Fry Art Gallery and Gibberd Gardens

On the way to Saffron Walden and the Fry Art Gallery, I called in to Thaxted Parish Church to see their painting by Stanley Clifford-Smith, the most mystical of the Great Bardfield artists.

Clifford-Smith was an active member of the Great Bardfield Artists community during the mid to late 1950s and became the Honorary Secretary of the group. Clifford-Smith and the other Bardfield artists exhibited in the large 'open house' shows in the rural village in 1954, 1955 and 1958 as well as several one-off exhibitions and touring shows in the late 1950s. These exhibitions attracted thousands of visitors and made the art community famous thanks to press, radio and TV coverage.

Clifford-Smith's work in the 1950s was diverse and included Irish and Italian landscapes, images of ships, as well as hypnotic 'mother and child' portraits. He received many positive press reviews for his work while at Great Bardfield. In 1958 he moved to the Old Bakehouse in Great Bardfield with his family., and during the late 1950s he began to teach art in Cambridge. In the early 1960s the Great Bardfield art community fragmented and Clifford-Smith and his family (which now included four sons) moved to Little Baddow Hall near Chelmsford. During his time at Little Baddow he painted mainly thickly textured monochrome moon portraits, works inspired by the 1960s interest in space.

Following his death, several exhibitions were organised; a retrospective at the Minories, Colchester (1969), Little Baddow Hall Arts Centre (1979) and at the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden (1998). His work is included in several collections including the University of Cambridge, Benjamin Britten Foundation, Aldeburgh, Suffolk; the Beecroft Art Gallery, Southend, Essex; and Thaxted Church, Essex.

The Fry Public Art Gallery was opened in 1987 and houses an impressive number of paintings, prints, illustrations, wallpapers and decorative designs by artists of the 20th century and the present day who have local connections and have made a significant contribution to their field. There is an emphasis on those who for a variety of reasons settled in Great Bardfield between the early thirties of the last century and the death in 1983 of John Aldridge RA who had lived in the village for fifty years.

Apart from the Great Bardfield Artists, after the end of World War II, north west Essex became the home for a later group of younger, more radical artists, embracing neo-romantic ideals. These were Michael Ayrton, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, and Keith Vaughan. The Fry Art Gallery has good holdings of these artists and are delighted that the Ingram Collection has lent further works by Ayrton and Vaughan as well as Graham Sutherland, John Craxton and John Minton for the exhibition 'A World of Private Mystery: British Neo-Romantics'.

An additional exhibition 'Art and Design' draws from the Gallery's Permanent Collection works which emphasise the contribution which the artists made to British design.

At St Mary's Saffron Walden is a sculpture of 'Mary' by Tessa Hawkes. The sculpture portrays her as a young and vulnerable woman, receiving the news from the angel Gabriel that she is to be the mother of Jesus, God's Son. Outside in Dorset House Garden is ‘The Children of Calais’ by Ian Wolter. The sculpture portrays six British children as refugees caught in the present migration crisis. Their poses echo Auguste Rodin’s famous 'The Burghers of Calais', completed in 1895. 'The Children of Calais' was unveiled on 8th June 2018 by Lord Alf Dubs.

I then went to the Gibberd Garden in Harlow to see more sculptures. The Gibberd Garden is an inspirational and fascinating Grade II listed garden. Created between 1957 and 1984 by Sir Frederick Gibberd, Master Planner of Harlow New Town and leading post-war architect, it is acknowledged to be one of the most important 20th century gardens in the country. The garden occupies 9 acres of a 14 acre site on the side of a small valley, sloping down to the Pincey Brook. It is full of sculptures and what Sir Frederick called ‘decorative objects’, including ceramic pots and items of architectural salvage. It has lawns, pools, streams and glades, a dramatic mature lime avenue, a brookside walk, a wild garden, an arboretum and a moated castle with a drawbridge. In making his garden Sir Frederick fulfilled his ambition to create a work of art. It is loved and admired by garden designers, professional gardeners and the many visitors who are captivated by its unique atmosphere.

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Robert Randolph and the Family Band - Baptise Me.

ArtWay meditation: Emmaus mosaic by John Piper

My latest meditation for ArtWay has been published today. It concerns the Emmaus mosaic by John Piper at St Paul's Harlow.

Here is some brief context to the production of the mosaic:

Visitors to British Design 1948 - 2012, an exhibition in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Year at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, were confronted by one third of John Piper’s huge mural created for the Festival of Britain and depicting varying forms of British architecture. Home and Land were key themes of the Festival of British where the English Neo-Romantic sensibility exemplified by Piper was prominently featured. Often viewed as nostalgic for its recognition of indigenous tradition and landscape, Neo-Romanticism actually aimed, as art critic Peter Fuller argued, to redeem the threatened and injured land.

Piper’s mural was selected by Frederick Gibberd, masterplanner of Harlow New Town, to be gifted to Harlow at the end of the Festival of Britain. The mural was installed on the wall of Harlow Technical College's main assembly room, where it remained until the college re-located in 1992. The design of Harlow New Town reflected the Festival of Britain style; light structures, picturesque layout and incorporation of works of art. So it was appropriate that the huge collection of public art Gibberd assembled for Harlow (to the extent that the Town is now known as a sculpture town) also included a mosaic by Piper for St Paul’s Harlow.

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Leigh Nash - Saviour, Like A Shepherd Lead Us (Blessed Saviour).

Beyond Airbrushed from Art History: Oisín Kelly and Patrick Pye

Two artists not included in Theology and Modern Irish Art by Gesa E. Thiessen but who have made significant contributions to religious art in Ireland are Oisín Kelly and Patrick Pye.

Oisín Kelly was one of the most versatile figures in Irish sculpture: "In 1949, Kelly received his first Church commission from the architect Liam McCormick. Thereafter, religious themes and motifs were a consistent element in his output. Indeed, he was arguably one of the few artists capable of producing religious artworks which had a genuine religious feeling - the result of deep but simple conviction, without rhetoric or sentimentality, though often with a touch of humour.

In 1951, Kelly became a member of the Committee of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art ... [In 1966 he] received a commission for a statue for the new Liberty Hall in Dublin. (The statue, 'Working Men' was subsequently relocated to City Hall, Cork. Another of Kelly's sculptures, 'The Children of Lir' was sited in the Garden of Remembrance, Dublin ...

In addition to religious and commemorative work, Kelly excels in studies of birds and animals - for example, his work 'Birds Alighting' - and small scale sculpture such as, 'The Dancing Sailor'. As a sculptor, he was equally comfortable with wood, stone, or metalwork like bronze and steel, and in stature he was the foremost Irish sculptor of the generation who emerged at the beginning of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art."

Patrick Pye started painting in 1943 under the sculptor Oisín Kelly. "He has completed many major commissions on religious themes, including Glenstal Abbey, Co. Limerick; Church of the Resurrection, Belfast; Convent of Mercy, Cookstown, Co. Tyrone (1965); Fossa Chapel, Killarney (1977); a triptych illustrating man's expulsion from the Garden of Eden at Bank of Ireland headquarters (1981); and Stations of the Cross for Ballycasheen Church in Killarney (1993). Recent commissions include an altarpiece, stained glass windows and roundels for a rebuilt church at Claddaghmore, Co. Armagh (1997-98); a crucifix for Our Lady of Lourdes church in Drogheda (1999); The Life of Our Lady, a six-panel painting on copper for the North Cathedral in Cork (1999); The Transfiguration, a 10-foot wallhanging for St. Mary's Oratory at NUI Maynooth (2000) and The Baptism of Christ, an oil painting for a new church at Drumbo, Belfast. The Royal Hibernian Academy exhibited Triptychs and Icons, a retrospective of his work, in 1997. Since the Millennium a large painting Theologian in his Garden has been acquired by St Thomas' University in St Paul (MN) for their Centre of Catholic Studies."

Brian McAvera argues in Patrick Pye: Life and Work that "Pye ... far from being on the periphery, is central to the Irish tradition and that he, along with a number of other English-born artists long resident in Ireland such as Camille Souter, reinvigorated the Irish tradition." McAvera also reviews Pye's influences:

"[Paul] Gauguin is ... a clear source, especially in a religious painting like Jacob Wrestling with the Angel with its flat areas of pure colour which are used non-naturalistically, whether for symbolic or expressive purposes. Gauguin, well aware of the decorative effect of colour - and Pye is a frankly decorative painter in terms of colour - also used strong outlines which, because of their patterned rhythms, often suggest the compositional structure of a stained glass window. Pye, who has been producing stained glass since the mid-1950s, and for whom luminosity is central, also structures in terms of patterned rhythms and strong outline shapes.

Gauguin, under whose influence they were formed, leads inevitably to the Nabis, and the Nabis are central to Pye and his use of colour. 'I am influenced by the Nabis. They are quite a concern of mine. I don't want to describe. I want to give a wholeness to the story. It is colour that is important. It's always directed towards the whole of our experience. Colour is what makes space. Line draws out from space. For me it's quite appropriate that Christian art should be abstracted, rather than descriptive'. That combination of the use of colour (symbolic, expressive, flat and often saturated), and abstraction rather than description, is of course precisely what marks out Gauguin's manner in his religious work, or, for that matter, other Pont-Aven artists such as Émile Bernard. It is also the hallmark of so many of the Nabis ... and the Irish artist sees a strong connection between abstracted art and Christianity, citing the tradition of Icons, El Greco and the Nabis, especially Maurice Denis, [Pierre] Bonnard and [Félix] Vallotton.

Denis, whose early work was very influenced by Gauguin, was, like Pye, a devout Catholic who wanted to re-invigorate contemporary religious painting ... his work often used pale, somewhat muted colours, but he emphasized flat patterning and was a markedly decorative painter ...

While Pye has always evinced a distinct liking for the English mystical tradition, the dominant English influence on him as a very young man was that of Neo-Romanticism. Of the nine artists featured in Malcolm Yorke's seminal study The Spirit of Place, five were mentioned by the artist: Paul Nash, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Robert Colquhoun and Keith Vaughan. Of these Nash and Sutherland are the key figures, 'Paul Nash was quite an influence on me; the little tiny photograph in the early volume [i.e. Penguin Modern Painters] of The Dead Sea. I still love Nash's sensuous quality of painting ...'

Graham Sutherland is probably a deeper influence ... The artist, noting that Sutherland 'converted [to Catholicism] in my childhood, being of my mother's generation', did a copy of The Blasted Oak, 'made a pilgrimage' to see the Northampton Crucifixion at St Matthew's Church, and also saw the tapestry at Coventry Cathedral and the Noli Me Tangere altarpiece at Chichester ...

Of the contemporary mystical painters both Cecil Collins and David Jones, visionaries who are sometimes considered Neo-Romantics, were of interest, But Stanley Spencer, in terms of impact, is probably close to Sutherland ... the artist's visionary quality of bringing the Bible into the present ... provide a parallel to Pye's work ...

Like so many of the twentieth-century European painters he admires, such as [Marc] Chagall, [Georges] Rouault or [Henri] Matisse ... he is a colourist who has created religious works which function equally well for the religious and the non-religious alike ...

Irish art begins to establish its own identity through the confluence of Northern Irish artists like [Colin] Middleton, [Gerard] Dillon, F.E. McWilliam, William Scott and George Campbell, alongside Southern ones like Louis le Brocquy, Jack B. Yeats, Brian Bourke, Nano Reid, Camille Souter, Mary Swanzy, Norah McGuiness and Evie Hone. Pye, like Bourke, le Brocquy and all of the previously mentioned female artists, is particularly interested in Modernism, especially in the abstracting elements and in the non-naturalistic use of colour. he builds on the foundations first established by these female artists, and then reinforced by Doreen Vanston, Elizabeth Rivers and many others, and like Bourke, Souter and Reid in particular, he develops an art whose taproots delve deeply into modernism."

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Van Morrison - Spirit. 

British Design 1948 - 2012 and 1948 Olympians

On entering British Design 1948 - 2012 at the V&A, one is confronted by one third of John Piper’s huge mural The Englishman’s Home created for the Festival of Britain 1951 and depicting varying forms of British architecture. Over 80 works created by many of Britain’s leading artists featured in the Festival of Britain, including other significant Neo-Romantic works such as Graham Sutherland’s mural The Origins of the Land.

Peter Fuller has argued that the work of the "best artists at the end of the 1930s and throughout the 1940s", such as Henry Moore, Sutherland, Piper, and even Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, "is stamped by a recognition of indigenous tradition, and of indigenous landscape: but it is not nostalgic; rather, the threatened and injured land emerges, again, as a metaphor, a wasteland redeemed through the aesthetic processes themselves."

Home and Land were key themes of the Festival of British and likewise are key themes too in the first room of this significant exhibition. At this time, as Fuller also notes, "the finest examples of the English neo-Romantic sensibility were greeted, literally, with worldwide acclaim." This influence can also be seen and felt in other sections of this opening to the exhibition.

Piper’s mural was selected by Sir Frederick Gibberd, masterplanner of Harlow New Town, to be gifted to Harlow at the end of the Festival of Britain. Gibberd assembled a huge collection of public art for Harlow (to the extent that it is now known as a Sculpture Town) including Moore’s Harlow Family Group, originally sited outside St Mary at Latton Church in Mark Hall. Piper also created an Emmaus mosaic for the Humphrys and Hurst designed modernist church of St Paul in Harlow Town Centre. Examples of Gibberd's designs plus Harlow Family Group feature in the exhibition.

An even more significant engaging of Neo-Romantic artists by the Church occurred through the design of the new Coventry Cathedral by Architect Basil Spence. Spence won the competition to design a new cathedral in 1951 and gathered a team of artists and craftspeople that included both Piper and Sutherland. Examples in this exhibition of work by many who were part of that team demonstrate that although consecrated in 1962, the new Cathedral typified the decorative modernism of the 1950s.

The engagement of the Church with artists such as Piper and Sutherland had been developed by Bishop George Bell and Canon Walter Hussey with St Matthew Northampton and Chichester Cathedral being the outstanding examples, after Coventry Cathedral itself. Bell and Hussey, like their French counterparts Père Regamy and Couturier, sought to work with the engage with the significant artists of their day, which in their case were primarily the Neo-Romantics. Yet Fuller notes that in less than a decade the influence of Neo-Romanticism had been lost and similarly this exhibition contains no other example of a nationally significant commission by the Church subsequent to Coventry Cathedral.

While the Church has continued to commission new work on the basis begun by Bell and Hussey, this exhibition suggests it has been unable to engage in any significant manner with the subversive strand of work - the counter-cultural movements from 1960s ‘Swinging London’, through to the 1970s punk scene and the emergence of ‘Cool Britannia’ in the 1990s- which are showcased in the exhibition’s second room. The only significant reference to Christianity, after Coventry, in this exhibition comes with Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy wallpaper where prescription drugs are given Biblical labels suggesting that healthcare has become our contemporary religion. The use Hirst makes of Christian references in this work suggests that Christianity has been superceded, an impression also given by the absence of Christian references in this exhibition after Coventry. In this way, the limitations of the Bell/Hussey, Couturier/Regamy approach become apparent as the mainstream art movements of the day may not share a natural affinity with the Church (particularly when the Church is seen as a part of which is to be subverted) and, if the focus is on engaging key mainstream artists, then less focus is paid to supporting emerging artists with a Christian faith able to engage effectively with the mainstream art world.

The 1948 and 2012 Olympics bookmark this exhibition. The ‘austerity games’ of 1948 (as they became known) took place at a time of economic crisis in a city devastated by bombing, but they provided a platform for reconciliation and reconstruction. In 2012 Britain welcomes the Olympics once more, and while the spirit remains, the context in which they are taking place has entirely changed. The exhibition tells the story of British fashion, furniture, fine art, graphic design, photography, ceramics, architecture and industrial products over the past 60 years. Highlighting significant moments in the history of British design, the exhibition looks at how the country continues to nurture artistic talent, as well as investigate the role that Britain’s manufacturing industry has played in the global market. It also examines the impact that Britain’s ideas-driven, creative economy has had on goods and design industries world-wide.

Similar sporting contrasts are also apparent in Katherine Green’s touring exhibition, currently at the Tokarska Gallery, 1948 Olympians. In 1948 London was recovering from war, athletes were truly amateur and therefore not paid. Athletes trained on rations whilst working full-time and raising children, they had to take unpaid leave to compete and many had to hand sew their own kits. When the Games were over, they returned to work and carried on as normal. Green’s images of the athletes that took part that year tell a story of a different age. For some shown here, sport became their lives, but for many it was a past time that practicalities meant they could not continue.

Green is a social documentary photographer based in London. Her work often focuses on the idea of community and what makes or bonds communities. She aims to highlight and celebrate members of the community who may otherwise go unseen. She says of this work: "At the same time as drawing parallels between 1948 and 2012 Olympic Games, I do hope these portraits and oral histories go some way to demonstrate the knowledge and experience of a valuable generation of people who are overlooked in our society. It has been a great privilege to spend time in the company of such interesting and modest people."

Green’s work therefore shows us some of those who have lived through the massive changes documented in broad outline by the V&A’s exhibition and offers an understated antidote to the lavish, opulent celebration of sport which will be the 30th Olympiad. If Britain has remained a global leader in design, sport or indeed any other fields, Green’s work suggests that this is not solely due to artists and designers who were born, trained or working in the UK and who have produced innovative and internationally acclaimed works from post-war to the present day, but also to the interesting, modest and overlooked people that she documents with such care.

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Tom Jones - Soul Of A Man.

John Piper and the Church

The commissioning of contemporary art for churches from significant British artists that began through the work of Walter Hussey and George Bell led to numerous stained glass and tapestry commissions for churches and cathedrals by John Piper, among others. Among Piper's most notable church commissions are pieces for the new Coventry Cathedral, Chichester Cathedral and Hereford Cathedral.
Piper had a life-long fascination with, and care for, church buildings; a relationship which began as a young boy when he produced his own sketches and guidebook to the churches in his home county of Surrey. In addition to his links with churchmen such as Hussey, Bell and Moelwyn Mer­chant, Piper enjoyed a 50 year friendship with Revd. Dr. Victor Kenna writing that “Kenna . . . had a lasting and import­ant influence on my life, combining as he did (and alas so few clergymen do) an understanding of the author­ity of the Church and the authority of form in paintings and sculpture.”

While, in his early artistic career, Piper was involved with the modernist 7 and 5 Society and Axis, the modernist journal edited by his wife Myfanwy, he moved 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. His subsequent paintings mainly focus on the British landscape and churches. 

Stephen Spender noted that Piper and Eliot, among others in this period, were linked in their commitment to the "idea of the sacred." Christopher Frayling has written that, the Neo-Romantic movement (of which Piper was part along with Graham Sutherland who also gained significant church commissions in the period), "sometimes chimed with the aspirations of the post-war Church of England" as they "searched for a lost Eden amid the ruins of the contemporary landscape: who wanted to depict its desolation while striving to reach beyond it; who felt it might soon be closing time in the gardens of the West, and who thought of the pastoral as one of the few remaining symbolic ideas in the culture from which to draw hope." 

An exhibition at Dorchester Abbey currently celebrates the contribution John Piper made to the development of modern art in British churches throughout the twentieth century. More than 70 works spanning Piper’s diverse and illustrious career are in the exhibition along with key works from public collections including the Britten-Pears Foundation; Manchester City Art Gallery; Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; The Collection, Lincolnshire and the V&A. The exhibition also includes special works from private collections, most of which have been rarely seen.

For the first time ever, one of each of the ecclesiastical vestments designed by John Piper for Coventry Cathedral, Chichester Cathedral, St Paul's Cathedral and the very first cope commissioned by Walter Hussey in c. 1954 are on show together. Piper's first piece of stained glass, together with his stained glass designs and cartoons, tapestries, photographs, drawings, collages, paintings and prints are also be on display in this major exhibition of his overwhelming artistic passion.

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Herbert Howells - One Thing Have I Desired.

Airbrushed from Art History: Peter Fuller

Since seeing the stunning Sutherland exhibition at Modern Art Oxford I've been re-reading material on the Neo-Romantics. This has meant that I have also been re-reading Peter Fuller's art criticism. Fuller championed the work of the Neo-Romantics, while also being able to see shortcomings in their work, because:

"... for all these artists, the pursuit of landscape was always something more than the quest for phenomena, or the appearances of natural and human forms. They were intent upon a transfiguration
of what they saw: often they laid claim to a religious or spiritual vision ..."

Fuller described the journey on which his art criticism had embarked in an autobiographical response to the exhibition entitled The Journey:

"I developed an even deeper sympathy for the romantic, the Gothic, and the spiritual dimensions of art ...

It seemed to me that no ‘materialist’ culture – certainly not the ‘modernism’ so celebrated by Clement Greenberg – had ever remotely approached the aesthetic glories of these churches [the great Gothic cathedrals and the medieval parish churches of Sussex]; and I was very much aware of the fact that their splendours, and their intimacies, were dependent upon a faith which I could not share and which was not shared even by contemporary Christians ...

When, in the early 1980s, I wrote the essays, later gathered together in Images of God, I felt that I was being tremendously daring and even perverse in reviving the idea that aesthetic experience was greatly diminished if it became divorced from the idea of the spiritual. What I responded to in Ruskin, above all else, was the distinction he made between ‘aesthesis’ and ‘theoria’, the former being a merely sensuous response to beauty, the latter what he described as a response to beauty with ‘our whole moral being’. My book, theoria, was an attempt to rehabilitate ‘theoria’ over and above mere ‘aesthesis’; I also tried to communicate my feeling that the spiritual dimensions of art had been preserved, in a very special way, within the British traditions. No one recognised this better that the great French poet and critic, Charles Baudelaire, who, as I have often remarked before, say in 1859 that British painters were ‘enthusiastic representatives of the imagination and of the most precious faculties of the soul’.

In my critical writing, I came to emphasise how British artists appeared to have faced up to the aesthetic consequences brought about by the spiritual dilemmas of the modern age. In particular, I became interested in the links between ‘natural theology’ and the triumphs of British landscape painting. I am still convinced that there is a close correlation between British ‘higher landscape’ and those beliefs about nature as divine handiwork which were held with a peculiar vividness and immediacy in Britain.

The experience of the ‘the long-withdrawing roar’ of ‘the Sea of Faith’ and the exposure of the naked shingles of the world’ created a great crisis for art, as for every other dimension of cultural life. The best British artists of the twentieth century, however, faced up to that spiritual crisis: I interpreted the work of David Bomberg, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland as differing responses to the phenomenon of Dover Beach. I argued that all these artists were imperfectly modern, and that this imperfection was a source of their strength. Unlike true modernists, they did not deny the spiritual and aesthetic calamity brought about by the ever present weight of God’s absence; none the less they did not merely tease ‘aesthesis’ but struggled to appeal to ‘theoria’, regardless."

Such views seem to have little place in the contemporary art world and, as Jonathan Jones has written, "this fierce defender of figurative painting and enemy of the avant garde has now been almost erased from the history of British art. His legacy has been reduced to the career of his protegee Sister Wendy Beckett and the annual Peter Fuller Lecture ... Even Modern Painters, the magazine he founded in 1987, officially abandoned his editorial policy ... to become broadly sympathetic to conceptual art ... Fuller has disappeared from the story of British art because that story has been mythicised and thinned out."

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Sam Phillips - Reflecting Light.

Airbrushed from Art History (12b)

Here's a little addendum to my 'Airbrushed from Art History' series of posts because the current edition of the Church Times has an interesting feature in which Stephen Laird uncovers the artist’s little-known fascination with the writings of Jacques Maritain.

Laird says that Sutherland had a well-thumbed copy of Maritain's Art and Scholasticism which influenced his 1936 essay 'A Trend in English Draughtsmanship' and Sutherland's Welsh landscapes of the 1930s, well before Sutherland's later 'religious' work for St Matthews Northampton and Coventry Cathedral:

"Visually, Sutherland's Welsh landscapes from the '30s are most reminiscent of some of William Blake's more haunting imaginative illustrations. Intellectually, they are a fully fledged expression of Maritain's theological programme ...

Sutherland borrows Maritain's words to describe how the artist's part is to create something truly inspired and "poetic", and how this cannot be achieved "ex nihilo", as it must be "gathered from the world of created things" ...

discovering one thing with the help of another, and by their resemblance making the unknown known."

This is of interest as it indicates a degree of influence by Maritain on a generation of British painters and sculptors in the immediate post-war years who were known collectively as ‘the neo-romantics’ (Paul Nash, Henry Moore sometimes, Sutherland, John Piper, John Minton, Keith Vaughan, Ceri Richards and others). This movement, as Christopher Frayling has noted, "sometimes chimed with the aspirations of the post-war Church of England" as they "searched for a lost Eden amid the ruins of the contemporary landscape: who wanted to depict its desolation while striving to reach beyond it; who felt it might soon be closing time in the gardens of the West, and who thought of the pastoral as one of the few remaining symbolic ideas in the culture from which to draw hope."

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Jonathan Harvey - Speakings.

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.