Forgotten gems
Andrew Lambirth
A Countryman in Town: Robert Bevan and the Cumberland Market Group
Southampton City Art Gallery, until 14 December
The Women’s Land Army — A Portrait
St Barbe Museum, New Street, Lymington, until 10 January The recent Camden Town exhibition at the Tate was a useful reminder of the originality of one of the few significant radical groups of modern British artists. It’s often said that the English aren’t joiners, but at the beginning of the 20th century when the Royal Academy dominated the London exhibiting scene, there were a number of rebel coalitions organised to provide mutual support and venues in which to show avant-garde work. The Camden Town Group was one such, and its successor, the much less-known Cumberland Market Group, was another. Robert Polhill Bevan (1865–1925) was a key figure in both, and in fact belonged to five different groups altogether, indicative not of a sociable nature but of the need for peer solidarity in the face of an uncomprehending public.
It’s been a good year for reassessing this generation of British artists. From Sickert to Gertler: Modern Art at Boxted House followed the Tate show, first in Edinburgh and subsequently at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury (where it closes on 13 December). Bevan featured in both shows, and now Southampton really does him justice. There are 93 works on view, most of them oil paintings, with a good sprinkling of drawings and watercolours. The exhibition starts in a small antechamber containing a couple of his self-portraits and a drawing of Cumberland Market where he took rooms in 1914 in order to observe the horses and carts which worked in the square. (Cumberland Market was London’s centre for horse feed and building materials after the hay market at Piccadilly closed.) Right from the beginning, Bevan had been associated with horses — he was a country boy from Sussex and a great huntsman — and here was a good source of active models.
In the first main room chronology takes over, and we are taken through the early stages of Bevan’s career, and his association with Gauguin at Pont-Aven in Brittany. What a natural landscape painter Bevan was. Notice the broken late-Impressionist handling of ‘The Ploughing Team, Dawn’ (1904–6), with its diagonal hatching like pastel. But a painting nearby demonstrates how much of an innovator he was: ‘Study for the Courtyard’ (1904) is a magnificently bold colour composition, which anticipates the Fauves and shows his instinctive feeling for creating form through colour. A wall of his contemporaries here, and particularly the Letchworth pictures of Spencer Gore, who died so tragically young, show the kind of colour experiments they were making, but several or even ten years later.
The second room focuses on the Cumberland Market Group, which enjoyed its only exhibition in April 1915, at the Goupil Gallery. Besides Bevan, the members were Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner and John Nash, with the later admission of Edward McKnight Kauffer and C.R.W. Nevinson. The loveliest painting here is perhaps Bevan’s of the open market square, a pale painting (he’s very good at white) from 1914–15. Next to it is ‘Two Bridges’ (1912–13), another colourful stunner, featuring a motorised red bus on the left and a horse-drawn conveyance on the right. ‘Horse Sale at the Barbican’ (1912) is one of his better-known pictures, already displaying the interest in angularity and Cubist faceting which would become a hallmark of his later style. The early John Nash landscapes in this room, of Gloucestershire and Buckinghamshire, and the McKnight Kauffer of Berkshire, are beauties in their own right, but serve to set off Bevan’s particular mastery. Notice the odd haziness of his drawing style in black crayon or charcoal, as if slightly out-of-focus: atmospheric and highly effective.
The third room deals with Bevan’s later years and touches on the first world war. Particularly memorable are two of Bevan’s most lucid paintings, ‘The White Barn’ (c.1916) and ‘Near Hemyock’ (1918). A final small room adds a coda with a beautiful pale crayon and watercolour of Devon, four of his exquisite lithographs and some paintings by his talented Polish wife, Stanislawa de Karlowska. There’s a very handsome catalogue (£19.99 in softback), containing expert and informative essays by the artist’s great-grandson Patrick Baty, John Yeates and Frances Stenlake. There’s also a large and more expansive hardback devoted to Bevan alone and entitled Robert Bevan: from Gauguin to Camden Town, by Frances Stenlake (Unicorn Press, £30). Suddenly Bevan is getting some of the attention his work has always deserved, and what a revelation it proves to be.
A Countryman in Town is a more enjoyable show than the Tate’s Camden Town blockbuster. It’s revealing that it takes a provincial museum to mount such a good show, away from the crippling political correctitude and axe-grinding of the capital. Southampton has done wonders (but then it has a superb permanent collection as a constant inspiration and back-up), just as other provincial museums, such as Pallant House in Chichester, are also doing. A scaled-down version of this excellent exhibition travels to Abbot Hall in Kendal (13 January to 21 March 2009), but it will be only half the size of the lavish display in Southampton. I urge you to see it before it closes. Highly recommended.
Not far away is the St Barbe Museum in Lymington, which has seized the initiative in the year that Defra has issued badges in belated recognition of the Land Girls’ unique contribution to the war effort in two world wars, to celebrate the Women’s Land Army. Known as ‘the Forgotten Army’, these were the girls who undertook tough unglamorous jobs like sprout picking and dairy duties, to keep Britain fed and on its feet in time of war. It didn’t suit everyone. In my own extended family, two young women were involved: one settled to tending tomatoes in greenhouse production, the other couldn’t stand working on the land and joined the SOE instead. Not all Land Girls were as resourceful and determined as the one in that marvellous Powell and Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale (1944), but I’m prepared to believe that a good few were. Certainly that spirit comes over well in the impressive exhibition at Lymington.
The show deals with both world wars presented through the paintings and drawings of quite a range of artists. The stars of the display are Randolph Schwabe (1885–1948) for the first world war and Evelyn Dunbar (1906–60) for the second. Both are unfairly neglected today. Schwabe’s drawings of hoeing and tree-felling are powerfully evocative, and his large painting of the flax harvest is a major statement about the rhythms of manual labour. Dunbar is a brilliant composer of images, able to control the larger design of a subject while ensuring the telling accuracy of detail. All her paintings here are special, though I particularly liked two small square-ish studies, one of a hostel, the other of sprout picking. In the work of Schwabe and Dunbar the job of recording is never neglected, but their ability to transform what they see into high art puts them in another category. The show is accompanied by a meaty book on the subject by the exhibition’s curator, Gill Clarke, published by Sansom & Company at £24.95. Well worth a visit. ❑
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