What was Modern? (1910-1914)

Continental Art and the British Public

At the outset of the twentieth century, when Londoners understood their city as the center of the world’s largest empire, many art critics (including Huntly Carter, who wrote regular columns for The New Age) saw London as decidedly peripheral. The formal innovations in the visual arts that were called modernism were instead viewed as originating in Paris; in relation, British art was often labeled derivative or retrograde. This view betrays an anxiety that London’s status as a center of commerce prevented it from being a center of culture; because London was the world’s most modern city, it was intrinsically inhospitable to the world’s most modern art. For Carter, England was a place where stock-jobbing and moneyed interest caused the meaning of the creative vision [to be] generally and grossly mistaken NA 11.8:191. Efforts were afoot to find legitimate British heirs to the new developments in French painting.

Prior to the widely-discussed Post-Impressionist Show of 1910, few Londoners had heard of Cézanne or Picasso, and even fewer had seen their work in person. As the advertisement from Rhythm shows, even lithographic reproductions of modern painting were rare, and their scarcity and novelty rendered them valuable. Small magazines like The New Age were one of the few places where the British public could find theoretical discussion of the new French art movements alongside reproductions of the paintings. The images that appeared in these periodicals offered a mediated form of access to art objects actually located in the French capital. Cubism, Futurism and the productions of other avant-garde movements were thus made available as models for English artists to imitate, but this access also made it possible for painters (such as Walter Sickert) to define an English version of modern art in opposition to continental developments.