)

Augustus John, The Portrait of Sir William Nicholson, (1909)

Walter Richard Sickert, The Juvenile Lead (self-portrait; 1907)

Edwardian EraWilliam NICHOLSON (1872-1949)

”painting isn’t a real thing—it’s an illusion, a grouped thing” (Spalding 11)

”The idea of a label of any sort takes from me all desire to paint.” (Nicholson on his own career.)

Edwardian EraWalter SICKERT (1860-1942)

• ”The gross material facts of bulk and shape, and colour are the conditions of the very existence of plastic arts” (Corbert 47).

• ”Anything, this is the subject matter of modern art” (Corbert 48). (cf. Woolf’s ”Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”)

Post-Impressionist Legacy in British Art (II)

Paul CézanneClive Bell Roger Fry

The Characteristics of Post-Impressionism~ formalism & plasticity

”Creating a work of art is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching a likeness or displaying address” (Bell 44).

”[...] we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exultation” (Clive Bell qtd. in Tickner 69).

Impressionism vs Post-ImpressionismPaul Cézanne vs Clive Bell

”[...] [Cézanne] discovered a sublime architecture haunted by that Universal which informs every Particular” (Bell 210).

• Cézanne corresponded nature with his aesthetic perception in a nonnaturalistic manner (Fry qtd. in Dowling 5)

• The element of time comes in, in the paintings of Cézanne → the objects ”move” (Dowling 5)

”the impression of an emerging order, on an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our very eyes” (Merleau-Ponty qtd. in Dowling 6).

→ interaction of canvas and viewer is implicated

• not a matter of technique → style as not of technique but of vision (Proust qtd.

in Dowling 8)

”Post-Impressionism is nothing but the reassertion of the first commandment of art—Thou shalt create form” (Bell 44).

”[...] forms arranged and combined according to certain unknown and mysterious laws do move us in a particular way [...]. These moving combinations and arrangements I have called [...] ‘Significant Form’” (Bell qtd. in Dowling 12, originally in Art [1913] 11).

• Landscape ”as an end in itself and an object of intense emotion [...] as pure form” (Bell 208-9).

”The important thing about a picture, however, is not how it is painted, but whether it provokes aesthetic emotion” (Bell 45).

• ”the thing [...] which lies behind the appearance of all things—that which gives to all things their individual significance, the thing in itself, the ultimate reality” (Bell qtd. in Dowling 13).

~ metaphysical pattern cf. Fry’s adherence to the natural world (Dowling 14)

~ visionary attitude ~ emerging order

Bloomsbury Domesticity

(III)The beach as a social space

The ethos of the home and domesticityThe duplicity of form (Roger Fry and Clive

Bell) and function (Le Corbusier)

Modernism in England—a socio-spatial approach

”The modern city man in his office... is probably a very fine fellow very alert, combative, and capable of straight, hard thinking, [but in his] villa in the suburbs [is reduced to] an invalid bag of mediocre nerves, a silly child”

(Wyndham Lewis representative of Vorticism) ║Le Corbusier ~ Charles-Édouard Jeanneret )

”a room of one’s own”

”Good God! to have a room of one’s own with a real fire and books and tea and company, and no dinner bells and distractions, and a little time for doing something!” (Virginia Woolf)

” I fell desperately homesick—but for what home?” (Lytton Strachey)

”I have been deprived of a house” (E. M. Forster)

Modernism & Avant-garde

”We claim in the name of the steamship, of the airplane, and of the motor-car, the right to health, logic, daring, harmony, perfection” (Le Corbusier)

”form follows function” → What sort of a house can fulfil this condition?

”the house is a machine for living in”

11

Vorticist Visions

”The artist’s objective is Reality.”

”Art at its fullest is a very great force indeed, a

magical force, a sort of life, a very great ‘reality’.”

(Wyndham Lewis)

English Vanguardism around the WWI

(IV)

Blast”There is one Truth, ourselves, and everything is

permitted.” (Wyndham Lewis*) * founder of the Rebel Art Centre as a revolt against Fry’s Omega

Workshops

”We stand for the Reality of the Present—not for the sentimental Future, or the sacripant Past.” (Long Live the Vortex in Blast No 1)

”WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE, and to feel its crude energy flowing through us.” (Long Live the Vortex in Blast No 1)

”AUTOMOBILISM (Marinetteism) bores us. We don’t want to go about making a hullo-bulloo about motor cars, anymore than about knives and forks, elephants or gas-pipes.” (Long Live the Vortex in Blast No 1)

Vorticist* Aesthetics

“deadness is the first condition of art. […] deadness, above all, for the fullest, most concrete ‘realism,’ is essential. […] a sort of death and silence in the middle of life.” (Wagner 5)

“You think at once of a whirlpool. At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist.” (Wagner 14)

↔ “We wish to glorify War—the only health-giver of the world militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill, the contempt for woman… Art can be nought but violence, cruelty and injustice.” by Marinetti (Harrison 87)

Vorticist Aesthetics —The Importance of the Vortex

“Will and consciousness are our VORTEX” by Lewis. (Wagner 14)

”VORTEX IS ENERGY” by Wadsworth (14)“Vorticism is art before it has spread itself

into flaccidity, into elaborations and secondary applications. The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” by Ezra Pound (14)

The representation of the human body

”Indeed, all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears. [...] [M]oving objects constantly multiply themselves [...]. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty and their movements are triangular.” (Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting [11th April, 1912])

The representation of the human body

”How often have we not seen upon the cheek of the person with whom we are talking the horse which passes at the end of the street.”

”Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit, and the sofas penetrate our bodies. The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with us.” (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting [11th April, 1912])

Modern Abstraction1930s

(V)

Unit One Group and its Aftermath

The Early 1930s—Unit One Group 1931-1934: the crucial years of the second phase of

English modernism

• “Going Modern and being English” by Paul Nash → ”going modern” is an act of taking account of European arts and its developments (234)

• “[...] the pursuit in modern life […]. It seems today to have two definite objects for the mind and hand of the artist. First, the pursuit of form: the expression of the structural purpose in search of beauty in formal interaction and relations apart form representation. This is typified by abstract art. Second the pursuit of the soul, the attempt to trace the 'psyche' in its devious flight, a psychological research on the part of the artist parallel to the experiments of the great analysts. This is represented by the movement known as Surréalisme.” (Nash in a letter to The Times)

Pop and Op Art

”Pop art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expandable (easily-forgotten), Low Cost, Mass Produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big

business.” (Richard Hamilton)

Richard Hamilton’s tabular image – a taxonomy of horizontal culture

• Before constructing the collage he programmatically wrote down all the areas of popular culture that would comprise it: ”man, woman, humanity, history, food, newspapers, cinema, TV, telephone, comics (picture information), word (textual information), tape recording (aural information), cars, domestic appliances, space.”

• ”The image should, therefore, be thought of as tabular as well as pictorial.” (Richard Hamilton)