It is not easy to see why Tate Britain felt this exhibition either needed or could carry off the epithet “Modernâ€. The painters it includes settled for a position a long way from Modernism, and do not seem to have been especially single-minded in their pursuit of modernity. No doubt provoked by the wording of the title, Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group, early commentators have made quick and brutal sport of the show’s lack of obvious cutting-edge qualities. Leaving it at that, unfortunately, they betray not only their own failure to reach back in imagination to a fascinating historical moment, but also their blindness to feats of pictorial composition which, if small, hard-won and rare, nonetheless deserve respect.
The historical moment comprised the three years from the Camden Town Group’s formation in 1911 to the outbreak of the First World War. The premature deaths, at about this time, of two of its most talented members, Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore, had, as it happened, nothing to do with bloodshed: it was pneumonia that picked off Gore in 1914, while Gilman fell to the 1919 Spanish influenza epidemic. Yet one cannot help regarding the European upheaval, with its revelation of mechanized Armageddon, as a decisive factor in bringing to a halt the Group’s parochial and genteel activities, rendering its vision of urban pastoral untenable and vindicating the explosive, jagged rhetoric of its contemporaries, the Vorticists. After the war, surviving Camden Towners either went their separate ways or rallied to different causes. Whichever path they chose, the collective fervour was dissipated.
So a certain poignancy attaches to this exhibition, representing as it does the death of a delicate and perishable idea, rather than the birth of a strong, fertile one. Those critics who aspire to write histories for the victorious will find little to lament in the rout and scattering of a brief alliance of individuals who, with the exception of their leader, Walter Sickert, will never be given a Tate show of their own; but I think they are wrong.
The Group can certainly be accused of a number of shortcomings: it was modest in its ambitions, it looked back for guidance to an earlier generation of mainly French painters and ignored the rude new noises being made in a wider Europe, and it never produced robust heirs. More than that, the work of even its most fêted members could look awkward, indecisive, even inept. (Charles Ginner has worn less well than most: his technique of massing jammily glistening pimples of pigment from edge to edge of the canvas has the effect of making the paint surface crawl – and our skins with it.) But it would be a mistake to dismiss the Group outright, and unjust to suggest that it added nothing vital of its own to the twentieth-century artistic record.
Sickert, whose own allegiance was to Whistler and Degas, was the father figure, but he had to watch his adoptive sons – no daughters! – trying out other fathers for size, and the consequence was a degree of dissension, possibly good for creative stimulus, within the small band. Gore turned to Monet, Pissarro, Gauguin and Vuillard; Gilman, to Vuillard and Van Gogh.
Such eclectic borrowings mean that the Tate show can offer no steady focus, only isolated failures and successes. Gore’s successes include “The Fig Tree†(c1912), a view from his Camden Town back window which goes well beyond stylistic indebtedness to a vision all his own: a startling emphasis on blue in the tree’s foliage and pink in the shadow it throws. The brushwork, too, is bolder than he was habitually capable of. So much of his other work looks, by comparison, like careful illustration, coloured draughtsmanship, optimistically conceived but timidly executed. In “The Fig Treeâ€, however, as in the caricaturish, yet genuinely comical “Gauguins and Connoisseurs†(1911), the railway scene “Nearing Euston Station†(1911), and the almost lurid “Balcony at the Alhambra†(1911–12), he is completely on top of his subject – not least because each of these paintings presents a view from above, a perspective that must have answered to some unique artistic need. None of these works, however, not even the last, theatrical one, resembles anything by Sickert; and when Gore did encroach on Sickert territory – as he did in his “Interior with Nude Washing†(1907) – the results were flatly unsatisfactory.
Gilman’s “Nude on a Bed†(c1911–12), another nod towards the master, is all clinical studio clarity, where Sickert himself would have exploited the poetry and dramatic suggestiveness of London murk. Brightness was Gilman’s thing, and his quest for it in grimy NW1 and environs comes to seem almost quixotic. He could find it abroad naturally enough, and his Van Gogh hommage, “Canal Bridge, Flekkerfjord†(1913), is by no means insulting to the painter who led him to it. But cornering and capturing such a light in London was another matter.
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