What was Modern? (1910-1914)

Art Shows Debated in The New Age

When critics writing for The New Age debated the direction art should take and the principles it should embody, they did so by making reference to exhibits taking place at the time. Those most frequently discussed include:

Manet and the Post-Impressionists, November, 1910 to January, 1911




Paul Cézanne. The Bathers

Featuring a variety of predominantly French artworks from the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist Show opened at the Grafton Galleries in November 1910. The exhibition unleashed a torrent of response in the London newspapers, from outrage and hostility to boundless enthusiasm, and critics have seen the show’s opening as synonymous with the inception of modern art in Britain. The artists whose works were available for viewing (and for sale) included Matisse, van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat, as well as Picasso. Cézanne was especially well represented. Chosen by Fry as self-conscious departures from Impressionism, the paintings included were formally diverse, but tended to manifest an interest in color, and acceptance of the artificiality of pictorial conventions.

The Camden Town Group at the Carfax Gallery, June, 1911 and December, 1911




Walter Sickert. Lou! Lou! I Love You. NA 09.10.

Although art historians have come to associate ‘Camden Town’ with the visual style of Walter Sickert – typically small-scale paintings of humble domestic interiors and London cityscapes – these two exhibits featured work by a diverse group of painters. Wyndham Lewis and Duncan Grant were included, as were Sickert and Augustus John. Called a parade of interesting individualities merged by unity of purpose into an artistic whole by New Age art critic Huntly Carter NA 9.12:272, these shows demonstrated that the Camden Town Group was less a school than a convenient means of procuring exhibition space for wildly differing artists.

Jacob Epstein at the Twenty-One Gallery, December, 1913




Jacob Epstein. Rock Drill

This was Epstein’s first solo exhibition. Though small, it inspired a critical response that was far out of proportion to its size. Displaying the Carvings in Flenite sculptures, which presented pregnant female forms, as well as the suggestively phallic drawing Rock Drill, the show outraged reviewers, who saw it as obscene and primitive. In response, Epstein’s works were passionately defended in The New Age by Wyndham Lewis and by T.E. Hulme, who wrote that Epstein’s genius lay in his extracting afresh, from outside reality, a new means of expression NA 14.9:252.

The Camden Town Group and Others, Brighton Public Art Galleries, December, 1913 to January, 1914




Wyndham Lewis. The Enemy of the Stars

The title of this show indicates its difference from the Camden Town Group’s earlier exhibitions; and Others marks the fissures in the group’s membership that were beginning to be felt by the time. It was originally conceived of as broadly inclusive – an orientation towards the “modern” and identifying as English were the only requirements for participating. Before the show’s opening, however, the works of five painters and one sculptor were placed in a separate room, dubbed The Cubist Room, for which Wyndham Lewis wrote an independent catalogue. Here, the differences between the Neo-realist works of Sickert and his followers and Lewis’s more geometric style were ossified into distinct ways of conceiving modern British art.