Exhibitions
A Paradise Lost: the Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-55 (Barbican Centre, till 19 July)
An art of our own
Giles Auty
0 ne of the least romantic things I can think of is a Filofax. To me few other objects so symbolise the self-inflicted pressures and fears of current city life. Nearly everyone I know who owns one is neurotic; probably any owner's greatest terror lies in mislaying this repository of irreplaceable facts. Inspection of a Filofax user's diary usually reveals a schedule of appointments only an amphetamine-crazed superman could keep. Time for reflection, which is essential not only for romantic but for most other life-renewing forces, has long been banished from our city walls. It is no coincidence that the neo-Romantic imagination, subject of a current, inspired exhibition at the Barbican, should have emerged and flourished in a slower-paced, if more genuinely dangerous era.
To some it may seem fanciful to suggest that our long-term neglect of the neo- Romantic movement and of most of its artists could be accounted for by the city-based domination of Britain's art world. Yet does not the city-dweller affect a certain scorn, tinged with envy, for the countryman? How can anyone afford to be so slow-moving and contented? This scorn might explain why all evidence of provin- cialism, regionalism or even the best kind of nostalgic nationalism is treated as the kiss of death in major urban art markets. The key to successful dealing in contem- porary art is to trade at the kind of price levels which 'international' acceptability alone can bring. Thus a bland, 'interna- tional', modernist style is much easier to export than anything too visionary or idiosyncratic. Even public pushers of our culture such as the British Council have seen it as their duty to promote and often, in effect, re-export the supposed 'interna- tionalism' of British artists rather than tackle the more difficult task of explaining that element of national vision inherent in the works of Sutherland, Piper, Ceri `Joan in the Field' (1943), by Michael Ayrton Richards and others of the neo-Romantics.
Following America's successful attempt to swamp us with their particular, formalist notion of 'international' style during the Fifties and Sixties we were led to accept their evaluation of us as artistic country cousins. This acceptance explains the fail- ure of nerve of many of our public gallery administrators and their concomitant eagerness to promote almost any form of overpaid art from another country. In their desperation to show they are as 'interna- tional' as the next man, such influential figures have been hard to dislodge from their suspicion of the home-born. The present exhibition thus owes a huge debt to Dr David Mellor who, in conceiving and organising it, has repudiated the more stereotyped visions of those who organised British Art in the 20th Century and who managed to omit all evidence of this major thrust in British art. I feel Dr Mellor's exhibition would have been strengthened by the inclusion of Eric Ravilious and the New Zealand-born artist Frances Hodg- kins, whose worth is due for a complete re-assessment. But these are minor cavils.
It is tempting to characterise the eclipse and subsequent neglect of neo-Romantic strains in British art since the mid-Fifties simply as the overthrowing of art inspired by the countryside by that conceived and nurtured in cities. Excepting only the landscape-inspired paintings of St Ives- based British Abstract Expressionists such as Peter Lanyon, the case seems conclu- sive. The works of later, loosely-knit groups such as the School of London, or so-called developments of style such as Op, Pop, Colour-field, Conceptualism, Mini- malism and their derivatives all grew out of cities. To the extent that cities resemble one another increasingly — at least throughout the Western world — it could be argued that city art is in a sense more `international' than rural art. But what we are speaking of here is of no more value than the 'internationalism' of inner-city violence and crime. Most of the more enduring strains in British art are linked indissolubly with our countryside. Only if the visions which sustained 18th-and 19th- century sensibilities such as those of Wil- son, Bewick and Gainsborough or of Blake, Turner, Constable and Palmer may be thought of as parochial, can the roots of British art be dismissed likewise.
One of the fascinations of the exhibition is the span of its embrace to include film, photography, poetry, stage design and book illustration. Yet there is an extraor- dinary cohesiveness of message and vision. When asked, during the last war, what they were fighting for, many of our servicemen cited an idealised vision of rural Britain. Something so deep in our national psyche can be dismissed only by those who are untouched personally by the power of the land. Dr Mellor has shown great under- standing of the era in including the natural- history photographs of Eric Hosking. Study of natural history at home and at school formed a central part of my own country childhood. Both my parents could recognise even rare fauna and flora on sight, and we made many unusual sightings. These helped create that essential magic of `special' places, often in woodland.
Artists in the exhibition include a num- ber whose work has been seen too rarely in recent years: Leslie Hurry, Alan Sorrell, Denton Welch, Gerald Wilde and Albert Richards, as well as more familiar stalwarts of neo-Romanticism such as Minton, Sutherland, Piper, Nash, Ayrton, Craxton, Colquhoun, Mervyn Peake and David Jones. With the Tate's forthcoming re- trospective of the paintings of Winifred Nicholson another valuable aspect of our buried art history is at last coming back into the light.
Previous page
