What was Modern? (1910-1914)

Modern Drawings

Walter Sickert, Portrait of Miss Enid Bagnold (NA 14.9, Jan 1, 1914)

On January 1, 1914, The New Age began printing the MODERN DRAWINGS series. It was edited by Walter Sickert, and featured works by a number of his art school students as well as the neo-Realist painters with whom he shared gallery space. The first work in the series, Sickert’s Portrait of Miss Enid Bagnold, was prefaced by a manifesto on “Neo-realism” in which Charles Ginner argued for the importance of direct contact between the artist and the thing being painted; this continued intercourse allowed for unconscious creation produced by the collaboration of Nature and the Artist’s mind NA 14.9:272. What was new about this sort of realism was its avoidance of copying and formula, and its emphasis on the subjective element of artistic creation. Stylistically, the drawings included in the series were quite varied, from the harsh broken line used by Sickert to suggest the play of light, to the more conservative shading employed in Richards’s sketch of a classical ruin. Taken together, these drawings suggest the diversity of expressive techniques that could be grouped under the umbrella term of neo-realism. These artists believed that representing the real was the essential function of art, but their attempts to do so were guided by newly-discovered modern theories of perception.