Romantic Moderns

I recently saw an episode of Escape to the Country where the mystery house was of a modernist design. The reaction of mother and daughter to this interior was typically British in that they loved its clean lines and open spaces but couldn’t see themselves feeling at home living within its spotless minimalism.

In her Afterword to Romantic Moderns, Alexandra Harris tells a similar story of visiting the V&A for its landmark exhibition on Modernism and moving:

"past cabinets full of competitively patterned tributes to man’s ornamenting instinct, and then – silence. A heavy mahogany door swung shut and I was in an immaculate world of suspended spirals, steel tubes, and slick, shiny architectural models. Manifestos, neatly typed, occupied the walls in orderly agreement about the aims of design in the twentieth century: ‘espousal of the new’, ‘rejection of history and tradition’, ‘embrace of abstraction’, the desire to ‘invent the world from scratch’.

There were few English contributions on display because the curator saw Englishness and modernism as being antithetical; modernism was cosmopolitan and English art was pastoral.

Harris’ book is a sustained plea for a more nuanced look at English responses to modernism than was the case in the V&A’s exhibition. The book is an expansive overview of architecture, art, conservation, cookery, criticism, gardening, literature, music, religion, restoration, topography and tourism which enlists modernists such as T.S. Eliot, John Piper and Virginia Woolf in a modern English renaissance celebrating the particularity of the English climate, localities and homes.

The career of Piper in some senses is illustrative of this story with an early milestone being his involvements with the modernist 7 and 5 Society and Axis, the modernist journal edited by his wife Myfanwy. Yet he moves from the creation of purist abstracts to celebrate and record, in forms that are both romantic and modern, an English provincial world of old churches and stately homes. Harris’ book provides the wider context into which Frances Spaldings’ magisterial biography of John and Myfanwy Piper sits and the reading of both will illuminate this fascinating period of English cultural life.

Ultimately, Harris’ book reads more as an elegy for a passing period of privilege than as a manifesto for a national engagement with modernism. The continuing influences of the English renaissance which she documents seem primarily to lie in the fields of conservation, restoration and tourism while not all the initiatives she notes are followed into their present manifestations.

This is certainly true of the revival of the commissioning of art for churches where in the chapter entitled ’Parish News’ Harris summarises the achievements of George Bell and Walter Hussey. Their legacy, however, does continue into the present as has recently been documented by the Commission exhibition and book; an engagement with contemporary art which still to some extent negotiates between the romantic and modern.

At the end of the ‘Parish News’ chapter Harris quotes Stephen Spender as saying that Piper and Eliot among others were linked in their commitment to the ‘idea of the sacred’. This perception is not developed further, however, meaning that a mystical strand of Romantic Modernism, as seen for example in the exploration of spirituality through imagined landscapes and worlds (which can be found in the paintings of Cecil Collins and David Jones and in the writings of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams), is not explored.

More surprising still in terms of omissions are the minimal references to the Neo-Romantics with no mention at all of the work of Michael Aryton, John Craxton or Keith Vaughan, among others. Neither is there mention of the major Church commissions undertaken by Piper and Graham Sutherland, perhaps because these tended to result in more obviously modernist creations as, in Piper’s case, where such commissions facilitated his return to abstraction.

Nevertheless, Harris largely succeeds in making an expansive and original case for an English renaissance in this period. However, in making the case that this renaissance valued the local and particular, it would seem that she also succeeds in confirming the modernist belief in the provincialism and pastoralism of English art.

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OMD - Maid of Orleans.