The Art Of Today

(via The Outline of Art) Frank Rutter writes:

The foundations of Mr Augustus John’s reputation were also laid in the drawings which he showed at the New English Art Club during the first decade of the present century. The exuberant flow of his line, his powerful modeling of form by subtleties of light and shade; the extraordinary vitality of his heads in chalks and sanguine—all seemed to suggest that in Augustus John was reincarnated the princely art of Rubens. One thing alone at that time limited his popularity. It was asked why did he draw such ‘ugly’ people. The truth was that Mr John, having an exceedingly original mind, found beauties in new types. A Welshman by birth and descent, John in his early days was a Borrow in paint, happiest and most at home among the Romanies. The apparent strangeness of his early drawings and paintings was largely due to his preference for gipsy types. While teaching at the Liverpool University School of Art, round about 1904, he would periodically disappear to go roving with the gipsies and then reappear, bringing with his pictures of the raggle-taggled life of the caravan. These pictures, bright and clear in color, incisive in line, and effective in composition, were a new thing in painting. As a painter John did not possess the precocious facility of Orpen, and his early work often shows a certain heaviness of handling when compared with his present day pictures, and in acquiring mastery of the brush John gradually evolved two distinct manners. Influenced to some extent by the modern French painters already mentioned in this Outline, he has shown a tendency to simplification which is most marked in his decorative work. In mural decorations, like ‘The Mumpers’ at the Tate Gallery, John deliberately sacrifices roundness of form for decorative effect. Like Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), the great painter of the Ste. Geneviève series in the Panthéon, Paris, John found that the qualities he aimed at necessitated a certain flatness of treatment. At the same time his color in these decorative works has become lighter and brighter. To this extent, in so far as it has tended to simplify rather than to complicate painting, the art of Augustus John may be said to illustrate a reaction from Impressionism. But while his decorative works often have primitive qualities, in his portraits he uses his full power of expressing form, and one of his most recent masterpieces ‘Madame Suggia’, proves that when this is his aim, John is second to no living man in realistic force and characterization. While infinitely various, there is an intense individuality in his draughtsmanship which unifies all his work and makes it recognizable as a ‘John’. His landscapes are closer to his decorative work than to his realistic portraiture. Finding his favorite subjects among the mountains and lakes of his native Wales, John has invented a new genre in landscape. Emphatic in their design, simplified in form, and brilliant but still in color, they strike a new note in British art.

Limitations of space prevent all but te briefest mention of another member of the New English Art Club, who has created a new type of landscape. Sir Charles John Holmes, the erudite Director of the National Gallery, was born in 1868. The son of a Cornish clergyman, he distinguished himself as a classical scholar at Eton and Oxford, and made a reputation as a writer on art before his watercolors and paintings became generally appreciated. Always a sytlist in design, simplicity is the outstanding quality in his work, and while he has painted many impressive landscapes of the grim, gaunt scenery of the Lake Country, it has been his peculiar distinction to invent ‘industrial landscape’, pictures in which factories and power stations of modern industrialism are powerfully presented with their surrounding landscapes. ‘The Burning Kiln’ is a fine example of the imaginative grandeur with which Sir C J Holmes invests these new subjects.

Another pupil of Professor Brown, Mr Walter W Russell (born 1867), added to the laurels of the New English Art Club by his brilliant portrait, ‘Mr Minney’, which was the picture of the year in the Academy of 1920.

In recent years the two most distinguished artists who have come from the Royal Academy Schools have been Mr Frederick Cayley Robinson (born 1862) whose poetic and decorative work shows a mingling of Pre-Raphaelite ideals with the noble simplicity of Puvis de Chavannes, and Mr Charles Sims (born 1873) who, after first attracting attention by the sheer beauty of his romantic idylls, astonished even his admirers by his exquisitely gracious and accomplished portrait ‘The Countess of Rocksavage and Son’, which was universally conceded to have won premier honors in the Academy of 1922.

Proverbially, art is long and talent today is so multitudinous that to attempt any adequate survey of present day achievements in Great Britain alone would be to embark on a voyage as lengthy as that which the reader has already traveled. Had space permitted it, it would have been gratifying to record successes in sculpture as well as in painting. Among the academic sculptors Sir George Frampton has acquired the widest popularity with his ‘Peter Pan’ in Kensington Gardens, while among the independent sculptors Mr Jacob Epstein’s bronze busts and Mr Eric Gill’s ‘Stations of the Cross’ in the Westminster Roman Catholic Cathedral are works which the present generation can leave with confidence to the judgment of posterity.

It is regretted that the scope of the present work has made it impossible to deal separately with etching, wood engraving, lithography, and other arts which are being practised today with skill and accomplishment. But all the pictorial and plastic arts are so intimately linked that the aims and ideals which animate them from generation to generation may to a great extent be deduced from a historical survey of painting. Without any pretence to be final or exhaustive, it is hoped that this work may contribute to a clearer understanding of the course followed by the main stream of European art from the thirteenth century to the present day.