Among the Bohemians (23 page)

When Evelyn could devise nothing further to paint he bought innumerable tuppenny and threeenny packets of postage stamps at the Islington stationers, and I would find him squatted on the floor, deeply preoccupied, surrounded by confettilike pools of these bright little stamps which he would stick in elaborate patterns on an ugly old coal-scuttle, his hair all tousled and his fingers dabbled in glue.
Later he would give the object a coating of varnish, endowing it with the patina of Sir Joshua Reynolds…

On a larger scale, the critic Raymond Mortimer entertained the young Cecil Beaton in a dining room which he had entirely papered with varnished foreign newspapers.
This was one of Beaton’s early sorties into the thrilling world of the ‘illuminati’, and entrance to these unorthodox chambers sent a rush of blood to his head: ‘I sensed a marvellous freedom of the spirit.’ To be deemed a friend of those ‘glorious people… who painted in mud colours or lived in Gordon Square in rooms decorated by Duncan Grant’ seemed to the young Beaton to be the realization of his highest ambitions.

Mrs Jennings raised words of caution: ‘Frescoes, let me say, are not suited to the modern dwelling house, and even panelled landscapes or figure groups are scarcely “practical politics”, save in the château or the palace…’ but the painters of Bohemia disregarded such timid advice.
Wyndham Lewis and his Vorticist comrades at the Rebel Art Centre went to work with a lot of red paint on the walls of their premises in Great Ormond Street.
The finished effect resembled ‘a butcher’s shop full of prime cuts’.
Carrington was much in demand for her whimsical murals.
Walls and fireplaces across London and the south of England were covered in Bell’s and Grant’s nudes, flower vases, cats, fountains and violins.
They were immensely prolific, and were commissioned so frequently to adorn the homes of the illuminati that they had to take on help.
The young Robert Medley was employed to redecorate the Stracheys’ entrance hall and five-flight stairwell.
Under Duncan Grant’s direction he brewed up powder colour, chalk and rabbit-skin size (a fixative) over a gas ring in the dining room.
This concoction produced the desired ‘fresco-like’ effect of depth of colour, with a characteristic ‘bloom’ floating on the surface like the fuzz on a peach.
For a short while Kathleen Hale also worked as an assistant to Bell and Grant, executing the areas of ‘faux’ marble while her employers got on with the more serious
side of things – nudes, urns and angels.
Duncan’s approach was an education to the young artist, for although her job appeared simple – to stipple black, white and grey marblings down a panel – she discovered when he pointed it out to her, that the undiluted colours she had chosen to mix together resulted in an uninspiring and flat effect.
She took his advice, and introduced subtle myriad tints into her black and white palette, whereupon the surfaces came alive with vibrant depth.
The philosophical impact of this discovery was to stay with her: you cannot paint, or live, by numbers.
Black is never just black, and white is never just white; thus in life as in art, one must question the inner truth of everything.

Meanwhile experimentalism continued to thrive, and the Post-Impressionist interior seemed within everyone’s grasp.
In his teens Igor Anrep took a paintbrush to his bedroom walls at their house in Suffolk and produced some ‘Charleston-y urns with flowers and spouts of water coming out of them’.
Lytton Strachey’s vacated rooms at Cambridge were taken over by his younger brother James who violently redecorated them in apple-green.
In their village retreat in Islip, Nancy Nicholson redesigned the interior of their cottage, repainted it and built some of the furniture herself.
Down in Dorset Augustus John’s children were let loose on the gardener’s cottage in which the family were camping until repairs and alterations were completed in Alderney Manor – they covered its walls, its furniture and themselves from top to toe in black and scarlet paint.
What this said about their deep spiritual needs is hard to fathom.

When Lady Ottoline Morrell moved into Garsington Manor she had the house renovated and redecorated.
She herself was not above donning overalls and pulling her weight alongside Percy, the house painter, and they worked as a team.
Ottoline was exigent about colours, and was forever sending Percy scuttling off to Oxford on his bicycle to obtain the exact shade of Venetian red she dreamt of, or the precise sub-aqueous green.
The hall was painted with a winter sunset in mind.
The old panelled room was red.
Guests were dragooned into helping gild the panels: among them D.
H.
Lawrence, his wife Frieda, Duncan Grant, Alvaro Guevara and Bertrand Russell:

We were an odd-looking company [she remembered], tall and short, thin and thick, dressed in white overalls, egg-cups of gold paint in our hands, creeping slowly round the room, outlining each panel with a fine paint-brush… Lawrence of course did his far quicker and straighter than any of us.
Frieda sat on the table in the middle of the room, swinging her legs and laughing and mocking at us, giving advice as to what curtains she would have…

Ottoline and her maid Eva sewed the curtains, and great consultations took place over their suitability for each room, Philip Morrell being called upon to deliver judgement.
Visitors to Garsington variously described the house as having ‘a sort of sumptuous homeliness’, ‘patched, gilded and preposterous’, or as ‘that fluttering parrot-house of greens, reds and yellows’.

*

After Matisse and Picasso, there was no going back to nice pale yellow morning rooms and quiet pretty bedroom wallpaper.
The time had come to dazzle.
At Asheham, the Bells’ first Sussex home, Vanessa hung up flame-orange curtains lined with mauve.
At Wissett Lodge, her rented house in Suffolk, she and Duncan distempered the walls a brilliant blue, and dyed the chair-covers with coloured ink.
They even painted the hens’ tails blue.
When they moved to Charleston Vanessa painted her bedroom black with red stripes down the corners.
Her son Quentin’s early years in London were stamped with a consciousness that the family was quite different from its neighbours – because all the other houses in Gordon Square had sober front doors, while theirs was ‘a startling bright vermilion’.

‘First Russian Ballet’ people favoured orange, purple and emerald green.
Viva King papered her sitting room navy blue.
The young Clifford Bax and his flatmate painted one bedroom in brilliant gamboge yellow, the other in scarlet.
In 1925 Robert Medley arrived at a turning point when he settled into a flat in Swiss Cottage and, putting Bakst, Benois and Matisse behind him, went for a more radical look – white.

Cleaned up and repainted in white distemper, this room with its Victorian marble mantelpiece and the mirror fixed over it was recognizably the prototype of all those rooms I have since liked to make.

Medley was looking for a colour that would reflect light, and a neutral background for his paintings, but it was around the same time that the craze for white took off.
Mayfair adopted the Bohemian studio look.
The fashionable interior designer Syrie Maugham’s unearthly white rooms, furnished with lavish white sofas, were an end in themselves.
Cecil Beaton loved them, and went for the ‘albino stage set’ look at his country house in Wiltshire, Ashcombe, where fashionable
haut
Bohemia gathered in the twenties.
Until people discovered how miserably impractical it was, the delicious clarity of white brought a breath of badly needed fresh air into English homes.

But Beaton loved brilliant colour too.
As
arbiter elegantiarum
of artistic
society for thirty-odd years, he exhorted his readers (in
Hie Glass of Fashion,
1954) to wake up to the potential of luminous, vibrant hues, rebuking the unconfident English whose demand for ‘off’ colours resulted in the murky shades obtainable from paint merchants: ‘One can never buy a clear blue, but rather a grey-blue or green-blue; pinks are seldom clear but are called cedar or squashed strawberry, and seldom can one find a rich crimson red.’ There was more at stake here than personal taste.
Detectable through Beaton’s appeal for richness and clarity is an insistence on something more fundamental – authenticity, honesty, unpretentiousness, conviction.
Cecil Beaton always reached out for the individualistic in his response to beauty.
‘Squashed strawberry’ stank of the craven, the cowardly, and it made him sick at heart.

*

Dreary colour wasn’t the only thing to be depressed about in England.
Equally Beaton found fault with manufacturers, whom he believed responsible for the hideous vulgarity of design available in shops throughout the land.
Mass production was putting the small craftsman or artisan out of business, to the great detriment of public taste in this country, whereas on the Continent in those days any village shop would sell you ‘good simple designs in pure colours’.
Beaton and Vanessa Bell would have seen eye to eye on this.
So would Ford Madox Ford, but for him this was not just a matter of aestheticism.
For Ford, as for William Morris, mass production was the demon corrupting our inner life, and surrounding oneself with well-crafted objects carried a moral imperative:

The very process of mass-production is deleterious to the public.
It is appalling to think that there are millions and millions of human beings to-day who never have and who never will taste pure food, sit in a well-made chair, hear good music played except mechanically – or use all their muscles or so much as cook well or properly polish the woodwork of their homes.

At the forefront of the outcry against terrible design in England was Roger Fry who, in starting the Omega Workshops in 1913, took matters into his own hands.
^*
The bracing artistic climate of the immediate pre-War yean was
encouraging.
The controversy surrounding his own two Post-Impressionist exhibitions, and of course the Ballets Russes, made him feel the world was ready for a shift in taste.
Fry’s vision was of a kind of Bohemian back-to-work scheme where penniless but talented artists could regain their self-respect, earn some money and sweep away some of the ugliness prevalent in the English home.
Furniture, screens, boxes, curtains, cushions, lampshades, parasols, fabrics and carpets were duly produced in energetic Post-Impressionist-inspired designs.
Blue sheep paraded across orange folding screens, goldfish swam among waterlilies on a rickety table top.
Not everyone liked them: ‘Would you let your Child Play in this Nursery?’ raved a
Daily Sketch
commentator about Duncan Grant’s linear elephants and rhinoceri.
Nevertheless Fry had an impressive range of high society contacts who were prevailed upon to patronise the workshop, and before long ladyships like Cunard, Morrell, Drogheda and Desborough were buying into the Bohemian look.
It made Naomi Mitchison feel good to subsidise adventurous artists, and she purchased some boxes and lamps, but was dissatisfied with their rather makeshift construction.
The silk lampshades were covered with annoyingly thin silk which rotted quickly.
Omega was in fact a litde too spotty and blotchy for Mitchison’s taste, and when her Omega dressing table began to look dated she disposed of it to a museum.
Though the Workshops didn’t last, succumbing to internal disputes and foundering in 1919, their influence continued and, partly as a result of Fry’s passionate advocacy, from the 1920s onwards interior design began to acquire artistic legitimacy.

*

Roger Fry and his followers were preoccupied by the need to create interiors that complemented contemporary works of art.
Love of art was, after all, the
raison d’être
of such people; how vital then, to ensure that the admired object was hung well, in the right light, with compatible neighbours.
You did not have to be rich, genteel or even fashionable to possess an eye for beauty.
Osbert Sitwell, whose devoted cook, Mrs Powell, was a discriminating art-lover, hung modern works in the kitchen.
She was delighted with her master’s choice, and disgusted when a hack journalist ran a column taunting the Sitwell brothers for having ‘achieved the impossible’ by persuading their cook to work alongside pictures of the modern school.
‘Servants are individuals like other people, and not a separate race.
I happen to like modern pictures,’ she protested.

And, whether servants, artists or patrons, how fortunate such people felt in not being condemned to the fate of the wretched upper classes, who, with
their interminable dreary equestrian portraits, reproductions of ‘Bubbles’ and the ‘Good Shepherd’, treated art as something ‘to keep down a wallpaper’.
Wallpaper was becoming outmoded in artistic circles, anyway.
Somehow Derain and Stanley Spencer didn’t look right against floral garlands.
At the turn of the century the use of distemper – an unstable mixture of chalk and pigment – was still seen as a radical departure from accepted middle-class practice.
C.
R.
W.
Nevinson described his mother as a pioneer who ‘used distemper instead of wallpapers’, causing him to be jeered in the streets ‘because our house looked different from the others’.
But Stephen Spender’s experience visiting the country house illuminati of the twenties showed that modern art patrons tended towards pale neutral distemper as a backdrop for their collections.
At Charleston, despite the received opinion that no surface remains undecorated, this is by no means the case.
Vanessa and Duncan ruthlessly obliterated every trace of the dainty Victorian and Edwardian wallpapers they found when they arrived in the house, but did not inevitably replace them with patterned surfaces.
Nor did they fall prey to the fashion for strong colours.
Several of the rooms are distempered a dull, subtle white, as are all the passages; other rooms are an almost unrelieved black.
Even the studio walls are painted in bands of ‘mud’ colour – a dirty green, a sludgy pink, a mottled black-grey.
Against these undemanding shades the clear colours of paintings, ceramics and objects sing with vibrant clarity.
It is this contrast that gives the impression of resonating colour everywhere in the house.
Charleston is both an artists’ home, and a carefully composed work of art in itself – some would say, Vanessa’s most successful creation.