Augustus John (65 page)

Reading the newspapers, led by ponderous jokes in
The Times
,
Hugh Blaker predicted the reversal of attitudes to come. ‘Cultured London is composed of clowns who will, by the way, be thoroughly ashamed in twenty years time and pay large sums to possess these things. How insular we are still.’
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This extravaganza of journalism presenting the first draft of art history was to give critics a quick device with which to begin the story of twentieth-century art in Britain. But the two Post-Impressionist shows actually confused the art scene in London dramatically. That Sir William Richmond should find these exhibitions ‘unmanly’ was to be expected. What was unexpected was the reaction of Henry Tonks, who came to recognize in Roger Fry the counterpart of Hitler and Mussolini. Fry,
to the irritation of Will Rothenstein and the amusement of Walter Sickert, became the leader of a band of young rebellious painters – before splintering from Wyndham Lewis and his regiment of Vorticists. The repercussions from these shows did not divide the sheep from the goats. As Eric Gill observed to Will Rothenstein: ‘The sheep and the goats are inextricably mixed up.’

In this mix-up Augustus John’s position was perhaps the most difficult of all to define. He had long been someone who said things he felt rather than what was expected of him. Indeed he was part of the change that was happening in human character. He was a pupil of Tonks, Fry’s enemy, yet provoked the same feelings of shame and outrage as Fry did in many Royal Academicians, including Sir William Richmond who called him ‘loathesome’. He admired Cézanne, was already influenced by Gauguin, but agreed with Sickert that Matisse was full of ‘the worst art school tricks’. There seemed to be two opposing views of John’s work during the first dozen years of the twentieth century. Surveying French trends from a British point of view in 1913, the art critic James Bone saw the new movement in English art as being ‘largely influenced by the Pre-Renaissance Italian masters, by archaic Greek, Byzantine, Egyptian, and Assyrian art, and by the art of the Far East.

‘Mr Augustus John, its leader, already occupies a position for which there is no parallel in our history in that his art, which is supported by many of the most fastidious and erudite connoisseurs of the time, has for its content democratic and revolutionary ideals of the most uncompromising kind… [His art] has much in common with the French Post-Impressionists, although Mr John’s development seems to have no connexion with their experiments; but the plastic freedom of Puvis de Chavannes undoubtedly gave importance to both schools. It is noticeable that they have sought in the first place to simplify their technical method as well as their representations. They use tempera, and in their experiments with oil have often reduced their colours to a few tints prepared beforehand… they have stripped art of much that was comfortable and informing, of many graces and charms… and it is natural enough that in the eyes of the older generation the result should have a naked, disquieting look. Mr John’s masterpiece,
The Girl on the Cliff,
is like nothing else in English painting in the pure keenness of its imaginative invention. The master draughtsman of his time, he has been strong enough to yield up every appearance of skill and of grace, and to limn his idea with the fresh, short-cut directness of a child.

…His poetry is his own… The old men look cunning and tough, the children untamed and fierce, the women deep-breasted, large-bodied,
steady-eyed, like mothers of a tribe… John rarely shows a figure at work… He makes you see that his strong men and women in poor clothes, standing with beauty under cold skies, have chosen their part… The distrust of comfort, of cities, of society in its present organisation, even of civilisation, and the desire for a simple life and the recovery of the virtues that lie in a more physical communion with the earth, are all questions of the time [that]… many are putting to the test of experiment.’
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Such was the ideology of John’s art. In 1909, when his pictures appeared along with those of Robert Bevan, J. D. Fergusson, Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore, Kandinsky and Sickert at the second Allied Artists’ Association exhibition, he seemed a focus for all that was most modern in Britain. But Clive and Vanessa Bell who had earlier bought John’s big decoration ‘The Childhood of Pyramus’ were to sell it in 1913. ‘I wish we could get a Cézanne,’ Vanessa wrote to Clive. ‘It would be a great thing to have one in England.’
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Once she had praised John’s influence on Lamb (‘His drawings are much freer than they were and have lost their rather unpleasant hardness’);
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now Lamb’s work appeared to her deadly academic, and John himself somewhat sentimental. Clive Bell was to relegate John, along with Stanley Spencer, into nursery provincialism. Mature European art had ‘jumped the Slade and Pre- Raphaelite puddles’.

‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ divided critics into those who, like Laurence Binyon, felt that ‘none of these paintings could hold a candle to the
Smiling Woman
of Augustus John,’
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and the art critic of
The Times
who wrote that, compared to the revolutionary painting in Paris ‘the most extreme works of Mr John are as timid as the opinions of a Fabian Socialist compared with those of a bomb-throwing anarchist.’
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Like the Post-Impressionists, John was simplifying his forms and intensifying his colour. But Post-Impressionism had moved away from a reliance on subject-matter because, Fry explained to Vanessa Bell when he took her round the Grafton Gallery, ‘likeness to nature was irrelevant in art unless it contributed to the idea or emotion expressed.’
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Though John never used storytelling or moral emphasis, he relied on nature – on the non-dramatic theatre of nature – and the ideas and emotions arising from this staged subject-matter. The question was: had he failed to put his talent to the test of painterly experiment, or had he been able to achieve a good deal of what the Post-Impressionists achieved without breaking tradition? In short, was he a ‘Post-Impressionist without knowing it’?

The trouble was, as the art critic Frank Rutter explained, ‘nobody but
Mr Roger Fry and Mr Clive Bell can tell us who is a post-impressionist and who not.’
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But Roger Fry and Clive Bell did not inevitably agree. ‘I have always been an enthusiastic admirer of Mr John’s work,’ wrote Fry in the
Nation
on 24 December 1910. ‘In criticising the very first exhibition which he held in London I said that he had undeniable genius, and I have never wavered in that belief, but I do recognise that Mr John, working to some extent in isolation, without all the fortunate elements of comradeship and rivalry that exist in Paris, has not yet pushed his mode of expression to the same logical completeness, has not yet attained the same perfect subordination of all the means of expression to the idea that some of these artists have. He may be more gifted, and he may, one believes and hopes, go much further than they have done; but I fail to see that his work in any way refutes the attainments of artists whom he himself openly admires.’
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Such isolation, which would eventually be perceived as a strength in Gwen John, was to be an increasingly unhappy and incomplete condition in Augustus, gradually removing him, a prominent but lonely figure, to the margins of the modern movement. What Virginia Woolf had called ‘the age of Augustus John’ was reaching its zenith, and over the next few years would rapidly fade away, leaving an unanswered question hanging in the air: was that legendary reputation of his early years a mirage or was the posthumous decline of that reputation ‘a quirk of our own time’?
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*

In these years before the Great War, as the republican revolution in art spread from these two Post-Impressionist exhibitions around Britain, Wilson Steer seemed like an old king about to enter retirement, while Sickert occupied the role of Regent, and Augustus John, in his early and middle thirties, was the heir apparent. Whatever he did was news, and whatever he did added not so much to his achievement as to his promise of future achievements. ‘Promise’ was a word that was invariably applied to his work; he was credited and debited with it; it hung like a label round his neck, and eventually like a stone. Ever since the Slade days, he had been dogged by an enviable and excessive facility. His admirers were encouraged to detect in his drawings and paintings signs of infinite potential. However good a particular work might be – his ‘William Nicholson’, ‘W. B. Yeats’, ‘Jane Harrison’, ‘The Smiling Woman’, his drawings of Ida and Alick, his dream picture of Dorelia standing before a fence – it added only to the weight of his future. ‘He seems always on the brink of tremendous happenings,’ wrote the art critic of the
Pall Mall Gazette.
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For the last dozen years these happenings had been constantly in the
public mind, associated with everything romantic, brilliant and scandalous. ‘He is the wonder of Chelsea,’ exclaimed George Moore in 1906, ‘the lightning draughtsman, the only man living for whom drawing presents no difficulty whatever.’ Two years later (10 June 1908) the painter Neville Lytton, describing him as ‘an anarchistic artist’, told Will Rothenstein: ‘I think John’s daring and talent is an excellent example for us and shows us in which direction it is expedient for us to throw our bonnets over the windmills.’ Some indication of the kind of fame he had achieved before 1910 is given by an exhibition of Max Beerbohm’s caricatures in May 1909 at the Leicester Galleries. One of these, as described by Max himself, showed Augustus ‘standing in one of his own “primitive” landscapes, with an awfully dull looking art-critic beside him gazing (the art-critic gazing) at two or three very ugly “primitive” John women in angular attitudes. The drawing is called “Insecurity”; and the art-critic is saying to himself “How odd it seems that thirty years hence I may be desperately in love with these ladies!”’
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Max’s ambiguous attitude to Augustus’s work reflected that of many contemporaries. At the Leicester Galleries his caricatures had been interspersed with pictures by Sickert and other artists – and ‘John has a big (oils) portrait of Nicholson,’ Max told Florence Beerbohm, ‘ – a
very
fine portrait, and quite the
clou
of the exhibition.’
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Four months previously Augustus and Max had dined with the Nicholsons and Max afterwards described Augustus as ‘looking more than picturesque… [he] sang an old French song, without accompaniment, very remarkable, and seemed like all the twelve disciples of Christ and especially like Judas!’ Admiration for his personality and for his painting were shot through with suspicion. ‘I’ve got a very fishy reputation,’ Augustus conceded. His appearance suggested some betrayal and his paintings caused bewilderment. ‘He [John] has a family group at the Grafton,’ Max wrote to Florence (April 1909), ‘ – a huge painting of a very weird family. I wish I could describe it, but I can’t. I think there is no doubt of his genius.’ Max considered ‘The Smiling Woman’ ‘really great’,
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but many of the paintings, especially of women, struck him as crude and ugly. At the same time he believed, like his art critic, that he would be ‘converted’ to them and that future generations would acknowledge their lasting value. The ‘promise’ which he attributed to Augustus was a symptom of an age that had not adjusted its focus and did not really know what to think.

To what extent this faith in Augustus’s work depended upon his glamorous personality is difficult to calculate. The artist Paul Nash, who did not know him and had ‘a deep respect for John’s draughtsmanship especially when it was applied with a paint brush’, observed that ‘technical power rather than vision predominated’.
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But critics were disconcerted by his
love of bravura and theatricality, his impromptu effects so prolific and unpredictable, and the emphasis he placed as a portraitist on candour and informality. He was worshipped by the young, and, until the 1920s, would remain a cult figure among students. The futurist painter C. R. W. Nevinson, to whom Augustus was ‘a genius’, noted that ‘though I am always called a Modern, I have always tried to base myself on John’s example’.
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‘I like success, occasionally,’ Augustus remarked. But he appeared to have achieved too easy a success – at the age of twenty-two, he was sharing a long notice with Giorgione. By the time he was thirty, critics had begun sprinkling their commendations with caveats. In 1907, in an article entitled ‘Rubens, Delacroix and Mr John’, Laurence Binyon wrote:

‘Mr John has shown such signal gifts, and has such magnetic power over his contemporaries, that he might to-day be the acclaimed leader of a strong new movement in English painting; only he seems to have little idea as to whither he is himself moving… he will never know the fullness of his own capacities till he puts them to a greater test than he has done yet, till he concentrates with single purpose instead of dissipating his mind in easy response to casual inspirations of the moment… ’
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Few questioned that here was a great draughtsman – but his work was felt to be too ‘unconventional’. It was not ‘normal’ to search for distortion as he persistently did. What was this ‘affectation’ that made him deliberately misplace ‘the left eye in the “Girl’s Head”?’ asked the
Magazine of Fine Arts;
‘…it is difficult to follow the aim of the artist’.
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The critic of
The Times
(3 December 1907) expressed, in a genial way, what many senior art critics thought about John’s work: ‘The artist, as is well known, is a favourite among the admirers of very advanced and modern methods; and, if he were a dramatist, his plays would be produced by the Stage Society. That is to say he is very strong, very capable, and very much interested in the realities of life, the ugly as well as the beautiful.’

Another critic, heralding what was to come, announced: ‘One must go to Paris to see anything approaching the nightmares that Mr John is on occasion capable of.’
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