The Times - UK (2022-05-28)

the times | Saturday May 28 2022 saturday review 15

F

rom a rickety studio in the garden

of No 1 Eldon Road, Kensington,

in December 1918, the painter

Frances Hodgkins wrote to her

mother in New Zealand about life

in postwar London. “I have been very

overworked and weary I can tell you

washing, charring, painting, teaching &

going out to tea and dinner — too much

altogether — I can’t keep it up. In between

the acts I get some painting done, but very

little — you can’t get any help at all —

women ask £1 a week just to light yr. fire —

the coal question is fierce. I have struggled

along with a smoking stove & insufficient

coal till I am desperate now I have decided

to make a clean sweep of the stove & get

a gas one instead and make my landlady

go halves.. .”

“Between the acts” is a fitting descrip-

tion for Frances Spalding’s The Real and

the Romantic. Art was urgent, ardent even,

in the 20 years between the end of the First

World War and the beginning of the

Second. Spalding’s canvas is panoramic,

her brushwork precise. She gives you

Hodgkins’s smoking stove and the incen-

diary battles between warring factions of

artists. This period of relative peace gave

rise to the skirmish of the isms: modern-

ism, constructivism, surrealism, neo-ro-

manticism... Were you Team Abstract or

Team Representation? Hampstead or

Bloomsbury? East End or Chelsea? Spald-

ing makes the case that the lines aren’t so

strictly drawn. The real and the romantic

weren’t opposing tendencies, but threads

that often intertwined.

English art of the time, Spalding writes

in her introduction, was “richly contrary.

Staunch conservatism jostles with ener-

getic revivalism; allusions to the classical

past or the early Italian Renaissance be-

come aligned with the pulse of the new; the

pursuit of the modern and international is

suddenly trumped by a return to native

traditions, the local and the vernacular.”

This is not the first survey of the art of the

age. In English Art and Modernism 1900-1939

(1981), Charles Harrison became “the first

art historian to apply rigorous critique to

this interwar period”. Yet as Spalding writes:

“It also excluded much.” While Spalding

more than does justice to the

biggies — Ben and

Winifred Nicholson,

Barbara Hepworth,

Henry Moore, Christo-

pher Wood, Vanessa

Bell, Duncan Grant,

John Piper, Paul Nash,

Stanley Spencer, Eric Ra-

vilious — she also brings

into sharper focus less-

exhibited, less-mono-

graphed artists such as

John Nash (the lesser-

spotted Nash brother),

Cedric Morris, Tristram

Hillier, Edward Wad-

sworth, John Minton and

Algernon Newton, the

Camden Canaletto.

Harrison’s history was

Wars of the isms: English art in peacetime

The fractious art

world of the 1920s

and 1930s is captured

in this excellent book,

says Laura Freeman

black boy and the caricatures of Chinese

people and observes that the room re-

mains closed to visitors. “The work forms

part of a Grade I-listed historic interior,

but its future is uncertain.”

Spalding, a biographer of Vanessa Bell,

Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and John and

Myfanwy Piper, knows her mid-century

stuff. She is an engaging and insightful

guide. Her technique is to zoom in on

biographical details such as Algernon

Newton examining the Canalettos in the

National Gallery with his magnifying

glass. Then she will zoom out — like the

RAF pilot and First World War artist

Sydney Carline soaring over Italy in a Sop-

with Camel plane, paint frozen on his

brush — to take in the wider scene.

So we learn of the young John Nash get-

ting out of school cricket by working to-

wards a botany prize, inspiring a lifelong

interest in plants; Ben Nicholson sloping

off from the Slade School of Art to eat

bowls of pineapple at one shilling or “1s 3d”

with cream; Henry Moore discovering

the sculpture collections of the British

Museum and feeling like “a starved man

having Selfridges’ grocery department all

to himself”; and Winifred Nicholson’s

observation that the sitters in Tudor por-

traits invariably looked “like eggs inside

their ruffs”.

Spalding draws your attention to the sol-

dier reaching out to stroke a tortoise — “a

reminder, perhaps, that each regiment in

the Greek army had its own pet tortoise”

— in Stanley Spencer’s Resurrection of the

Soldiers for Sandham Memorial Chapel.

(Go on to the National Trust website —

you can just spot two tortoises at the far

right.) Then, Spalding pulls back to take in

taste, patronage, Paris, the pig-headedness

of the Tate when it came to Picasso, the

explosion of competing artists’ groups and

allegiances, and the “belligerence and

antagonism”, in John Piper’s view, that

went with them.

Spalding is excellent on technique too.

Ever since A-levels, I’ve talked of “tem-

pera” painting (something to do with pig-

ment and egg?) without really under-

standing what it is. In a single paragraph

Spalding explains it perfectly. She also

observes how Ravilious made use of the

“starved brush” — a watercolour brush

with very little water — “when creating

hatching or cross-hatching as it allows the

white of the paper to show through and

suggests the sparkle of the light”. She

notes: “Ravilious frequently drives his

brush across the paper in a manner not un-

like that of an engraver using his tools to

create hatching. He creates the clods of

earth in a recently ploughed field in Downs

in Winter by means of a scudding brush.”

Scudding brush — is that not lovely?

Spalding’s prose is as clear as a Ravilious

greenhouse, her thoughts as orderly as a

Ben Nicholson white relief. No art-world

waffle whatsoever. Hurrah. Am I allowed

one little complaint? Only because he’s my

favourite? There is not one illustration by

the wonderful watercolourist, wood en-

graver and war poet David Jones. This

book deserves to go into many editions.

Let’s have a Jones for the paperback.

Spalding’s writing is

admirably free of

polemic, tickings-off

and grinding of axes

NATIONAL TRUST IMAGES/JOHN HAMMOND ESTATE OF STANLEY SPENCER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2022/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; ARTOKOLORO/ALAMY

dreams of england The Resurrection of the Soldiers by Stanley Spencer, 1928-29.

Below: Solva, Fishing Village in Pembrokeshire by Frances Hodgkins, 1936

not exactly bursting with women

artists. Spalding does nothing so ob-

vious as to bang the drum; she sim-

ply introduces, with the tringing of a

triangle, often overlooked artists

such as Dora Carrington, Evelyn

Dunbar, Winifred Knights, Gwen

John, Sybil Andrews and Eileen

Agar. Never heard of ’em? That’s

rather Spalding’s point.

This book is admirably free of

polemic, tickings-off and grinding

of axes. When Spalding comes to

Rex Whistler’s scheme for the re-

freshment rooms at what is now

Tate Britain she places the murals

within the fantasy-picturesque

tradition, notes the concerns

about the portrayal of an enslaved

The Real and

the Romantic

English Art Between

Two World Wars

by Frances Spalding

Thames & Hudson, 384pp;

£35

n a v p t s D J A r p o R f T w t a