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Charles Ginner’s Piccadilly Circus, detail |
Distortion of art history?
• GERALD Isaaman is right to pay tribute to the fine paintings in the current Tate Britain exhibition Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group (Group that painted the town, February 22).
However, it is incorrect, as the Tate does, to claim that it is “the most comprehensive critical survey of the group’s work to be shown in Britain for over 50 years”.
This is wrong for two reasons – size and content.
The Tate exhibition shows 102 pictures by nine artists, two of them – Walter Bayes and Lucien Pissarro – represented by just one work.
Thus it excludes any pictures by the seven other original group members: James Dickson Innes, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Wyndham Lewis, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, James Bolivar Manson and John Doman Turner (Duncan Grant replaced Lightfoot after the latter’s resignation).
These were all included in the superb Camden Town Recalled exhibition, at the Fine Art Society in 1976, its catalogue a scholarly and detailed examination of the group by Dr Wendy Baron.
With the inclusion of a few pictures by artists associated but not members of the group, such as William Rothenstein, Albert Rutherston and Ethel Sands, the Fine Art Society displayed 153 pictures.
Omitting the seven original group members plus Grant is unjust and misleading.
First, artists such as John, Lamb, Lewis and Manson can hardly be written off as artistic also-rans.
Apart from their artistic merit, try buying a good example of any of these cheaply in the auction rooms!
In addition, the Hampstead Garden Suburb-based Manson, at his best a fine painter and later director of the Tate, was secretary of the group and thus a key figure in its development.
Above all, the exclusion of some of the artists distorts art history.
This was not a group with a single aim and a cohesive style, as the present exhibition tends to emphasise. Rather, it was an attempt by a number of artists to assemble, in the words of Charles Ginner, “those painters whom they considered to be the best and most promising of the day”.
There could never be cohesion in a group that when formed included the romanticism of Innes, the fluent draughtsmanship of John and Lamb, the angularity of Lewis, the singular qualities of Lightfoot and Turner and the neo-impressionism of Manson and Pissarro, all producing highly individual pictures.
David Buckman
Author, The Dictionary of Artists in Britain since 1945 |
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