During a lecture to the Heretics Club in Cambridge in 1924, Mrs Virginia Woolf made the famous assertion: ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed.’ She was not quite sure, precisely, when this change in character occurred:
I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was nevertheless; and since we must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.
She observed a change in the behaviour of her cook. Before December 1910, the cook stayed downstairs in the kitchen. After December 1910 she was forever popping up into the drawing room to borrow the Daily Herald or ask advice about a hat.
1910 was a curious year. If there was a change in human character in general, and in the behaviour of Mrs Woolf’s domestic staff in particular, there was a quite extraordinary lack of change in the political landscape of the House of Commons. 1910 began with a General Election in which the Liberals and Tories tied at 273 seats each and a Liberal government led by Mr Asquith continued in power with the support of 42 Labour MPs and 82 Irish Nationalists. And the year ended with another General Election. This time the Liberals and Tories tied again with 272 seats each and the Liberal government led by Mr Asquith continued in power with the support of 42 Labour MPs and 84 Irish Nationalists.
Sandwiched between these two nearly identical elections, 1910 was a year of momentous events.
It was the year that Dr Crippen poisoned his wife, became the first criminal to be apprehended with the help of radio waves, and was hanged.
It was the year that Suffragettes mobbed the Prime Minister and forced a member of his Cabinet to retire, hurt, to his bed.
It was the year that the Welsh miners came out on strike in support of the dockers and the cavalry was sent in to quell riots in Pontypridd and Tonypandy.
It was the year Haley’s Comet came within 13 million miles of the Earth and was seen in the night sky for the first time since 1835.
It was the year that King Edward VII died and King George V succeeded him.
And it was the year that the term Post-Impressionism was invented in a short thoroughfare running between the top of Dover Street and Bond Street.
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No. 7 Grafton Street was flanked by the premises of a Court Milliner and a dressmaker. On an upper floor was the office of the Kennel Club.
The exhibition which opened at the Grafton Galleries on Guy Fawkes Night, 1910, came about almost by chance. Roger Fry, painter, art critic and editor of the Burlington Magazine, heard that the gallery had a gap in its programme and he persuaded the director to let him organise an exhibition of contemporary French painting. A secretary, Desmond MacCarthy, was appointed for a fee of £100 to handle the business side. Fry himself worked for nothing, deeming it a privilege to introduce the work of French painters he so much admired to the English public. It was not expected that the exhibition would make any money from sales, but in the unlikely event that it did, MacCarthy was told he could expect a half share of the profits, the other half going to the Gallery.
The first public announcement appeared at the bottom of page 13 of The Times of 1 October:
An exhibition of pictures by the Post-Impressionists of France will be held at the Grafton Galleries during November, December and January. Among the artists of this School who will be represented are Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse.
The term ‘Post-Impressionism’ had been a late invention. The artists included did not belong to a school of painting as such and Fry knew it. All they had in common was that they had developed forms of visual expression beyond Impressionism and beyond the scientific and slavishly realistic representation of the world. Fry claimed they were ‘cutting away the merely representative element in art to establish more and more firmly the fundamental laws of expressive form in its barest, most abstract elements’. But some term was required to pull all the very different painters and styles together. Just before the announcement appeared in The Times, Fry became exasperated and, on the basis that they had come after the Impressionists, decided on the concept ‘Post-Impressionism’. About 250 paintings, drawings and sculptures were assembled. The artists most represented were Gauguin by 36 canvases, Cézanne by 22, and Van Gogh by 19.
As if to soften the impact of modern painting for the timid English public, Fry included nine works by an already acknowledged master and called the exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’. Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergère was the most expensive work on show and was insured for £10,000, according to the Daily Express, a record for a modern painting.
It should not be forgotten that this revolutionary exhibition, described by Desmond MacCarthy in a memoir written in the Forties as ‘The Art-Quake of 1910’, was grouped around the work of four dead painters. Cézanne had been dead for four years, Gauguin for seven, Van Gogh for twenty and Manet himself for over a quarter-century. They were, nevertheless, relatively unknown in England.
Twenty-two other artists were represented, including Derain, Vlaminck, Matisse and Picasso. According to Laurence Binyon’s account in the Saturday Review, the exhibition was set out to afford visitors a gradual immersion in the ‘modern’:
By an admirably discreet arrangement, reminding one of a Turkish bath, the shock of the revelation is only administered by degrees. In the first room you need scarcely be uneasy; Manet reigns there, and Manet is already a classic; in the second room the temperature is more exciting, you are in the face of Gauguin and Van Gogh; and only when sufficiently acclimatised need you venture yet further into the wild realms of Matisse and his peers.
Fry would exhibit much ‘wilder’ examples of the work of Matisse and Picasso at the same gallery two years later. This time he erred on the side of caution. Of the two, it was Matisse who drew most of the critical fire. His startlingly coloured portrait, Girl with Green Eyes, excited a great deal of comment, mainly along the lines of unfavourable comparison with the products of an average nursery. One of the two Picasso paintings on the other hand, Nude Girl with a Basket of Flowers, was well received, called ‘a fine thing, almost an exquisite thing’ in The Builder and even compared, albeit to its disadvantage, to the work of Whistler in the Fortnightly Review.
‘This show will be a great affair’, Fry told a friend the month before it opened. ‘I am preparing for a huge campaign of outraged British philistinism.’ He was not disappointed.
The gentlemen of the press enjoyed themselves immensely. The Daily Express correspondent spoke for the majority of his colleagues:
It is paint run mad. The aim of the Post-Impressionists is not to paint objects as they strike the human eye but simply to convey emotion by means of paint. They are invariably successful but one may cavill at the fact that the emotion expressed is too often that of a sick headache.
The exhibition was an enormous success. 25,000 people paid a shilling each and passed through the turnstile during the following three months. As the hordes of English men and women came to grips with the newest trends in art to reach their shores, the general mood was hilarity. ‘It is all titter and cackle’, wrote the critic from The New Age:
well dressed women go about saying: ‘How awful! A perfect nightmare, my dear!’ ‘Did you ever? Too killing! How they can!’ They are like dogs to music; it makes them howl, but they can’t keep away. Men with tall hats are funny over the exhibits, saying: ‘This is a horse; No this is a horse; This is a man.’ All through the galleries I am pursued by the ceaseless hee-haw of a stage duke with a monocle.
Desmond MacCarthy, who as secretary observed the phenomenon daily, recalled a couple who seemed to have stepped out of a Bateman cartoon:
A stout, elderly man of good appearance, led in by a young woman, went into such convulsions of laughter on catching sight of Cézanne’s portrait of his wife that his companion had to take him out and walk him up and down in the fresh air.
And Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, writing in his diary ten days after the show opened, expressed the views of the public without a sense of humour:
The exhibition is either an extremely bad joke or a swindle. I am inclined to think the latter, for there is no trace of humour in it. Still less is there a trace of sense or skill or taste, good or bad, or art or cleverness. Nothing but that gross puerility which scrawls indecencies on the walls of a privy. The drawing is on the level of that of an untaught child of seven or eight years old, the sense of colour that of a tea tray painter, the method that of a schoolboy who wipes his fingers on a slate after spitting on them. There is nothing at all more humorous than that, at all more clever . . . Apart from the frames, the whole collection should not be worth £5, and then only for the pleasure of making a bonfire of them.
Sir William Richmond RA wrote a letter to the Morning Post. He hoped that in the remaining years of his long life he would never again feel, as he had whilst walking through the Grafton Galleries, ashamed of being a painter:
For a moment there came a feeling of terror lest the youth of England, young promising fellows, might be contaminated there. On reflection I was reassured that the youth of England, being healthy, mind and body, is far too virile to be moved save in resentment against the providers of this unmanly show.
Oliver Brown, later director of the Leicester Galleries and, incidentally, Wyndham Lewis’s dealer, remembered being buttonholed by an elderly academician as he entered the exhibition. This individual, who may have been Sir William Richmond himself, cried out earnestly: ‘Don’t go in, young man, it will do you harm. The pictures are evil.’
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During the year that Mrs Woolf judged human character to have changed, the name of P. Wyndham Lewis had become known, to the readership of a couple of periodicals at least, as belonging to a writer of short clever travel pieces and character sketches of the inmates of French and Spanish hotels. During the very month in which Mrs Woolf estimated the change as occurring, subscribers to The Tramp would have encountered a 13-verse poem called ‘Grignolles (Brittany)’.* He had written it earlier in the year, sent it to John in the South of France as a peace offering, ‘a very small, insignificant present’, and hoped to make him the bigger present of a book of verse before long. He was ‘going to do nothing but poetry’, he declared, now that his ‘analytic novel’ was finished. Clearly, it was as a writer, not as a painter, that he saw himself. He was 28 years old and a decade separated him from the promising young winner of the 1900 Slade Scholarship. During that decade he had had eight articles published and exhibited only one drawing – Study of a Girl’s Head – in the 32nd Exhibition of Modern Pictures held by the New English Art Club at the Dudley Gallery in April and May 1904. It was as a writer, not as a painter, that anyone else would have seen him towards the end of 1910.
As he was in London at the time ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ was creating such a stir, it is likely that he visited the exhibition on at least one occasion. However there is no definitive evidence that he did so. It is probable that he would have seen nothing there that he had not already seen in Paris. He was certainly aware of Picasso and Matisse. He had mentioned them to Moore the previous year, although without making further comment beyond an enquiry as to whether his friend had seen any of their paintings.
And he made only one documented reference to the major upheaval in the art world, writing to Moore, who was out of the country in February 1911. He made no mention of the contents of the exhibition, and confined his remarks only to the furore it had caused:
I suppose the Post-Impressionists’ Christmas in London, and the ‘ahurissement’ of the citizens, you will, in one way or another, have heard about?
More importantly, in the same letter, he announced that he had ‘included once more various plastic arts’ in his ‘already extensive programme’ and he looked forward to Moore’s return when he would place before him ‘the first fruits of [his] new enterprise’. A tone of modest apology for this distraction from literary endeavour was belied by his obvious confidence in the quality of the work:
The first misgivings you will feel on hearing I have again become an idolator (as [Eric] Gill describes all artists) are, you will be glad to hear, without reason. I have already quite justified this step.
It is tempting to suggest that the resumption of artistic activity was stimulated, or even inspired, by a visit to ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’.
* The name of this town ‘grown bald with age’ was ‘fabulous’ he told John. It may have been derived from the French word grignotage: erosion.