When I began reading this book I had misgivings about its premise: surely it is a mistake to associate an international artistic movement like modernism with a particular English county? However, within a few pages my doubts began to waver, and then dissipated altogether. In the introduction Wolf makes clear that her intention is to examine those artists who were strongly associated with Sussex and whose works reflected a very wide definition of modernism. Since the term can be used in many ways, it is helpful that she explains her understanding of it to describe a work that in some way reflects contemporary life and does not have to be stylistically ‘modern’ per se.
Each chapter is devoted to a particular artist or to a loose grouping of artists, but the book is so arranged that it follows a logical, chronological structure, allowing us to follow the development of the modernism theme even when, stylistically, individual artists sometimes return to older approaches. One result of this is to dismiss the unhelpful idea that each artistic movement represents some sort of advance on previous schools as the false concept that it is: good artists take note of and use what has gone before them, rather than rejecting past masters out of hand.
The opening chapter shows that the author is not afraid to confront challenging artists or ideas. In 1910 two sculptors, Jacob Epstein and the now-disgraced Eric Gill, had the idea of creating “a sort of twentieth century Stonehenge” on a six-acre plot of land belonging to Ashram House near Lewes. They envisaged a temple for a new kind of religion combining spirituality and eroticism, heavily influenced by Hindu and Buddhist religious art and the Ceylonese philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy, and produced a number of explicit studies for this ambitious, but ultimately unrealised project.
The list of artists who worked and lived in Sussex reads like a Who’s Who of twentieth-century English masters. The book includes chapters on Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Paul Nash, Edward Burra, Eric Ravilious, John Piper, Roland Penrose, Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein), and Edith Rimmington, while many other artists are mentioned in passing. When you put them alongside further famous residents representing other creative fields, such as Virginia Woolf and Radclyffe Hall, it becomes clear that this relatively small county played an outsized cultural role. As the book progresses, Wolf shows that artists responded to the same environment in different ways.
Edward Burra has become more popular in the years since his death in 1976. Working primarily in watercolour, he is almost impossible to pigeon-hole: although often grouped with the Surrealists he took a more varied and experimental approach, ranging between contemporary scenes, portraits, and landscapes but also into the wildly strange and angry. Wolf’s chapter on Burra is a fascinating and illuminating exploration of this challenging artist, beginning with plenty of evidence that Burra was not enamoured of his colleagues who painted romantic rural views of Sussex and Kent. Nor was he particularly keen on engaging with others to discuss his own art: at one point the county magazine, imaginatively entitled Sussex, asked him for an interview, which, he later recalled, struck him as an “utter nightmare of horror and boredom.” The interview never happened.
However, Wolf really excels in her analysis of Burra’s paintings. Landscape near Rye (1943-45) is in part a response to those bucolic, painterly scenes that he so despised: the picture is bleak and dark, with ominous black clouds in the background, about to deposit large amounts of rain. However, the painting’s real subject lies in the foreground: a broken-down farm cart with giant pincer-like shafts sprawls across it, while in between the pincers are the skull and bones of a large horned animal. There are crumbling walls and an absence of any visible life besides the countryside, while around the broken cart are overgrown weeds. While this is certainly not a landscape of which the Rye Arts Club would have approved, according to Holt the painting is also a statement on war’s futility and indiscriminate destruction.
An earlier work, The Tea Shop from 1929, shows Burra at his most mischievous. A tea shop is normally the most wholesome of rural images, with little old ladies gossiping over tea and cake in comfortable surroundings, but Burra’s so-called ‘tea shop’ is anything but. Semi-clad waitresses serve the customers, two of whom are seated in the foreground in 1920s attire. The work may have been inspired by the 1928 French surrealist silent film Le Pompier des Folies Bergère, which follows a drunken fireman hallucinating naked women in various locations, and Radclyffe Hall and her partner Una Troubridge may have been the models for the two elegantly dressed women. Hall’s book The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928 and then banned until 1949, was hot news in Rye at the time, and the couple lived nearby and were friends of the artist. However, quite why a pot of tea is being poured over one of their heads is anybody’s guess!
While there can be little argument that Burra’s work is largely modernist in terms of style and subject matter, it is harder to detect modernism in the works of some other artists discussed here, such as David Jones, who, although he only lived in Sussex for a few years, painted some of his best works there. On the surface his watercolours of this period are fairly conventional, with an expressive realism, but they also display an underlying honesty, clearly conveying emotional unease. Jones served three years at the front in the First World War, during which time he was not only seriously wounded but nearly died of trench fever. He wrote the magnificent poem In Parenthesis over a period of several years, and painted at the same time. Calypso’s Seaward Prospect (1931) was completed shortly after the breaking-off of his engagement to Eric Gill’s daughter. The myth of Calypso is one of separation and release: the goddess has agreed to set Odysseus free so that he can return to his wife Penelope. So in one respect this is clearly not a modernist theme, since painters have used ancient myths as subjects since the Renaissance. In this picture, an empty chair faces an open window. Two boats can be seen in the far distance, one a small sailing ship, the other an old steamer. The ships are sailing in opposite directions, which suggests that Calypso is being left behind. The goddess is nowhere to be seen, and her empty chair perhaps symbolises her loneliness. The blurred lines and colourful washes of blues and pinks are reminiscent of Dufy, giving the work a distinctly modernist feel. Jones was deeply influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, and his writing is often concerned with the separation of mother and child. He converted to Catholicism in 1921 and often wrote about what he called “the break,” by which he meant the disconnection from God after the Fall, but also the replacement of religious worship by the pursuit of money. The absence of the goddess in this picture is perhaps the visual representation of this dislocation.
Any discussion of the early twentieth-century visual arts scene in Sussex must, of course, include the coterie which surrounded Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard. There have been so many books about the Bloomsbury Group that one would imagine there to be little left to add, but Wolf concentrates her account on their own influences and ambitions. Although both Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were major painters in their own right, much that has previously been written about them instead concerns their influence on other artists.
In 1919 Bell painted a glorious still-life entitled Arum Lilies. The lily has symbolised many things within Western culture, but mainly purity, divinity, and peace. In the late nineteenth century the Aesthetic movement, which included Oscar Wilde and Walter Crane, adopted it as their symbol and gave it a new meaning deriving from the passage in the Bible “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin, yet not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these.” The Aesthetes believed that art should be appreciated for its inherent beauty rather than used as a vehicle for moral instruction. Arum Lilies shows three lilies in an Arts and Crafts bowl placed on a painted wicker chair, the sort of furniture that would have been found at Charleston House, where Bell lived at the time. The lily was additionally associated with conscientious objectors (of whom Duncan Grant was one) and the suffragette movement —as a symbol of goodness, honesty, and truth— while it also memorialised the fallen. Altogether, then, this deceptively simple still-life is loaded with extra meanings directly connected to contemporary society.
A final picture must be mentioned, by Duncan Grant. Painted around 1920-21, Bathers by the Pond is an extraordinary work by an underrated artist. At a time when England was reeling from a devastating war, he painted a tranquil scene of (mostly) naked men resting at the water’s edge, safe and relaxed together, far from bombs, gunfire, and gas. The central figure’s feet are resting on a white towel, which forms a rare splash of colour together with the red and white swimming trunks on two other men. Grant was homosexual, and this portrayal of carefree happiness may have been his attempt to evoke a new world in which his orientation would no longer be illegal.
Even though I began this book with a sense of trepidation, after a few chapters I was not only convinced of the title’s appropriateness, but I also realised that it actually sheds new light on a much-researched subject. There are further fine chapters that I have not mentioned in this review, and the book is illustrated in a way that enhances the text. Wolf’s monograph takes the reader on a long and fascinating journey, and is to be warmly recommended. --Paul Flux
