Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism 9780271084305

Citation preview

art and form

Sam Rose

Art and Form From Roger Fry to Global Modernism

The Pennsylvania State University Press | University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rose, Sam (Art historian), author. Title: Art and form : from Roger Fry to global modernism / Sam Rose. Other titles: Refiguring modernism. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2019] | Series: Refiguring modernism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Explores the rise of formalism in the visual arts. Employs an expanded sense of form to rethink a range of areas, including the history of writing about art, constructions of high and low culture, and the idea of global modernism”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2018053189 | ISBN 9780271082387 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Formalism (Art) | Art—Philosophy. | Art criticism. Classification: LCC N66.R67 2019 | DDC 701/.8—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053189

Copyright © 2019 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

In memory of Mary Ensor and Mark Koller

Contents

List of Illustrations—————————————————————————— .viii Acknowledgments—————————————————————————— .ix Introduction————————————————————————————— .1

Part one Art Writing 1. Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910——————————— .18 2. The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s—————————————— .48

Part two Art and Life 3. Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture————————————— .72 4. Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing: For and Against Mass Culture—— .98 5. Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia————————— .128

Notes———————————————————————————————— .159 Bibliography————————————————————————————— .181 Index———————————————————————————————— .203

Illustrations

1. Mortar of Handroanthus chrysanthus wood, 1616–1418 BCE—————————— 2 2. Tony Smith, Die, 1962, fabricated 1968——————————————————— 2 3. Seated Musician, thirteenth century———————————————————— 4 4. Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ, ca. 1488–50, with markings——— 7 5. Erle Loran, diagram of Paul Cézanne’s House and Farm at Jas de Bouffan, 1889–90—————————————————————————22 6. David Bomberg, In the Hold, ca. 1913–14——————————————————25 7. Roger Fry, notes on Leonardo da Vinci, with comparison of ears by Leonardo and Lorenzo di Credi——————————————————— 28 8. Filippino Lippi, Three Archangels with Tobias, 1485———————————— 29 9. Alesso Baldovinetti, Portrait of a Lady, 1465————————————————34 10. Walter Richard Sickert, Girl at a Looking-Glass, Little Rachel, 1907———————37 11. Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863——————————————————————39 12. Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples, ca. 1877–78—————————————— 49 13. Pieter Brueghel (attributed), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1560s————59 14. Caravaggio, Madonna and Child with St. Anne, 1605–6————————————73 15. Lucas van Valkenborch, Winter Landscape with Snowfall Near Antwerp, 1575—

88

16. Paul Joseph Jamin, The Vandal with His Share of the Spoils, 1893——————— 89 17. Julia Margaret Cameron, Juliet Stephen (née Jackson), 1867————————— 99 18. Paul Klee’s Der Beladene, , 1929, tracing and photograph—————————— 105 19. Viscount (“Jack”) Hastings, The Worker of the Future, 1934————————— 117 20. Charles Spencelayh, Why War?, 1938—————————————————— 123 21. Henri Matisse, Marguerite, 1906–7——————————————————— 132 22. Aina Onabolu, Sisi Nurse, 1922 ————————————————————— 137 23. Gerard Sekoto, Girl with Orange, ca. 1942–43——————————————— 137 24. Gaganendranath Tagore, Untitled (Calcutta), ca. 1920–25—————————— 139 25. Abanindranath Tagore, Tissarakshita, Queen of Asoka, 1911————————— 143 26. Jamini Roy (and workshop), Painting, Seated Brahmin, ca. 1935——————— 144 27. George Blessed, Whippets, ca. 1939——————————————————— 149

viii

Acknowledgments

I feel a particular debt to the many people who read parts of what came to be this book—even long before it looked like it might come together as a book— and whose comments and challenges have helped make it what it is: David Peters Corbett; Whitney Davis; Lily Foster; Martin Golding; Jack Hartnell; Alexander Hutton; Nicky Kozicharow; Polly Mitchell; Bence Nanay; C. Oliver O’Donnell; Stephanie O’Rourke; Gavin Parkinson; Barbara Pezzini; Alistair Rider; Claire White; various anonymous reviewers; the Penn State Refiguring Modernism editors Ellie Goodman and Jonathan Eburne; and copyeditor Annika Fisher. Many others have offered help and advice, answered questions, or contributed in other important ways: Natalie Adamson; Allan Antliff and Kim Croswell; Kate Aspinall; Lynn Ayton; Wendy Baron; Samuel Bibby; Paul Binski; Richard Braude; David Carrier; Sharon and Richard Collier; James Day; Andrew Demetrius; Charlotte DeMille; Samuel Elmer; Katie Faulkner; Bill Feaver; James Fox; Jenni French; Luke Gartlan; Linda Goddard; Martin Golding; Christopher Green; Emily Hannam; Shona Kallestrup; Elsje van Kessel; Sonal Khullar; Perrin Lathrop; Anneke Lennsen; Jules Lubbock; Julian Luxford; Peter Mandler; Alex Marr; Owen Martin; Derek Matravers; John, Victoria, and Lizzie Mitchell; Laura Moretti; Sylvester Okwunodo Ogbechie; Richard Read; Christopher Reed; Margaret A. Rose; Kate Rudy; Vid Simoniti; Catherine Spencer; Andrew Stephenson; Telfer Stokes; Ilse Sturkenboom; Lisa Tickner; Bernard Vere; Fernanda Villarroel; Dawn Waddell; Karolina Watras; Paul Wood; Annie Woudhuysen; my research assistants Frankie Dytor, Meredith Loper, and Kriszta Rosu; and the students in the courses on art theory and on global, canonical, and British modernisms that I’ve taught at Cambridge and St Andrews. I would also like to acknowledge here the scholars I haven’t met whose work on Fry, form, modernisms, questions of the “global,” and many other things has been fundamental to the conception and development of this book. Research for the book would not have been possible without the assistance of staff at numerous libraries and archives: the British Library; the Courtauld Institute Library; the University College London Library; the Royal Collection Trust; the Gerard Sekoto Foundation; the King’s College Cambridge Archive Centre; the National Art Library, London; the Archive of Art &

ix

Design, London; the National Archives, London; the BBC Written Archive Centre, Reading (in particular Jessica Hogg); the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the University of Victoria Library and Archive, Canada; the Royal Academy Library and Archive, London; the Tate Library and Archive, London; the Cambridge University Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the National Library of Scotland; and the University of St Andrews Library. Finally, I’d like to acknowledge the various institutions and funding bodies that have supported my work on this book: the Arts and Humanities Research Council; the Courtauld Institute of Art; the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse, Cambridge; and the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews.

x

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Consider three scenes.1 Searching through a bog in the late 1700s, as he apparently sometimes does, the philosopher Immanuel Kant stumbles upon a piece of carved wood (fig. 1). Recognizing it as deliberately shaped, he calls it a product of Art rather than Nature. Its shaped-ness allows him to judge that its producing “cause” had “conceived of an end, which the wood has to thank for its form.”2 Viewed as a humanly made thing, its visible features become imbued with meaning. Carved, scraped, handled to look the way it does, it is seen to have existed for its original maker in those terms. Turning a corner on a country path in the early 1900s, the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin encounters four painters who have lined up their easels in front of the same landscape. Resting for a moment from the midday Tivoli sun, Wölfflin pauses on a nearby rock and finds himself fascinated enough to stay and watch the paintings develop. He observes that each painter had fixed on exactly the same view and tried as hard as possible to paint nothing but what was before him, but that “the result was four totally different pictures, as different from each other as the personalities of the four painters.”3 Pictures of the world, it turns out, are profoundly shaped by their makers. And it might be that the shaping, rather than the Tivoli landscape itself, is where meaning really lies. Finally, entering a room in a New York gallery in the 1960s, the art critic Michael Fried is faced down by a six-foot steel cube (fig. 2). Disturbed by the degree to which this object prompts an experience that depends entirely on his particular situation, Fried decides that the work simply cannot be called art proper. Whereas art offers a world of meaning of its own, this coy lump seems more like a natural object, a stone or rock, than a humanly made thing. Leaving aside the personal thoughts and feelings of the viewer or explanations from theology or natural science, there is no content here to interpret. It is as if the life drains out of the piece of wood in Kant’s hand, as, showing it to an acquaintance, he is told it had just happened to break off from a nearby tree. These examples from modern philosophy of art, art history, and art criticism suggest something fundamental about the world of things that are

1

Figure 1. Mortar, 1616–1418 BCE. Handroanthus chrysanthus wood, 31.5 × 18.9 × 15.4 cm. National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad and Tobago, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Acc. no. 80/A/549. Photo: Joanna Ostapkowicz / Courtesy of the National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad and Tobago. Figure 2. Tony Smith, Die, 1962, fabricated 1968. Steel with oiled finish, 182.9 × 182.9 × 182.9 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2003.77.1. Photo © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2018 / Estate of Tony Smith.

2

Art and Form

made to be visible, and how it is that we make sense of that world. This is because they speak to a philosophical and artistic idea of form. They suggest, first of all, that the way we experience the world is in large part down to how our minds constitute things for us. (Older and grander words for this include “worldview” and “spirit”; more recent and more modest terms range from “way of seeing” to “visuality.”4) Second, they suggest that the things we make to be visible for others—in the way that we put them together—register and make discernible some of that constituting or forming activity. (Here we move to words that grapple with this more familiar sense of form on the ground, such as “configuration,” “structure,” “device,” and “arrangement,” with such forms ready in turn to engage and reshape viewers via “aesthetic experiences,” “affects,” “operations,” or “affordances.”5) Intelligence (of artworks) and intuition and inference (by beholders) become key ideas here. Made things appear to pulse with the life that created them, suffused with a purposiveness that allows viewers to know the activity that made them what they are. To see this in practice, we can look not just to stories or to major summaries of aesthetic theories but also to its enactment in writing on art. Take a passage from a twentieth-century art critic, the British writer and artist Roger Fry, on a thirteenth-century French sculpted figure (fig. 3): But what is striking here is the certainty with which the artist has grasped the central character of the figure. In the movement of the head and the expression of the face he has made us vividly aware not only of the character of the boy but of his state of mind. In his intentness on the music which he is playing he is scarcely aware of the outer world—his face has that vague unseeing regard which comes from a withdrawal from the outside, from concentrating on what is passing within the mind.

And in the figure there is the poise, the absence of muscular tension,

except in the hands, which exactly corresponds to this mood. The whole design has a peculiarly easy rhythmic flow and unity because the man who did this was a great sculptor, but for the moment what I want you to note is the fact that that rhythm is based upon a vivid imaginative grasp of a particular moment in an everyday incident.6

Note here the subtle shifting back and forth between the work of art as the artist apparently saw it, as the critic reports having seen it, and as we are now supposed to see it. It is not just that the “certainty with which the artist grasped the central character of the figure” is “striking,” but that, in viewing

Introduction

3

Figure 3. Seated Musician, thirteenth century. Musée Saint-Remi, Reims. As illustrated in Roger Fry, Characteristics of French Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932). Photo courtesy Musée Saint-Remi.

the work, we become “vividly aware” of the figure’s character and state of mind. By the third sentence, the communion between viewer, critic, and artist is complete. Fry shifts to pure description—“In his intentness on the music which he is playing he is scarcely aware of the outer world”—safe in the knowledge that his readers will treat this description of his seeing as if it were the artist’s own. The passage that follows indicates how form has secured this

4

Art and Form

for the critic. The “easy rhythmic flow and unity,” as he aesthetically judges it, is both the work of a “great” sculptor and is “based upon” that artist’s “vivid imaginative grasp of a particular moment in an everyday incident,” a grasp that we are given access to in turn. Aesthetic judgment, based on form, allows the critic into the artist’s vision of forms in the work. The critic moves from the artist’s vision of the forms in the work into the artist’s vision of the scene—and from the artist’s vision of the scene into the worldview or visuality embodied in the work as a whole. Form is here the intermediary that allows the crucial alternation between us seeing the object and seeing it as the maker did. The partial re-­creation of the maker’s own experience is nicely summed up by the critic in his own words, “imagining the artists at work,” or the impression he gives that he is operating from within “the artist’s vision.”7 It also makes it more comprehensible, though no less jarring to some readers now, when Fry moves freely into confident psychologistic generalizations about worldviews of the original makers and users of these images: the “nimbleness of mind, this awareness of actual life” characteristic of French people, the “peculiar power to seize on what is characteristic in human beings as they are,” and the “sudden alert turning of the mind in its tracks” so characteristic of French art.8 ——— Though it ranges from the late nineteenth century through to the present, this book is centered on the years 1910 and 1939, when, according to standard accounts, the doctrine of “significant form” was popularized by the British writers Roger Fry and Clive Bell, but before “high” formalism’s rejuvenation at the hands of Clement Greenberg. A starting point for much of the discussion is the art writing of Roger Fry. The subtleties of Fry’s thought make his work a useful platform from which to revise ideas about the tie of form and modernism and to examine characteristic modernist positions on visual culture. (I use the term “visual culture” because, although Fry’s account was developed in order to deal with art, in practice it involved a whole system of thought about how the humanly made visual world was meaningful.)9 More than that, as the son of a knighted judge, a member of the elite Apostles discussion society at Cambridge, and one of the set of intellectuals and artists known as the Bloomsbury group, Fry is representative of a range of modernists who were formed and remained entangled in the society that they attempted to critique. His place amid so many social and institutional networks allows for an examination that also works outwards and shows how ideas about form and

Introduction

5

visual culture at the time spread widely into contemporaneous culture and lived on long after this period.10 According to the traditional view that I hope to move beyond, artistic modernism understood in terms of the narrowest of formalisms is often called “formalist modernism,” the name for the turn in criticism and art alike to the appreciation of form alone and a purely abstract art to match. In this story, a dominant strand of formalist modernism was spread in Britain and beyond from around 1910 by the writing of Fry and Bell.11 Theirs is taken to be an escapist position that emphasizes disinterested contemplation of the shapes and colors of the works and a particular (irreducible and unique) set of experiences generated by them. Reference to life outside is excluded because art is an end in itself; despite any expression it involves, it is appreciated for its own sake alone. Form is “structure to the exclusion of meaning,” to use a recent phrase, and any projects that suggest art might incorporate elements of life or even play a direct role in shaping the social world run counter to the trend.12 These are writers who supposedly turned pictures on their side so that the subject matter would not interfere with their design quality and whose critical approach to works of art can be likened to diagramming their significant form for others (fig. 4).13 Formalist modernism of this kind finds a starting point in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment of 1790. “Pure” judgments of taste about “free” beauty, Kant wrote, were made “according to mere form” or “properly concern[ing] only form” (114). But this focus on form alone meant an abstraction away from everything not immediately present in contemplation, with judgments made in relation to what the viewer “has before his sense” rather than “what he has in his thoughts” (116). The everyday existence of things slipped away in a contemplation of form that was also a contemplation of things “without respect to use or to an end” (125).14 Following polemically simplifying readings by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Britain and Victor Cousin and Madame de Staël in France, Kant’s account of this particular kind of free beauty was expanded into a model for the concept and proper experiences of art as such. The tie of form to art and aesthetic experience was then radicalized in the “art for art’s sake” attitudes of late nineteenth-century French symbolism and British aestheticism, which considered aesthetic experience of this sort as an end in itself, a justification for life rather than a means of connection. The alleged heir to these trends, the “modernist project,” was popularized first by Fry and Bell and then by writers in the United States. It began in earnest

6

Art and Form

Figure 4. Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ (ca. 1488–50) with indications of halves and thirds. Drawing by Andrew Demetrius after illustration in Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

Introduction

7

at the turn of the twentieth century and resided in a “process of progressive purification,” as each particular art sloughed off all elements extraneous to its search for the purely aesthetic—for the effects that were proper to the medium alone and that would ensure a suitable richness of experience.15 Formalist modernism found its natural outcome in the sheer optical plenitude of midcentury abstract art in the United States. It found its natural advocacy in Clement Greenberg’s apodictic explanation of the development of painting from Édouard Manet to Jackson Pollock and others as the story of painting’s salvaging of its aesthetic quality and claim to artistic status amid general cultural degradation. This was a salvation achieved by way of the gradual elimination of all nonformal features that were discovered to be extraneous to the essence of the specific medium, in this case painting. So influential was this narrative that by the 1980s many felt an “anti-aesthetic” stance was the sole way to move from Greenberg, formalist modernism, elitist conceptions of beauty, and the like to a contextually minded, conceptually oriented, repoliticized view of what visual culture and its study might involve.16 Since at least the 1960s, increasingly complex accounts of modernism have been proposed by those unwilling to rest with this traditional view or to abandon the notion altogether as the “emptiest of all cultural categories.”17 Modernism might now be understood in the context of an expanding cluster of interrelated themes in modernity, such as (in no particular order): “the imaginative proximity of social revolution,” the pursuit of freedom in the sense of “self-determining and self-sufficient subjectivity,” the renegotiation of boundaries between high and low culture, the critique and ensuing crisis of representation, engagement with the dis- and re-enchantment of the world, and the emergence of cross-national cultural forms from negotiations between Western and non-Western worlds (not to mention the specific configurations of these and their subsets found in particular national, local, or transcultural modernisms).18 Nonetheless, the formalist modernist construction has proven surprisingly difficult to displace as a historical account of how modernist culture was understood by many at the time. Much revisionist work since the 1960s has continued to take formalist modernism at face value and either to set a newfound richness and diversity of contemporaneous culture against the narrow view of this central strand or to recontextualize this strand in ways that still keep to the old view of formalism and modernist criticism.19 In this book I attempt to effect this displacement in a more internal manner. What I mean by this is that I do not try to simply highlight the naïveté of the formalist

8

Art and Form

modernist account, just as I do not attempt to look for alternative strands of aesthetic theory while still accepting the traditional picture of the central one. Instead, my aim is to directly address why it is that the traditional picture of formalist modernism is itself so partial and inadequate. The alternative view I put forward in this book sees form as bound up with making contact, even as the basis for a limited notion of communication.20 In the recent words of the modernist art historian T. J. Clark, “It is the form of our statements, and the structure of our visualizations, that truly are our ways of world-making—at any rate the ways that hold us deepest in thrall.”21 Thinking of form in this way builds on the conception of form as structure or organization, carefully developed in Russian formalism from the 1910s onwards.22 Form is here what Viktor Shklovsky called “the principle underlying the construction of the object,” or, in a more expansive recent update of the view, “Forms are organizations or arrangements that afford repetition and portability across materials and contexts.”23 At its most restricted, then, form might be simple shape—a decorative pattern, like paisley or the Greek fret, or the linear frameworks that some have tried to discover and map in particular works of art (see fig. 4 above, as well as fig. 5 below). But this concept of form as an organization that can move and mutate through time can also apply to things as various as a particular configuration of a pictorial motif such as the Madonna and Child, a literary genre like the Bildungsroman, or a technical format like the oil-on-canvas easel painting.24 Thinking of the “formal opportunity” or “form-class” of relevance to Cézanne’s work, George Kubler spoke of the long history of the problem of landscape and “tectonic order” that the painter had taken up from Poussin: “The anonymous mural painters of Herculaneum and Boscoreale connect with those of the seventeenth century and with Cézanne as successive stages separated by irregular intervals in a millenary study of the luminous structure of landscape.”25 Form in the sense of structure or organization presumes that particular kinds of ordering carry a “distinctive semantic force” and, as such, allow for comprehension.26 But what this concept of form as structure leaves out is that forms are also the product of a process, the end result of active making or a shaping principle. And because things are formed—and seem to reflect or embody the process by which they have been made in a way that gives them a style—their meaningful structures are also always historical.27 This comprehension for us, faced with formed things in the present, might also open onto the forming or world-making of others in the past. Formalism of the kind I

Introduction

9

describe in this book combines analysis of visual and aesthetic effects with the historical production of the object in question, often with the former used as primary evidence with which to make judgments about the latter. This formalism is interested not in structure to the exclusion of meaning but in structure’s connection with traces of intentionality, of a meaningful way to make judgments about ways of seeing and forms of life. And it is as much aesthetic as it is based on reasoning, reliant on feeling it or seeing it as much as calculating it or working it out. By retrieving the communicative aspect and bringing it back into the moment of formalism’s consolidation at the turn of the twentieth century, I show how the sensory and the formal were brought together to produce a criticism predicated on the intuitively felt life, the manifest purposefulness, that objects of human production exhibited and from which whole forms of life could be imaginatively reconstructed. “To assume consciousness is at once to assume form,” wrote the French art historian Henri Focillon in the 1930s; “The artist develops, under our eyes, the very technique of the mind; he gives us a kind of mold or cast that we can both see and touch. His high privilege is not merely that of being an accurate and skillful molder of casts. He is not manufacturing a collection of solids for some psychological laboratory; he is creating a world—a world that is complex, coherent and concrete.”28 Over the course of five chapters, I move from this grand, world-making sense of form to a modest one of simple contact. The latter kind is a “postformalism” that is no longer stridently confident about the direct communicative potential of humanly made things, no longer certain that the look of a painting accords with the vision of the artist, and no longer certain even that human creation has a distinct and primary sort of meaning.29 As such this is the only formalism I think appropriate for the contemporary moment. But an unusual element of what I put forward, reflected in each chapter’s move outwards from Fry to others far closer to the present, is nonetheless the continuity between what was standardized in the years around 1910 and what has remained with us. My aim is to offer not only a new way to think about formalism and formalist modernism for scholars in early to mid-twentiethcentury art and literary theory but to offer those interested in theory and intellectual history through to the present an account of ideas that they will recognize as very much having persisted. So what does my take on form change, exactly? Formalist modernism traditionally describes a cultural moment that rejected such externally directed concepts as intention, meaning, and communication. In contrast I

10

Art and Form

discuss how close attention to the use of form reveals a deep and complex commitment to the external world. One aspect of this engagement with the external is an ideal of viewing as the aesthetic recovery of creative activity that construes the engagement with visual culture as a kind of historical psychology—the use of the imagination to reexperience or reenact the activities and worldviews of others. Beyond finished or static form, then, historical thinking that makes use of form requires a recovery of process, including the particular ways of seeing, the emotions or the experiences that made up the work. Not only do we see this in metaphors of liaison, transaction, or transmission regularly put to use in art writing but in the fact that the proper appreciation of the work was also often described as a process of re-creation of the artist’s forming activity. Analysis involves a pattern of shifts between analysis of the finished form, contextual material, and imaginative re-creation or reenactment of the process of creation.30 This tendency came to standardize an interpretative method that to this day underlies the kinds of engagement with visual culture that claim to be attentive to some variation of the object or the visual: to become suitably informed about the artist and the work in question, to look long enough to discern its standard effects on the viewer, and to make judgments about purposive activity on the artist’s part on this basis.31 Rooted in the criticism of nineteenth-century writers like John Ruskin and Walter Pater and still with us in many ways, early twentieth-century art writing should seem less an anomaly or paradigm shift than a key (consolidating and paradigmatic) moment in a much wider tradition. The traditional view of formalist modernism also supports the orthodoxy that aestheticism was countered throughout the twentieth century by a more radical (“historical”) avant-garde dedicated to bringing the spheres of art and life back in touch with each other.32 On the one hand is the line of medium-specific painters and sculptors from Manet to midcentury abstract art; on the other is the work of dada, the Bauhaus, and other groups that engaged current events and conditions of social life in thematic and practical ways and in doing so explored the critical potential of cultural production. As a generalized dichotomy, however, this is misleading about both art theory and the artists and writers in dialogue with it. In contrast, I discuss the ways in which formalism was and continues to be ethically and politically motivated, even attempting to counteract what was taken to be the solipsistic aestheticism of previous generations by elevating art to a central position within the social world. After 1900 a range of new practices developed in response to the idea that close engagements with works of visual art play an invaluable and

Introduction

11

possibly inescapable role in shaping human lives fit for modern democratic society. Formalist theory penetrated cultural arenas including general education and the design-led reform of the modern visual environment, not to mention all forms of education in the practice and appreciation of art (and as such shows why the antiformalism of Marxist critics and other skeptical contemporaries often failed to hit the target). Within two decades after 1910, in effect, a broad formalism had taken hold that was already able to attack the straw man of aestheticist formalism in order to champion its own social (and avowedly anti-aestheticist) credentials. The stress on creativity and connection with life leads to a further, perhaps even more unexpected, point. One way that the art of modernism has often been distinguished from what followed is the apparent stress on openness and viewer participation in post-modern work. For Peter Weibel, Since the experimental music of the 1950s (from John Cage to Henri Pousseur) and the experimental poetry (Umberto Eco), the public has been invited to participate in the creation of artworks. The artist is not the sole contributor to the work, there is also the spectator. Marcel Duchamp stated in 1957 in his famous lecture on the creative act: “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator . . . adds his contribution to the creative act.” . . . This performative turn has an influence on our notion of creativity, on the behavior of the masses, and on our concept of art. First and foremost, we experience the emancipation of the audience: the visitor becomes a user.33

Weibel here suggests that the “performative” paradigm of work as invitation, with the spectator now a necessary contributor to the creative act, distinctly separates modernism from the art that followed. To an extent, Weibel’s assumption about modernism accords with the formalism discussed in the first four chapters of this book: the confident and universalizing understanding of form’s world-making and world-recovering potential, with modernist art apparently a repository of fixed experiences around which a science of criticism could even be modeled. But, as will be seen, formalism’s view of visual culture is ultimately not so neat. Works formed and experienced a certain way in the past had, for those in the present, to be formed once again in the act of viewing. The idea of the viewers creating the works for themselves in contemplation—engaging imaginatively rather than passively consuming—was fundamental to the interest in form. And as the “science” of form broke down over the course of this period, revealing the unpredictable

12

Art and Form

nature of active and imaginative engagements by “users,” what emerged was that even modernist art was all along a space for interpretation without center or limit: “A place where inquiry is initiated, but the results of the inquiry are scrambled.”34 This is one of the less often recognized lessons of form: the extent to which viewing is a process of active construction, a putative re-creation wherein we can never be sure what quotient of the creation is “re” and what simply is starting anew. It is not just, then, that “formalism” and the oftenreferenced “crisis of representation” are names for the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century shift of attention from things represented to acts and modes of representation. They are, equally, names for the newfound engagement with the problem of communication in items of visual culture at a moment when it has become clear that modernity has not lived up to its promise of “reconciled social relations of persons who are free because they actually stand in relations of at least institutionally secured mutuality of recognition.”35 Formalism (in modernism) emerges as a sustained communal engagement in criticism and aesthetic theory with the status of public, shareable meaning, as well as the social consequences for the production and consumption of art that flow from a focus on that question. Though rarely recognized at the time, this is an idea that my account in this book allegorizes and builds towards. It is also, as my final chapter explores, a lesson that any modest or “post-” formalism practicable or recoverable for the present day would have to learn and make central to its self-understanding. These comments on form, experience, and communication raise the issue of another word key to my book—“aesthetics.” If aesthetics has seen a recovery and rejuvenation in the last twenty years, this has in part been at the expense of the unity of the notion, as all forms of theoretical speculation on art and the experiential are now brought under its banner.36 To offer just one example, talk of “the aesthetic,” suspicious precisely because of its association with representations of formalist modernism at its narrowest, is replaced in recent visual studies by that of “presence,” “affect,” “agency,” and occasionally even (somewhat ironically) “the formal.”37 But rather than such substitutions indicating a marginalization of aesthetics, the contemporary understanding of the practice has simply expanded to encompass all of these approaches.38 The expansion of aesthetics is opportune for a study that wishes to rethink a historical moment where the experiences offered by items of visual culture, as well as the textual narration and encouragement of such experiences, was given as great a prominence as it ever has been. Taking up the

Introduction

13

history of aesthetics alongside modernism (as modernist aesthetics) now implies a far broader purview: not just the aforementioned story of the development from German philosophical thought to a British art for art’s sake valorization of aesthetic experience, but the stance art writing took on the theoretical and the phenomenological in the widest senses. While “art writing” is here used to stand for investigation that privileges the practical writing and real-life actions of canonical and noncanonical texts and authors alike, “aesthetics” stands for investigation into past paradigms of “critical reflection on art, culture, and nature” (to use the definition of the recent Encyclopedia of Aesthetics).39 My book is about aesthetics in the anachronistic sense it currently has, as the catchall term for a general category of cultural reflection. ——— In practice I mix historical and analytic exposition throughout this book, with each chapter taking up a major theme in the study of art theory and writing. The book is split into two parts: “art writing” and “art and life.” While the two parts ultimately rely on each other, it is also possible that those solely interested in the history and analysis of aesthetic theory and criticism could focus on part one, while those more interested in the politics and practicalities could skip forward to part two. The first chapter attempts to come to terms with the nature, spread, and legacy of the broadened formalism discussed in the book as a whole. After a brief introduction to the Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition of 1910–11 that put forward postimpressionism as an idea and helped bring Fry and formalism to popular attention, I show how confusing and unhelpful Clive Bell’s related notion of significant form came to be. I then introduce connoisseurship into the story, a crucial model as it helps demonstrate how the perhaps unusual conjunction of form, style, intention, and communication might work in practice (and have consequences for the writing of art history and criticism from modernism right through to the present). Finally, I move beyond Fry, Bell, and the connoisseurs, showing how such ideas can be found in a range of contexts from academic literary criticism (I. A. Richards) and philosophy (R. G. Collingwood) through to a number of popularizing writers long forgotten but at the time enormously influential. Chapter 2 then takes up the issue of how and why formalism was thought to offer an objective, perhaps even scientific, form of art criticism. Following on from discussions of connoisseurship and the aesthetic, it

14

Art and Form

analyses the parallel between formalist writing and the nineteenth-century aesthetic criticism of Walter Pater and others, showing how form was thought to give a more secure path to imaginative reenactments than simply descriptions of shape, line, and color. The rest of the chapter moves into the reconfiguration of objectivity in art criticism when faced with new quasi-scientific conceptions of art and psychology, psychoanalysis, the laboratory, and a more positivistic historicism. A concluding discussion takes up the legacies of these debates in contemporary art history and aesthetics. The second part of the book expands the revisionist understandings of art writing and art theory explored in the first to reexamine the politics and ethics of formalism as a way of thinking about visual culture. Chapter 3 shows how a broadened formalism supported a particular ethics of close looking that, in turn, came to construct and justify the separation of “high” and “low” cultural spheres. The discussion links a number of usually separate figures and areas, moving between Fry and Bell, the rise of “English” or literary study as an academic discipline, twentieth-century legacies of aestheticism, government initiatives to bring art “to the people,” and present-day upholders of the value of “fine” art. It concludes by showing how aestheticism came to be attacked in the twentieth century according, ironically, to the same socially motivated ideas of its original adherents. Chapter 4 pursues the analysis through the discussion of two alternative contemporaneous visions for an adequate response to mass culture: design theory and Marxist art writing. The first half examines the basic conflict in a design theory that hoped not only to replicate items of visual culture for mass consumption but to preserve the aesthetically crucial intervention of the individual maker. The second half turns to debates within Marxist writing about the ability of art to be truly of the people while still maintaining its highest values. In either case, the chapter shows that the assumptions of formalist theory and writing derailed a number of attempts to break away from the dominant ideal of close looking at high art objects. Finally, chapter 5 turns to the issue of modern art and its cultural authenticity in Africa, Britain, and South Asia to indicate other senses in which formalist theory was deeply ingrained and widely consequential, as well as to think about the relation between broadened formalism and a broadened or global modernism. (It is more common now to acknowledge the heterogeneity of artistic practices at this moment by speaking of global modernisms in the plural, though I suggest there may be some reason to at least acknowledge the singular form in a way that remains attentive to the multiplicity of the strands within.) I chart the attempts to spread a particular formalist kind of

Introduction

15

aesthetic education outside of Britain, in some cases unwittingly imposing universalist assumptions that, unsurprisingly from the present perspective, look all too contingent. The narratives lead into a more general reflection on the fate of modernism as a potentially global concept and a concluding discussion of the possibility that its scope might be greatly expanded without a repetition of the errors of the earlier attempts to globalize. Learning these lessons, I suggest, also shows how a more modest formalism might still be defensible, or even inevitable, in the present day.

16

Art and Form

1 Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

Before 1910 Roger Fry might have seemed an unlikely champion of modern art. Until then Fry was best known as a critic and connoisseur of old master painting, missing out on the directorship of England’s National Gallery only because he had already accepted the role of Curator of Paintings for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a painter, too, Fry had often shied away from what we now think of as modernism. In writings of the 1890s and early 1900s, Fry held up the Renaissance as a guide for the present, and in 1905 he edited an edition of Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses due to his belief that the lessons of the eighteenth-century founder of Britain’s Royal Academy were still “of the highest value to the artist.”1 But when, in 1910, the Grafton Galleries needed a filler exhibition for the end of the year, Fry set out to arrange a display of modern French art. Fry’s premise for the resulting 1910–11 Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition was straightforward: Édouard Manet and the postimpressionists Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin demonstrated that modern art no longer aimed at the faithful representation of the external world. Interest, he believed, had shifted from the thing represented to the form of the work of art itself. Fry and his co-organizer, Desmond MacCarthy, originally favored “expressionists” as a term for these artists, and they saw the

18

ideal of expression over representation not as a rebellion but as a link to traditions of past art that ranged from Egyptian sculpture to Byzantine mosaics to early Renaissance painting. Although their exhibition was not the first display of advanced French painting in Britain, the enormous crowds and the critical storm that followed ensured it would be remembered as the exhibition that definitively introduced modern art to a reluctant country. At the time it gave rise to public outrage and accusations in the press of everything from fraudulence to political anarchism. For Virginia Woolf, looking back over ten years later, “on or about December 1910” was the point at which “human character changed.”2 As the co-organizer and critical interpreter of the work in the exhibition for the public, Fry came to be seen as the figure who changed public taste, “in so far as taste can be changed by one man,” and who put forward formalism as a means of doing so.3 While everyone could agree that form was crucial to Fry’s justifications, the exact nature of the idea of art as form was more controversial. Desmond MacCarthy, a literary critic who “had never seen the work of any of the artists exhibited,” later recalled that as he traveled around examining and selecting works for the exhibition with Fry, his own comments tended to concern whether a painted cow was too close to a tree or whether a crimson blob seemed rightly or problematically placed.4 Fry, on the other hand, he wrote, made observations of an entirely different kind; he “explained all sorts of things—aims, intentions, styles.”5 MacCarthy’s mode of viewing here seems almost a parody of the most extreme or simplistic kind of formalism, focused on no more than composition and aesthetic quality. This can be contrasted with the view related to Russian formalism that I raised in the introduction, according to which form is akin to organization, structure, or device. This more nuanced structural view of form has the advantage of going beyond static conceptions of form as shape, dealing as it does with organizations moving through time, just as its close engagement with the actual operations of the work moves beyond the experience of form as transcendent and indefinable. Yet in its desire to focus closely on the work itself, the structural view explicitly removes the functioning of the work from its actual interactions with makers and users, and so it, too, does not suffice to explain Fry’s apparent grouping of “style” with “aim” and “intention.” In this chapter I take up and explain Fry’s unusual drawing together of these terms, looking in particular to the context of connoisseurship in order to explore Fry’s link between form and communication, whether in a modest sense of making contact or a grander one of world-making. What the chapter reveals is a view

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

19

of form that speaks to the Russian or structural view but takes the ability to properly assess form and its operations as a stepping stone to life and history rather than a path away from it. Form, it could be said, is the basis of the ability to re-create or recuperate the original functioning of the work: securing correspondence of experience between makers and viewers of artworks, conveying expressed thought and feeling, grounding historical reenactment, or simply guaranteeing that one can properly assess its historical operation. Before discussing this in detail, however, it is first necessary to explain a widespread misconception about form that emerged at this time.

Art and the Problem of Significant Form As Woolf’s reference to the change that came in 1910 implies, within a few years the tide of Britain’s art world turned dramatically. Cubism and futurism came to London and in turn were rejected by a new set of modernist artists for whom the shock at the postimpressionist exhibition seemed a distant (and embarrassing) memory. Even over the course of 1911, a host of books and articles appeared to defend and celebrate the art on show, with form playing a standard part in their explanations. Despite the nuance shown in much of this writing, however, the early 1910s also witnessed the rise of a highly simplified and dogmatic view of formalism. This interpretation of formalism was of great service to popularizers wanting something basic to defend or for rival factions looking for a caricature to attack, but its subsequent adoption by historians as representative of formalism as a whole has done much to overshadow the complexities of modernist aesthetics. Understanding this is key to moving past it. And there is no clearer way to do so than through the bestselling book on art and form that appeared in 1914, Clive Bell’s straightforwardly entitled Art. Though long interested in fine art, Bell was an ambitious writer reluctant to commit to a particular area or subject. Years earlier a grander project called The New Renaissance had been planned, once allegedly described by Bell as a general “treatise on modernism.”6 His drift towards art as a sole focus owed much to circumstance. Bell had helped draw Roger Fry into the Bloomsbury group after he and Virginia Woolf ran into Fry at Cambridge railway station and talked passionately about art and aesthetics on the train back to London. Bell was taken on as one of the scouts for Manet and the Post-­ Impressionists and became a regular sparring partner for Fry over artistic

20

Art Writing

matters, at the same time as other Bloomsbury members, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, became increasingly prominent painters. Bell was clear about his debts, describing Fry’s 1909 “Essay in Aesthetics” as “the most helpful contribution to the science that had been made since the days of Kant,” but he added a simplistic and polemic edge to Fry’s views about form that at times made Fry seem almost conservative.7 Bell’s unique ability to distill and polemicize with the ideas set out by Fry was key to his success. As many have noted, the idea of significant form was not entirely new; the philosopher Bernard Bosanquet, for instance, in his History of Aesthetic of 1892 referred to Kant’s “doctrine of significant form” to explain the distinction between natural and imaginative kinds of beauty, and Fry in 1911 spoke of “significant and expressive form.”8 But Bell used the term more directly and consistently than ever before as a shorthand for the turn to form. “Significant Form,” Bell wrote in Art, was “the one quality common to all works of visual art,” and the presence of significant form was the feature that distinguished art from everything else (8). Contemplation of significant form in turn gave rise to “aesthetic emotion,” a feeling that was intrinsically good and which transported the viewer away from the mundanities of day-to-day life. The emphasis on form allowed Bell to declare that representation in art is irrelevant to artistic value, just as the emphasis on direct contemplation of that form allowed him to reject the relevance of prior knowledge of any kind. Viewers need bring “nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space” in order to appreciate works of art (27). Artworks that required historical or other forms of knowledge or that involved elaborate subject matter, such as William Powell Frith’s Railway Station, relied for their effects on “anecdote” or “information,” and as such they displayed a sad misunderstanding of what art could truly achieve (16–20). Bell’s views, when taken from the most direct statements made in Art, represent a remarkably extreme conception of formalism. In terms of what form is, Bell describes no works in detail and speaks only in vague terms of “lines and colours combined in a particular way” (8). Many subsequent readers have thus assumed that form for Bell was akin to a basic diagram of formal features, like those that Erle Loran later offered of Cézanne’s paintings (fig. 5). On this basis Bell has often been taken to be a champion of abstract art, even though his book Art mentioned none at all and instead took Cézanne as its ideal. In terms of the value or interest of form, Bell often spoke of “aesthetic emotion” as if it were a singular, transcendent experience. Understood this way, the contemplation of form leads away from life,

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

21

Figure 5. Erle Loran, diagram of Paul Cézanne’s House and Farm at Jas de Bouffan, 1889–90. From Loran, Cézanne’s Composition: Analysis of His Form with Diagrams and Photographs of His Motifs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 53. © 1963, 2006 by the Regents of the University of California.

history, or the social world and instead leads to pure “aesthetic experience” or even “beauty.” Taken together these ideas about form’s nature and value add up to a view powerfully attacked at the time and ever since, perhaps nowhere more so than in critiques of aestheticization and aesthetic ideology by the Frankfurt School. Art’s view of form as static and pure seems like the epitome of so-called bourgeois formalism. It is a theory of culture that sees value as both rooted in form and transcendental—a way of thinking about the made world that in its obsession with abstracted form and a singular kind of experience can mean only a radical deformation of, or even an utter blindness to, the material, social, and historical.9 Many at the time struggled with the extreme view of formalism, even as Fry and Bell attempted to correct and nuance their ideas. A basic confusion over the use of form in art criticism in the 1910s exacerbated matters. Critics like Fry insisted on the importance of expression, communication, or even intention. The form-based language of design, plane, and rhythm, on the other hand, seemed instead to insist “on the independence of the art work as an expressive object in its own right,” discounting everything beyond it from

22

Art Writing

the subject matter represented (a landscape or vase of sunflowers) to thoughts and feelings connected with the making of the work (the artist’s emotion).10 Description concerned itself with form, in other words, in a way that could be highly misleading. Critics found themselves advocating for artistic expression through form, but they were unwilling or unable to go beyond mere description of that form. Consequently art writing was understood to serve as no more than a pointer to the experience-giving or significant forms of the work, which viewers ultimately had to experience for themselves. For many the limitations placed on critical description implied that they were in the presence of a simplistic formalism interested only in static form and experience entirely detached from life. Despite repeated attempts by Bell to protest otherwise, his manifesto was regularly taken not to combine significance, expression, and form together but to imply that form was a property of the objects to be contemplated purely. According to the simplifying readers of Bell, this contemplation would give rise to a single and universally applicable aesthetic emotion in the viewer rather than a unique category of emotions or a particular one in every new case. Fry protested that significant form meant “something other than agreeable arrangements of form, harmonious patterns, and the like” and that it was “the outcome of an endeavor to express an idea.”11 Bell asserted that the “significance” lay in the fact that the form had been created by an artist and expressed an emotion while natural beauty did not, and so only the latter could rightly be called “insignificant” form.12 But many critics simply reversed the point; the widespread view of the project that caught on was summed up by the Times art critic Alan Clutton-Brock, who in 1932 spoke of “the sense in which Mr. Bell used the phrase [significant form], to mean in-significant form, form which signifies nothing.”13 Fry and Bell’s aesthetics were taken by such critics to imply an ideal of “an exclusive and all-sufficing beauty inherent in form, colour, rhythm and texture,” an ideal cast as the same undifferentiated experience of beauty supposedly characteristic of late Victorian art for art’s sake aestheticism.14 In addition to laying the ground for attacks on Fry and Bell, the simplified formalism regularly served as a starting point for others to put forward a nuanced formalism allegedly of their own. The narrow plane of argument and basic misconceptions, then, allowed rival factions to stake claims for the originality of their positions despite holding fundamentally similar beliefs about expression and communication of artistic sensibility and its manifestation in the form or formed aspect of the artwork. It was no surprise that

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

23

conservative upholders of representation in art—such as William Rothenstein, D. S. MacColl, and Arthur Hind—attacked formalism as a dehumanizing theory that disregarded human and spiritual qualities alike. But the self-styled “radical” modernists—including the vorticist group of 1913–15, which produced work as artistically “advanced” as anything seen in Britain for almost another twenty years—were equally keen to denigrate Fry and Bell and to proclaim form as something properly understood only by themselves.15 Fairly typical was Laurence Binyon, then keeper at the British Museum and a friend of the founders of vorticism, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. In books published between 1906 and 1913, Binyon outlined a theory of art that sidelined imitation—inspired in large part by his research on Chinese and Japanese art—and instead placed emphasis on spiritual expression through rhythmic form.16 Binyon’s protomodernist ideas about art’s turn against appearance and the Western naturalist tradition in favor of form were enthusiastically taken up by Pound and Lewis, who with Henri Gaudier-­ Brzeska, Jessica Dismorr, and others, placed them in the service of the kind of fully abstract art that Clive Bell had not accepted and that Fry only provisionally and half-heartedly endorsed.17 T. E. Hulme, another key theorist of vorticism and contributor to their journal Blast, like Lewis and Pound, claimed that as opposed to the “literary,” “the appreciation of a work of art must be plastic or nothing.”18 Again like Lewis and Pound, Hulme nonetheless marked out his difference from Bell with the common line that Art had advocated attention to form contemplated for its own sake, so as to produce a specifically aesthetic emotion. Though Hulme supported contemporary abstract painters like David Bomberg, he also critiqued the purist approach to form their work might imply (fig. 6). Bomberg’s device of dividing his painting In the Hold into sixty-four squares, Hulme wrote, suggested the aim of focusing attention on nothing but the arrangements of shape within each separate area: “All the general emotions produced by form have been excluded and we are reduced to a purely intellectual interest in shape.”19 For Hulme, Bomberg’s work and Bell’s analysis alike went wrong in the assumption about what form could convey: “If form has no dramatic or human interest, then it is obviously stupid for a human to be interested in it . . . the emotions produced by abstract form, are the ordinary everyday emotions—they are produced in a different way, that is all.”20 Hulme thus took his endorsement of artists who used “abstract form . . . as the bearer of general emotions” to distance himself from the idea of significant form and from writers like Fry and Bell.21 In this he was repre-

24

Art Writing

Figure 6. David Bomberg, In the Hold, ca. 1913–14. Oil on canvas, 196.2 × 123.1 cm. Tate Britain, London. Presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery, 1967. © Tate, London 2018.

sentative of the view that while form was fundamental to art, the focus on form did not entail a total disconnect from life, from history, or from the social world. It was also, as we will see, representative of the fact that views positioned directly against Fry and Bell could in fact closely correlate with the aesthetics of Fry at very least.

Rethinking Form: The Context of Connoisseurship Even as Fry was fending off critics in the storm that followed the 1910 opening, he was also working on his next exhibition. The 1912 Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition is well known for cementing the popularity of Fry’s conception of modern art begun with the first. It is less well known that in between these two shows he hung one further exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, the 1911 Exhibition of Old Masters, which featured artists ranging from Duccio and

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

25

Masaccio to Titian, Poussin, and Claude. That Fry continued to practice as a connoisseur, critic, and exhibitor of premodern painting is a reminder that the rise of formalism coincided with the spread of a new model of connoisseurship that had a dramatic influence on the art worlds of Europe and North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.22 Connoisseurship is not introduced here to replace other origin stories of formalism. Beyond the link to Kantian aesthetics raised in the introduction to this book, many have suggested that the stage was set for formalist art criticism in 1860s Paris, when Charles Baudelaire and Émile Zola both wrote of the special value of the formal properties of paintings and considered subject matter to be of a different kind of importance or even (in Zola’s reading of Manet) of none whatsoever.23 Others, including Fry himself, took the writing of symbolist critics like Maurice Denis to be a turning point in the rise of a modernist aesthetics of form—as most famously embodied in Denis’s comment that a painting “before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or an anecdote of some sort—is essentially a flat surface covered with colours, arranged in a certain order.”24 What connoisseurship helps add to these stories, though, is an explanation of how it is that form and intention can work hand in hand. The connoisseurship of Fry and those like him reveals a set of writers not gazing blankly as they wandered the galleries but re-creating the imagined activity of the “artistic personalities” behind the works, a process thought to be so potentially accurate that swathes of previously anonymous or dubiously attributed works could now be confidently attributed to the hand of a particular maker. If form is disconnected from life and history, then this has little relevance to the development of modernist aesthetics. But according to the theoretical model set out at this point, form and aesthetic experience might not be the problem for, but the answer to, a properly historical and life-­ oriented art criticism. Rather than leading away from life to transcendent experiences, the internal evidence of the work of art itself and the personal response of the viewer to that work could be primary tools of historical analysis. In near paradoxical fashion, this meant that writers could be deeply interested in true aim or intention yet nonetheless claim to disregard artistic intention in order to focus on the work itself. The true set of actions that made up the work, as we will see, had to be carefully separated from the conscious thought and documented activities of the artist. And on this basis, critics could focus on form alone, but they could use the feeling for form seen in the work to come to know the historical activities and experiences of the artistic personality responsible for its creation.

26

Art Writing

Much of the growing prestige of professional art history in the late nineteenth century was based upon the possibility of bypassing the uncomfortably subjective nature of personal, aesthetic responses to works of art.25 While many found the answer in a more rigorous turn to documents and the archive, the most famous connoisseurs of the second half of the century continued to stress the primary importance of the evidence of the work of art itself. In Britain the dramatic series of revisions to oeuvres and reputations provided by Joseph Arthur Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle did much to facilitate the ascendant reputation of connoisseurship, as did the idea of a “scientific connoisseurship” put forward by Giovanni Morelli around 1880.26 For Morelli an often somewhat mystical method could be explained and regularized, with authorship discerned through close examination of small, unconsciously produced details of the artwork. He suggested that due to their bodily habits, makers produced such tiny formal details (Grundformen) in a strictly individual manner so that their identity was discernible from the characteristic form taken by an eye, ear, or finger in their painting (fig. 7).27 Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry both took up the study of Italian painting under the spell of Morelli. Berenson in particular had begun as a strictly Morellian critic, basing attribution on a careful analysis of pictorial details in isolation from the effect of the work as a whole. By the time Fry took up connoisseurship in the 1890s, the twin examples of Morelli and Berenson were impossible to ignore. (Fry in fact formed a close personal connection with Bernard and Mary Berenson at this point, painting a tray in Quattrocento manner for their marriage at Villa I Tatti in 1900, though he fell out with them soon after.) Both Berenson and Fry, however, quickly reintroduced the aesthetic into the heart of their practice, indebted to readings of late Victorian aestheticist critics like Walter Pater and philosophical writers on aesthetics like George Santayana. Personal response was to be both an art-historical tool and a proper goal of scholarly activity. Berenson and Fry’s reintroduction of the aesthetic meant that, in addition to the use of Morellian details and technical aspects as a guide to the connoisseur’s judgment, aesthetic response was taken to be the factor that ultimately secured attribution.28 Qualitative analysis was “essential to the construction of any given artistic personality,” Berenson wrote in the 1901 book that most influentially set out his methods, so that while it had not been privileged in the traditional (Morellian) science of connoisseurship, “the Sense of Quality is indubitably the most essential equipment of a would-be connoisseur.”29 In his writing of the time, Berenson also maintained a distinction

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

27

Figure 7. Roger Fry, notes on Leonardo da Vinci, with comparison of ears by Leonardo and Lorenzo di Credi. Pencil in sketchbook. King’s College Library, Cambridge, Papers of Roger Eliot Fry, REF/4/1/1. Photo courtesy of the estate of Roger Fry / Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge.

between the decorative and literary qualities of art. Of these, it was the decorative (or formal) that carried a timeless aesthetic significance and by which artists communicated their own feelings or emotions—the key element both for attribution and proper appreciation.30 The “internal evidence” of the pictures themselves was the “supreme test,” as Fry put it in a 1902 survey of the current state of connoisseurship.31 But the reliance on internal evidence was not a matter of particular, definable (Morellian) forms. The primary means of analysis was a more general “feeling for form” that the critic would experience and employ in order to know the artist’s own creative activity. The model can be seen in practice in Berenson’s essay “Amico di Sandro,” first published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1899, which attempted to introduce a new individual to explain authorship of a group of paintings often

28

Art Writing

divided between Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Filippo Lippi.32 Berenson linked The Three Archangels and Tobias (fig. 8), the painting in which Amico di Sandro truly became a “distinct artistic personality,” with earlier works by the artist on the basis of particular details: the “square jaws, pointed chins, faulty noses . . . the hair curling and yet as of a wig” that are shared by figures in the paintings (50). The feeling betrayed by the forms of the work, however, now marked out the distinctive personality of the creator, who “reveals a gayer, more easy-going temperament than Sandro’s,” “does not take his art at all so earnestly,” and “is something of an improviser” (49). Berenson was able not only to discover an entirely new artistic personality on the basis of the works alone but to feel a wide range of that personality’s own experiences in front of the works of art—from the “dolorous yearning” of the painter to his “easy-going temperament” (45, 49). Berenson explained his method in this case as an attempt “without the aid of a single document or a single ‘literary’ hint, to construct an artistic personality; to show how it proceeded from, how it was influenced by, and how it influenced other such personalities; and even to establish with fair

Figure 8. Filippino Lippi, Three Archangels with Tobias, 1485. Oil on panel, 100 × 127 cm. Galleria Sabauda, Turin. Licensed by the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo, Musei Reali Torino.

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

29

accuracy the period when this personality was active.”33 According to Berenson’s method, the critic might separate the individual behind a work into two, with only creative activity (rather than biographical identity) able to be recovered by the critic’s personal response to the work. Alongside his emphasis on aesthetic response or qualitative analysis, Berenson stressed that a focus on the aesthetics of the artworks would lead not so much to the attribution of pictures to particular documented human agents as to the determination of the artistic personality or individual sensibility that lay behind the work: the hypothetical individual revealed by the experience of the work. Focus on the work itself would allow one to come to know the creative individual who had produced it, yet this individual would only secondarily be linked with some actual human agent. The qualitative “determination of purely artistic personalities” through the experience of the work itself came first, “and only then, and chiefly for mere convenience of naming, might one turn to documents . . . and attempt to connect with this abstract some actual personality in the past.”34 Roger Fry had long maintained that successful attribution was only a partial goal, with “true” criticism centered on “the appreciation of the painter’s intention and of the emotional equivalent of the picture.”35 The combined appeal to intention and personal experience of purely internal evidence points to the way in which Berenson’s example gave to art criticism a general model both of the actual subject matter of criticism and of the terms on which this was to be practiced. Formalism has often been taken as a shift towards the object, leading to a twentieth-century ideal of criticism interested in neither the artist’s intention nor the viewer’s reception but instead the artwork in itself: “a strong analogy between artworks and physical phenomena construed as objects suitably stable and determinate for the purposes of description, interpretation, criticism, and explanation.”36 Although the shift implied by connoisseurship was to an approach where the work itself would be the ground of any description and interpretation, however, its ultimate focus moved beyond the object itself to the imagined artistic personality revealed by it. As in Berenson’s writing on Amico di Sandro, the experience of formal structure leads to the hypothesis of an artistic personality, which in turn becomes an imaginative point of view from which other works are examined and analyzed. The spectator’s imaginary identification with the artistic personality found in or through the picture is folded into the analysis, becoming a central part of the process of looking at that object.37 The artistic personality becomes the

30

Art Writing

true object of criticism, as well as the means by which the critic engages with the art object. As much as the talk of spirit or sensibility might appear to date the notion, the underlying point was a logical and still popular one: namely, that the agent encountered in a body of work may be a very different one from the biographical subject to whom that work is attached. The intention of the artistic personality was simply whatever was successfully realized in the work of art—as recovered by the suitably imaginative (as well as qualified and sensitive) observer—and so was naturally to be sectioned off from anything not realized in the work that the actual artist may have thought and felt. This connection between intention and what is realized in the work rendered the artist’s stated or actual intentions of minimal interest, supplanted by the critic’s retrospective and artwork-based understanding of the true nature of the artist’s practice. The artistic personality was to be hypothetically reconstructed primarily through attention to the works alone, not only in genuinely imaginary cases where no real historical agent was known to exist—such as Amico di Sandro or the numerous artists hypothesized solely on the basis of extant works that could not be attributed to any known producer—but just as much so when the critic was presented with definite historical people. The resulting reliance of art writers on intent even without acknowledging it as such—what I have elsewhere called the appeal to “an attenuated form of intention”—is one of the most pervasive, though least noticed, legacies of formalism in art writing from the turn of the twentieth century through to the present day.38 The same idea—that the true intention was whatever was fully realized in the work or, put another way, that the work simply was its own meaning— has come to underwrite one of modernist criticism’s characteristic moves. In this move the critic views the work and practices imaginary psychological identification with the maker’s creative activity, in doing so prioritizing their own critical judgment over so-called external details about the life and expressed views of the maker. At the other end of the century, Clement Greenberg could, in the space of a few minutes, agree with an interviewer that he had no interest in artists’ intentions and then go on to reject the idea of religious or mystical symbolism in abstract art with a classic demonstration of imaginary psychological identification with the artist. Although some abstract artists used forms “derived from other forms that originally had symbolic meaning,” he stated, “It’s unthinkable that any of these artists would stand in front of the canvas and say, ‘Now I have to put a symbol down; there’s a symbol for this.’ They were trying to make good art.”39

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

31

Roger Fry’s Formalism Having cleared up the problem of how form and intent could come together, we can now turn to the conditions of formalist criticism and aesthetics more broadly. As I have already indicated, much of the subtlety and substance of Fry’s formalism was suppressed in both critical and laudatory responses to the writings of Fry and Bell. Fry’s ideas in particular however indicated not only that criticism and connoisseurship could be deeply connected but also—and perhaps more importantly—that attending to and experiencing form could allow one to access the creative activity of its maker. On this view, as closer analysis of his model of formalism reveals, careful inspection of the object opens up a prospective link between the present and the past. By the early 1900s, a number of formalist tendencies had appeared in England alone, but these were by no means systematically pursued and in all cases entailed some important qualifications.40 The arts and crafts movement’s rejection of narrative subject matter emphasized the decorative arts over actual picture making and still incorporated naturalistic representation into designs. Artists associated with symbolism and aestheticism (so Fry, at least, argued) forewent “expression” in their search for purely formal harmony or, in the case of many symbolists, still based their pictures on elaborate subject matter. New Art Criticism still insisted on the importance of subject matter as a basis or guide for the “treatment.”41 Strictly scientific connoisseurship as represented by some Burlington writers downplayed the aesthetic in favor of archival documentary evidence and non-aesthetic (Morellian) minor details of artworks.42 Finally, philosophers such as Bernard Bosanquet in his 1892 History of Aesthetic, and James Sully in his Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on “Aesthetics” (still in use in the 1911 edition), maintained a general division between form and expression.43 Roger Fry’s formalism, which developed to its characteristic version between his 1905 edition of Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses and his 1909 “Essay in Aesthetics,” is so telling and interesting because of the stridency with which it resolved these various qualifications and divisions. Just as Berenson had suggested that the artist communicated directly through decorative rather than literary qualities, Fry suggested that in the experience of properly artistic or aesthetic beauty (as opposed to the lesser stage of natural beauty), one felt conscious of a human artistic purpose behind the form of the artwork.44 (This division between sensuous or natural beauty and imaginative or aesthetic experience was a significant one, with Fry by 1920 claiming that it defined the two main groups of contemporary art.)45 Beyond the simple sensuous pleasure

32

Art Writing

of the abstract qualities of unity and variety (which, Fry noted, had been analyzed by Denman Ross in his Theory of Pure Design of 1907), the additional “emotional qualities of design” found in the artist’s departure from naturalistic norms of representation were—in a manner close to Berenson’s empathetic understanding of artistic appreciation—said to cause reactions based “upon the fundamental necessities of our physical and physiological nature.”46 The ability of such purposive, nonnatural form to impact the imaginative life of the viewer in this way could thus make good the link with the artist—and ultimately enact the role of art as “a means of communication between human beings,” which, according to Fry, had been best demonstrated by Tolstoy’s theory of art.47 The set of ideas around the distortion of the natural world in artistic creation, human purpose, and communication were played out in Fry’s art criticism and his connoisseurship alike, with the latter continuing alongside his growing interest in modern art. In the years surrounding the postimpressionist exhibitions of 1910–11 and 1912, Fry continued to make attributions in the pages of the Burlington Magazine and helped organize the abovementioned exhibition of old master paintings at the Grafton Gallery in 1911. One of his attributions of a painting—to Alesso Baldovinetti rather than Piero della Francesca—was made through careful analysis of a mode of paint application (a barely visible use of a dotting technique) unique to Baldovinetti (fig. 9).48 Fry’s text supplemented this visual scrutiny with a highly Morellian comparison of small formal details which he identified in another Baldovinetti work: similarities in the form of the nose, the demarcation of the top of the upper lips, the line between the lips, and the “method of design” of the folds of drapery.49 Only in Fry’s judgments about the “peculiar cleanness and sweetness in his line” does the essay hint that qualitative analysis might have been at work in tandem with attention to technique and pictorial detail, an idea confirmed by Fry’s reference in his very first discussion of the work ten years earlier to the discovery “throughout Baldovinetti’s work of a peculiar technique closely allied to a peculiar feeling for decorative effect.”50 More common was a direct link between attributions of authorship and qualitative judgments based on Fry’s shift from his own feeling for form to that of the artist. Defending one work on display at the 1911 exhibition from charges that it was merely a later copy of a lost original, Fry used the experienced feeling for form—the “characteristics of form which made a personal appeal to [the artist’s] sensibility”—as more or less his only real evidence.51 Fry compared the work, Piero di Cosimo’s Hylas and the Nymphs, to a painting by Botticelli judged to have provided the model for the nymph. As in the com-

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

33

Figure 9. Alesso Baldovinetti, Portrait of a Lady, 1465. Tempera and oil on wood, 62.9 × 40.6 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo © National Gallery, London.

parisons made in Berenson’s article on Amico di Sandro, it was the manner in which the artist had formally reinterpreted such details that revealed their individuality. “Piero,” Fry wrote, “shows the authentic nature of his inspiration in the totally new quality of linear rhythm which he imposes.”52 Fry’s analysis confidently proclaimed that the forms of the work not only marked out the general design as reminiscent of Piero but that their power was too strongly felt for the painting to be anything but an original work by the hand of Piero: “After examining it again carefully I cannot see how to accept this view [that the picture is a copy]. It seems to me to bear throughout the marks of original creative effort. Its very crudities and the extreme gaucherie of the figures are but characteristic proofs of the intense conviction and sincerity of Piero di Cosimo’s perplexing genius.”53

34

Art Writing

When it came to artists of his own time, Fry did not have to decide on the authenticity of works that had their authorship questioned. Amid conservative claims that the postimpressionism exhibition was “a colossal farce got up for the deception and exploitation of a gullible public,” however, he did have to decide on a related form of authenticity.54 Authenticity of this second kind involved the question of whether or not the work was a product of “sincere conviction” by the creator.55 For connoisseur-critics, versed in “feeling” the artistic personalities behind works, it was natural that this ability to know creative activity would extend to the art of the present. Due to its constant testing of boundaries and search for new values, modern art has always faced the threat of fraudulence, of being called fake or a sham.56 Though not usually linked, the twin authenticities show how modern art criticism could both rely on subjective judgment without rule and still model its results as provisionally objective. (In chapter 2, I discuss the complications and breakdown of this idea, while chapter 3 will turn to a further kind of authenticity that troubled critics: the artistic “sin of compromising with the public demand for pictures which arouse curiosity or gratify sentimental longings.”57) The priority of the modern artist discovered in the painting over the documented biographical agent can be seen in Fry’s account of Manet.58 Though Fry saw Manet’s work in terms of a turn to two-dimensional design, Manet—who died in 1883, when the success of even the original impressionists was far from secure—was not known to ever have talked of his own work in this way. Fry was well versed in nineteenth-century French art, literature, and history and knew of Charles Baudelaire’s writing on the “painting of modern life” as well as the illustrations of Constantin Guys, Honoré Daumier, and others who seemed to have pursued a Baudelaire-like program in their art.59 Analyzing Manet and those he grouped alongside him as postimpressionists, however, Fry took only slight notice of written evidence and carried out his historical analysis through the evidence of his own experience of the works in question. The painting of modern life was ignored as an aim, replaced entirely in Fry’s construction by Manet’s depth of concern for pictorial design. The critical prioritization of experience found an even stronger form in Fry’s commentary on a highly voluble contemporary.60 The British impressionist painter Walter Sickert, throughout a long friendship and rivalry with Fry, constantly declared that subject matter was crucial to art, often writing on illustrators like Guys and Daumier as the high points of nineteenth-century art. Despite Sickert’s sensitivity to what he called the “language of art,” he cast Fry’s theory of postimpressionism as an influential and disastrous

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

35

mistake, based on a faulty reading of the “wrong Messiah,” Paul Cézanne.61 Writing on Sickert, however, in essays thought important enough to reprint in his first collection, Vision and Design, Fry explained Sickert’s work through the general theory of “artistic vision” developed from his notion of postimpressionism.62 No matter what the painting seemed to represent, Sickert’s true subject, in Fry’s account, was the arrangement of forms that he in each case abstracted from the natural world and reassembled on his canvas. Paintings of urban subject matter glimpsed through thickly smeared and rubbed oil and pigment have, to later critics, seemed to be characteristically modernist attempts to test “the adequacy of painting as an investigative instrument for the apprehension of the realities of modern experience” (fig. 10).63 For Fry they were exemplary cases of works painted by an artist who placed no significance whatsoever on subject matter. Sickert had historically painted clearly identifiable and meaningful subjects—though being ambivalent in his own writing about whether form or subject matter was the true focus of his work—and in later works he emphasized subject matter in increasingly strenuous ways. Just as in 1906 Sickert had painted the first known depiction in oil of a cinema interior (The Gallery of the Old Mogul), at the other end of his career he moved in even closer, creating a work in which a scene from the film itself filled the canvas entirely (Jack and Jill, ca. 1936–38).64 In other paintings, dramatic, evocative, and recognizable subjects were picked out from everyday London life or newspaper photographs, and paintings and prints alike were supplemented with writing so that dates and places would be actually labeled or contemporary figures given voice. Fry was nonetheless reassured by the evidence of his own experience in the face of the works, as well as the kinds of experiences his view of modern art (as postimpressionism) taught him to expect. Fry, as a result, simply denied that Sickert the conscious being, who defended subject matter and literally wrote on his works, could overrule Fry’s own judgments about Sickert the creative artist, whose feeling for form took over whenever he began to create his works.65 For Fry, the contrast between Sickert’s conscious protests and his actual work merely showed Sickert to be “with deliberate perversity trying again and again to do what he knows to be wrong and with an almost pathetic fatality doing what is right.”66 It was left for writers like Hugh Walpole and Virginia Woolf to protest that Sickert’s works allowed for multiple possible readings, even as Fry’s version of the “true” Sickert came to dominate criticism for much of the century.67 Such extreme outcomes of Fry’s views have led many readers to the assumption that his formalism was designed as a method with which to weed

36

Art Writing

Figure 10. Walter Richard Sickert, Girl at a Looking-Glass, Little Rachel, 1907. Oil on canvas, 51.1 × 41 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Photo © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

out the formal and aesthetic from the literary and extra-aesthetic. The connoisseurial context emphasizes, however, how complex the motivation and practice behind the seemingly simple result was. While an ever-present part of early twentieth-century formalist aesthetics was the preference for “good” form, it is misleading to take this predilection as definitive of formalist critical practice.68 The broader or more practical point was a methodological one, such that inferences based on the purposiveness of pictorial organization were the primary means of access to the artistic personality behind the work. This was a kind of transfer that works out whether the form and its associated feeling are harmonious or in some way found wanting, for judgments about purposiveness were worked out in the only way they ever could be (and so still are to this day): on the basis of the thoughts and feelings to which the configuration of the work gave rise. For Fry and the many who followed him, the experience of attending to form—as the “how” of the picture’s construction—

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

37

allowed one to know which thoughts and feelings were down to the intentional structure of the work and which were irrelevant (merely personal and contingent) associations. The words of one recent defender of connoisseurship sum up the point neatly: it was a commitment “to the idea that style is meaningful, that it works.”69 The historical sense of form can be seen in action, finally, in returning to the account of impressionism and postimpressionism put forward in the years around 1910. For Fry the French impressionists marked the final stage in Western art’s “progressive triumph over the difficult feat of representing nature.”70 In the scientific realism of Claude Monet and others in the 1870s, brushwork on canvas was used to set down “the purely visual patchwork of appearance” given by the array of light on the retina.71 Impressionism as such simply continued the nineteenth-century pursuit of “photographic vision,” with an extreme neglect of pictorial design that resulted.72 Manet, on the other hand, anticipated the developments beyond impressionism’s dead end with a turn away from naturalistic representation, spurred by his “deep, perhaps unconscious, concern for the picture surface.”73 Already in the 1860s, Manet illuminated his pictures as if light streamed in frontally from a source located somewhere behind the artist, a strategy that reduced the half tones and shadows on objects and figures and instead emphasized the two-dimensional patterning on the picture plane formed by contours and harmonies of shade and hue (fig. 11).74 (In the later reading of this innovation by the American critic Clement Greenberg, indebted to Fry’s account: “Modernism used art to call attention to art,” and “Manet’s paintings became the first Modernist ones by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted.”75) Manet’s turn away from representation was “seized upon” by Paul Cézanne, the central artist of the new movement, whose path was “followed by two younger artists, [Vincent] Van Gogh and [Paul] Gauguin,” then others throughout Europe, the United States, and Russia.76 In all cases the art of these postimpressionists involved a turn away from unmediated re-presentation of the world in favor of a very personal set of visions. As much as Fry’s analysis draws heavily on external knowledge about artistic convention, it still relies on the all-important belief that close inspection of the works will allow one to come to know something about what they really are, with the link between past and present vision provided by form. For Fry, artists throughout history have different “passions” and “personalities,” with the “sentiment” the artist “wishes to convey” dependent on “how much

38

Art Writing

Figure 11. Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 130.5 × 190 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo courtesy of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

or how little naturalism the artist should employ.”77 Fry’s preference for good form can thus distract from the even more significant concern for mode or style of representation. Deviation from natural form—in pictorial representation, a move away from the full “presence” of a trompe l’oeil or other painting that is seen as no more than the real-life thing it depicts—means that the work exhibits human organization. In the pictorial case, the form of the work given by the artist’s creative filtering of natural appearances is what allows interpretation to get off the ground. It is the basis of thought about the set of actions that made it up and through which the artist’s vision, emotions, or experiences may tentatively be approached by a suitably informed and receptive viewer.

Aesthetics and Criticism After 1910 We’ve seen connoisseurs, Fry, and figures like Binyon and the “radical modernists” all support a communicative take on form. But is this view still nonetheless that of an isolated minority? In this final section I want to show how broadly the communicative idea took hold after 1910, looking to three

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

39

separate contexts, none of which are usually seen to be close to Fry’s thought. First of all, I consider I. A. Richards, the English literature academic and literary critic taken by many at the time to be directly opposed to Fry’s aesthetics. Second, I turn to a discussion of aesthetic theory by academic philosophers (an arena Kenneth Clark influentially and falsely implied had no interest in or connection with Fry’s ideas).78 And finally, I look at the spread of communicative formalism by popularizing writers working far outside of academics or other such rarefied areas. While Fry was gaining notoriety in the 1910s through round after round of exhibitions, public lectures, and essays, Richards was soon to gain a different kind of fame in the 1920s, speaking to Cambridge lecture rooms barely able to contain the numbers of students who showed up. Employed to teach on the new English tripos at Cambridge from 1919, Richards soon gained an enormous following due to the novelty and apparent rigor of his theoretical attention to questions of literature and aesthetics.79 Richards is now best known as the originator of “practical criticism” in the study of English literature, as well as for his influence on the New Critics in America. Prior to his most influential books of the 1920s, however, Richards carried out a kind of ground-clearing analysis of contemporary aesthetics that gives useful insight into discussions of the time. His writings of the period show an exasperation with what he saw as the almost universally accepted and entirely unexamined notion that art involved expression, and a contrary desire to replace this with a more precise and psychologically grounded explanation of the communication involved in art.80 In what he took to be a counter to theories like Fry’s, Richards disputed the assumption he thought common to almost all writers after Kant of a special aesthetic attitude and emotion and further cast doubt on the extent to which subject matter could be said to be irrelevant in the act of aesthetic appreciation.81 Yet what is so telling is the point of agreement: commenting on the importance Fry placed on Tolstoy, Richards twice proclaimed that the notion of art as the communication of something was simply self-evident, being “common ground to all aesthetics” and “the most obvious fact about [the arts].”82 Richards went as far as to suggest that the state of mind involved in the contemplation of significant form described by Fry and Bell may even be that described in Richards’s own chosen doctrine of synaesthesis—a theory that involved “contact with the personality of the artist” and a harmonization of impulses in a state of equilibrium notably detached, impersonal, and disinterested.83 A good work of art involved a valuable experience successfully

40

Art Writing

communicated, though Richards did not specify a method for analysis of the visual works that would result. In the book Foundations of Aesthetics, a scene from a fourth-century painted scroll attributed to Gu Kaizhi was illustrated alongside a comment that was only implicitly related to the object: “Art is a means of establishing relations with personalities not otherwise accessible. The gulf which separates us from ancient peoples, savages, enemies, allies, people of another sex, children, or the aged is thus bridged. . . . The exertions of the majority of anthropologists might have been more valuable had they not shown themselves unable or unwilling to use this obvious method of understanding.”84 Unlike Fry and Richards, contemporary academic philosophers of art in Britain had remarkably little visibility then and ever since. But, Richards was equally critical of the work of these philosophers as he was of Fry and Bell. Above all he took aim at Benedetto Croce, whose work and legacy in Britain provides a philosophical perspective on how art could be conceived of in terms of form, expression, and communication, without necessary reference to Fry’s or Bell’s views.85 Croce’s influence in Britain has merited surprisingly little attention since, though it may in part be due to the general lack of interest in the history of aesthetics in the country. The work in the philosophy of art that brought him particular notice was his Æsthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, published in 1902 and translated into English in 1909, so that in America and Britain it was from the later date onwards that he began to gain particular prominence in aesthetics and literary criticism.86 In the 1910s critics and writers on aesthetics such as Arthur Balfour, E. F. Carritt, Arthur Clutton-Brock, and Herbert Wildon Carr had published books that endorsed Croce’s view of art as intuitively felt and realized expression.87 These efforts were supported by the translations made by Douglas Ainslie, who in 1916 also set out Croce’s views over the course of two articles in the Burlington Magazine.88 Already by the later 1910s, the arts and crafts architect and founder of London’s Central School of Art and Design, W. R. Lethaby, was admitting with some distaste that Croce “has perhaps made the most mark of recent writers on aesthetics.”89 Croce’s influence grew increasingly through the twenties and thirties: expressly taken up by major philosophers such as the successive holders of the Waynflete Professorship of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford between 1910 and 1941, J. A. Smith and R. G. Collingwood;90 adopted or at least acknowledged as dominant by a range of lesser philosophers, educationalists, art and literary critics, and others;91 and officially enshrined in Croce’s 1929 “Aesthetics” article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.92 In the

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

41

following decade, the contemporary historian of aesthetics the Earl of Listowel, trained in London and at the Sorbonne, recalled of the twenties that “in academic circles Croce was hailed at this time as the thinker who had said all but the last word on aesthetics, and the two stout volumes of his Aesthetic had become the vade-mecum of the average university lecturer and professor interested in the subject.”93 Speaking not just of academic philosophy but of modern criticism more generally, Herbert Read later suggested that Croce’s influence had been of far greater significance than was usually acknowledged.94 The consequences for art and form were perhaps most clearly summed up by the philosopher Louis Arnaud Reid in a 1929 analysis of the state of aesthetics in Britain. Reid agreed with I. A. Richards that Fry, Bell, and the former Oxford professor of poetry A. C. Bradley should be placed together in one group as the extreme or “pure critics” but suggested, in addition, that Croce provided a better route: a way to reconcile ideas of form and autonomy with art’s deep connection with, and importance to, spiritual life.95 Croce’s view that all intuition was itself aesthetic and expressive suggested that the division between art and life was really quantitative rather than qualitative—life itself was made up of the same aesthetic stuff as the artwork, which as such differed from everyday life in degree rather than in kind. Croce could nonetheless hold “that the ‘content’ of art is of no aesthetic importance,” for it was solely the form of intuition expressed in the actual work of art that was relevant (the subject’s creative [in Croce’s case, purely mental] activity rather than the object intuited).96 In 1931 Reid could even apply his Crocean thinking to an endorsement of “significant form” as the quality “common to all works of art whatsoever.”97 In Reid’s usage, significant form brought together “meaning and perceived form,” with the two united in “aesthetic ‘imagination’ or ‘imaginativeness.’”98 Expression, according to the line of thought linked with Croce, was not just a vague gesture at emotion but a claim to content quite specifically expressed and re-creatable, a point demonstrated in a fascinating manner in R. G. Collingwood’s comments on Cézanne. Cézanne’s importance, Collingwood wrote, lay in his move beyond the impressionist aim of “squirting light on a canvas.”99 According to the “Cézanne-Berenson approach,” that is, the return of tactility to painting, Cézanne “began to paint like a blind man”: His still-life studies, which enshrine the essence of his genius, are like groups of things that have been groped over with his hands. . . . Trees never looked like that; that is how they feel to a man who encounters them with his eyes shut,

42

Art Writing

blundering against them blindly. A bridge is no longer a pattern of colour . . . ; it is a perplexing mixture of projections and recessions, over and round which we find ourselves feeling our way as one can imagine an infant feeling its way, when it has barely begun to crawl, among the nursery furniture. And over the landscape broods the obsession of Mont Saint-Victoire, never looked at, but always felt, as a child feels the table over the back of its head.100

Collingwood here explicitly rejects form as mere shape, with the bridge “no longer a pattern of colour.” Instead he seems to know the artist’s own imagined participation in the scene (“that is how they feel to a man who encounters them with his eyes shut”) and through this even intimates the experienced presence of things not immediately visible (Mont Saint-Victoire felt “as a child feels the table over the back of its head”). Underlying this kind of interpretation is almost the very opposite of an escapist search for pure beauty or personal experience: an ideal of identity of mind between artist and critic, as Samuel Alexander had it.101 In Collingwood’s own formulation, the artist “paints his picture in such a way that we, when we look at it using our imagination, find ourselves enjoying an imaginary experience of total activity like that which he enjoyed when painting it.”102 Croce had his strong critics and opponents, a particularly common complaint being that his aesthetics took no notice of the medium or material of the artists’ works—as if artists were able to simply pre-form works entirely in their minds and subsequently transfer this mental stuff into the material works without resistance or remainder.103 The revised edition of what had been one of the first major histories of aesthetics to document the period actually saw the first few decades of the twentieth century as a battle on exactly these grounds between Croce’s idealist view of the artwork as expressed intuition and George Santayana’s materialist view of the artwork as objectified pleasure.104 Yet in practice the theoretical distinction between idealism and materialism or realism was regularly elided. It may not be surprising that a practical critic like Berenson endorsed form together with more materialist, empathy-based theories (noting that he used “tactile values” as a direct substitute for “form”),105 but even the most famous realist and idealist philosophers in Britain, Alexander and Collingwood, respectively, conversed in detail about the fundamental compatibility of their aesthetics.106 The apparent conflict between materialism and idealism dissolved in agreement that the artist’s realization of the work took place in relation to the material qualities of the medium. Alexander and Collingwood both held that

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

43

the work was not mentally pre-formed, being shaped in and through the entire process of creation. Disagreement, such as it existed, was simply over whether Croce’s aesthetics were compatible with this view. In 1933 the Oxford philosopher E. F. Carritt’s short history of twentieth-century aesthetics told of the developing recognition of “art as expression,” leading from George Santayana and Henri Bergson through to the present triumph of Croce, not as a history of conflict but as a gradual and cumulative journey towards the wide agreement found in the present moment.107 The extraction of a general model from multiple, apparently conflicting theories was even more easily effected in mainstream art criticism of the time (where the antisystematizing bias of British art writing worked not as a hindrance to art theory as such but only to a truly systematic view that would subscribe exclusively to just one philosophy).108 The widespread contemporary will to simplification and conflation is perfectly demonstrated in the explicitly popularizing and pedagogical writing of figures such as Margaret Bulley. Bulley’s work is a remarkable example of the way in which apparent factions in the art world were bridged. She was in contact with Laurence Binyon and the philosopher Bernard Bosanquet in the 1910s,109 was involved as principal arts lecturer and educator with the Arts League of Service (in part heavily populated by former members of the Rhythm group) in the 1920s,110 was a contact of Fry and the formalism-influenced art educationalist Marion Richardson,111 and later was an active member of the design and functionalism-oriented Design and Industries Association.112 Though largely forgotten now, Bulley’s legacy survives in an eponymous collection of decorative art at the Victoria & Albert Museum that includes a number of Omega Workshop pieces by Roger Fry, as well as a series of letters in the museum’s archive harassing Kenneth Clark and others for funding for yet another of her books aimed at the improvement of public taste (points I return to in chapters 3 and 4 below).113 Bulley’s 1925 book, Art and Counterfeit, was derived in part from lectures delivered for the Arts League of Service but was also produced with the support of the Burlington Magazine’s editor and some of its major writers.114 The book was variously praised in the highest terms in places ranging from the Daily Telegraph to the British Journal of Psychology, with the Times Literary Supplement calling it “one of the most instructive and entertaining books on art that we have read for a long time” and the middle-of-the-road art magazine the Studio proclaiming it “an almost ideal way of ‘explaining art.’”115 Bulley’s basic tenets were that artists expressed their own experiences or visions of the world through the formal properties of their art or their

44

Art Writing

“design”—in doing so, making contact with “reality”—and that proper experiences of artworks involved the viewers’ re-creations of the artists’ aesthetic or “spiritual” experiences in the creation of the pictures. In each section of Art and Counterfeit, Bulley compiled quotations from authorities of the past who confirmed this view of art as the discovery of artistic sensibility in the formal design of the artwork, a strategy that equated the views of Fry and Berenson with an astonishing range of writers and philosophers from Alberti and Vasari to Tolstoy and Croce.116 Echoing points made by Fry, Bulley stressed the difference between “natural” and “artistic” beauty as well as the relative insignificance of representation.117 What Bulley also, crucially, shared with Fry was the idea that a focus on form in works was the route to a rich array of communicated experiences: “For it is to design that in our final evaluation we return. We judge the paintings of the Stone Age by the same standards as those of to-day, not by the formal structure only, since this is psychologically impossible, but by the quality, richness, and precision of the experience as conceived, embodied, and communicated in terms of design.”118 Though Bulley stressed art’s “embodiment and communication of a state of mind,” she also held such experiences to be beyond reason, reached only in imaginative contemplation.119 Her art writing thus stayed at the level of historical and formal description, assuming but not attempting to describe deeper experiences. The artistic development from impressionism to Cézanne was, for example, explained simply as a shift from the attempt to paint light, often to the detriment of design, to Cézanne’s reintroduction of solid, significant form. Works that failed to live up to the ideal of formal quality are treated harshly, as in her description of a head by John Singer Sargent from his Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885–86): “Where is the suggestion of weight and balance, of underlying solid three-dimensional forms? How thin and paperlike the structure is, and how insensitive! This painter has planned his design in three dimensions, but has failed to suggest them. We have a flat and flimsy head on flat and flimsy shoulders. No pleasure can be gained from a subtle inter-relationship of the planes of the face, because the author has not felt this pleasure himself, or has not been able to express it. In comparison with . . . Velázquez how anæmic is the experience communicated!”120 Bulley’s firm dismissal of Sargent shows a characteristic confidence in the ability to correctly “feel” the works. Not only is “no pleasure” to be gained by the viewer, but this is ruled to be either a case of outright inauthenticity (the artist’s failure to experience aesthetic pleasure) or sheer incompetence (the artist’s inability to express that pleasure). The writing equally assumes

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

45

that largely formal descriptions of relative plasticity or flatness are accurate judgments about the painter’s activity. From such judgments access to the experience communicated can be assumed, even though this experience is not something that the critic can actually hope to articulate. Many have acknowledged the role of “design” in the 1920s as the fundamental explanatory term or even synonym for art everywhere from arts journals to governmental arts discussions.121 Without the host of assumptions to do with communication of experience addressed above, however, it has previously been difficult to understand why it became so natural for mainstream writers to regularly celebrate expressive distortion but denigrate mere decoration. “Design” and “decoration” were set up as binary terms denoting a distinction between form that was expressive of deeper emotion and form that was merely attractive. As Fry had originally intended in his 1909 “Essay in Aesthetics,” “design” and “significant form” did not just come to mean the aesthetics of formal patterning but also the richness of artistic experience that was stimulated by properly created form. Writers since have also often assumed that any mention of “significance,” “aesthetic emotion,” “disinterested appreciation,” and other such terms in the interwar years implied the direct influence of Fry and Bell. Yet as my narrative has suggested, their ideas were part of a general trend in art theory, too broadly spread amongst philosophers, literary critics, and other popular critics to be pinned on the two writers alone—even though close examination of their thought is a useful guide—and based on terms and arguments in use long before the postimpressionist exhibitions. It is true that Fry simplified and expressed concepts such as the tie of significance, expression, and form in a way that many found extremely useful. Nonetheless, though it has been proposed that “Fry’s aesthetics have a subtlety which transcends the widely disseminated ideas about ‘significant form’ which were abroad in the twenties,” it may in fact be the subtlety of these “widely disseminated ideas” that must be addressed in order to gain a better grasp of early to mid-twentieth-century art discourse.122 Bell himself recognized this very point. In the early 1920s he wrote of the “prevailing critical theory” of the time as that which not only rejected subject matter and external association but also combined an interest in the intrinsic (formal) properties of the work with the experience of manifold things expressed by the artists: “[Viewers] will recognize, for instance, the tragedy of Michael Angelo, the gaiety of Fra Angelico, the lyricism of Correggio, the gravity of Poussin, and the romance of Giorgione. They recognize them as pertaining, not to the subjects chosen, but to the mind and character of the artist. Such manifestations

46

Art Writing

in line and color of personality they admit as relevant; but they are quite clear that the gossip of Frith and the touching prattle of Sir Luke Fildes are nothing to the purpose.”123 For such critics, in Bell’s account, art is an aesthetic route to the experiences of life—to the tragedy, gaiety, romance, or whatever else is embodied by each artist. The only stricture on relevance is that such experience be conveyed by the “mind and character of the artist” through formal means rather than by any subject chosen, which is to say that the “significance” of a picture is “implicit in its forms,” with viewers “moved æsthetically” when “responding to “manifestations in line and colour of personality.”124 Writing in the abstract, Bell here and elsewhere praised art and art criticism that took a purer approach than this to form. But to see how far Bell’s own criticism strayed from attention to form in isolation, one only need look at his comments on the artist he found to be the antithesis of his beloved Cézanne. The “representative figure of the age,” Bell wrote of the eighteenth-century French painting he despised, is Greuze; Greuze led by his animator and head-turner Diderot . . . the good qualities of Greuze disappear beneath such a mess of vulgar insincerity as seldom or never was smeared on canvas by one whom even for a moment serious judges took seriously. . . . Greuze and his inheritrix Madame Vigée-Lebrun, have ejected across the ages a slime so copious and penetrating that a good deal of what is most repulsive in the popular pictures of the last hundred years can be traced to them. Les enfants d’Edouard, A distinguished member of the Royal Humane Society, Bubbles, Vertige, are to be laid at their door. They are the source of the infection. We catch of you, Greuze.125

The sources, complexities, and consequences of such horror at supposed academic and commercial sentimentality—what certain critics called “popular” art—will be taken up in chapters 3 and 4 below. First, though, I turn in chapter 2 to the complications of the communicative theory outlined in this chapter, which the richness of writing like Bell’s practical art and literary criticism threatened to stretch to breaking point.

Form and Modernist Aesthetics On or About 1910

47

2 The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s

If Édouard Manet was, by a trick of timing, the first postimpressionist, Paul Cézanne was the perfect one. Cézanne “was the great genius of the whole movement,” Fry wrote in 1910, and by the time he came to publish a book on the artist in 1927, he recorded that the “artists among us whose formation took place before the war recognize Cézanne as their tribal deity, and their totem.”1 As the artist who meant most in the formation of modern art, Cézanne provided a test case of sorts for the furthest reaches of formalist criticism. In his “Retrospect” essay of 1920, Fry had refused to attempt to explain the deepest value of art, for any such endeavor “would probably land me in the depths of mysticism. On the edge of that gulf I stop.”2 Fry’s writing on Cézanne at times seemed to echo that hesitation, with the critic admitting to “find[ing] myself, like a mediæval mystic before the divine reality, reduced to negative terms.”3 Venturing positive statements, the “helplessness of language” left Fry “forced to search for poetical analogies even to adumbrate at all the emotional effects” of Cézanne’s works.4 All the same, Fry offered quite specific psychologizing commentary about Cézanne’s practice, his motivations, and the experiences embodied in his works (fig. 12): Though he had no dramatic purpose, though it would be absurd to speak of the drama of his fruit dishes, his baskets of vegetables, his apples spilt upon the

48

kitchen table, none the less these scenes in his hands leave upon us the impression of grave events. If the words tragic, menacing, noble or lyrical seem out of place before Cézanne’s still-lifes, one feels none the less that the emotions they arouse are curiously analogous to these states of mind. It is not from lack of emotion that these pictures are not dramatic, lyric, etc. but rather by reason of a process of elimination and concentration. They are, so to speak, dramas deprived of all dramatic incident. One may wonder whether painting has ever aroused graver, more powerful, more massive emotions than those to which we are compelled by some of Cézanne’s masterpieces in this genre.5

One of formalist criticism’s major claims, derived from the scientific criticism of connoisseurship, was to have overcome the freewheeling subjectivity of previous generations of art writers. A host of resources were drawn on to justify the superiority of formalism over the “impressionistic” or “aesthetic” criticism of Walter Pater and others of the late nineteenth century, including ideas around disinterest, communal inquiry, the psychology of introspection, and psychoanalysis. The immense weight placed on personal response

Figure 12. Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples, ca. 1877–78. Oil on canvas, 19 × 27 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Lent by the Provost and Fellows of King’s College (Keynes collection). © Reproduced by the kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge.

The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s

49

nonetheless made art-critical claims to objectivity deeply controversial. Close attention to form was a means of ensuring that art writing could not only document rich experiences of the artwork but that this documentation would capture something of the artistic personality or intention—the historical experience—behind the work. But how rich a range of experiences might actually be embodied in works of art, how secure were the critics’ claims to have replicated the experience or imaginative activity of the artist, and to what extent could these experiences ever be set out in language? The range of responses to these questions helps shed light on how formalist method could survive even as new understandings of psychology, psychoanalysis, and objective historical method all threatened to undermine the notion of a scientific criticism grounded in aesthetic response.

The Artist’s Vision: Scientific, Objective, and Aesthetic Criticism In chapter 1 we saw connoisseurship branding itself the science of art criticism and, in so doing, reinforcing the claim of criticism to correctly judge the activity out of which works are made up. Here I want to return to the point, examining the conditions of, and the use of, form in criticism that claimed to offer a correct account of works in a way that would leave behind the literary or impressionistic practices of previous generations. Many writers have discussed the aspirations to scientific status, antiidealist philosophy, and a revived interest in psychology within a literary and artistic culture in Britain that was largely in thrall to the empirical and the methods of science.6 Decades earlier Vernon Lee and Clementina AnstrutherThomson had led the way in carefully measuring bodily responses to works of art, but still, by the 1920s, few believed that resorting to the laboratory and the world of empirical psychology was the right way to come to terms with the finer points of aesthetic experience.7 In the hands of writers such as I. A. Richards, psychology was instead still thought to involve primarily introspection—the self-examination of one’s own experience.8 And it was this primacy of introspection that brought psychology into line with the aesthetic investigations of Roger Fry and the science of criticism. Introspection as a critical tool was given its validation by the empiricist and positivist belief that through acquaintance by introspection our own feelings and thoughts could be encountered directly. Properly studied, personal experience might be a tool in objective scientific analysis, its data as

50

Art Writing

real and incontrovertible as any other.9 Such proper study of personal experience in turn entailed a few conditions. The analysis of experience required a disinterested or depersonalized attitude to ensure the interpretation of mental data would not be clouded by irrelevant personal concerns. The recording of experience required the kind of commensurate, logical, or clear language that could allow such subjective experiences to be made intersubjective, permitting them to be communicated and compared amongst the group of researchers.10 The requirements were registered in appeals by Fry for a shared language and a fair communal atmosphere.11 Defending his own method in 1919, he noted, “What . . . I and some other enquirers are endeavouring is to analyse and describe certain extremely elusive psychological phenomena—namely, our reactions to works of art. In attempting this we are using language to adumbrate certain states which are not exactly definable in language.”12 What Fry described as his “purely practical” aesthetic was based on “provisional induction from my own æsthetic experiences” as opposed to the abstract theorizing of the “metaphysicians.”13 In doing so he faced not just the problem of holding one’s “reaction to a work of art clearly in view,” but equally of “translating [that reaction] into words.”14 This practice, as I explore it below, effectively placed “disinterested” lovers of art in the roles of introspective, psychological researchers, with their experiences to be shared, compared, and generally treated as scientific data for aesthetics.15 Disinterest and plain language, then, were the ideas around which scientific and aesthetic claims to impartiality came together. Crucially, disinterestedness or detachment here functioned as anything but the hallmarks of a singular and pure aesthetic experience (as critics of modernist criticism have occasionally assumed). Instead, scholarly impartiality grounded the idea of a historical study of artworks that could at once operate aesthetically and make claims for the objectivity of its results.16 Through experience of the work, critics claimed to move from their own trained sensibility to the artistic personality in the work, leaving behind potential worries about the haze of commercial interest or responses that were subjective in the sense of merely personal. For Max Friedländer, the “impression [that] fills us with pleasurable satisfaction—with ‘disinterested pleasure’ as the aestheticians say”—was the means of access to the “emotional values experienced by the artist in his vision”: “We stand in expectation of some such kind of delight as a work of art can produce . . . and we decide on authorship and authenticity according as such an experience does or does not take place.”17 Or as Herbert Read, certainly no defender of purist aesthetics, put it, “The appreciation of

The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s

51

art demands an abnegation of self, a surrender of the will. Only by lowering oneself, humbling oneself before a work of art can one enter into the artist’s vision and intention, and so rise again to the heights to which he would transport us.”18 As Berenson had admitted at the turn of the century and as Friedländer maintained even by the time of his 1942 On Art and Connoisseurship, the path from artwork to artist’s vision was an aesthetic one.19 The final judgment should always rest not on aspects such as documentary or archival sources or distinct pictorial details in the manner of Morelli but in the intuitive sense of quality felt before the work.20 It has since given rise to so much misunderstanding that it is worth stressing again how broadly disinterested experience could be conceived. The Earl of Listowel in his Critical History of Modern Aesthetics of 1933 explained it as “the almost universally accepted doctrine of the disinterestedness and detachment of the aesthetic attitude, its complete freedom from the domination of practical or ideal interests.”21 In Listowel’s international survey of aesthetics, he attributed aspects most often associated with disinterest—such as the imaginative or contemplative nature of the aesthetic attitude, with resulting freedom from morality and practical action—not just to formalism but to art theories ranging from expression and play to contemporaneous experimental aesthetics and German art history.22 In words of Listowel’s that show the absurdity of caricatures about the narrowness of disinterested experiences associated with form, when the principle of disinterestedness has been challenged, as it was by Nietzsche, its rejection has been due to a serious misunderstanding. For no one seriously maintains that the impassioned devotion that beauty awakens in the soul, and the spirit of selfless service in which it is pursued by the elect, are not part and parcel of the truly artistic vision; the principle under discussion really signifies that the creative or contemplative moment is not overshadowed by organic, practical, or ideal interests,—such as appetite for food and drink, lascivious or acquisitive desire, religious, moral, or speculative issues—involving so complete an abandonment to, and absorption in the experience itself, that all alien and irrelevant interests, whether in themselves noble or base, are automatically excluded. It is in this sense, and only in this sense, that the aesthetic attitude may be described as completely disinterested.23

Listowel’s comments emphasize that the disinterested critical attitude was not just an appropriate one with which to judge or to have a pure and singular

52

Art Writing

aesthetic experience. Instead, it could be part of a multivalent experience of the artwork that involved “impassioned devotion” and at the same time re-created the imaginative activity of the artist.24 Listowel, as I noted in the previous chapter, elsewhere closely echoed scientific criticism’s dream of matching the viewer’s and artist’s experiences in his description of the re-creative power of disinterested critical contemplation: “The objectivity and universal validity of the standard judgment is guaranteed in the last instance by the identity between the perfect critic’s mind in the moment of contemplative delight and the imaginative vision of the artist himself.”25 The focus on experience and re-creation here helps mark off the historically minded formalism of Fry and of modernist criticism from the best-known contemporaneous art-historical formalism: that associated with Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History. In that book, published in 1915 and widely distributed in the United Kingdom and United States after its translation into English in 1932, Wölfflin focused on what he called the “second root” of style. Rather than “expression” (the “first root” of style) and “quality,” Wölfflin used the formal properties of artworks to investigate broad changes over time in “modes of seeing” or “forms of imagination.”26 For Wölfflin, this historical study of vision and its sedimentation in pictorial form simply was art history, properly understood. But Fry, crucially, had no interest in the analysis of form when practiced in isolation from expression and quality. Fry explicitly criticized German-language art history for its neglect of aesthetic matters, and in the extended reprint of his review of Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History, he even digressed from his account of the book into a long attack on “the brilliant charlatanism of Caravaggio” and that artist’s malign influence on future generations.27 (The section was developed from an earlier and even more strongly worded discussion of Caravaggio as “an essentially journalistic talent”—“What an impresario for the cinema!”—after whom others “went a-whoring.”28) Like many British art critics and historians who followed in his wake, Fry read Wölfflin against the grain. The great proponent of the historical study of vision was not described as the creator of a set of analytic categories for the objective analysis of form but as a master of psychologizing who also incorporated quality, expression, and imaginative reenactment into his analyses. Wölfflin’s great merit was that he “looks at art with some understanding of the problems of the creator” and “does not merely see what there is in a work of art” but “knows what mental conditions in the artist’s mind are implied by that configuration.”29 It is telling here that the British art historian Michael Baxandall, trained in close reading while studying English at Cambridge with

The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s

53

F. R. Leavis, later spoke of Wölfflin as doing “close observation” of a kind that “fitted the literary critical training I’d had.”30 This is a Wölfflin whom one reads not for grand historical narratives about shifts in vision and pictorial form but so as to sharpen one’s attention to the visual specifics of individual works and the set of aims that made them look the way they do. With its interests in quality, experience, and imaginative enactment, formalist criticism of Fry’s kind, in fact, has a striking though rarely noticed similarity to late nineteenth-century aesthetic criticism: what Walter Pater called “the best sort of criticism, the imaginative criticism . . . which is itself a kind of construction, or creation, as it penetrates, through the given literary or artistic product, into the mental and inner constitution of the producer, shaping his work.”31 When, in the preface to his book The Renaissance, Pater cited Matthew Arnold’s dictum that the aim of all true criticism was “to see the object as in itself it really is,” it was not so as to reject the notion but instead to add the correction that “in æsthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.”32 The problem for formalist critics was not the emphasis on personal response here, the command to know the object through one’s own engagement with it, to “know one’s own impression as it really is.” More troubling was the step taken by writers after Pater like Oscar Wilde, who suggested that in cultivating a properly “creative” personal response the critic was left entirely free in each case to construct however new an object as they desired: “The highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself.”33 The problem was tellingly described in the 1920s by Clive Bell, in a notably charitable discussion of “impressionist criticism” (by which he meant the “aesthetic criticism” of Pater alongside other critics in his wake who privileged personal response above all else). Bell portrayed this form of criticism as a practice in which the critic “clears his mind” of past knowledge and “merely tells us what a book, a picture, or a piece of music makes him feel.”34 According to Bell, such criticism “can be intensely exciting; what is more, it has made vast additions to our æsthetic experience. It is the instrument that goes deepest.”35 Yet Bell ultimately condemned impressionist criticism for the unwarranted subjectivity to which it could lead. Bell credited Fry for having made a crucial shift beyond impressionist critical method through his attention to the formal properties of artworks.36 The proposal that Fry’s method was a corrective rather than a break was left to another

54

Art Writing

regular Burlington contributor, Gwilym Price-Jones, writing after Fry’s death in 1934: Fry had in fact “made modern æsthetic criticism in this country.”37 According to Price-Jones, “Fry’s criticism . . . forms one long vindication of the feasibility and the value of æsthetic criticism, having for its major premise the belief that, by cultivating the requisite degree of introspective detachment, it is possible to correlate our æsthetic experiences to a stage beyond the merely particular and subjective.”38 Fry’s introspective and experimental method had all along depended on the example of aesthetic criticism, updating and modernizing rather than rejecting that mode. That Fry’s links with aesthetic criticism were not more widely recognized had much to do with his aversion to the subjectivity raised by Bell, including the poetically loose language that accompanied the neglect of the introspective detachment of scholarly method. Fry displayed a deep interest in the experimental writing of his friend Virginia Woolf and spent years working in homage on a translation of poems by Stéphane Mallarmé. His suggestion that it would take “the mastery of the poet” to “translate into words” personal reactions to artworks with “accuracy” might well be taken to imply an endorsement of the poetic and lyrical in art writing.39 At the same time, however, Fry discussed the notion of talent in art writing only in as much as it might help communicate one’s meaning more precisely and never entertained the possibility of a cognitive value in stylistically experimental writing on art. In the early 1920s Fry admitted to youthful reading of Walter Pater and John Ruskin, the latter producing a great impression on him as a boy. He added that he lost interest when he realized that Ruskin “talked a great deal of nonsense” and that Pater was more of a “poet” than an “art authority.”40 When, around the same time, the poet and art historian Herbert Horne’s 1908 book on Botticelli was criticized in the younger art historian Yukio Yashiro’s new book for its dryness, Fry took up the attack as a lesson in the rights and wrongs of art criticism.41 Reviewing Yashiro’s book, Fry contrasted Horne’s “formidable learning” stemming from “passionate æsthetic devotion” with Yashiro’s “reliance on vague impressions [that] makes him a very insecure guide to the clear understanding of Botticelli’s art. He is so pleased to expatiate upon his own subjective impressions, he follows at such length what the Freudians would call his ‘free associations’ with the ideas suggested to his mind, that as we attempt to follow him we lose all contact with fifteenth-century Florence.”42 Horne’s account of the Birth of Venus involved a meticulous recounting of the story behind the work as well as the painting’s stylistic features, allusions, and physical condition. Quoting Pater a number of times in his book,

The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s

55

Horne’s few moments of strongly expressed aesthetic judgment still tended to note specific points of technique or art history to which the reader could anchor those judgments: “In the exquisite art by which the masses of her hair, caught by the breath of the Winds, are portrayed with a sense of hieratic voluptuousness, ‘sicut purpura regis,’ Botticelli forestalls something of Leonardo’s power of giving definite expression to the fleeting shapes of such mutable things, as clouds or waves.”43 Yashiro, on the other hand, was open about his aim to “vindicate the sentimental love for Botticelli” developed in the late nineteenth century by poets and writers like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Pater, and Ruskin.44 Scholarly in his collection of facts, Yashiro nonetheless rejected past commentary and allowed personal experience of the work to lead to highly speculative psychologizing conclusions about the artist. Where Horne stayed close to a pictorial or art-historical detail (a mass of hair or a Leonardesque goal), Yashiro’s associative moves drifted lyrically from such secure reference points. The “soul” of Botticelli, he wrote of the Birth of Venus, “in an agony of beautiful sin, seems to be reflected in the trembling but dreamy Venus. To one who is not sensuous, the question of the flesh is simple. He shuns the danger, or, rather, there is no danger. To Botticelli the spiritual danger, hidden in the flesh, must have been great in proportion with his extreme sensuousness. I imagine that to him the female body was the ‘white ghost’ of mediaeval fancy. She looms out of the night, menacing him with an awful charm.”45 On the combined evidence of the paintings and an account of a dream in which Botticelli expressed fear of marriage, Yashiro goes on to pit this “sensuous Botticelli” directly against the “special chastity” of Horne’s artist. The latter, for Yashiro, was part of a widespread “puritanical prejudice in understanding great men of the past.”46 Fry’s response is so interesting because it stakes a claim to the true legacy of the late nineteenth century rather than just calling for criticism to move on. Fry wrote that for Horne’s generation, emerging from the shadow of aestheticism and Pater’s aesthetic criticism, “Paterism was almost synonymous with Botticellianism,” and that for this reason Horne’s book was in some ways a deliberate reaction, an embrace of reason as the result of an even greater aestheticism: “The excessive austerity and dryness of that book is dictated, no doubt, by an æsthetic ideal, but it is no longer the Paterian ideal. With Pater, feeling found its end in an exuberant richness of expression; with Horne, a profounder, more passionate feeling must be translated into patient research and the dry, precise statement of hard-won facts.”47 For Fry, in other words, in order to do historical work with something as supposedly wild and subjective

56

Art Writing

as aesthetic experience—to make it available to communal examination—one had to work all the harder to avoid the dead end of subjective impressions left to roam entirely free. Scientific criticism had corrected aesthetic criticism and made it modern by stressing that artworks were humanly produced objects, and as such, the experience of the artistic personality that created them set the bar for the proper set of thoughts and feelings to be had in front of the artwork. While introspection was a privileged investigative route, the experience needed to be correlated with the experiences of other investigators, checked against historical evidence, and set out in a clearly communicable manner. That the ultimate end of scientific criticism might be the imaginative re-creation of the artistic vision is hardly surprising for a critic who claimed (in essays of the 1920s) that to “make full contact with a work of art” was to “come to terms of intimacy with its creator,”48 that “the whole object and purpose of the work of art is the expression of the artist’s peculiar sensibility,”49 and that the “respect” and “attention” devoted to “masters” was in order to “apprehend the nature of their states of mind.”50 But re-creation as an end needed to be approached with varying degrees of caution that often obscured its guiding presence. Art-critical texts in practice had to move between judgments of authorship or quality, description of the key features of form or design itself, and elements of the particularly relevant (pictorially generated) experience the work gave rise to in contemplation, all shadowed by the rarely mentioned knowledge of the history of commentary on the work. Fry’s ideal, as he had put it many years earlier in revealing praise for Berenson’s book Lorenzo Lotto, was something akin to “a psychological romance made out of the minutest, sometimes the driest criticism of style.”51 The complexity of the aim entailed a constant oscillation in actual art-critical writing. On the one hand, critics must attend closely to the description of form, observing works in the present day and commenting on what is immediately apparent. On the other, critics must look at works as if they themselves have become the artists who first made those works, with description carried out on the basis of that empathetic identification with the process of looking and making.52 Of these the more immediate description of form is often thought of as the province of formalist analysis. But in fact observation of the work’s immediately present features acted as much as the grounding for the imaginative re-creation or psychological reenactment of the activity of the artistic personality. According to such an idea, the relevant plastic or emotional elements of design were crucial to the proper

The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s

57

contemplation of the artwork, yet proper contemplation involved not just attention to these but to the experiences and deeper forms of imaginative engagement they gave rise to. Description in its fullest sense involves (just as in Pater) imagination and communication of a fascinatingly broad range of experiences had in front of the work. Take Fry writing on The Fall of Icarus (fig. 13), then thought to be by Pieter Brueghel, at around the same time as his comments on Botticelli, Horne, and Yashiro: The mere fact of taking a classical myth as his pretext has set Brueghel free to indulge in a wider, more unconditioned vision than was his wont. One cannot doubt from his drawings that so curiously observant a spirit as his, was deeply impressed by the landscapes that he traversed on his way to Italy, and here it is hardly fantastic to see the effect on his mind of some first glimpse of the Mediterranean, the record of the emotions of strangeness and wonder with which he greeted so unfamiliar a sight. Something of his habitual curiosity and precision remains in the subtle harmonies of violet greys and orange of the sky, with its anticipation of another Northerner’s reaction to the Mediterranean light—for it is such an effect as Claude loved—but in general it lacks the sharp accent of his realistic vision. He seems deliberately to have generalized, to have suffused the scene with the glow of his lyrical mood. Only in the field and ploughman of the foreground does he fall back on literal and familiar fact, and even this has a curious distortion, altogether unfamiliar in Brueghel’s work. It, too, is “poetized”; the ploughman himself seems influenced by the elegiac mood. Nothing is more curious, from the point of view of the psychology of artistic creation, than this lapse from grim and almost brutal realism into all too conscious poetry. Brueghel’s imagination was intensely individual and, within certain limits, perfectly sincere, but it was not profound enough to reach the highest flights without some distorting effort.53

Aesthetic response is here used as a means of entry, so that nonformal qualities, though of less aesthetic interest to Fry, are still allowed into the subsequent analysis in as much he considers them to be relevant to “Brueghel’s imagination.” It is almost as if visions of critic and artist become one. But the powerful feeling the passage gives of allowing the reader to see the work as the artist—we “see the effect on his mind of some first glimpse of the Mediterranean, the record of the emotions of strangeness and wonder with which he greeted so unfamiliar a sight”—is achieved not quite through

58

Art Writing

Figure 13. Pieter Brueghel (attributed), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1560s. Oil on canvas, 73.5 × 112 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Photo © RMFAB, Brussels / J. Geleyns, Art Photography.

writing as if the artist. Fry instead offers a report back to the viewer from the position of one who has examined the work from within the artist’s vision, who has time traveled via the apprehension of form and has now come back to tell about it. This fiction is established by almost imperceptible rhetorical shifts between the work, the vision of the artist, and the seeing of the critic. Fry for instance writes that Brueghel’s “habitual curiosity and precision remains in the subtle harmonies of violet greys and orange of the sky,” just as he “seems deliberately to have generalized, to have suffused the scene with the glow of his lyrical mood.” The artist is made the grammatical subject of key passages, with the historical or contextual detail—Brueghel’s use of myth, travel drawings, standards of distortion—not simply “extra-aesthetic” or a separable context but fundamental to the analysis as a whole. At every point Fry’s writing threatens to break free of anything that might conceivably be thought a reconstruction of the artist’s way of seeing the work. But the psychologizing is secured by details of the work in question or known details of Brueghel’s life

The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s

59

and oeuvre, all of which clearly (though implicitly) rely on established opinion about the artist. Constrained by the ideal of the artist’s vision, Fry was unable to reach the heights of Pater and Ruskin’s visionary metaphorizing: Luca della Robbia’s “pieces of pale blue and white earthenware . . . like fragments of the milky sky itself, fallen into the cool streets, and breaking into the darkened churches”;54 or the Venetian boat that “darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the front of the Ducal Palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation.”55 In Fry’s book Cézanne: A Study of His Development, his most extended analysis of a single artist, the great majority of the text is taken up in careful reconstructions of creative processes as his subject’s “artistic personality” developed over time. The confidence about Cézanne’s creative activity stemming from the elision of man and work in Fry’s writing—“for him, as I understand his work”—is both striking and utterly typical of modernist criticism (3). However unconscious Cézanne’s creative activity, for the sensitive critic the artist’s pictures could show him “intensely” preoccupied by questions (59), “dominated” by an idea (25), or “obsessed” with pictorial details that were “at once a fascination and a dread” (51–52). Yet creative activity is still a relatively limited area of the experiences that Fry and others associated with art—an imaginative reenactment, to be sure, but only being sure in as much as it can focus on the process of creation: Cézanne is so discreet, so little inclined to risk a definite statement for fear of being arrogant; he is so immensely humble; he never dares trust to his acquired knowledge; the conviction behind each brush stroke has to be won from nature at every step, and he will do nothing except at the dictation of a conviction which arises within him as the result of contemplation.

For him, as I understand his work, the ultimate synthesis of a design was

never revealed in a flash; rather he approached it with infinite precautions, stalking it, as it were, now from one point of view, now from another, and always in fear lest a premature definition might deprive it of something of its total complexity. For him the synthesis was an asymptote towards which he was for ever approaching without ever quite reaching it; it was a reality, incapable of complete realization. (3)

Fry could make strong claims on the basis of his ability to work backwards through the work to Cézanne’s thought; that “for Cézanne at this period a skull was merely a complicated variation upon the sphere,” and that

60

Art Writing

“the deepest emotions could only exude, like a perfume—it is his own image— from form considered in its purest essence” (53). But the closest Fry came to actual identification of the emotions exuding “like a perfume” were his tentative suggestions of emotions no more than “analogous” to the “tragic, menacing, noble, or lyric” (41–42). These emotions were “graver, more powerful, more massive” than painting may ever have aroused before, yet ones that escaped the grasp of introspectively based description (42). We may read Fry’s reticence as, in part, a rhetorical flourish. We may even read it as admission of a failure of his method or of his own inability to come fully to terms with the work of art. Yet what I hope is closed off now is reading it as a solipsistic contemplation of form alone, so that we are no longer tempted to see Fry’s vision as cut off entirely from concerns—artistic or historical—not immediately present in contemplation. What we encounter here may not seem to reflect an engagement with life in its everyday sense— the skull merely a sphere for Cézanne, the person understood only through their work. But in its concern for contact with the inner lives of others, its desire to come to terms as honestly as possible with one’s own experience, and the longing for a description of that personal experience that grounds communal enterprise, Fry’s criticism, in its own way, attempted to be as open to the world of human concerns as it thought it possible to be.

After the Science of Criticism: Art History Without Aesthetics, 1930–Present The politics of a formalist criticism that models itself as a kind of reenactment or re-creation are taken up again in the next chapter. But first I turn to the breakdown of faith in the science of such criticism when faced with developments in psychology and psychoanalysis, as well as the new models of the scientific study of art that arose in its place. The newly professionalizing art history, which shunned formalist criticism and its engagement with aesthetics, left a gap in its own practice and in its ability to speak to public interest in art that, ironically, allowed key formalist assumptions to live on, unexamined and unquestioned. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the science of criticism based around form and the artist’s vision spread broadly, often with support from unlikely arenas. Read is well known for widening the scope of his aesthetics in the 1930s to allow for acceptance of more or less any new avant-garde practices he

The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s

61

encountered. Yet throughout his embrace of new forms of psychology and artistic practice alike, he still held on to the idea of a “common element” in art based around the artist’s creative activity (and its recovery): “The act of putting pencil to paper, brush to canvas, becomes an act of what Croce has called lyrical intuition, and in that act, in that instant, the personality, and indeed, the spirituality of the artist is revealed.”56 More surprisingly, even the BBC showed support, enlisting not just the popular critic Margaret Bulley but the psychologist Cyril Burt to spread the word about proper taste and viewing of art.57 According to Burt’s psychology of art, the perception of relations in the artwork (or form) was a general factor in the viewing of artworks, with such generally accessible viewing of the artwork creating a likeness between the experience in the viewer’s mind and that of the artist.58 Just as the experimental psychologist Edward Bullough in 1920 had suggested that “ideally, appreciation is the re-creation of the work in the mind of the recipient,” Burt wrote, “The artist, in his work, expresses his own emotional experience; we respond, and so far as we respond, become artists ourselves.”59 By the end of the 1930s, however, the dream had collapsed. In his Slade Lectures of 1933–34, Fry acknowledged that psychoanalysis, now unavoidable for anyone interested in the exploration of the mind, had demonstrated the weight of personal history that fed into aesthetic engagements. As such, critics would have to abandon objectivity in aesthetic judgment and acknowledge the depth of uncertainty when working with “the notion of the work of art as the central term—the liaison in a transaction which takes place between the artist and the spectator” (whereby “the ideal transaction would be one in which the artist embodied his ‘experience’ completely in the work of art and met with a spectator capable of perfect response to that experience”).60 For Read, reviewing the publication of Fry’s lectures in 1939, Fry’s argument “strikes at the roots of any scientific approach to the problems of art.”61 Formalist criticism carried on stronger than ever, with Read and a host of popularizing critics taking up metaphors of vision and communication. Yet its claims to scientific status were swiftly abandoned. If the formalist science of art had come to an end, meanwhile, other models for a science of art could be found in the renewed interest in documentary evidence and context as the basis for art history, as well as new laboratory methods, such as X-ray analysis. These new models point not just to a shift in conceptions of what a science of art might be but also to the dilemma towards which art writing was moving. An activity that claimed to be based around the aesthetic and the visual—the central stuff of art—was

62

Art Writing

left unable to discuss those aspects in a manner acceptable to the increasingly professionalizing discipline of art history. In the years that followed, in other words, alternative and deliberately non-aesthetic sciences of art came to the fore, cleaving art history from aesthetics in a manner that has never been fully resolved. When Berenson, in his 1927 Three Essays in Method, attempted to provide a worked-through demonstration of the scientific nature of his connoisseurship, he did so by stressing its grounding in documentary research and Morellian attention to details of artworks.62 To this appeal, both Fry and Read countered that the primacy of aesthetic intuition or the action of sensibility could not be ignored.63 Discussing the foundation of the Courtauld Institute, Fry used the term “scientific” to refer to the close attention to the artwork he advocated over the “literary,” in a course that he envisaged as one of “comparative applied aesthetics.”64 When the Courtauld was opened in 1932 as the first institution dedicated to the academic study of art history in Britain, both Fry and Read were involved as lecturers, alongside a teaching staff drawn almost entirely from object-focused museum curators.65 Nonetheless, there was a converse desire to operate on a more secure scientific basis—the sort of practice that would allow for the study of art to still focus, first and foremost, on the work of art, but now with an object-­ centered positivism that could bypass the subjectivity of reliance on aesthetic connections with artworks. By the late 1920s the rise of new types of scientific technique—beyond the more abstract and theoretical psychological possibilities—were hard to ignore. Making the same point about the “contradiction” of the “science of art” as in his review of Fry’s Last Lectures, Read had pointed to the “new methods” of scientific laboratory work as the only true sense in which one could now speak of scientific art criticism.66 By the 1930s the most common use of “scientific” in regard to connoisseurship was in reference to newly developed laboratory methods, with technical analysis of paint and X-rays used in the determination of authorship. A debate on the use of such methods had been initiated in the Burlington Magazine towards the end of the 1920s, when, on the basis of paint condition alone, Fry had attempted to retract the authentication of a Brueghel painting he previously thought an original.67 The forger, Fry suggested, had painted in glazes and thin scumbles over “an old picture of no value but with genuine craquelures all over,” creating a new work that almost perfectly suggested a truly aged one.68 The game was given away by those passages where greater loading of pigment had concealed the craque-

The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s

63

lure, as this proved the paint to be more recent than the original aged picture surface. A. P. Laurie, a professor of chemistry and pioneer of the chemical analysis of pictures, replied that in talking not of the “style and methods” of the artist but of the “surface of the picture,” Fry had abandoned his “claims as an art critic.”69 The question was one that could only be settled “by a thorough scientific examination,” the scientific being the province (according to Laurie) of the chemist alone.70 In 1929 these rival methods received very public attention at the Hahn Leonardo court case, at which the infamous art dealer Joseph Duveen was sued for defamation after having identified a version of Leonardo’s La Belle Ferronnière as a later copy. The case quite publicly gave documentary and laboratory methods legal primacy, for although those who testified included the most prominent connoisseurs of the day—including Berenson, Holmes, and Fry—the judge cast doubt on the relevance of any “expert” connoisseurial evidence that involved talk of quality and sensibility rather than externally verifiable fact.71 Though few went so far as to advocate the use of technology as a sole or even primary route to attribution, its potential importance was hard to ignore. From its foundation, the Courtauld Institute made this new approach to connoisseurship a major part of its program, raising money for a scientific laboratory.72 After consultation with the major museums—and notably with none of the non-connoisseurial professors of fine art or art historians practicing independently or in university departments—the laboratory was set up in the mid-1930s.73 At that time the acknowledged influence of Berenson and his approach to connoisseurship was still at its height. Yet the new emerging connoisseurship based its claim to scientific status on definite evidence rather than the aesthetic. Ellis Waterhouse, reviewing the book of lectures Art History and Connoisseurship: Their Scope and Method, published in 1938 by the Courtauld’s departing first director, W. G. Constable, summed up this new connoisseurship as that which “describes the nature of the evidence which may be available for placing a work of art under its local name and habitation, and it gives an account of the limitations inherent in the various sorts of evidence. It is almost entirely objective, showing the mechanism by which an attribution can be presented to an expert jury, or by which an hypothesis or a tradition can be tested.”74 This practice was opposed by Waterhouse, in a clear nod, to the older kind, that of giving a “description of the psychological process involved, when a scholar is faced with a hitherto unknown work of art in his own field, and emerges from a spiritual struggle to report that he is faced with a hitherto unknown work by—to name but one—Antiveduto

64

Art Writing

Grammatica.”75 The link here between an “objective” connoisseurship as that which might be “presented to an expert jury”—rather than appealing to the “psychological process” involved in aesthetic engagement—shows the pressures of the courtroom and laboratory now coming to the fore. It is also an appeal to the external and verifiable over the aesthetic that exactly reversed the earlier views of Fry and the connoisseurial critics. Constable’s book illustrates a dilemma that art history has never quite worked through. Art history was (as in its formalist mode) said to focus on things that contain an aesthetic element, yet there was now a desire to refuse as overly subjective the kind of aesthetic explorations fundamental to the practice of Fry and Read.76 The fear of the aesthetic could mean a further embrace of historical documentation as well as the laboratory. In 1933 the Warburg Institute moved to London, and by the end of the decade Anthony Blunt had started to come under the influence of the Warburg staff, ready to swap object-centered (Morellian) positivism for the document-centered contextual kind.77 Fritz Saxl, director of the Warburg Institute from Aby Warburg’s death in 1929 until 1948, who has been described as “the central figure among the émigré scholars to Britain in the thirties,” was also said to represent an “archaeological and archival” art history. He wrote that while a poet, preacher, or writer may help one enjoy a work of art, the historian’s “task is to elucidate the historical facts.”78 In a mid-1930s speech to the Royal Historical Society, Constable, as director of the Courtauld, had asserted that in reverse of the normal historian, the art historian “must always find his main material in the works of art themselves, treating record and literary sources as merely auxiliary and subsidiary.”79 By the time the Courtauld was reconstituted after the Second World War, having in the meantime had a medieval historian as its director, Blunt had reversed the argument. Adamant that “if art history is to be a serious study, proper to a university faculty, it must be studied as a branch of history,” as he wrote in 1948, Blunt held that the art historian must “go beyond mere connoisseurship and Stilkritik to art history proper.”80 The possibility had already been explicitly and disapprovingly registered by Fry the very year the Warburg Institute came to Britain. For Fry, the setting aside of aesthetics in pursuit of an “objective” art history was too great a price to pay, and a loss of faith in the aesthetics-based science of criticism meant that “Art-History” should be practiced as Kunstforschung rather than a non-aesthetic and thus greatly limited Kunstwissenschaft.81 Fry’s position of the 1930s, in fact, interestingly paralleled key aspects of the view of the great proponent of iconology

The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s

65

Erwin Panofsky, even as these aspects were being abandoned by Panofsky’s more historicist and positivistic followers. Both writers stressed the roles of aesthetic experience and re-creation proper to the engagement with works of art, as well as the importance of the recovery of creative activity even where the artist may not have been able to articulate that activity to themselves.82 An additional irony was the modernization and professionalization aided by the émigré scholars, who in many ways brought art history into line with the way history as an academic discipline was changing in Britain. The new modernized history placed an emphasis on professionalism and a mode of practice inimical to whig history and formalist method alike. The antimetaphysical and scientific approach of the modernizers meant a focus on hypothesis confirmed by proof; on archives, documents, training, and disciplinary journals; and on the steady accretion of “facts” secured by rational scientific method rather than artistry and inspiration.83 It also brought isolation; in one recent historian’s words, “In what we now call the postmodern condition, whig presupposition has revived to a surprising degree, and it is the [modernist] successors of the whigs who now look outmoded as the defenders of a narrow and unrewarding mindset, over-impressed by scientific method, underimpressed by their need to communicate their thinking to a wider audience, more responsible for killing history in its best sense than preserving it.”84 The modernization of history during and after the 1930s takes on such importance because, far from an answer to any pressing theoretical issues, the effect of the “division between sensibility and historical knowledge” enacted in Saxl and the new art historians’ practice “was to enforce” the growing separation of art history from criticism and aesthetics.85 By the 1940s, Blunt had, at the suggestion of the Warburg staff, given up his popularizing art criticism published in the Spectator so as not to compromise his academic activity. The words above on the narrow-mindedness of the modernist historians apply perfectly here. Art history had embraced professional modernization without acknowledging the lessons of artistic modernism, and in doing so firmly excluded the kind of whig popularization from itself that had always been a trait of (even quasi-scientific) British art writing, with Read, Adrian Stokes, and others pushed outside of academic art history. Ernst Gombrich’s accessible and best-selling Story of Art (of 1950) and Kenneth Clark’s television series Civilisation (of 1969) became the exception rather than the rule.86 Aesthetic appreciation likewise had not been just a naively pursued ideal, ready for someone more theoretically informed to point in the right direction, but a carefully worked through and deeply selfconscious choice. By driving formalism and aesthetic appreciation—so widely

66

Art Writing

conflated in the early twentieth century, I have argued, as to be inseparable— out of its purview, art history simply had to forget part of its history, its range of possibilities, and its reason for existence.87 Not that this lack would be clear with the dearth of analytic tools available to art historians that would have allowed them to grasp the challenge (and the unspoken presence) of the aesthetic. Within a segment of the academy, aesthetic questions were set aside, seen as interpretative and theoretical matters irrelevant to the kind of hard empirical study involved in art history. The neglect of aesthetics left mainstream formalist criticism to seize the future of the understanding of art even as formalism received many of its most decisive nuances and critiques—from Marxist historians, from Edgar Wind, from Erwin Panofsky, and many others. Art criticism expanded on the process begun in the 1920s and ’30s where, for the first time, formalism was brought to “the people” and turned into a general, rather than simply elite, mode of artistic appreciation. Perhaps, then, it is unsurprising that formalism survived the interwar critiques so easily, and that, when Clement Greenberg gave the doctrine one of its most successful formulations, it was through the route of the art schools and wide-circulation periodicals that it gained influence, and for so long there was so little (most) art historians could convincingly say about it. It was also due to this gap in art history as it developed after 1930 that, despite the caricatures that befell it, the pre-1930s moment in Britain continued to hold significance for some later writers. As a young art historian in the 1960s, coming from training by F. R. Leavis in extremely close critical attention to literary works, Michael Baxandall was deeply dissatisfied with contemporary British art history, or “Courtauld stuff,” and instead favored that being taught in the art schools by less orthodox art historians like Michael Podro (also a former student of Leavis).88 Later in life Baxandall spoke of the role that “aesthetic value” played for him and, as such, why his Warburg Institute engagement was one of “trying to do Leavis and Roger Fry—who are an odd pair in the first instance—with enrichment from central Europe, rather than trying to do central Europe in England,” with this, in a sense, “being art criticism rather than art history.”89 (It might now be clearer why Baxandall remained extremely keen on Wölfflin’s writing but, as mentioned earlier in the chapter, treated it more as a paradigm of practical criticism in the visual arts than the basis for a systematic theory of stylistic change.) Richard Wollheim, likewise, suggested that the problem with “art history” over “art criticism” was inherent in the former’s very name:

The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s

67

Standardly we do not call the objective study of an art the history of that art. We call it criticism. We talk of literary criticism, of musical criticism, of dance criticism. What then is the special feature of the visual arts, something which must be over and above the general way in which all the arts are connected with a tradition, and which has, allegedly, the consequence that, if we are to understand painting or sculpture, or graphic art, we must reach an historical understanding of them? I do not know, and, given the small progress that art-history has made in explaining the visual arts, I am inclined to think that the belief that there is such a feature is itself something that needs historical explanation: it is a historical accident.90

Rejecting the positivism that had “deeply infected” contemporary art history, Wollheim thought of “connoisseurship, or the science of attribution” as “the best hope for the objective study of painting,” for it was in that practice that one truly pursued (aesthetic) criticism of the artist’s particular style.91 Wollheim foregrounded his interest in the representational aspect of works, from an early point developing an account of pictorial representation as a psychological episode whereby one saw depth “in” the marked surface of the picture.92 At the same time, he suggested that style had psychological reality, embodying the physical and mental habits of the maker in the work, and that lengthy inspection of the picture itself could allow one to pick these purposive features out from amongst those that were not salient. Echoing the tradition of connoisseurial criticism, much of Wollheim’s art writing involved making inferences from the finished work to the hypothesized fulfilled intention of the artist (the thoughts and feelings realized in and through creation). Lengthy sessions of looking at the work revealed the insistent effects of easily overlooked pictorial elements—the gaze of Manet’s figures that seems at once to confront and look away or the impossible spatial organization of columns painted by Ingres—that in turn were understood as crucial to the artist’s particular project.93 All of this is not to say that the implied momentary disappearance of aesthetics as a discipline was quite the reality. The standard picture is now of rupture and break in the study of aesthetics over the turn of midcentury, with a recent history of the American Society of Aesthetics suggesting that “the birth of American aesthetics was truly a birth. In 1939 no organized study devoted entirely to aesthetics was taking place anywhere in the world.”94 The rise of analytic philosophy over the first half of the century rendered unfashionable some forms of metaphysical aesthetics, coinciding with what has been

68

Art Writing

seen as a suspicion of continental philosophy in the shadow of the Second World War.95 Yet the majority of writers on the subject were little troubled by this, having by the interwar years already established to their satisfaction the scientific and antimetaphysical character of their ideas.96 Remarkably, though keeping an extremely low profile, British philosophical aesthetics lived on through to the foundation of the organizations that continue to exist today. The American Society of Aesthetics took up and continued to treat Read, E. F. Carritt, and their contemporaries as major figures. And in 1960, when the British Society was formed, Read, Carritt, and Louis Arnaud Reid were all instrumental founding members, with Read and Carritt serving as the first president and vice president.97 As late as 1986, the president of the British Society of Aesthetics, Harold Osborne, another founding member and the first British Journal of Aesthetics editor, spoke of Reid’s deep personal influence on him and the society and of Reid’s A Study in Aesthetics of the early 1930s as a book that “still repays study.”98 All the same, aesthetics as a discipline seemed to forget part of its own history, compounding the view of a late twentieth-century advance over previously naïve formalist art theory and criticism. The writers often taken to have revived analytic aesthetics from the 1960s onwards and to have in part set it on its contemporary course—Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, and Nelson Goodman—all dealt at points with the questions of style and expression.99 They gave no indications, however, that these questions might bear a close relation to what the early twentieth-century formalist art critics and theorists had always been getting at. All three continued to attack a caricatured pure aesthetic or manifest formalism.100 Philosophical aesthetics as it developed, in other words, was less help than would have been expected, greatly contributing to (rather than correcting) the widespread caricature of a narrow formalism that has since made the idea so difficult to fully come to terms with. ——— One final point about the science of art. Writing in 1933, Listowel had stressed that the burden for a discipline claiming the status of a science is that its conclusions must be prescriptive or “normative”:101 “Those who deny the existence of any rules or standards for assessing the merits of a work of art are denying simultaneously the very possibility of aesthetics. For the work of description and explanation peculiar to science furnishes ipso facto laws for the identification and production of its object.”102 There was a flip side, then,

The Science of Art Criticism After the 1910s

69

to Fry’s claims for the experimental and empirical elements of his scientific aspirations. I opened with a suggestion that the myth of pure formalism partly stems from those who focused solely on Fry’s prescriptive pronouncements about modern art, and however broad his critical method in practice, one truly new consequence of Fry’s aesthetics was that in his hands, for the first time, expressive form became a prescriptive ideal. For formalist writers, the belief in the correct nature of their theories was not just about getting right the attention paid to art, but it also grounded a further network of beliefs about the value of art and the role it should play in society. The following chapters of this book turn to the way in which these people attempted to standardize a set of beliefs that spread across art and life.

70

Art Writing

3 Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

Caravaggio, for Roger Fry, was the first popular artist. Though the “vast mass” of art had always been “mediocre or frankly bad,” Fry wrote in “The Seicento,” before Caravaggio the bad artist had at least played along with the standards and practices of the best artists of the time (141). The new tradition of “popular and commercial art” set out with a different strategy, one of direct and calculated appeal to the “uninstructed” public, with the “power of gaining immediate success” as the only standard that mattered (143). To achieve this end, artists had to make their work easy—to present no challenges of interpretation or understanding. Scenes of “sentimental and melodramatic emotion” were embraced so as to provide “a slope down which the imagination glides without effort” (143). More generally, Fry wrote of works from the sixteenth century to the “Royal Academy, the Salon, and almost the whole art of the cinema,” such popular art “lacks style” (142–44). Such art deliberately abandoned form in favor of the direct and unadulterated description of the external world. Gone was the visible trace of the artist’s activity that provided a kind of complicating screen for subject matter. In a painting like Caravaggio’s Madonna and Child with St. Anne (fig. 14), the artist’s “ultra-photographic realism” and concentration on particular dramatic moments “skilfully illuminates the dryness of

72

Figure 14. Caravaggio, Madonna and Child with St. Anne, 1605–6. Oil on canvas, 292 × 211 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Licensed by the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo, Galleria Borghese.

theology with the vividness of cinematographic presentment. For whatever the scene,” on this way of working, “it must be presented in such a way that the spectator would be forced to concentrate his attention on certain facts, gestures or expressions” (159). Caravaggio, the “impresario for the cinema” avant la lettre, always aimed “to produce the most vivid shock of surprised acquiescence from any, even the least cultured, spectator.” (158–59). Fry’s words are a vivid reminder that form was central to modernist constructions of high and low culture—a usage which dates back to at least the 1760s, when the first regular, fully public exhibitions of paintings in Britain began, and a raft of often-satirical commentary arose in response. With an expanded public now able to see and discuss contemporary art, one

Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

73

means of distinction for the expert commentator became the ridiculing of those who treated pictures as transparent windows onto their subject matter. Fry’s anxiety about the viewers who ignored “form” and saw only “description” was dramatized in tales such as the “country-fellow” at an exhibition, who on seeing depicted “the sign of the Green Man at Barnet, dogs and all . . . immediately fancied [himself] before the inn door, and called, in a loud voice, for Will Hopkins the ostler to take care of [his] horse.”1 But these worries about naïve looking extend far beyond Fry and British art writing, running through critiques of popular culture from the classical period to the present day. Stretching back to Plato’s attack on mimetic poetry in the Republic, the underlying idea is that art may be harmful if it offers experiences and representations that are consumed without reflection.2 Popular art is linked to unreflective consumption by its formalist critics precisely because, as Fry put it, it lacks style. The fine or high arts are distinguished by their ability to use the difficulty or “opacity” provided by form to force their audience into an active and aware mode of engagement with their content, while the “transparency” of popular or low arts make no such demands on their passive consumers.3 “Kitsch,” as the low has come to be called by many, is everywhere characterized by the “avoidance of difficulty”— the rejection of complexity in favor of the accessible, the legible, the undemanding.4 Even more troubling are the political consequences of the reduction of viewers to mere “spectators.”5 Low culture, rejecting the difficulty of the high, threatens to push unmediated views of a distorted world that are unquestioningly and blankly taken in. Formalism, then, diagnosed and defended against some of the dangers of modern mass culture. And in order to do so, it made strong claims about the political and ethical potential of the objects viewed and the ways of viewing them. Grounded in formalist thinking about art, the demand for proper forms of attention involved grappling with the politics of high and low culture in the broadest sense. Literature, film, newspapers—these, too, were battlegrounds for the hearts and minds of the public. In this chapter, I explore how much of the controversy over the ethics and politics of formalism ultimately stemmed from the tension between the active and the passive, including the conflict between ideals of historically informed, imaginative engagement on the one hand and of entirely free looking on the other. The latter idea of a looking unconstrained by knowledge or history helped give rise to the series of attacks on aestheticist formalism and mass culture that have long misled historians. For as formalist theory based its deepest claims on

74

Art and Life

having moved on from the aestheticism of previous generations, “bad” aestheticism and mass culture came to look remarkably like one another.

Passivity: The Critique of Low Culture In 1909, when film seemed like a new technology yet to be consumed by the forces of commercialization, Fry had noted its profound potential. The cinematograph had the ability to distance viewers from what it pictured and, in doing so, allowed them to see and experience apparently familiar things with a striking new clarity. By the 1930s Fry was writing of the medium only in negative terms.6 Jean-Antoine Watteau, a partial outsider observing a new and freer form of social life in eighteenth-century Paris, had, on Fry’s account, paralleled cinema’s surface beauty and charm with a vision of a dreamlike world without consequence.7 Watteau’s world was an “art of escape” but an escape that Fry justified by situating it “just beyond the confines of personal desires”; gazing at Watteau’s painting, the viewer need not mourn the fact that they could not themselves “embark for Cythera.” The cinema, on the other hand, like the “popular novel,” offered an entirely different and more harmful form of escape. The cinema and novel allowed the consumer to enjoy “in imagination, a life of unrestrained luxury which he does not seriously hope to share.” Typical of much “popular art,” these were modes of escape based on “crude imaginative participation in a world where the desires which are frustrated in actual life are gratified.” In the following sections of this chapter, I examine the way that the ideals of viewing expressed by Fry were used to ground defenses of modernism and high culture. In order to orient this discussion, it is first necessary to address the problem of low culture, which provides the foil to that of high. Why was it that the low meant gratification of “personal egoistic wishes,” as Fry put it, and that this particular form of escape might be so problematic for formalist writers? ——— The early twentieth-century disarray of the British public sphere may seem only too familiar to the present. For contemporary critics the problems of the newly widened public sphere were rooted in a broad combination of new techniques of mass production with modern methods of commercial management and exploitation of audiences. All of these techniques and methods, the

Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

75

critics suggested, had been set in place to meet (or manipulate) the rises in leisure time and spending of the middle and lower classes.8 The growth of a press appealing to sensation and human interest, cheap and accessible fiction catering to the desire for escape from the real world, popular music and cinema designed for a similar form of pleasure, and even large dance halls and pubs severed from traditional folk music and community organization: all of these were thought to have distracted from the intellectual and emotional merits of more traditional high or folk art pastimes. Culture had ended up in the hands of irresponsible capitalist producers interested only in turning a profit, creating a product aimed at the lowest common denominator, and bringing down in turn the level of the general audience.9 But the problem went beyond the corruption of mass taste by its exposure to cultural products created to be the very easiest sort of pastime. The pessimistic story of taste fed into the political fear shared by politicians, artists, and writers across the political spectrum of the irresponsibility of the passive and easily manipulated “crowd” or “herd,” given more power by the rise of mass democracy at the very point that increasingly “the multiplying mass of readers took their news and views from a diminishing band of newspaper magnates.”10 Cultural criticism itself in the interwar years took up the link between “modernity” and accelerating cultural decline.11 T. S. Eliot’s early 1920s “dissociation of sensibility” claim—that the seventeenth century saw a separation of thought from sensibility or feeling “from which we have never recovered”—gained notably widespread acceptance and influence as the basis for such pessimism.12 I. A. Richards meanwhile developed the teaching of English literature in order to train his subjects to counter the negative effects of the modern mechanized world filled with advertisements.13 In the 1930s this pessimism was coordinated and spread in books and essays such as F. R. Leavis’s 1930 Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, and, from 1932 on, in the pages of the Leavis-controlled journal, Scrutiny. The social task of literary criticism, then, brought taste and politics together in its battle against the ignorance and deception that led to the habits of passivity, distraction, and stock response.14 This undertaking, despite its aim to reach into all areas of life, depended to a large extent on close study of the written text and the uses of language. In the words of a recent commentator, “The prolonged exposure to the kind of verbal artefact that is ‘a world by itself’ came to seem to be a privileged position from which to conduct the critical scrutiny of the failings of one’s own society.”15 As such, while the early to mid-twentieth-century reaction against the effects of industrialized

76

Art and Life

modernity and commodity culture has been widely discussed, the formalism of writers on the visual arts such as Fry has tended to be separated off from the writing of Richards and Leavis. The latter are usually taken at their own word as having offered an alternative—“practical critical”—mode of engagement that from the 1920s onward superseded Bloomsbury’s purist aestheticism.16 The separation of literary and visual formalisms is especially problematic given that those who continued to espouse the ethical value of the visual arts into the mid-twentieth century, most notoriously Clement Greenberg but also Herbert Read, drew on a free mixture of the ideas found in theories of form and visual culture with the Cambridge English, Scrutiny, or New Critical traditions associated with the impact of Richards and Leavis. The critique of low culture did not necessarily imply a rejection of mass or popular culture, but the common assumption was nonetheless that the two went hand in hand: the demands of mass industrial production had brought much of culture to a low state, which in turn had taken popular taste down with it. The link between low and mass or popular can be seen to underwrite the efforts to spread and institutionalize close visual attention to fine art objects—by institutions such as the British Broadcasting Council, the British Institute of Adult Education (BIAE), and later the Arts Council of Great Britain—from the 1920s onwards. Fine art was assumed to be more difficult for the contemporary population and so was set against a general category of popular art, which took in everything from Royal Academy pictures and magazine illustrations to the more accessible side of contemporary film production. In order to see this in more concrete terms, it is useful to turn to the critical and institutional attempts to reorient contemporary viewers in the direction of high culture. What the guidebooks of the 1920s and early 1930s shared—whatever their views of Fry and Bell—was the emphasis on the imaginative and active engagement that art proper demanded and the belief that such experience was to be governed by the structure of the artworks rather than being entirely personal and idiosyncratic. Sentimental and associative attitudes were attacked along with any preference for naturalism; the figure of “the philistine,” who just “knew what he liked,” was roundly criticized.17 As the painter Raymond Coxon put it in Art: An Introduction to Appreciation, art proper was about “communication through emotional response”; “a work of art which appeals solely on account of verisimilitude and external association is misread.”18 Another book, Arthur Milton’s The Lure of the London Galleries: A Record of Beauty and Romance, in being the closest there

Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

77

was to an exception, perhaps proves the rule. The book incessantly strove for popular appeal, even closing with a “conversation” about the best painting between the author and his aunt and uncle, during which he offered the stirring refrain, “Let the public decide!” (189). Sentimental stories were prevalent, and the final chapter on modern art was titled after a quotation taken from the author’s description of Paul Gauguin: “He was like a schoolboy, fired with the romantic desire to plough the Spanish Main; his motto might well have been Stevenson’s ‘Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum’” (180). Even in a book so oriented to mass appeal, however, the now-orthodox narratives of modern art seen in Fry’s account of postimpressionism were repeated. In their focus on the mastery of appearances, the impressionists “seem to have forgotten that an artist must be more than a recorder of Nature” (176–77). Paul Cézanne’s “Post-Impressionism” involved a turn away from pure naturalism to instead “introduce the artist’s own emotions when confronted with the scene before him” (177). Cézanne’s was an art of “human interests and emotions,” to be sure, but one that achieved these through formal means (178). The view of the contemporary plight of the popular was carried into the 1930s by those involved with bringing art “to the people” on the radio and through other forms of adult education. Writers like the archaeologist and writer on sculpture Stanley Casson continued to mock the philistine audience that relied on personal association, a position that united figures who were otherwise opposed, such as Clive Bell and Herbert Read (who wrote that “in [Bell’s] great fight against the philistine I hope that I am on his side”).19 For many associated with the BBC (and especially its adult education side), the pervasive negative opinion of public taste was confirmed by the public’s inability to engage properly with their arguments. Reading letters on his “Design” talk series, the novelist Anthony Bertram noted with some surprise “how thin their [the public’s] suggestions and opinions were” and elsewhere suggested that the “democratic” view of art was “wrong. The opinion of the majority does not hold in matters of art. The instinctive appreciation of art is a very rare gift. The capacity to appreciate is, I believe, fairly common, but it must be trained.”20 After reading the letters sent by listeners and readers to J. E. Barton after his introductory talks series on modern art, Casson summed up the “astonishingly few” issues raised: “1. Why should not art be true to nature? 2. Is distortion possible in art? 3. How can I detect insincerity in art? 4. Should art teach a lesson? So poverty stricken is the imagination of the average listener in matters of art that that is really all that he can think of.”21 When the British Institute of Adult Education began its Art for the People

78

Art and Life

traveling exhibitions later in the decade, the surveys of participants carried out were taken as empirical evidence of the prevalence of naïve looking amongst the public. According to the 1935 report, “Most of the inhabitants of Great Britain have been brought up to believe that a good picture must be a good representation; within that limit they show both patience and discernment in their appraisal. Beyond that limit they are lost.”22 The 1939 report was even more direct: “The normal attitude is (1) that the picture should be like something, and (2) that it should be like something that is liked.”23 The preference for sentimentality and verisimilitude was put down to the contingencies of education and experience—notably that the types of pictures the average person saw in photographic or cheap color reproduction were either popular old master works, popular works by royal academicians, or pictures with news, advertising, or sentimental value.24 The solution to the perceived problem lay in art appreciation that moved beyond mere likeness and association to things the public liked. The 1935 report concluded that: “It is equally clear from this experiment that this ‘illiteracy’ is chronic but not incurable. It exists not because people are stupid, but because their innate conservatism has never been educated by contact with new ideas.”25 The cure for this visual illiteracy was starkly formalist, with the viewers who responded to “effects of light and shade . . . balance of masses . . . effects of lines” approved as having responded to “painting as a fine art, rather than painting as reproduction.”26 The pessimism of R. G. Collingwood’s late 1930s view of the degradations of popular culture that had left the poor and the unemployed “functionless and aimless in the community, living only to accept panem et circenses, the dole and the films,”27 has since been described as “worthy of Leavis at his most irascible.”28 The nostalgia for a Ruskinian preindustrial workers’ harmony, it is said, places him “on the conservative wing of the so-called ‘culture and society’ tradition, with its deep yearning for modern life to go away.”29 Yet despite Collingwood’s clear suspicion of modern life, it should also be acknowledged that his writings and especially his Principles of Art formed part of a remarkably broad and influential contemporary tendency to apply Leavis-like values to visual culture. It is telling that Read reviewed the book in the highest terms, calling it the most important work on aesthetics published in English since George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty.30 Despite Read’s own genuine engagement with “mass” industrial conditions in works such as Art and Industry of 1934—as I examine in the next chapter—he echoed Collingwood’s sentiments in texts of the surrounding years. Three years after his review of Collingwood’s book, Read wrote of the contemporary “human being”: “If he is rich he

Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

79

can command amusements which soothe his exacerbated nerves without engaging his mind or intriguing his imagination; if he is poor he will plunge into the cheap make-believe world of Hollywood where he can enjoy vicariously the glittering life of the rich; or he will gamble his ill-spared shillings on the football pools in the expectation of one day being able to indulge in his own hectic spending. . . . But rich or poor, it is the same fever to escape from reality.”31 By this point such views were prevalent even outside of the taste reform movement. In 1941 the liberal social reformer Seebohm Rowntree echoed this exact rhetoric in speaking against the “new and attractive ways of spending leisure which make absolutely no contribution to physical, mental, or spiritual development”:32 “Undoubtedly the cinema shares with other forms of entertainment the danger that it may become to some merely a way of escape from monotony rather than a means of re-creation. True re-creation is constructive, and wholesome re-creation implies re-creating physical, intellectual, or moral vitality. As one among several ways of spending leisure, visits to the cinema may well be re-creative. But some cinema ‘fans’ rely on the cinema too exclusively as a way of passing their leisure hours. It becomes for them a means of escapism rather than of re-creation, and this arrests their development.”33 According to what came to be a standard construction, low culture was taken to be the negative shadow of properly imaginative art: objects of visual culture not conducive to imaginative and ethical projects because their ease of reception or reading meant they had no ability to stimulate the imagination to any great degree; in film and the visual arts, this implied that they were structured around straightforwardly illusionistic representations of objects and simple narratives. None of this, however, makes it clear why imagination and form would be so inextricably tied together. It is that link to which I now turn.

Recreation: Aestheticism, Modernism, and the Defense of High Culture When all of these critics pit the redemptive power of art against the ills of industrialized modernity, they might seem to evoke the ethical ideals of nineteenth-century figures like John Ruskin and William Morris, but the role of their reliance on close engagement with high art objects is still not clear.34 Twentieth-century art theory, it is sometimes said, abandoned both the arts and crafts ethics of “right making” and the Victorian morality of art based on uplifting subject matter.35 In this traditional view of formalist modernism,

80

Art and Life

art’s deepest purpose shifted from social reform to an ideal of morally ambivalent self-expression by artists and mute or “disinterested” contemplation by viewers. The traditional view of formalist modernism, however, contrasts dramatically with the politics of formalist aesthetics to which I now turn, for such aesthetics rejected passive spectatorship to instead model proper viewing as imaginative “re-creation.” The first hint that formalist theory did not abandon social concerns comes from the defenses of modernist culture that relentlessly stress the critical potential of art. For Greenberg writing in 1939, Western industrialization had given rise to kitsch, a falsifying mass art of “vicarious experience and faked sensations.”36 The great role of the modernist “avant-garde”—an unheard-of development spurred by the newfound criticalhistorical consciousness that developed in the nineteenth century—was its ability to “keep culture moving” faced with this situation, even if that meant a turn inwards to a critical examination of its own means.37 For T. J. Clark, writing around forty years later with Greenberg in mind, there is a line of art stretching back to David and Shelley that makes no sense— that would not have existed—without its practitioners believing what they did was resist or exceed the normal understandings of the culture, and that those understandings were their enemy. This is the line of art we call modernist. . . . In the visual arts since 1850, it seems as if no work of real concentration was possible without it being fired—superintended—by claims of this kind. The test of art was held to be some form of intransigence or difficulty in the object produced, some action against the codes and procedures by which the world was lent its usual likenesses.38

I have already suggested that “intransigence or difficulty in the object,” the resistance to norms of representation, is grounded in a concept of form. To better understand this point, it helps to see how it emerged out of and in opposition to the aestheticism with which formalism has so often been equated. Far from passive appreciation, this reveals the stress on active engagement and even critical re-creation that came to underlie the defense of high culture and with it the special nature of modernism in the arts. Since the late nineteenth century, “aestheticism” as a term has come to be linked with an extreme pursuit of pure beauty and art for art’s sake. The phenomenon was later neatly summed up in Leavis’s judgment that “an indulging of religious sentiment in a hushed cult of Beauty, of religiose

Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

81

sensuality, a retreat out of the profane world into an exquisite cloistral art; . . . this describes fairly enough the development from the Pre-Raphaelites and [Algernon Charles] Swinburne through [Walter] Pater and Oscar Wilde to the nineties.”39 By the 1910s modernist journals such as Rhythm and Blast were defining their love of art in terms that explicitly rejected and aimed to move beyond aestheticism, typically describing it as a dead end and calling for “an art that strikes deeper, that touches a profounder reality, that passes outside the bounds of a narrow aestheticism.”40 A sign of how widely the view spread is its adoption even by those who might be expected to come to aestheticism’s defense. Just a few years after his apparent hymn to art and aesthetic experience, Moments of Vision of 1954, Kenneth Clark wrote of aestheticism such as that of Walter Pater that it “judge[s] people and things, actions and ideas, by the standard of sensuous beauty.”41 For Clark, the opening pages of Pater’s essay “The School of Giorgione,” which talked of a great picture as having no more definite meaning than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow, foreshadowed the “pure æsthetic sensations which Roger Fry propounded so persuasively in the 1920s.”42 Aestheticism by this point, as Clark’s text shows, had come to be directly equated with the extreme or simplified formalism some found in Clive Bell’s Art and that I described in chapter 1: the contemplation of formal qualities alone in pursuit of nothing but transcendent aesthetic experience and the escapist attitude towards life that resulted. This caricature of aestheticism meant that, in the early 1900s, critics of the aesthete as an escapist lover of beauty felt no sense of contradiction when they cited Ruskin’s and Morris’s ethical socialist views on art in support of the perceived role of art in the social world.43 One especially prominent contemporary critic of the aesthete was the Fabian socialist, arts and crafts advocate, and Times art critic Arthur Clutton-Brock, who in 1914 wrote of the “aesthetic discontent” registered in the ugliness and superfluity of the widely consumed art of the present as both a reproach to present day “civilization” and a “disease” affecting society: “We can make things such as men have never made before; but we cannot express any feelings of our own in making them, and the vast new world of cities which we have made and are making so rapidly, seems to us, compared with the little slow-built cities of the past, either blankly inexpressive or pompously expressive of something we would rather not have expressed.”44 For Clutton-Brock, Ruskin’s importance was as the first to make conscious the link between the growing and still-present sense of “aesthetic discontent” and a spiritual, rather than merely material, malaise,

82

Art and Life

which resulted in the judgment of the creation of art as an activity of “man” taken as an aesthetic, moral, and intellectual whole (as William Morris followed Ruskin in doing).45 Ugliness was a symptom of the ethical wrongness of the activity and was not an aesthetic failing alone. Morris’s favored solution to the problems of inauthenticity and passive consumption was to advocate the adoption by all of personal and practical creation, often understood in terms of actual craft or physical creation of other kinds. This faith in the primary importance of physical creation did not survive on the whole.46 But while physical creation was sidelined in the first half of the twentieth century, the ideals of creativity and the training of the imagination espoused by the advocates of form from the 1910s onwards gave a new legitimacy to themes associated with the early aestheticism of Ruskin and Morris. Contemporary art theorists advocated the idea (linked with Benedetto Croce) that “the significance and value of life are most plainly seen in its creative activities.”47 Herbert Read, A. J. Finberg, and others meanwhile attempted to recast Ruskin’s place in the history of aesthetics as the pioneer of the “Crocean” or “modern” theory of art as creative expression.48 How then to spur creativity and imagination through objects if not to actually make or create them physically? Turning away from practical creation and refusing rote learning or copying of past poetry or other works of art, early twentieth-century reformers instead took up the notion that proper experience of artworks could be an imaginative re-creation of artistic activity. Re-creation thus underpinned another answer to the problem of inauthenticity and passive consumption that drew as much from Ruskin and Pater as from Morris (though it had already been intimated in Matthew Arnold’s suggestions that though “the critical power is of lower rank than the creative,” criticism itself may still be a route to “a joyful sense of creative activity”).49 High art could sidestep the problem of the passive if the positive effects of creating the qualities of the artwork could be experienced, in Read’s words, “in a secondary and stimulating way, from the mental act of re-creating [those qualities] in contemplation.”50 Re-creation is key to understanding the breadth of formalism and its politics. Formalism, as I have outlined it in previous chapters, required not just the original creation or expression of the artist but a corresponding reaction in the successful viewer.51 Formalism’s resulting ability to close what John Dewey called “the gulf . . . between producer and consumer” directly contradicts the stereotype of a merely and passively contemplative mode of looking or a one-sided experience of the object by the viewer that amounts to an

Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

83

aesthetics of consumption rather than creation or production.52 The value of imaginatively experienced creative activity led Dewey, writing in America, to speak openly of the “instrumental” role of formally expressive art.53 On this basis, likewise, Richards’s celebration of the arts as a practically valuable “storehouse of recorded values” could be adopted by those writers on the visual arts who took up an increasingly popular kind of communicative formalism, even as many rejected what they considered an escapist Bloomsbury or aestheticist view.54 Re-creation has since been overlooked by historians in favor of the mass cultural initiatives related to design, due largely the prominence of design in the 1930s “good taste” movement and its notable influence on government-led drives to improve the quality of manufactured “industrial design.”55 I examine this in more detail in the next chapter. But what is missed in a focus only on design is the way in which the particular fine arts side of the more general effort to reform visual taste operated, in which it was the increasing prominence of the popularizing critics of the 1920s and their enlistment to the cause of creativity and aesthetic education through educational reformists that normalized the ideals of formalism, vision, and close looking as re-creative activity. The basic point had been explained in 1920 by Thomas Percy Nunn in the hugely influential tract Education: Its Data and First Principles as the fact that appreciation of the artwork was a truly creative activity. His explanation, invoking Croce, is worth quoting in full: What we usually think of as the artist’s expression—the actual picture or statue or poem—is not the expression in Croce’s sense, but only a record of it and a means by which it can be communicated to others. The true “work of art” is, in his view, the perfect analytico-synthetic process that takes place in the artist’s mind. . . . It follows from Croce’s position that whenever we truly “appreciate” a work of art, we repeat ourselves the creative act in which the artist gave birth to it. This corollary is, no doubt, substantially sound, and is very important from the standpoint of aesthetic training. To lead pupils to “appreciate” is not merely to lead them to admire or to take pleasure in a beautiful thing, but to make them become in a sense its recreators.56

By the 1930s the doctrine of viewers as re-creators—and therefore of proper art appreciation as the action of “repeat[ing] ourselves the creative act in which the artist gave birth to [the work of art]”—was being espoused by such prominent art world figures as the head of the British Institute of Adult

84

Art and Life

Education’s Art Committee (as well as Courtauld director), W. G. Constable.57 In his view either art practice or appreciation were adequate for creative purposes, as appreciation could be regarded as a form of “vicarious creation.”58 Constable once again provides an example of how apparently conflicting approaches were brought together. In the 1920 book Education, Nunn had linked Constable’s ideas of creativity and re-creation through art to Croce’s aesthetics, but Constable had begun as an art critic associated with Roger Fry, developed his ideas in reference to the practice of connoisseurship and the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, and justified the communicative ideal that underlay proper art appreciation with reference to the materialist theory of empathy (he was also a reader of the strongly anti-Crocean philosopher the Earl of Listowel).59 The canon of aesthetic theorists or art writers that such popularizers drew on—seen in the reading lists attached to the articles, pamphlets, and books they issued— tended to include not just Fry, Bell, Croce, or Berenson but a free mixture of all of these writers together with Heinrich Wölfflin, George Santayana, and other now more obscure figures, such as Margaret Bulley.60 The most dominant trope in the popularizing works was not mention of form—though a broadly understood formalism underpinned the aesthetic considerations—but instead the doctrines on the training of imagination and vitality. Repeated references were made to self-development, to coming to understand others, and to the language of art.61 These are ideas that connect the formalism of this moment with a whole host of writers, from early to mid-twentieth-century critics such as Richards in Britain and Dewey in the United States to later figures such as Michael Baxandall, who wrote at length of reenactment, as well as his ambition “to do a Leavis on visual art.”62 Understanding close looking this way reveals an important point about the politics intended by its practitioners. The requirement for a positive experience in the face of the artwork, which in some sense accorded with that of the artist, implied a measure of imagination, creativity, or generally active participation that a successful piece of art demanded from the viewer. This demand for a certain kind of contact with the work structured the widely endorsed split between the positive nature of active engagement and the potentially harmful nature of passivity. Proposed already by Fry in the 1910s, this was explained by Read in Politics of the Unpolitical of 1943 as a “distinction [in art criticism] which is more firmly established than most . . . that between art and entertainment.”63 According to Read, the distinction cast entertainment as “something which distracts us or diverts us from the routine of daily life” and “makes us for the time being forget our cares and worries” (147). Art

Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

85

qua art, “though it may divert us from the normal routine of our existence, causes us in some way or other to become conscious of that existence” (147). It has since become common to oppose a detached formalist aestheticism in favor of a socially aware stance that connected art with life. In reality the criterion of ethical and political interest adopted by these writers was not a question of the importance invested in subject matter but instead was based on active versus passive forms of engagement. Only authentically expressive art could allow for such constructive engagement with the creative process and would project a world different enough from the everyday that it would demand some measure of imaginative work from its audience. This is a perspective that brings earlier views interestingly into line with later ones. In his 1961 pamphlet for the Fabian Society, Socialism and Culture, Richard Wollheim provided a kind of summa of the formalist critique of low culture.64 Though he rejected liberalism in favor of socialism, he believed socialism had nonetheless appropriated “the old liberal ideal of autonomy.” (48). Culture should play a part in the production of free, self-determining individuals, and it was central to culture’s role in individual development that works of art proper “call for a certain amount of ‘reading’ or ‘projection’ on the part of their audience” (20). “A novel or play or painting that requires no interpretation from the reader or spectator, who can therefore totally immerse himself in it without in any way drawing upon the imagination or the intellect, is without that capacity to stimulate and enrich the mind which we have come to expect from the arts” (20). Easy cultural forms were dangerous social phenomena in as much as they drained the time and energy of participants in society into activity that was pointless (as a form of total escapism) or actively harmful (encouraging passive consumption of potentially false presentations of the world). Culture, gone wrong, would negate individual criticality and reinforce unquestioning receptivity to commonplace attitudes and emotions. The view seen here is representative of longstanding assumptions about what art or culture, high and low, might do. Wollheim did not link his praise for art that necessitated interpretation to particular traditions, and the binary of active/​passive engagement has since proven significant for a number of areas in aesthetics. Popularizers and neo-pragmatists have used it to contest the sharp divide of high and low in a variety of ways. Popular works may after all be actively put to use in the service of the same imaginative and ethical ends as high or modernist ones.65 And it may be that such active recasting will show the divisions of high and low to be contingent or merely based on the

86

Art and Life

changing ways in which the works tended to be used.66 Or high art and entertainment may be equally valid cultural forms that simply serve different ends.67 More recent debates over literary Darwinist approaches to art grounded in evolutionary psychology have relied on the same value structure.68 For some, art’s evolutionary role lies in its training in imagination and empathy, while a competing view sees art as a pleasure-based activity valued for its escapism and entertainment. It should now be apparent that we can trace a line of thought about the politics of high and low culture from early twentieth-century thinking through Wollheim and into the present. But even within this line supporters of modernism in the arts have come to see the rejection of the passive as a defining modernist trait: advocated by writers from Walter Benjamin to Clement Greenberg in the 1930s and reaffirmed later in the century in areas ranging from the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno; to the late modernist art history of T. J. Clark, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss; to the more recent recasting of the emancipatory possibilities of modernist culture in the work of Jacques Rancière.69 The continuation of the line from early ­twentieth-century thinkers to Wollheim through to the present is seen nowhere more clearly than in the writing of the British art historian and Art & Language collaborator Charles Harrison, even though Harrison himself saw earlier writers like Fry as interested in no more than significant form and aesthetic quality.70 In Harrison’s exemplary version of the avoidance of the passive, a work might emphasize the pictorial surface in a way that interfered with the painting’s “mimetic relation to the world.”71 We can see this in the way that the dabbed white paint in Lucas van Valckenborch’s Winter Landscape not only suggests a snow scene but also calls attention to the painterly artifice of the work (fig. 15).72 Pictorial “complexity” here results from the “significant lack of fit between the world as lived and the imaginary world the work of art proposes.”73 The difference of the pictorial world from what we expect, the barrier posed to effortless entry by the formed nature of the work, may then force the viewer into a “scepticism about appearances” that leads to an all-important “reconstruction of the artist’s practical enterprise” as part of the viewing experience.74 Paul Joseph Jamin’s painting The Vandal with His Share of the Spoils, for Harrison, stood for how artistically and ethically wrong a work that neglected complexity might be (fig. 16). Shown at the Paris Salon of 1893, it achieved its ends not through its ostensible (and faked) moralizing about barbarity but by the “imaginative anticipation of rape.”75

Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

87

Such a fantasy was presented to the late nineteenth-century audience by the slickly transparent “surface of the painting” that offered “no barrier to the enjoyment of this prospect.”76 For Harrison the most “obvious” candidates to set against this example came from “art of the modern period,” with Manet’s Olympia a paradigmatic example: The kind of painting I have in mind is one which presents some aspect of its own production as a bar to unreflective consumption, which renders problematic the relationship between what it represents and how it represents it, which figuratively embodies time as a necessary aspect of its own coming into existence, which is therefore not possibly perceived as a mere glimpse or scene or effect, but which imposes on the spectator a necessity for engagement with what it is

Figure 15. Lucas van Valkenborch, Winter Landscape with Snowfall Near Antwerp, 1575. Oil on oak panel, 61 × 82.5 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt. Photo © Städel Museum—U. Edelmann—ARTOTHEK.

88

Art and Life

Figure 16. Paul Joseph Jamin, The Vandal with His Share of the Spoils, 1893. Oil on canvas, 162 × 118 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, La Rochelle. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais

of—an engagement that is disciplined by acknowledgement of the painting’s own factitious character, and that is objective to the extent that the spectator’s own preferences and predispositions are regulated by the priority of that acknowledgement.77

Olympia demonstrated how in foregrounding its “production,” a painting could present “a bar to unreflective consumption.”78 More than just self-­ consciousness prompted by Olympia’s gaze, it is the visibility even at some distance of the overtly marked (painterly) surface and the oddities in the depiction itself—the ambiguous scene, the unlikely cat—that force the spectator to engage with the “factitious character” of the painting. The experience of Olympia, properly understood, builds in a heightened self-consciousness,

Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

89

reflective of the thought that this was a work painted by an artist to be looked at in a particular way, an experience almost like looking at the work with the artist standing behind and looking at your looking. Manet, Cézanne, and other modernist painters, on this way of thinking, all created works that barred an unreflective relationship of fantasy to the subjects depicted and instead required a self-conscious and constructive viewing properly understood in terms of imagination. This brings us, finally, to the political valence of the appeal to the imagination. Much of its contemporary significance derived from its connection with a cluster of concepts—freedom, autonomy, self-development— emphasized by the idea of a socialized liberalism. Various historians have suggested that the so-called strange death of liberal England before the First World War was a gross exaggeration but that subsequently the definitions of liberalism became so blurred as to make the continued influence of the orientation difficult to trace.79 The obscurity of liberalism’s continuation is partly explained by the fact that, towards the end of the 1910s, certain liberal principles had become dominant even as the decline of political liberalism had reached a near terminal stage.80 Despite this latter decline, the tradition of public moralists lived on in an intellectual elite that still desired to spread the moral qualities of individual and collective self-government, now with a noticeable inclination towards the cultural and aesthetic values of “civilization.”81 Dovetailing with a construction of the national character predicated on freedom, “self-reliance,” “autonomy,” and “self-realization” were all qualities praised in the development of the self-governing individual.82 The emphasis on the individual, however, is easy to oversimplify. Ethical socialists espousing social and aesthetic reform in Britain often spoke of the values of the community and the individual in the same breath, just as they suggested that art might reveal the deeper reality behind the social and natural worlds at the same time as they praised art as expression and self-­ fulfillment in a manner shot through with the liberal language of self-­ development and autonomy.83 The intertwining of universalist and expressivist rhetoric echoes the basic point of the socialistic New Liberalism of those who followed in the wake of the political philosopher T. H. Green—even though the point is now often described as communitarian and thus in absolute opposition to liberal thought—that the full development of autonomous human agents could only be realized within the context of their social community (or the sum of social institutions and practices that made up their society).84 The critique of anticollectivist individualism, in other words, did not

90

Art and Life

entail a critique of individuality as such. Nor did the critique of mindless conformism mean a critique of community as such. Both New Liberalism and ethical socialism, instead, entailed an organic view of society that saw the individual as a significant element of a properly functioning whole.85 The general idea was summed up in a report on a conference attended by many of the educational reformers of the moment: “If the members tried to put shortly the philosophic basis of their view it would be to say that every human being was developed in and through society, but that human society owed its development and sustentation to the individuality and cooperation of its individual members.”86 This point is crucial to our understanding of how apparently escapist theories of self-expression through art could come together with more obviously socially concerned views of art’s role in communal life. Even as writers such as Read, highly supportive of the ethical socialist craft and design tradition, drew on contemporary science and philosophy to extend the arguments about the shared grounding of art and the social world in the laws of nature itself, they also stressed the new and special place of the individual in the modern world.87 Just like the socialism later espoused by Wollheim, the social anarchism that Read supported explicitly from around 1938 (and implicitly from the 1910s) was based on the interplay of individual expression and universalism or the realization of full and free development of the self, which only a properly functioning social sphere would allow.88 As Read put it, the ideal society, “itself reflecting the organic rhythms and balanced processes of nature, would give the individual the greatest degree of liberty consistent with a group organization. A group organization is itself a necessity only in order to guarantee this liberty.”89 For Read “such a society is anarchist” due to the rejection of the machinery of a political government as a necessary support.90 Nonetheless, the parallels with New Liberalism are obvious, especially given that the widespread emphasis on “the state” found in T. H. Green and other New Liberal theorists was often a specifically Hegelian usage—it involved social organization rather than strictly governmental activity.91 Looking back more closely at the political divisions of the moment, we can now see how an interest in the interrelation of the individual and the social whole ties various formalist writers into the socialism and anarchism that they often espoused—writers including Fry, Stokes, and Bulley at points expressed support for anarchism—as well as the liberalism to which they have more commonly been linked.92 And thus, far from expression as a selfish and escapist approach to art, the communication of expression and corollary

Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

91

development of imagination were seen to play a vital part in art’s social role: possibilities of self-development and autonomy were for many best embodied in the operations of such art that promised the creation of individual citizens able to operate freely and harmoniously within the communal context of modern democratic society. Present-day polemics about the ethical potential of the aesthetic have resulted in us losing sight of this middle ground. Projects that make use of the aesthetic to institute an “ideological model of self-regulating and self-­ determining subjectivity” have recently been heavily criticized as characteristic of modern society’s desire to locate the law and state within the subject.93 Others, by contrast, have seen the strategic use of the aesthetic as the only way to authorize a true subjective freedom and capacity for anti-state resistance.94 As the strange cross-party consensus that formed in the early to mid-twentieth century shows, however, the formalist conception could appear ambiguous between freedom as ability to develop within preset boundaries and freedom as entirely autonomous self-direction. The conception was equally open on the question of relative endorsement or rejection of the state. Just as Read espoused the values of individual freedom in relation to anarchism, by 1961 Wollheim could write that socialism (as mentioned earlier) had taken up the liberal ideal of autonomy.95 Following from the tie of community and individuality, “It should be the ultimate boast of socialism that it decreases the possibility of bad upbringing, that it increases the possibility of good education, and that, having in this way realized the conditions upon which free choice depends, it further offers a man reasonable security that as he chooses, so in fact he will be able to live.”96

Aestheticism as Social Criticism After this recovery of re-creation and the related potential of the aesthetic, what then of the political legacy of aestheticism? Aestheticism, if predicated on the experience of a pure aesthetic emotion in the face of high art products, is usually thought to be an adjunct of elite culture. But something else is implied by Collingwood’s assertions that art proper was a matter of interaction between artist and audience, that one-sided artistic self-expression was a disastrous consequence of nineteenth-century individualism, and above all that the twentieth-century degradation of popular culture into forms of passive receptivity was a direct outcome of the “vicious late nineteenth-century

92

Art and Life

tradition of art for art’s sake.”97 When such unsympathetic commentators equated ideas of aesthetic emotion associated with Fry and Bell with mere passive and uncreative pleasure, one odd consequence was the relegation of the aesthete to the same category as the audiences for low mass cultural entertainment that craved an escape from life. Given the account above of the defense of high culture and critique of low culture, it is nonetheless possible to link aestheticism of a principled kind with social criticism. Reading the many commentaries on Fry and Bell, then and since, that cast them as entirely pure, detached, or impersonal, it is relatively easy to see how the attack on an escapist Bloomsbury aesthetic could actually operate in tandem with the critique of mass culture. And it is worth turning to a writer connected to the Barnes Foundation for one of the most insightful explanations of this phenomenon. In a comment from the 1920s that gets to the heart of the matter, Laurence Buermeyer suggested of Fry: “In his separation of the ‘sensuous’ and the ‘emotional’ elements of design, he appears to be on the track of the legitimate distinction between decorative pattern and the structural or expressive form in which an artist expresses his personal and penetrating vision of the essences of things,” but Fry and Bell alike were nonetheless seen as fatally ambiguous on this fundamental “distinction between pattern and truly expressive form.”98 The writer pointed out that Fry’s account of imagination—based, as it seemed to be, in “detached” contemplation—was unable to fully distinguish between the appreciation of true art objects, which embodied an intention to communicate emotions, and the emptier experience involved in the contemplation of nonart items or even mass cultural ephemera such as magazine illustrations.99 Fry’s accounts of his method, in other words, left him open to the charge that his preferred mode of contemplation was precisely the pure and empty kind that was thought to characterize the worst excesses of both mass cultural consumption and late nineteenth-century aestheticism: in both cases a solipsistic stance that asked nothing and discovered nothing from the objects encountered. This, ironically, was a likeness that could be found in some of the very first attacks on Pater’s Renaissance.100 Fry explicitly attempted to distance himself from the narrow aestheticist attitude. In 1920, he qualified his previous criticisms of the moralism of Ruskin with the suggestion that the decorative had been used by Whistler and others to sweep away the ethical “perhaps too cavalierly,” with the “‘decorators’ fail[ing] to distinguish between agreeable sensations and imaginative significance.”101 He later wrote of the “decay of all standards of art” from the

Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

93

mid-nineteenth century when “on the one hand there crystallized out the commercial painting of the Royal Academy, moulded to suit the taste of the new-rich Philistine, and, on the other hand, in protest to that, a whimsical æstheticism utterly divorced from life and from good sense.”102 On this basis the Pre-Raphaelites were said to have “fled from contemporary life instead of facing and interpreting it,” and as such created work that “had no roots in life—it was an artificial hot-house growth. They had shut themselves off from new experiences, and so starved their own imaginative life.”103 Yet Fry’s very terms were turned against Bloomsbury as a whole, with the ambiguity in his theory identified by Buermeyer providing the grounds for attack. I. A. Richards associated Bloomsbury directly with the aestheticism of A. C. Bradley while defining himself against this position.104 Wyndham Lewis provided some of the most memorable attacks on Bloomsbury as a form of aestheticism, with his description in the mid-1910s of the Omega’s “skin” as “Greenery-Yallery” and in 1921 of the Bloomsbury painters as “a small group of people which is of almost purely eminent Victorian origin, saturated with William Morris’s prettiness and fervour. ‘Art for Art’s sake,’ late Victorianism, the direct descendants of Victorian England.”105 The import of the association for later writers was perhaps best expressed by Geoffrey Grigson, who wrote not just that in having described Bloomsbury art theory as nothing more than a reversion to late-Victorian aestheticism, “Mr. [Wyndham] Lewis estimated Roger Fry modestly and exactly” but also that “[Fry] withdrew and wanted everyone else to withdraw ‘from the passions of the instinctive life,’ but the only withdrawal possible is into the imaginative life, a vital sphere which Mr. Fry never did more than visit.”106 The link of formalism with aestheticism and the same contentless or unimaginative pleasure given by low cultural products has proven deeply influential.107 Most recently and prominently, T. J. Clark has written of his quarrel with “certain modes of formalism” as one with an “old picture of visual imaging as pursued in a trance-like removal from human concerns.”108 Clark describes his own interest as lying instead with a stress on “the specificity of picturing, and on that specificity’s being so closely bound up with the mere materiality of a given practice, and on that materiality’s being so often the generator of semantic depth—of true thought, true stilling and shifting of categories,” an account that he turns to the “possibility of resistance in a world saturated by slogans, labels, sales pitches, little marketable meaningmotifs.”109 Clark’s drawing together of high cultural values with a critique of contemporary image culture and attendant forms of passive spectatorship is

94

Art and Life

clearly aestheticist in the sense identified by Wollheim that I discuss below: “To see the distance [of visual imagery from verbal discourse] narrowed day by day, and intellectuals applauding the narrowing in the name of some wholly illusory ‘transition from the world of the word to that of the image’—when what we have is a deadly reconciliation of the two modes, via the utter banalization of both—that is bitter to me.”110 But such concerns are now most likely to be thought of as marking a distinct break from traditions of formalism and aestheticism. It is striking that by the 1970s, formalist practice could have come to epitomize rather than stand in solidarity against “the various ways in which visual imagining of the world has been robbed of its true humanity and conceived of as something less than human, nonhuman, brilliantly (or dully) mechanical.”111 Looking back at late twentieth-century attacks on aestheticism and formalism, the way in which “aesthete” came to be a term of abuse in twentiethcentury art writing appears to be one of its great ironies.112 The deep need or longing for the role that art and the aesthetic might play in the social world was one of the most prominent characteristics of those later champions of modernist art, a point that supporters like Clark and Harrison have continued to link to some notion of form.113 But because Victorian art for art’s sake aestheticism was regularly characterized as entailing a passive or escapist mode of relation to the world—the same used to critique mass culture—and because of the need to demarcate vital aesthetic experience from what now appeared to be a misguided past, Ruskinian standards of imagination and the importance of art were taken up by new hands in a battle against the formalist and the so-called aesthete. Formalist and “bad” aesthete, in short, were now equated. ——— Nonetheless, the denigration of the aesthete obscures the instrumental role many gave to close attention to art and aesthetic experience, a point about which Wollheim at least was clear. Commenting on Adrian Stokes’s art writing from the 1930s, Wollheim later described real aesthetes as in a “middle position,” able to make their surroundings a partial vehicle for their fantasies, without ever turning away from acknowledgement of their true nature.114 In the same text Wollheim suggested, “It is in the tradition of the great aesthetes, though not necessarily of the great artists, to be social critics.”115 But he also recognized the danger that had by then led to the association of the aesthete with total surrender to fantasy: “It is only when men have been already reduced to the status of furniture or decoration, when they themselves have

Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

95

become part of a colourful or inert environment, that within the aesthetic creed their rights as percipient beings become slighted.”116 Wollheim’s comment is as clear a statement as could be had of the ethical necessity of acknowledging a thing’s status as having the particular history and nature that it does. Decoration in its negative sense emerges simply when something gets treated as if it has no history, but the treatment of real things as mere decoration was not true aestheticism; there was “a natural connection between these two roles” of aesthete and social critic, “and . . . it is the cases in which they do not coincide, in which the aesthete is indifferent to the conditions of his society, that require explanation.”117 According to the Stokesian view pursued by Wollheim, to develop one’s sensibility was to develop one’s understanding of the way that others used experience to make meaning out of their visual world.118 The vision of a (true) aesthete as social critic made the aesthetically engaged viewer the person best placed to understand and work against the “tyranny of a monstrous environment over many of our fellow beings,” “bullying us, humiliating us, inserting itself into us in a domineering and distorting fashion, and at the same time protecting itself from criticism by posing as an authority whose orders it is childish or wilful to question.”119 Stokes himself summed this idea up in a description of one of his own books: with its attention to “symbol, substitution, projection, whatever the aesthetic context is,” the work was intended as “a piece of cultural analysis. . . . For the prime subject matter is not myself, not architectural appreciation nor the . . . eye. It is the giant structure of substitution itself; humanism in my view.”120 With its focus on imaginative identification and partial intersubjectivity yielded by communicable experience and the danger of free and subjective response brought under control by the constraints of the (formal) properties of the object itself, the social project of formalist criticism at its most subtle was intended to reconcile what has been seen as the conflict in Ruskin’s method of “reason and imagination, of accuracy and vision.”121 Taking a broad and fully imaginative notion of seeing and vision, such critics essentially agreed with Ruskin’s doctrine that “the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see some thing, and to tell what he saw in a plain way.”122 To be empathetic to, and able to intervene in, the experience of the visual environment by others, while better able to control one’s own experience, was one way to keep in mind Morris’s dream of an earthly paradise, translated into Wollheim’s utopian ideal “that the outer world should exhibit a degree of harmony or integration comparable to that which man tries to establish within himself.”123

96

Art and Life

But unlike the collapsing of the realms of art and life that was key to the avant-garde reading of Morris, this form of aestheticism as social criticism relied on the particular instrumentality of authentically imaginative and expressive “fine” art.124 Though many popularizers used the language of the merging of art and life to support their promotion of fine art as an assurance that their communicative formalism would not be confused with the escapist or passive kind, such a strategy in reality did not respond to the disconnection of art from the public at large with attempts to make art and life one. Instead, as Wollheim approvingly noted of Stokes, the goal was “to narrow, perhaps to close, the cultural divide,” while at the very same time, “to defend, to justify, if need be to sharpen the conceptual distinction.”125 Wollheim’s views, like Clark’s, I hope it is clear, are not presented here as a move beyond early formalism so much as a development and exemplification of its ethical ideal. And while this ethical ideal carries a certain, almost seductive beauty—and, for some, has come to seem the very justification of the practice of close engagement with objects that is known as art history—it, too, was beset by the range of worries I raised in closing the previous chapter. It is the problems that attend this ethical ideal—and the possible move beyond it to a more modest use of form—to which the final chapters now turn.

Mass Civilization and Minority Visual Culture

97

4 Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing: For and Against Mass Culture

Formalism’s claims to social engagement involved more than just close attention to items of high culture. Just as significant were views on design, which at their most optimistic pointed the way to the radical reform of the everyday visual world. Here, however, the formalist demand for human intervention and style ran up against machine production, for the possibility of production without human intervention sat uneasily with formalism’s demand for a humanly formed aspect to made things. The problem is seen nowhere more clearly than in the case of photography. Since the invention of photography, writers have worried about how valuable such pictures could be given their apparent lack of human intervention. For the philosopher Roger Scruton, in a characteristic statement, a painting stands in an “intentional” relation to its subject and is thus meaningful in terms of the artist’s activity in selecting and shaping the representation.1 The relationship between an “ideal” photograph and its subject, on the other hand, is merely a mechanical or causal one, and as such the interest taken in a photograph can only be an interest in the external things in the world that it shows. Earlier in the twentieth century, formalist critics of photography offered similar views but stressed the priority of the hand over the machine even more directly. For Henri Focillon, the photograph intimated a future

98

Figure 17. Julia Margaret Cameron, Juliet Stephen (née Jackson), 1867. Albumen print, 27.6 × 22 cm. Art Institute of Chicago. Harriott A. Fox Endowment. Photo © 2018, Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, New York / Scala, Florence.

time “when artists paint by machine, as with an airbrush”: “Then at last the cruel inertia of the photograph will be attained by a handless eye, repelling our sympathy even while attracting it, a marvel of light, but a passive monster. . . . Even when the photograph represents crowds of people, it is the image of solitude, because the hand never intervenes to spread over it the warmth and flow of human life.”2 Roger Fry, meanwhile, hesitated when faced with photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron that seemed to echo so many of the subtleties found in painting and drawing (fig. 17). Perhaps, he suggested tentatively, it might be wrong to consider control by the hand “a sine quâ non of all artistic expression.”3 With the “inevitable growth of mechanical processes in the modern world,” it seemed, “we shall probably become increasingly able to concentrate our attention on those elements of artistic

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

99

expression which do not depend upon this intimate contact at every point of the work with the artist’s nervous control.” That time had not yet been reached, however. There remained a “natural tendency” to turn away from work in which “mechanism replaces that nervous control of the hand which alone seems capable of transmitting the artist’s feeling to us.” Close to the problem of the lack of style as a mark of low culture, the problem of human intervention or the hand as a necessary element in cultural production plagued efforts to reconcile mass cultural conditions with a visual environment satisfactory in both aesthetic and ethical terms. A visual culture that would be truly popular in its mass engagement and use might entail the rejection of potentially individualistic and elite fine art in favor of a more socialized form of art as design. But the democratizing potential of machine production brought to the fore the difficulty of justifying aesthetic quality and cultural authenticity in works not produced by the individual maker. Would the expressive quality of the individual hand be necessary for aesthetically satisfying objects, and if so, how could this be reconciled with the elitism inherent in the critique of mass production? The issue is further brought into focus by challenges from Marxist art writers from the 1930s onwards, who in their attacks on formalism attempted to oppose realism and other forms of image production to design as the answer to an incipient mass or popular culture, only to find themselves outflanked by arguments about the passivity of popular culture and the alternative potential of design.

The Machine and the Hand Between 1913 and 1919, Roger Fry organized the Omega Workshops, a scheme intended to engage artists in the design and production of “the objects of daily life.”4 As Fry put it in his prospectus for the Workshops, the “PostImpressionist” turn from naturalism to design had opened the way for an engagement with applied art by modern artists.5 Fry looked back with nostalgia to the days before nineteenth-century industrialization, when “men used for daily life objects which expressed the joy of the creator and craftsman and conveyed a corresponding delight to the user.” William Morris, whose writing Fry echoes here, was said to have made the “most notable” previous attempt to reverse the “divorce between art and industry.” Though the Omega participants did not “hope to solve the social problems of production as Morris did,” they still aspired to substitute “the directly expressive quality of the artist’s

100

Art and Life

handling for the deadness of mechanical reproduction.” In a very few cases, the artists would create designs to be produced by modified mechanical process, as with the ceramics Fry made with the firm Carter & Co. that either cast pots from hand-thrown molds or used plaster hump molds as the bases for new thrown pots.6 Largely though, the products of the Workshop relied on the intervention of the individual. Walls and screens were painted, fabrics dyed, and furniture decorated, all by hand. In other cases designs for rugs or items of furniture were produced by craftsmen as one-off pieces. On the basis of this insistence on the hand, Fry was attacked over the tension between a socially motivated reform of design and the carefully theorized critique of machine production. As I show in this chapter, however, the tension between reformation of hand design and the turn to machine production was one that pervaded the theorizing of even Fry’s staunchest critics. The many roles taken on by Herbert Read over the interwar years— from his place as key contributor for the Criterion to his own participation in adult education and promotion of a range of modernist painters and sculptors—show the depth of his involvement with the spread of the high art ideal. Yet he simultaneously advocated for the kind of large-scale reform of the visual environment that he felt could only be provided by new forms of mass design. Read’s forceful judgment on Fry’s inability to reconcile himself to the rise of mass democratic culture has become a commonplace in assessment of high art–oriented formalism’s pretensions to social engagement.7 Bloomsbury as a whole, Read suggested, “turned with a shudder from the threatening advance of what it would call ‘the herd.’ Though it despised the moral pretensions and social prestige of the parent generation and hated the prevalent commercialism, it did not attempt to reconcile its own traditions of good taste and refinement with the necessary economic foundations of a new order of society. This was very obvious in Roger Fry’s case: faced with the machine, mass-production and universal education, he could only retreat into the private world of his own sensibility.”8 There was one major problem with reviving Morris, as Read’s critique brings sharply into focus. The rise of a true mass culture had raised the problem of authenticity that the majority of historians have seen as fatal for Morris’s legacy, which is usually said to have collapsed in the 1910s under the pressure of the mass mechanization impossible to ignore in the face of the First World War.9 Morris relied on an ideal of the artist’s unique sensibility and its transfer into the made object or the authentic trace of the maker left behind in the visible purposiveness that handmade work could allow. This “nervous tremor of the

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

101

creator,” as Fry later called it, was understood to be inevitably lost in the mass-produced art made possible by the machine.10 The art of machine production would thus have to be rejected by those claiming an orthodox continuation of Morris’s principles.11 Design seemed to carry a structural resistance to mass production, just like the high or humanistic art that it aimed to replace. Fry stood in difficult relation to these developments. Intellectually raised on arts and crafts principles, he remained friends with key figures of the movement,12 and his language betrayed its continued influence.13 Fry’s stress on the ethics of process, the full range of human production, and the connection with the spirit of the maker are obvious echoes of Morris. They evoke the pursuit of an aestheticist earthly paradise, where all made products in the world would be infused with authenticity or a visible spiritually expressive purposiveness. For certain socially minded writers such as Michael Sadler, the educationalist and advocate for modern art, this side of Fry made him the figure who had taught his generation the truth about the intrinsic connections between art and the wider world.14 Fry’s efforts in the direction of his educational and design projects arguably pointed the way towards the later mass participatory schemes of Read and others. Yet in their engagement with domesticity, Fry and the Bloomsbury figures have since been seen to reject the “utopian” vision of “total social overhaul” in order to instead operate as a “subculture”—“sustain[ing] opposition to dominant norms without the promise of eventually becoming, [itself], normative.”15 Perhaps at times thinking it impossible, Fry struggled to fully theorize and put into practice ways to have his design activity effect more than a localized group. His most regularly celebrated contributions remained his successes in bringing high culture to the masses through relatively cheap and widely available books, exhibitions, and famously well-attended lectures. (The opening of access to art was a running theme in his obituary notices and was held up in his defense as a socially engaged critic not only by Virginia Woolf but by the then-Marxist Anthony Blunt, who wrote approvingly that “as a public lecturer he can hardly ever have had his equal.”16) According to critics such as Read, Geoffrey Grigson, and Francis Klingender, however, Fry’s successes with the popularization of high art were not enough. Fry’s inability to theorize a successful form of mass production or mass (non-bourgeois) art, it was claimed, meant he had neither answers to present-day social questions (as demanded by Read) nor the material for a direct challenge to ruling power or societal structure (as demanded by Marxist writers).17

102

Art and Life

The initiative that had the closest relation to the arts and crafts legacy was Fry’s Omega Workshop, where from 1913 artists were employed to design and decorate often prepurchased items of furniture. Omega differed from Morris’s aims in its cultivated “primitive” crudity and simplicity of the decoration, as well as more controversially in the fact that many goods were brought in and decorated rather than fully designed and made all the way down.18 (For Fry’s critics, this feature separated Omega decisively from the ideals of Ruskin and Morris, who would not have considered it legitimate to simply add decoration to an already-finished product.)19 For its moment the Omega did in fact take a significantly progressive stance on the machine. Fry experimented with a process that would replicate his own handmade pottery, potentially preserving the expressive touch of the maker, while the workshop also sold machine-printed cottons from Charles Sixsmith’s Bentinck Mills.20 But as with the original arts and crafts movement and other anti-machine craft workers of the interwar years, Fry was unable to give up on the idea of the “nervous tremor.”21 The transfer of sensibility into the object and on to the viewer was bound up with the individual “handwriting” of the artist, and machine production had so far not been successful in retaining this crucial aspect. The stress placed on the touch of the individual maker meant that the enterprise suffered from the inevitable high-priced exclusivity of hand production. Though its designs were to have a strong influence in the interwar years, the workshops themselves were finally closed due to financial difficulties in 1919. Despite the material failure, Fry’s theorization of decorative art was significant in a number of ways. His focus on the formal qualities of the object as the locus of expressive qualities blurred divisions between fine and applied arts, with paintings and pottery alike presented as expressions of sensibility via form. The support given to pottery in the Burlington Magazine from around 1910—including the emphasis on non-Western ceramics and early English pottery, and even the inclusion of artists’ pottery alongside canvases in the postimpressionist exhibition of 1910—was crucial for the rise and acceptance of the high cultural status of craft items in England.22 By the 1920s potters such as William Staite Murray were able to exhibit alongside modern painters and sculptors and claim comparable fine art status for their work.23 From that decade on, Read and other critics followed and developed Fry’s line, taking decorative art not just as a fully realized form of abstract art but even as a model for the future of nonrepresentational art as a whole.24

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

103

Though it opened the way for crafts practitioners who rejected individualism in production and high art status altogether, Fry’s thinking also rejected the utopian socialist homogeneity of the international style in modernist design. According to the utopian social aims of modernist design, rationalization of design and production meant that standardized architecture and machine-produced goods could raise the general aesthetic and practical level of everyday surroundings even for the poorest in society. But as I have discussed in earlier chapters of this book, since the turn of the century, Fry had made a hard distinction between the natural beauty found in the world at large and the more imaginatively stimulating artistic beauty found when a made object bore the visual mark of the expressed purposiveness of its maker.25 Fry toyed with the idea that machine-produced goods might carry the full imaginative charge, but aside from the brief foray into replication of his pottery designs, his views expressed on design in the surrounding years were firm in the conviction that hand production was of utmost importance.26 Late in life Fry went as far as to provide an illustration of the primary aesthetic interest that the hand alone could provide. Having traced a copy of Paul Klee’s painting Der Beladene (1929) with a straight-edge ruler, Fry compared his reproduction with the original work to demonstrate the difference between a drawn line’s connection with the nervous control of the artist and the “mechanical and insensitive” nature of the ruled line (fig. 18).27 Fry’s copy and Klee’s original here stand in neatly for the greater and lesser forms of aesthetic interest that hand and machine production might provide. The ruled copy managed to retain the basic design of Klee’s work and through this could still “express a good deal” of the “personality” of the original artist.28 Nonetheless the copy was now closer to the “geometric” art of Twelfth Dynasty Egypt, an art of “mechanical perfection” rather than an art that used line to express “the artist’s sensibility” in full.29 Drawing on the distinction between types of beauty, Fry repeatedly insisted in his writings on design that the functional beauty of an object that was fit for its purpose—a beauty that he accepted could be present in machine-made goods—was nonetheless only equivalent to the first stage of natural beauty rather than a more fully aesthetic beauty. The division allowed that functionalism and the machine could yield some definite form of beauty, albeit a secondary one. Even this partial admission of the value of the machine was a relatively advanced view for Britain in the 1910s, and one that gave rise to the notion of Fry as a progressive critic.30 But the view still implied that such functional beauty was not sufficient for it left untouched the aesthetic

104

Art and Life

Figure 18. Roger Fry’s tracing (left) of a reproduction of Paul Klee’s Der Beladene (1929), shown at right. From Fry, Last Lectures, ed. Kenneth Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), fig. 1.

heights that human artistic intervention alone could generate. As part of the Gorell Committee in 1932, formed by the government to address the conjunction of art and industry, Fry was at the heart of the decade’s proposed reforms of contemporary design. His appendix to its report advocating for “laboratories of design” nonetheless drew the criticisms of Read and other design activists for exactly this downgrading of functional beauty as secondary relative to a human and fully aesthetic one.31 In his book Art and Industry, Read was generous in praising Fry as a critic “whose appreciation of the true nature of art cannot be doubted,” but he wrote that Fry’s contribution to the report missed the point in its focus on the decorative arts, as well as in its attempt to fight against the more extreme theory of functionalism (that “when an object fulfills its function perfectly, it is, ipso facto, beautiful and a work of art,” which was “admittedly a fallacy”).32 Concerned with “the formal basis of beauty in design” as a whole, Read had a more general battle in mind; he was gearing up for the fight against “the conception of art as something external to industry, something formulated apart from the industrial process, something which the manufacturer can ‘take advice on’ and import into his industry should he think fit.” This was more extreme than Fry’s

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

105

theory, which implied there was still the possibility that the artist might add a special kind of beauty to products during or even after the design process. For Read, on the other hand, the artist able to create industrial art of true formal beauty had to be a designer fully trained and deeply involved in the processes of production. Fry’s conception of the artist in industry still implied, in Read’s words, “an individual external to industry—a talented humanist to whom the manufacturers come for a little culture and refinement.”

Art and Industry In the early 1930s Paul Nash was at the forefront not only of British experiments with surrealism and abstraction but with the trend of the moment for artists to lend their efforts to design work. Beauty was “inherent in functional objects,” Nash wrote in the 1932 article “The Artist and Industry,” and even beyond function, the control of “the mind of the artist” was behind the “only successful enterprises for making articles of use or decoration which have had a wholesome influence on the appearance of everyday life.”33 In 1935, however, he heavily qualified these views. Unable to lend full support to the pursuit of even the gentle abstraction represented by John Piper and Myfanwy Evans’s journal Axis, he wrote that he only felt the freedom to indulge in full abstraction in “the geometrical planning of a textile or other form of industrial design.”34 Nash approvingly cited Read’s conception of a fully abstract pure or geometrical art that might serve as a research tool for industrial design but only to stress that his own art (rather than design work) was quite unlike Read’s “mechanic or geometric sensibility.”35 Outside of design, things could not be severed from representation altogether for Nash did not feel able to abstract so far from the objects he took up as to lose sight of “their own image.”36 The design activity of Nash, who was at various points president of the Society of Industrial Artists and a member of the government’s Council for Art and Industry, demonstrates how widespread the merging of art and industry was at that moment. At the same time his insistence that art and design operated on slightly different terms points to how concerns similar to those raised by Fry continued to undermine the efforts to break down boundaries between the two. The most direct attempts to merge art and industrial design in England belonged largely to the activities of the Design and Industries Association (DIA). From the group’s formation in 1915, many of its members, inspired by

106

Art and Life

the recent design and trade successes of the Werkbund in Germany, argued that the only way to revivify the ideals of Morris was through an embrace of industrial production.37 Though the DIA’s theoretical advocacy of the machine was inconsistent and strongly contested even within the group, Frank Pick in his work for the London Underground (often with Charles Holden) and businessmen-designers such as Harry Peach managed to drive the ideal forward in England at least for a time.38 Acceptance of the utopian social vision of machine work was restricted. But the diverse membership of the DIA was highly effective in spreading a more generalized propaganda of fitness and the unity of the arts, capitalizing on the prewar rise of arts and crafts figures in positions of power as well as the nationalistic (and government-backed) economic drive for the take up of good design. By the early 1920s, the DIA’s rhetorical tropes of the unity of the arts and “fitness for purpose” could be found in government reports, in the literature of organizations such as the Arts League of Service, and in newspaper campaigns such as the Times’s “Art in Common Life” series.39 Boosted by the presence of Fabians such as Sidney Webb, sympathetic to the same ethos and eager to capitalize on any enhancement that the project might give to the economic competitiveness of British goods, the government founded its own British Institute of Industrial Art in 1920. The Institute put on a series of exhibitions of industrial design in the 1920s, often with DIA support, though still with an uneasy attitude towards the respective roles of the craftsman and the machine.40 Even more significant in terms of spreading the discourse of industrial design was the long running arts and crafts magazine Studio—then the best-selling arts magazine in England—and, from later in the decade, its more minor spin-offs, Commercial Art (later renamed Art and Industry) and Drawing and Design (later renamed Drawing and Decorative Art).41 The respective contributions of the DIA, other arts groups, and the government created an atmosphere highly supportive of artists involving themselves in practical design work, which led one critic to later reflect on the decade as that of “the triumph of design.”42 Activities stretched from individual works to the broadest concern for the visual environment as a whole: from McKnight Kauffer posters and Eric Gill sculpture for the London Underground to countrywide campaigns that compared good and bad examples of advertising and urban design (as the DIA joined forces with the newly formed Council for the Preservation of Rural England).43 The practices spurred by the DIA, however, cannot easily be separated from the more orthodox and anti-industrial arts and crafts legacy. Craft

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

107

continued in a number of forms that belied its interwar association with the dilettantish activities of “arty-crafty” amateurs: the pottery of Bernard Leach, Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie, William Staite Murray, and Michael Cardew; the calligraphy of Edward Johnston; and the textiles of Phyllis Barron, Dorothy Larcher, and Ethel Mairet, to mention only some of the best-known examples.44 The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, with which the DIA had broken, lived on, and its many adherents continued to provide stinging critiques of the project of industrial art, even as it began to address the question of the machine from 1930.45 Like Fry and perhaps Nash, many writers were able to keep up a kind of “cultural schizophrenia” that kept their advocacy for well-designed, mass-produced goods and that for handicrafts on entirely separate planes.46 The shared language and networks meant that magazines such as Studio were able to act as lynchpins of DIA advocacy of the machine while nonetheless continuing their support for craft practitioners and critiques of industry. The occasionally triumphant rhetoric of industrial design, then, was somewhat misleading, despite the wide publicity that the governmentally driven reform of taste received with the formation of the Gorell Committee in 1931 (followed by its report in 1932 and the creation of the Council for Art and Industry in 1934). By the 1930s the level of mass design and taste was as low as ever. National institutions such as the Royal College of Art failed to show any signs of reform in the direction of design, continuing to celebrate the old notion of fine art applied to industry, while ever-greater tensions developed between the ideals of craftsmanship and machine production.47 In the early years of the 1930s, the conflicts between art, craft, and the machine—and between industrial design for utopian ends versus for governmental aims or capitalist profit— came no closer to resolution. The Gorell Committee and 1933 Exhibition of British Industrial Art at Dorland Hall, in part organized by the DIA, were able to spread the language and example of pared down functionalist design. But subsequent exhibitions organized by other groups at venues including Burlington House were roundly criticized for their embrace of every tenet of outmoded, archaizing, and ornamental style.48 “No exhibition of recent years has been so pitilessly raked by criticism,” Nash wrote in a letter to the Times, “yet no educated visitor to Burlington House can deny that it is deserved.”49 Read’s Art and Industry of 1934 was a timely intervention, strongly advocating the ideals of Walter Gropius, quoted alongside William Morris at the beginning of the book. Read’s book paved the way for the influx of émigré design theorists such as László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, and Gropius himself, who in the middle to late 1930s quickly came to

108

Art and Life

overshadow the Design and Industry Association’s attempt at Britain’s “own kind of Bauhaus.”50 Read’s book argued for the decisive embrace of the machine that even most DIA members had struggled with. It suggested that new aesthetic standards were necessary for the new means of production and that the artist should be given total control in developing these, once suitably trained in the materials and processes of modern industry. Drawing on an organicist conception of art as connected on a structural level with the forms and rhythms of the natural world, Read attempted to unify Fry’s two kinds of beauty and argue that design and function would naturally go hand in hand with aesthetic rightness. (Fry had argued that fitness for purpose could only result in the first stage of natural, rather than fully human or aesthetic, beauty while Read often suggested that fitness was an entirely sufficient criterion for full beauty—an idea sometimes accompanied by an appeal to nature as the model for human design that tied Read and other contemporaries in England such as H. G. Wells together with the émigrés associated with the Bauhaus.)51 Apparently solving the dilemma of humanistic machine production, Read proposed that the artist could pioneer machine design by acting as a kind of aesthetic researcher. Read echoed Gropius as well as the arguments of the European revolutionary avant-garde in his suggestion that abstract art and craft were both to be encouraged as a model for industrial design and the aesthetics of the society of the future, with a 1934 abstract painting by Jean Hélion held up as one such example. The point was shifted to operate on a symbolic level, too, when Read pushed the revolutionary potential of abstract art the following year, an argument which was repeated in England in 1937 by a number of the avant-garde themselves in the publication Circle.52 With the arguments of Read and the émigré writers in mind, a new generation of artists and writers came to champion the beauty, functionality, and ethical rightness of machine-produced goods. Even as the pessimism about capitalist industrialized modernity embodied in Scrutiny and the “culture and society” tradition was becoming ever more widespread, Bloomsbury ideology was increasingly criticized in retrospect for the inability to reconcile itself to machine-produced goods.53 The apparent widespread acceptance of the machine, however, was only ever partial, and the strongest supporters were often left no choice but to bemoan the lack of progress in modern design. In his Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius of 1936, Nikolaus Pevsner influentially traced the direct line from Morris to the Bauhaus implied by his subtitle. But though he praised the aims and efforts of Frank Pick and C. R. Ashbee elsewhere, Pevsner was also

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

109

damning of the actual state of industrial design in interwar England and saw little progress in the quality of industrial products, even by the time of the following year’s An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England.54 More recent scholars have largely agreed that the reformers in Britain ultimately had little impression on industry, let alone in reproducing the successes of the much discussed Werkbund and Bauhaus in Germany, so that “it was in the field of printing and typography alone that Britain had any positive contribution to make to international developments.”55 Two closely linked theoretical issues exacerbated the difficulties of fully merging art and industry. The first was the problem of how surely machine beauty could be justified with the idea of fitness for purpose. Certain members of the DIA in the 1910s and 1920s and writers like Geoffrey Grigson in the 1930s embraced fitness as a sufficient condition for full beauty.56 Yet the division of the two types of beauty made by Fry—fitness as sufficient for a secondary beauty but not a human and fully aesthetic one—remained an issue even for the design movement’s most central figures. W. R. Lethaby, supposedly the driving theoretical force of the DIA, had in the 1910s made exactly the same distinction: “Although a machine-made thing can never be a work of art in the proper sense, there is no reason why it should not be good in a secondary order—shapely, smooth, strong, well fitting, useful; in fact, like a machine itself.”57 Popular critics and DIA members like Margaret Bulley and Noel Carrington attempted to get around the issue by diverting attention away from the sole stress on fitness.58 In one case Carrington actually argued that fitness was in some ways secondary to beauty and the “creative act” of aesthetic selection in home design.59 And even Read himself at times seemed to imply acceptance of this division between lesser and greater kinds of beauty with the binaries he drew.60 Sometimes the binary divided geometric and organic (or humanist) art; sometimes it divided the Greek vase “based on exact measurements” with “every trace of the potter’s hand . . . carefully removed” from the less regular Chinese vase that was “superior as a work of art” because, in the case of the latter, the form was “not intellectual, but intuitive or unconscious.”61 In whatever case there seemed to be a familiar implication of greater and lesser kinds of beauty or form. Later, as if acknowledging that the problem had only ever been papered over, it was the same tension that came to underpin Read’s partial disillusionment with the project of modernist design. In his words of 1961: “A dialectic thus arose, an opposition of organic vitality to mathematic law, which has guided the whole historical development of art. . . . In the development of industrial design, as of functional

110

Art and Life

architecture, it has proved easier to seek out and establish the laws of a mathematical harmony than to preserve an organic tradition, but the result has been something less than perfect art. I think there is now a general realization, accompanied by resignation and even despair, that the finest achievements of modern architecture do not compete with the finest achievements of the great styles of the past.”62 A related problem with the hope of merging art and industry was summed up in a question posed by the Times’s art critic Alan Clutton-Brock: “But what does a ‘functional’ picture entail?”63 For although the popularizing critics and DIA members often embraced the rhetoric of fitness for purpose and the unity of art and design, most also wanted to retain the particular imaginative and instrumental capacity of fine art. An easy way to reconcile the aesthetics of fitness to high art was found with J. E. Barton’s suggestion that although the machine and fitness for purpose were entirely sufficient for full beauty, in the case of fine art the “purpose” could be of a special “spiritual” kind.64 Eric Newton attempted to combine the theory of art as “communication” with the theory of art as a useful object, leading to a similar argument about the “spiritual” purpose of fine art: “Material usefulness is not the only kind of usefulness: there is such a thing as spiritual usefulness.”65 (Frank Pick meanwhile provided an example of such spiritual use, writing of the unique role fine art played in teaching viewers to see the world “with new eyes.”66) Anthony Bertram was especially prominent in the design movement, and his writings on the perfect fit between modern art and the modern interior have been used by historians since to show the coming together of art and design in the 1930s. But despite linking paintings with design, Bertram went on to suggest that paintings were not “merely decorative,” and although they were also “fulfilling a social function,” they still “serve on a higher plane than the chair.”67 Later in the decade he argued that a dedicated room in the home used as a gallery was “really the most respectable way to treat pictures. To use them simply as furniture is rather degrading them.”68 Exacerbated by such ambivalence and recalling the politics of craft, the politics of industrial design remained deeply ambiguous. At its most ambitious, industrial design theory suggested that mass production and the machine were now the solution to the problem that had brought down the arts and crafts movement. With mass production and distribution techniques, people of all classes could surround themselves with beautiful and authentic items; the lost “joy in labour” of the individual makers would be replaced by “joy in service” to the utopian aesthetic community being created.69 But as a

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

111

development of Christian Socialism that was really a kind of socialized capitalism, the new hope was to pragmatically utilize rather than resist or overthrow the modern industrialized economy.70 In practice the supporters of such an ideal could stretch across the political spectrum. The editor of the Studio, C. G. Holme, was joined by the Prince of Wales and members of the Royal Academy in proclaiming the nationalistic and economic aspects of the promotion of British industry. Socialists and anarchists like Gill and Read, meanwhile, saw mass design as a route to an aestheticized democratic society with a new equality of consumed goods, disagreeing only on whether that society would be organized through a centralized or a syndicalist political structure.71 As the rise of central planning met with rationing in the war years, the hope that mass production might democratize good design even led to the pursuit of schemes that dictated to those in need what set of well-designed items their homes would be furnished with. Celebrated by many at the time, the idea of mandating the visual environments of the working classes in this way has been likened by one later antisocialist critic to a reintroduction of sumptuary laws.72 Even leaving aside the specter of governmentally driven imposition of particular tastes, at no point did the drive for reconciliation with the conditions of mass culture involve concession to popular taste in the shape it had taken due to modern conditions—concession, that is, to the actually existing conditions of populism or mass culture. Just as in 1912 Fry had spoken of a “population drugged by the sugared poison of pseudo-art,” in the early 1940s Read could dismiss an exhibition of amateur painting that “may be taken as a fair and uncensored representation of popular taste” as a valueless reflection of the worst of contemporary society: “In criticizing such an exhibition, one is always in the invidious position of the Superior Person, but even a worm could lift its head above such a level. What stretched before us was the sordid scum left by a receding civilization.”73 Read never reconciled himself to the engagements with popular or mass culture of the Independent Group and pop art or to Lawrence Alloway’s value-leveling approach to visual culture as a whole. Throughout Read’s thinking, the notion of authentic created form remained fundamental: the spirit of the maker or designer that would infuse ethically produced goods and could in some sense be re-created in their enjoyment.74 Though the desire to unify fine and applied art was often referred to as the integration of art and life, then, design theory only offered a program that broke down barriers between art and life in a polemical or honorific sense. Art was given as elevated a status as ever before, while mass culture as it stood, in

112

Art and Life

terms of the film, the press, and the pub, were all attacked in ways that echoed the original views of William Morris. As Arthur Clutton-Brock put it in his 1914 book on Morris: There are many reformers today who think that the life of the poor ought to be brightened by amusements and excursions. Morris would never have been satisfied with such palliatives any more than with “gas and water Socialism.” He wanted all men, rich and poor, to enjoy themselves in their workshops; and then, he believed, they would have no trouble in enjoying themselves outside them. Nearly all the amusements of rich and poor alike are now passive. He believed that a man must be something of an artist in his work, if he is to be anything of an artist in his play. With us the turntable has taken the place of the folk-song, but the poor would not endure turntables or any other mechanical substitute for art, if they knew what art was from their own practice of it.75

Rather than a unification of high and popular art or of art and life, it would be more accurate to say that the design-based critique of elite fine art was intended to lift all human production (and consumption) to the status and spiritual efficacy of high culture. That which could not be so lifted was to be rejected, in a highly prescriptive manner. As with Richard Wollheim’s defense of the reality of art and its difference from life, the aim was to tend to the proper understanding (and production) of art, albeit now construed more broadly than before, so that it might better infuse and enrich the separate domain that is life.

Marxist Art Writing Against Formalism In this and the previous chapter, we have seen how various supposed realisms failed to meet the criteria of a criticism based on form. Film and photography, Caravaggio and Courbet, all seemed to sacrifice imaginative interest for subservience to natural appearance. Even realisms that were ostensibly socially motivated were not spared. In Courbet’s more unfortunate works, like the “terrible affair of a life-size lady paddling a canoe in which vulgarity becomes positively ridiculous,” Courbet’s La femme au podoscaphe (1865), Fry saw the painter as “creating the formula for the popular Academy and Salon pictures of succeeding generations with its insistence on a trivial verisimilitude.”76

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

113

By the 1930s, nonetheless, an increasingly visible alternative basis for a new mass or popular art was exactly the kind of socially motivated realism that many believed Courbet had proposed. It is hardly surprising that the Marxist critics who hoped to place realism at the center of this new art would align themselves directly against formalist thinking. What makes this alignment so interesting here, however, are the problems their project faced. The partial failure of Marxist art writing in Britain at the time helps further reveal form as critically engaged with, rather than merely set against, popular and mass culture. From 1933, social realism and its attendant critique of formalism came together around the foundation of the Artists’ International (AI), and as the decade wore on, much British Marxist cultural criticism became increasingly triumphalist and deterministic. According to the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, writing in 1935, it had “become more and more evident to serious writers that the prevailing ‘consciousness’ of the times is a political consciousness, and this is increasingly manifest in their work”; “the old conception of ‘pure’ art—art as an activity and an existence fundamentally divorced from ‘ordinary’ life and on a different plane from it—is rapidly losing its grip.”77 Day-Lewis’s confidence, like the equally triumphalist assessments of Marxism as an entirely successful counter to the dominance of formalism in 1930s Britain, is put into sharp perspective by the low impact of British Marxist art writing in the decade. A large gap between actual political activism and the success of cultural criticism might be expected, but it is notable that aside from an active minority (John Berger and Francis Klingender come to mind) and their vocal supporters, surprisingly little British Marxist art writing survived beyond the 1930s. Even by the end of the 1930s, furthermore, the Artists’ International Association (as the AI had become) had embraced a pluralistic stance that at times seemed almost indistinguishable from the formalism it initially set out to critique.78 The difficulty that Marxist criticism had in gaining a hold in a culture dominated by formalism deserves more sober assessment than it has so far received. While the level of sophistication of Britain’s Marxist culture has been doubted by some, the pages of Left Review, between its existence from October 1934 to May 1938, show a desire to look beyond overly simplistic models of art’s place in the social environment, including the notorious assumption of a smooth flow of causation from economic base to cultural superstructure.79 Much early 1930s criticism in particular admittedly did take a relatively naïve reflectionist approach: making the assumption that art mirrored the world and should be judged on its reproduction of objective reality and the political

114

Art and Life

attitude manifest in this reproduction.80 Nonetheless, the literary criticism of Day-Lewis and many writers grouped around the periodical quickly shifted to a more complex exploration of Marxist principles.81 Analyses of the historical and social circumstances of particular cases ranged from surrealism and D. H. Lawrence to the detective story and Charlie Chaplin.82 Among other notable contributors, the work of Christopher Caudwell has remained a model of how subtly Marxist thought can be turned to the analysis of the dilemmas of individual liberty within the constraints of the social world.83 Relative to the analysis of cultural production in general, however, it is remarkable how little change there was in the mode and objects of analysis underlying Marxist visual art writing over the decade. British Marxist criticism of the visual arts in the 1930s has come to be associated largely with the writings of Blunt and Klingender, with little or no apparent theoretical engagement with the kinds of formally sensitive critical theory and resultantly reworked realisms explored in contemporary Germany.84 While a host of theoretical sources have been suggested, Frederick Antal was the most openly acknowledged influence,85 even though Blunt later claimed that he had realized the fundamental weakness of his mentor’s approach as early as the beginning of the 1940s.86 The basic move of Blunt’s and Klingender’s art writing was to directly relate the historical development of formal properties of artworks to historical shifts in the means of production. This link has since been most closely associated in art history with the books published later but written largely during the thirties by Antal (resident in England from 1933) and Arnold Hauser (resident from 1938)87 and is the method for which—in its tie of form to external social development—Klingender later claimed the pedigree of Antal’s teachers, Alois Riegl and Max Dvořák.88 In the hands of Klingender and Blunt, the critical method was linked to a particular construction of the history of Western art, in many ways (or at least in its basic intention) a direct reversal of the formalist history constructed by Fry.89 For Klingender and Blunt the rise of the bourgeoisie under capitalism saw a severing of the bond between artist and public, as artists no longer worked for the same goals as their communities. Especially since the nineteenth century and the advent of modernity, the artist was forced to retreat into forms of self-expression characteristic of bourgeois individuality. The modern artist now explored his or her own sensibility in ways increasingly irrelevant to the public at large. The modernist retreat could now be witnessed in the full embrace of the art for art’s sake practice of abstract painting or the similarly solipsistic retreat of surrealist art into the artist’s very

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

115

unconscious. When the “revolutionary” potential of abstraction and surrealism were, very occasionally, acknowledged, the movements were still criticized for their lack of links with the proletariat and their resultant inability to act as models for the rising class that would form the socialist state of the future.90 The only valid counter to the solipsism of modern art was the line of realist painting that stretched from certain favored nineteenth-century artists to the efforts of present-day socialist realists. Socialist realism, for Klingender and Blunt, had so far flourished most successfully in revolutionary countries such as Soviet Russia and Mexico, but there was the potential that a revival of realism, which would enforce class solidarity, was possible even in bourgeois, capitalist countries like Britain. The ensuing prescription for artistic practice followed Lenin in an uncompromising embrace of realism, understood as being the only art that could be truly popular in its direct appeal to the (revolutionary) proletariat. For Klingender and Blunt, however, popular realism should not involve capitulation to the most traditional, academic forms of realism. Form remained important, and the way the works were made and looked should itself shift in line with the new revolutionary content of socialist realist art. This view meant support for the Society of Easel Painters (OST) artists in Russia who were relatively experimental in terms of form—such as Aleksandr Deineka and Yuri Pimenov— rather than the more technically conservative Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR).91 Internationally Diego Rivera was Blunt’s most regularly praised artist, with a balance between revolutionary content and form echoed in Britain by artists such as Rivera’s pupil “Jack” Hastings (fig. 19). The “representation of the most ordinary and typical scenes,” as Blunt put it while describing another favored artist, Peter Peri, was matched with “a technique appropriate to the scenes which he studies.”92 The art writing of Klingender and Blunt was ideally suited to the initial incarnation of the Artists’ International in Britain. Between 1933 and 1934, the group took a hardline Marxist stance based on support not just for the forms of art best suited to a proletariat revolution but, in the words of a 1934 statement, against “Imperialist War on the Soviet Union, Fascism and colonial oppression.”93 With the increasing labor and communist embrace of popular front policy in 1934 and 1935, however, the group rebranded as the Artists’ International Association (AIA) and shifted to a pluralistic embrace of artists of all kinds who were willing to range themselves “Against Fascism and War” (as its first exhibition was called). With the subsequent inclusion of realist artists across the board, the message became more confused.

116

Art and Life

Figure 19. Viscount (“Jack”) Hastings, The Worker of the Future, 1934. Fresco. Marx Memorial Library, London. Photo: Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School, London / Estate of the artist.

By the mid-1930s, a wide range of “realisms” could be drawn together under the vague banner of social engagement.94 Such realisms included not only the social realism inflected by modernism that Klingender and Blunt supported (and saw in the work of Diego Rivera and Peter Peri) but directly political illustration (most famously represented in Left Review by James Boswell, James Fitton, and James Holland), actual workers’ or proletariat art (represented for instance by the Ashington Group and the students of Percy Horton’s Working Men’s College), and the documentary movement (including the photography of Edith Tudor-Hardt and Bill Brandt, the films of John Grierson as head of the GPO film unit, the many activities of Mass Observation, and arguably even some of the later 1930s objective painting by members of the Euston Road school, such as William Coldstream and Graham Bell).95 Even beyond this range of more obviously “social” realisms, the British art world also included a great quantity of other realisms, including the more innocent and modernism-lite centre party (a category that might embrace everyone from Walter Sickert to Vanessa Bell to John Piper to, more controversially, the Euston Road artists) and the more “photographic” chocolate box and sentimental realisms of the Royal Academy and popular commercial artists.96 The centre party and Royal Academy realisms, respectively, are reminders of the inability of the Klingender–Blunt account to properly theorize and come to terms with authenticity and populism. The

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

117

need to deal with these two issues was to prove increasingly problematic as the decade wore on. In terms of authenticity, to put it simply, the Klingender–Blunt account failed because it misunderstood the broad nature of contemporaneous formalist theory. Blunt’s link between modernism and the abandonment of realism was fairly orthodox: “For most of the last thirty years no painter or sculptor of any sensibility has thought of the possibility that the first aim of his art might be the rendering of the outside world.”97 More controversial was his claim that the turn to form meant a turn away from life and thought: in modern art “the concern of the artist was either to express himself or to create a particular kind of formal pattern,” and “it was not in any case [the artist’s concern] to make statements about the life that went on around him, or to set forth his opinions about the world.”98 Blunt, in other words, constructed an absolute opposition between authentic and expressive art on the one hand and art connected with life on the other. His insistence that a connection between art and life could only be found in the depicted subject matter of realism ignored the basic expressive, communicative, and deeply humanist thrust of formalist art theory as it was promoted and popularized. This stance severely limited the force of his analysis as a critique of art theory, writing, and practice as they actually existed. Blunt even hinted at the potential of form-oriented modernist production, noting that “all paintings are a kind of propaganda, in which the artist expresses with varying degrees of directness something of his attitude towards life.”99 By denying any specificity to individual modernist artworks and their expressive and communicative potential, however, Blunt was forced into the view that all modern art was a generalized, homogeneous expression of bourgeois individuality. Fry, Read, and other form-oriented contemporaries would certainly have agreed that “paintings are the expression of the views and feeling of the artist” and that “works can only be understood in terms of these views and feelings—that is to say, in general human terms.”100 But they would have been bemused by Blunt’s additional claim that artistic expression and feeling must be linked with representation of things in the external world. Unable to fully come to terms with form, Blunt insisted that art without depiction “reduces art to something entirely cut off from all the serious activities of life, so that it becomes a sort of game, an ingenious pastime, partly intellectual, partly manual, having no connexion with any issues which can be called important in the ordinary sense.”101 The aesthetics of Fry and Read, as we have seen, were based around exactly Blunt’s ideals of the embrace of life, active engagement,

118

Art and Life

expression, and re-creation, all pitted against the dangers of escapism, passivity, and mindless pleasure. But given the formalist account of art’s role in achieving all of the former—the stress on process and thus re-creation as key to imaginative value—representation was simply beside the point. True to his insistence on depiction, in the later 1930s Blunt was forced to defend not just socialist realism but realism of all sorts. Perhaps most notorious now is the moment when Blunt and Read took opposing sides in the 1936 AIA-organized debate at Conway Hall between the Euston Road school and the surrealists.102 Read’s jibe at the debate that the Euston Road school realists supported by Blunt were simply the offspring of Bloomsbury aestheticism might seem like a cheap shot, a bit of rhetoric, or a throwaway comment. But really it gets to the heart of the matter. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were at that point lining up alongside the other realists in AIA exhibitions, and the organization increasingly embraced formalist values about the ethics of art alongside Marxist ideals of socially motivated realism.103 Even the “workers’ art” of the Ashington Group was promoted less for the socially motivating depiction of everyday life than for the development of individual sensibilities and the freshness and spontaneity of the artists’ unique “vision” (see the illustration of George Blessed’s Whippets in chapter 5 below, fig. 27).104 Popular critics often appeared to endorse Blunt’s rhetoric, as evident in Bertram’s comment of 1936 on artists’ divorce from the “aesthetic” attitude: “That attitude, in its ninetyish dress, has long been discarded, but Roger Fry and his followers really did no more than new-dress it. But since the crisis there has been a remarkable and widespread denunciation of it, with a complementary assertion of the relationships between art and social, economic and religious conditions and beliefs.”105 Yet, as seen above, Bertram’s rejection of “Fry and his followers” in the name of art’s connections with life entailed an endorsement of the ideals of communication and expression rather than a demand for depictions of socially relevant subject matter. In this sense Blunt’s criticism entirely missed the mark. The narrowness of Blunt’s attacks on form allowed the new generation of supporters of aesthetic education, however formalist, to see their own views as outside of the scope of the Bloomsbury aesthetes that had been attacked in such engaged Marxist art writing. By the end of the 1930s, skepticism about didactic realism had spread throughout the AIA. The organization’s exhibitions projected a liberal artistic pluralism, and they effectively joined forces in their pluralist promotion of the value of art with the British Institute of Adult Education, the BBC, and the University Extension schemes.106 The AIA News Sheet at this time noted, “When

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

119

a non-A.I.A. lecturer is speaking, it should be made clear that the organization is not partial to any one particular aesthetic view-point, and welcomes discussion on all subjects of interest to aesthetics.”107 A 1939 article in the Times could say that the “best tribute to the fourth annual exhibition of the Artists International Association” was that, aside from some new versions of Goya’s Disasters of War, “it is free from propaganda.”108 The article and an accompanying editorial both agreed that “the influence of art for peace, democracy and cultural progress depends upon its absorption in its own affairs,”109 with the editorial arguing for a “use of art” based on the “usefulness in apparent inutility” and “detachment”— values said to be perfectly demonstrated throughout the exhibition.110 By the early 1940s, Klingender was proclaiming the victorious popularization and democratization of art as realism.111 Meanwhile it was the formalist canon of writers—such as Read and Fry, rather than Blunt and Klingender—who were being placed on the popularizing reading lists.112 In this context it is unsurprising that Read’s paean to a formalist ethics of art, Education Through Art, was endorsed in glowing terms in the AIA Bulletin, which suggested that Read’s ideas were merely a confirmation of those that educationalists like the Bulletin’s reviewer had been attempting to carry out and noted that the AIA educational subcommittee was now attempting to put Read’s ideas into practice.113 Even R. H. Wilenski, an art critic associated with the critique of Bloomsbury amateurism and escapism, saw the choice not in terms of (escapist) form and (committed) subject matter but simply as one between expression and repression. In language close to that of other popularizing art critics such as Eric Newton, Wilenski wrote in 1944 of the glorious survival of “aesthetic art” and its “expression of [the creative artist’s] personal will” despite the attempted suppression of “Liberal Democratic civilization” and the discrediting of “Art for Art’s sake” by the totalitarian “doctrine of ‘Art for the sake of Authoritarian Government.’”114

Marxism and Mass Culture Just as significant as authenticity was the second issue faced by the Klingender– Blunt critique of formalism: populism. For despite repeated appeals to the popular and the public at large, the pair had a typically patrician disdain for the kind of painting that was widely loved at the time. Take a work that was one of “the two most talked about painting[s]”—“admired by critics and visitors alike”—in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1938, Charles Spencelayh’s Why War? (fig. 20).115 There could hardly be a starker contrast

120

Art and Life

with Hastings and Peri than this deeply sentimental image of an old man seated in a richly decorated Victorian interior surrounded by associations to memory of war and the looming threat of its recurrence, all set out with a style harking back to before even Courbet that paid a loving attention throughout to the very texture and substance of the bourgeois world of material possessions. Contemporary commentators, as it has recently been put, “recognized that it was an old-style, storytelling, Victorian type of painting, but found no fault with that.”116 In the late 1930s Blunt, after lecturing on the BBC and writing in the Listener about realism and the art of Diego Rivera, was met with a satirical response that is worth quoting almost in full as it so neatly poses the problem faced by both populism and anti-Communism amongst the so-called philistine masses. Its focus was essentially Blunt’s inability, in practice, to bridge the gap between socialist realist art and the actual tastes of the working class public that he (often vainly) insisted such art would appeal to: Not that I’m interested in art, but I liked it when Mr. Blunt as good as said that all the time these artists are wrong and that the public is all right. . . . I think Mr. Blunt knows what he’s talking about, especially when he asks artists to give us something we can understand instead of all this funny stuff like that chap Epstein turns out. . . . Now my ideal of a picture is one like I saw on a calendar in a bazaar the other day of a nice little thatched cottage with real lattice windows and flowers growing up the wall and a nice lot of flowers in the garden and a crazy path. Just like a photograph it was—only coloured. Nice colours too. That’s the kind of thing I like. I can understand that . . . that’s the sort of thing artists ought to paint and everyone I know thinks the same, although my wife would rather they did nice little kittens—fluffy ones. Good old Mr. Blunt.

P.S.—I must say, however, that I can’t quite see eye to eye with Mr. Blunt’s

praise of Diego Rivera. I remember having seen some photographs of this man’s work somewhere, and my wife and I thought it simply awful. It wasn’t as though it was drawn properly, and who wants to have paintings of men and machines all jumbled together on the wall? Couldn’t make head or tail of it. Besides isn’t the man a Communist or something? As though a Communist could paint pictures! And as for Americans crowding to see it—well Americans are a polyglot lot in any case. I’m an Englishman and I know what I like.117

The satire had a double force. On the one hand it draws attention to the very real fact that naturalistic scenes of personal interest and certainly not quasimodernist scenes of socialist interest were favored by popular taste. On the

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

121

other it emphasizes the obviously low regard in which philistine taste was held by intellectuals, Marxists on the whole included. The problem of populism— specifically the fear of the degradations of mass taste under modern industrialized capitalism—was an issue that cut across the political spectrum. It is a problem that needs to be understood in Marxist and formalist thinking alike through its association with a defense of art’s role in the development of individual imagination and sensibility. Far from an embrace of untrammelled populism, some of the most vociferous attacks on contemporary mass culture—not to mention Klingender’s art theory—were actually the ones that came from the Marxist left.118 As a more recent commentator has summed up the problem in a very different context, such uncritically populist positions could easily be read as “collapsing the dialectical opposition between massmarketed culture and grass-roots popular culture, so that a false synthesis emerges.”119 Such a willful reinvention of art was inevitably premature and, in words borrowed from Herbert Marcuse, is one that “establishes cultural equality while preserving domination.”120 In the same volume as Blunt’s “Art Under Capitalism and Socialism,” Day-Lewis blamed the isolation of his favored writers from the public on the conditions of contemporary society. Admittedly there was “an almost constant inverse ratio between literary merit and popularity,” but this was to say that literary merit was not being recognized by the public rather than the issue lying with the work that Day-Lewis and his associates were creating.121 Echoing the critiques of mass or popular culture discussed above, writers in Left Review complained that cultural products such as journalism neglected true “insight or understanding” in favor of “distraction.”122 Popular novelists were likewise now merely the “hack of the printing and paper industry,” their nature and success “due to the final complete development of capitalism in book production.”123 The idea that “together with the cinema, the popular press and the radio, [lowbrow novels] must be accepted as the common basis upon which the popular imagination feeds,” was for these writers a truly alarming one.124 For the British Marxist writers, then, grassroots popular culture had been so deeply infected by mass-marketed culture that the people needed to rediscover their connection with vision and creation in order to remake an authentic culture for themselves. Far from a rejection of high or middle-class culture, this entailed a recuperation of “civilization” through training against cultural deception that bore clear shades of the skepticism about modernity of F. R. Leavis.125 (Though for Leavis, while a critical elite might counter the

122

Art and Life

Figure 20. Charles Spencelayh, Why War?, 1938. Oil on canvas, 71 × 91.5 cm. Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, Lancashire, UK. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

impact of mass society and the “machine economy,” Marxism was itself closer to the problem than a solution: “To aim at solving the problems of civilization in terms of the ‘class war’ is to aim, whether wittingly or not, at completing the work of capitalism and its products, the cheap car, the wireless and the cinema.”126) Douglas Garman described the necessary basis of Marxist criticism in 1935 as “the constant showing up of the pretentious humbug of democratic culture as represented by popular fiction, the film, etc.”127 This meant a rejection of standards based on the naïve and ill-educated masses, for “the literature of the future cannot be ‘thirled’ to limitations that have had their roots in lack of educational opportunity and other methods of mass mutilation.”128 Or as Day-Lewis put it in Left Review, “As the structure of capitalism has crumbled and the revolutionary situation grown more acute, an ever-increasing flood of false art has been turned on the workers—the gutter-press, newspapers, dope-fiction, sentimental and unreal films. The effect of this has been to weaken the workers’ responses to the emotional effect of genuine art.”129

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

123

Certainly there were those at the time who wanted to accept working class culture as it had developed, with a faction of the Workers’ Educational Association around G. H. Thompson happy to argue against the high art advocates that the cinema and the pub were entirely satisfactory cultural diversions.130 But just as in America, where from the end of the 1930s Greenberg and those around Partisan Review fought against the degradations of the “kitsch” cultural products favored by popular taste, the suspicion of debased popular attitudes continued in the subsequent Marxist tradition in Britain.131 In the early 1960s Wollheim wrote the pamphlet Socialism and Culture discussed in the previous chapter, which spoke of popular art as a kind of entertainment or catering that, while perhaps a necessary part of a life, could not hope to reach the imaginative and emotional heights of art proper.132 Richard Hoggart more directly bemoaned the replacement of authentic working class culture with the “Candy Floss World” of cheap and easy thrills, while Raymond Williams attempted to demarcate worthwhile cultural products from examples of “bad culture” such as “the horror-film, the rape novel, the Sunday strip paper and the latest Tin Pan drool.”133 What all these writers shared was a respect for the previous canons of high culture, even if they were to be rethought and remade in the service of new interests. Klingender and Blunt had a less coherent line. Advocating realism in painting while rejecting the radical philistine possibility of an embrace of the mass taste that actually existed, the two were forced to awkwardly defend the value and efficacy of painting while still denying the value of the canonical examples of such art.134 Many writers, Marxists as well as members of the rival surrealist group, saw the realist option as the worst of both worlds. Not only did it forego any true revolutionary potential in its rejection of formal and imaginative possibilities, but perhaps even worse, it involved a capitulation to the demand for ease of consumption that was itself “a symptom of the disease called capitalism.”135 The Marxist left had wanted to claim the tradition of William Morris for the present day. Jack Hastings included Morris looking over Lenin’s shoulder towards Marx in the mural he painted for Marx Memorial House in the mid-1930s, and Klingender in his Marxism and Modern Art of 1943 ended by quoting not just Lenin but also Morris. Yet the juxtaposition in Klingender’s book is telling. The Lenin quotation was an out-and-out call for populism: “It does not greatly matter what we ourselves think about art. Nor does it matter what art means to some hundreds or even thousands in a nation, like our own, of many millions. Art belongs to the people. Its roots should penetrate deeply

124

Art and Life

into the very thick of the masses of the people. It should be comprehensible to these masses and loved by them. It should unite the emotions, the thoughts and the will of these masses and raise them to a higher level. It should awaken artists in these masses and foster their development.”136 Klingender glossed these words as a call for socialist realism, with the suggestion that, “Realism, the attitude of the artist who strives to reflect some essential aspect of reality and to face the problems set by life, is from its very nature popular. It reflects the outlook of those men and women who produce the means of life. It is the only standard which can bring art back to the people today.”137 But the quotation from Morris with which Klingender concluded merely set out the well-known call for an earthly paradise, that, as has been seen above, in no sense implied a call for realism in painting and other fine arts: “Let us work like good fellows trying by some dim candle-light to set our workshop ready against tomorrow’s daylight—that tomorrow, when the civilized world, no longer greedy, strifeful, and destructive, shall have a new art, a glorious art, made by the people and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user.”138 Klingender might have realized that in invoking Morris he risked undermining his own arguments. The exhibitions, lectures, and pamphlets produced as part of the effort to bring “art to the people” were couched in the language of aesthetic education rather than Marxist critique.139 And furthermore, as discussed above, at the very same moment as the DIA and the government pushed for the improvement of everyday goods and as the Bauhaus came to Britain, there was an increasingly visible effort to use modern methods to re-create popular art on Morris’s own design-based terms. Especially when combined with the influence of technologically modernizing Bauhaus thinkers, this effort appeared to offer an equally, if not more, viable means of both short-term and utopian reform of the visual environment, with the most extreme abstract artist placed (as “researcher”) at the heart of such developments.140 The effort had already gained the endorsement, if not conversion, of key segments of the original AIA membership. Its creator and first leader, Misha Black, founded the Design Research Unit in 1943, later became professor of industrial design at the Royal College of Art, and eventually, after receiving a knighthood, served briefly as president of the Design and Industries Association. In Britain after the Second World War, it was Herbert Read and John Berger who were facing off for the positions of formalist aesthetic education and Marxist realism, but the terms of engagement and consensus remained the same. After reading Read’s 1955 edition of The Grass Roots of Art, in which

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

125

his anarchist vision for the organicist reform of art, design, and society was set out in detail, Berger was inspired to hastily pen a long note to Read on the dust jacket of the volume. Despite their differences over issues such as realism, Berger wrote to Read, “[I want] to tell you that what you want, that the decent, just, fully human situation you imagine possible in the future and from which you try to assess the present, is based on a faith and vision absolutely identical to my own.”141 Read, for his part, was able to agree: “I have been writing and fighting for nearly forty years now, and it is just because I believe that fundamentally we are fighting for the same values that I regret, equally with you, that we should have quarrelled about the means.”142 Berger, in reply, endorsed the place of education, perhaps the fundamental factor for Read: “I think that you are absolutely right to emphasize as you do the importance of education. There far more than in any pension-scheme, housing plan or organizing of public culture, can a revolution be prepared for—both in the psychological (spiritual?) and social sense.”143 Yet despite all the areas on which they came together, they remained divided over the role of the popular. For Berger the kind of realism that could connect with the public at large was still the most important form of art making, but for Read this view sacrificed all the qualities that made art such an important force in present-day and future society. In a letter to Berger at the beginning of the 1960s, reminiscent of the earlier British Marxists as much as of Fry and Leavis, Read wrote, “There is the assumption that the groping sensibility of the man in the street is intrinsically more valuable than the refined sensibility of the aristocrat (I use the extreme word, without any political implications). There is the assumption that untutored feeling (let us call it sentimentality, because that is what it really is) is somehow more genuine than controlled or educated feeling—that form, style, intelligence, intuition, discrimination, etc. do not really matter, or are not so important as the chaotic and crude reality of life—the crudities and vulgarities of the masses.”144 The things in this letter, Read added, were “difficult to say,” and he hoped Berger could “meet me half way in my gropings towards the truth.” But the fundamental belief in a higher form of art and the rejection of those who could not understand its values nonetheless remained dominant: “These are not human beings, in the sense that Shakespeare or Balzac or Tolstoy depicted human beings. They are deformed creatures (deformed by industrialism and commercialism) and the fact that they exist in their millions is no reason for accepting their values. I want to destroy the system that has distorted their minds and crippled and stunted their bodies, and I would not feel I was

126

Art and Life

helping to that end by a sympathetic identification with their way of life.”145 It would be wrong to judge Read’s politics on the basis of the quotation. For one thing it sounds far harsher than it was, for by “identification” Read meant to reject endorsement of cultural views rather than empathy for others per se. Nonetheless, it makes as plain as could be that formalism was (or is) a democratizing project of sorts but only on highly restrictive terms apparently unrecognizable to many of its practitioners; something that is nowhere better brought out than in Fry’s near-paradoxical attempt at a concession to artistic pluralism couched in rigidly expressionist, communicative terms: though in the past, Fry wrote, “I really believed that there was a right way of painting and a wrong way of painting. I honestly confess that I have changed my mind. Now, I no longer think that there is a right way or a wrong way of painting, but every possible way. Every artist has to create his own method of expression in his medium, and there is no one way, right or wrong, but every way is right when it is expressive throughout of the idea in the artist’s mind.”146 What Read’s words also present with particular clarity is the desperation of tone, a crack or faltering in the voice, that followed as the dream of a particular ideal form of life began to break down. As the other parts of this book demonstrate, many elements of the writers’ views and culture lived on. But the systematic claims to rightness and truth of their most dearly held and utopian schemes did not survive, beset on the one hand by the downplaying of the ideals of sensibility and authenticity in forms of production and consumption of an ever more mechanized world and on the other by the intimation that a (postmodern) moment was dawning where their very desirability and even intellectual coherence might be rejected altogether. It is to the dream, its breakdown, and what we might now salvage, that, in relation to a very different set of contexts, the next and final chapter turns.

Design Theory and Marxist Art Writing

127

5 Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

After midcentury, the tie of art and form only got stronger. Critics, of course, regularly suggested that the art world had moved on.1 Yet in Britain the various activities of Herbert Read at this time show the breadth of the theoretical and institutional hold of formalism: its spread in art education through the Society for Education through Art, its popularization in exhibitions and talks via the activity of the Arts Council of Great Britain, its universalist and transhistorical view of art in exhibitions such as 40,000 Years of Modern Art, and its partial professionalization in the early activity of the British Society of Aesthetics. In America, by midcentury, formalism was equally firmly entrenched. Since the turn of the 1930s, Alfred Barr at MoMA had been promoting an account of modern art based in large part around form. The formalist vision of modern art was further reinforced by Albert Barnes at his institute (with the support of John Dewey) and a host of critics, art historians, and philosophers, such as James Johnson Sweeney, Thomas Munro, and Robert Goldwater. In 1939 and 1941 Clement Greenberg published the essays “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and “Towards a Newer Laocöon” that first set out his historical narrative of medium specificity in modern art, preparing the way for his full and near-final formulation in “Modernist Painting” of 1960. Even as the dominance of the large-scale abstract art favored by Greenberg began to

128

be questioned, that essay, along with the activity of younger critics including Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss, would set the terms of debate about modernism for the 1960s and decades after. In this final chapter I turn to a less familiar history than that of modernist criticism in the United States: the case of modern art and its cultural authenticity (or “originality”) in Africa and South Asia as well as Britain.2 In historical terms, these histories highlight the remarkable spread and widely consequential nature of formalist art theory beyond the scope of Europe and the United States. Just as significantly for present-day accounts of modernism, the chapter redescribes the structure of originality and belatedness that continues to dog attempts to attend to modernism beyond a supposedly central Western line. Two very different models of a global modernism emerge that parallel the grand and modest (or high and post-) formalisms described in the introduction to this book. The model that upholds the self-confidence of modernism and high formalism is a “real primitivism,” one that pits true universalism against the inequality of claiming that some are “belated” or “not yet modern” compared to others.3 Yet given the problems with universalism highlighted by the history told in this chapter and book as a whole, we may be left with only a modest formalism to hold on to, and this may be something to embrace rather than to fear. Moving past universalism still leaves us with a recognition of the value that form might play in making contact, but it is now a recognition that takes contingency as its watchword and understands that learning to see for yourself has nothing to do with learning to tell others how they should see.

What the Artist Should Do: Aesthetic Education and Early Modernism in Nigeria Thinking of things as formed, I have stressed throughout this book, promises a way to understand the activities and even people that made those things. How easy, then, to slip almost imperceptibly from sympathetic attempts to engage with others into overconfident pronouncements about the way that others make and see. Writing in 1949 on 40,000 Years of Modern Art, Read suggested that we look beyond the “obvious” fact that “certain modern artists have at certain periods of their development been influenced by primitive art” to the less obvious “universality of art.”4 Looking back in time and across cultures, for Read, we could clearly see the “eternal recurrence” in art of the features now labeled “modern.”5 There were nonetheless limits to the artistic

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

129

universality that Read could accept. Inspecting examples of twentieth-century Chinese painting ten years later in his preface to Sullivan’s Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century, Read wrote that “too many” of the pictures reproduced in the book in question showed “an uneasy compromise” between “the East and the West.”6 (Read was here referring to reproductions of works such as Pan Yuliang’s Pears and Floral Cloth, 1943, Anhui Provincial Museum, Hefei.) The lesson here was not art’s universality but instead the fact that the “currency of art is debased if it is robbed of its native core.” Despite the apparent influence of Japanese prints, Western art, for Read, had “evolved from naturalism to abstraction . . . without interference from an alien culture.” In modern China the reverse was true, with a sad attempt made “to see the world with Western eyes.” In as much as the aim “leads to an imitative art (with only a slight difference of accent),” Read wrote, “the Western critic will be inclined to deplore it as one more example of the general leveling and lowering of taste and sensibility due to the efficiency of modern methods of communication.” Read’s words demonstrate a fairly typical imbalance that arises in modernist art writing, especially when the universal and primitive are invoked together.7 Cultural products from outside the West are appropriated by Western artists in pursuit of an especially direct, authentic or primitive means of expression. But while artists in the West can freely appropriate from others outside the West, those outside the West are in turn cast as “belated” or “inauthentic” as soon as they attempt the reverse. Here I examine this issue alongside both formalist aesthetic education and the early history of modernism in Nigeria. Doing so shows first of all one basis for the high formalist claim that art really should be a certain way: concerned with authentic personal expression and to this end stressing form rather than mere reproduction of natural appearances. It also shows how toxic that apparently liberatory view can be. Looking back from the present, it is clear that there really is no single route to authenticity and certainly not one that could ever, on the back of form, float free of historical circumstance. Postimpressionism, as theorized by Roger Fry, was really a general theory of modern art. Somewhat unusually, though, Fry did not see modern art as an avant-gardist enterprise of ever-new movements or isms. Instead, modern artists from Manet in the 1860s through to Matisse and Picasso ca. 1910 had a fundamentally similar aim, and this was an aim actually found in the art of many earlier times and cultures.8 In chapter 1, I noted that, in Fry’s narrative, while Western art up to and including impressionism pursued an ever-greater naturalism, the artists of what he called the “new movement”

130

Art and Life

turned away from naturalism to focus instead on form. Fry drew on recent international art-historical work on the history of representation to explain this binary of naturalism versus a “Post-Impressionist” modern art based on form. Types of naturalism like impressionism involved the recording of purely perceptual sense data, while the postimpressionists instead drew on inner mental or “conceptual” imagery.9 Naturalism at its logical extreme operated like the “ideal” photograph, with sense data streaming from object to eye to canvas in a way so lacking in human intervention as to provide a pure and effectively formless reproduction of appearance. (This should recall Fry’s criticisms of popular art as that which lacks style, as discussed in chapter 3 above.) Postimpressionism instead involved direct links between individual, named objects represented conceptually in the mind. Representations of objects in modern art, that is, were separated out and individually flattened against the picture plane—like the concept of “coin” turned into a circle, “book” into a rectangle, or “eyes” given almond shapes with circular pupils within—as each element is shown in its broadest or most characteristic aspect (fig. 21). This notion is an early version of twentieth-century clichés about depicting what was “known” rather than what was “seen,” since according Fry such art consisted “not so much in an attempt to represent what the eye perceives, as to put a line round a mental conception of an object.”10 When in 1902 it was finally accepted that the art of Altamira was a genuine product of the Paleolithic era, the age of the paintings demonstrated to Fry and his contemporaries that naturalism was in no sense a natural and characteristically civilized element of human evolution away from “earlier” and “more primitive” cultures (as Victorian anthropology had previously argued).11 The apparent discovery that child art and so-called primitive art both operated on the basis of conceptual rather than perceptual imagery opened up the possibility that naturalism had in fact been a historical error. For the Victorian anthropologists of a previous generation, naturalism was the mark of an evolved civilization, but now it seemed more like a turn away from a truly natural means of creation, expression, and communication that, anchored as it was in universally shared human capacities, reached across times and cultures. In this natural rather than naturalistic mode of creation, “the artist does not seek to transfer a visual sensation to paper, but to express a mental image which is coloured by his conceptual habits.”12 Universal and particular came together, here. Through the particular style of representation that revealed the individual’s schematizing and synthesizing activity, an artwork could at once be a testament to the (general human) inner workings

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

131

Figure 21. Henri Matisse, Marguerite, 1906–7. Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Succession H. Matisse / DACS, London. Photo Digital image: © RMN–Grand Palais (Museée national Picasso–Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau.

of the mind and a window onto the vision of the individual creator. Such an art would maximize not just aesthetic value but also the communicative potential held by art as form. The assumed discovery of the true nature of art had strong consequences for artistic or aesthetic education, consequences explored by Fry and Marion Richardson throughout the 1910s that fed in to education policy in Britain and organizations such as the Society for Education through Art for decades after. This account of art implied that art teaching should focus on working from inner mental imagery and, above all, from memory. Anchored as it was in universal human nature, the method claimed to transcend local circumstances of time and place, as did its ultimate goal of developing creators able to express their particular vision through personal style. The alleged rightness of the account of creative activity, in other words, meant there was no contradiction in imposing it as a universal means through which individuality should be developed from within. Even for a socially oriented anarchist

132

Art and Life

like Herbert Read, the method could at once teach the ethics of correct looking—distinguishing “the beautiful from the ugly, the good from the evil, the right pattern of behavior from the wrong pattern, the noble person from the ignoble”—and encourage individuals’ abilities to develop themselves as parts of, and contributors to, “the organic wholeness of the community.”13 At the same time as such art education began to gain governmental and official influence through the teaching of Richardson at the London Day Training College (LDTC) in the 1920s, psychology helped give formalist aesthetic education a measure of official, scientific weight. From 1920 Richardson’s colleagues Thomas Percy Nunn (the LDTC principal from 1922) and the psychologist Cyril Burt both published major works that drew together psychology, art, and education.14 According to the key tenets of their books and paralleling conclusions already drawn by Fry and Richardson, artistic creativity was universal in nature, and artistic production developed over time from the reliance on “inner” conceptual imagery to “outer” perceptual data. In the liberal view of Nunn, as well as Fry and Richardson and the many who followed, it seemed that this development from inner imagery to outer data might really be a corruption of a truer form of creative activity. The “new education” movement of which Nunn was an enthusiastic proponent had shown that education for personal autonomy meant teaching children to develop their own capacities rather than having external example imposed on them.15 Perhaps the artistic parallel of teaching people to be themselves, then, was to help them avoid the turn away from the true creativity of art making based on mental imagery rather than on the external world. Already by the end of the 1910s, art produced in Africa had been recognized in Britain as a determinate influence on modern art, and such art was even directly acknowledged by Fry to have inspired the new educational view of the aesthetic education of the child.16 It was clear for advocates of the universal account of art and creativity that the tenets of aesthetic education they had learned from abroad would in turn apply across the globe. If the creations of “primitive” artists had pointed towards something universal about the nature of art, then, to be sure, their work might offer hope to a corrupted West. But the West might also, in turn, be able to help other regions to avoid their own artistic degradations that the spread of Western modernization now threatened to globalize. Nonetheless, it was not until aesthetic education had been institutionalized in Britain in the way just described that the attempt was made to draw consequences for Africa, with the Colonial Office in the mid-1920s appointing its Advisory Committee on Education in

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

133

the Colonies.17 As a member of the Advisory Committee, Nunn was to become instrumental in the movement for colonial aesthetic education, advocating for the values of the “new education” to be spread abroad via individuals trained in an “Educational Institute for Empire.”18 From the late 1920s, with Nunn’s support, first the London Day Training College and then the Institute of Education (created out of the LDTC in 1932) had subdepartments devoted to the “training of Colonial Office probationers for educational work in the colonies,” which actively promoted the methods of art education developed by Richardson and Fry.19 Fry himself was reportedly enthusiastic about the attempt to bring aesthetic education to the continent, though skeptical about the potential for success.20 This promotion of art education faced a basic difficulty. The official stance of the Advisory Committee was that respect of local traditions and circumstances would go hand in hand with the teaching of citizenship and self-development.21 Yet in ignoring the widespread desire amongst the populations under British control to gain new training and experiences denied to them by previous generations of officials, the overriding ethos of British policy was very much governed by what has been described as a “salvage paradigm.”22 Nervous about the potential destruction of traditional ways of life, officials set out to establish an education that would revitalize local and national tradition so that its subjects might become “themselves” once again. The problem here is indicated by the vexed question of trusteeship at the time: should the Empire serve as a tool of moral reform, or were questions of constitutional reform and self-government in fact prior to any such ends? Was it right to teach self-government in an aesthetic and metaphoric sense, in other words, when the chance for self-government of a literal political kind was being refused?23 This problem as it manifested itself in contemporary discussions of art and design education can be gauged from a book of 1934 entitled Suggested Methods for the African School, with a foreword by Nunn.24 Nunn wrote that he had been struck by the fact that “the teacher of African children has to deal with no ‘African mentality’ differing in kind from the mentality of European children,” and despite “the special experience and special needs of African pupils,” the “basic principles of method which are sound in Europe must be sound in intertropical Africa.”25 Paralleling advice given in Britain, the book stressed the need for the self-development of children according to their own individual needs and capacities, though at the same time with attention to the specific community life into which the individuals needed to integrated.26 The

134

Art and Life

past art of Africa was cited as evidence of the natural artistic ability still present there, with such art at its best a natural part of everyday life and therefore pervasive throughout the life of the community.27 A direct echo of the doctrines of Fry and Richardson, naturalism and Western techniques were to be avoided. Instead, emphasis would be placed on fostering original expression through training in memory drawing, which would develop in the student a stock of “mental pictures.”28 So far, so universalist and familiar. Recalling the advocated need for individuality to be fostered within a specific community, however, the book suggested that individualism was tempered by the reminder of a need for the use of local traditions, styles, and interests. These, it claimed in a crucial diversion from orthodox new education views, might express a collective sensibility rather than a purely personal one.29 The preservation of local tradition and national or racial sensibility was repeated often over the subsequent years and enshrined in the 1935 handbook for teachers edited by the chair of the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies’ subcommittee on aesthetic education, The Arts of West Africa, Excluding Music: the “machinery of educational freedom” would save indigenous art, with the particular “artistic genius of a people” rekindled by careful control of their exposure only to examples of art from selected local tradition.30 Where the mask of universalism revealed itself to be no such thing, schemes of individual self-development threatened to slip into essentialist forms of national or even racial determinism. The values of formalist aesthetic education were increasingly explicit in the three most significant art education projects carried out in British Africa over these years, all of which relied on memory drawing and the rejection of academic realism and acknowledged, to a greater or lesser extent, the importance of Fry and Richardson’s views: G. A. Stevens in Achimota, Gold Coast (now Ghana) from 1924; K. C. Murray in Nigeria from 1927; and in East Africa, Margaret Trowell at Makarere College, Uganda from 1937.31 The artistic values espoused by these educators stand in stark contrast to the early modernism in Nigeria of Aina Onabolu, who took up elements of Western academic technique to develop a realism in direct opposition to the colonial construction that “native” populations were capable only of craft or other forms of nonnaturalistic artistic production (fig. 22).32 Onabolu’s aim was not an art of pure optical naturalism; he noted the value of the “character” of the production and that the qualities of a “good” painting are not simply those of a color photograph.33 Yet his artistic exemplars were not European modernists but G. F. Watts, Matthew Boulton, and the artists of the early Royal Academy in England, and his ideal was

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

135

painting that used perspective, focus, and geometry “to denote the representation of objects as they would appear from an assumed point of sight.”34 Here was an undoubted modernism—an artistic response to the conditions of the present (in this case, colonial and oppressive)—that flatly refused the universalist account of artistic production seen in Fry’s view of what modern art should be.35 Ironically, it was in part Onabolu’s campaign for proper art education in the country that led to the arrival of the British art teacher K. C. Murray and with him a program of formalist aesthetic education that absolutely refused Onabolu’s self-conscious engagement with sophisticated realist technique. Having naturalized the ideas of creativity and inner expression, British teachers like Murray were blind to the possibility that the use of academic technique or, in fact, any other tradition could be more meaningful than the authentic expression of the self that their methods claimed to promote. Opinion on Murray and schemes of his kind has since been mixed. Ola Oloidi has called his efforts “admirable,” Sylvester Ogbechie has shown how the pioneer Nigerian modernist Ben Enwonwu made creative use of his early training with Murray, while most recently Chika Okeke-Agulu has flatly refused the idea that Murray could be credited with progressive views or a contribution to the post-independence development of a postcolonial modernism in Nigeria around the Zaria Art Society.36 Leaving these debates to one side, my point here concerns the structure of what Olu Oguibe has called “reverse appropriation as nationalism in modern African Art.”37 As Oguibe makes clear, being modern and nationalist did not have to mean faith in one single universalist ideal. While Fry was theorizing a universal kind of artistic creativity that would reject naturalism, for an artist like Onabolu, artistic power lay in a highly self-conscious reaction to a situation: here, namely, the use of the techniques of Western academic art as a means to challenge colonial constructions according to which he would not be capable of naturalistic painting.38 In a sense both Fry and Onabolu made claims to the universal, in as much as form and realist technique were in their different contexts posited as the paradigm modes of human creative practice.39 What Onabolu’s example shows, however, and what the proponents of aesthetic education failed to realize is how claims to the universal themselves take local and highly specific forms. Attention to contingency rather than total faith in universality is here where typically modernist forms of self-consciousness and self-­ determining authenticity lie. We can see the exact same point apply even where a masterful “PostImpressionist” style did develop in Africa, as in the work of the South African

136

Art and Life

Figure 22. Aina Onabolu, Sisi Nurse, 1922. Oil on canvas, 64 × 41 cm. © Estate of Aina Onabolu. Figure 23. Gerard Sekoto, Girl with Orange, ca. 1942–43. Oil on canvas, 47 × 39.5 cm. Johannesburg Art Gallery. Photo © Gerard Sekoto Foundation.

artist Gerard Sekoto (fig. 23). Similar ideas about aesthetic education that naturalized postimpressionism as universally human were at precisely this time spreading throughout Britain.40 Where the use of oil paint and the example of postimpressionist style had been necessary for Fry and others to develop their ideas about authentic expression, however, the threat of stylistic borrowing foreign to the development of a native mode meant that these supposedly universal means were denied to many students around Africa. In the case of Sekoto, initially working in South Africa while the country was a dominion of the British Empire and experiencing dramatic forms of racial discrimination, the language of modernist expression he developed in self-conscious relation to the example of the French postimpressionists now stands (as Oguibe has suggested) with that of Onabolu as one more form of “reverse appropriation as

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

137

nationalism.”41 That is, not only was Onabolu’s appropriation of Western academic realism a political act in its adoption of something he was otherwise denied, but even Fry’s allegedly universal art of postimpressionism, in its own way and in another place, could also be a style of creation denied to indigenous populations. Sekoto’s use of postimpressionism in this context thus reads as one more politically significant act of appropriation. There could be no stronger indication of how arbitrary and culturally restrictive the allegedly liberatory aims of formalist aesthetic education—telling artists what they should do in order to become themselves—turned out to be.42

What the Spectator Should See: Authenticity and Early Modernism in India In the early 1920s, Gaganendranath Tagore, an artist best known at the time for his satirical lithographs, turned his attention to cubism. “I have been experimenting with cubism, and this is the result,” he wrote to a friend on the back of one such postcard painting (fig. 24).43 Tagore’s works found supporters in India at the time, but in the book India and Modern Art of 1959, the British art historian W. G. Archer wrote of Tagore’s failure both to understand cubism and to make the style authentically his own. Taken up in recent years by Partha Mitter, this assessment has become a classic example of the problem of belatedness seen already in Herbert Read’s words on twentieth-century Chinese art. Mitter has coined the term “Picasso-manqué syndrome” for such judgments: the familiar pattern where those who look to Western modernism from the “outside” are again and again judged by Western critics to have failed in their attempt to understand and make creative use of that example.44 We can see the echoes of the modernism of Onabolu and Sekoto in Mitter’s words. But important as Mitter’s counter is, it could easily be misconstrued. Mitter’s positive judgment of Tagore, taken casually, might seem precisely to repeat the structure of Archer’s negative one—a case of no more than one critic proclaiming a greater capacity for aesthetic sensitivity to the authentic than another.45 In practice Mitter’s work is based on a more careful history, not just an intuitive judgment; it is deeper and more sympathetic because it entails a more knowledgeable engagement. But the point here, explored below through examination of the history of early modernism in India that leads up to Tagore’s work as well as Mitter’s own, is how deceptive form can be. Form seems to promise not just expression but a safe route to

138

Art and Life

Figure 24. Gaganendranath Tagore, Untitled (Calcutta), ca. 1920–25. Watercolor on card, 9.5 × 14.3 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

understanding what is expressed. Yet local circumstance always seems to militate not only against there being one way that authentic and truly expressive form should look (as above) but also, in turn, to dictate what exactly it is that viewers are able to see as actually being expressed. Indian art has long had to struggle with its constructions in British art writing. Mitter has suggested that up until the 1970s at least, ways of interpreting Indian art were still structured around the views of two sets of writers who published the first major histories of the subject between the 1870s and the 1920s.46 According to the first view, developed in the nineteenth century and typically colonialist, the applied arts of India should be celebrated even though the country was not capable of producing fine art proper.47 A second view was proposed by early modernist writers led by Ernest Binfield Havell, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, and the artist Abanindranath Tagore, and was promoted in Britain by the trio alongside Fry and other members of the India Society after its founding in 1910.48 According to these writers, the

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

139

notion of Western artistic superiority was not only wrong but was based on a false distinction between fine and applied arts.49 Ultimately fine and applied arts were one because all artistic production relied on form for its significance. The books produced by the early modernist writers and those under their influence over the subsequent years were shot through with the language of formalism and aesthetic education. The texts took up by now familiar tenets: creativity was universal with the true and universal “intention” of artistic production to create formally and aesthetically; art proper was based on inner imagery rather than the external world, and as such realism should be rejected as irrelevant.50 Havell, typically, argued that previous writing on Indian art had neglected the intentions behind the works of art in favor of an archaeological approach.51 But in a classic formalist and modernist critical move that recalls my discussion of connoisseurship in chapter 1, he attempted to divine true artistic intention solely through attention to the internal aesthetic qualities of the work. Havell suggested that he aimed to get to the artist’s real intention, but he also universalized this “actual” intention to reject straightforward naturalism (in his words, the “common philosophic basis of art in all countries assumes that art is not merely an imitation . . . of . . . phenomena in Nature”).52 And form, not history was the means by which this intention could be known: “Convinced as I am that the learning of the orientalist, however profound and scientific it may be, is often most misleading in æsthetic criticism, it has been my first endeavor, in the interpretation of Indian ideals, to obtain a direct insight into the artist’s meaning without relying on modern archæological conclusions and without searching for the clue which may be found in Indian literature.”53 Ananda Coomaraswamy likewise argued that “for the plastic artist, painting and sculpture are languages by which he expresses and understands thoughts which are not in any sense vague, but which cannot be equally well, at least by him, expressed by means of words.”54 This language of art through which the artist could express and understand thoughts not able to be verbalized meant, of course, the “language of form and colour.”55 Though the contrast of conceptual inner visualization with the perceptual copying of external reality is familiar from the discussion of aesthetic education above, often its advocates appealed to non-Western tradition or example. In this way theories at once partook of and helped to confirm notions about the transcultural efficacy of memory drawing and attention to conceptual images. According to the doctrine of the “inner eye” as discussed by Abanindranath Tagore, artists should train their own powers of internal,

140

Art and Life

mental visualization so as better to express the workings of their imagination through their art.56 Set in place in the preceding years, the use of these basic formulae only increased after 1920 amongst these writers and those under their influence.57 A book such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Hindu View of Art of 1933 (read in manuscript by Read) provides a telling example. The book at once echoed Coomaraswamy; cited Gill as a formational influence; recalled Bell’s 1914 Art with a chapter titled “The Aesthetic Hypothesis”; espoused the doctrine of memory drawing and conceptual images; and both stated that art should be understood as the way in which an artist communicates emotion to the viewer and carried an introduction by Gill suggesting that the universal nature of all art lay in its search for “reality.”58 (Gill himself, in a 1934 letter to Read, described Fry’s own shorthand for conceptual imaging of “the child who draws a line around his think” as “the cornerstone of my aesthetic” and noted that the importance of making lay ultimately in the conceptual ability “to think in plastic images,” “to imagine the thing to be made.”59) Anand acknowledged the point, suggesting that the doctrine on which the particular form of art was based was also that underlying modern Western art: “Most contemporary artists would if interrogated about their methods of work disclose that they unconsciously employ the method of Yoga contemplation themselves. The testimony that such a modern artist as Rodin used to hold séances to realize his work mentally before he began to mold his statues is significant. And the general modern European aesthetics represented by Croce points to the same truth: “The true artist never makes a stroke with his brush without having previously seen it with his imagination.”60 The language of inner and external here brought so-called Eastern methods in line with allegedly universal modernist aesthetics. These ideas came together in an early stage of Indian modernism around Abanindranath Tagore (fig. 25). Coomaraswamy had in the first decade of the twentieth century advocated against the adoption of the more naturalistic styles found in Indian painting after the end of the Rajput “school” of painting in the eighteenth century. His history cast naturalism as an imperial stylistic trait imported into the country under first the Mughal Empire and then the British Empire, with the latter ultimately responsible for the contemporary decline of Indian art.61 As principal of the Government School of Art in Calcutta, Havell had rejected overt Western influences in order to encourage national traditions of art making.62 Coomaraswamy and Havell together supported Tagore, also drawing on Okakura Kakuzō’s advocacy for a unity of thought and art across a generalized “Asia” in his attempt to create a new and

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

141

truly Indian art through a blend of past Mughal and Japanese artistic forms with Indian national mythology.63 The Bengal school of Tagore and his followers, as it came to be known, survived well into the twenties. It has since been both championed as an active and conscious rallying point for revolutionary nationalist sentiment and criticized as a “safe” outlet for nationalistic feeling with its parameters entirely predefined by the Orientalizing bounds of Western colonialist and aesthetic discourse.64 In either case the question turned on the communicative power of form: what would it mean to communicate a truly national or collective, rather than individual, worldview via style, and to what extent would naturalism have to be rejected in order for style to be truly expressive? By the 1920s and 1930s, everyone wanted to claim their own favored mode of artistic production as properly expressive. But how to judge whether authentic modes of creation should lean towards the perceptual, as the academics and traditionalists tended to assert, or the conceptual, as the modernists more often suggested? At the perceptual end of the spectrum, favoring straightforward optical naturalism, conservative teachers and administrators associated with the Bombay School of Art argued that even the preservation of an academic realism originally introduced through Western example posed no problems for authenticity. According to these supporters, art was indeed a creative expression of personal vision, but naturalism was the proper means to this route. There was no danger that academic training would be a “Westernizing” or “de-Orientalizing” of Indian art as their critics tended to suppose: in painting naturalistically, students were not being taught to work in a particular style derived from Europe but instead in a universal manner derived directly from the example of “Nature.”65 The Bengal school and supporters like Havell were caught in the middle of the perceptual/​conceptual poles, advocating inner vision over straightforward naturalism and reacting with horror to those who claimed that Western naturalism could provide an adequate basis for Indian artistic expression.66 The Bengal school, all the same, produced works of art in partially naturalistic styles that modernist critics like Fry saw as capitulations to everything that art should now reject. Writing in 1910 on a work by Abanindranath Tagore that he took to be still overly close to Western naturalism, Fry could only lament the “well-intentioned but regrettable” examples of “the profound corruption which contact with European ideas has created in Oriental taste.”67 We might on the face of it here seem to be confronted with another “Picasso-manqué” judgment like that of Archer on Gaganendranath Tagore or Read on Chinese

142

Art and Life

Figure 25. Abanindranath Tagore, Tissarakshita, Queen of Asoka, dated December 29, 1911. Watercolor and body color, 25 × 18.9 cm. Photo Royal Collection Trust, UK. / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018.

modernism. Yet knowing the history recounted above shows there is a deeper kind of confusion—or an even greater irony—in play. For Abanindranath Tagore, his own work was a studied rejection of Western art, including its naturalism, while for Fry, Tagore’s work showed a capitulation to precisely the Western artistic tendencies which Tagore understood himself to have rejected. Tagore saw Indian style and history while Fry, confidently making his judgment based on form and on the degree of stylistic deviation from fully perceptual naturalism, saw Western style and history. The failure shifts from artist to critic or perhaps to both as we begin to see a contingency to their own seeing to which their deep faith in form left them blind. Even at the more straightforwardly formalist pole ordinarily associated with modernism and based on the idea that artistic vision must prioritize the conceptual over the perceptual for true expression to take place, things were no simpler. The shift in this direction became strikingly visible in the work of a new generation of modernists of the twenties and thirties who turned

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

143

Figure 26. Jamini Roy (and workshop), Painting, Seated Brahmin, ca. 1935. Opaque watercolor on card, 41.4 × 26.2 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London / Photo © Estate of Jamini Roy.

against the now seemingly institutionalized and historicist nationalism of the Bengal school.68 Due to new aesthetic strategies alongside their appeal to the “village,” Mitter has grouped Rabindranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil, and Jamini Roy together as representatives of a new “primitivist” stage of Indian modernism at this moment.69 The conceptual look of many of their works is seen nowhere more clearly than in Roy’s emphasis on large areas of bright and unmodulated color, heavy contour lines around figures, and pictorial details such as bodies extended and eyes flattened against the picture plane (fig. 26). Yet once again, to rely on form alone as a way into history and intention here would be deceptive. Rabindranath Tagore developed a technique of automatic drawing parallel to surrealism, emerging from “erasures” in his literary manuscripts that linked the turn from naturalism to form with a claim to the universality of human psychology and creativity. Roy developed an art of

144

Art and Life

radical simplification that rejected Western example right down to manufactured pigment and the individualism of authorship, taking up the specificity of particular rural areas and scroll painting traditions rather than more recent generalized ideal of the village and in doing so linking the turn to form with a claim to the local as set against the universal and the Western alike. In SherGil’s hands, meanwhile, the mixture of partially postimpressionist style with the subject matter of rural India, following training in Paris with travel around India and an engagement with art from Ajanta to the villages, linked the turn to form at some times with a claim to the universal appeal of artistic form and at others with a seeming knowingness about her dual engagement with styles from modernism and from the Indian past.70 The conceptual look, to repeat the point, means little here on its own. While Tagore appealed to the universal and Roy to the local, Sher-Gil’s art might be seen to appeal to the contingencies of negotiating between such totalities, not an outright universalism but what Sonal Khullar has called a “practice of worldly affiliations” that “questioned and complicated the boundaries of East and West.”71 If this artist making use of postimpressionism might now emerge as “a paradigmatic figure of the twentieth century,” as Saloni Mathur has recently put it, it is precisely not because such art offered a path to a singular “natural” human identity but instead because of her “enactment of identity as a dialogue across difference”—a practice that in its self-conscious games of reference and deference speaks to the “modern self shaped through the migratory historical conditions of our time.”72 In any case and in all these cases, what we see here—or what we can see once we know enough to know what to look for—is not the turn to form as a return to the natural or universal. Instead, style, even a folk primitivism or a postimpressionism, turns out to be a carefully articulated choice that gains meaning precisely through the specificity of that articulation. Thinking that learning to look at form will be a sure way into that which is not otherwise accessible is a safe path only to misrecognition.

Form and Universality: Real Primitives, Real Authenticity The disagreements over expression via style return us to the cultural authenticity of modern art and in particular the problem of how anyone can know that they are dealing with the authentic. The most direct response, suggested by formalism at its most antihistoricist, has been the attempt to find a set of

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

145

criteria that will be valid in all cases for artists and viewers alike. This would be the counter to the problems of originality and authenticity that pits modernism as static, timeless, and universal. Doing some injustice to the subtlety of his argument, Paul Smith’s recent discussion of “real primitives” can be taken as a present-day best possible formulation of the potential universality of form and modern art, at once revealing the value and the limits of such an idea.73 Smith develops his account of “the germ of truth hidden inside the primitivist aesthetic” in relation to two major uses: first, the middle to late nineteenth-century use of “primitive” as a stylistic label primarily attached to painters before the Renaissance and the widespread adoption of linear perspective, and second, its more general affirmative usage in order to mean the lack of corruption or oversophistication that accompanies personal and collective innocence (94–95). The “nub of this conception,” for Smith, “is that art is most exemplary when it issues from ‘primitive’ capacities within the artist’s self” (94). For Wittgenstein, in Smith’s reading, “primitive,” instinctual, behaviors are those that are part of our “animal” nature (99). These “transparently meaningful, pre-reflective behaviours” are shared by other members of the species (94), and it is this shared feature that provides the ground on which the conventions that structure our more “complicated forms of life” can build (102). The equivalent in painting is, Smith notes, the embodiment of what Merleau-Ponty describes as “primordial” perceptions, with the novel look of paintings here a reflection of unhabitual ways of seeing the world.74 A painting is at heart the “outward” expression of “inner” visual experience, with the caveat that this experience is in part only articulated and made known through its expression (102). As such, though the paintings of an artist like Cézanne may at times have been forced and are “always inflected by culture,” “paintings can only express what they do because they use signs that are not wholly conventional” (106). “Pictures like Corot’s or Cézanne’s are transparently expressive because they arise from ‘primitive’ behaviors to which we are attuned to respond intuitively, without having to draw inferences from them, much as we react to signs of other people’s pain without having to draw analogies with our own pain” (106). The consequences for authenticity are clear. We “justifiably denigrate” paintings when they do not “exemplify the reactions they purport to” because this is to say that they have failed to be true expressions of the inward visual experience, primordial perceptions, or primitive form of life belonging to the artist (106). Painting that loses touch with its primitive grounding is sterile or meaningless; it fails to be authentic

146

Art and Life

and thus expressive (113–14). And the sterility of the work, based as it is in the lack of true aesthetic expression and intuitively driven viewer response, is a sterility that observers will be able to “see” directly. All of this goes some way towards salvaging the ideal of universality in Fry’s account of a generally valid method by which artists might find a style that is authentically their own. Style of this kind, as Wollheim also theorized it, is unique to the artists themselves as it is anchored in their particular psychomotor capacities (while nonetheless understandable by others on the basis of our shared human nature).75 Understanding style this way also pits modernism itself as a kind of end-of-history moment in which development has given way to a universal present. The fact of art making as individualized expression and communication has been “worlded” in as much as it is now thought to hold for human beings (with their shared human nature) across the globe. A crucial aspect of the universalist account presented here is its attention to “intention in action”: it accounts for the meaningful activity that artistic practice involves rather than just appealing to preformulated intentions based on texts available at the time.76 The ideal of a painting grounded in a return to naïve vision does also have a clear possible basis in late nineteenth-century theory, being related to “ideologies of seeing propounded by [Hippolyte] Taine and other empiricists,” who conceive of vision as “both child-like and invested with tactility.”77 As seen throughout the present book, similar ideas were popularized in striking ways in the decades that followed. Not only could the idea of an artistic practice “grounded in primitive instincts” be “exemplary for successive generations,” but the theoretical ideas surrounding it could also gain increasing authority.78 This combination of theory and practice did in fact come to ground a certain type of painting, as evident in the early years of the twentieth century in France and after 1910 in Britain, when a generalized postimpressionist style became widely accepted and lived on as one of the most common forms of artistic practice ever since, despite its rejection by the avant-garde. Later noted even by Clement Greenberg as of generally high quality since the late nineteenth century (though not of the highest quality) and as a representational mode of painting that derived stylistically “from nothing later than fauvism,” this type of painting could be thought of as the global postimpressionism that would be the correct path for modernist painting according to formalism at its most universal.79 Greenberg himself noted late in life not only that “the Fauve way of painting—alla prima, no underpainting, no glazing, and so forth—became the lingua franca by 1910,” but that artists

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

147

around the world—he mentioned Japan, South America, and Canada—were still producing significant work in exactly this manner.80 As the pervasive nature of the ideals of liberal and aesthetic education would suggest, precisely these views were found not only in the interwar British art writing concerned with the British Empire but also in the prescriptions by British art writers for artistic practice in Britain itself. Critics could regularly be found making approving judgments along the lines of: “Each artist has seen and felt for himself, and the bond between him and his fellows is simply that of strongly gripped method and power of expression”;81 or “The temper of the Society is essentially catholic. If an artist is sincerely interested in the advancement of water-colour painting as a mode of expression it matters little whether he be of a radical or conservative persuasion.”82 In his review of the 1935 Empire Art Exhibition organized by the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists, “Artists of the Empire,” W. G. Constable was especially forthright in criticism of those artists who had allowed a national or given style to inhibit the true, universally applicable goal of turning local circumstances towards the development of an individual artistic “vision” (69). His prescription for the future of art was typical of the dream of a universally natural (“primitive” or “Post-Impressionist”) style. Constable wrote that “race, climate, geographical structure, and the materials available” were factors that might shape the work of an artist but that these factors should be put to use to “create in him a new kind of vision, a new way of looking at the world” (65–66). He noted critically that impressionist technique had now supposedly become standard and thus academic but suggested hopefully that impressionism “is being succeeded by [a style] in which the dominant aim is interpretation and expression, based on the emotions experienced by the artist in front of nature” (66–67). These criticisms, Constable added, were intended to emphasize “the fact that art is nether imitation of nature nor of another art, and that vigour and originality depend ultimately on cultivating one’s own garden” (72). The same values were evident when in a British Institute of Adult Education initiative in the middle to late 1930s—with a report reprinted in the same Listener volume as Constable’s article—a number of men in Britain outside of normal systems of art education were taught to paint and create “art by the people.”83 The enforced development of individual, nonderivative (historically or otherwise), and thus authentically expressive personal style was predictably put to the fore.84 With this came a familiar look for the favored art (fig. 27). The participants were taught to use a simple wet-in-wet technique in order to paint what was in front of them, strictly eyeballed rather than measured. The

148

Art and Life

Figure 27. George Blessed, Whippets, ca. 1939. Oil on cotton on hardboard, 37.2 × 52.4 cm. Woodhorn Museum & Northumberland Archives. Photo courtesy the Ashington Group Trustees.

approach often yielded a loosely postimpressionist, representational style of strong color and free distortion.85 Belonging to modernism on the terms of high formalist universality does not mean belonging to the particular historical narrative of art at its most significant—that is, belonging to an avant-garde—but rather participating in a global community able to share a singular modernity that exists as an endless present. The political potential of such universalism has been exploited by many, including in the turn of the twentieth-century pan-Asianist ideals of the Bengal school and the later modernists in Africa, India, and many other places who cast aside fears of belatedness to work in styles influenced by Western modernism that they felt to be validly (as well as intrinsically and universally) expressive. Just as clear is the potential of this ideal of a singular modernity to degenerate into governmental techniques of the management of the soul, regulating life and liberty through the control of ways in which people would learn to “become themselves” through forms of ethical and aesthetic self-government. Leaving aside the politics, though, my main point here concerns the strange consequences the universalist account has, if taken at face value, for the making and viewing of art. High formalist universality seems unable finally to say how any style, however abstract or naturalistic,

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

149

could be more or less authentically expressive than any other. This is because all potential signifiers of authenticity—such as free and visible brushwork or deliberate rejection of linear perspective—are absorbed into a generalized postimpressionist style. At this point particular visual criteria might be called upon as a way out. Around the turn of the century, this might involve elements of what Richard Shiff has called the “technique of originality”: artists’ manipulation of the look of their pictures in particular ways cleverly breaks with what they know to be current convention and gives viewers the sense that the artists have relied on their unique vision and mode of setting it down.86 Techniques that come to mind here in relation to modernism include ever more visible brushwork and expressive deviation from naturalistic representation. The technique of originality, as we have seen, can also mean embrace of the conceptual rather than the perceptual: objects presented in near two-dimensional manner with one or more of their most characteristic outline shapes parallel to the picture plane and objects given their individual sizes according to the artist’s intuition rather than perspectival standards that make size relative to distance from the viewer. Once again, though, the look of a work alone is unable to provide a satisfactory answer no matter how closely the viewer looks.87 Just how conceptual, how frontal, or how out of scale must a work be to be truly reflective of primordial perception? Even Roger Fry’s own painting, after its most experimental moments in the mid-1910s, tended towards a careful remaking of representation that amounted to a naturalism softly tempered by postimpressionist technique.88 Fry continued to believe that such paintings had come as close to an authentically expressive manner as he could manage, but very few critics have since been able to share that judgment. On the logic of high formalist universality, the judgment of authenticity ultimately has to be made ad hoc, intuitively, with the key notion not being belatedness (not being up to date with what really matters) but simply aesthetic failure (not being good enough to put to use what really matters). The logic in fact governs the most recent discussions of what Mitter calls “Picasso manqué” judgments—the judgment of derivativeness and aesthetic failure of modernism outside the West that comes after and seems to stylistic resemble Anglo-American high modernism. On the one hand Mitter simply denies that judgments of this kind could be valid, while on the other James Elkins writes that (for him) such judgments are impossible to avoid.89 In these cases, decisions about the second rate nature of an artist’s work are not based on the artist’s belatedness to a way of making art but instead on judgments about the

150

Art and Life

quality of their work. These, as such, are judgments on the artists’ successes or failures in internalizing and making their own whatever previous models they have drawn upon. The answer for the present that follows from this logic would be the embrace of such intuition and its consequences. The same idea of divining “affinity” in intention through aesthetic appreciation that was so ridiculed in relation to projects predating postcolonialism’s influence on the art world, such as William Rubin’s Museum of Modern Art Primitivism exhibition of 1984, would now be recovered in order to save previously neglected modernist practices from obscurity. It should be remembered, in this regard, that the judgment of cubist or modernist manqué has been a major part of Western art history’s judgment of its own modern artists. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, painters were judged on their ability to make an “original” copy of a motif that used learnt style in order to express themselves sincerely.90 In the first half of the twentieth century, those outside the mainstream of French modernism were regularly criticized for their merely superficial borrowing of stylistic elements, whether they were artists in France of allegedly secondary importance such as the “salon” cubists or those in Britain and other parts of Europe and North America.91 Even within the MoMA Primitivism catalogue itself one can find accusations of “inauthentic” Western borrowing of African motifs, as in Jack Flam’s assertion that in Maurice de Vlaminck’s 1908 Bathers “the faces of the two frontal figures appear to have a strong—in fact, embarrassingly literal and banal—resemblance to the Fang mask he had sold to Derain two years earlier. Compared to the contemporary work of Derain, Matisse, or Picasso . . . this painting is most noteworthy for the rather poor understanding it reflects of either Cézanne or Primitive art.”92

Form and Contingency: The Shapes of Time and the Shapes of Modernism Whatever its former appeal, the high formalist universality that envisions a modernism outside of time cannot be supported by the connections between form and history that I have presented throughout this book. And this conclusion fits with the widespread agreement that modernism cannot now be discussed in such a uniform and universalist manner. Amid the “definitional proliferation” (in Aarthi Vadde’s phrase) of terms for modernism after the global turn, the editors of a recent cluster of essays on the subject note

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

151

that there are three principles about which all seem to agree: “(1) that ‘modernism,’ whatever it may be, is best understood as a maximal rather than restricted phenomenon; (2) that it uniquely addresses the conflicts of ‘modernity’ across space and time; (3) that it is hybrid and multivalent rather than monolithic or singular.”93 On this basis one might wonder whether the still-common term “global modernism” retains any value whatsoever. Is it merely empty, designating no more than a concern to expand our view beyond previously narrow confines? Or is it actively misleading in implying a singular modernism, reinstating the homogenizing process in which a traditional (Western) view of modernist art is used as the model to explain (or denigrate) a vast range of practices across times and cultures? One justification for the appeal to the singular form of global modernism is the long-recognized danger that plural modernisms may be cast as mere alternatives, leaving the canonical Western construction in place as primary. But a more interesting answer is possible now that the imagined primacy of the Western canon, which had once seemed unassailable, is already beginning to fade away. Looking back in time, we know there is not a linear history of modernism’s “influence on” the global South but a story of the characteristics of modernity and artistic modernisms in some parts and in different ways originating from them, with lines of attachment drawing traditions back and forth at multiple points over time.94 And in the present the imperatives of ecological crisis to which modernity has given rise mean that we are faced with a moment when to think of “our own collective action,” whether contemporary or historical, is also to imply the “planetary,” regardless of the geographical or cultural placement and awareness of any one actor.95 With this in mind, in this final section I want to show how a modest formalism dovetails with a global modernism that can acknowledge both multiplicity and the possibility of a shared horizon.96 My focus on temporality is not new and in part follows Keith Moxey’s suggestion that the time of modernism “flows at different speeds in different situations.”97 But here I relate temporality to a major, though neglected, aspect of late modernist criticism itself, which following Stanley Cavell notably made contingency central to its self-understanding. Considering this line of thought and reconciling it with the discussion so far might lead back to the modest formalism I raised in the introduction: an acceptable kind that now acknowledges at once both the end of grand modernist self-confidence and universality and the fact that the desire to do anything historical with objects will always require some, albeit now so much more limited, appeal to form.

152

Art and Life

Reflecting on the fate of modernism in the historical present, Moxey suggests that modernism has “always been tied to the star of temporal progress,” with its time not only “teleological” but finding “its home in the West.”98 As one classic account of modernism across the arts explains this situation, in modernity the artist is “cut off from the normative past with its fixed criteria,” such that “tradition has no legitimate claim to offer him examples to imitate or directions to follow.”99 Strangely though, according to accounts of modernism that have become popular in art history, in this situation the rebellion against tradition (in the form of classicism or bourgeois norms) makes a new kind of tradition that constantly reforms as it grows even more important for art’s success. In order to secure its survival in the future, art has to address itself to what mattered most in the immediate past. The only valid test becomes something like the authentic effort during creation of the artist who has internalized, and now works according to, the standards provided by the art of that immediate past.100 The true artist is thus the figure able to successfully internalize the significant art of the recent past in such a way as to be fully attuned to the state and direction of contemporary high culture. Inauthenticity or belatedness here (what Thierry de Duve labels “avantgardism” as opposed to the genuine avant-garde) is represented by work that addresses itself to (or “fakes” itself for) an imagined present and future without any concern that it feels “right” to the artist.101 Artists may well find themselves to be belated, but this is less about taking up past artistic forms per se; it is rather the problem of doing so in a way that fails to convince their viewers that this was a necessary (as timely) move.102 As the history of abstract art shows, styles could very easily find themselves an unexpected second life if the artist was sufficiently informed and sensitive to take them up in just the right way at just the right time. For Hubert Damisch, the endeavor of American abstraction at midcentury represents “less a new development in the history of abstraction than a new departure, a resumption—but at a deeper level and, theoretically as much as practically, with more powerful means—of the match begun under the title of abstraction thirty or forty years earlier.”103 And this entirely satisfies his demand that at any one moment the painter “must succeed in demonstrating to us that painting is still something we positively cannot do without, that it is indispensible to us, and that it would be madness—worse still, a historical error—to let it lie fallow today.”104 According to Mitter, one of the great advantages of primitivism is its potential to offer a way to escape the “teleological certainty of modernism.”105

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

153

But it might instead be the temporal account of modernism that truly offers a way out of the contradictions and confusions produced by high formalist universality and “real” primitivism as well as the stress on intuitive judgment the two imply. For Greenberg, art’s ability to communicate the (aesthetic) experiences built into it is dependent on the connection between an artwork and its place in art history.106 Modernism to him was to be regarded as a process whereby in order to stay vital each art form gradually sloughed off everything extraneous to it through a constant testing and rethinking of the conventions that were necessary to it. Modernism thus found an end point— in the case of painting—in flatness and its delimitation by the framing edge. The path to flatness, though, was merely a contingent example of Greenberg’s more general rule of constraints and conventions. Conventions for Greenberg “put resistances, obstacles, controls in the way of communication at the same time that they make it possible and guide it.”107 Without the play of expectation and satisfaction that such constraints and conventions supply, the viewer would be unable to recognize the particular experiences the work was supposed to afford. Working relative to historically shifting conventions of the medium turns out to be what allows the artist to produce work that can be recognized and understood and what allows the artist to be sure that an ambiguous object will be seen in a particular way because it is understood by viewers relative to a particular set of other works of art.108 In order to be more than merely ambiguous, art would thus have to be made as part of a tradition and the viewer’s imaginative recovery of that tradition would be crucial for proper appreciation of what the artist had achieved and potentially communicated in the work in question. In Rosalind Krauss’s elegant summary of her onetime allegiance to high modernist criticism: The history we saw from Manet to the impressionists to Cézanne and then to Picasso was like a series of rooms en filade. Within each room the individual artist explored, to the limits of his experience and his formal intelligence, the separate constituents of his medium. The effect of his pictorial act was simultaneously to open the door to the next space and to close out access to the one behind him. The shape and dimensions of the new space were discovered by the next pictorial act; the only thing about that unstable position that was clearly determined beforehand was its point of entrance. In 1965, it followed logically that to work at the level of Velázquez, Frank Stella had to paint stripes, and that Noland’s choices about structure had narrowed to what Michael Fried termed “the deductive logic of the framing-edge.”

154

Art and Life



We saw the aching beauty of those works in their constant invention of

formats that collapsed into one instantly perceived chord the sounds of all those doors to the past closing at once, managing in the space that was left to lodge powerful evidence of the feelings of their makers. One part of what we were seeing was a kind of history, telescoped and assessed; and the other part was the registration of feelings generated by that historical condition. I never doubted the absoluteness of that history. It was out there, manifest in a whole progression of works of art, an objective fact to be analyzed.109

While the many commentators who have followed and critiqued Greenberg have dispensed with the historical certainties of his account of painting’s teleology, the general structure of recursively given constraints has been retained. In the past to be outside “the narrative of progress ascribed to artistic production by influential critics such as Clement Greenberg”—outside the “triumphal progression towards ever greater abstraction” that is the narrative of the West—was automatically to fail to make interesting art.110 After Greenberg, with “essence” reconceived historically or dialectically, “the modernist project” becomes (in Michael Fried’s formulation) “not a matter of doing away with norms and conventions that had been revealed to be inessential—as if in pursuit of a timeless and unchanging core—but rather of discovering precisely which conventions, at a given moment, turned out to be crucial to the enterprise of painting (for example) at its most serious and exalted, which is to say at its most committed to providing instances of painting capable of standing comparison with the painting of the past whose quality is not in doubt.”111 For the critical upholders of antiessentialist modernism who followed, then, to be outside of the communally produced norms for which modernism was responsible—outside of a different but very particular form of history—is still to be outside of what could conceivably matter. According to Cavell, “only masters of a game, perfect slaves to that project, are in a position to establish conventions which better serve its essence. This is why deep revolutionary changes can result from attempts to conserve a project, to take it back to its idea, keep it in touch with its history.”112 When a movement like pop art is too clumsily direct in its attempt “to break with the tradition of painting and sculpture” it follows, “the result is not that the tradition is broken, but that these works are irrelevant to that tradition, i.e., they are not paintings, whatever their pleasures.”113 Similar judgments can be found in the present day in places ranging from Krauss’s worry that in the contemporary “post-medium”

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

155

condition “the abandonment of the specific medium spells the death of serious art” to Robert Pippin’s view that “the heritage of art is as important to its nature as its projection into a future. It is by being true to the continuing, unique heritage of art that we come to a position in which we begin to understand ourselves as capable of directing the future in a way that is unique to the aesthetic mode of intelligibility.”114 Clearly to the extent that it excludes art outside of a single valid chain of creation, this approach is no longer satisfactory. The stresses throughout this book on a broadened formalism, communication, and the connection between form and an imaginative historical psychology, however, show the valuable element of, and grain of truth in, these accounts that needs to be preserved. This is not only the plausible nature of the story of art making finding its standards set by the immediate past, albeit in highly unexpected ways. It is also the importance of such accounts for the side of criticism, viewing, or art writing, in as much as such histories provide a structure for testing and potentially recovering what (if anything) was put into the work that remains ready to be experienced again in the future. Greenberg’s account lapses into essentialism, and antiessentialist modernist accounts still retain the idea that there is a single tradition or closely clustered set of traditions that are all there is of real significance. Can the insights these have provided be retained without repeating their exclusions? The notion that important art finds its standards within a history of successful art making has an interesting parallel in historical conventionalist definitions of art, whereby art making is essentially a practice bound in tradition. In order to qualify as such, on these accounts, an artwork must stand in meaningful relation to a definite previous work of art.115 Similar problems arise here to those haunting narrative accounts of modernism. How is it that a relation to a definite previous work of art might be properly judged meaningful? How can one securely know who the experts are whose judgments of artwork past and present correctly identify the true tradition of what was and is now art? And what can one say about other creative traditions such as non-Western ones with no causal connection to the allegedly single true art tradition or chain?116 This might all, however, point to exactly what is required for an account of modernism broadened in the various ways this chapter has implied are needed. The necessary corrective can be found in the attempts at a “postformalist” history of world art that have followed George Kubler’s Shape of Time of 1962, taking up Kubler’s stress on the typological and seriated ordering of

156

Art and Life

things or their compared and grouped physical characteristics and places in specific rule-bound series.117 Crucially, Kubler’s basic “rule of series”—in one abbreviated formulation that “in an irreversible finite series, taking one position defines and reduces the formal motions that are possible in succeeding positions”—in its similarity to an account of an unfolding sequence of moves in a rule-governed game, bears a fundamental relation to the antiessentialist modernisms charted above.118 While the progress towards a final end point in “painting as an art” found in Greenberg’s account is rejected, “if painting is an art,” as Whitney Davis has put it, “there cannot be mere regress either.”119 Like after each move in a game of chess, “one is constrained by what has been done before, even if [it] has been superseded—indeed precisely because it has been superseded.”120 Supplemented by a postformalist and postcolonial take up of Kubler, the model of antiessentialist modernism can be suitably supplemented and salvaged. The first step is Kubler’s acknowledgement that there are in fact many “shapes” of time moving alongside and intersecting each other, even in apparently singular art making traditions.121 Modernisms, in other words, might be thought of as multiple chains of “essences” built on particular histories that come to restructure and even support one another rather than one central “tradition” and the barely relevant “periphery” or “alternatives” built around it.122 The second step is Davis’s suggestion that attention be paid not just to the developmental orders noted by Kubler—where the rule of series is followed like an unfolding game of chess—but also to “devolutionary” orders that are not governed by any such rules, even if “people in the series might well project emergent rules to apply to things they produce in it.”123 Devolutionary orders are series in their maintenance of causal relation but emerge “when and where any rules of series (or the forms of likeness that they express and relay)” begin to break down and “are reworked or suspended.”124 It follows that “we should probably not seek to map series of ‘formal motions’ into accepted topographies and chronologies of what we take to be the world, that is, the globe or the planet or regions thereof. Rather, tracking series, the projected rules that govern them, and their unavoidable devolutions and unintended consequences in differently governed series, in ungoverned series, and in new series, tells us what the worlds are.”125 Worlds (aesthetic traditions) can consolidate or re-world, just as traditions can flow in and out of one another, with rules that hold to consolidate a tradition in developmental orders, or they can restructure to unmake and open up the possibility of new traditions in devolutionary orders. The task for

Modernism and Form in Africa, Britain, and South Asia

157

art writers (or historians, or critics) is to track the rules and shapes as they make and re-create themselves and in doing so not just to rely on their own intuition—which will, as Greenberg and many others recognized, be a function of the shapes they have already familiarized themselves with—but suspend reliance upon aesthetic judgment until their acquaintance with new shapes and worlds can have reworked their capacity for judgment accordingly. This, in the end, may be a truer way to understand the quality of Mitter’s recoveries of Indian modernists that are in fact based not on aesthetic judgment but on careful charting of the histories on which each of them have drawn, alongside other major studies that are now demonstrating the deeply innovative making and remaking of traditions across nations and cultures since the dawn of modernity. The account of shapes that interweave without collapsing together may also help move us beyond the descriptions both of alternative modernisms relative to a European center or of a universal modernism to which all areas must conform. We are left, instead, with the mixture of variety and unity by which we find ourselves living at the intersection of multiple traditions, making our way in the world through our own attachments and forms of likeness, and bound together by the planetary-scale concerns that are modernity’s irradicable legacy.

158

Art and Life

Notes

Introduction 1. These are three fictionalized examples based very loosely on Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §43; Wölfflin, Principles of Art History (though only his “first root” of style); Fried, “Art and Objecthood”; and Michaels, Shape of the Signifier (for his reading of Fried’s essay). 2. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 182. 3. Wöfflin, Principles of Art History, 1. 4. David Summers has provided the foundational analysis of form in these older terms (“‘Form,’ Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics”), an analysis further explored in Rose “Significance of Form”. More recently Summers and other “postformalists” have attempted to work out what can be salvaged from the formalist project once the metaphysical assumptions and unwarranted universalism of grander formalisms have been left behind, while still retaining, for instance, form’s deep connection with human interests and capacities but without simplistic expectations of direct windows onto the worldviews of others. Major examples include Summers, Real Spaces, and Davis, Visuality and Virtuality. Critics have nonetheless struggled to see how postformalism departs from the older universalist kind, which is something that in separating grand from modest (or “post”) formalisms in this book I hope to help clarify in favor of the latter. 5. Connections between form and ideas of affect and affordance have recently received book-length treatments: respectively, Cronan, Against Affective Formalism, and Levine, Forms. 6. Fry, Characteristics of French Art, 6. 7. Ibid., 8 and 10, respectively. 8. Ibid., 5–6. 9. In this somewhat unorthodox use of the term “visual culture,” I follow Davis, General Theory of Visual Culture. 10. Fry’s development as a critic has been carefully charted by many scholars, including Spalding, Roger Fry; Reed, Roger Fry Reader; and Rubin, Roger Fry’s “Difficult and Uncertain Science.” Christopher Reed has offered the most expansive view of the nuances, cultural reach, and ethical commitments of Fry’s work (Roger Fry Reader and Bloomsbury Rooms), a project also taken up by Green (Art Made Modern). In the present book I build on all of these accounts but aim to move beyond the context of Fry and Bloomsbury as well as beyond the 1910–30 moment, showing how a nuanced account of Fry’s work opens onto broader cultural and historical currents of modern-

ist aesthetics. I also try to stress the aspects of Fry’s thought where continuity and influence can be found, as opposed to the shifting over time emphasized by Reed and Rubin. 11. Sophisticated recent writings on art and aesthetics that still take the traditional view of formalist modernism as a starting point include Drucker, Theorizing Modernism; Teukolsky, Literate Eye; Wolff, AngloModern; and Gaiger, Aesthetics and Painting. Modernist culture has been broadly critiqued on this basis in Bell-Villada, Art for Art’s Sake; and Smith, Modernism’s History. 12. McCreless, “Formalism, Fair and Foul,” https://nonsite .org/article/formalism-fair-and-foul. 13. See Krauss, “View of Modernism,” and the critique’s further development in Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 95–142. Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois have defended a structural view of form derived from Russian formalism, though they have tended to see Fry (and Clement Greenberg in his bad moments) as bound up with a shape-based, “morphological” conception of form far removed from the defensible variant. See Bois and Krauss, “Vive le formalism,” and, for probably the clearest discussion, Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism.” 14. I have given a longer account of this history in Rose, “Fear of Aesthetics,” 223–29. 15. Jay, “From Modernism to Post-Modernism,” 263. 16. The classic account that popularized the term is Foster, Anti-Aesthetic. See also the more recent explorations in Costello, “Greenberg’s Kant,” and Roelofs, “Anti-Aesthetic.” 17. Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” 112. See also Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism.” 18. Respectively, Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” 104–5; Hammer, Adorno’s Modernism, 3; Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes; Lewis, Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, 1–10; Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment”; and (to name just a few of many possible examples) Doyle and Winkiel, Geomodernisms; Friedman, Planetary Modernisms; Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism”; and Wollaeger and Eatough, Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. The continuing expansion of criteria has been discussed in Mao and Walkowitz, “New Modernist Studies.” For attempts to examine and complicate the question of art-historical modernism(s) in particular, see Elkins, Master Narratives and Their Discontents; Bann, Ways Around Modernism; and Shiff, Doubt. 19. Important examples of the former attempt to look beyond formalist modernism are Corbett, Modernity of

159

En­glish Art; Saler, Avant-Garde in Interwar England; and Wolff, AngloModern. The latter attempt to offer a new context (here Victorian anthropology) for formalist modernism while still understanding the theory in traditional terms can be seen in Teukolsky, Literate Eye. I discuss the literature that has taken up formalism and modernist criticism more directly throughout this book, though for a more focused discussion of the contributions of various writers, see Rose, “Significance of Form.” 20. Prown, “Style as Evidence,” especially 208. 21. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 165. 22. For a general outline, see McCreless, “Formalism, Fair and Foul.” 23. Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 46; Levine, Forms, 14. 24. See, for instance, Fore, Realism After Modernism, and for an exploration of affects themselves in this manner, see Brinkema, Forms of the Affects. 25. Kubler, Shape of Time, 88. 26. Clark, “More Theses on Feuerbach,” 4. 27. Cf. Macpherson, “Little Formalism,” which is exceptionally useful in setting out the terms of a formalism of this kind that is not “accountable to” history, something that, as I analyze it (and as Macpherson is well aware), form almost inevitably is. This places MacPherson in one of two camps of new formalism that Marjorie Levinson discerns in post-2000s literary scholarship; the other being a set of approaches that openly aims to use the analysis of form to get closer to history (“What Is New Formalism?”). This latter desire to connect aesthetic form to history in effect makes the high modernist formalism I describe in this book a true precursor to “New Formalism.” On this, see also Rose, “Significance of Form,” and, for one telling parallel, compare appeals to “complexity” in new formalism (Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” 561) with the politics of form I discuss in chapters 3 and 4 below. Caroline Levine’s model of forms as arrangements of all kinds, regardless of whether found in art or life, is the most influential recent expansion of form beyond the confines of the text or artwork (Forms). 28. Focillon, Life of Forms in Art, 119. 29. It is worth asking here whether a postformalism could also be a nonhuman- or eco-formalism. As my opening examples suggest, formalism as I discuss it might appear to be a humanist ideal diametrically opposed to the cluster of nonhumanist or new materialist methods like Object Oriented Ontology and Actor Network Theory that downgrade the human in order to distribute agency in far broader terms, for example across “plants, animals, blades of grass, household objects, trash” (Bennett, “Systems and Things,” 232, and see Macpherson, “Little Formalism”). Yet this is so only in so far as a grander formalism is held to, with its clear distinction between forms of agency that relate to “human” versus

160

Notes to Pages 9–14

“nature” and its confident sense that human-made artifacts will yield a definite access to the human. A modest formalism acknowledges the potential of form as a tool for investigation into shaping forces but without the confidence that one will be able to make any clear distinctions between the human and other forms of agency or that meaning lies straightforwardly in the recovery of human activity. For more on the human/​nature distinction, see Latour, Politics of Nature; on a postformalism that does not assume a direct equivalence between viewer’s vision, the reified “form” of an object, and intended meaning or vision, see Davis, General Theory of Visual Culture, and “What Is Post-Formalism? (Or, Das Sehen an sich hat seine Kunstgeschichte),” Nonsite 7, October 12, 2012, https:/ /​nonsite.org/​article/​what-is-post-formalism-or-dassehen-an-sich-hat-seine-kunstgeschichte. And for a developed attempt at thinking about “form beyond the human” (p. 157), see Kohn, How Forests Think, especially 153–88. 30. Here and below I draw heavily on and develop arguments given in Green’s unpublished paper “Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson,” and Davis, General Theory of Visual Culture, the latter of which discusses formalism as a kind of “virtual historical psychology” (p. 72). 31. This method is explored in Rose, “Close Looking and Conviction.” For a prime example, see Bois’s chapter “Perceiving Newman” in Painting as Model, 187–213. 32. The classic account of the “historical” avant-garde here is Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde. For a later summary, see Bürger, “Avant-Garde”; for a historical overview of the idea of the avant-garde, see Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 95–148. 33. Weibel, “Globalization and Contemporary Art,” 27. 34. Wood, “Image and Thing,” 141. 35. Pippin, After the Beautiful, 37. 36. For detailed commentary, see Rose, “Fear of Aesthetics.” 37. On this suspicion, see Costello, “Greenberg’s Kant.” Keith Moxey in Visual Time, for example, writes that the “historiographic pendulum” swings between interest in the work’s “affective role in the present or its location in history, its apparently ahistorical form or its historical content” (p. 59); Boehm’s iconic criticism involves “a radical perceptual formalism that tends to eschew considerations of content” (p. 64), while Bredekamp’s Bildwissenschaft “has an unapologetically formalist dimension” (p. 66). The original texts Moxey discusses are Boehm, “Wiederkehr der Bilder,” 11–38, and Bredekamp and Werner, “Editorial,” 7. 38. See, for example, the entries on “Animism” (by Papapetros) and “Image Theory” (by Manghani) in Kelly, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. 39. Kelly, “Preface to the First Edition,” xxxi. “Artwriting” as a term was given its first extensive exploration in Car-

rier, Artwriting. It has been most thoroughly expanded and defended as a subject for contextually sensitive cultural history in Teukolsky, Literate Eye.

Chapter 1 1. Fry, preface to Discourses Delivered to the Students, by Reynolds, x. 2. Woolf, Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown, 4. 3. Clark, preface to Last Lectures, by Fry, ix. For the exhibition in the context of 1910 and Bloomsbury, in addition to sources on Fry cited in the introduction, see Stansky, On or About December 1910. An expanded context has been offered by Rachel Teukolsky, who fits the exhibition within the longer history of art writing as it developed out of Victorian practices (Literate Eye, 192–233). Charles Molesworth has recently given close attention to Fry’s early career (Capitalist and the Critic). 4. Desmond MacCarthy, “The Art-Quake of 1910,” Listener, February 1, 1945, 123. 5. Ibid., 123. 6. Bell quoted in Edel, Bloomsbury, 193. 7. Bell, Art, ix. 8. Bosanquet, History of Aesthetic, 269; Fry, “Post-­ Impressionism,” 109. 9. For the roots of this position in the work of Walter Benjamin (and the idea that close attention to Adorno’s engagement with Kant may in fact offer a counter based on the aesthetic), see Kaufman’s essays: “Red Kant” and “Negatively Capable Dialectics.” 10. Beasley, “Definite Meaning,” 61–62. 11. Fry, “Retrospect,” 199. 12. Bell, “Significant Form,” 257. 13. Alan Clutton-Brock, “Aesthetics,” Times Literary Supplement, April 14, 1932, 265. 14. Rothenstein, British Art Since 1900, 18. 15. The actual dates of the movement are controversial, with only two issues of the journal produced in 1914 and 1915. Probably the most telling accounts of the moment have set vorticism’s aesthetics against contemporary literary culture. On vorticism and Lewis, see Edwards, Wyndham Lewis. For vorticism’s place among contemporary literary culture, see Levenson, Genealogy of Modernism, 63–164, and Beasley, Ezra Pound, 49–111. 16. Binyon’s publications include William Blake (1906), Painting in the Far East (1908), Flight of the Dragon (1911), and Art of Botticelli (1913). See also Beasley, “Definite Meaning”; Corbett, Modernity of English Art, 26–32; and Corbett, “Laurence Binyon.” 17. Corbett, Modernity of English Art, 28. 18. Hulme, “Mr Epstein and the Critics,” 103.

19. Hulme, “Modern Art III,” 662. 20. T. E. Hulme, “Modern Art IV: Mr David Bomberg’s Show,” New Age, July 9, 1914, 231. 21. T. E. Hulme, “Modern Art III: The London Group,” New Age, March 26, 1914, 662. See also Hulme, “Modern Art IV,” 231. 22. In bringing together Berenson and Fry, I have partly followed Green’s work in “Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson,” and Art Made Modern, 18–19. On Fry, connoisseurship, and criticism, see also Maginnis, “Reflections on Formalism,” and Elam, Roger Fry’s Journey. For related analyses of Berenson’s connoisseurship and art writing, see Melius, “Connoisseurship, Painting, and Personhood”; Davis, General Theory of Visual Culture, 112–19; and Calo, Bernard Berenson, 87–93. An important prehistory of the moment is given in Prettejohn, Modern Painters, Old Masters. 23. For a critical analysis of the various claims made by Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and others, see Carrier, High Art, 22–48. 24. Denis, “Définition du néo-traditionnisme,” 540. The classic analysis of the history of symbolist art criticism and the emergence of Fry and others from it, all focused around late nineteenth-century painting, is Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism. Denis’s engagement with form has most recently been revisited and revised in Morehead, Nature’s Experiments, 47–77. Prettejohn has discussed the history of the symbolists and Fry in longer perspective with a particular focus on the status of “beauty” and “the aesthetic” (Beauty and Art). Fried has offered an alternative version of Fry’s emergence from and relation to the French tradition (“Roger Fry’s Formalism”). 25. On the process of “replacing personal enthusiasms with more detached scholarly analysis,” see Rampley, “Idea of a Scientific Discipline,” 55. 26. Most famously: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy; Morelli, Werke Italienischer Meister. 27. For Morelli’s method, see Wollheim, “Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship,” and Davis, General Theory of Visual Culture, 86–112. 28. Here I am talking of Berenson and Fry, but a sense of how pervasive this notion was in the British art world can be gained from the history and influence of the Burlington Magazine at the time. For the blurring of art criticism and connoisseurship, see the editorial in the inaugural issue (Dell, “Editorial”); for the influence on the British art world, see Rees-Leahy, “For Connoisseurs”; and for Fry’s involvement, see Elam, “More and More Important Work.” Francesco Ventrella has drawn attention to the connoisseurship of Contance Jocelyn Ffoulkes as an important counter to the primacy of internal evidence, with Ffoulkes advocating the use of documents as a means of establishing professional

Notes to Pages 18–27

161

authority in a field dominated by assumptions of the superiority of male aesthetic judgment (“Contance Jocelyn Ffoulkes”). Ventrella’s work is part of an important recent trend in reassessing the gendering of connoisseurship, as well as art writing more broadly (see Clark and Ventrella, “Women’s Expertise and the Culture of Connoisseurship”). 29. Respectively, Berenson, Study and Criticism of Italian Art, viii and 147–48. Luke Uglow has recently pointed out how in practice Morelli did not strictly adhere to his famous method (“Giovanni Morelli and His Friend Giorgione”). Berenson himself warned his readers against being “foolish enough to take [Morelli] at his word” (Study and Criticism, viii). 30. This point is brought out especially in Maginnis, “Reflections on Formalism,” 194–95. Following his Harvard teacher William James, Berenson thought of these decorative traits as bundles of habits, though writers like Fry were able to subscribe to the method without accepting this specific underlying justification, a point I return to below. 31. Fry, “Andrea Mantegna.” See also the discussion of this text in Elam, “Roger Fry and Early Italian Painting,” 88–89. 32. Berenson, “Amico di Sandro,” 46–69. 33. Berenson, Study and Criticism of Italian Art, vii–viii. 34. Ibid. 35. Fry to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Bergamo, November 7, 1894, in Fry, Letters of Roger Fry, 1:162. 36. Margolis, Selves and Other Texts, 15–16. 37. Green calls this the role of the “participant spectator”: “In this new relationship, the artist inevitably is to some extent invented by the spectator as part of the process of finding meanings in the work” (“Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson,” Microsoft Word file). 38. See Rose, “Close Looking and Conviction,” 161–62. Todd Cronan has drawn attention to Fry’s tendency to appeal to the unavoidable sensory impact or “affect” of artworks, but for the reasons I have outlined here and in “Close Looking and Conviction,” I think there is a clear connection between Fry’s method and that practiced by present-day modernists like Cronan (Against Affective Formalism, 52). In this sense Fry’s theory was explicit about explaining the place of intention once form and meaning were collapsed; his writing is no more haunted by intentionality than that of contemporary writers who claim to carry out historical work based primarily on the “internal” visual examination of artworks. 39. Respectively, Greenberg, Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, 157–58 and 161. 40. For formalism in late Victorian art criticism, see Prettejohn’s essays “Out of the Nineteenth Century,” and “From Aestheticism to Modernism.” For formalism in the arts and crafts movement, see Tillyard, Impact of Modern-

162

Notes to Pages 27–35

ism, 47–80. For the conjunction of arts and crafts and aestheticism, see Reed, Roger Fry Reader, 167–86, and “Making History.” For Victorian anthropology, and more general engagement with the idea of the “Primitive,” see Teukolsky, Literate Eye, 192–219, and Green, Art Made Modern, 119–32. 41. See Stokes, “It’s the Treatment.” For a Burlingtonrelated case—“The principles of design [are] always dependent upon the subject matter of a picture”—see Holmes, Notes on the Science, 24. 42. See Dell, “Editorial,” and the works of Fry and Berenson. For a purer example of such a Burlington writer, see Pezzini, “More Adey.” 43. Bosanquet, History of Aesthetic, 4–5, and Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), s.v. “Aesthetics.” 44. “There is the consciousness . . . of a peculiar relation of sympathy with the man who made this thing in order to arouse precisely the sensations we experience”: Fry, “Essay in Aesthetics,” 19–20. See also “Retrospect,” 194. This view parallels Bosanquet’s reference (as noted above) to Kant’s prioritization of “imaginative” over natural beauty as the “doctrine of significant form” (History of Aesthetic, 269). 45. Fry, “Modern Paintings,” 304. 46. Fry, Vision and Design, 21–23 and 25, respectively. On Ross’s A Theory of Pure Design as well as Fry’s interest, see Frank, Denman Ross, chapters 2 and 3. The growth of physiological aesthetics of the kind that Fry appeals to here has been examined in relation to earlier thinkers in Britain in Morgan, Outward Mind, 86–129, and in relation to modernism more generally in Brain, Pulse of Modernism. 47. Fry, “Retrospect,” 193–94. See also Fry, Vision and Design, 18. He writes, “And when we come to the higher works of art, where sensations are so arranged that they arouse in us deep emotions, this feeling of a special tie with the man who expressed them becomes very strong. . . . And this recognition of purpose is, I believe, an essential part of the æsthetic judgment proper” (ibid., 20). 48. Fry, “On a Profile Portrait by Baldovinetti.” The attribution is discussed in Elam, Roger Fry’s Journey, 20–24. 49. Fry, “On a Profile Portrait by Baldovinetti,” 311–12. 50. The first quote from ibid., 312. The second is a quotation from Fry’s 1901 Cambridge University Extension lectures on Florentine art, in Elam, Roger Fry’s Journey, 22. 51. Fry, “Exhibition of Old Masters,” 72. 52. Ibid. Scholarship has tended to follow Panofsky’s later reinterpretation of the picture’s subject (“Early History of Man,” 12–30). 53. Fry, “Exhibition of Old Masters,” 72. 54. Fry, “Post-Impressionism,” 99. 55. Ibid. 56. For the classic analysis, see Cavell’s essays “Music Discomposed” and “Matter of Meaning It.” The idea is devel-

oped in relation to Fry and Cézanne in Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, 143–46. 57. Fry, “Post-Impressionism,” 99. 58. Fry and MacCarthy, “Post-Impressionists,” 83; Fry, French, Flemish, and British Art , 77–78; Fry, Henri-Matisse, 403. 59. Fry’s familiarity is evident in his writing on the history of nineteenth-century France and the work of illustrators in Characteristics of French Art, 73–78. 60. Fry, “Artist’s Vision,” and Fry, “Walter Sickert, A.R.A.,” New Statesman, January 17, 1925, 417. For an extended analysis of the dialogue between Fry and Sickert, see Rose, “With an Almost Pathetic Fatality,” 126–47. 61. Sickert, “Mesopotamia-Cézanne,” 339. See also Robins, “Walter Sickert,” 41–47. 62. See Fry, “Artist’s Vision.” 63. Corbett, “Seeing into Modernity,” 158. 64. Though based on Bullets and Ballots, Sickert most likely culled the image from a publicity still; see Baron, Sickert, 554. 65. This position was put forward most directly in Fry’s essays “Ottoman and the Whatnot” and “Artist’s Vision.” 66. Fry, “Walter Sickert A.R.A.,” 417. 67. Walpole, preface to Catalogue of an Exhibition; Woolf, Walter Sickert. 68. On this preference, described as a case of “normative formalism,” see Wollheim, On Pictorial Organization, 3, 11–15. 69. Neer, “Connoisseurship and the Stakes of Style,” 7. 70. Fry, “Post-Impressionism,” 103. Fry’s early and late statements of the account outlined here are broadly consistent, and I draw on both; see “Post-Impressionism,” and Henri Matisse. 71. Fry, “Post-Impressionists—II,” 91. 72. Fry, “Grafton Gallery—I,” 86. 73. Fry, Henri-Matisse, 403. 74. Fry and MacCarthy, “Post-Impressionists,” 83. 75. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 86. 76. Fry and MacCarthy, “Post-Impressionists,” 83. 77. Ibid., 96 and 104. 78. Clark in Fry, Last Lectures, xvi, as reiterated by Denys Sutton in his introduction to Letters of Roger Fry, 1:70. For a representative philosophical discussion, see Reid, Study in Aesthetics, 310–34. 79. See Baldick, Social Mission of English Criticism, 134–61. 80. Richards first tackled the issues in “Four Fermented Aesthetics” of 1919 and developed his ideas more fully in Ogden, Richards, and Woods, Foundations of Aesthetics. The works that followed on—Ogden and Richards, Meaning of Meaning of 1923 and Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism of 1925—were attempts to explain and rectify the looseness

of contemporary discussion. For his early articles, see Richards, Collected Shorter Writings. 81. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 11–18. 82. Respectively, Ogden, Richards, and Woods, Foundations of Aesthetics, 53 n. 2, and Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 186. Though it is worth noting that this “fact” was only true of aesthetics that made the necessary assumption, as Fry did, that aesthetics was a matter of experience in the perceiving mind rather than about properties of objects. See Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 19–24. 83. Ogden, Richards, and Woods, Foundations of Aesthetics, 53 and 63–66. 84. Ibid., 67. See also Richards, Practical Criticism, 19–20. The scroll in the British Museum is now thought to be a fifth- to early seventh-century copy. 85. The conflation of expression and communication is evocatively summed up in Samuel Alexander’s suggestion that “art is purposeful, is expressive, is not purely descriptive like science and bound to its subject, is essentially communicative” (“Creative Process,” 320). 86. Croce, Æsthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic. On the history of the rise and decline of interest in Croce in America, see Roberts, “Croce in America.” 87. Balfour, Criticism and Beauty; Carritt, Theory of Beauty; Clutton-Brock, Ultimate Belief; and Carr, Philosophy of Benedetto Croce. In his work Carr suggested that now whenever the term “expression” was used without qualification it was generally associated with Croce (p. 3). 88. These Croce translations included Æsthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic; Breviary of Æsthetic; Essence of Aesthetic; and the second edition of Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, which contained full translations of the historical sections rather than the summaries contained in the first edition. The Burlington articles by Ainslie are “Theory of Æsthetic,” and “Theory of Æsthetic (Conclusion).” 89. Lethaby, Form in Civilization, 158. 90. Smith, Nature of Art; Collingwood, Outlines of a Philosophy of Art. 91. For example: Reid, Study in Aesthetics; Hannay, Roger Fry; McDowall, Beauty and the Beast; Nunn, Education; Dodds, Romantic Theory of Poetry; and Finberg, Modern Painters. 92. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed. (1929), s.v. “Aesthetics.” 93. Listowel, “Aesthetic Doctrines of Samuel Alexander,” 191. 94. Herbert Read, “Croce,” review of Benedetto Croce, by Gian N. G. Orsini, undated typescript article, reference no. 10.30, p. 4, Sir Herbert Edward Read Fonds, Macpherson Library, University of Victoria. Even Greenberg, whose

Notes to Pages 35–42

163

stress on intuition was notorious, suggested later in 1978 that “Kant and Croce were the only philosophers I’d learned anything real from in the line of aesthetics” (Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, 157). 95. Reid, “Beauty and Significance,” 123–24, 125–27. 96. Ibid., 125. 97. Reid, Study in Aesthetics, 43. 98. Ibid., 42–43. 99. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 146. 100. Ibid., 146 and 144, respectively. 101. See Listowel, “Aesthetic Doctrines of Samuel Alexander,” 188–89. 102. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 150. 103. Bosanquet, “Croce’s Aesthetic,” with a response by Carr, “Mr. Bosanquet on Croce’s Æsthetic.” Listowel was one of the most persistent, harsh critics of Croce, who instead advocated a more “materialist” theory of transference from artist to viewer that he saw as represented by certain German writers as well as by Samuel Alexander (Critical History of Modern Aesthetics, and “Aesthetic Doctrines of Samuel Alexander,” especially 187–88). See also Alexander, Art and the Material. 104. Gilbert and Kuhn, History of Esthetics, 550–59. 105. Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance, 199–200. 106. Letters from Collingwood to Samuel Alexander, 1924–38, reference no. ALEX/​A/​1/​1/​68, Samuel Alexander Papers, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. 107. Carritt, “Arts and Aesthetic Theory”; see also Raby, New Learning, xviii. 108. The commitment of specifically “English” art writers to an empiricism that masks its own theoretical nature has been described in Cheetham, Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism. Listowel in the mid 1930s noted that Alexander’s writing was the closest anyone in the country came to “systematic æsthetic” (“Present State of Æsthetics,” 197). 109. See the preface to Ancient and Medieval Art, by Bulley, viii. Gerald Baldwin Brown and Martin Conway are also acknowledged. 110. Arts League of Service Annual, 17–18. 111. Richardson, Art and the Child, 33. 112. Bulley actually served on the 1932 Gorell Committee on Industrial Art, recommended by the Victoria and Albert Museum director Eric Maclagan, while also having built up a collection of decorative arts that included handmade work from the Omega Workshop and elsewhere (later donated to the V&A); for this correspondence, see the Mrs. G. W. Armitage Nominal File, Archive of Art and Design, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 113. See the above note. The correspondence is included in the Mrs. G. W. Armitage Nominal File, Archive of Art and Design, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

164

Notes to Pages 42–50

114. Sections of Bulley’s book Art and Counterfeit had been published in the October 1919, October 1923, and October 1925 issues of the Burlington Magazine. 115. Quotations taken from the inside cover of her 1927 book, Simple Guide to Pictures and Painting, in reference to Art and Counterfeit published two years earlier. 116. Bulley, Art and Counterfeit. 117. Bulley, Simple Guide to Pictures and Painting, 35. 118. Ibid., 43. 119. Ibid., 19, 22–23. 120. Ibid., 25. The Sargent is now in the Tate Britain, London. 121. See, especially, Corbett, “Modernity and Revisionist Modernism,” 66–92, and Saler, “Morris, the Machine, and Modernism,” 65–91. 122. Corbett, “Modernity and Revisionist Modernism,” 76. 123. Bell, Since Cézanne, 92–93. 124. Ibid., 91–92. 125. Bell, Account of French Painting, 130–31.

Chapter 2 1. Fry, “Post-Impressionists—II,” 90; Fry, Cézanne, 1. 2. Fry, “Retrospect,” 244. 3. Fry, Cézanne, 2. 4. Ibid., 73. 5. Ibid., 41–42. 6. “Science” at this point meaning a loose mixture of rationalism, impartiality, inductive reasoning, and regulated method. Richards’s and Read’s open appeals to a science of criticism—as charted below—are only the most obvious examples. On both Eliot and Hulme as influenced by Russell and scientific empiricism, see Shusterman, T. S. Eliot, 18–30, 33–40. For scientific culture in the context of 1930s sculpture in particular, see Juler, Grown But Not Made. 7. For the pre-twentieth-century history of engagement between aesthetics and empirical psychology, leading through to connections between Lee, Anstruther-Thomson, and Richards in the 1920s, see Morgan, Outward Mind, 219–54. 8. See Hearnshaw, Short History of British Psychology, 228–29. As Richards put it, “The theory of criticism shows no great dependence on experimental æsthetics, useful in many respects as these investigations are” (Principles of Literary Criticism, 10). The same was not true of inspection: “There are, it should be noted, no other facts which can be directly studied quite in the same way as our own ‘experiences,’ our own feelings. . . . This possibility of direct study (introspection) gives to psychology a privileged position, and adds to its fascination as the most fundamental and intimate method of studying any portion of reality” (Ogden and Richards, “First Steps in Psychology,” 37). A more “pro-

fessional” confirmation of this view can be found in the popularizing book produced by the psychologist Cyril Burt, where Burt described introspection as a necessary part of psychological method alongside “experimental” observation and psychoanalysis, with the latter—“the first time the B.B.C. has decided to place the subject of Psycho-analysis on its programme” (p. 61)—discussed by Ernest Jones (How the Mind Works, 8–10, 17–58). 9. A similar point can be found in Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description.” (I take this view of personal experience to be one of the grounding ideas of Fry’s that he saw as confirmed in Russell’s writing, as much as Russell’s thought changed over time. Letters to Russell expressing Fry’s approval for his books in 1915 and 1928 are held at Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University Library, reference nos. 0076797 050169 and 0076800 050172.) Banfield has argued that Fry’s thought is deeply related to Russell’s 1910s theory of knowledge—so that “vision” and “design” (or “impressionism” and “postimpressionism”) are analogues of sensory “knowledge by acquaintance” and the “knowledge by description” that relates to the nonvisual structure of the world (Phantom Table, 245–93). For discussion of the relevant philosophical context in Britain, see Preston, Analytic Philosophy, 137–38, 144–51. 10. Such objectivity is not as the truth of direct engagement with the object as it really is but the agreement of a community of trained judges on the extent to which, in the manner discussed in the previous chapter, the critic’s mind and subsequent description had replicated and transcribed the imaginative vision of the artist. See Shusterman, “Mutations of Objectivity.” 11. A useful account of Fry’s work in the context of his appeals to the empirical method can be found in Green, Art Made Modern, 31–44. This view is expanded in Rubin, Roger Fry’s“Difficult and Uncertain Science.” The empiricism of specifically “English” art theory more broadly has been discussed in Cheetham, Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism. 12. Fry, “Mr MacColl and Drawing,” 84–85. 13. Fry, “Retrospect,” 189. 14. Ibid. 15. The position was elaborated by Fry’s protégé Charles Mauron, especially in “Rôle of the Amateurs.” In giving background information on contemporary psychology, I have tried to make clearer why Fry and Mauron viewed their method as scientific, despite the fact that “in practice, Mauron’s criticism, like Fry’s, was scientific only in a very loose and metaphorical sense. There were no real experiments, . . . no universal scientific laws. What there was, at least in theory, was a scientific attitude of rational impartiality” (Hutcheon, Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic, ix).

16. Though it is also worth noting that “amateurism” in the collector and appreciator of art was prized as a guarantee of judgments free from the taint of the market; the very first Burlington editorial had praised the “collector who is also a sincere amateur, a true lover of the arts” and was highly critical of those for whom “the pleasures of legal possession come to seem more positive than those of a disinterested appreciation.” Dell, “Editorial,” 5. 17. Friedländer, “Artistic Quality,” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 143. 18. Herbert Read, “De Gustibus . . . ,” Listener, September 9, 1931, 139, 409. (The argument here formed the basis for the discussion in Read’s book Art Now of the “common factor,” which I mention below.) One reader actually responded that Berenson had shown the “decorative” qualities of art to be beyond the vicissitudes of fashion; Mary Barne, “Art and Fashion,” Listener, September 23, 1913, 141, 509. 19. For endorsement of the position by the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, used as a defense of the magazine’s own practice of offering disinterested opinions on the authenticity and authorship of artworks for a fee, see “‘Expertising,’” editorial, Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 41, no. 232 (July 1922): 3–4; “‘Expertises’—an American Passion,” editorial, Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 52, no. 302 (May 1928): 209. The service was advertised from 1903 until at least March 1944. 20. On Friedländer’s ideas, see especially the chapter “Artistic Quality: Original and Copy,” in his On Art and Connoisseurship (a chapter thought significant enough that it was one of two printed in the Burlington Magazine in 1941 in advance of the book). 21. Listowel, Critical History of Modern Aesthetics, 181. The term was understood broadly enough to be thought entirely compatible with (empathetic) features such as “artistic sympathy” and “appreciative delight,” listed alongside disinterest by Listowel in his conclusion as the “essential and outstanding characteristics” of the experience of beauty (p. 171). 22. In Critical History of Modern Aesthetics, Listowel surveys formalism (p. 145), as well as many other theories and theorists including pleasure (p. 26), play (p. 28), appearance and illusion (p. 31), empathy (pp. 59, 68, 77, 80), phenomenology (p. 85), the English “eclectics” Bernard Bosanquet and Samuel Alexander (pp. 88–89), the psychological theories of I. A. Richards, C. K. Ogden, and J. E. H. Wood (p. 102), the experimental work of Edward Bullough (pp. 103–4), Emil Utitz and Max Dessoir’s “science of art” (p. 123), and Listowel’s own concluding view of aesthetics (p. 274). Importantly, some of the other writers rejected the actual term “disinterest” (for example, see Lee, Beautiful, 6) but subscribed to the same underlying ideas, as Lee’s account in the surrounding pages demonstrates.

Notes to Pages 51–52

165

23. Listowel, Critical History of Modern Aesthetics, 182. 24. Ibid., 181. 25. Listowel, “Aesthetic Doctrines of Samuel Alexander,” 188–89. 26. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. On this point, see Gaiger, “Analysis of Pictorial Style,” 20–36. 27. Fry, “Seicento,” 167. For Fry on German art history, see Last Lectures, 4. 28. Fry, “Settecentismo,” 163. 29. Fry, “Baroque,” 146. 30. Baxandall and Candida Smith, Substance, Sensation, and Perception, 37. 31. Pater, “Amiel’s ‘Journal Intime,’” 29. 32. Pater, Renaissance, 1986, xxix (emphasis added). 33. Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 261. 34. Bell, Since Cézanne, 174–75. 35. Ibid., 175. 36. Ibid., 176–77. 37. Price-Jones, “Roger Fry and Æsthetic Criticism,” 181. 38. Ibid., 182. 39. Fry, “Retrospect,” 189. 40. “Deposition by REF in the case of Andree Hahn vs. Joseph Duveen,” September 18, 1923, pp. 36–37, 50, Papers of Roger Eliot Fry, reference no. REF/​7/​8, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge. 41. Fry, “Sandro Botticelli,” 197; Horne, Alessandro Filipepi; and Yashiro, Sandro Botticelli. 42. Fry, “Sandro Botticelli,” 197. The previous year Yashiro had started work as a research assistant for Berenson on his book Drawings of the Florentine Painters and was replaced soon after by the young Kenneth Clark. 43. Horne, Alessandro Filipepi, 152. For more on Horne’s book, see Codell, “Horne’s Botticelli.” 44. Yashiro, Sandro Botticelli, 188. 45. Ibid., 94. 46. Ibid., 92. See also Yashiro’s comments at 38 and 187–88. 47. Fry, “Sandro Botticelli,” 196. 48. Fry, “Some Aspects of Chinese Art,” 68. 49. Fry, “On Some Modern Drawings,” 199. 50. Fry, “Some Aspects of Chinese Art,” 81. 51. Fry, review of Lorenzo Lotto, by Bernhard Berenson, Athenaeum, April 18, 1903, 503, as discussed in Green, “Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson.” 52. This is the point outlined in the section on connoisseurship in my first chapter. 53. Fry, “Flemish Art at Burlington House,” 137. 54. Pater, Renaissance, 1986, 41. 55. Ruskin, Stones of Venice, 2–3. Stokes deemed this excerpt part of the “greatest of all his passages” (Venice, 41). 56. Read, Art Now, 144. Originally printed in his article “The Painter-Critic,” (Listener, December 7, 1932), Read

166

Notes to Pages 52–64

opposed this idea to “symbolic form,” the latter of which he suggested could be excluded from criticism proper. Read, typically, wavered on this position. Even in apparently antiformalist surrealist work, he later wrote, “The art is in the pattern which is a personal intuition of the artist, and not in the imagery. Imagery . . . does not constitute aesthetic expression, or art, until it has been given expressive form” (Read, “Situation of Art in Europe,” 48). 57. For revised published versions of the broadcasts, see Burt, How the Mind Works. For the broadcasts, see Bulley, Have You Good Taste?; “An Experiment in Artistic Taste,” Listener, January 18, 1933, 76; “Testing Taste,” Listener, January 18, 1933, 84; Charles Holmes, “Can Taste Be Taught?” Listener, January 18, 1933, 76–82; and Burt, “The Psychology of Art,” Listener, January 25, 1933, 139–40. The taste test’s connection with contemporary design has been discussed in Cohen, Household Gods, 195–98, and Buckley, Designing Modern Britain, 106–14. 58. Burt, “Psychology of Art.” For more on Burt and psychology at this time, see Thompson, Psychological Subjects, and Rose, Psychological Complex. 59. Bullough, “Mind and Medium in Art,” 40; Burt, “Psychology of Art.” Burt went one step further than Bullough, who had cast doubt on the Crocean extrapolation that all men are artists. 60. Fry, Last Lectures, 15. This was endorsed the following year by the Oxford Slade professor H. S. Goodhardt-Rendel, who borrowed Fry’s analogy of “the wireless” (Fine Art, 59–81). 61. Read, review of Last Lectures, by Roger Fry, 215. 62. Berenson, Three Essays in Method, 1–71. 63. Fry, “Berensonian Method,” 47–48; Herbert Read, “Method in Art Criticism,” Listener, February 26, 1930. 64. Respectively Fry, “Courtauld Institute of Art,” 276, and Fry, “Art and the State,” in Transformations, 72. 65. On the foundation and early history of the Courtauld, see Lasko, Courtauld Institute of Art. 66. Herbert Read, “New Methods in Art Criticism,” Listener, November 9, 1939, 922. 67. Fry, “Authenticity of the Renders Collection,” 261–63, 267. See also Laurie, “Identification of Forged Pictures,” 342–44, and Editorial, “The Forger and the Detective,” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 51, no. 292 (July 1927): 3–4. 68. Fry, “Authenticity of the Renders Collection,” 261. 69. Laurie, “Identification of Forged Pictures,” 343. 70. Ibid., 343. 71. This aspect of the Hahn trial is covered in detail in Brewer, American Leonardo, including the judge’s comments at pp. 181–83. Examples of such writing in the Burlington Magazine include Ganz, “Unpublished Holbein Portrait”; Burroughs, “X-Rays and Picture Restoration”; and Douglas,

“Photographic Evidence.” See also Burroughs, Art Criticism from a Laboratory. 72. Witt, “Courtauld Institute of Art.” 73. Information is here drawn from the file of correspondence with the Wallace Collection: Witt, “Courtauld Institute of Art: Laboratory for Scientific Research,” reference no. AR 1/​566, National Archives, Kew. 74. Waterhouse, review of Art History and Connoisseurship, by W. G. Constable, 50. 75. Ibid., 50. 76. Compare the first and last chapters of Constable, Art History and Connoisseurship. 77. For the Courtauld Institute’s move to London, see Saxl, “History of the Warburg Library.” 78. Podro, “Art History and the Émigré Scholars,” 81. C. Oliver O’Donnell has shown how Ernst Gombrich, director from 1959–72, in correspondence with Meyer Schapiro in the late 1940s, even more closely echoed Fry’s earlier statements in writing of the difficult task of translating personal response into “inter-subjective” language but again took this as a reason to be skeptical about aesthetic judgment rather than to embrace it (“From Löwy and Fry to Wertheimer and Gombrich,” in Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates: Art Through a Modern American Mind, forthcoming). 79. Quoted in Johnstone, “History and Art,” 455–56. 80. Blunt, “Place of Art History,” 385. 81. Fry, “Art-History as an Academic Study,” 4. 82. The classic statement is the introduction to Panofsky, Studies in Iconology. 83. Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, especially his chapter “Modernist Method.” 84. Ibid., 8. 85. Podro, “Art History and the Émigré Scholars,” 85. 86. On one aspect of this divide, see Read, “Art Criticism Versus Art History.” 87. For a recent discussion of the dilemma this development has left for the discipline, see Corbett, “Visual Culture and the History of Art.” A counter to this separation of art history and aesthetics can be seen in the recent resurgence of approaches that claim to more directly deal with the actual encounter with works of art, an overall trend discussed by Moxey (Visual Time, 53–75). For the sense in which we might understand such approaches as a revival of “aesthetics,” despite the misrepresentations of this term, see Rose, “Fear of Aesthetics.” 88. Baxandall in Langdale, “Interviews with Michael Baxandall,” 27. On Baxandall and Leavis, see Lubbock, “To Do a Leavis.” The connections between Leavis and writers on visual culture such as Fry and Wollheim are taken up again in the following chapter of this book. 89. Baxandall in Langdale, “Interviews with Michael Baxandall,” 21, 22.

90. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 9. 91. Ibid., 9–10. For his thoughts on style, see Wollheim, “Pictorial Style: Two Views”; Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 25–36; and Wollheim, “Style in Painting.” 92. For a late, reflective statement, see Wollheim, “On Pictorial Representation.” 93. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 156–60, 274–75. 94. Goehr, “Institutionalization of a Discipline,” 101. 95. On the suspicion of European philosophy, see Akehurst, Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy, and, representatively, chapter six of A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic. 96. This perspective is expressed by Listowel in his review of The Aesthetic Theories of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, by I. A. Knox; and Critical History of Modern Aesthetics, 9–10. His own work, tellingly, was in retrospect seen in almost the opposite manner; see Schaper, review of Modern Aesthetics: An Historical Introduction, by Earl of Listowel. 97. See Saw, “E. F. Carritt.” 98. Osborne, “Professor Louis Arnaud Reid,” 309. 99. Danto, “Metaphor, Expression, and Style”; Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 9; Goodman, “Status of Style.” 100. Goodman, “Pure in Art”; Wollheim, “On Formalism and Pictorial Organization.” 101. Listowel, Critical History of Modern Aesthetics, 273. 102. Listowel, review of Roger Fry and Other Essays, by Howard Hannay, 349–50.

Chapter 3 1. This account is quoted in De Bolla, Education of the Eye, 45–46. 2. Here I follow Nehamas, “Plato and the Mass Media.” For such issues in modernity more specifically, see Nehamas’s foreword to Renaut, Era of the Individual, especially xvii. 3. “Opacity” and “transparency” have become standard terms in critical writing on modernism (for an explication in terms of modernism and Greenburg’s writing, as well as notions of “active” and “passive,” see Shiff, “Constructing Physicality,” 42). Philippe Junod has undertaken an archaeology of the terms in Transparence et Opacité. 4. Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kitsch”; Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” 147. See more generally Kulka, Kitsch and Art, and Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 223–62. 5. For a powerful analysis and critique of the traditional view of the “spectator” as both ignorant and passive, “separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act” (p. 2), see Rancière, Emancipated Spectator. 6. For Fry’s early comments on the distancing effect of the “cinematograph”—that it strips away the need for “resultant action” found in “actual life” and thus allows us to “see the event much more clearly”—see “Essay in Aesthetics,” 12–13.

Notes to Pages 64–75

167

I discuss his later comments in this paragraph. On Fry and other Bloomsbury writers on film, see Marcus, Tenth Muse. 7. All quotations in the following two paragraphs are from Fry, Characteristics of French Art, 35. 8. Arguably the most brutal portrait of “elite” modernist reaction to such “mass” conditions has been given in Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses. Picking up on threads in Le­Mahieu, Culture for Democracy, Saler has argued that an arts and crafts-influenced portion of contemporary thinkers and design activists were, despite their cultural paternalism, committed to a more populist project of breaking down divisions between fine art, craft, and industrial art, while placing value on the arts and crafts principles of pleasure in creation and fitness for purpose (Avant-Garde in Interwar England). 9. Amongst the mass of literature on this subject, a particularly useful recent account of the relationship between artistic modernism and “commodity culture,” including an extremely valuable chapter on Herbert Read, is Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes. 10. Ensor, England, 1870–1914, 535 (Ensor was referring to the 1910s but clearly saw the moment as a stage in a ongoing process); see also LeMahieu, Culture for Democracy, 107–21. On the growing political fear of the “crowd,” and skepticism over the very possibility of mass democracy in the early twentieth century, see also Bellamy, “Advent of the Masses,” 70–103. 11. See Collini, “Where Did It All Go Wrong?” 12. Eliot, “Metaphysical Poets,” 281–91. The claim was first made in a 1921 review and reprinted in books of 1924 and 1932. See Collini, “Where Did It All Go Wrong?,” 247–49, 260–63. 13. This view is arguably voiced most directly in Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism. See Baldick, Social Mission, 134–61. 14. For the critical revisionist accounts of the moment, see Baldick, Social Mission of English Criticism, and Mulhern, Moment of “Scrutiny.” 15. Collini, “On Highest Authority,” 159 (emphasis added). 16. For example, LeMahieu, Culture for Democracy, 137. Richards and Leavis may have been dismissive of what they saw as the escapism or aestheticism of Bloomsbury, but the rare mentions of Fry in Scrutiny were surprisingly kind. The most direct commentary on Fry’s writing by a Scrutiny editor in the 1930s was not at all hostile, although it hardly took Fry’s work very seriously: Culver, “Reading About Art,” 90. In the following decade, an essay by Fry on the evolution of the visual arts was even described by Boris Ford as an unsurpassable model of an internal literary critical history —another “uncharacteristic endorsement of a Bloomsbury product in Scrutiny,” as Hilliard has noted (English as a Vocation, 203–4).

168

Notes to Pages 75–83

17. For an extended case, see Stanley Casson and Christopher Cox, “Why Should I Bother About Art? A Discussion Between Stanley Casson and a Philistine,” Listener, April 13, 1932. 18. Coxon, Art, 40. 19. Herbert Read, “The Modern Æsthete,” Listener, March 28, 1934, 527. 20. Respectively, letter from Anthony Bertram to Guy Burgess, January 12, 1937, RCONT1/​Anthony Bertram Talks File, BBC Written Archive Centre, Reading; Bertram, “Art of Picasso,” 106. 21. Letter from Stanley Casson to the BBC Talks Department, March 20, 1934, RCONT1/​Stanley Casson Talks File, BBC Written Archive Centre, Reading. 22. British Institute for Art Education, Art for the People, 31. 23. Gordon, “Art for the People,” 10. 24. Ibid., 4. 25. British Institute for Art Education, Art for the People, 31. 26. Ibid., 23. 27. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 102. 28. Collini, Absent Minds, 343. 29. Ibid. 30. Herbert Read, “What Is Art,” Listener, May 18, 1938, xiv. 31. Read, Politics of the Unpolitical, 101. 32. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress, 448. 33. Ibid., 470–71. 34. Clutton-Brock, William Morris, 231–32. 35. Willis, review of Civilising Caliban, by Borzello, 169. 36. Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” 12. 37. Ibid., 31. 38. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 364. 39. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, 20–21. This is not to say that there was not also a contemporary awareness that the extreme “decadence” of the 1890s against which many rebelled was itself a reaction to earlier forms of aestheticism; see, for example, “. . . Modernisms Old and New,” Times Literary Supplement, May 1, 1937, 333. 40. Murray, “Aims and Ideals,” 36; see also Helmreich, “Death of the Victorian Art Periodical,” 249. 41. Clark, introduction in Renaissance, 1961, by Pater, 12. 42. Ibid., 21–22; Pater, “School of Giorgione.” 43. For accounts of earlier influence, see Britain, Fabianism and Culture, and Stansky, Redesigning the World. 44. Clutton-Brock, William Morris, 7. 45. Ibid., 8–18. 46. Though a minority did continue to support practical creation, with Collingwood in the 1920s notably holding on to this aspect of Morris’s thought. Writing on art and education, he suggested that any successful aesthetic education towards an art “for the people” would have to be active and creative rather than passive and contemplative, and for

this reason it would ultimately necessitate some revival of actual arts and crafts practice (Collingwood, “Place of Art in Education,” 440–41). He elsewhere elaborated that reading books or studying art history risked a kind of “reexpressing” of the artistic activity of those in the past that hindered the expression of one’s own (Collingwood, “Æsthetic,” 207–11). Mere reexpression of the past risked “putting our imagination to school” and restraining it rather than “indulging it in the free play of its powers” (ibid.). 47. Nunn, “New Education Fellowship,” 34–35. 48. For Ruskin as a forerunner of Croce, Bergson, and others, see Read, Annals of Innocence, 185–91, which includes the claim that “it is Ruskin’s theory of expression, his theory of art as language, that comes nearer to Croce’s aesthetic than any preceding treatment of the subject” (p. 189). See also Finberg, Modern Painters. 49. Arnold, “Function of Criticism,” 260, 285. 50. Read, Politics of the Unpolitical, 121. 51. Of all the formalist critics in Britain, Wilenksi was the only one to directly and fully dispute that successful viewing involved precise re-creation (notably reacting against what he took to be this view in John Dewey’s Art as Experience), but his alternative theory that viewing necessitated an understanding of the artist’s intention and an according reaction by the viewer remained a very close parallel. See Wilenski, “Art as Experience,” and Eric Newton and R. H. Wilenski, “The Modern Critic Explains His Creed,” Listener, March 13, 1935. 52. Dewey, Art as Experience, 15, as notably quoted by Read, “Art and Design NUT Conference,” undated typescript, reference no. 31.16, Sir Herbert Edward Read Fonds, MacPherson Library, University of Victoria. 53. Dewey and Barnes, Art and Education, 12. 54. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 22–23. See, for example, Hannay, Roger Fry, 163. 55. See, for example, the accounts in Saler, Avant-Garde in Interwar England; Buckley, Designing Modern Britain; and Cohen, Household Gods. I discuss this point further in the following chapter. 56. Nunn, Education, 192–93 n. 1. 57. Constable, in a talk given at the “New Ideals in Education” conference at Oxford, presided over by Michael Sadler and reported in Thomas Percy Nunn, “Aim of Modern Education,” Times, April 19, 1933, 7. 58. Ibid. 59. On Fry and the Burlington, see the February 2, 1919 letter from Fry to Constable, who at that point was just starting out as an art writer (Letters of Roger Fry, 2:443–44), and Constable’s later elaboration of his practice in his book Art History and Connoisseurship. On empathy, see Constable, “Art and Adult Education,” 10. Listowel is referenced in

Constable, Art History and Connoisseurship, 32. An advertisement in the Burlington Magazine also shows that Listowel gave public lectures at the Courtauld in the mid-1930s on “Æsthetics and Art History,” while Constable was still director there (Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 65 [October 1934], xv). 60. Two examples here will have to suffice. At the end of Herbert Read’s “Meaning of Art: An Introduction for the Plain Man” pamphlet for the Listener (2, supplement no. 1, September 25, 1929), he gave as recommended reading works by (in order, with some cited commentary): Benedetto Croce, Clive Bell, Georges Hardy, Josef Strygowski, Wilhelm Worringer, R. H. Wilenski, Charles Marriott, Heinrich Wölfflin, C. J. Holmes, Roger Fry (“the most suggestive critic of art now writing in England”), George Santayana (“the most adequate theory of æsthetics in English”), Margaret Bulley (“an excellent book to make a beginning with”), W. R. Lethaby, Bernard Berenson, Geoffrey Scott, E. Cartilhac and H. Breuil, Helen Tongue, Wassily Kandinsky, and Charles Mauron. At the end of Burt’s “Psychology of Art” article (Listener, January 25, 1933), he gave as recommended reading works by (in order): C. W. Valentine, E. F. Carritt, Roger Fry, Margaret Bulley, Clive Bell, Herbert Read, Charles Spearman, Arthur Clutton-Brock (Ultimate Belief), C. J. Holmes, and Cyril Pearce (p. 140). 61. As well as the Bulley works mentioned in chapter 2, classic examples include Stanley Casson, “On Using Our Eyes,” Listener, October 28, 1931; Barton, Purpose and Admiration (based on a series of BBC talks, partly republished in the Listener); Newton, Artist and His Public; Constable, “Art and Adult Education”; Bertram, What Is a Painting?; and Herbert Read, “The Language of the Eye,” as printed in the pamphlet An Exhibition of British Painting Since 1900, Bridgend, May 30–June 22, 1940 (London, 1940). 62. Baxandall’s comment on Leavis and Fry is recorded in Langdale, “Interviews with Michael Baxandall,” 21. Richards’s idea of the direct transmission of experience from artist to receiver has already been mentioned, but it is also worth noting Leavis’s famous definition of analysis as “a process of re-creation in response to the black marks on the pages,” or his more detailed comment that “analysis is not a dissection of something that is already and passively there. What we call analysis is, of course, a constructive or creative process. It is a more deliberate following-through of that process of creation in response to the poet’s words which reading is. It is a re-creation in which, by a considering attentiveness, we ensure a more than ordinary faithfulness and completeness” (Education and the University, 70). Baxandall noted this aspect of Leavis in the manuscript document “Leavis on Critical Theory,” Cambridge University Library Add. Mss 9843/​7/​2/​5/​1, reprinted in Lubbock’s

Notes to Pages 83–85

169

“To Do a Leavis on Visual Art,” 38: “Analysis. ‘Practical criticism’ is not a part but an illustration of criticism. In analysis we are not dealing with an inert object. Analysis is a process of re-creation. Involving discipline in relevance.” On re-creation and reenactment, see also Davis, “Art History, Re-enactment, and the Idiographic Stance.” 63. Read, Politics of the Unpolitical, 146 (emphasis in original). Fry distinguished art used for “diversion” and for “prestige” from art proper in “Art in a Socialism,” 37–38. The citations in this paragraph are from Read’s book. 64. Wollheim’s pamphlet received immediate criticism and should not be taken as representative of leftist thought in Britain at the time, though it is striking that E. P. Thompson’s attack was gauged in precisely the terms of activity and passivity that are at the heart of Wollheim’s argument in my reading: Wollhiem’s “facile vision of the eclectic consumer in an ‘affluent’ culture evades the point at which the real discussion starts—that a culture is lived and not passively consumed” (Thompson, “Long Revolution,” 208). On the context of the disagreement, see Hutton, “Moment of Culture and Society.” 65. For the former, see Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses; for the latter, see Saler, “Waste Lands and Silly Valleys.” 66. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, especially 141–46. 67. Shusterman, “Entertainment”; Fisher, “High Art Versus Low Art.” 68. For a succinct expression of this topic, see Dutton’s comments on Joseph Carroll and Stephen Pinker in “Pleasures of Fiction.” 69. For the latter, see Rancière, Aisthesis. Fried has discussed Fry as an antitheatrical critic like himself, an analysis extended by Richard Moran in an essay that brilliantly brings out one complexity of active and passive aspects of contemplation in formalism, given that for Fry and Fried alike art must at once display artistic purposiveness and yet not manipulate its audience through an overly manifest or “theatrical” appeal that would risk controlling (and in my terms rendering merely passive) that audience (Fried, Roger Fry’s Formalism; Moran, “Formalism and the Appearance of Nature,” 117–28). For attempts to link Clark and Fried, and Fried and Rancière, respectively, see Pippin, After the Beautiful, 63–95, and Peden, “Grace and Equality,” 189–205. 70. Harrison, “On the Surface of Painting,” 305; this position goes as far back as Harrison, “Roger Fry in Retrospect,” 220–21. 71. Harrison, 296. 72. Ibid., 269. Harrison throughout relied on the accounts of depiction and intention in Wollheim’s Painting as an Art. 73. Harrison, Since 1950, 217. 74. Harrison, “On the Surface of Painting,” 269. 75. Ibid., 312.

170

Notes to Pages 85–91

76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 320. 78. For condensed and expanded versions of this reading, see Harrison, “Modernism”; Harrison, Modernism, 62–67; and Harrison, Painting the Difference. 79. Mandler and Pedersen, After the Victorians, introduction; and Jackson and Stears, Liberalism as Ideology. The classic work on political liberalism in the period remains Freeden, Liberalism Divided. 80. Laski, Decline of Liberalism, 3; Collini, Public Moralists, 338. 81. Mandler and Pedersen, After the Victorians, 1–5. 82. See Lawrence and Mayer, Regenerating England, 4, and the article “Education of the People; The National Culture,” Times, September 15, 1923. 83. The ethical socialism of a swathe of “medieval modernists” looking back to the arts and crafts movement has been discussed in Saler, Avant-Garde in Interwar England. A more sober assessment is given in Harrod, Crafts in Britain, 16–28, 153–76. 84. Laski, Decline of Liberalism, 11–12. The actual relation of the philosophies of T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, and others such as J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse is controversial, but what is significant here is the assumption of a mutually beneficial relationship between individual and society, as outlined in MacIntyre, Short History of Ethics, 244–48. For the wider impact on subsequent political theory, see Collini, “Hobhouse, Bosanquet, and the State”; Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats; and Freeden, New Liberalism. 85. For the wider context, see Freeden, “Biology, Evolution and Liberal Collectivism.” 86. Nunn, “Aim of Modern Education.” 87. For statements of the value of the “individual” by Read, see Education Through Art, 3, and Philosophy of Anarchism, 12. Similar views of Gill’s are recorded in a letter from Gill to Read, August 27, 1934, Sir Herbert Edward Read Fonds, MacPherson Library, University of Victoria. For Summerson’s application of the same point to contemporary architecture, which was read “in substance” to the Architectural Association in 1941, see “Mischievous Analogy,” 205. On Summerson in this context, see Mandler, “John Summerson.” 88. Wollheim, Socialism and Culture, 48. 89. Read, Annals of Innocence and Experience, 233. 90. Ibid., 234. 91. See Collini, “Hobhouse, Bosanquet, and the State,” especially 104–11. 92. Fry proclaimed that “I’m an individualist anarchist” in a letter to Helen Anrep, September 16, 1925, reference no. 2006 11 ANREP/​FRY, Tate Gallery Archive, London. Bulley recorded her early friendship and agreement with Kro-

potkin in a letter to Read, September 14, 1950, Sir Herbert Edward Read Fonds, MacPherson Library, University of Victoria. Stokes expressed “fervent agreement” with anarchism in an undated letter to Herbert Read (ca. 1944), Sir Herbert Edward Read Fonds, MacPherson Library, University of Victoria. On Bloomsbury and anarchism, see also Brockington, Above the Battlefield, 44–48; and for distinctions between anarchism and mere “individualism,” see Antliff, “Anarchism and Art History.” Reed discusses Bloomsbury and individualism in Bloomsbury Rooms, 10–17. 93. Donald, Sentimental Education, 72–73; see Donald also for a Foucauldian critique of the general educative endeavor as promoting a kind of “freedom” in fact determined by scientific technologies of state surveillance and control (or “bio-power”). 94. See Gagnier, “Critique of Practical Aesthetics,” 264–65; Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic. In this vein, a more optimistic view of Foucault’s late views on aestheticist selfcreation and its possibilities can be found in Nehamas, “Fate for Socrates’ Reason.” 95. Wollheim, Socialism and Culture, 48. 96. Ibid. 97. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 298. 98. Buermeyer, “Aesthetics of Roger Fry,” 285 and 287, respectively. On Bell and a similar distinction between “pattern and plastic form,” see Buermeyer, in Dewey, Art and Education, 92–102. 99. Ibid., 279–80. For the Barnes context, see Bahr, “Naturalistic Aesthetic.” 100. See the comment on “housemaids addicted to sensation fiction,” in Beaumont, introduction to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, by Pater, xx. As Beaumont goes on to note, Pater’s attempt to break away from the kinds of habituated perception brought on by the “mechanization and routinization of urban life” is in fact a clear forerunner of early twentieth century (formalist) ideals (pp. xxvii–xxix). 101. Fry, “Retrospect,” 190. For Reed, Fry’s position here reflects a shift in aims in the wake of disillusionment brought on by the war in particular, from full social reform to the partial opposition of “subculture” (Roger Fry Reader, 167–86). 102. Fry, French, Flemish, and British Art, 188. 103. Ibid., 188–89. 104. See Collini, “On Highest Authority,” 157–60. 105. From the letter sent to Omega shareholders and the press in October 1913 (Lewis, Letters of Wyndham Lewis, 47–50), and Lewis, “Roger Fry’s Rôle,” 3. 106. Geoffrey Grigson, “The Work of Roger Fry,” Bookman (October 1934): 37, Papers of Roger Eliot Fry, reference no. REF/​13/​7, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge. 107. An older example in the British tradition is Peter Fuller’s claim that a return to the thought of Ruskin would

embrace “theoria” or rich and imaginative (moral or symbolically rooted) forms of aesthetic experience, rather than “aesthesis” or the “merely sensuous, retinal pleasure,” supposedly endorsed by “the pure formalist painters” (Fuller, Images of God, 11–12). The position was elaborated in Fuller’s Theoria. Despite his self-assumed distance from Fry, when Fuller enlisted Ruskin and Morris in his advocacy of a “two tier” economy that could embrace industrial production for everyday use on the one hand, while still retaining a place for the unique imaginative and spiritual merits of the handmade on the other, he came extremely close to Fry’s thought on the matter (as I outline it in the next chapter). 108. Clark, Sight of Death, 122. See further Clark, “Art History,” 1–30. 109. Clark, Sight of Death, 122–23. 110. Ibid., 122. In this regard it is interesting to see Clark noting his formation as “a young Leavisite and Empsonian,” and applauding the efforts of those whom Leavis taught and who took his methods and values into schools such as the one Clark attended (“Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage,” 225, and “Thank God for the Leavisites,” 4). 111. Clark, Sight of Death, 122. 112. On aspects of the conflict of aestheticism and modernism in the visual arts, see also Prettejohn, “From Aestheticism to Modernism”; Prettejohn, Beauty and Art; Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake, 193–94, 274–75, 279–81; Corbett, World in Paint, 1–36, 226–27, 240–41; and Laity, “Editor’s Introduction.” 113. Clark himself provides one of the most extended paeans to this aspect of modernism in general in Farewell to an Idea, as well as one of the strongest explicit appeals to form (at p. 165). For Harrison’s endorsement of this passage, see Harrison, Since 1950, 235 n. 15. On the use of form in Clark’s earlier work, see Summers, “‘Form,’ Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics,” 388–93. 114. Wollheim, preface to Invitation in Art, by Stokes, xxx. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid., xxx–xxxi. 117. Wollheim, Image in Form, 31. 118. Less often discussed in this socio-political vein, see also the account of Stokes in Inglis, Radical Earnestness, 123–32. For a summary of Wollheim’s writing on projection (on the coloring of the inner world by the outer and vice versa), see Budd, “Wollheim on Correspondence.” The central texts of Wollheim’s in this regard are Thread of Life and Painting as an Art. 119. Wollheim, preface to Invitation in Art, by Stokes, xxxi. 120. Letter from Stokes to Read, n.d. (possibly discussing Inside Out of 1947), Sir Herbert Edward Read Fonds, MacPherson Library, University of Victoria. The ideas expressed here are heavily informed by Stokes’s engage-

Notes to Pages 92–96

171

ment with psychoanalysis, but the incorporation of psychoanalytic thought is relatively informal, meaning that the general point about the aesthete could be accepted without necessitating acceptance of psychoanalysis as such (instead implying the sort of partial and nonspecific acceptance I discussed in chapter 3). On Stokes’s quite generalized and “non-technical” use of psychoanalytic concepts, especially substitution, at this point, see Paul Tucker, “‘A Summing Up of All I Have Ever Thought’: Adrian Stokes’ ‘In Short’ and Other Writings of This Period,” Tate Papers, November 19, 2013, http: //​www.tate.org.uk/​research/​publications/​tate-papers/​summing-all-i-have-ever-thoughtadrian-stokess-short-1942-and-his. On Inside Out and its partner Smooth and Rough of 1951 in their particular postwar context, see Read, “Vico, Virginia Woolf, and Adrian Stokes’s Autobiographies.” 121. McGann, “Formalism, Savagery, and Care,” 606. McGann describes the “savagery” of Ruskin’s subjective criticism as picked up and developed by Harold Bloom, an imaginative stance in opposition to “objective” formalism. McGann’s view of formalism is an extreme one derived from New Criticism, but as I suggest here, the point is that formalism understood in the communicative manner of the writers I discuss, in fact, partook of both sides of this supposed split. 122. Ibid., 605. 123. Wollheim, preface to Invitation in Art, by Stokes, xxxi. 124. Wollheim, Socialism and Culture, especially 13–14, 18–21, 24–28. 125. Wollheim, Image in Form, 31.

Chapter 4 1. Scruton, “Photography and Representation,” 577–603. 2. Focillon, Life of Forms in Art, 174. 3. All quotations in this paragraph from Fry, “Mrs. Cameron’s Photographs,” 28. 4. The politics, origins, and afterlife of the Omega Workshops scheme have received the most thorough discussion in Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms; see also Collins, Omega Workshops; Gerstein, Beyond Bloomsbury. 5. All quotations in this paragraph are from Fry, “Prospectus for the Omega Workshops (1913),” 198–99. 6. Stair, “Employment of Matter,” 27–33. 7. A particularly explicit contemporary example of Read’s defense of high (elite) art over low (popular) art was made in his Art and Society, 70–73. As Walter L. Adamson, who quotes from these pages, notes, in the early 1940s Read momentarily endorsed the abandonment of the categories of elite and popular art, only to reinstate the distinction in the relative disillusionment of the subsequent years (Embattled Avant-Gardes, 325–40).

172

Notes to Pages 96–103

8. Herbert Read, “Books of the Day: Roger Fry,” Spectator, August 2, 1940, 124. 9. This, at least, is the view taken in standard accounts of the arts and crafts movement such as Naylor, Arts and Crafts Movement. 10. Fry, Art and Commerce, 56; see also Shiff, “From Primitivist Phylogeny,” 185. 11. This was a contentious point, as Morris did come to allow some partial role for the machine later in life. Pevsner argues that this was still highly inadequate given the conditions of modern production (Pioneers of Modern Design, 24–27). On its legacy, see also Harrod, “Paradise Postponed,” 6–32. 12. In particular, C. R. Ashbee and Arthur Clutton-Brock, as Fry’s collected letters indicate. The early interest is described in Spalding, Roger Fry, 19–23. 13. See Tillyard, Impact of Modernism, especially 47–80. 14. Sadler, “Roger Fry,” 16–17. For Fry’s praise of the educative and civilizing work of Sadler, see Sadleir, Michael Ernest Sadler, 332. 15. Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms, 13. 16. The obituary notices are collected in “Cuttings Relating to Fry” in the Papers of Roger Eliot Fry, reference no. REF/​13/​7, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge. For Woolf’s defense of Fry’s popularizing activity as of political significance, see, for example, Letters of Virginia Woolf, 414. For the obituary written by Blunt, see his “Professor Roger Fry,” Cambridge Review, October 19, 1934, 26. 17. In shifting the criteria for a politics of aesthetics from a total overhaul of the political order to subtler forms of opposition to societal norms, these critiques have been most thoroughly countered in Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms. 18. See Harrod, Crafts in Britain, 9, 20. 19. See P. G. Konody’s comments as quoted in Collins, Omega Workshops, 63, and Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design, 19, 23. 20. Stair, “Employment of Matter,” especially 29–33; Harrod, Crafts in Britain, 25–26. 21. This point is taken up in detail in Shiff, “From Primitivist Phylogeny.” For the context of contemporary British design, see Buckley, Designing Modern Britain, 63–65. 22. The new theorization and acceptance is charted in Stair, “Critical Writing,” 28–166. 23. For a detailed examination of shifting conditions of display, see Stephenson, “Strategies of Display.” Murray’s exhibition history is instructive, with his contributions to the Red Rose Guild and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society exhibitions perfunctory in comparison to those linked to fine art: he showed his work alongside paintings by Cedric Morris in 1924; shared an exhibition with Christopher Wood and Ben Nicholson at Beaux Arts Gallery in

1927, and with Ben and Winifred Nicholson at the Lefèvre Galleries; was given one-man shows at Paterson’s Gallery, usually associated with Old Master painting between 1924 and 1929 and then switched to Lefèvre, associated with European avant-garde work, in 1930; participated in every Seven and Five exhibition between 1928 and 1935; showed at the Bloomsbury Gallery with sculpture by Hepworth and paintings by Nicholson in 1931; and often charged painting-like prices, including 160 guineas for a pot in the early 1930s. See Haslam, “William Staite Murray,” 50–53. 24. See Beard, “Pottery as Precedent”; Ford, “Plastic Art in Its Most Abstract Essence”; Stephens, “Ben Nicholson”; and Stephenson, “Telling Decoratively.” 25. The classic formulation is Fry, “Essay in Aesthetics,” 19–20. For a 1920s reiteration (applied to architecture), see Fry, Architectural Heresies of a Painter, especially 218–20; for a 1930s reiteration, see Fry, “Sensibility Versus Mechanism,” Listener, April 6, 1932. 26. Shiff’s highly detailed account is notable in finding no evidence at all of Fry leaning towards an acceptance of the machine (“From Primitivist Phylogeny”). 27. Fry, “Sensibility Versus Mechanism,” 22–23. Davis has discussed this passage, as well as pointing out that Fry would have used Einstein’s Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts for the Klee (General Theory of Visual Culture, 61–63). 28. Fry, “Sensibility Versus Mechanism,” 23–24. 29. Ibid., 57–58. 30. As I discuss below, this view was echoed by a number of the more overtly modernist design reformers in the 1930s, as well as by Lethaby in the 1910s (“Art and Workmanship”). 31. Fry, “Memorandum by Mr. Roger Fry,” 44–49. 32. All quotations in this paragraph from Read, Art and Industry, 174. 33. Nash, “Artist and Industry,” 82. 34. Nash, “For, But Not With,” 112. As Anthony Bertram later noted, the championing of design work in the early 1930s was in large part a momentary, quickly abandoned, development; Bertram, Paul Nash, 185 n. 1. 35. Nash, “For, But Not With,” 112. 36. Ibid. 37. See generally Saler, Avant-Garde in Interwar England. 38. Saler, “Earthly Paradise.” 39. This shift is charted in Saler, “Morris, the Machine, and Modernism.” 40. See Suga, “Purgatory of Taste.” 41. See Holt, “Call of Commerce.” 42. Rutter, “Triumph of Design.” 43. There is no standard general survey of visual culture in 1920s Britain, but see Corbett, “Modernity and Revisionist Modernism”; LeMahieu, Culture for Democracy, 154–70, 198– 99, and 206–9; and Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 25–61.

44. For individual practitioners, see Coatts, Pioneers of Modern Craft. A general outline is given in Harrod, “Paradise Postponed,” 8–18, expanded in great detail in Harrod, Crafts in Britain, 15–208. 45. The debates are covered in Harrod, Crafts in Britain, 25–28, 123–26. 46. Ibid., 123. 47. Despite the sympathies of the principal, William Rothenstein, a government report in 1936 noted that it was the fine art side that had blossomed under his leadership (Board of Education, Report of the Committee [London: H.M.S.O., 1936], 8). The way that the rhetoric of the unity of fine and applied art (pp. 5–6) could nonetheless mask business as usual is indicated by its judgment that there was no need to abolish fine art at the RCA as “the creative designer must be a finished artist and drawing, painting and sculpture are the backbone of an artistic education,” with provision necessary “for the study of Art in both its aspects” (emphasis added) (p. 15). 48. Amidst a generally scathing review, Read himself commented that the 1935 Royal Academy British Art in Industry exhibition “will do far more harm than good unless it is ruthlessly criticised” (“Novelism at the Royal Academy,” undated typescript, reference no. 37.121, Sir Herbert Edward Read Fonds, MacPherson Library, University of Victoria). 49. Nash, “Art and Industry,” 79. 50. The phrase is Mandler’s interpretation of Saler’s argument (“How Modern Is It?,” 280). 51. On this aspect of the Bauhaus and its impact in late 1930s Britain, see especially Anker, “Bauhaus of Nature”; on this aspect of modern sculpture in 1930s Britain, see Juler, Grown But Not Made. For modernism more broadly, see the essays collected in Botar and Wünsche, Biocentrism and Modernism, which includes a useful essay by Antliff (“Biocentrism and Anarchy”) on this aspect of Read’s thought; for perhaps Read’s own two most indicative summaries of his thoughts on the matter, including often overlooked acknowledgement of the only limited extent to which aesthetic value could be anchored in the laws of natural morphology, see Art and Industry, 23–32, and Annals of Innocence, 202–5. 52. Read, “What Is Revolutionary Art?,” and see the essays collected in Gabo, Martin, and Nicholson, Circle. 53. For contrasting views of Read’s book and the positive or negative nature of its impact, see Kinross, “Herbert Read and Design,” and Potter, “Herbert Read.” 54. Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement; Pevsner, Enquiry into Industrial Art, especially 179–80. 55. Naylor, Arts and Crafts Movement, 191. 56. Grigson championed machine production wholeheartedly in “In Search of English Pottery.” Even he struggled

Notes to Pages 103–110

173

to maintain this logic, however, when he in the same year criticized what he took to be the “geometric” art of Piet Mondrian and those like him for being machine-like, sterile, and inhuman (Arts To-Day, 79, 83–85). 57. Lethaby, “Art and Workmanship,” 211. 58. Margaret Bulley, “Æsthetic Value of Functionalism,” Listener, February 1934, 293; Carrington, Design in the Home. In relation to Bulley, see also J. E. Barton, “What Is Taste?,” Listener, October 4, 1933. 59. Carrington, Design in the Home, 9 (a point kept in the later revised edition of the text, Design and Decoration in the Home, 11–12). See also Gloag, Industrial Art Explained, 89–90, with Fry quoted approvingly. 60. Read, Art and Industry, 30–32. Read’s use of multiple binaries—derived in part from Wilhelm Worringer, but with many sources—has so far proved impossible for scholars to entirely reconcile. For the argument that in the 1930s these binaries yield two (lesser and greater) forms of art or beauty more or less on the lines of what I have described above as Fry’s division of merely natural and fully aesthetic beauty, see Goodway, “Herbert Read, Organicism, Abstraction,” as well as the rejection of this argument in Antliff, “David Goodway Critiques Herbert Read.” 61. Read, Art and Industry, 32. 62. Read, “Address to the International Council of Industrial Designers,” typescript of September 14, 1961, pp. 8–9, Sir Herbert Edward Read Fonds, MacPherson Library, University of Victoria. 63. Alan Clutton-Brock, “Art and Criticism, 1918–1939,” Times Literary Supplement, August 10, 1946, 374. 64. J. E. Barton, “Art Begins at Home,” Listener, February 24, 1932. 65. Newton, European Painting and Sculpture, 18. 66. “When I go to the Tate Gallery I always know whether my visit has been fruitful or not. As I leave and look across the river—and no one can say that the view is lovely—I often see it with new eyes and find something that is gladding or harmonious in it, that I have not seen before. Then I realise that the painters have given me something fresh, something vivid.” Pick, “Is ‘Modern’ Art a Sham?,” 74. 67. Anthony Bertram, “Artists Indoors,” Listener, November 1, 1933, 660. 68. Bertram quoted in “Did You Hear That?,” Listener, April 21, 1937, 744. The 1937 broadcast was part of Bertram’s BBC-commissioned design tour of the country, with his talks collected in his book Design published in 1938. 69. Saler, Avant-Garde in Interwar England, 78–84. 70. For the nonconformist religious character of the DIA, tapping into “the Protestant temper of a nation schooled in the virtues of utility and plain common sense,” see Saler,

174

Notes to Pages 110–115

Avant-Garde in Interwar England, 21–23, 76–78. Corbett is not untypical in judging the movement harshly as a result of its commercial aspect (“Modernity and Revisionist Modernism,” 87–88). 71. Holme brings together industrial art, Mussolini, and William Morris in a single Studio article: “Where There Is No Vision.” 72. Lubbock, Tyranny of Taste, 313–25. 73. Respectively, Fry, “Art and Socialism,” 43; Read, Politics of the Unpolitical, 83. 74. For the Independent Group’s proclamation that their attitudes were a direct reaction against Read’s, see Massey, Independent Group, 45. For a direct statement of Read’s doubts about pop art as a truly popular form of art, see Wygant, “Conversation with Sir Herbert Read,” 32–33, and for discussion, see Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes, 335–40. 75. Clutton-Brock, William Morris, 243. 76. Fry, Characteristics of French Art, 68. Gustave Courbet’s La femme au podoscaphe of 1867 is an oil on canvas now in the collection of the Marauchi Art Museum, Tokyo. 77. Day-Lewis, “Writers’ International Controversy,” 35. Day-Lewis was also, admittedly, trying to make the point that this “pure” art conception still lingered on unconsciously. 78. The most positive accounts of the AIA are Morris and Radford, Story of the A.I.A., and Radford, Art for a Purpose. Both books, though, show the organization stuck between a minority position while embracing radical politics (the early to mid-1930s) followed by a long period of popularization and deradicalization. This trend works out as almost the inverse of political shifts in Britain; see Stallabrass, “Conservatism and Class Difference.” The eventual resurgence of Marxist art writing is discussed in Hemingway, “New Left Art History’s International.” 79. Clark, for example, has labeled it “frivolous or flimsy” (“Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” 141). 80. Margolies, Writing the Revolution, 45. 81. Ibid., 45 and 91. 82. For a selection (including a notable contribution by “Bert Brecht”), see ibid., 91–182. 83. A volume of essays was published the year after Caudwell’s 1937 death as Studies in a Dying Culture; for a direct statement on aesthetics, see Caudwell, “Beauty.” A thoughtful discussion of his significance can be found in Thompson, “Christopher Caudwell.” 84. For discussion of contemporary German art writing and artistic realisms, see Schwartz, Blind Spots, and Fore, Realism After Modernism. On Klingender and Blunt as art writers, see Bindman, “Art as Social Consciousness”; Pooke, Francis Klingender; Carter, Anthony Blunt; Green, “Anthony Blunt’s Picasso”; and Carrier, “Anthony Blunt’s Poussin.”

85. Blunt, “From Bloomsbury to Marxism”; Read, introduction to Goya and the Democratic Tradition, by Klingender, ix. 86. Blunt, “Anthony Blunt: Memoir,” 61. 87. For Antal, see Stirton, “Frederick Antal.” For Hauser in Britain, see Steele, “Circles of Modernism.” For Antal’s most visible Marxist art writing in English in the 1930s, see his two essays “Reflections on Classicism and Romanticism” and “Reflections on Classicism and Romanticism—II.” 88. Morris and Radford, Story of the AIA, 23–24. 89. For the fullest statements, see Klingender, “Content and Form in Art”; Klingender, Marxism and Modern Art; and Blunt, “Art Under Capitalism and Socialism.” Also especially relevant are Blunt, “Realism Quarrel”; and Klingender, “Revolutionary Art Criticism.” While Blunt applied Marxist method only to criticism and only in the 1930s, Klingender did go on to make more subtle uses: a book entitled Goya in the Democratic Tradition, finished in 1940, in which he attempted a close study of the ways Goya’s style and its conflicting elements stemmed from social conflict in Goya’s time (what Klingender called his “content”); and a book entitled Animals in Art and Thought (written after his resignation from the Communist Party of Great Britain and published in 1971, six years after his death) that drew on Freud to align shifting artistic style with various historical forms of projection and imagination in human relations with animals. 90. The closest Klingender came to out-and-out praise in the midst of a tactically charitable review of the first AIA exhibition to embrace the Popular Front policy was that “the present phase of abstract art in England is from a social point of view progressive only in its negation of bourgeois content” (Klingender, “Review of Art in the USSR,” Eye 1 [October 17, 1935]: 3, quoted in Pooke, Francis Klingender, 118). 91. See Pooke, Francis Klingender, 116–18, 137–67. 92. Anthony Blunt, “Cross Section of Art in England Today,” Listener, June 16, 1938, 1280. 93. Radford, Art for a Purpose, 22. 94. Ibid., 73–85. 95. Examples of art by actual workers include the Mass Observation Unprofessional Painting exhibition in 1938 and exhibitions of less visible organizations such as working men’s clubs (which are entirely neglected in the literature), including the yearly exhibitions (now almost completely forgotten) of the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Clubs held at the Bethnal Green branch of the Victoria and Albert Museum. 96. For the enormous range, going far beyond what is listed here, see Elliot and Llewellyn, True to Life. 97. Blunt, “Realism Quarrel,” 76. 98. Ibid.

99. Blunt, “Art Under Capitalism and Socialism,” 106 (emphasis in original). 100. Ibid., 107. 101. Ibid., 106–7. 102. On the debate, see Harrison, English Art and Modernism, 313–15, and Radford, Art for a Purpose, 87–92. 103. Radford actually suggests that artists of the time were united in a desire to escape “the fustiness of Bloomsbury aestheticism,” but he has less to say about the involvement of these Bloomsbury artists within the AIA (Art for a Purpose, 85). Duncant Grant, for example, had written the preface for an AIA exhibition on an artist killed in Spain; see the exhibition catalogue, “Drawings of Felicia Browne,” October 1936, Artists International Association Papers, reference no. 7043.3.1, Tate Gallery Archive, London. On the continuation of debates over the proper form of realism after the 1939–45 war, this time with David Sylvester and John Berger taking sides for modernist and social tendencies, see Hyman, Battle for Realism, and Steyn, “Realism Versus Realism.” 104. See Art by the People, and the summary in Lyon, “Experiment in Art Appreciation.” 105. Bertram, “Review of Books,” 360. 106. The first AIA Everyman Prints exhibition was even opened by Kenneth Clark, as the exhibiting activity of the AIA and BIAE increasingly merged. 107. Artists News Sheet, undated (ca. 1940), 6, Artists International Association Papers, reference no. 7043.19.3, Tate Gallery Archive, London. 108. “Art and Democracy,” Times, February 15, 1939, 10. 109. Ibid. 110. “The Use of Art,” Times, February 15, 1939, 13. 111. Klingender, Marxism and Modern Art. Blunt and Klingender did continue to write and lecture for the AIA. See Blunt, foreword to Artists International Association Travelling Exhibition, no. 2, n.d. (1941), Artists International Association Papers, reference no. 7043.3.11, Tate Gallery Archive, London; Klingender, “Our Tradition,” in Exhibition of War Pictures, 1941, Artists International Association Papers, reference no. 7043.3.10, Tate Gallery Archive, London. Read did so as well, as in his article “Sculpture and Pottery,” in AIA and FGLC Exhibition of Sculpture and Drawings, 1941, Artists International Association Papers, reference no. 7043.3.9, Tate Gallery Archive, London. 112. The reading list given by Gordon (Art for the People, 8) actually placed Fry’s Vision and Design first, as well as texts such as Bertram’s What Is a Painting? 113. “Education Through Art,” A.I.A. Bulletin, November 1943, Artists International Association Papers, reference no. 7043.20.30, Tate Gallery Archive, London. 114. Wilenski, Modern French Painters, v. It is telling that Wilenski did not even mention the possibility of engaged

Notes to Pages 115–120

175

communist or left wing realist art. For a similar statement by another popular art historian, with the “Totalitarian” suppression of artistic freedom described as one in which “the whole nature and purpose of art have been misunderstood,” see Newton, European Painting and Sculpture, 18. 115. Elliot and Llewellyn, True to Life, 125. 116. Ibid. 117. F. Whicker, “But Perhaps Mr. Blunt Was Pulling Our Leg?,” Listener, September 1, 1938. 118. See Klingender’s article “Revolutionary Art Criticism,” and the response by Ralph Fox labeling him “Colonel BlimpKlingender” and suggesting that it would be best “to deprive him of pen and ink for the rest of his life,” in Margolies, Writing, 124–31. 119. Stallabrass, “High Art Lite,” 82. 120. Ibid. For a more recent take, see Stallabrass, “Elite Art.” The key reference point here is Theodor Adorno’s description to Walter Benjamin of high and low as “torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.” (Adorno to Walter Benjamin, London, March 18, 1936, in Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics, 123). 121. Day-Lewis, Mind in Chains, 14. 122. Writers’ International position statement from the foundation conference, February 1934 (as published in the first issue of Left Review), quoted in Margolies, Writing the Revolution, 23. 123. Brown, “Writers’ International Controversy,” 28. 124. Holtby, “What We Read,” 96. 125. These shades were especially clear for Eagleton and many others since who have recognized Scrutiny efforts, like the 1933 volume by Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness, as part of the origins of the later quasi-Marxist discipline of cultural studies. The point is noted in Eagleton, Literary Theory, 29–30, and developed in detail in Steele, Emergence of Cultural Studies. 126. Leavis, “Under Which King, Bezonian?,” 172. 127. Garman, “Writers’ International Controversy,” 40. 128. MacDiarmid, “Writers’ International Controversy,” 43. 129. Day-Lewis, “Revolutionaries and Poetry,” 58. 130. Steele, Emergence of Cultural Studies, 72–97, especially 75–80. 131. It is notable that Greenberg, whose “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” is now one of the best-known contemporary examples of the Marxist critique of mass culture, was also a reader of Scrutiny at the time (Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” 148 n. 5). For a discussion of this history in relation to the Scrutiny legacy, see Hilliard, “Adult Education and ‘Left-Leavisism.’” 132. Wollheim, Socialism and Culture, especially 20. 133. Hoggart, Uses of Literacy, 155; Williams, Long Revolution, 336. See als, Collini, “Richard Hoggart.”

176

Notes to Pages 120–129

134. Some would see such a strategy as at the heart of the project of visual culture studies, though divorced from an overt Marxism; see Moxey, “Nostalgia for the Real.” For other formulations of the critique, see Woodmansee, “Uses of Kant in England,” and Smith, Contingencies of Value. A very different idea of a Marxist “philistinism” is explored in Beech and Roberts, Philistine Controversy. 135. Gascoyne, David Gascoyne, 29. 136. Klingender, Marxism and Modern Art, 49. 137. Ibid. 138. Ibid. 139. Far from an anti-aestheticist break with his contemporaries, in other words, Klingender’s view that “a work of art which lulls the creative faculties, which drugs and deflects men from the struggle of life, is unconditionally bad” was an area of extremely broad consensus in the contemporary art world (ibid., 48). 140. Amongst the many contemporary political justifications for the project by Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Mondrian, and others, the highly active and influential Marxist scientist J. D. Bernal was particularly forthright in denouncing socialist realism as a naïve and backwards-looking form of revolutionary art; see Gabo, Martin, and Nicholson, Circle, 123. 141. Letter from John Berger to Herbert Read, written on the dust jacket of Read’s Grass Roots of Art, n.d., Sir Herbert Edward Read Fonds, MacPherson Library, University of Victoria. 142. Letter from Herbert Read to John Berger, July 31, 1955, Sir Herbert Edward Read Fonds, MacPherson Library, University of Victoria. 143. Letter from John Berger to Herbert Read, August 9, 1955, Sir Herbert Edward Read Fonds, MacPherson Library, University of Victoria. 144. Letter from Herbert Read to John Berger, December 24, 1961, Sir Herbert Edward Read Fonds, MacPherson Library, University of Victoria. 145. Ibid. 146. “Deposition by REF in the case of Andree Hahn vs. Joseph Duveen,” September 18, 1923, Papers of Roger Eliot Fry, reference no. REF/​7/​8, 52, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge.

Chapter 5 1. This is even the case for Read himself in “Farewell to Formalism.” 2. “Originality” has famously been described as one of the founding myths of modernism: the fiction of “self as origin” allows avant-garde artists to imagine that their art has broken free from the “tradition-laden past,” even as originality itself

only comes into focus against “a ground of repetition and recurrence” (Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, 157–62). In this chapter I follow Pippin and Cavell in shifting the discussion to authenticity, understood in the sense of a person who is “false, not genuine, inauthentic” (Pippin, “Authenticity in Painting,” 575). Authentic art might then be akin to the deeds and practices in which (in a nonalienated sense) one can recognize one’s own agency. Authentic creation must make use of past example without alienating the artist from their deeds (or without making them merely “responsive to the anticipated reactions and demands of others”) (ibid., 591). Reception meanwhile must use an unstable combination of reconstructed history and personal experience in order to separate the authentic from the inauthentic. I chart the antiessentialist consequences below, but for Krauss’s engagement with similar issues (including with the work of Cavell), see her book Under Blue Cup. 3. I develop the term “real primitivism” from Smith, “Real Primitives.” The major reference point for discussions of the temporalities of modernities and modernisms is Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. For succinct discussions of this problem in relation to visual modernisms, see Hassan, “African Modernism,” and Moxey, Visual Time, 11–22. 4. Read in Archer, Melville, and Read, 40,000 Years of Modern Art, 6. 5. Ibid. 6. All quotations in this paragraph are from Read, preface to Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century, by Sullivan, 6–7. 7. For other accounts of primitivism and the “imbalance,” see, for example, Wood, Western Art and the Wider World, and Lemke, Primitivist Modernism. 8. Bell, typically, phrased it most directly: “[A] good PostImpressionist picture is good for precisely the same reasons that any other picture is good. The essential quality in art is permanent. . . . Like all sound revolutions, Post-Impressionism is nothing more than a return to first principles” (Art, 41, 43–44). 9. Fry’s opposition of perceptual and conceptual is brilliantly analyzed in Shiff, “From Primitivist Phylogeny.” See also Green, Art Made Modern, 119–32, and Teukolsky, Literate Eye, 192–219. 10. Fry and MacCarthy, “Post-Impressionists,” 84. 11. On formalism and Victorian anthropology, see Teukolsky, Literate Eye, 192–219. 12. Fry, “Bushman Paintings,” 334. 13. Respectively, Read, Education Through Art, 70, 5. 14. Nunn, Education; Burt, Mental and Scholastic Tests. For more on psychology at this moment, see Thompson, Psychological Subjects, and Rose, Psychological Complex. 15. See, in this context, Nunn, “New Education Fellowship.”

16. Fry, “Children’s Drawings,” 225–27, 231. Fry’s 1920 essay “Negro Sculpture” has occasionally been described as novel in its praise for African or so-called tribal art, which was almost entirely absent from the Burlington Magazine before that date (see Rhodes, “Burlington Primitive”). 17. This is a history charted in detail in relation to design by Harrod in multiple works (“Breath of Reality”; Crafts in Britain, 185–92; “Sincerely Themselves”; and Last Sane Man). Other major sources are listed in notes below. 18. Nunn, “New Education Fellowship”; Nunn, “Educational Institute for Empire”; and Mayhew, review of Education, by Nunn, 98. The overall project, the journal Oversea Education (from which many of these sources are drawn), is discussed in Whitehead, “Oversea Education.” 19. See “University of London Institute of Education.” The activities were documented from 1931 in the yearly studies and reports of the University of London Institute of Education. 20. See Carline, Draw They Must, 177–78. 21. The committee formation and tone of the report was itself prompted by the severely negative reports of two commissions, which were sent by the American Phelps-Stokes Fund to tour West Africa in 1920–21 and East and Central Africa in 1924; see Steele and Titmus, Adult Education for Independence, 15. 22. Ibid., 16. See also Clifford, “Others.” 23. See Pederson, “Modernity and Trusteeship,” 211–14. 24. Jowitt, Suggested Methods for the African School. As the book noted, Jowitt was director of native development for Southern Rhodesia and author of The Principles of Education for African Teachers in Training. A reviewer of the book called Jowitt, previously involved with school inspection, “an Inspector after Matthew Arnold’s own heart” (A. V. M., review of Suggested Methods for the African School, by Jowitt, 428). 25. Nunn, in Jowitt, Suggested Methods for the African School, v. 26. Ibid., 3–5. 27. Ibid., 206–7. 28. Ibid., 207–10. As Carline, an active participant in the movement as well as an AIA member and advocate for design reform, explained, “With the growing recognition in artteaching circles in Great Britain that children could express themselves far better in their own fashion than by trying to imitate the work of adults, it soon emerged that this must apply even more forcibly overseas, where the type of art being imitated was an alien one” (Draw They Must, 175). 29. Jowitt, Suggested Methods for the African School, 206–8, 210–12, and 254–68. 30. Sadler, Arts of West Africa, 10. See also Harrod, “Sincerely Themselves,” 137. The almost unanimous endorsement of Art of West Africa’s goals (of “saving” or even

Notes to Pages 129–135

177

re-creating “native” art) in reviews in Britain was telling. (See, for example, the reviews by Thomas, Cox, and Drew.) Read, reviewing a contemporary exhibition though not commenting on the book, was similarly approving of the “advance” in appreciation of primitive art (“Art of Primitive Peoples”). 31. Carline, Draw They Must, 180–81. 32. The most thorough accounts of Onabolu’s career and politics are Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, 39–69, and Gbadegesin, “Picturing the Modern Self,” 152–91. 33. Onabolu, Short Discourse on Art, 4–6. 34. Ibid., 5–6, 12–14. 35. Okeke-Agulu has particularly stressed that Onabolu’s rejection of tradition in its own context carried the same “radical charge” as formal experiments of a different kind by European modernists (Postcolonial Modernism, 47). 36. Oloidi, “Art and Nationalism in Colonial Nigeria,” 192; Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu, 36–84; and Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, 52–64. 37. See his discussion of the subject in Oguibe, Culture Game. 38. Oguibe, Culture Game, 50–55; Oloidi, “Art and Nationalism in Colonial Nigeria,” 193; Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, 39–69. 39. Onabolu’s appeal to a naturalism was, in a sense, grounded in a universal human nature, for the fact that his pictures had been painted “without the aid of an art master” demonstrated “that God is impartial in his endowments of various talents to mankind” (“Short Discourse on Art,” 1). An alternative appeal to naturalism as universal is seen below in the case of the Bombay school in India. 40. Though perhaps telling, these notions were fully standardized only in child education and in the “art for the people” schemes aimed at bringing art to the working class. See Tomlinson, Picture Making by Children, and Johnstone, Creative Art in England; for the aspiration to shift the means to adult education, see Johnstone, Child Art to Man Art. 41. Oguibe, Culture Game, 55–58. 42. Ibid. 43. The note is on the reverse of Gaganendranath Tagore, Untitled (Calcutta), ca. 1920–25, watercolor on card, IS. 1261984, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 44. Mitter, “Decentering Modernism”; Mitter, Triumph of Modernism, 16–26. 45. This emerges most clearly in Mitter’s writing on Rabin­dranath Tagore that does quite directly reverse the content of the judgment rather than the actual governing terms in claiming, “Tagore’s affinity with the European avant-garde was not a form of emulation but simply a parallel approach to artistic primitivism,” and that “as with the European avant-garde, Tagore’s primitivism sprang from an inner psychological need” (Indian Art, 93–94).

178

Notes to Pages 135–142

46. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 225, 256. 47. The first group of key works and authors identified by Mitter include Fergusson, History of Eastern and Indian Architecture (1876); Birdwood, Industrial Arts of India (1880); and Cole, Catalogue of the Objects of Indian Art (1874), which, according to Mitter, contained “the very first history of Indian art” (Much Maligned Monsters, 256). 48. On the early years of the India Society and its context in England, see Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 307–14; Turner, “Crafting Connections”; and Turner, “Essential Quality of Things.” 49. See Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 256, 270–86; King, Views of Difference, 73–74; and Harrod, Crafts in Britain, 176–79. 50. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 270–86. 51. For Havell’s desire to get back to artists’ intentions, see ibid., 271–77. 52. Havell, quoted in ibid., 272. 53. Havell, Ideals of Indian Art, xviii. 54. Coomaraswamy, Art and Swadeshi, 57. 55. Ibid. 56. For Abinandranath Tagore and the “inner eye,” see Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 370–74. 57. These features as characteristic of the influence of Fry and Bell in particular have been discussed in Tillotson, “Painter of Concern.” 58. Anand, Hindu View of Art, especially 9–10, 26–27, 49–50, and 178–86. 59. Letter from Eric Gill to Herbert Read, August 20, 1934, Sir Herbert Edward Read Fonds, MacPherson Library, University of Victoria. 60. Anand, Hindu View of Art, 186. 61. In particular, Coomaraswamy, Art and Swadeshi, 44–55, 127, 133–35. See also Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 80. 62. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 73–74. 63. Drawing on Edward Said’s famous argument in Orientalism—that the West made use of an essentialized image of the East as a place suffused with spirituality and standing outside of history in order to better carry out its project of domination and control—the identification of a true Indian art has been aptly described as “an Orientalism which was in search not merely of antiquity and a lost civilization in the East, but of a living wave of spirituality and a superior wisdom that could resist the colonization of the West” (GuhaThakurta, Making of a New “Indian” Art, 169). For Okakura, see Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 262–66 and 289–94; for more links with Fry and Britain, see Harrod, Crafts in Britain, 177–83. 64. Aside from the books by Mitter and Guha-Thakurta, the two sides of the school have been discussed sympathetically by Banerji (“Orientalism of E B Havell”) and more criti-

cally by Jamal (“E. B. Havell”; “E. B. Havell and Rabindranath Tagore” [which reads Tagore as a counter to Havell]; and “Debashish Banerji’s Havell”). Another useful document in the debates is Mitter’s review of Guha-Thakurta’s book, where he partially agrees with her “Saidian” view but suggests that a less passive view of the nature of Indian response needs to be taken (“Western Orientalism”). 65. Younghusband, Conference on Indian Art, 19. The lecture and discussion were notable for repeating so many of the tropes of nineteenth-century writing, including the supremacy of Indian decorative art (pp. 6, 10), the idea of the West looking to India for artistic revival (p. 11), the emphasis on “creation” (p. 13), the view that art was such a natural thing in the country that all the inhabitants were really artists (pp. 17–18), and the notion that it was the artist who taught others how to see beauty (p. 24). 66. Havell explicitly criticized the views of Gladstone Solomon in, amongst other places, “Correspondence,” 106. 67. Fry, “Oriental Art,” 236–37. The work was Tagore’s Kacha and Devâjâni, reproduced in Havell, Indian Sculpture and Painting. 68. See Mitter, Triumph of Modernism, and Khullar, “National Tradition and Modernist Art.” 69. Mitter, Triumph of Modernism, 29–120. It should be noted here, too, that all of this is only to speak of “early” modernism in India, rather than the modernism that followed independence and partition explored by so many others. 70. For a good discussion of how such artists and the critics supporting Sher-Gil and others in India at the time not only took up Fry’s formalism but focused explicitly on the expressive and communicative implications as much as its “pure” side, see Tillotson, “Painter of Some Concern.” 71. Khullar, Worldly Affiliations, 89. 72. Mathur, “Retake of Sher-Gil’s Self-Portrait,” 544, 539, and 544. 73. Smith, “Real Primitives.” The page references in this and the following paragraph are to this article. See also Smith, “Cézanne’s Primitive Self,” and Smith, “Cézanne’s ‘Primitive’ Perspective.” 74. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt”; Smith, “Cézanne’s ‘Primitive’ Perspective.” Further references in this paragraph are to Smith, “Real Primitives.” 75. Wollheim, “Style in Painting.” 76. Smith, “Cézanne’s ‘Primitive’ Perspective,” 96. See also Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 17–19. 77. Respectively, Smith, “Real Primitives,” 96, and Smith, “Cézanne’s ‘Primitive’ Perspective,” 105–6. 78. Smith, “Real Primitives,” 112. 79. “Over the past fifty years, the less than very best, less

than major painting (which less-than-best is still precious) has been mostly of a kind deriving from nothing later than Fauvism. It has not followed advanced painting very closely as a rule, or has done so only sporadically. The major art of our time has been preponderantly abstract, but just below that level the best art has been preponderantly representational—and, as it looks to me, still is” (Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics, 37). 80. Clement Greenberg, “Edmonton Interview,” Edmonton Contemporary Artists’ Society Newsletter 3 and 4, 1996, http://​ www.sharecom.ca/​greenberg/​interview.html. 81. Stephens, “Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition,” 68. 82. McInnes, “Canadian Water-Colours,” 208–9. 83. Lyon, “Experiment in Art Appreciation.” 84. See ibid. 85. For the afterlife of the experiments, see Feaver, Pitmen Painters. 86. Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, 70–98, 175–84; Shiff, “Representation, Copying, and the Technique of Originality.” 87. For a different articulation of this point, see Rose, “Close Looking and Conviction.” 88. The context of Fry’s continually cautious engagement with the “primitive” has been discussed eloquently in Green, Art Made Modern, 119–32. On Fry’s painting, see also Morphet, “Roger Fry.” 89. See Elkins’s comments about “second and third rate pastiches of Van Gogh and Gauguin” and work that “will necessarily appear initially as poor and derivative” (Elkins and Valiavicharska, Art and Globalization, 69, as well as 47–49, 68–71, 123, and his afterword; see also, more generally, Elkins, “Writing about Modernist Painting”). See also Moxey, Visual Time, 11–22. The conditions under which Moxey’s assertion can be said to have escaped this stricture are outlined in the final section of this chapter. For critical comment on the structure of “affinity,” see Gikandi, “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata.” 90. This point has been developed over many years by Shiff. See his works: Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, 70–98, 175–84; “Representation, Copying, and the Technique of Originality”; “Original, the Imitation, the Copy”; “Original Copy”; and, more recently, “Ingemination.” 91. On the salon cubists, see, for example, Cottington’s judgment of Jean Metzinger’s lost painting of 1910: “It is an accomplished pastiche [of Picasso]; but since it bears little relation to anything in his previous work, it is hard to see it as anything other than a wholesale plagiarism, or to see Metzinger’s motives for painting—and so promptly exhibiting—it as other than avant-gardist opportunism” (Cubism and Its Histories, 62–63). On the denigration of English attempts at belonging to modernism, see McCon-

Notes to Pages 142–151

179

key, Memory and Desire, 9–11, and Barlow, “Millais, Manet, Modernity.” 92. Flam in Rubin,“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art, 215. 93. Respectively, Aarthi Vadde, “Scalability,” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 2, January 2018, https://​doi.org/​ 10.26597/​mod.0035, and Thomas S. Davis and Nathan Hensley, “Scale and Form; or, What Was Global Modernism?” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 2, January 2, 2018, https://​ doi.org/​10.26597/​mod.0033. 94. To give just one major example of the value of continuing to think in global rather than merely local terms, Lisa Lowe has demonstrated how even an idea as assertively “Western” and sui generis as political liberalism can be seen to be entangled in modernity’s global history of trade, colonialism, and slavery (Intimacies of Four Contents). 95. Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” 1. On this shift of scale generally in terms of modernity, the present, and artistic cultures, see Latour, Inquiry into Modes of Existence; Latour, Facing Gaia; and Elias and Moraru, Planetary Turn, xi–xxxvi. 96. Pheng Chea has suggested that “world” is a better term than “globe” if we want to evoke the sense of belonging or community that a shared horizon or understanding might entail (“World Against Globe”), but in art-historical study “world art” is tainted for many by the problematically universalist assumptions about art as a singular phenomenon across times and places. “Planetary,” likewise, though more suggestive of the planetary concerns that post-1500 modernity has generated, has already been invoked by Susan Stanford Friedman to suggest a temporally expanded range of modernities that date back far before our own (Planetary Modernisms). In fact Chea’s reason for disliking “global”—the implication of “a bounded object in mercatorian space” (“World Against Globe,” 310)—is a useful reminder that a history of global modernism can be one that acknowledges the world as physical environment while also taking in the contingencies of particular connections and divisions generated over the long history of post-1500 globalization. 97. Moxey, Visual Time, 14. 98. Ibid., 11. 99. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 3. 100. This discussion draws on de Duve, “Silences in the Doctrine,” 39–86. 101. Ibid., especially 61–86. 102. For an extended study of this feature, see Wainwright, Timed Out.

180

Notes to Pages 151–157

103. Damisch quoted in Bois, Painting as Model, 256. 104. Damisch quoted in ibid., 255. 105. Mitter, Triumph of Modernism, 35; for comment, see also Dadi, review of Triumph of Modernism, by Mitter, 53–54. 106. The crucial texts here are collected in Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics. For commentary, see Gaiger, “Constraints and Conventions.” 107. Greenberg, “Convention and Innovation,” 47, as discussed in Gaiger, “Constraints and Conventions,” 388. 108. See Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics, especially 31–58, and Gaiger, “Constraints and Conventions,” 387–91. 109. Krauss, “View of Modernism,” 121–22. 110. Moxey, Visual Time, 15. 111. Fried, Four Honest Outlaws, 8–9. Or put another way, “If there are no a priori criteria that guarantee something will count as a painting, then modernism cannot be understood as an attempt to locate the ‘unique and irreducible’ properties of artistic media; instead, modernist artists are best understood as seeking to discover those criteria capable of securing their work’s identity as painting, sculpture, and so on, at a given historical moment” (Costello, “On the Very Idea,” 293). 112. Cavell, Claim of Reason, 121, as discussed in Costello, “On the Very Idea,” 290. 113. Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” 206–7 (emphasis added). 114. Krauss, Perpetual Inventory, xiii; Pippin in Hussain, “After Hegel,” http: //​platypus1917.org/​2011/​06/​01/​ after-hegel-an-interview-with-robert-pippin. 115. Levinson, “Defining Art Historically”; Levinson, “Refining Art Historically”; and Levinson, “Extending Art Historically.” 116. For the latter in particular, see Davies, “Non-Western Art.” For related comments on historical definitions and the problem of “world art,” see Davis, “Radical WAS.” 117. Davis, “World Series”; Davis, General Theory of Visual Culture; and Kubler, Shape of Time. 118. This is the reformulation given in Davis, General Theory of Visual Culture, 296–97. 119. Davis, “World Series,” 496. 120. Ibid. 121. Kubler, Shape of Time. 122. Useful in this regard is Khullar’s model of “affiliation,” theorized and put into practice in Worldly Affiliations. 123. Davis, “World Series,” especially 498–501. 124. Ibid., 500. 125. Ibid. Emphasis in original.

Bibliography

Abbot, Claude Colleer, and Anthony Bertram, eds. Poet and Painter: Being the Correspondence Between Gordon Bottomley and Paul Nash, 1910–1946. London: Oxford University Press, 1955. Abbot, Matthew, ed. Michael Fried and Philosophy: Modernism, Intention, and Theatricality. New York: Routledge, 2018. Adamson, Walter L. Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedmann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Adorno, Theodor W., Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács. Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso, 2007. Ainslie, Douglas. “Theory of Æsthetic.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 29, no. 163 (October 1916): 289–92. ———. “Theory of Æsthetic (Conclusion).” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 29, no. 164 (November 1916): 310–13. Akehurst, Thomas L. The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy: Britishness and the Spectre of Europe. London: Continuum, 2010. Alexander, Samuel. Art and the Material: The Adamson Lecture for 1925. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925. ———. “The Creative Process in the Artist’s Mind.” British Journal of Psychology 17 (April 1927): 305–21. ———. Papers. John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. Anand, Mulk Raj. The Hindu View of Art. London: Allen and Unwin, 1933. Anderson, Perry. “Modernity and Revolution.” New Left Review 144 (March–April 1984): 96–113. Anker, Peder. “The Bauhaus of Nature.” Modernism/​ Modernity 12, no. 2 (April 2005): 229–51. Antal, Friedrich. “Reflections on Classicism and Romanticism.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 66, no. 385 (April 1935): 159–63, 166–68. ———. “Reflections on Classicism and Romanticism—II.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 68, no. 396 (March 1936): 130–33, 136–39, 141. Antliff, Allan. “Anarchism and Art History: Methodologies of Insurrection.” In The Continuum Companion to Anarchism, edited by Ruth Kinna, 72–85. London: Continuum, 2012.

———. “Biocentrism and Anarchy: Herbert Read’s Modernism.” In Biocentrism and Modernism, edited by Oliver Botar and Isabel Wünsche, 153–60. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. ———. “David Goodway Critiques Herbert Read.” Anarchist Studies 19 (2011): 98–106. Archer, W. G. India and Modern Art. London: Allen and Unwin, 1959. Archer, W. G., Robert Melville, and Herbert Read. 40,000 Years of Modern Art: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern. Exhibition catalogue. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1949. Armitage, G. W., Mrs. Nominal File. Archive of Art and Design, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Arnold, Matthew. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” In Lectures and Essays in Criticism, edited by R. H. Super. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962. Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard. Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Art by the People: The Work of Individual Students and Art Classes in Adult Education. London: 1935. Artists International Association Papers. Tate Gallery Archive, London. The Arts League of Service Annual 1921–1922. London: Arts League of Service, 1922. Auther, Elissa. “The Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg.” Oxford Art Journal 27 (January 2004): 339–64. A. V. M. Review of Suggested Methods for the African School, by Harold Jowitt. Journal of the Royal African Society 33 (October 1934): 428–30. Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth and Logic. London: V. Gollancz, 1936. Bahr, Megan Granda. “A Naturalistic Aesthetic and the Critical Method of Albert C. Barnes.” Real: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 15 (1999): 323–41. Baldick, Chris. The Social Mission of English Criticism. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Balfour, Arthur James. Criticism and Beauty: A Lecture Rewritten. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910. Banerji, Debashish. “The Orientalism of E B Havell.” Third Text 16, no. 1 (2002): 41–56. Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bann, Stephen. Ways Around Modernism. With an introduc-

181

tion by Margaret MacNamidhe. New York: Routledge, 2007. Barlow, Paul. “Millais, Manet, Modernity.” In English Art, 1860–1914, edited by David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry, 31–38. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Baron, Wendy. Sickert: Paintings and Drawings. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Barton, J. E. Purpose and Admiration: A Lay Study of the Visual Arts. London: Christophers, 1932. Baudelaire, Charles. Écrits sur l’Art. Edited by Yves Florenne. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Baxandall, Michael. “Leavis on Critical Theory.” Add. Mss 9843/​7/​2/​5/​1. Cambridge University Library. ———. Patterns of Intention. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Baxandall, Michael, and Richard Candida Smith. Substance, Sensation, Perception. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1998. Beard, Lee. “Pottery as Precedent: Herbert Read and Sculptural Form.” In Paraskos, Rereading Read, 126–27. Beasley, Rebecca. “‘A Definite Meaning’: T. E. Hulme’s Art Criticism.” In T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, edited by Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek, 57–72. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. ———. Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Beaumont, Matthew. Introduction to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, by Walter Pater, vii–xviii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Béchard-Léauté, Anne. “The Contribution of Émigré Art Historians to the British Art World After 1933.” Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1999. Beech, Dave, and John Roberts, eds. The Philistine Controversy. London: Verso, 2002. Bell, Clive. An Account of French Painting. London: Chatto and Windus, 1931. ———. Art. London: Chatto and Windus, 1914. ———. “Significant Form.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 34 (June 1919): 257. ———. Since Cézanne. 2nd ed. London: Chatto and Windus, 1929. Bellamy, Richard. “The Advent of the Masses and the Making of the Modern Theory of Democracy.” In The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, edited by Terence Ball and Bellamy, 70–103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Bell-Villada, Gene H. Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life: How Politics and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism, 1790–1990. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Belting, Hans, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel, eds.

182

Bibliography

The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. Karlsruhe: ZKM, Center for Art and Media, 2013. Bennett, Jane. “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 225–33. ———. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Bentley, Michael. “Modernist Method.” In Modernizing En­gland’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970, 194–218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———. Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Berenson, Bernard. “Amico di Sandro.” Pts. 1 and 2. Gazette des Beaux-Arts 41 (June 1899): 459–71; 41 (July 1899): 21–36. Reprinted in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art: Second Series, 46–69. London: George Bell and Sons, 1902. Page references are to reprint. ———. The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. London: Phaidon, 1952. ———. The Study and Criticism of Italian Art: Second Series. London: George Bell and Sons, 1902. ———. Three Essays in Method. Oxford: Clarendon, 1927. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The ­Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. Bertram, Anthony. “The Art of Picasso.” Listener, July 19, 1933. ———. Design. London: Penguin Books, 1938. ———. Paul Nash: The Portrait of an Artist. London: Faber and Faber, 1955. ———. “Review of Books.” Studio 111 (May 1936): 360. ———. Talks File. BBC Written Archive Centre, Reading. ———. What Is a Painting? London: British Institute of Art Education, 1937. Bindman, David. “Art as Social Consciousness: Francis Klingender and British Art.” In Hemingway, Marxism and the History of Art, 67–88. Binyon, Laurence. The Art of Botticelli: An Essay in Pictorial Criticism. With an etching by Muirhead Bone. London: Macmillan, 1913. ———. The Flight of the Dragon: An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Art in China and Japan, Based on Original Sources. London: John Murray, 1911. ———. Painting in the Far East: An Introduction to the History of Pictorial Art in Asia, Especially China and Japan. London: Edward Arnold, 1908. ———. William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job. Vol. 1. London: Methuen, 1906. Birdwood, George. The Industrial Arts of India. London: Chapman and Hall, 1880.

Blunt, Anthony. “Anthony Blunt: Memoir.” Add MS 88902. British Library Archives, London. ———. “Art Under Capitalism and Socialism.” In The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the Cultural Revolutions, edited by Cecil Day-Lewis, 112–22. London: Frederick Muller, 1937. ———. “From Bloomsbury to Marxism.” Studio International 186 (November 1973): 164–68. ———. “The Place of Art History in the Universities.” Universities Quarterly 2, no. 4 (August 1948): 383–88. ———. “The Realism Quarrel.” Left Review (April 1937): 169– 71. Reprinted in Margolies, Writing the Revolution, 76–79. Page references are to reprint. Board of Education. Report of the Committee on Advanced Art Education in London. London: H.M.S.O., 1936. Bodkin, A. M. “The Relevance of Psycho-Analysis to Art Criticism.” British Journal of Psychology 15, no. 2 (October 1924): 174–83. Boehm, Gottfried. “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder.” In Was ist ein Bild?, edited by Gottfried Boehm, 11–38. 2nd ed. Munich: W. Fink, 1994. Bois, Yve-Alain. “Formalism and Structuralism.” In Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, edited by Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, and Rosalind E. Krauss, 32–39. London: Thames and Hudson, 2004. ———. Painting as Model. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Bois, Yve-Alain, and Rosalind Krauss. “Vive le formalisme.” Art Press 149 (July–August 1990): 47–51. Borenius, Tancred. “Roger Fry as Art Historian.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 65, no. 380 (November 1934): 235–36. Bosanquet, Bernard. Croce’s Aesthetic. Proceedings of the British Academy, December 1919. Vol. 9. London: H. Milford for the British Academy, 1919. ———. A History of Aesthetic. 2nd ed. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1904. First published 1892 by S. Sonnenschein (London). Botar, Oliver, and Isabel Wünsche. Biocentrism and Modernism. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Brain, Michael. The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. Brantlinger, Patrick. “A Postindustrial Prelude to Postcolonialism: John Ruskin, William Morris, and Gandhism.” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 466–85. Bredekamp, Horst, and Gabriele Werner. “Editorial.” In Bilder in Prozessen, edited by Claudia Blümle, Horst Bredekamp, and Matthias Bruhen; Bildwelten des Wissens: Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch für Bildkritik 1, no. 1 (2003): 7. Brewer, John. The American Leonardo: A 20th-Century Tale of Obsession, Art, and Money. London: Constable, 2009.

Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Britain, Ian. Fabianism and Culture: A Study in British Socialism and the Arts, 1882–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. British Institute for Art Education. Art for the People: Report of the British Institute of Adult Education Experiment in Providing Three Loan Exhibitions at Barnsley, Swindon, and Silver End. London: British Institute for Art Education, 1935. Brockington, Grace. Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement in Britain, 1900 1918. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Brown, Alec. “Writers’ International Controversy.” Left Review (December 1934): 76–77. Reprinted in Margolies, Writing the Revolution, 27–29. Page references are to reprint. Brown, Rebecca M. Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. ———. Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India. London: Routledge, 2010. Buckley, Cheryl. Designing Modern Britain. London: Reaktion, 2007. Budd, Malcolm. “Wollheim on Correspondence, Projective Properties, and Expressive Perception.” In Aesthetic Essays, 239–251. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Buermeyer, Laurence. “The Aesthetics of Roger Fry.” In Art and Education, edited by John Dewey, 273–83. Merion: Barnes Foundation Press, 1928. Bulley, Margaret. Ancient and Medieval Art: A Short History. London: Methuen, 1914. ———. Art and Counterfeit. London: Methuen, 1925. ———. Have You Good Taste? A Guide to the Lesser Arts. London: Methuen, 1933. ———. A Simple Guide to Pictures and Painting. London: Chatto and Windus, 1927. Bullough, Edward. “Mind and Medium in Art.” British Journal of Psychology 11, no. 1 (October 1920): 26–46. ———. “Recent Work in Experimental Aesthetics.” British Journal of Psychology 12, no. 1 (June 1921): 76–99. Bürger, Peter. “Avant-Garde.” In Kelly, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 1:263–66. ———. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Burroughs, Alan. Art Criticism from a Laboratory. Boston: Little Brown, 1938. ———. “X-Rays and Picture Restoration.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 56, no. 327 (June 1930): 33. Burt, Cyril, ed. How the Mind Works in the Child: Problems in the Development of the Child. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1933.

Bibliography

183

———. Mental and Scholastic Tests. London: P. S. King and Son, 1927. Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, AvantGarde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987. Calo, Mary Ann. Bernard Berenson and the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Carline, Richard. Draw They Must: A History of the Examination and Teaching of Art. London: Edward Arnold, 1968. Carr, Herbert Wildon. “Mr. Bosanquet on Croce’s Æsthetic.” Mind 29, no. 114 (April 1920): 207–11. ———. The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce: The Problem of Art and History. London: Macmillan, 1917. Carrier, David. “Anthony Blunt’s Poussin.” Word and Image 25, no. 4 (2009): 416–26. ———. Artwriting. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. ———. High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist Painting. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Carrington, Noel. Design and Decoration in the Home. Rev. ed. London: Country Life, 1938. ———. Design in the Home. London: Country Life, 1933. Carritt, Edgar Frederick. “The Arts and Aesthetic Theory.” In The New Learning: A Contribution to a General View of the World, edited by F. J. E. Raby, 205–32. London: I. Nicholson and Watson, 1933. ———. The Theory of Beauty. London: Methuen, 1914. Carroll, Noël. Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Carter, Miranda. Anthony Blunt: His Loves. London: Macmillan, 2001. Casson, Stanley. Talks File. BBC Written Archive Centre, Reading. Caudwell, Christopher. “Beauty: A Study in in Bourgeois Æsthetics.” In Further Studies in a Dying Culture, 77–115. London: Bodley Head, 1949. ———. Studies in a Dying Culture. London: Bodley Head, 1938. Causey, Andrew. “Herbert Read and Contemporary Art.” In Goodway, Herbert Read Reassessed, 123–44. Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. ———. “A Matter of Meaning It.” In Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, 213–37. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. “Music Discomposed.” In Must We Mean What We

184

Bibliography

Say? A Book of Essays, 180–212. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222. ———. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chea, Pheng. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. ———. “World Against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature.” New Literary History 45 (Summer 2014): 303–29. Cheetham, Mark A. Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain: The “Englishness” of English Art Theory Since the Eighteenth Century. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Clark, Kenneth. Introduction to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, by Walter Pater, 11–26. London: Fontana, 1961. ———. Moments of Vision and Other Essays. London: John Murray, 1981. Clark, Meagan, and Francesco Ventrella. “Women’s Expertise and the Culture of Connoisseurship.” Special issue, Visual Resources 33 (2017): 1–197. Clark, T. J. “Art History in an Age of Image Machines.” EurAmerica 38 (March 2008): 1–30. ———. “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art.” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (September 1982): 139–56. ———. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. ———. “More Theses on Feuerbach.” Representations 104, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 4–7. ———. “Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage: An Interpretation.” New Literary History 45, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 221–52. ———. The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. ———. “Thank God for the Leavisites.” London Review of Books 35, no. 19 (October 10, 2013): 4. Clarke, Peter. Liberals and Social Democrats. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Clifford, James. “The Others: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm.” In The Third Text Reader: On Art, Culture, and Theory, edited by Rashid Araeen, Sean Cubitt, and Ziauddin Sardar, 73–77. London: Continuum, 2002. Clutton-Brock, Arthur. The Ultimate Belief. London: Constable, 1916. ———. William Morris. Rochester: Grange Books, 2007. First published 1914 by H. Holt (New York). Coatts, Margot. Pioneers of Modern Craft: Twelve Essays Profiling Figures in the History of Twentieth-Century Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Codell, Julie F. “Horne’s Botticelli: Pre-Raphaelite Moder-

nity, Historiography, and the Aesthetic of Intensity.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies 2 (1989): 27–41. Cohen, David. “Herbert Read and Psychoanalysis.” In Art Criticism Since 1900, edited by Malcom Gee, 164–79. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. Cohen, Deborah. Household Gods: A History of the British and Their Possessions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Cole, Henry. Catalogue of the Objects of Indian Art Exhibited in the South Kensington Museum. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1874. Collingwood, R. G. “Æsthetic.” In The Mind: A Series of Lectures Delivered in King’s College London, During the Lent Term, 1927, edited by J. S. McDowall, 214–44. London: Longmans, 1927. ———. An Autobiography. With a new introduction by Stephen Toulmin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. First published 1939 by Oxford University Press (London). ———. Outlines of a Philosophy of Art. London: Oxford University Press, 1925. ———. “The Place of Art in Education.” Hibbert Journal 24 (April 1926): 439–43. ———. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938. Collini, Stefan. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. “On Highest Authority: The Literary Critic and Other Aviators in Early Twentieth-Century Britain.” In Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, edited by Dorothy Ross, 152–70. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. ———. “Hobhouse, Bosanquet, and the State: Philosophical Idealism and Political Argument in England, 1880–1918.” Past and Present 72 (August 1976): 86–111. ———. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930. Reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. ———. “Richard Hoggart: Literary Criticism and Cultural Decline in Twentieth-Century Britain.” In Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies, edited by Sue Owen, 33–56. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ———. “Where Did It All Go Wrong? Cultural Critics and ‘Modernity’ in Inter-war Britain.” In The Strange Survival of Liberal England: Political Leaders, Moral Values, and the Reception of Economic Debate, edited by E. H. H. Green and D. M. Tanner, 247–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Collins, Judith. The Omega Workshops. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Constable, W. G. “Art and Adult Education.” Adult Education 7 (September 1934): 10. ———. Art History and Connoisseurship: Their Scope and Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938.

———. “Artists of the Empire.” In Art in England, edited by R. S. Lambert, 65–72. London: Pelican Books, 1938. Coomaraswamy, Ananda. Art and Swadeshi. Madras: Ganesh, 1912. ———. Mediaeval Sinhalese Art: Being a Monograph on Mediaeval Sinhalese Arts and Crafts, Mainly as Surviving in the Eighteenth Century, with an Account of the Structure of Society and the Status of the Craftsmen. Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1908. Corbett, David Peters. “Laurence Binyon, and the Aesthetic of Modern Art.” Visual Culture in Britain 6, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 101–19. ———. “Modernity and Revisionist Modernism in the Twenties.” In The Modernity of English Art, 57–99. ———. The Modernity of English Art, 1914–30. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. ———. “Seeing into Modernity: Walter Sickert’s Music-Hall Scenes, c. 1887–1907.” In English Art 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity, edited by Corbett and Lara Perry, 150– 67. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. ———. “Visual Culture and the History of Art.” In Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Culture, edited by Caroline van Eck and Edward Winters, 17–36. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. ———. The World in Paint. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Corbett, David Peters, Fiona Russell, and Ysanne Holt, eds. The Geographies of Englishness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Costello, Diarmuid. “Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 217–28. ———. “On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts.” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 274–312. Cottington, David. Cubism and Its Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Cox, Trenchard. Review of The Arts of West Africa, by Michael Sadler. Oversea Education 4 (January 1935): 136–37. Coxon, Raymond. Art: An Introduction to Appreciation. London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1932. Croce, Benedetto. Æsthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic. Translated by Douglas Ainslie. 1909. 2nd ed, London: Macmillan, 1922. ———. The Breviary of Æsthetic. Lecture for the inauguration of the Rice Institute of Houston, Texas, in 1912. Rice Institute Pamphlet, vol. 2, no. 4. Translated by Douglas Ainslie. Houston: William Marsh Rice University, 1915. ———. The Essence of Aesthetic. Lecture for the inauguration

Bibliography

185

of the Rice Institute of Houston, Texas, 1912. Translated by Douglas Ainslie. London: Heinemann, 1921. Cronan, Todd. Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Crowe, J. A., and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle. A New History of Painting in Italy, from the Second to the Sixteenth Century. London: J. Murray, 1864–66. Culver, Donald. “Reading About Art.” Scrutiny 2, no. 1 (June 1933): 89. Dadi, Iftikhar. Review of The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947, by Partha Mitter. Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (December 2008): 53–54. Danto, Arthur. “Metaphor, Expression, and Style.” In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 165–208. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Davies, Stephen. “Non-Western Art and Art’s Definition.” In Theories of Art Today, edited by Noël Carroll, 199–216. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Davis, Whitney. “Art History, Re-enactment, and the Idiographic Stance.” In Michael Baxandall: Vision and the Work of Words, edited by Peter Mack and Robert Williams, 69–90. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. ———. “Fantasmatic Iconicity: Freudianism, Formalism, and Richard Wollheim.” In Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond, 271–96. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. ———. A General Theory of Visual Culture. Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 2011. ———. “Radical WAS: The Sense of History in World Art Studies.” World Art 3, no. 2 (2013): 201–10. ———. Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Prehistory to Perspective. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. ———. “World Series: The Unruly Orders of World Art History.” Third Text 25, no. 5 (2011): 492–501. Day-Lewis, Cecil, ed. The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the Cultural Revolutions. London: Frederick Muller, 1937. ———. “Revolutionaries and Poetry.” Left Review (July 1935): 397–402. Reprinted in Margolies, Writing the Revolution, 51–58. Page references are to reprint. ———. “Writers’ International Controversy.” Left Review (January 1935): 128–29. Reprinted in Margolies, Writing the Revolution, 35–37. Page references are to reprint. De Bolla, Peter. The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Deliss, Clémentine, and Jane Havell, eds. Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1995.

186

Bibliography

Dell, Robert. “Editorial.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 1, no. 1 (March 1903): 3–5. Denis, Maurice [Pierre Louis]. “Définition du néo-traditionnisme.” Art et critique 65 (August 23, 1890): 540–42. Reprinted in Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood with Jason Gaiger, translated by Peter Collier, 863. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Page references are to reprint. Dewar, Heather. “A Comparison of Tests of Artistic Appreciation.” British Journal of Educational Psychology 8, no. 1 (February 1938): 29–49. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Minton Balch, 1934. Reprinted in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 10, 1934, 1–352. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Page references are to reprint. Dewey, John, and Albert C. Barnes, eds. Art and Education. Merion: Barnes Foundation Press, 1929. Dickinson, G. Lowes. After Two Thousand Years: A Dialogue Between Plato and a Modern Young Man. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930. Dodds, Annie Edwards Powell. The Romantic Theory of Poetry: An Examination in the Light of Croce’s Æsthetic. London: E. Arnold, 1926. Donald, James. A Sentimental Education: Schooling, Popular Culture, and the Regulation of Liberty. London: Verso, 1992. Douglas, Langton. “Photographic Evidence.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 60, no. 351 (June 1932): 280–83, 286–89. Doyle, Laura, and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Drew, A. B. V. Review of The Arts of West Africa, by Michael Sadler. Man 35 (April 1935): 61–62. Drucker, Johanna. Theorizing Modernism. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Dutton, Denis. “The Pleasures of Fiction.” Philosophy and Literature 28, no. 2 (2004): 453–66. Duve, Thierry de. “Silences in the Doctrine.” In Clement Greenberg Between the Lines: Including a Debate with Clement Greenberg, translated by Brian Holmes, 39–88. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. ———. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Anniversary edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Eatough, Matt, and Mark Wollaeger, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Edel, Leon. Bloomsbury: A House of Lions. London: Hogarth Press, 1979.

Edwards, Paul. Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2000. Egbert, Donald Drew. Social Radicalism and the Arts, Western Europe: A Cultural History from the French Revolution to 1968. New York: Knopf, 1970. Einstein, Carl. Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. 3rd ed. Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1931. Elam, Caroline. “‘A More and More Important Work’: Roger Fry and The Burlington Magazine.” Burlington Magazine 145, no. 1200 (March 2003): 142–52. ———. “Roger Fry and Early Italian Painting.” In Green, Art Made Modern, 87–106. ———. Roger Fry’s Journey from Primitives to the Post-Impressionists. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2008. Elias, Amy J., and Christian Moraru, eds. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” In Selected Essays, 281–91. London: Faber, 1951. Elkins, James. Master Narratives and Their Discontents. With an introduction by Anna Sigrídur Arnar. New York: Routledge, 2005. ———. “Writing About Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America.” Transcultural Studies 1 (2010): 1–19. http: //​journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/​index.php/​ transcultural/​article/​view/​1928/​0/. Elkins, James, and Zhivka Valiavicharska, eds. Art and Globalization. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Elliott, Patrick, and Sacha Llewellyn. True to Life: British Realist Painting in the 1920s and 1930s. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2017. Ensor, R. C. K. England, 1870–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. Enwezor, Okwui, ed. The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994. Munich: Prestel, 2001. Enwezor, Okwui, and Olu Oguibe. Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to Marketplace. London: inIVA, 1999. Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Evans, Joan. Taste and Temperament: A Brief Study of Psychological Types in Their Relation to the Visual Arts. London: Jonathan Cape, 1939. Eysenck, H. J. “The General Factor in Aesthetic Judgements.” British Journal of Psychology 31, no. 1 (July 1940): 94–102. Falkenheim, Jacqueline. Roger Fry and the Beginnings of Formalist Art Criticism. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980.

Feaver, William. The Pitmen Painters: The Ashington Group, 1934–1984. London: Chatto and Windus, 1988. Fergusson, James. A History of Eastern and Indian Architecture. London: John Murray, 1876. Fernihough, Anne. D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. ———. “‘Go in Fear of Abstractions”: Modernism and the Spectre of Democracy.” Textual Practice 14, no. 3 (Winter 2000): 479–97. Finberg, A. J., ed. Modern Painters. London: George Bell and Sons, 1927. Fisher, John A. “High Art Versus Low Art.” In Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes, 527–40. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2005. Fishman, Solomon. The Interpretation of Art: Essays on the Art Criticism of John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Herbert Read. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Focillon, Henri. The Life of Forms in Art. Translated by George Kubler. New York: Zone Books, 1992. First published in 1942 by Yale University Press (New Haven). Ford, Boris. “The Concise ‘C.H.E.L.’” Scrutiny 10 (October 1941): 201–3. Ford, Simon. “‘Plastic Art in Its Most Abstract Essence’: Pottery and Art in the Interwar Years.” In Modern British Sculpture, edited by Penelope Curtis and Keith Wilson, 136–40. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011. Fore, Devin. Realism After Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Foster, Hal, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. Fox, James. British Art and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Frank, Marie Ann. Denman Ross and American Design Theory. London: Eurospan, 2011. Freeden, Michael. “Biology, Evolution and Liberal Collectivism.” In The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform, 76–116. Reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. ———. Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. ———. The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform. Reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 12–23. ———. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ———. Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. ———. “Roger Fry’s Formalism.” In Another Light: JacquesLouis David to Thomas Demand, 195–223. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

Bibliography

187

Friedlander, Max J. “Artistic Quality: Original and Copy.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 78, no. 458 (May 1941): 143–51. ———. “Artistic Quality: Original and Copy.” In On Art and Connoisseurship, 230–45. London: Bruno Cassirer, 1942. ———. On Art and Connoisseurship. London: Bruno Cassirer, 1942. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/​Time Borders of Modernist Studies.” Modernism/​Modernity 13, no. 3 (September 2006): 425–43. ———. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Fry, Roger. “Andrea Mantegna.” Quarterly Review (January 1902): 139–58. ———. Architectural Heresies of a Painter. London: Chatto and Windus, 1921. Reprinted in A Roger Fry Reader, edited by Christopher Reed, 212–28. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Page references are to reprint. ———. Art and Commerce. London: Hogarth Press, 1926. Reprinted in Journal of Cultural Economics 22 (1998): 49–59. Page references are to reprint. ———. “Art and Socialism.” In Vision and Design, 36–51. ———. “Art and the State.” In Transformations, 44–55. ———. “Art-History as an Academic Study.” In Last Lectures, 1–21. ———. “Art in a Socialism.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 29, no. 157 (April 1916): 36–39. ———. The Artist and Psycho-analysis. London: Hogarth Press, 1924. Reprinted in A Roger Fry Reader, edited by Christopher Reed, 351–65. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Page references are to reprint. ———. “The Artist’s Vision.” In Vision and Design, 31–35. ———. “The Authenticity of the Renders Collection.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 50, no. 290 (May 1927): 261–63, 267. ———. “The Baroque.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 39, no. 222 (September 1921): 145–48. ———. “The Berensonian Method.” Review of Three Essays in Method, by Bernard Berenson. Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 52, no. 298 (January 1928): 47–48. ———. “Bushman Paintings.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 16, no. 84 (March 1910): 334–38. ———. Cézanne: A Study of His Development. London: Hogarth Press, 1927. ———. Characteristics of French Art. London: Chatto and Windus, 1932. Reprinted in French, Flemish, and British Art, 3–96. London: Chatto and Windus, 1951. Page references are to reprint. ———. “Children’s Drawings.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 30, no. 171 (June 1917): 225–27, 231.

188

Bibliography

———. “The Courtauld Institute of Art.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 57 (December 1930): 317–18. Reprinted in A Roger Fry Reader, edited by Christopher Reed, 275–77. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Page references are to reprint. ———. “An Essay in Aesthetics.” New Quarterly 2 (April 1909): 171–90. Reprinted in Vision and Design, 11–25. Page references are to reprint. ———. “Exhibition of Old Masters at the Grafton Galleries— I.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 20, no. 104 (November 1911): 66–67, 70–73, 76–77. ———. “Flemish Art at Burlington House. II—The Later Schools.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 50 (March 1927): 132–33, 136–39, 142–45, 148–50, 153. ———. French, Flemish, and British Art. London: Chatto and Windus, 1951. ———. “The Grafton Gallery—I.” Nation, 19 November 1910, 331–35. Reprinted in A Roger Fry Reader, edited by Christopher Reed, 86–90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Page references are to reprint. ———. Henri Matisse. London: A. Zwemmer, 1935. Reprinted in A Roger Fry Reader, edited by Christopher Reed, 401–15. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Page references are to reprint. ———. Last Lectures. With an introduction by Kenneth Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939. ———. Letters of Roger Fry. Edited by Denys Sutton. 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1972. ———. Letter to Helen Anrep, September 16, 1925. Reference no. 2006 11 ANREP/​FRY. Tate Gallery Archive, London. ———. “Memorandum by Mr. Roger Fry.” In Art and Industry: Report of the Committee Appointed by the Board of Trade under the Chairmanship of Lord Gorell on the Production and Exhibition of Articles of Good Design and Every-Day Use. London: H.M.S.O., 1932. ———. “Modern Paintings in a Collection of Ancient Art.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 37, no. 213 (December 1920): 302–9. ———. “Mr MacColl and Drawing.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 35, no. 197 (August 1919): 84–85. ———. “Mrs. Cameron’s Photographs.” In Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women by Julia Margaret Cameron, edited by Tristram Powell, 9–15. Rev. ed. ­London: Chatto and Windus, 1992. First published London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1926. ———. “Negro Sculpture.” Athenaeum 20 (August 1920): 247–48. Reprinted in Vision and Design, 65–68. Page references are to reprint. ———. “On a Profile Portrait by Baldovinetti.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 18, no. 96 (March 1911): 308–13.

———. “On Some Modern Drawings.” In Transformations, 197–212. ———. “Oriental Art.” Quarterly Review 212, no. 422 (Jan 1910): 225–39. ———. “The Ottoman and the Whatnot.” In Vision and Design, 26–30. ———. Papers. King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge. ———. “Post-Impressionism.” Fortnightly Review, May 1, 1911. Reprinted in A Roger Fry Reader, edited by Christopher Reed, 99–110. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Page references are to reprint. ———. “The Post–Impressionists–II.” Nation, December 3, 1910. Reprinted in A Roger Fry Reader, edited by Christopher Reed, 90–94. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Page references are to reprint. ———. “Prospectus for the Omega Workshops (1913).” In A Roger Fry Reader, edited by Christopher Reed, 198–200. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. “Retrospect.” In Vision and Design, 188–99. ———. “Sandro Botticelli.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 48, no. 277 (April 1926): 196–200. ———. “The Seicento.” In Transformations, 95–124. ———. “Sensibility.” In Last Lectures, 22–36. ———. “Settecentismo.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 41, no. 235 (October 1922): 158–59, 162–65, 168–69. ———. “Some Aspects of Chinese Art.” In Transformations, 67–81. ———. Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art. New York: Doubleday, 1956. First published 1926 by Chatto and Windus (London). ———. Vision and Design. London: Chatto and Windus, 1920. Fry, Roger, and Desmond MacCarthy. “The Post-Impressionists.” In Manet and the Post-Impressionists, 7–13. Exhibition catalogue. London: Ballantyne, 1910. Reprinted in A Roger Fry Reader, edited by Christopher Reed, 81–85. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Page references are to reprint. Fuller, Peter. Images of God: The Consolations of Lost Illusions. London: Hogarth, 1990. First published in 1985 by Chatto and Windus (London). ———. Theoria: Art and the Absence of Grace. London: Chatto and Windus, 1988. Gabo, Naum, Leslie Martin, and Ben Nicholson, eds. Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art. London: Faber and Faber, 1937. Gagnier, Regenia. “A Critique of Practical Aesthetics.” In Aesthetics and Ideology, edited by George Levine, 264–82. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994. ———. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. ———. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Gaiger, Jason. Aesthetics and Painting. London: Continuum, 2008. ———. “The Analysis of Pictorial Style.” British Journal of Aesthetics 42, no. 1 (January 2001): 20–36. ———. “Constraints and Conventions: Kant and Greenberg on Aesthetic Judgement.” British Journal of Aesthetics 39, no. 4 (October 1999): 376–91. Ganz, Paul. “An Unpublished Holbein Portrait.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 56, no. 324 (March 1930): 116, 118–19, 122–25. Garman, Douglas. “Writers’ International Controversy.” Left Review (February 1935): 180–82. Reprinted in Margolies, Writing the Revolution, 40–42. Page references are to reprint. Gascoyne, David. David Gascoyne: Selected Prose, 1934–1996. Edited by Roger Scott. With an introduction by Kathleen Raine. London: Enitharmon Press, 1998. Gbadegesin, Olubukola A. “Picturing the Modern Self: Politics, Identity, and Self-Fashioning in Lagos, 1861–1934.” Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2010. Gerstein, Alexandra, ed. Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshops, 1913–1919. London: Courtauld Gallery in association with Fontanka, 2009. Gikandi, Simon. “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference.” Modernism/​Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 455–80. Gilbert, Katharine Everett, and Helmut Kuhn. A History of Esthetics. 2nd ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1956. Gloag, John. Industrial Art Explained. Illustrated by Norman Howard. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934. Goehr, Lydia. “The Institutionalization of a Discipline: A Retrospective of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and the American Society for Aesthetics, 1939–1992.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (Spring 1993): 99–121. Goldstone, Andrew. Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gombrich, Ernst. The Story of Art. New York: Phaidon Press, 1950. Goodhardt-Rendel, H. S. Fine Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934. Goodman, Nelson. “Pure in Art.” In Ways of Worldmaking, 57–58. Hassocks: Harvester, 1978. ——— . “Status of Style.” In Ways of Worldmaking, 23–40. Hassocks: Harvester, 1978. Goodway, David. “Herbert Read, Organicism, Abstraction, and an Anarchist Aesthetic.” Anarchist Studies 19 (2011): 82–97. ———, ed. Herbert Read Reassessed. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998. Goodwin, Craufurd D., ed. Art and the Market: Roger Fry on Commerce in Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Bibliography

189

Gordon, Cora. “Art for the People: The Fifth Year.” Adult Education 12 (September 1939): 3–12. Gordon, Jan. Art for the People: Loan Exhibition of Modern Paintings. London, 1940. Green, Christopher. “Anthony Blunt’s Picasso.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 147, no. 1222 (2005): 26–33. ———, ed. Art Made Modern: Roger Fry’s Vision of Art. Exhibition catalogue. London: Merrell Holberton, 1999. ———. “Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson: Connoisseurship and Modernism.” Unpublished essay, 1998. Microsoft Word file. Green, Nancy E., and Christopher Reed, eds. A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant Garde and Kitsch.” Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939): 34–49. Reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, edited by John O’Brian, 5–22. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Page references are to reprint. ———. Clement Greenberg: Late Writings. Edited by Robert C. Morgan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ———. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Vol. 1. Edited by John O’Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. ———. “Convention and Innovation.” In Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste, 47–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. “Modernist Painting.” Lecture originally broadcast by the Voice of America, first published in unrevised form in Voice of America Forum Lectures. Washington, DC: US Information Agency, 1960. Reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, edited by John O’Brian, 85–93. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Page references are to reprint. ———. “Towards a Newer Laocöon.” Partisan Review 7 (July– August 1940): 296–310. Grigson, Geoffrey, ed. The Arts To-Day. London: John Lane, 1935. ———. “In Search of English Pottery.” Studio 110 (November 1935): 256–63. ———. Recollections. London: Chatto and Windus, 1984. Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics, and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Hammer, Espen. Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

190

Bibliography

Hannay, Howard. Roger Fry, and Other Essays. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1937. Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2011. Harney, Elizabeth. “Postcolonial Agitations: Avant-Gardism in Dakar and London.” New Literary History 41, no. 4 (Autumn 2010): 730–51. Harrison, Charles. English Art and Modernism, 1900–1939. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1994. ———. “Modernism.” In Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff, 188–201. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ———. Modernism. London: Tate Gallery, 2001. ———. “On the Surface of Painting.” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 292–336. ———. Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. “Roger Fry in Retrospect.” Studio International 171 (May 1966): 220–21. ———. Since 1950: Art and Its Criticism. With a preface by Alex Potts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Harrod, Tanya. “‘The Breath of Reality’: Michael Cardew and the Development of Studio Pottery in the 1930s and 1940.” Journal of Design History 2, no. 2/3 (1989): 145–59. ———. The Crafts in Britain in the 20th Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. ———. The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew: Modern Pots, Colonialism, and the Counterculture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. ———. “Paradise Postponed: William Morris in the 20th Century.” William Morris Revisited: Questioning the Legacy, edited by Jennifer Harris, 6–32. London: Crafts Council, 1996. ———. “‘Sincerely Themselves’: Child Art in Britain and Colonial West Africa.” In The Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000, edited by Juliet Kinchin, 135–37. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Harvey, Benjamin. “The Rest Is Silence: The Senses of Roger Fry’s Endings.” Journal of Art Historiography 9 (December 2013). https: //​arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/​2013/​ 12/​harvey.pdf. Haslam, Malcolm. “William Staite Murray.” In Pioneers of Modern Craft: Twelve Essays Profiling Figures in the History of Twentieth-Century Craft, edited by Margot Coatts, 50–53. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Hassan, Salah M. “African Modernism: Beyond Alternative Modernities Discourse.” South Atlantic Quarterly 109 (Summer 2010): 451–73. Havell, E. B. “Correspondence.” Indian Arts and Letters 1 (1925): 106.

———. The Ideals of Indian Art. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1912. Hearshaw, L. S. A Short History of British Psychology, 1840– 1940. London: Methuen, 1964. Heath, Lionel. “Exhibits of the Bombay School of Art at India House.” Indian Arts and Letters 4 (1930): 121–22. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979. Helmreich, Anne. “The Death of the Victorian Art Periodical.” Visual Resources 26, no. 3 (September 2010): 242–53. ———. Nature’s Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Hemingway, Andrew, ed. Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left. London: Pluto, 2006. ———. “New Left Art History’s International.” In Marxism and the History of Art, 175–95. Hemsley, Nathan K. Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Heyder, Corin Joris. “Same, Similar, Semblable—Languages of Connoisseurship.” Journal of Art Historiography 16 (June 2014). https://​arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/​2017/​ 05/​heyder.pdf. Hilliard, Christopher. “Adult Education and ‘Left-Leavisism.’” In English as a Vocation: The “Scrutiny” Movement, 142–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. ———. English as a Vocation: The “Scrutiny” Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of WorkingClass Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. London: Penguin Books, 1957. Holme, C. G. “Where There Is No Vision the People Perish.” Studio 100 (July 1930): 3–6. Holmes, C. J. Notes on the Science of Picture-Making. London: Chatto and Windus, 1909. Holt, Ysanne. “The Call of Commerce: The Studio Magazine in the 1920s.” The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939, edited by Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, 151–73. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Holtby, Winnifred. “What We Read and Why We Read It.” Left Review (January 1935): 111–14. Reprinted in Margolies, Writing the Revolution, 93–98. Page references are to reprint. Horne, Herbert P. Alessandro Filipepi, Commonly Called Sandro Botticelli, Painter of Florence. London: George Bell and Sons, 1908. Hulme, T. E. “Mr Epstein and the Critics.” In Further Speculations, edited by Samuel Haynes, 103–44. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955. Hussain, Omair. “After Hegel: An Interview with Robert Pippin.” Platypus Review 36 (June 2011). http: //​platypus1917.org/2011/​06/​01/​ after-hegel-an-interview-with-robert-pippin.

Hutcheon, Linda. Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic: The Example of Charles Mauron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Hutton, Alexander. “The Moment of Culture and Society.” In Uses of the Industrial Past in Britain: History, Literature, and Politics, 1910–1970, chapter 7. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Huyssen, Andreas. “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World.” New German Critique, no. 100 (Winter 2007): 189–207. Hyman, James. The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain During the Cold War, 1945–60. New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2001. Inglis, Fred. Radical Earnestness: English Social Theory 1880– 1980. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982. Jackson, Ben, and Marc Stears, eds. Liberalism as Ideology: Essays in Honour of Michael Freeden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Jaillant, Lise, and Alison E. Martin. “Introduction: Global Modernism.” Modernist Cultures 13 (2018): 1–13. Jamal, Osman. “Debashish Banerji’s Havell.” Third Text 16, no. 3 (2002): 313–16. ———. “E. B. Havell and Rabindranath Tagore: Nationalism, Modernity, and Art.” Third Text 14, no. 53 (2000): 19–30. ———. “E. B. Havell: The Art and Politics of Indianness.” Third Text 11, no. 39 (1997): 3–19. Jay, Martin. “From Modernism to Post-Modernism.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe, edited by T. C. W. Blanning, 260–81. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Johnstone, Hilda. “History and Art.” Contemporary Review 149 (April 1936): 455–56. Johnstone, William. Child Art to Man Art. London: Macmillan, 1941. ———. Creative Art in England from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. London: Stanley Nott, 1936. Jones, Ernest. “Artistic Form and the Unconscious.” Mind 44, no. 1 (October 1935): 496–98. ———. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 3, The Last Phase, 1919–1939. London: Hogarth, 1957. Jowitt, Harold. The Principles of Education for African Teachers in Training. London: Longmans, 1932. ———. Suggested Methods for the African School. With a foreword by T. Percy Nunn. London: Longmans, 1934. Juler, Edward. Grown But Not Made: British Modernist Sculpture and the New Biology. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Junod, Philippe. Transparence et opacité: Essai sur les fondements théoriques de l’art modern. Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon, 2004. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of the Power of Judgment.

Bibliography

191

Edited and translated by Paul Guyer with Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kapur, Geeta. “When Was Modernism in Indian Art?” In When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, 297–324. New Delhi: Tulika, 2000. Kaufman, Robert. “Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde.” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 354–84. ———. “Red Kant or the Persistence of the Third ‘Critique’ in Adorno and Jameson.” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 682–724. Kelly, Michael, ed. Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. 2nd ed. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. “Preface to the First Edition.” In Kelly, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 1:xxxi–xxxviii. Khullar, Sonal. “National Tradition and Modernist Art.” In The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, edited by Vasudha Dalmia and Rashmi Sadana, 163–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ———. Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. King, Catherine, ed. Views of Difference: Different Views of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the Open University, 1999. Kinross, Robin. “Herbert Read and Design.” In Goodway, Herbert Read Reassessed, 145–62. Klingender, Francis. Animals in Art and Thought: To the End of the Middle Ages. Edited by Evelyn Antal and John Harthan. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971. ———. “Content and Form in Art.” In Rea, Five on Revolutionary Art, 37–38. ———. Goya in the Democratic Tradition. New ed. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1968. ———. Marxism and Modern Art: An Approach to Social Realism. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1943. ———. “Review of Art in the USSR.” Eye: The Martin Lawrence Gazette 1, no. 2 (October 17, 1935): 2–4. ———. “Revolutionary Art Criticism.” Left Review (October 1935): 38–40. Reprinted in Margolies, Writing the Revolution, 124–28. Page references are to reprint. Kobi, Valérie. “The Limits of Connoisseurship: Attribution Issues and Mistakes; An Introduction.” Journal of Art Historiography 16 (June 2014). https://arthistoriography.files .wordpress.com/2017/05/kobi-introduction.pdf. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Kramnick, Jonathan, and Anahid Nersessian. “Form and Explanation.” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 3 (Spring 2017): 650–99.

192

Bibliography

Krauss, Rosalind E. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. ———. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. ———. Perpetual Inventory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. ———. Under Blue Cup. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. ———. “A View of Modernism.” Artforum 11, no. 1 (September 1972): 48–51. Reprinted in Perpetual Inventory, 115–28. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. Page references are to reprint. Kubler, George. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962. Kulka, Tomáš. Kitsch and Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Laity, Cassandry. “Editor’s Introduction: Beyond Baudelaire, Decadent Aestheticism, and Modernity.” Modernism/​ Modernity 15, no. 3 (September 2008): 427–30. Lambert, R. S, ed. Art in England. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1938. Lang, Karen. Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Langdale, Alan. “Interviews with Michael Baxandall.’” Journal of Art Historiography 1 (December 2009): 1–3. https: //​ arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/​2011/​02/​media_​ 139141_​en.pdf. Laski, H. J. The Decline of Liberalism. Lecture Delivered on 24 May 1940 at Canterbury Hall, London School of Economics, London. London: Oxford University Press, 1940. Lasko, Peter. The Courtauld Institute of Art and Art History in Britain: A Talk Given to the Friends of the Courtauld Institute. London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 1975. Latour, Bruno. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History 45 (Winter 2014): 1–18. ———. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. ———. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. ———. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Laurie, A. P. “The Identification of Forged Pictures.” Magazine 50, no. 289 (June 1927): 342–43. Lawrence, Christopher, and Anna-K. Mayer, eds. Regenerating England: Science, Medicine, and Culture in Inter-War Britain. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Leaper, Hana. “Old Fashioned Modern: Claude Flight’s LinoCuts and Public Taste in the Interwar Period.” Modernist Cultures 11, no. 3 (November 2016): 389–408. Leavis, F. R. Education and the University: A Sketch for an “English School.” London: Chatto and Windus, 1943.

———. Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture. Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930. ———. New Bearings in English Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972. First published 1932 by Chatto and Windus (London). ———. “Under Which King, Bezonian?” In For Continuity, 160–75. Cambridge: G. Fraser, Minority Press, 1933. Leavis, F. R., and Denys Thompson. Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness. London: Chatto and Windus, 1933. Lee, Vernon. The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913. LeMahieu, D. L. A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Lemke, Sieglinde. Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Lennsen, Anneke. “The Two-Fold Global Turn.” ARTMargins 7 (2018): 83–99. Lethaby, W. R. “Art and Workmanship.” Imprint 1 (January 1913): 1–2. Reprinted in Form in Civilization: Collected Papers on Art and Labour, 208–13. London: Oxford University Press, 1922. Page references are to reprint. ———. Form in Civilization. London: Oxford University Press, 1922. Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Levinson, Jerrold. “Defining Art Historically.” British Journal of Aesthetics 19, no. 3 (1979): 232–50. ———. “Extending Art Historically.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 411–23. ———. “Refining Art Historically.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 21–33. Levinson, Marjorie. “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122, no. 2 (March 2007): 558–69. Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lewis, Wyndham. The Letters of Wyndham Lewis. Edited by W. K. Rose. London: Methuen, 1963. ———. “Roger Fry’s Rôle of Continental Mediator.” Tyro: A Review of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Design 1 (1921): 3–5. Listowel, William Francis Hare. “The Aesthetic Doctrines of Samuel Alexander.” Philosophy 14, no. 54 (April 1939): 180–91. ———. A Critical History of Modern Aesthetics. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1933.

———. “The Present State of Æsthetics in This Country.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 35, no. 1 (June 1935): 195–208. ———. Review of Aesthetics and Psychology, by Charles Mauron, translated by Roger Fry and Katherine John. Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 68, no. 394 (January 1936): 58. ———. Review of The Aesthetic Theories of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, by I. A. Knox. Philosophy 12, no. 47 (July 1937): 349. ———. Review of Roger Fry and Other Essays, by Howard Hannay. Philosophy 12 (July 1937): 349–50. Loran, Erle. Cézanne’s Composition: Analysis of His Form with Diagrams and Photographs of His Motifs. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. First published in 1946. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Lubbock, Jules. ‘“To Do a Leavis on Visual Art’: The Place of F. R. Leavis in Michael Baxandall’s Intellectual Formation.” In Michael Baxandall, Vision, and the Work of Words, edited by Peter Mack and Robert Williams, 25–47. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. ———. The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550–1960. New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, 1995. Lyon, Robert. “An Experiment in Art Appreciation.” Listener, May 29, 1935. Reprinted in Art in England, edited by R. S. Lambert, 118–23. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1938. Page references are to reprint. MacDiarmid, Hugh. “Writers’ International Controversy.” Left Review (February 1935): 182. Reprinted in Margolies, Writing the Revolution, 43. Page references are to reprint. MacIntyre, Alasdair. A Short History of Ethics. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1998. MacLagan, Eric. “Leonardo in the Consulting Room.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 42, no. 238 (January 1923): 54, 57–58. Macpherson, Sandra. “A Little Formalism.” ELH 82, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 385–405. Maginnis, Hayden B. J. “Reflections on Formalism: The Post-Impressionists and the Early Italians.” Art History 19, no. 2 (June 1996): 191–207. Mandler, Peter. “How Modern Is It?” Review of From William Morris to Sergeant Pepper, by Peter Stanskey; Singular Continuities, edited by George K. Behlmer and Fred Leventhal; Modern Life and Modern Subjects, by Lisa Tickner; and The Avant-Garde in Interwar England, by Michael Saler. Journal of British Studies 42 (April 2003): 271–82. ———. “John Summerson, 1904–1992. The Architectural Critic and the Quest for the Modern.” In After the Victori-

Bibliography

193

ans: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain, Essays in Memory of John Clive, edited by Mandler and Susan Pedersen, 231–48. London: Routledge, 1994. Mandler, Peter, and Susan Pedersen, ed. After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain, Essays in Memory of John Clive. London: Routledge, 1994. Manghani, Sunil. “Image Theory.” In Kelly, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 3:422–26. Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. “The New Modernist Studies.” PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 2008): 737–48. Marcus, Laura. The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Margolies, David, ed. Writing the Revolution: Cultural Criticism from “Left Review.” London: Pluto, 1998. Margolis, Joseph. Selves and Other Texts: The Case for Cultural Realism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Marriott, Charles, A. B. Walkley, Henry J. Watt, Edward Bullough, and C. W. Valentine. “Mind and Medium in Art (I–V).” British Journal of Psychology 11, no. 1 (October 1920): 1–54. Massey, Anne. The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–1959. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Mathur, Saloni. “A Retake of Sher-Gil’s Self-Portrait as Tahitan.” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 515–44. Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion, 1998. Mauron, Charles. “The Rôle of the Amateurs.” In Æsthetics and Psychology, translated by Roger Fry and Katherine John, 11–15. London: L. V. and Woolf, 1935. Mayhew, Arthur. Review of Education: Its Data and First Principles, by Thomas Percy Nunn. Oversea Education 2 (January 1, 1931): 98. McConkey, Kenneth. Memory and Desire: Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. McCreless, Patrick. “Formalism, Fair and Foul.” Nonsite 8 (January 2013). http: //​nonsite.org/​article/​ formalism-fair-and-foul. McDowall, Steward A. Beauty and the Beast: An Essay in Evolutionary Aesthetic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920. McGann, Jerome. “Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of Criticism Once Again.” Critical Inquiry 2, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 605–30. McInnes, G. Campbell. “Canadian Water-Colours.” Studio 112 (October 1936): 208–9. Melius, Jeremy. “Connoisseurship, Painting, and Personhood.” Art History 34, no. 2 (April 2011): 288–309. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics

194

Bibliography

Reader. Edited by Galen A. Johnson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Milton, Arthur. The Lure of the London Galleries: A Record of Beauty and Romance. London: Mills and Boon, Ltd, 1925. Mitter, Partha. Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850– 1922: Occidental Orientations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. “Decentering Modernism: Art History and AvantGarde from the Periphery.” Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (December 2008): 531–48. ———. Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. ———. The Triumph of Modernism: Indian Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947. London: Reaktion Books, 2007. ———. “Western Orientalism and the Construction of Nationalist Art in India.” Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 1 (1995): 140–43. Molesworth, Charles. The Capitalist and the Critic: J. P. Morgan, Roger Fry, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Moran, Richard. “Formalism and the Appearance of Nature.” In Abbot, Michael Fried and Philosophy, 117–28. Morehead, Allison. Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Morelli, Giovanni. Die Werke Italienischer Meister in den Galerien von München, Dresden und Berlin: Ein Kritischer Versuch. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1880. Morgan, Benjamin. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Morphet, Richard. “Roger Fry: The Nature of His Painting.” Burlington Magazine 112 (July 1980): 462, 478, 481–89. Morris, Lynda, and Robert Radford. The Story of the AIA: Artists International Association, 1933–1953. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1983. Moxey, Keith. “Nostalgia for the Real: The Troubled Relation of Art History to Visual Studies.” In The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History, 103–23. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. ———. Visual Time: The Image in History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Mulhern, Francis. The Moment of “Scrutiny.” London: New Left Books, 1979. Murray, J. M. “Aims and Ideals.” Rhythm 1, no. 1 (Summer 1911): 36. Nanay, Bence. Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Nash, Paul. “Art and Industry: The Royal Academy Exhibition.” Times, February 18, 1935. Reprinted in Paul Nash: Writings on Art, edited by Paul Causey, 113. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Page references are to reprint. ———. “The Artist and Industry.” Week-end Review, September 24, 1932. Reprinted in Paul Nash: Writings on Art, edited by Andrew Causey, 81–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Page references are to reprint. ———. “For, But Not With.” Axis (January 1935): 24–26. Reprinted in Paul Nash: Writings on Art, edited by Andrew Causey, 110–12. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Page references are to reprint. Naylor, Gillian. The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of Its Sources, Ideals, and Influence on Design Theory. 2nd ed. London: Trefoil, 1990. Neer, Richard. “Connoisseurship and the Stakes of Style.” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 1 (Autumn 2005): 1–26. Nehamas, Alexander. “Fate for Socrates’ Reason: Foucault on the Care of the Self.” In Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault, 157–88. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. ———. Foreword to The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of Subjectivity, by Alain Renaut, vii–xviii. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. ———. “Plato and the Mass Media.” In Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates, 279–302. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Newton, Eric. The Artist and His Public. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1935. ———. European Painting and Sculpture. 4th ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1956. Nunn, Thomas Percy. “An Educational Institute for Empire.” Oversea Education 3 (October 1931): 6–11. ———. Education: Its Data and First Principles. London: E. Arnold, 1920. ———. “The New Education Fellowship.” Oversea Education: A Journal of Educational Experiment and Research in Tropical and Subtropical Areas 1 (January 1930): 33–37. O’Donnell, C. Oliver. Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates: Art Through a Modern American Mind. Forthcoming. Ogbechie, Sylvester Okwunodu. Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008. Ogden, Charles Kay, and I. A. Richards. “First Steps in Psychology.” Psyche 2, no. 1 (July 1921): 67–79. Reprinted in John Constable, Collected Shorter Writings, vol. 9, edited by Richards, 36–52. London: Routledge, 2001. Page references are to reprint. ———. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism.

With an introduction by J. P. Postgate and supplementary essays by B. Malinowski and F. G. Crooskhank. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner, 1923. Ogden, Charles Kay, I. A. Richards, and James Edward Hathorn Wood. The Foundations of Aesthetics. Edited by George Constable. London: Routledge, 2001. First published 1922 by George Allen and Unwin (London). Oguibe, Olu. The Culture Game. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Okeke-Agulu, Chika. Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Olodi, Ola. “Art and Nationalism in Colonial Nigeria.” In Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa, edited by Clémentine Deliss and Jane Havell, 192–94. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1995. Onabolu, Aina. A Short Discourse on Art. Lagos: printed by the author, 1920. Osborne, Harold. “Professor Louis Arnaud Reid.” British Journal of Aesthetics 26, no. 4 (Autumn 1986): 309–10. Panofsky, Erwin. “The Early History of Man in a Cycle of Paintings by Piero di Cosimo.” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1, no. 1 (July 1937): 12–30. ———. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939. Papapetros, Spyros. “Animism.” In Kelly, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 1:91–96. ———. On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Paraskos, Michael. Rereading Read: New Views on Herbert Read. London: Freedom Press, 2007. Pater, Walter. “Amiel’s ‘Journal Intime.’” In Essays from “The Guardian.” 1901. Reprint, London: Macmillan, 1910. ———. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Edited with an introduction by Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. ———. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. With introduction and notes by Kenneth Clark. London: Fontana, 1961. First published 1873 by Macmillan (London). ———. “The School of Giorgione.” In The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 126–44. With introduction and notes by Kenneth Clark. London: Fontana, 1961. ———. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Edited with an introduction by Matthew Beaumont. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Peden, Knox. “Grace and Equality, Fried and Rancière (and Kant).” In Abbot, Michael Fried and Philosophy, 189–205. Pederson, Susan. “Modernity and Trusteeship: Tensions of Empire in Britain Between the Wars.” In Meanings of Modernity: Britain in the Age of Imperialism and World

Bibliography

195

Wars, edited by Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger, 203–20. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Pevsner, Nikolaus. An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937. ———. Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960. First published 1936, as Pioneers of the Modern Movement, by Faber and Faber (London). Pezzini, Barbara. “The Burlington Magazine, The Burlington Gazette, and The Connoisseur: The Art Periodical and the Market for Old-Master Paintings in Edwardian London.” Visual Resources 29, no. 3 (September 2013): 154–83. ———. “More Adey, the Carfax Gallery, and ‘The Burlington Magazine.’” Burlington Magazine 153, no. 1305 (December 2011): 806–14. Pick, Frank. “Is ‘Modern’ Art a Sham?” Studio 113 (February 1927): 74. Pippin, Robert B. After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. ———. “Authenticity in Painting: Remark’s on Michael Fried’s Art History.” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 575–98. ———. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Podro, Michael. “Art History and the Émigré Scholars.” In Die Europäische Herausforderung: England und Deutschland in Europa, edited by Adolf M. Birke and Kurt Kluxen, 81–91. Munich: Saur, 1987. Pollock, Griselda. “Art History and Visual Studies in Great Britain and Ireland.” In Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, edited by Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, and Hubert Locher, 355–78. Brill: Leiden, 2012. ———. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London: Routledge, 1999. Pooke, Grant. Francis Klingender, 1907–1955: A Marxist Art Historian Out of Time. London: Gill Vista Marx Press, 2007. Potter, Matthew C. The Inspirational Genius of Germany: British Art and Germanism, 1850–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Potter, Norman. “Herbert Read: Word and Object, in Response to Robin Kinross.” In Goodway, Herbert Read Reassessed, 163–76. Preston, Aaron. Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion. London: Continuum, 2007. Prettejohn, Elizabeth. Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2007. ———. Beauty and Art, 1750–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

196

Bibliography

———. “From Aestheticism to Modernism, and Back Again.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 2 (May 2006). http: //​doi.org/​10.16995/​ntn.440. ———. Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. ———. “Out of the Nineteenth Century: Roger Fry’s Early Art Criticism.” In Green, Art Made Modern, 31–44. Price-Jones, Gwilym. “Roger Fry and Æsthetic Criticism.” Criterion 15 (January 1935): 181–92. Prown, Jules David. “Style as Evidence.” Winterthur Portfolio 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1980): 197–210. Raby, F. J. E, ed. The New Learning: A New Contribution to a General View of the World. London: I. Nicholson and Watson, 1933. Radford, Robert. Art for a Purpose: The Artists’ International Association, 1933–1953. Winchester: Winchester School of Art Press, 1987. Ramazani, Jahan. “Form.” In A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, edited by Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, 114–29. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Rampley, Matthew. “The Idea of a Scientific Discipline: Rudolf von Eitelberger and the Emergence of Art History in Vienna, 1847–1873.” Art History 34, no. 1 (February 2011): 54–79. ———. The Vienna School of History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Rancière, Jacques. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Translated by Zakir Paul. London: Verso, 2013. ———. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009. Rattray, R. S. Religion and Art in Ashanti. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927. Rea, Betty, ed. Five on Revolutionary Art. London: Wishart, 1935. Read, Herbert. Annals of Innocence and Experience. London: Faber and Faber, 1940. ———. Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design. 2nd ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1944. ———. Art and Society. London: Heinemann, 1937. ———. Art Now. London: Faber and Faber, 1933. ———. “The Art of Primitive Peoples.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 67, no. 388 (July 1935): 42. ———. Collected Essays in Literary Criticism. London: Faber and Faber, 1938. ———. Education Through Art. 1943. Reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1945. ———. “Farewell to Formalism.” Art News 51 (1952): 36–39. ———. Fonds. MacPherson Library, University of Victoria. ———. The Grass Roots of Art: Lectures on the Social Aspects of

Art in an Industrial Age. Rev. ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1955. ———. Introduction to Goya in the Democratic Tradition, by F. D. Klingender, vii–xii. New ed. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1968. ———. The Meaning of Art. London: Faber and Faber, 1931. ———. The Philosophy of Anarchism. London: Freedom Press, 1940. ———. The Politics of the Unpolitical. London: Routledge, 1943. ———. Preface to Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century, by Michael Sullivan, 7–8. London: Faber and Faber, 1959. ———. Review of Last Lectures, by Roger Fry. Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 75, no. 440 (November 1939): 215. ———. “The Situation of Art in Europe.” In The Philosophy of Modern Art: Collected Essays, 36–52. New York: Meridian Books, 1957. ———. Surrealism. London: Faber and Faber, 1936. ———. “What Is Revolutionary Art?” In Rea, Five on Revolutionary Art, 11–22. Read, Richard. “Art Criticism Versus Art History: The Letters and Works of Adrian Stokes and E. H. Gombrich.” Art History 16, no. 4 (December 1993): 499–540. ———. “Vico, Virginia Woolf, and Adrian Stokes’s Autobiographies: Fantasy, Providence, and Isolation in Post-War British Aesthetics.” Art History 35, no. 4 (September 2012): 778–95. Reed, Christopher. Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. ———. “Making History: The Bloomsbury Group’s Construction of Aesthetic and Sexual Identity.” In Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History, edited by Whitney Davis, 189–224. New York: Haworth Press, 1994. ———, ed. A Roger Fry Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Rees-Leahy, Helen. “‘For Connoisseurs’: The Burlington Magazine, 1903–1911.” In Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, edited by Elizabeth Mansfield, 231–45. London: Routledge, 2002. Reid, Louis Arnaud. “Beauty and Significance.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 29 (1928–29): 123–54. ———. A Study of Aesthetics. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931. Reynolds, Joshua. Discourses Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy. Edited by Roger Fry. London: Seeley, 1905. Rhodes, Colin. “Burlington Primitive: Non-European Art in the Burlington Magazine Before 1930.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 146, no. 1211 (2004): 98–104. Richards, I. A. Collected Shorter Writings, 1919–1938. Edited by John Constable. London: Routledge, 2001.

———. “Four Fermented Aesthetics.” Art and Letters, n.s. 2, no. 4 (Autumn 1919): 186–93. ———. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. Edited by John Constable. London: Routledge, 2001. First published 1929 by Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner (London). ———. The Principles of Literary Criticism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1926. Richardson, Mary. Art and the Child. With an introduction by Kenneth Clark. London: University of London Press, 1948. Rivers, W. H. R. Instinct and the Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920. Roberts, David D. “Croce in America: Influence, Misunderstanding, and Neglect.” Humanitas 8, no. 2 (1995): 3–34. Robins, Anna Gruetzner. A Fragile Modernism: Whistler and His Impressionist Followers. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. ———. “Walter Sickert and the Language of Art.” In Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle, edited by Grace Brockington, 27–48. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. Roelofs, Monique. “Anti-Aesthetic.” In Kelly, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 1:101–5. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Rose, Nikolas. The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics, and Society in England, 1869–1939. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. Rose, Sam. “Close Looking and Conviction.” Art History 40, no. 1 (February 2017): 156–77. ———. “The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory.” New Literary History 48, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 223–44. ———. “Formalism in Art Criticism.” In Kelly, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2:213–16. ———. “The Significance of Form.” Nonsite 20 (January 2017). http://​nonsite.org/​feature/​the-significance-of-form. ———. “‘With an Almost Pathetic Fatality Doing What Is Right’: Late Sickert and His Critics.” Art History 37, no. 1 (February 2014): 126–47. Ross, Denman. A Theory of Pure Design: Harmony, Balance, Rhythm. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907. Rothenstein, John. British Art Since 1900. London: Phaidon Press, 1962. Rothenstein, William. “The Development of Indigenous Art.” Oversea Education 1 (October 1929): 3–6. Rowntree, B. Seebohm. Poverty and Progress: A Second Social Survey of York. London: Longmans, 1941. Rubin, Adrianne. Roger Fry’s “Difficult and Uncertain Science”:

Bibliography

197

The Interpretation of Aesthetic Perception. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013. Rubin, William, ed. “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984. Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice. Vol. 2, The Sea-Stories. London: George Allen, 1900. Russell, Bertrand. Archives. McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario. ———. “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description.” In The Problems of Philosophy, 25–32. London: Williams and Norgate, 1912. Rutter, Frank. “The Triumph of Design.” In Evolution in Modern Art: A Study of Modern Painting, 1870–1925, 140–62. London: George G. Harrap, 1926. Sadleir, Michael. Michael Ernest Sadler (Sir Michael Sadler K.C.S.I.): A Memoir by His Son, 1861–1943. London: Constable, 1949. Sadler, Michael. “Articles on African Art in ‘The Burlington Magazine.’” Journal of the Royal African Society 41, no. 162 (January 1942). ———, ed. The Arts of West Africa (Excluding Music). With an introduction by William Rothenstein. London: Published for the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures by the Oxford University Press, 1935. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Saler, Michael. The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. “The Earthly Paradise of the London Underground.” In Avant-Garde in Interwar England, 92–121. ———. “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review.” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 692–716. ———. “Morris, the Machine, and Modernism, 1915–1934.” In Avant-Garde in Interwar England, 61–91. ———. “Waste Lands and Silly Valleys: Wittgenstein, Mass Culture, and Re-Enchantment.” In The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, edited by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, 56–71. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Santayana, George. The Sense of Beauty, Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896. Saw, Ruth L. “E. F. Carritt.” British Journal of Aesthetics 4, no. 1 (1964): 3–6. Saxl, Fritz. “The History of the Warburg Library (1886– 1944).” Drafted ca. 1943, supplemented with material from 1944. Reprinted in Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 325–38. 2nd ed. Oxford: Phaidon, 1986. Page references are to reprint. Schaper, Eva. Review of Modern Aesthetics: An Historical

198

Bibliography

Introduction, by Earl of Listowel. Philosophy 44, no. 167 (1969): 74. Schwartz, Frederic J. Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Scruton, Roger. “Photography and Representation.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 3 (Spring 1981): 577–603. Segal, Hannah. “A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 33, no. 2 (1952): 196–207. Sewell, Arthur. The Physiology of Beauty. London: Kegan Paul, 1931. Shaw, Samuel. “Scarcely a Scholar: William Rothenstein and the Artist as Art-Writer in English Periodicals, ca. 1890–1910.” Visual Resources 31 (2015): 45–60. Shiff, Richard. Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ———. “Constructing Physicality.” Art Journal 50 (Spring 1991): 42–47. ———. Doubt. New York: Routledge, 2008. ———. “From Primitivist Phylogeny to Formalist Ontogeny: Roger Fry and Children’s Drawings.” In Discovering Child Art: Essays on Childhood, Primitivism, and Modernism, edited by Jonathan Fineberg, 157–200. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. ———. “Ingemination.” Art History 37, no. 4 (September 2014): 764–83. ———. “Original Copy.” Common Knowledge 3, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 88–107. ———. “The Original, the Imitation, the Copy, and the Spontaneous Classic: Theory and Painting in NineteenthCentury France.” Yale French Studies 66 (1984): 27–54. ———. “Representation, Copying, and the Technique of Originality.” New Literary History 15, no. 2 (Winter 1984): 333–63. Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher with an introduction by Gerald L. Bruns. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990. Shusterman, Richard. “Entertainment: A Question for Aesthetics.” British Journal of Aesthetics 43, no. 3 (2003): 289–307. ———. “Mutations of Objectivity.” In T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, 41–76. London: Duckworth, 1988. ———. T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism. London: Duckworth, 1988. Sickert, Walter. “Mesopotamia-Cézanne.” New Age, March 5, 2014, 569–70. Reprinted in Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art, edited by Anna Greutzner Robins, 339. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Page references are to reprint.

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Smith, Bernard. Modernism’s History: A Study in TwentiethCentury Art and Ideas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Smith, J. A. The Nature of Art: An Open Letter to the Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924. Smith, Paul. “Cézanne’s ‘Primitive’ Perspective, or the ‘View from Everywhere.’” Art Bulletin 95, no. 1 (March 2013): 102–19. ———. “Cézanne’s Primitive Self and Related Fictions.” In The Life and the Work: Art and Biography, edited by Charles Salas, 45–75. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007. ———. “‘Real Primitives’: Cézanne, Wittgenstein, and the Nature of Aesthetic Quality.” In Value, Art, Politics: Criticism, Meaning and Interpretation after Postmodernism, edited by Jonathan Harris, 93–122. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Smith, Vincent A. A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911. Spalding, Frances. Roger Fry: Art and Life. 2nd ed. Norwich: Black Dog Books, 1999. Stair, Julian. “Critical Writing on English Studio Pottery, 1910–1940.” Ph.D. diss., Royal College of Art, 2002. ———. “The Employment of Matter: Pottery of the Omega Workshops.” In Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshops, 1913–1919, edited by Alexandra Gerstein, 27–33. Exhibition catalogue. London: Courtauld Gallery in association with Fontanka, 2009. Stallabrass, Julian. “Conservatism and Class Difference in Twentieth-Century British Art.” In The History of British Art, 1870–Now, edited by Chris Stephens, 120–51. London: Tate Publishing, 2008. ———. “Elite Art in an Age of Populism.” In Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, edited by Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Perling Hudson, 39–49. Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2013. ———. “High Art Lite at the Royal Academy.” Third Text 12, no. 42 (Spring 1998): 79–84. Stansky, Peter. On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. ———. Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and Crafts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Steele, Tom. “Circles of Modernism: Arnold Hauser, Herbert Read, and the Emergence of Art History in Leeds.” In Paraskos, Rereading Read, 112–19. ———. The Emergence of Cultural Studies: Adult Education,

Cultural Politics and the “English” Question. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997. Steele, Tom, and Colin Titmus. Adult Education for Independence: The Introduction of University Extra-Mural Work into British Tropical Africa. Leeds: Study of Continuing Education Unit, School of Education, University of Leeds, 1995. Steiner, Wendy. The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation of Modern Literature and Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Stephens, Chris. “Ben Nicholson: Modernism, Craft, and the English Vernacular.” In The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880–1940, edited by David Peters Corbett, Fiona Russell, and Ysanne Holt, 225–47. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Stephens, Jessica. “The Royal Scottish Academy Exhibition.” Studio 86 (August 1923): 68. Stephenson, Andrew. “Strategies of Display and Modes of Consumption in London Art Galleries in the Inter-War Years, c. 1919–40.” In The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939, edited by Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, 98–125. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. ———. “‘Telling Decoratively’: Ben Nicholson’s White Reliefs and Debates Around Abstraction and Modernism in the Home in the Late 1920s and 30s.” Visual Culture in Britain 9, no. 2 (2008): 43–60. Steyn, Juliet. “Realism Versus Realism in British Art of the 1950s.” Third Text 22, no. 2 (2008): 145–56. Stirton, Paul. “Frederick Antal.” In Hemingway, Marxism and the History of Art, 45–66. Stokes, Adrian. The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes. Edited by Lawrence Gowing. 3 vols. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978. ———. Inside Out: An Essay in the Psychology and Aesthetic Appeal of Space. London: Faber and Faber, 1947. ———. Smooth and Rough. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. ———. Venice: An Aspect of Art. London: Faber and Faber, 1945. Stokes, John. “‘It’s the Treatment, Not the Subject’: First Principles of the New Art Criticism.” In In The Nineties, 33–52. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Stonebridge, Lyndsey. The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Suga, Yasuko. “‘Purgatory of Taste’ or Projector of Industrial Britain? The British Institute of Industrial Art.” Journal of Design History 16 (2003): 167–85. Summers, David. “‘Form,’ Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description.” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 372–406. ———. Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. London: Phaidon, 2003.

Bibliography

199

Summerson, John. “The Mischievous Analogy.” In Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture, 195–218. London: W. W. Norton, 1949. Tansley, A. G. The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1920. Tekiner, Deniz. “Formalist Art Criticism and the Politics of Meaning.” Social Justice 33, no. 2 (June 2006): 31–44. Teukolsky, Rachel. The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Thistlewood, David. “Herbert Read’s Organic Aesthetic: [I] 1918–1950.” In Goodway, Herbert Read Reassessed, 215–32. Thomas, Trevor. Review of The Arts of West Africa, by Michael Sadler. Folklore 46, no. 1 (June 1935): 186–87. Thompson, E. P. “Christopher Caudwell.” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 305–53. ———. “The Long Revolution.” New Left Review 9 (May–June 1961): 24–29, and 10 (July–August 1961): 34–39. Reprinted in E .P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left, edited by Cal Winslow, 187–214. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014. References are to reprint. Thompson, Matthew. Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Thorburn, J. M. Art and the Unconscious. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1925. Thorburn, J. M., A. H. Hannay, and P. Leon. “Symposium: Artistic Form and the Unconscious.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 13 (1934): 119–58. Thornton, Alfred, and Ronald Gordon. “The Influence of Certain Psychological Reactions in Painting.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 36, no. 206 (May 1920): 251–54. Tillotson, G. H. R. “A Painter of Concern: Critical Writings on Amrita Sher-Gil.” India International Centre Quarterly 24, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 57–72. Tillyard, Stella. The Impact of Modernism, 1900–1920: Early Modernism and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Edwardian England. London: Routledge, 1988. Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art? Translated by Aylmer Maude. London: Walter Scott, 1898. Tomlinson, R. R. Crafts for Children. London: Studio, 1935. ———. Picture Making by Children. Edited by C. G. Holme. London: Studio, 1934. Turner, Sarah Victoria. “‘Alive and Significant’: ‘Aspects of Indian Art,’ Stella Kramrisch and Dora Gordine in South Kensington c 1940.” Wasafiri 27, no. 2 (2012): 40–51. ———. “Crafting Connections: The India Society and the Formation of an Imperial Artistic Network in Early Twentieth-Century Britain.” In India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, edited by Susheila Nasta, 96–114. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

200

Bibliography

———. “The ‘Essential Quality of Things’: E. B. Havell, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Indian Art and Sculpture in Britain, c. 1910–14.” Visual Culture in Britain 11, no. 2 (2010): 239–64. Twitchell, Beverley H. Cézanne and Formalism in Bloomsbury. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987. Uglow, Luke. “Giovanni Morelli and His Friend Giorgione: Connoisseurship, Science, and Irony.” Journal of Art Historiography 11 (December 2014). https://​arthistoriography .files.wordpress.com/​2014/​11/​uglow.pdf. “The University of London Institute of Education.” Oversea Education 3 (July 1932): 183–86. Valentine, C. W. An Introduction to the Experimental Psychology of Beauty. Rev. ed. London: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1919. Ventrella, Francesco. “Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes and the Modernization of Scientific Connoisseurship.” Visual Resources 33 (2017): 117–39. Wagner, Ann M. Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Wainwright, Leon. Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Walkowitz, Rebecca. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Walpole, Hugh. Preface to Catalogue of an Exhibition of Paintings by W. R. Sickert A.R.A. Exhibition catalogue. London: Savile Gallery, 1928. Waterhouse, E. K. Review of Art History and Connoisseurship, by W. G. Constable. Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 74, no. 430 (January 1939): 50. Weibel, Peter. “Globalization and Contemporary Art.” In The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, edited by Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel, 20–27. Karlsruhe: ZKM, Center for Art and Media, 2013. Whitehead, Clive. “‘Oversea Education’ and British Colonial Education, 1929–63.” History of Education 32, no. 5 (September 2003): 561–75. Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist—Part I.” In The Major Works, edited with an introduction by Isobel Murray, 241–66. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Wilenski, R. H. “Art as Experience.” Studio 12 (August 1936): 111. ———. Modern French Painters. 2nd ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1944. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961. Willis, Kirk. Review of Civilising Caliban: The Misuse of Art, 1875–1980, by Frances Borzello, and The Impact of Modernism, 1900–1920: Early Modernism and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Edwardian England, by S. K. Tillyard. Albion 22, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 167–69.

Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968. Witt, Robert. “The Courtauld Institute of Art.” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 61, no. 356 (November 1932): 231–32. ———. “Courtauld Institute of Art: Laboratory for Scientific Research.” Wallace Collection, Correspondence and Papers. Reference no. AR 1/​566, National Archives, Kew. Wolff, Janet. AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Wölfflin, Heinrich. The Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. Translated by M. D. Hottinger. London: George Bell and Sons, 1932. Wollaeger, Mark. Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, edited by Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, 3–25. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Wollheim, Richard. “Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship.” In On Art and the Mind, 177–201. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974. First published 1973 by Allen Lane (London). ———, ed. The Image in Form: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. ———. “On Formalism and Pictorial Organization.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 127–37. ———. On Pictorial Organization. Lawrence: Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, 2002. ———. “On Pictorial Representation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 217–26. ———. Painting as an Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. ———. “Pictorial Style: Two Views.” In The Concept of Style, edited by Berel Lang, 183–202. Rev. ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.

———. Preface to The Invitation in Art, by Adrian Stokes, ix– xxxii. London: Tavistock, 1965. ———. Socialism and Culture. London: Fabian Society, 1961. ———. “Style in Painting.” In The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts, edited by Caroline van Eck, James McAllister, and Renee van de Vall, 37–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. The Thread of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Wood, Christopher S. “Image and Thing: A Modern Romance.” Representations 133, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 130–51. Wood, Paul. Western Art and the Wider World. Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2013. Woodmansee, Martha. “Uses of Kant in England.” In The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, 111–48. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson. Vol. 6, 1936–1941. London: Hogarth Press, 1980. ———. Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown. London: Hogarth Press, 1924. ———. Roger Fry: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1940. ———. Walter Sickert: A Conversation. London: Hogarth Press, 1934. Wygant, Foster. “A Conversation with Sir Herbert Read.” Art Education 20 (December 1967): 32–35. Yashiro, Yukio. Sandro Botticelli. London: Medici Society, 1925. Younghusband, Francis, ed. Conference on Indian Art Held at the British Empire Exhibition on Monday, June 2, 1924, Under the Auspices of the India Society. London: India Society, n.d. Yusaf, Shundana. Broadcasting Buildings: Architecture on the Wireless, 1927–1945. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. Zola, Émile. Écrits sur l’art. Edited by Jean-Pierre LeducAdine. Paris: Gallimard, 2003.

Bibliography

201

Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. abstract art, 6, 8, 11, 21, 24, 31, 103, 106, 109, 115–16, 125, 153, 155 academic philosophers and communicative idea, 41–44 Adorno, Theodor, 87 Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, 133–34, 135 aesthetes, 82, 93, 95–96 aesthetic “purely practical,” 51 reintroduction of, by Berenson and Fry, 27–30 aesthetic beauty, Fry on, 32, 104–5, 109 aesthetic criticism, 54–57 aesthetic education, 132–38, 140, 148 aesthetic failure, 150–51 aestheticism British, 6 formalism and, 11–12, 23, 32, 56 mass culture and, 74–75 as social criticism, 92–97 twentieth-century critics of, 80–84 See also Morris, William; Pater, Walter; Ruskin, John aestheticist formalism, 12 aesthetic judgment, 3–5, 158 See also “Picasso-manqué” judgments aesthetics art history and, 62–63, 65–69 Croce on, 41–42, 43–44 as discipline, 68–69 history of, 13–14 Read and, 61–62 “re-creation” and, 81–92 Richards on, 40–41 use of term, 14 aesthetic traditions, 157–58 Africa, aesthetic education in, 133–38 AIA (Artists’ International Association), 114, 116, 119–20, 125 Ainslie, Douglas, 41 Alexander, Samuel, 43–44 Alloway, Lawrence, 112 American Society of Aesthetics, 68, 69 Anand, Mulk Raj, Hindu View of Art, 141

anarchism, 91, 112, 170n92 See also Read, Herbert Anstruther-Thomson, Clementine, 50 Antal, Frederick, 115 anti-aesthetic stance, 8 antiessentialist modernism, 155–57 Archer, W. G., India and Modern Art, 138 Arnold, Matthew, 54, 83 art as such, concept of, 6 art criticism disinterested critical attitude in, 51–53 formalist, 49–61, 67 modern, 35 science of, 50, 61–62 use of form in, 22–23 See also art writing; connoisseurship; critics art for art’s sake, 6, 81–82, 92–93, 95, 115–16 art-historical formalism, 53 art history, 27, 61, 62–63, 65–69 artistic creativity, as universal in nature, 133 artistic personality, 27, 29–31, 37, 57–61, 66 artists attribution of works of, 26, 27–30, 33–34, 63–65 communion between critics, viewers, and, 3–5 Artists’ International Association (AIA), 114, 116, 119–20, 125 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, 108 Arts Council of Great Britain, 128 art writing aesthetic theories and, 3 Fry on, 55 Marxist, 113–20 metaphors used in, 11 as pointer to significant forms of works, 23 use of term, 14 See also art criticism; critics Ashbee, C. R., 109 Ashington Group, 117, 119 Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, 116

attributions of authorship, 26, 27–30, 33–34, 63–65 authenticity cultural, 129, 176n2 formalism and, 127, 145–46 Fry and, 35 in India, 138–45 logic of high formalist universality and, 150–51 machine production and, 100 Marxist art writing and, 118 rise of mass culture and, 101–2 routes to, 130 signifiers of, 150 See also attributions of authorship Axis (journal), 106 Baldovinetti, Alesso, Portrait of a Lady, 33, 34 Balfour, Arthur, 41 Barnes, Albert, 128 Barr, Alfred, 128 Barron, Phyllis, 108 Barton, J. E., 78, 111 Baudelaire, Charles, 26, 35 Bauhaus, 109–10, 125 Baxandall, Michael, 53–54, 67, 85, 169n62 BBC (British Broadcasting Council), 77, 78 belatedness, 138, 150–51, 153 Bell, Clive on aesthetic criticism, 54 Art, 20, 21–22, 24, 82 Fry and, 20–21 modernist project and, 6, 8 philistines and, 78 on prevailing critical theory, 46–47 significant form and, 5, 21–23 Bell, Vanessa, 21, 119 Bengal school, 142, 144, 149 Benjamin, Walter, 87 Berenson, Bernard, 27–30, 43, 57, 63 Berger, John, 114, 125–26 Bertram, Anthony, 78, 111, 119 Binyon, Laurence, 24, 44 Black, Misha, 125 Blessed, George, Whippets, 119, 149

203

Bloomsbury group, 5, 20–21, 77, 84, 94, 101, 109 Blunt, Anthony, 65, 66, 102, 115–16, 118–19, 121–22, 124 Bombay School of Art, 142 Bomberg, David, In the Hold, 24, 25 Bosanquet, Bernard, 21, 32, 44 Botticelli, Sandro, 33, 55–56 Bradley, A. C., 42, 94 Breuer, Marcel, 108 British Broadcasting Council (BBC), 77, 78 British Institute of Adult Education, 77, 78–79, 148 British Institute of Industrial Art, 107 British Society of Aesthetics, 128 Brueghel, Pieter, The Fall of Icarus, 58–60, 59 Buermeyer, Laurence, 93 Bulley, Margaret, 44–46, 62, 110 Bullough, Edward, 62 Burlington Magazine Ainslie articles in, 41 Bulley and, 44 connoisseurship and, 32 Constable and, 85 debate over technical analysis in, 63 Fry and, 33 history and influence of, 161n28 pottery in, 103 Burt, Cyril, 62, 133 Cameron, Julia Margaret, Juliet Stephen (née Jackson), 99, 99 Caravaggio, 53, 72–73, 73 Cardew, Michael, 108 Carr, Herbert Wildon, 41 Carrington, Noel, 110 Carritt, E. F., 41, 44, 69 Casson, Stanley, 78 Caudwell, Christopher, 115 Cavalcaselle, Giovanni Battista, 27 Cavell, Stanley, 152, 155, 177n2 Cézanne, Paul Bell and, 21 Collingwood on, 42–43 Fry on, 38, 48–49, 60–61 House and Farm at Jas de Bouffan, diagram of, 22 Kubler on, 9 “Post-Impressionism,” 78 as postimpressionist, 48 P. Smith on, 146 Still Life with Apples, 49

204

index

child art, 131 cinema, criticism of, 75, 80 Clark, Kenneth, 44, 66, 82, 175n106 Clark, T. J., 9, 81, 87, 94–95, 97 Clutton-Brock, Alan, 23, 111 Clutton-Brock, Arthur, 41, 82–83, 113 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 6 Collingwood, R. G., 41, 42–44, 79, 92–93 communication and form, 9, 10 communicative theory academic philosophers and, 41–44 Bell and, 46–47 as broadly embraced, 39–40 Constable and, 85 formalism of Fry and, 33–39 popularizing writers and, 44–46 Richards and, 40–41 connoisseurship, 14, 25–31, 33–38, 50–52, 57, 62–65, 68, 85, 161n28 Constable, W. G., 64, 65, 85, 148 contingency and form, 151–58 Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish, 139–40, 141 Courbet, Gustave, La femme au podoscaphe, 113 Courtauld Institute, 63, 64, 65 Cousin, Victor, 6 Coxon, Raymond, Art, 77 critics communion between viewers, artists, and, 3–5 connoisseurship and, 26–31 See also art writing; specific critics Croce, Benedetto, 41–42, 43–44 Crowe, Joseph Arthur, 27 cubism, 138 culture, high and low, 73–74 Damisch, Hubert, 153 Danto, Arthur, 69 Daumier, Honoré, 35 Davis, Whitney, 157 See also postformalism Day-Lewis, Cecil, 114, 115, 122, 123 decorative qualities of art, 28, 32, 93–94, 103 Deineka, Aleksandr, 116 Denis, Maurice, 26 design Fry and, 102, 104–5 industrial, and art, 106–13 mass culture and, 84 Omega Workshops and, 100–101 role of, 46

utopian social aims of, 104, 107 Design and Industries Association (DIA), 106–7, 108, 110, 125 Dewey, John, 83–84, 85 disinterested critical attitude, 51–53 Dismorr, Jessica, 24 documentary movement, 117 Duchamp, Marcel, 12 Duve, Thierry de, 153 Duveen, Joseph, 64 Eliot, T. S., 76 Elkins, James, 150, 179n89 Empire Art Exhibition, Royal British Colonial Society of Artists, 148 engagement active/passive binary of, 85–87 with external world, 10–12 Enwonwu, Ben, 136 escapism, art as, 80, 82, 84, 87, 91–92, 95 ethical ideal of formalism, 80, 97 Euston Road school realists, 119 Evans, Myfanwy, 106 Exhibition of British Industrial Art, Dorland Hall, 108 Exhibition of Old Masters, Grafton Galleries, 25–26 expression Carritt and, 44 Croce and, 41, 42 Fry and, 22–23, 40, 46, 127 individualized, 147 representation and, 18–19, 23–24 film, Fry on, 75 Finberg, A. J., 83 Flam, Jack, 150–51 Focillon, Henri, 10, 98–99 form. See significant form formalism/formalist modernism affordances and, 3, 9 art criticism and, 49–61, 67 art-historical, 53 attacks on, 92–95 authenticity and, 127, 145–46 definition of, 6–10 ethical ideal of, 80, 97 as ethically and politically motivated, 11–12 formalist modernism and, 6–13, 80–81 global modernism and, 152–58 Greenberg and, 8

high, 5 illustration of, 7 Kant and, 1, 6 literary and visual, 76–77 Marxist art writing against, 113–20 modernist project and, 6, 8 new formalism and, 160n27 nonhuman, 160n29 photography and, 98–100 politics of high and low culture and, 74–75 Read and, 128 realism and, 113–14 re-creation and, 83–92 Richards and, 85 Russian, 9, 19–20 simplified and dogmatic view of, 6–8, 20–25 tendencies toward, 32 traditional view of, 6–8, 10–11, 80–81 See also connoisseurship; Fry, Roger; Read, Herbert Frankfurt School, 22 French impressionism, 38 French symbolism, 6 Fried, Michael, 11, 87, 129, 155 Friedländer, Max, 51, 52 Frith, William Powell, Railway Station, 21 Fry, Roger aesthetic criticism and, 54–55, 56–57 aesthetic education and, 134 aestheticist attitude and, 93–94 on art-historical formalism, 53 on art history, 65–66 arts and crafts movement and, 102 attribution of authorship by, 33–34 Bell and, 20–21 Buermeyer on, 93 Bulley and, 44, 45 on Caravaggio, 53, 72 career and writings of, 18 Cézanne, 60–61 on Cézanne, 48–49 connoisseurship and, 27, 28, 30 consequence of aesthetics of, 70 Constable and, 85 on Courbet, 113 Courtauld Institute and, 63 design activity of, 102 “Essay in Aesthetics,” 21, 46 Exhibition of Old Masters, 25–26 on expression, 22–23, 40, 46, 127 on The Fall of Icarus, 58–60

on film, 75 formalism of, 32–39 on form and communication, 19 on French impressionism, 38 machine production and, 103, 104–5 on Manet, 35, 38 Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition and, 18–19, 20, 35 as modernist, 5–6 modernist project and, 6, 8 naturalism and, 38–39, 130–31, 136 notes on Leonardo da Vinci, 28 Omega Workshops and, 100–101, 103 painting of, 150 on photography, 99–100 postimpressionism and, 130–31, 137–38 on “purely practical” aesthetic, 51 Read and, 102, 105 reproduction of Klee by, 104, 105 “Retrospect,” 48 on sculpted figure, 3–5 “The Seicento,” 72 Sickert and, 35–36 significant form and, 5, 23 Slade Lectures of, 62 on A. Tagore, 142 universalism and, 136 Vision and Design, 36 Fuller, Peter, 171n107 Garman, Douglas, 123 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 24 Gauguin, Paul, 18, 38, 78 Gill, Eric, 107, 112, 141 global modernism, 15, 129, 149, 152–58 global postimpressionism, 147–48 Goldwater, Robert, 128 Gombrich, Ernst, Story of Art, 66 Goodman, Nelson, 69 Gorell Committee, 105, 108 Grant, Duncan, 21, 119 Green, T. H., 90, 91 Greenberg, Clement aesthetic judgment and, 158 commentators on, 155 conventions and, 154 defense of modernist culture by, 81 essays of, 128–29 essentialism and, 156 ethical value of visual arts and, 77 formalist modernism and, 8 high formalism and, 5 influence of, 67

on intention, 31 on Manet, 38 mass culture and, 124 on postimpressionism, 147–48 rejection of passive and, 87 Grigson, Geoffrey, 94, 102, 110 Gropius, Walter, 108–9 Guys, Constantin, 35 Hahn Leonardo court case, 64 Harrison, Charles, 87–89, 95 Hastings, Jack, 116, 117, 121, 124 Hauser, Arnold, 115 Havell, Ernest Binfield, 139–40, 141, 142 Hélion, Jean, 109 high culture, 77–78, 103, 113, 126–27 high formalism, rejuvenation of, 5 high formalist universality, 149–51 Hind, Arthur, 24 historians, modernist, 66 historical production of objects, 9–10 Hoggart, Richard, 124 Holme, C. G., 112 Horne, Herbert, on Birth of Venus, 55–56 Hulme, T. E., 24–25 imagination, political valence of appeal to, 90–92 impartiality, claims to, 51–52 inauthenticity, 153 India, authenticity and early modernism in, 138–45 India Society, 139 individual, 90–92 industry and art, 105, 106–13 inference by beholders, 3 “inner eye” doctrine, 140–41 intelligence of artworks, 3 intention in action, 147 form and, 26–31, 140 introspection, as critical tool, 50–51, 57 intuition, 3 Jamin, Paul Joseph, The Vandal with His Share of the Spoils, 87–88, 89 Johnston, Edward, 108 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 6 Khullar, Sonal, 145 kitsch, 74, 81, 124 Klee, Paul, Der Beladene, 104, 105

index

205

Klingender, Francis, 102, 114, 115–16, 120, 124–25 Krauss, Rosalind, 87, 129, 154–56 Kubler, George, 9, 156–57 Larcher, Dorothy, 108 Laurie, A. P., 64 Leach, Bernard, 108 Leavis, F. R., 67, 76, 77, 81–82, 122–23 Lee, Vernon, 50 Left Review, 114–15, 117, 122 Lenin, Vladimir, 124–25 Lethaby, W. R., 41, 110 Lewis, Wyndham, 24, 94 liberalism, socialized, 90 Lippi, Filippino, Three Archangels with Tobias, 29 Listowel, William Francis Hare, 42, 52–53, 69, 85 literary criticism, social task of, 76–77 Loran, Erle, 21, 22 low culture, 75–80, 85–87, 94, 98, 100 See also escapism, art as MacCarthy, Desmond, 18–19 MacColl, D. S., 24 machine production acceptance of, 109–10 fitness for purpose and, 110–11 Fry and, 103, 104–5 low culture and, 98, 100 politics of, 111–12 Read on, 105–6, 109, 110–11, 112 Mairet, Ethel, 108 makers. See artists making contact, form and, 9 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 55 Manet, Édouard, 18, 35, 38, 39, 88–90 Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition, Grafton Galleries, 18–19, 20, 35 Marcuse, Herbert, 122 Marxism in art writing, 113–20 mass culture and, 120–27 mass culture and Marxism, 120–27 Mathur, Saloni, 145 Matisse, Henri, Marguerite, 132 Mauron, Charles, 165n15 memory drawing, 135, 140–41 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 146 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 108 Milton, Arthur, The Lure of the London Galleries, 77–78

206

index

Mitter, Partha, 138, 139, 144, 150, 153, 158 modernism accounts and themes of, 8 antiessentialist, 155–57 global, 15, 128, 149, 152–58 in India, 138–45 in Nigeria, 135–38 planetary 152, 158, 180n96 principles of, 151–52 rejection of passive and, 87–90 See also formalism modernist project, 6, 8 modernity 8, 13, 76, 80, 109, 115, 122, 149, 152 Moholy-Nagy, László, 108 Monet, Claude, 38 Morelli, Giovanni, 27 Morris, William aesthetic discontent and, 82–83 Clutton-Brock on, 113 ethical ideals of, 80 Fry and, 100, 102 Marxists and, 124, 125 Read on, 101, 108 utopian ideal of, 96–97 mortar of Handroanthus chrysanthus wood, 2 Moxey, Keith, 152, 153 Munro, Thomas, 128 Murray, K. C., 135, 136 Murray, William Staite, 103, 108 Nash, Paul, 106, 108 natural beauty, 23, 32, 104, 109 naturalism civilization and, 131–32 Coomaraswamy and, 141 Fry and, 38–39, 130–31, 136 Havell on, 140 high culture and, 77–78 optical, 135, 142 postimpressionism as turn from, 100 A. Tagore and, 143 new formalism, 160n27 New Liberalism, 90–91 Newton, Eric, 111, 120 Nigeria, aesthetic education in, 135–38 Nunn, Thomas Percy, 84, 85, 133, 134 objective criticism, 51–53 Ogbechie, Sylvester, 136 Oguibe, Olu, 136 Okeke-Agulu, Chika, 136

Oloidi, Ola, 136 Omega Workshops, 100–101, 103 Onabolu, Aina, 135–36, 137, 137–38 organization, form as, 9–10, 19 originality, 129 Osborne, Harold, 69 Panofsky, Erwin, 65–66 Partisan Review, 124 passivity, 75–80, 85–90 Pater, Walter on aesthetic criticism, 54 art writing of, 11 criticism of, 49 Fry and, 27, 55, 56 The Renaissance, 54 “The School of Giorgione,” 82 Peach, Harry, 107 performative paradigm of work as invitation, 12 Peri, Peter, 116, 121 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 109–10 photography and formalism, 98–100 “Picasso-manqué” judgments, 138, 142–43, 150–51 Pick, Frank, 107, 109, 111 pictorial “complexity,” 72–73, 87 pictorial organization, purposiveness of, 37–38, 39, 68 Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, 7 Piero di Cosimo, Hylas and the Nymphs, 33–34 Pimenov, Yuri, 116 Piper, John, 106 Pippin, Robert, 156, 176n2 Pleydell-Bouverie, Katherine, 108 Podro, Michael, 67 political valence of appeal to imagination, 90–92 politics of formalism, 11–12 of high and low culture, 74–75 of industrial design, 111–12 pop art, 112, 155 popular and commercial art aestheticism and, 92–97 commentary on, 73–74, 112 design theory and, 112–13 Fry on, 72 passivity and, 75–80 transparency of, 74 populism and Marxism, 120–27 postformalism, 10, 129, 156–57, 159n4

postimpressionism, 35–36, 38–39, 78, 130–31, 137–38, 147–48 Pound, Ezra, 24 Pre-Raphaelites, Fry on, 94 Price-Jones, Gwilym, 55 primitivism, 129–33, 144–51, 153–54 Primitivism exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, 151 process, form as product of, 9–10, 11 See also connoisseurship psychology and art, 49–50, 62, 87, 133 public sphere, British, 75–76 Rancière, Jacques, 87 Read, Herbert aesthetics of, 61–62 on appreciation of art, 51–52 Art and Industry, 79, 105–6, 108–9 British Society of Aesthetics and, 69 on Chinese painting, 130 Courtauld Institute and, 63 on Croce, 42 Education Through Art, 120 ethical value of visual arts and, 77 Euston Road school realists and, 119 formalism and, 128 on 40,000 Years of Modern Art exhibition, 129–30 Fry and, 102, 105 The Grass Roots of Art, 125–26 on high culture, 126–27 on machine production, 109, 110–11, 112 mass design and, 101 philistines and, 78 Politics of the Unpolitical, 85–86 on popular culture, 79–80, 112 on re-creation, 83 Ruskin and, 83 social anarchism and, 91, 126, 132–33 realism formalism and, 113–14 Klingender, Blunt, and, 116–20, 125, 126 socially motivated, 124 Western, appropriation of, 135–36, 138 “real primitives,” 146–47 re-creation aestheticism and, 81–83 formalism and, 11, 62, 83–92 visual culture and, 80 See also connoisseurship Reed, Christopher, 159n10

Reid, Louis Arnaud, 42, 69 representation Bell on, 21 Blunt on, 116, 118 conservative upholders of, 24 crisis of, 13 expression and, 18–19 Nash and, 106 norms of, 33, 81 Wollheim on, 68 See also naturalism reverse appropriation, 130, 136–38 Richards, I. A. on arts and values, 84 on Bloomsbury, 94 formalism and, 85 Fry compared to, 77 practical criticism and, 40–41 psychology and, 50 Reid on, 42 teaching of English literature and, 76 Richardson, Marion, 44, 132, 133, 134 Rivera, Diego, 116, 121 Ross, Denman, Theory of Pure Design, 33 Rothenstein, William, 24 Rowntree, Seebohm, 80 Roy, Jamini, 144, 144–45 Royal College of Art, 108 Rubin, William, 151 Ruskin, John, 11, 55, 80, 82–83, 96 Russell, Bertrand, 165n9 Russian formalism, 9, 19–20 Sadler, Michael, 102 Santayana, George, 27, 43, 79 Sargent, John Singer, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 45 Saxl, Fritz, 65, 66 science of art, 62–63, 69–70 science of art criticism, 50, 61–62 scientific criticism, 50–51, 57 Scruton, Roger, 98 Seated Musician sculpture, 3–5, 4 Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, 25 Sekoto, Gerard, 137, 137, 138 self-development and liberalism, 90–92 Sher-Gil, Amrita, 144, 145 Shiff, Richard, 150 Shklovsky, Viktor, 9 Sickert, Walter, 35–36, 37 significant form, 5, 7, 20–25, 42 Smith, J. A., 41

Smith, Paul, 146–47 Smith, Tony, Die, 2 social criticism, aestheticism as, 92–97 socialism, ethical, 90–91 Society for Education through Art, 128, 132 Society of Easel Painters (OST), 116 Spencelayh, Charles, Why War?, 120–21, 123 Stevens, G. A., 135 Stokes, Adrian, 66, 95, 96, 97 structure, form as, 9–10, 19–20 Studio (magazine), 107, 108, 112 style, authentic, 147–50 Sully, James, “Aesthetics,” 32 Summers, David, 159n4 Sweeney, James Johnson, 128 synaesthesis, 40–41 Tagore, Abanindranath, 139–43, 143 Tagore, Gaganendranath, 138, 139 Tagore, Rabindranath, 144, 145 technique of originality, 150 temporality, 152, 153–54 Thompson, G. H., 124 Trowell, Margaret, 135 universalism, 129–30, 133, 135, 136, 141, 145–51 utopian social aims of modernist design, 104, 107 Valckenborch, Lucas van, Winter Landscape with Snowfall Near Antwerp, 87, 88 Vadde, Aarthi, 151 van Gogh, Vincent, 18, 38 viewers communion between critics, artists, and, 3–5 as creating works in contemplation, 12–13 as naïve spectators, 74, 79 as re-creators, 84–85 viewing, 13, 19 See also viewers visual culture engagement with, 10–13 high, 80–92 low, 75–80 mandating, 112 use of term, 5 Vlaminck, Maurice de, Bathers, 150–51 vorticist group, 24

index

207

Walpole, Hugh, 36 Warburg, Aby, 65 Warburg Institute, 65, 67 Waterhouse, Ellis, 64 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 75 Webb, Sidney, 107 Weibel, Peter, 12 Wilde, Oscar, 54 Wilenski, R. H., 120, 169n51 Williams, Raymond, 124

208

index

Wölfflin, Heinrich, 1, 53–54 Wollheim, Richard analytic aesthetics and, 69 on art history, 67–68 on aesthetes, 95–96 on authentic style, 147 on socialism, 92 Socialism and Culture, 86, 124 on Stokes, 97 Woolf, Virginia, 19, 20, 36, 55, 102

working class culture, 120–27 world-making sense of form, 9–10, 12 Yashiro, Yukio, 55, 56 Zola, Émile, 26

A Series Edited By Jonathan Eburne

rm

refiguring modernism

arts l i t e r at u r e s sciences

Refiguring Modernism features cutting-edge interdisciplinary approaches to the study of art, literature, science, and cultural history. With an eye to the different modernisms emerging throughout the world during the twentieth century and beyond, we seek to publish scholarship that engages creatively with canonical and eccentric works alike, bringing fresh concepts and original research to bear on modernist cultural production, whether aesthetic, social, or epistemological. What does it mean to study modernism in a global context characterized at once by decolonization and nationbuilding; international cooperation and conflict; changing ideas about subjectivity and identity; new understandings of language, religion, poetics, and myth; and new paradigms for science, politics, and religion? What did modernism offer artists, writers, and intellectuals? How do we theorize and historicize modernism? How do we rethink its forms, its past, and its futures?

Other Books in the Series David Peters Corbett The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914

Abigail Gillman Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler

Juli Highfill Modernism and Its Merchandise: The Spanish Avant-Garde and Material Culture, 1920–1930

Jordana Mendelson Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929–1939

Stephen Petersen Space-Age Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Postwar European Avant-Garde

Damien Keane Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication

Barbara Larson The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon

Stefanie Harris Mediating Modernity: Literature and the “New” Media, 1895–1930

Allison Morehead Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form

Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg, eds. The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere

Michele Greet Beyond National Identity: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy for Andean Art, 1920–1960

Margaret Iversen Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes

Paul Smith, ed. Seurat Re-viewed

Stephen Bann, ed. The Coral Mind: Adrian Stokes’s Engagement with Architecture, Art History, Criticism, and Psychoanalysis Charles Palermo Fixed Ecstasy: Joan Miró in the 1920s Marius Roux The Substance and the Shadow Aruna D’Souza Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint

David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson, eds. Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity David Getsy From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art Jessica Burstein Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art Adam Jolles The Curatorial AvantGarde: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France, 1925–1941

Laura Kalba Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art Catherine Walworth Soviet Salvage: Imperial Debris, Revolutionary Reuse, and Russian Constructivism Jo Applin, Catherine Spencer, and Amy Tobin, eds. London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent, and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–1980 Erik M. Bachman Literary Obscenities: U.S. Case Law and Naturalism after Modernism Lori Cole Surveying the Avant-Garde: Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines Elizabeth Pender and Cathryn Setz, eds. Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism