REVIEW OF BOOKS
Quentin Bell on flaws in John's portrait
"This is a biography, it is not an art book" thus Mr Holroyd begins the first volume of this study of Augustus John*; he then refers the reader to David Cecil, John Rothenstein and the joint work (listed above) which he and Dr Easton now offer**. In as much as 'art books' offer peculiar difficulties and peculiar temptations to their authors, this definition of purpose is decidedly welcome. But there is particular cause for rejoicing given the special circumstances of this work; for this sober resolve to leave criticism and apologetics on one side, treating Augustus John's painting simply as one of the events of his life, leaves Mr Holroyd free to engage in that part of his business for which he is particularly well equipped. He has an enviable ability to deal with the intricacies of multiple relationships, with the tensions and developments of complex human situations. This, of course, is precisely what is needed if the youth and early adventures of Augustus John are adequately to be described, and in fact the gradual, sometimes comic and sometimes tragic, development of what became known as 'the John tribe" is excellently rendered. One could have wished for some description of John's fantastic relationship with Mme Strindberg; but this perhaps is more properly contained within the second volume.
To attempt any kind of summary of Mr Holroyd's narrative would be unjust, witness the misleading condensations of a Sunday paper which by no means does justice to the original. It is, however, worth noting that the stature of the painter's friends and particularly of his women friends is such that Augustus does not dominate the scene: the reader is in ruth more likely to be arrested by the monumental qualities of Gwen John, Dorelia McNeill and, above all, Ida Nettleship, so that we are not profoundly shocked when that redoubtable woman refers to Augustus, almost ontemptuously, as "our great child artist." But we ought to be shocked, for the young John was not simply a very promising artist; he was in the eyes of his contemporaries a giant, a hisus naturae. As a draughtsman he had vigour, a vivacity and an invention which left even the most severe critics half incoherent with admiration. He seemed another Rubens and when Tanks, that stern censor of the Slade, told the young man that in his drawings he stood unequalled since Michelangelo (a view which was shared by Sargent), John replied with a modest disclaimer; but no-one smiled. To this we should add that in addition to his cloaks, his profusion of hair, his earrings and all the rest of his dramatically bohemian apparatus, John did possess a real grandeur of manner, a style more genuine than any eccentric pose, a kind of native majesty which commanded respect.
*Augustus John Volume One — The Years of Innocence Michael Holroyd (Heineman £5.75) **The Art of Augustus John Malcolm Easton and Michael Holroyd (Seeker and Warburg £10.75) What then went wrong? That something went very wrong indeed is hardly to be doubted. John still has his admirers but it is not in terms of Michelangelo or of Rubens that they speak; he has his niche in the Pantheon of twentieth century painting but his is not a central position, somehow the enormous promise of his youth remained unfulfilled. Mr Holroyd has an explanation, a legitimate explanation in that it is essentially biographical. The trouble, as he sees it, was a failure of personality "he steered a blind and desperate course never reaching home." There was "no core to him." Clive Bell in n article written in 1938 (and here quoted) comes to a rather similar conclusion; John, he felt, was in some way not serious, beneath "the general effect" was "nothingness."
The Art of Augustus John, a handsome volume with some very good reproductions, leads us to the same conclusions for here the authors are concerned to give us, not so much a cross section of the painter's work, as a selection of that which is most likely to please; in consequence the last forty years of John's career is rather thinly represented. Strictly speaking this leaves us with a rather unbalanced picture but it certainly makes for a more enjoyable volume. The clear and informative text of this joint work cannot but lead one to wonder in what manner the co-authors divided their tasks and why, having arrived at a very practical arrangement with regard to the 'art book' they did not extend their collaboration to the biography. Mr Holroyd stands in some need of a competent art historical advisor and this not simply because he is after all dealing with a painter, but also because be does not remain wholly faithful to his original undertaking; a point comes at which, abandoning the historical and analytic standpoint of the biographer,
he boldly takes his stand as an apologist and a critic of art historians.
This stance would have been a good deal more convincing if Mr Easton had been able to go over the manuscript with a blue pencil; he, surely, would have corrected the wild misstatements about Ruskin on page one hundred and twenty-two, nor I think could he quite have accepted the following description of British art in the 1870s
... the Royal Academy was all powerful, steeped in the English literary tradition which, by the last third of the century, had degenerated in artists like Frith and Alma Tadema into pure illustration.
This does not make a very reassuring preface to Mr Holroyd's attempt to revise and re-situate John's position in relation to the post Impressionists during the years 1909-1912. This, says Mr Holroyd, is the moment when the art historians believe that John took the wrong turning whereas, in fact, it was a moment of apotheosis in which the painter launched "a private revolution of his own"; the art historians have got in all wrong.
In 1909 Augustus was avant garde; by 1912 he had been relegated to the rearguard of British art: that, with the foreshortening of time, is how it can now appear. The younger artists had formed up behind him, but he had nowhere to lead them and they turned instead to Fry. This is the judgment of history But is it? Who were these "younger artists"? Henry Lamb, to be sure; but a solitary lamb hardly constitutes a flock. No doubt there were others but John, who surely was neither a theorist nor a pedagogue, was not interested in forming proselytes. The description could with much greater accuracy be applied to Walter Sicken — he (and the comparison is instructive) did have a doctrine, he also had followers, and he indeed found himself cast as a reactionary while his followers deserted him — not indeed for Roger Fry whose role as a mentor of the young has I think been somewhat exaggerated — but for Cezanne and the post Impressionists. For Sickert this must have been a painful experience but the fact that he did adopt a positively reactionary attitude or, to put it another way, that he remained true to the realist doctrine of Degas, and refused to acknowledge the greatness of Cezanne gave him, perhaps, that moral force which allowed him to survive as an artist. John, on the other hand, was neither a true revolutionary nor a true reactionary and lacked both the weaknesses and the fortitude of the aesthetic doctrinaire.
Thus when Mr Holroyd devotes a good deal of space to showing that John really admired all the right people and was just as unpopular with the philistines as Van Gogh himself I find him interesting rather than persuasive; such information does not seem to have very much bearing on his private revolution. Indeed on the positive side the only evidence for this grand commotion seems to consist of a certain number of sufficiently charming landscapes produced in concert with J. D. Innes of which one very fair example is provided in The Art of Augustus John, a not uninteresting but hardly a dramatic symptom of Revolution.
I cannot take leave of Mr Holroyd witnout uttering a plea, not only on my own behalf but I believe on behalf of a multitude of readers. He has been entrusted — and rightly entrusted — with some important biographical tasks; others await him. That which he writes deserves to be read, for he has important things to say. Could he not contrive to make it rather more readable? I believe that he could; he has, so it seems to me, a decent workmanlike bricks and mortar prose style ,which, in what seems to be a spirit of sheer perversity, he conceals beneath a profusion of 'fine writing', a form of literary stucco which, though intended as ornament, hardly achieves its purpose.
Quentin Bell has written Virginia Woolf, a critical biography. He is also Professor of the History and Theory of Art at Sussex University.
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