MODERN PAINTERS
The Camden Town Group
Tate Britain
It is not easy to see why Tate Britain felt this exhibition either needed or
could carry off the epithet “Modern”. The painters it includes settled for a
position a long way from Modernism, and do not seem to have been especially
single-minded in their pursuit of modernity. No doubt provoked by the
wording of the title, Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group, early
commentators have made quick and brutal sport of the show’s lack of obvious
cutting-edge qualities. Leaving it at that, unfortunately, they betray not
only their own failure to reach back in imagination to a fascinating
historical moment, but also their blindness to feats of pictorial
composition which, if small, hard-won and rare, nonetheless deserve respect.
The historical moment comprised the three years from the Camden Town Group’s
formation in 1911 to the outbreak of the First World War. The premature
deaths, at about this time, of two of its most talented members, Harold
Gilman and Spencer Gore, had, as it happened, nothing to do with bloodshed:
it was pneumonia that picked off Gore in 1914, while Gilman fell to the 1919
Spanish influenza epidemic. Yet one cannot help regarding the European
upheaval, with its revelation of mechanized Armageddon, as a decisive factor
in bringing to a halt the Group’s parochial and genteel activities,
rendering its vision of urban pastoral untenable and vindicating the
explosive, jagged rhetoric of its contemporaries, the Vorticists. After the
war, surviving Camden Towners either went their separate ways or rallied to
different causes. Whichever path they chose, the collective fervour was
dissipated.
So a certain poignancy attaches to this exhibition, representing as it does
the death of a delicate and perishable idea, rather than the birth of a
strong, fertile one. Those critics who aspire to write histories for the
victorious will find little to lament in the rout and scattering of a brief
alliance of individuals who, with the exception of their leader, Walter
Sickert, will never be given a Tate show of their own; but I think they are
wrong.
The Group can certainly be accused of a number of shortcomings: it was modest
in its ambitions, it looked back for guidance to an earlier generation of
mainly French painters and ignored the rude new noises being made in a wider
Europe, and it never produced robust heirs. More than that, the work of even
its most fêted members could look awkward, indecisive, even inept. (Charles
Ginner has worn less well than most: his technique of massing jammily
glistening pimples of pigment from edge to edge of the canvas has the effect
of making the paint surface crawl – and our skins with it.) But it would be
a mistake to dismiss the Group outright, and unjust to suggest that it added
nothing vital of its own to the twentieth-century artistic record.
Sickert, whose own allegiance was to Whistler and Degas, was the father
figure, but he had to watch his adoptive sons – no daughters! – trying out
other fathers for size, and the consequence was a degree of dissension,
possibly good for creative stimulus, within the small band. Gore turned to
Monet, Pissarro, Gauguin and Vuillard; Gilman, to Vuillard and Van Gogh.
Such eclectic borrowings mean that the Tate show can offer no steady focus,
only isolated failures and successes. Gore’s successes include “The Fig
Tree” (c1912), a view from his Camden Town back window which goes well
beyond stylistic indebtedness to a vision all his own: a startling emphasis
on blue in the tree’s foliage and pink in the shadow it throws. The
brushwork, too, is bolder than he was habitually capable of. So much of his
other work looks, by comparison, like careful illustration, coloured
draughtsmanship, optimistically conceived but timidly executed. In “The Fig
Tree”, however, as in the caricaturish, yet genuinely comical “Gauguins and
Connoisseurs” (1911), the railway scene “Nearing Euston Station” (1911), and
the almost lurid “Balcony at the Alhambra” (1911–12), he is completely on
top of his subject – not least because each of these paintings presents a
view from above, a perspective that must have answered to some unique
artistic need. None of these works, however, not even the last, theatrical
one, resembles anything by Sickert; and when Gore did encroach on Sickert
territory – as he did in his “Interior with Nude Washing” (1907) – the
results were flatly unsatisfactory.
Gilman’s “Nude on a Bed” (c1911–12), another nod towards the master, is all
clinical studio clarity, where Sickert himself would have exploited the
poetry and dramatic suggestiveness of London murk. Brightness was Gilman’s
thing, and his quest for it in grimy NW1 and environs comes to seem almost
quixotic. He could find it abroad naturally enough, and his Van Gogh
hommage, “Canal Bridge, Flekkerfjord” (1913), is by no means insulting to
the painter who led him to it. But cornering and capturing such a light in
London was another matter.
He did, however, manage it at least twice, against the odds. “The Eating
House” (c1913–14) exults in the decor of its lowly setting, where human life
is reduced metonymically to flat caps and overcoat shoulders glimpsed past
wooden partitions, while most of our attention is concentrated on such
details as the vertical line at which glossy tongue-and-groove meets garish
wallpaper in an unreconciled clash. This is the urban indoors trying to do
sunshine and cheer. Equally eloquent of both the precariousness of humanity
and the preciousness of light, “Interior with Mrs Mounter” (1916–17) shows
Gilman’s little, elderly, lopsided landlady standing in his upper-storey
Maple Street flat, while an open, apparently north-facing sash window at the
back suffuses the place with the sort of big radiance London occasionally
allows. Is this “modern” art? Not by Vorticist criteria, though it says more
about the feeling of a precise moment, the intimately registered coincidence
of ephemeral and cosmic, than any Vorticist, summarizing the zeitgeist,
could be bothered to do.
Rightly, Sickert is more amply represented in this exhibition than any of his
juniors, and we are able to inspect a substantial body of his work predating
the Group alliance, most notably from the series of nudes in bedrooms that
he painted between 1906 and 1909. In September 1907, the murder of Emily
Dimmock in her Camden Town bedsit caught the headlines – and Sickert’s
imagination.
A painting from the summer of 1907, “Mornington Crescent Nude”, had already
exposed a macabre ambiguity in the model’s supine pose: her one visible arm
lying stiff and inert along the rumpled bedsheet, her face turned awkwardly
towards the bolster, a choker emphasizing the vulnerability of her throat,
her thighs cut off sharply by the top sheet, and light from between barely
parted curtains playing over her large breasts and undulant belly with a
tactile intrusiveness. For Sickert, this is a relatively bright and airy
work; other treatments by him of the same theme dwell on the dinginess of
the setting and the consequent unreadability of the model, made all the more
troubling by the repeated introduction of a clothed male figure.
Titles like “The Camden Town Murder” and “L’Affaire de Camden Town” show the
artist’s lack of scruple about exploiting a sensational opportunity, and if
such works have led to hot-headed speculation about his possible involvement
in this murder, and even in those of Jack the Ripper towards the end of the
previous century, he must have been aware of the risk and may even have
smiled at it. The more likely truth is that Sickert was simply the first
painter in a long tradition to point out that the reclining nude, a standard
compositional trope, had a lot in common with the inertia of a corpse, and
the scrutiny of the artist with the calculating gaze of the malefactor.
Pre-eminently among his colleagues, he understood that it was the artist’s job
to notice and record things that others had missed. With his consciously
old-masterish technical bravura and adherence to a classically restrained,
even sombre palette, he was nonetheless ahead of the game when it came to
spotting novel subject matter and claiming it as his. The special qualities
of theatrical and cinematic light that he caught in “Noctes Ambrosianae”, a
view up towards the gods in the Middlesex Music Hall, and “Gallery of the
Old Mogul”, a cinema audience seen from behind, are relished in this spirit;
and in each of these 1906 painted snapshots of London public life, the sly
reversal, whereby audience unwittingly becomes spectacle, lends a piquant
irony.
It has been said that what Sickert’s bedroom nudes share is a keyhole
viewpoint, but the observation loses its intended sting when you appreciate
that so much of his art was shamelessly that of the voyeur, the stealer of
unofficial glimpses. “The Mantelpiece” (c1906–07) illustrates the point
perfectly: a young woman adjusts her chignon in a mirror, but while the
artist, from his greater height, can render her reflection whole, her own
view is impeded by a clutter of mantelpiece ornaments, so that even by
craning she can presumably get only a partial sight of herself. It is an
artistic moment that has very little to do with “modernity”, but a great
deal to do with what is fresh, true and enduring.
Christopher Reid's most recent collection of poems, Mr Mouth, was
published in 2005. He is editor of the Selected Letters of Ted Hughes, 2007,
and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull.
